Witchfire Pt 6 Finally Done!

Considering parts 5 & 6 were supposed to just be a more detailed account of the events that were summarized at the end of Chapter 4, they turned into a monster.  Chapter 6 is 16,712 words long, and has a few sex scenes, a few fight scenes, and A literal ton of plot and character advancement.

Witchfire Pt 6 – Revelations

Things should start falling together for readers, giving them a better idea of the shape of things in MY version of Delta City.  I’ve made a real effort to create a world with some depth and grit without going total emo melodrama.

As always, comments and feedback are welcome and encouraged. 🙂

And for those still not up on the characters, here’s Mister X’s heroines fact sheets page.

That specific page is fairly tame, but be warned that other parts of his site are solidly NSFW.

Witchfire Pt 5 Posted!

This took far longer than I anticipated, but chapter 5 is finally out.  This one is covering the events that were just skimmed over at the end of chapter 4.  I felt that was a sloppy wrap up and I wanted to do something more proper.  Chapter 6 will conclude that series of events and lead into the Halloween story I did.  THAT will hopefully be ready next week.  For now, enjoy chapter 5

Witchfire, Pt 5

Chapter 6 will have more fighting and sex.

Most Curious…

I posted a bit of thinking out loud regarding the rules for writing yesterday.  Afterwards, I asked for opinions from other writers regarding how “carved in stone” these rules were, etc…  I got six likes in the post, which is awesome.  Absolutely NO replies however…

It got me wondering if anybody REALLY reads posts, or if they just take a quick glance, then either decide they like it OR just click “Like” in the hopes of getting reciprocal likes.

Just making that assumption would be pointlessly negative though.  I personally will click “Like” on content I enjoy, but won’t add a comment unless I can add something actually meaningful to the conversation.

Realistically, either option is, or at least COULD BE true of a segment of the likes.  So could other explanations. The whole thing just has me wondering now if anything I write here IS truly liked OR if we’re just spinning our wheels here pretending that what we say or do here matters any more than social media.

And if anybody didn’t guess, I’m pragmatic and consider social media largely about vanity and killing time.  Decent marketing tool though.

Writing Rules???

So, this is one I’m actively soliciting feedback (comments) on from fellow writers, particularly if you’ve self published on Amazon or similar, or have been professionally published.

I’ve read the guides about showing not telling, no adverbs, and ideally no or minimal adjectives also, avoid long drawn out descriptions, etc…  I can’t help but wonder how much validity there is to some of it though.  Clearly some, but how much in the modern era?  There are top selling professionally published books out there that seem to break multiple rules.

50 Shades of Grey being my favorite example here.  Plenty of tell instead of show, there are long involved descriptions of things like the wood of the bed frame, which really doesn’t serve to advance the plot or characters in a major way, etc…

Show don’t tell is probably the really tricky one.  Don’t tell us a character is mad, have them show it in their words and actions.  That was one example in a book.  Western culture generally seems so pacified and non-confrontational anymore that I wonder if having a character slam a door and yell at another character can even be taken as plain anger as opposed to the character being wrongly seen as unhinged.  To some, I’m sure that may seem a silly exaggeration, but I live in a very politically correct area.

Plenty of self-published stuff on Amazon and B&N that seems to ignore the rules even further and sells modestly well.  Of course, none of us want tosell only “modestly well”, right? 

Now that I’ve rambled on in my sleep deprived state, how do you all avoid brain lock worrying about the rules?  What are your personal opinions on their level of validity nowadays?

Note here: I DO have comments set up to be screened, but only to filter spam and comments on the level of “you’re a whore for writing smut”.  Anything intelligent and constructive, agreeing or not, gets posted here.

Post Drama Update

First of all, I’m trying out the upcoming new editor for WordPress.  It has alot of nice features, BUT I really don’t like the layout.  Everything is off to the side, like the options for adding tags and such on posts.  Working with word processors as long as I have, I strongly prefer that format.  Beyond that, I think people will like it.  Seems to have almost as many options as MS Publisher.

Beyond that, I’m trying to get my focus back and have been slowly plugging along at writing again after dumping ProtonMail.  Enough said about them though.  I should thank them, the couple of rants on twitter got me quite a few views here.  No likes or followers though.  I hope my writing is better than that, LOL. 

Air quality here has been utterly abominable; record level BAD, and that’s not helping my focus either.  Enough complaining though.  So what’s upcoming?

My current project is Witchfire part 5.  A large chunk of that will be the events that I just kind of did a quick recap on at the end of chapter 4.  It felt abrupt and poorly done there so I could finish on time.  After that, the Halloween story will be getting what’s called a “RetCon” in comic books; AKA Retroactive Continuity.  For all you NON geek and geekette writers; that translates out to “it’s getting re-written”.  My admittedly unusual idea for Hexanna didn’t mesh with existing stories when I found out that despite what’s posted about her, she CAN indeed cast spells without her staff.  So for the sake of consistency, I’m going to rework things.

Why Superheros and Superheroines?

A Twitter post by Ava Sterling, (link to her blog “What I Write” is to the right) who follows this blog and is an amazing erotica writer, inspired me to write this.

