Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Upstaging of Supporting Characters

Upstaging of Supporting Characters

I write Romantica, Erotica, Sensual Prose, as well as Romance and Fantasy and action adventure. Ever since Reading Raphael Sabatini and Alexander Dumas I’ve been hooked. When I write, what flows off my fingertips affects others. Some like it some don’t, some find it amusing, some find it discomforting but it affects others.

One of the things about Writing.com I like is the tolerance there is for this full range of the writing I enjoy. This is not the case at all writing sites and even though it is not officially recognized, erotica is allowed. (See the Unofficial Erotica Newsletter.)

Anyway in this Genre I was taking a class offered by the House of Sensual Prose which is a small group of writers who seek to teach their students how to take the power of erotica and adapt it to their more serious works and thereby become better writers….in other words use erotica to energize their writing without going too far over the top….I know, some students interpret the limits differently.

Now everybody who posts likes to get feedback (reviews) and some even find the negative useful…which to me is the most useful of all. However to me it is not the reviews but the views that provide the most telling feedback. There are two types of view, member and non-member. A member is a fellow writer and they see your work differently than a non-member. A member is more of a producer than a consumer of the written word. They don’t have the time (because they write) that a non-writer has. Further they consciously or unconsciously compare your work with theirs and react differently than someone that is more a reader and compares your work with others they have read. Members tend to see your work more viscerally than non-members.
My experience is about seventy-five percent of the views I get are from non-members however that varies with how my work is promoted. If it is part of a contest more members view it, at least initially than non-members…. I suspect this is contestants who are interested in the other submissions. Another thing I do is write using a serial technique which means many of my submissions share the same characters and like having novels in my ports I can see how the chapters compare with each other.

For someone into statistics my average port submission is about twenty-five views however that has been climbing the past year as my readership has increased. I suppose that anyone reading this blog is wondering where this is leading….allow me to explain what has gone on recently.

I was taking an Erotica course that had six class assignments... I decided to write a serial…that is using the same characters from assignment to assignment. It was called The Car builder and the Real estate Agent. The file has about twelve episodes and can be found in my port. Anyway I’m cranking along and I get an assignment that is supposed to deal with voyeurism. I know absolutely nothing about that but undeterred I write about the protagonist and his friend, seeing a Limo in front of his girlfriend’s office/condo and sneaking up and looking in the window…There they see their two girlfriends, a gangster and his driver. Serving drinks is a bunny girl who seems to be on a trial of sorts and is not meeting expectations….she is finally told she has not made the cut and to return to the car.

Now there is a lot of ambiguity in this episode and it generated plenty of unexpected interest. Reviewers wanted to know what was going on….in a follow up episode the gangster goes to the car builder and wants to buy a car. Again there was a spike in interest…Even though the episodes are over a month old I still keep getting comments and questions and views. Finally I write a third episode involving Manny (The Gangster) and his Bunny Girl at a pageant and it explodes off the charts. In two weeks I have gotten 127 views behind only “The Librarian” (144…that is a story in itself) which is two years old. My wife hates this Mr. Hardin character and even Giselle who runs the contest was uncomfortable even though she awarded it a first place.

As an author I expect my main characters to capture the lime light….I work hard to try and make that happen and I am dismayed when a supporting character on the fringe begins to get all the attention. This happened with another supporting character of mine, Bedelia, in a fantasy I was into last year and is sitting on the back burner. My wife keeps asking when I ‘m going to get back to Bedelia.

If anyone out there in the ether understands why Mr. Hardin is getting all the attention I would like to know.