Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Floundering in the Surf

Floundering in the Surf

Someone out there might be interested in what I’m writing now and how I got interested in doing it.

After taking my final in a class given by The House of Sensual Prose…I stepped back and said, “You know this story “The Ruse,” has potential for a longer work…I had just finished watching the serial on TV called “Pillars of the Earth.” Now be advised the exam requirement has a requirement for some “Romantica,” so if you don’t like that kind of literature don’t read The Ruse

Anyway I decided to expand it into a couple of chapters and see where it was heading….surprisingly it began leading away from sensual prose into the romance genre. About this time socalscribe, AKA something different every week, announced the Nano competition…last year I had thought that might be cool and took the material I had written thus far and expanded it into a novel outline. The problem was that I had already written the first two chapters and I didn’t want to lose the enthusiasm and ideas that were beginning to spin off what I was working on….So I decided to follow the Nano idea but in an unofficial capacity….also I didn’t want to get into a fire hose of words mode that can be the outcome when I try and crowd my limited typing skills that never grew beyond twenty words a minute.

Plus, if my muse gets tired I find my work starts to become a bloodless piece of prose that might sound elegant (to me at least) but when I read it later I discover it is lacking in the visceral passion I need to animate the framework. Even when I write non erotica, I need that passion which is the reason I am interested in sensual prose to begin with….In my mind the genesis of passion is sexual energy.

The first name I gave to the story was “Institutions of Shame.” It had the same ring as Pillars of the Earth and I thought if it worked for them why not me? Then I decided that was too transparent and decided on “Don Francisco de Castile.” Then as I was doing some internet research I discovered that the Inspector General of the Inquisition was Tomas de Torquemada, a friar. To make this work I decided my protagonist would be the third son and his older to brothers die…. That Tomas would set aside his calling and become a soldier, taking up the responsibilities he had as new family head. Then I began thinking that maybe Tomas would have a traumatic experience that would cause him to return to the Monastery and resume his role as monk in keeping with the historical record. I would bend the history a bit but not abandon it altogether. That is where I am at now. I have been working quietly and posting the episodes as serials which nobody on writing.com even looks at which allows me to work in an undistracted mode.

Now however, I am taking a new class by someone I think is one of the more talented writers on the site. He wants his students to keep the same characters throughout the written requirements and has teamed up with Giselle and the Quickie Contest to give the students more visibility. They are using the same weekly prompts. I am trying to kill three birds with one stone…i.e. do the class work, write a piece of contest quality erotica and use the work in my serial. What I am discovering is that the form of the contest entry and the form of a novel are quite different and are not even close to interchangeable.

If you want to follow along as a writer struggles and grows you can follow the Novella, Don Tomas de Torquemada, (way down on the bottom of my file listing) while at the same time seeing adaptations in Giselle’s contest. Further if you want to see some of the lessons learned in erotica writing, gleaned in the past year and a half; check under “Class work in Erotica” the file called Rules of Thumb for Writing Erotica.

I might do some more blogs on this theme…It has been a fascinating experience.