Where It All Comes From

Behind the scenes.

An essay regarding the background of the stories I've published on Literotica, Stories Online and Amazon.

Basically, this is a missive going into some detail about each of the stories I've written, where the inspiration came from, who the characters might have been based on, threads that didn't go anywhere or got removed and plain, what the intent was (and how far I may have missed the original mark).

If you've not read my stuff, then this really won't mean that much to you. For those who have, I'm hoping this will serve as some degree of behind the scenes interest. Be aware though, there are big time spoilers in here, so if you haven't read the story concerned, you'd be better off reading them first.

So, each story, usually in chronological order, unless they are part of a series.

A little about me.

I'm fifty-ish, I live in AZ (which is where the az part of Jezzaz comes from), although I'm British born and raised. I've been married for almost thirty years (Oh GOD! Time for the "We need to talk" trope??) and have two kids.

I work as a software engineer, and I think that's really all you need to know. I've never made a dime off my stories so far, and my wife thinks my little hobby is a bit weird and doesn't involve herself in it.

The act of Writing

One thing that most readers on Lit and Stories Online don't really understand is how long it takes to write these things. Most of my stories are between forty and fifty thousand words. That's a hell of a lot of words, particularly for someone who has not only a day job, is a parent and also runs a contracting company on the side.

I plan out the story; I know exactly what the plot is, what I want to say and what is going to happen before I start anything. Then I write an outline. Usually I'll describe some of the characters, then write a scene by scene break down - usually two or three sentences per scene - that details what happens in that scene, and why; how it moves the plot forward. This is essential if I leave a story and come back to it later; this way I can pick up where I left off and remember the rest of where I was going without having to wrack my brains or go in a direction I didn't intend.

Then it's a question of filling out each scene. Sometimes I'll jump ahead to write the last scene, or a scene with a lot of plot in it, just to get it out of the way, and to give me something to aim at. I wrote the last scene of the conclusion of the Ingrams Series as one of the first things I did, for example -- I know exactly where it's going and how it's getting there.

Then, once it's written -- and that can take anywhere from a couple of weeks if the muse is flowing, or four or five months if not (the last ingrams story took almost two years, with me writing other things in-between writing bursts) -, there's at least two more passes. I go through once to make sure the plot flows, and to fill in gaps of events I reference but missed writing. Then I go through and make sure the names are all correct and spelled the same way (I wish I hadn't called Jessica Ingrams right hand man Dermott. I can never remember if it's one 't' or two). Then there's a dialog pass, where I add and trim dialog, to make sure it flows better, and that the characters say everything I want them to say, to really explore the situation they are discussing.

Somehow I usually end up with another one to two thousand words more than I started with. I'm not sure how that happens, but it always seems to.

Then it goes out to the editor, who removes half my commas, complains about all the dashes, adds notes, sometimes tweaks my dialog and generally removes stuff. If I'm lucky, they'll suggest a better title than the one I came up with.

Then I to go through those changes, and decide if I want to keep those changes or not (and generally there are between a hundred, to a thousand changes in the text after the editor has gotten hold of it) and that takes more than a few hours.

Then I have to decide if I'm going to chop it up into chapters, and if so, how many and where the breaks are. For some, I decided that chapters were the way to go. Then, after I'd been publishing a bit, I was reading QHML1's stuff and he did almost all his stories as one shots, and I thought that might be a better fit for those stories I write that are under 50k.

Then I add the top bit of text and any end text, if I go there (most of the time I don't). Then it's submission time, and on Lit, that generally takes about five to seven days to show up on the site.

It's extremely time consuming, and you guys get all that effort for free. So please, lighten up on the "You should stop writing and just die" comments I sometimes see on stories, both mine and other peoples.

This takes days, and my editors are for free, which means there is no pushing them. One editor that I only used once, was quite taken aback at how big the text I sent him was, and complained about it. I don't have any right to complain back -- he IS doing this for free -- but I've made a point of not using him again, because yeah, I am taking advantage, and the last thing I want to do is piss off an editor unnecessarily because I'm a wordy bastard.

My first Editor, PennLady, made me a twenty times better writer by pointing out all the writing mistakes I was making in terms of syntax (for example, she mentioned that numbers are ALWAYS written as words, never as numbers. Four years later and I still have to go through a manuscript and change numbers to words), plus she challenged me on every emotional reaction of my characters. "Why would they do this? That doesn't make sense" and so on -- pushing me to justify why they would do what they do, and in doing so, adding extra thoughts or reactions so it made the characters more 'real' to explain themselves.

I'm extremely grateful to each and every one of my editors -- they've done me proud and made my stuff ten times better than it was, and NoneTheWiser has this distressing habit of a) dropping in better dialog for my characters than I wrote and b) embarrassingly almost always coming up with a better name for the story than I had. Swine. :)

The original writing itself is hard though. Sometimes the stories just pour out -- Live from the Game was like that, as was Stone Cold and also License to Kill. Sometimes, there are weeks or even months between me starting a story and finishing it (Ingrams #2 was like that, as was The Wrong side of Smart).