Much of the public today doesn’t understand the attraction that superheroes hold for others.  This is my attempt at explaining that, and why a good portion of this blog has stories focusing on them.

In the bigger picture, we live in a world where everything seems upside down and out of control.  Everything is exaggerated and distorted by special interests and the media.  This is on both sides of every issue in my opinion.  Real world heroes are human and have flaws which are exposed and they’re torn down.  People love their heroes though.  They want role models and to believe there are people out there who can make a difference.  Superheroes have taken the place of knights in shining armor in the eyes of some of the public.  Others gravitate towards Jason Bourne type characters, but the general pattern holds true.

Marvel movies are so popular because they give people heroes who stand up for their beliefs and go the distance to do what’s right.  Then there’s the fact that everything superheroes do is on a grandiose scale which makes for great modern special effects movies.  Sadly the comic companies themselves are losing money like mad on their actual books.  There are multiple reasons, but the biggest one is that they’ve just forgot their audiences and try to make the characters and world as muddied as the real world.

Metahumans can be just as three dimension and suited for grown ups as any characters though.  They simply need intelligent story telling.

On a personal level, I’m doing fan fiction so I don’t burn through story ideas for my own erotica of all flavors.  I need to improve a bit before I’m on Ava’s level (And thus ready to try getting published), and this is my personal training regimen.  Taking something like the objectified and stereotyped characters of Danger Babe Central and turning them into more three dimensional characters with unique personalities and motivations is a major exercise in creativity and writing also.  All the more so if I want to keep some of the exaggerated sexual vulnerabilities these characters have while making them human beings.

I’ll be the first to admit that the vast majority of fan fiction is complete drivel.  If I write a Star Wars story, it may not be on the level of Alan Dean Foster also.  I can promise you it’ll be better than a lot of blogged writing though.  So, if you’ve only read my “normal” stories, I hope you’ll give the other stuff a look also.

Catching the Boss Posted

My latest non-fan fiction piece of erotica is now posted.  Find out what happens when an executive assistant catches her boss in a compromising position and decides she now has leverage to make her fantasies about him become reality

Catching the Boss

Will Jessica get what she’s been craving for three long years, or will she get more than she bargained for with the strict Vice President?

Quick Note

An embarrassing number of typos and other errors have been corrected in the Witchfire Halloween story (see last blog entry).  In the next day or two I should also have a non fan-fiction erotica story about an executive assistant setting her sights on the boss.

Witchfire Halloween Story Added!

What’s a sexy witch without a bit of gothic horror added to the erotica around Halloween, right?  Granted, I’d hoped to get this put out there earlier, BUT life got in the way.  Anyway, read and see how our favorite heroine peril witch handles dealing with an infamous and powerful vampire lord.

A Witchfire Halloween

This one works as a standalone, and has little in the way of traditional superhero stuff also.  It can be read as modern witch meets vampire and enjoyed on that level.

As always, constructive feedback appreciated. 😉

Learning and Growing

I’m feeling a bit introspective today after my rant.  Doubly so since it got more likes by far than anything else I’ve written, LOL.  It almost makes me wonder if I should be blogging about common sense middle ground solutions to social issues instead of writing erotica.  Like all redheads, I’m stubborn once I’ve set my mind to something though.

In between plotting several new stories I have in mind and posting that rant, I’ve been reading books on how to be a better writer & author.  Thanks to said books, I’m seeing where I’ve come up short on my past stories.  This is especially true of the more recent ones.

First, in some cases, I haven’t got into the characters’ heads enough to properly define them “on paper” for the readers.  I’ve done a fair job, (I think), but not enough to truly capture the readers’ attention and make them feel connected to the characters.  Marc in the Power Girl story and even Krystal (Witchfire) come to mind.  I gave people enough to understand who they are on a basic level, but not enough to make them understand or empathize with the character.

The other major flaw has been the oft heard writing adage of  ‘Show, don’t tell’.  I think I do a good job there when it comes to the sex scenes.  Not perfect, but better than many folks.  Where I fell short, particularly with “Power Girl” was not being as descriptive of what was happening and how the characters were feeling elsewhere.  People that gave me feedback felt it was too long.  Looking at it after reading those books, I can see it was too dry up till the sex and there wasn’t enough to capture the readers’ imaginations and draw them in.  Granted, a writer can get away with that to a limited degree in a short story.  That one was just too long for it though.

I’m working on keeping my sentence structure cleaner and more straight forward as well.  I’ve been knocked on overly complex and run-on sentences since I was in the third grade, so I should know better.

As an added note, I’m also going to do better at remembering that people may not be familiar with characters established elsewhere, and do a better job bringing such characters to life for the reader.

So, this post was mainly just thinking out loud.  Maybe it will also have the benefit of helping other aspiring writers avoid a few common pitfalls however.  The best mistakes to learn from are other peoples’ mistakes after all. 🙂

At this point, I figure I need to get a few stories I’m TRULY happy with posted here as well as rework the existing ones before I’m ready to try publishing “for real” (ie outside of a blog).  The journey continues however.