11/3/2024
Perspiration
This is number eighty-six in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
THE HARDEST THING I DO is sit down in front of an empty page. From my conversations with other authors, I’m not unusual in that. We get this great idea for a story—maybe even draft an outline, but then we have to sit in front of a blank page and actually write the damn story.
Oh! Forget about the story! I just need to get the first sentence out! In fact, it would be helpful if I had a title. Just so I could write something at the top of the page.
When I talk to fans and readers, I often hear, “I’ve got a great idea for a story!” When I suggest they write it, it’s typically followed by, “I just don’t have any inspiration when I sit down to write.”
Wrong word. You have the inspiration. You simply aren’t willing to do the actual hard work of writing. When I talk about how many books I’ve written or how many words a year I write, people often give a little snort and say, “Yeah, but you don’t have a life.”
Maybe that’s true. I don’t write for a living; I write to live. I don’t feel right if I’m not working on a project.
In November of 2019, I wrote the first draft of A Place at the Table for my November novel. I was pretty pleased, though I knew it would be one of the books that would require a 90% rewrite from the original draft. I tried to enjoy the holiday season, even heading down to Oklahoma to see a woman I thought was my girlfriend. She said she liked older guys, but when she came to visit me up north, I nearly died. I don’t think she was thinking about that old! So, by Christmas, I was sitting in my trailer in an RV park near Tulsa, thinking about life and funny things that had happened.
During the summer, I’d been sitting with friends at the weekly social hour at Sun Meadow Family Nudist Park when the subject of how we became nudists came up. My friend Doug started in on a tale about freedom and lack of body shaming, then suddenly quieted and said, “The truth is, I just like boobs. Don’t tell my wife I said that.”
Next to him, his wife lifted her prodigious boobs and said, “As if I didn’t know.”
I started thinking that if Doug hadn’t told his wife that little bit of information, what else might a guy never tell his wife? And the title Things I Never Told My Wife crept into my mind. I set it aside as I worked on my November novel, but as Christmas came and went, I started toying with it more seriously, making a list of things he might never mention.
But there I was, sitting in front of a blank page with just a title in front of me. And then it came to me:
I met my soulmate when I was sixteen years old.
Of course, I never told my wife about that.
I ‘broke the page’ and was off and running. I pounded out the 82,000 words in thirty days. My editors were apparently as hungry for something to work on as I was because they shoveled the chapters back to me as fast as I could get them rewritten and sent off. I released the book on February 10, 2020 on SOL and on the 16th on Bookapy.
According to my logs, I was spending eight to ten hours a day most days in front of my computer writing, editing, rewriting, and getting the story ready. That was while I was traveling for four weeks through Oklahoma and Texas.
No life? Who says?
Things I Never Told My Wife is available as an eBook on Bookapy.
In talks I’ve given at writing events and conferences, I’ve often told aspiring novelists that the difference between a writer and a non-writer is that writers sit their butt in a seat and write.
Or as Red Grange reportedly said in the 1940s, “Writing is simple. You just sit at a typewriter and open a vein.”
Indeed, I’ve bled on a number of pages, and the results weren’t always pretty. Somehow, I keep getting excited about the next project.
Which brings me to the next project I’m working on—my November novel for 2024.
Getting the idea to write a modern take on the myth of Sisyphus was truly the easy part. I’ve always enjoyed mythology and have riffed on different themes in other works. They always require a fair amount of research and preparation, so I’ve been working on this for the better part of a month. But my first outline missed the mark significantly. That’s because I didn’t really understand who the mythical character of Sisyphus was. My editor was not impressed with the outline and said my character sounded like a narcissistic sociopath.
Definitely not fun to write about.
So, I went back to the myths to try to compile a good picture of what this Greek anti-hero was really like. Most of us know that Sisyphus was condemned to push a rock up a mountain, but every time he neared the top, the rock would break loose and roll back to the bottom. He had to start over. But why?
As Jim told me, the Olympian gods didn’t punish people for being bad, but for hubris, acting or presuming above their station. Indeed, I found evidence of multiple instances in which Sisyphus—apparently acting in the best interest of his city—went up against Zeus. He was known to have murdered guests, in contradiction to Zeus’s law of hospitality. That got Zeus mad, but not quite enough to punish Sisyphus.
But Zeus had a wandering eye, and when he abducted Aegina and had his way with her, her father, the river god Asopus, came hunting for her. Sisyphus was attempting to build a temple and fortress at the top of the Corinthian acropolis, but there was no water there. He traded the information of where Zeus had taken Aegina in return for Adapos creating a spring on top of the acropolis so it would have water.
That really pissed Zeus off and after chasing Adapos back where he came from, he ordered Death to take Sisyphus to Tartarus and chain him there forever.
Quick-thinking Sisyphus tricked Death into showing him how the chains worked by chaining Death to the rock. Then Sisyphus returned to the living. That was an affront to both Zeus and to Hades. But years later, when Sisyphus once again died, he tricked Persephone into letting him return to the land of the living to remind his wife of her duties to her dead husband. Let’s say Sisyphus seduced Hades’ wife, which really ticked off the god of the underworld.
When it finally came to the attention of the gods that Sisyphus was still running around in the land of the living, Hermes was sent to drag him before Hades and Zeus for judgment. That’s what resulted in the punishment.
I’ve followed the writings of Albert Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus” and have interpreted his punishment as living life over and over again, but always dying in the end.
The first line to break the page is “Another day, the same old rock.”
Now to write the rest of the book.
You can join my Sausage Grinder tier patrons on Patreon for just $10 per month. These patrons receive daily updates on the progress of this story as I write it. The updates are raw and unedited, and allow the patrons to read the story as it unfolds from my mind. It’s not always pretty, but it’s fun. Next week: “Writing Was the Easy Part.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