Generally I have two stories on the go at once -- so when I get stuck or bored with one, I swap to the other. One is normally a series story (Ingrams or a Ryan story), and the other a stand-alone.

I have to admit, I do like a happy (ish, at least) ending. I don't always write one -- In Sickness and In Health doesn't have one, but there is a reason for that, and I'll get into it later -- but when it's appropriate, I do try and get one. I don't think life has enough happy endings, and so in my escapism, I like to see that.

People have asked for sequels to some of the stories -- Words in the most requested one by far. I'm not really that interested in doing sequels to the one act stories like Words or Opening Arguments -- the characters in those stories are very one dimensional and there purely to make the plot go forward. They aren't three dimensional in my mind, and generally I have something specific I want to say or some point to make, or some situation to explore, and once that's done, that's done for me. I will add some local color to the characters, so they don't seem so one dimensional, and also to give them reasons for doing the things that the plot demands of them, but the reality is, they are. There's nothing that happens past the events of Words that's worth discussing -- the two of them split because of what's occurred and that's that -- because there's not really enough depth in the characters in the first place. There is just enough for the plot to work, which is the root of the story I am telling, and no more. The reader is invited to make whatever sequel they want out of it, in their own minds.

Live from the Game was the only time I buckled and wrote a sequel, and that's only because I thought I had a good idea for it (we'll get to that, too), and honestly, I now wish I hadn't, since it's all spiraled into a lot more work than I had intended.

That said, other people have asked to do sequels and generally, for the one-act, one-off stories, I've not been particularly precious about it and said, "sure". What Qhml1 has done with the characters in Mr. and Mrs. America has been particularly interesting, for example. He's taken them in quite a different direction from the intention of the original story, but that's fine because what he's produced has been a rip-roaring action thriller and I've enjoyed the hell out of it. Even if Jake became Paul half way through and that was explained in a less than detailed way:)

I do tend to be a bit more protective of the characters in the multi-part stories, like Ryan and April. I am going somewhere with those characters and I'd rather they were left alone till their arcs are complete.

I've corresponded with other authors on occasion -- Jmavor and Carvohi are very interesting people to chat with, but others I've tried reaching out to don't reply at all, which is a shame. The seminal Ohio has even reached out once, which was a highlight!

And, of course, some wonderful comments from Daniel Q Steele, who has seen fit to allow me to comment on some of his stories prior to publishing. Beat that, everyone else! :)

One amusing anecdote was that when Live from the Game was done, and I was all smug about having written some half decent dialog, regarding Ryan and Crystal, I had an email thread with Matt Moreau. Now Matt gets a bum rap on Lit I think. He has an interesting style, although his stories tend to be quite same-y -- he's obviously working something out internally with the writing, and I think that's great. He is fascinated by the cuckold story, and gets a hell of a reaction from all the men who get quite angry about it (get over yourselves guys. It's JUST A STORY.) Anyway, we talked about the idea of writing a story together -- he'd provide the premise, but I'd write the dialog for one of the characters, and he, the other.

The thing is, it just doesn't really work. In order to do that, you have to go back and forth for each line of dialog. It would have taken months to write anything at that rate, so the idea slowly died and faded away, and I think that's probably for the best. I was just being arrogant and flush with a little bit of praise because of Live from the Game, anyway.

Interestingly, Matt let me know that he also writes in a very different way from me -- he honestly doesn't know the end conclusion of his stories as he starts them -- he starts with characters and a premise and then just goes. He had no idea if the characters will stay together or not when he starts. I am such the opposite of that...:) Horses for courses I guess;)

I have been asked why I do chapters for my longer stories. Honestly, it's because I read When We Were Married from Daniel Q Steele and I just copied that approach. Since then, I've experimented -- the longer stories tend to get broken up into ten thousand word per chapter submissions, but I tried breaking Stone Cold into two, both chapters being about twenty-five thousand words in length, just to see if that's any better. I tried making the chapters much larger with the Ingrams conclusion, but that was more from necessity than anything. The natural breaks occurred at much larger sizes, and I didn't want more than 6 chapters (as it was, it ended up being 5). Oh look. I used numbers as numbers again. Sorry PennLady:)

StangStar06 put out one story that was twenty pages long when published on Lit, and he got hammered for it in the comments, so I won't be doing that.

In terms of inspiration, most of my stories start from a premise and a question. "What would happen if someone on the kiss cam at a baseball game was cheating, but kissed her lover anyway?" That was essentially where Live from the Game came from.

This kind of thing happens to me a lot, and I'd say only about five percent of the premise and questions that arise from that premise ever make it to a story -- most I either can't put a story to, or there's a gaping hole in the premise or question that would make writing a story an exercise in convoluted plotting. Occasionally I think of a new angle on an existing premise, or something that I hope is entirely new, but quite a lot of the time, I might even start on something but the excitement and need to get it down just fades away.

Once in a great while, I find that something I am working on gets preempted by another story that comes out -- that happened recently on a story I was writing about when a spouse gets amnesia and marries someone else, truly unsuspectingly, what happens when the original spouse suddenly pops up, and memory is returned? I got twenty thousand words into that when pretty much the same story popped up on Lit. I wouldn't have minded and would have continued but the one that arrived first was really good and said a lot of what I had intended to say. So that's just languishing on my hard drive until I can figure out a new perspective or twist in the story for that.

