I am also revising Alice and hope to be able to publish the paperback soon after Alexandra.

I am also plotting Justine. I was struck on Chapter 2. After all the flash backs in chapter 1 I was unsure how to write rest of the novel. Writing the entire novel as “overlapping flashbacks” seemed firstly very difficult and secondly could end up being very hard to read. I could easily get lost writing flashback after flashback, and the reader could become totally confused. But I think I have devised a way that will work.

Also If I want to publish Celia as a paperback I will really need to rewrite it. Celia was my first novel. And it is not at all up to the standard that I write to now. I have ideas for other novels set in the same storyline telling Becky’s, Jazz’s and Sam’s stories(characters in Celia). So If ever want to write them I will need to rewrite Celia.

So I’m proofing Alexandra, revising Alice, plotting Justine and maybe rewriting Celia. And maybe working on Becky(I have an outline of chapter 1 from years ago), Jazz and Sam.

And yes, I have noticed a trend in the names of my novels(though in this case Sam is a boy).

Many thanks to everyone who has shown an interest and I hope the ebooks are easier to read than the online version.

I have experimented for the past year with putting the full text of my novel Alexandra on this site and running advertising alongside it. This was successful in getting my novel read by lots of people, but it was not very successful in terms of being a professional author as I never made more than a few dollars a month. My goal as a professional author is to provide a sustainable income for myself.

So now I am embracing the “future of publishing” and issuing my novel as a downloadable ebook. I chose SmashWords because they will provide my novel in all these formats:

• Online Reading (Javascript)
• Online Reading (HTML)
• PDF format
• RTF format (Readable by nearly all word processors)
• Kindle (.mobi) format
• Plain Text format (download)
• Plain Text format (in a web page)
• Palm Doc (PDB) format

So no matter how you perfer to read your ebooks there should be a format that suits you.

And what better way to say that you like my work than by paying for it

Please enjoy.

But I also like to leave questions in the readers mind. The title of the chapter is “Seducing a girl” but …

• Is John seducing Justine?
• Are Justine and John seducing the (unnamed)girl?
• Is Justine simply using John to seduce the girl?
• Or is it in fact John that is being seduced, and perhaps even corrupted, by Justine, and hence is Justine being seduced by John’s corruption?

And why is the girl unnamed, while a throw-away character like Barry gets a name(and a birthday party)? Is she just another throw-away character, a girl to have fun with and then discard without a second thought?
I have another unnamed character, who appears in chapter 3, who will be central to reveling Justine’s past and her true feelings towards John.

I know that my unique take on erotic fiction does not fit a traditional market. I get comments both that there is too much explicit sex and comments that there is not enough sex in my novels.
And that is one of the reasons that I have started this blog. I want to find an audience that shares my taste in erotic literature.
The great thing about the Web is things that are not mainstream can still find an audience, the worst thing about the web is that so many things, both mainstream and not, are competing for attention.
But my fist, faltering steps at marketing must be working, because you are reading this post.

Mostly today I spend working on the story line for a prequel to Justine.
There are some references, in later chapters of Justine, to a previous relationship of Justine’s. One which hurt her really badly emotionally. And I have just today, during my free writing warm up exercise merged another recurring fantasy that I have with Justine’s backstory to come up with the outline of another complete novel. The story of Justine’s first major relationship. Which happen before the events recounted in Justine. The story is really compelling so it has immediately been bumped up to No. 3 in my to-do list (Alice and Justine are 1 and 2. Senna – Alice Pt. 2 is now at No.4).

I seem to be in the habit of wanting to write prequels to my novels. The same thing happened with my novel Celia. I want to write the stories of Jazz, Becky and Sam, as well as a sequel continuing Celia’s story.

And the same thing happened to me with my novel Alexandra. I keep wanting to write the story from both Alexandra and Jasmine’s point of view. (Did you know that Alex and Jasmine knew each other before either met Kevin? I didn’t until just recently). Both stories are more interesting than Kevin’s. It’s just that when I first sat down to write Alexandra the Kevin character shouted the loudest and so I told it from his point of view.
I guess there was more of him in me that I want to admit, or maybe I just had to write him down on paper in order to get him out of my head.
I not sure that I am a good enough writer, yet, to do justice to either Alex or Jasmine, so you will have to wait to hear their stories.

So, the long and the short of it is, I am not going to get Chapter 2 finished today(the 23rd). And tomorrow I will be running about bring the dog to boarding kennels, packing suitcases and buying last minuet supplies. So I may not get it finished tomorrow either.
I am bring a laptop with me and I am sure that they do have Internet cafe’s in Italy. I’ll probably have Internet access in my hotel. So I will work, some of the time, when I’m not celebrating my brother-in-law’s wedding. And I will post the results my labours next week.

It is a question that says more about the questioners than it does the author who gets asked it.

If you write a story about a bank robbery, people don’t ask if you rob banks.
If you write a story about a murder, people don’t assume that you have committed murdered.
If you write a story about sex, people want to know who you did it with.
It doesn’t matter what sex acts that you portray your characters performing, from the most plain vanilla to the most outrageous BDSM, people always want it to be real. They want all the juicy details of who you really did it with.
You can repeatedly tell them that it is fiction, and they will smile and say, “No, really. You can tell me. Was it [insert random name]?” as they give you a conspiratorial wink.

I suppose this attitude could be explained by the fact that not everybody robs banks, there are very few murderers amongst us, and has anyone ever met an international playboy spy? But everybody has sex, or at the very least wants to have sex:-).

What amused me most was that half the people I first showed Alexandra to assumed that it was based on my relationship with a particular girl, let’s call her A. But the other half, who knew me when I had another girlfriend, let’s call her B, assumed that it was her that I was writing about. The two girls were as alike as chalk and cheese!
I must repeat that neither the Alexandra or Jasmine characters are based on past girlfriends of mine.
But this is a bit like telling people that you are not gay. The more often one says “I am not gay.” The more people think you are. At least that is what happens to me .

So I must repeat neither Alexandra or any other story I publish is real.

Now all my pages used the same navigation links.

At least it looks OK in my web browser, I hope it looks OK in everyone else’s as well.

Now All I have to do is sort out the formatting on the first 10 Chapters.

In my mind text is just text. I “grew up” in the days of green screens and fixed width type fonts. In fact I used computers for years without hearing the word “font”. Fonts were something graphic designers used, not computer programmers.
I never had any formatting problems when everything was displayed in fixed width block caps.

It is taking longer than I thought to upload the complete novel. Mainly in time spent reading the text to find suitable places to split the chapters in to smaller chunks for easier on-line reading.

Splitting the chapters will also make it easier to bookmark the place where my readers have paused in their reading. I don’t expect many people to read an entire novel on-line in one sitting.

I have switched from static pages to WordPress. Over the next while you may find that I am experimenting with different templates and layouts etc.

At the moment I am putting the full text of my erotic novel Alexandra on line. It might take a few days to get the complete text formated and put online.

Pleas enjoy.