4/28/24
Getting Distracted
This is number fifty-nine in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I ADMIT to being older than I was when I started writing erotica. I hate to say it, but if you’ve been reading my works of erotica since I released my first serial, The Art and Science of Love, back in 2011, you’ve gotten older, too. And as you get older, time starts to lose meaning. It might seem to move interminably slowly, or it might be racing past. 2024 is already a third over!
I find that I keep track of what day of the week it is by what is printed on my pill tray. Ah yes! It must be Friday and I’ve taken the morning dose.
I think just this short introduction answers the question, “Why don’t you write about people your own age?”
Monday, my houseguest left after a delightful ten-day visit. I don’t entertain house guests often. I looked at my calendar to try to figure out what all we did during that time. I guess I felt compelled to entertain her and my friends here in Vegas fell in line to help. If my count is correct, we saw six shows, had a champagne brunch, ate out for spaghetti and meatballs, sushi, and burgers, and toured Hoover Dam.
I struggled to get any writing done, even though I was uninterrupted all morning each day because she slept until at least noon. I have reached the undeniable conclusion that there is simply something about the presence of breasts in this bachelor pad that is very distracting to this old bachelor. Even if he is not actively engaged with them at the moment.
All the way back in the early days of my erotica career when I was working on the Model Student series, I recognized the distractibility of artists (including writers). By that time, I’d already published four mainstream novels by Nathan Everett and had discovered that when I was writing, I did not see or hear anything else around me. I was very much like Tony when he had earbuds in and a canvas in front of him.
In Diva, Model Student book three, Tony’s parents recite the story of his having been missing for an entire day back in Nebraska. When he finally came pedaling his bicycle into the yard, it was pastor Larsen who asked him what he’d been doing. Tony showed the preacher a sketchbook that was completely filled with the things he’d drawn that day. The entire concept of time had vanished. This theme recurs frequently in the series.
And it recurs frequently in my life.
The entire Model Student series is available as individual eBooks or as a six-book set from Bookapy. Paperback from other vendors.
It was a relatively new experience to be distracted from writing. In 2019, I wrote 1.14 million words. In 2021, 1.17 million words. In 2022, 1.39 million words! That’s well over 3,000 words a day for 365 days straight! My writing distracted me from all kinds of chaos around me. It was the only thing I could see or focus on.
This year, by the way, I’m averaging only slightly more than 1,700 words a day.
My word count fell off drastically during 2023. Not because I wasn’t distracted by my writing, but because the writing of Follow Focus, the sixth and final volume in the Photo Finish series, required five to six hours of research for every hour of writing I put in. And I know it’s not error-free. There were many things I remembered from my young adult years in the 1970s that I had to revise my understanding of in light of my research. Not everything was the way I remembered it.
It was also the 21-22 season, while I was working on the Team Manager series, that I became a fan of women’s college basketball—first of the American Rivers Conference and Simpson College in Iowa (NCAA Div III), and then of the remarkable Caitlyn Clark of the University of Iowa. (Not Iowa State as so many writers who don’t bother to research their stories have stated.) That made writing from November to March a little more difficult. I’d discovered a new distraction.
I’m determined not to let all the streaming service channels that I had to purchase for this year’s season control my life. I canceled all the subscriptions as soon as the tournament was over. Now I’m investigating which service I will have to subscribe to in order to watch some of the same players now that they are in the WNBA.
Um… Sorry. Got a little distracted there.
My point is… I think… that the older I get the more easily I become distracted. Especially by breasts inhabiting my trailer for a week. It did not require being actively engaged with said breasts to distract me—though that was also a distraction. Their mere presence in their unadorned glory (the typical state in the trailer) was enough to make me forget what I was working on.
Into the breach comes the outline. When I have two or three days in a row during which I am not writing, I have to spend half the next day reading at least the past two chapters or more and reconstructing my thought process regarding where I was going with this masterpiece. That happened with next Sunday’s release of Nathan Everett’s The Staircase of Dragon Jerico. I followed my initial outline last November and had a draft of a little over 60,000 words. After I had put it aside for a while before writing, it was the outline I created that kept the book on track through an additional 30k.
Then I finished a draft of A Place Among Peers, which is still awaiting my attention to rewrite. A random comment by a reader of A Place at the Table showed me where I think I was still missing something in the current work and I’ll get back to it soon. Distracted. I started the next book in The Props Master Series, but about the time I received word in late December that I needed a few procedures on my heart, I was distracted from finishing it.
I determined to learn more about my craft—I’ve been doing this for forty years now—and become a better writer. So, when I started my current work in progress, I constructed a beat sheet outline that I revised and expanded regularly before I started writing the first draft, and have revised frequently since. I’ve found it extremely valuable, because while I was being distracted by breasts in my trailer, the beat sheet was steadily holding the story in line. Monday when my guest departed, I looked at the beat sheet and immediately wrote the next two chapters of The Strongman. I’m still only about halfway through the story, but I’m right on track with what I outlined as what I wanted the story to look like.
I don’t know if I’ll continue to do such elaborate pre-planning, but I feel that as I get older and more distractible by little things—well, not that little—a better and more complete outline will start to hold my stories together better than I can currently do when writing by the seat of my pants.
We shall see what comes next in May!
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