I've got about another five or six stories in various stages of completion that I don't think I'll finish -- I'm trying to be a lot more disciplined about what I start now, with the intention of finishing that which I start.

Out of Love

This was actually the first story I wrote for Lit. It had no editor, and it shows. I made a bunch of rookie mistakes and the second part was actually blocked from publication because of some mistakes I'd made with dialog, -- two people's comments on the same line, etc.

This is actually only the third thing I've ever written in my life, as a fiction story. The other two, -- some cyber punky stuff, -- are pretty terrible, as I look back on it. I keep meaning to do a pass on them and bring them up to the current writing standard, which is light years past what it was when I started. I have a third book in that cyber punk series about thirty-three percent written, I just need to get the discipline together to get on and finish it. There are actually six stories planned for that series; I know what all of them are, and how they tie together, I just need the time to actually write them.

Anyway, back to Out of Love. This came about simply because I'd read a lot of Literotica, and I was really interested in how the betrayers can make it up to those they betray. You'll find that a common theme in my work, -- Long After the Game is pretty much all about that.

I'd read a lot of crap in Literotica, -- let's face it, most of it is, -- and I was curious about whether I could do better. So, put your money where your mouth is. If EL James can earn millions with that absolute drivel that is fifty Shades of Grey (and it is so badly written and constructed. Did you know this was originally twilight fan fiction, with the main characters renamed? Explains a lot, doesn't it?), well, I can't write any worse, can I? And neither can you... Hell, my dog can do as well...

I hadn't planned out Out of Love well enough, and the story meandered a bit, and I really only had sorted out the start and the end of the story, not the middle. Really, the middle act was just an excuse to have lots of sex in it (and damn, it's hard to write that stuff and not be repetitive), with some twists and turns.

None of the characters are particularly well developed, and certainly, the circle of friends are very desultorily sketched out, -- they are there just to serve the purpose. I should have done a better job on them, -- made them more real.

But the central concept, that of "how far would you go to try and rebuild a relationship you helped destroy" was, I think, well served. I still think this is one of the closest I've gotten to actually completely realizing the intent of what the story was to be about, going in.

The whole Ingrams idea came about when I wrote the end part, -- where the conclusion came about and Jace explained the whole situation, and Jessica Ingrams was revealed for who she is. I was intrigued with the back-story she must have, and the Ingrams series came about, in terms of the premise, almost fully formed from that.

I deliberately planned it out as several installments, each as their own standalone story, complete with a prequel to set the scene for who our protagonist was going to be.

In terms of the characters in this story, there's no real-life counterparts. There are some aspects of Jace that come from me, but almost none in Chloe from anyone I know. The nod to the Mustang was a nod to StangStar06, who has always rated highly in my estimation, even if the marriage ending stories he writes tend to be the same story repackaged again and again. They are still very worth reading and are well written with fun characters in them. His other stuff, -- the science fiction stuff, and the stuff with fantasy elements are outstanding. Very very imaginative guy, that one.

The Ingrams & Associates Series

When I decided to write these, I knew it was going to be a few years in the making. I had intended that each story would explore a different Loving Wives trope, -- one would be about raising kids that weren't yours, unknowingly (or, in this case, knowingly, but having already balanced out the scales, unbeknown to everyone else), one was going to be about hypnotism, one was about a psychological duel between April and another woman, who did similar things that she did, only for evil purposes, one would be about a man completely betrayed by pretty much every woman he'd ever invested his heart in, and finally died, broken, and what it did to the women who he left behind. And over the top of all of them would be an overarching plot, which would resolve in the final episode.

I don't think I've even remotely come close to the original intentions, but hopefully I've still written some fun stories along the way.

Now, the premise itself, as many commentators have pointed out, is ridiculous. I mean, if it were in real life, these people would be discovered, sued, disbarred and probably jailed for fraud. What they do is underhand, manipulative and fairly immoral, without question. However, I *don't* view the agents as Whores, as some commentators have called them, -- they aren't exchanging sex for money, or selling their bodies. They really do believe in what they are doing, which is at root, helping people. They just use rumpy-pumpy in doing so because quite often, the issues they need to help resolve are either sexual in nature, or a self-confidence issue.

However, the reality is that tourniquet therapy is unlikely to be of long-term use, -- it usually takes more than one good screw to fix a wobbly table:) But still, the premise itself is intriguing. It mixes Romance, Sex, Mystery and Thrillers all into one, with a side order of Action. It serves as a backdrop to explore all kinds of kinks and deviances, but also have a happy ending. Mostly.

One thing I actively wanted to do was make this a thriller kind of thing, with some real James Bond moments, but, unlike James Bond, make the sex an actual part of the plot. Bond tends to get his end away a lot but it's not really central to the plot (in some circumstances, it's to get info out of women, but most of the time it's just so he can be seen as One Hell Of A Lad), and what I wanted to do here was make sense and relationships actually central to the plot. I was, after all, going to be putting this on LitErotica, and if there is any place where you can do that, it's there, so why not?