Aerial (Arcanium Book 3) – COMPLETE

Tags

aerial, arcanium, complete, demonic circus, erotic horror, erotic romance, erotica, lars, novel, seth, work in progress, writing

Title: Aerial

Series: Arcanium

Summary: Seth and Lars are drawn into the world of Arcanium after Seth makes a throwaway wish in front of the circus fortune teller, who decides Arcanium needs a little something extra in the ring. Seth and Lars are torn from their lives of intermural soccer, on-campus parties, and bright futures. Instead, Bell curses the two men to never separate, forced to remain in constant contact at all times.

Now they perform incredibly skilled and beautiful aerial acts for the circus, but these two otherwise straight men must also adjust to always touching – how to sleep together in the same small bed, how they never have any privacy, and how the curse alters the way they express and experience desire for others, like their choreographer and the Arcanium contortionist Valorie as well as conjoined twins Joanne and Jane.

And – to their chagrin and confusion – themselves.

Notes:

In keeping with my hope to write one long novel a month, with all the time I have on my hands due to illness, I managed to write both the second and the third Arcanium novels in May and June respectively. This means that I can now set them aside until October to edit. The original plan was to write them in July and August and edit right after, but I hate immediate editing turnaround, so putting aside my other project for July in order to write the Arcanium novels turned out for the best in all cases.

With the third written – and all the time and hope invested into it – my nervousness about writing erotica with circus oddities and being perceived as adding to the fetishization and demonization of non-average people only increases. Seriously, I am sometimes paralyzed and terrified, wanting to contact my editor and withdraw Arcanium from her consideration. But I love it so much, love all my people, and because I love them, I want to share them, want others to love them as much as I do.

I think Arcanium partially arose out of a reaction to the narrowness of body types that are permitted in erotic fantasies. As though those are the only ones who are permitted to have erotic fantasies. The only ones who deserve to have sex. And the rest of us are out of luck. I realize it’s about fantasy and there’s no shame in wishing to be pretty people, but I think we do ourselves a disservice keeping our fantasies so narrow and not seeing the beauty, humanity, and sexiness in more than the conventionally beautiful.

There are those in Arcanium there voluntarily who embrace what they are, whether they made themselves that way or were born that way. There are those in Arcanium there voluntarily who accept that there aren’t many other places for them to go. There are those in Arcanium who are cursed into it, who eventually reach a tentative acceptance of the oddity or ability that Bell gave them. There are those in Arcanium who are cursed into it and who never accept it, or who are definitely being punished.

My cast run the gamut of human and demon, cursed and natural, accepting and resistant. I think that represents a lot of humanity’s response to being non-average. It’s not an ideal existence, but everyone deals with it in different ways. And since this is Arcanium – and since an incubus and succubus stick around – a lot of them deal with it with sex. Average and non-average amazing sex.

I know my intentions. My fear is that intentions aren’t good enough, that I’m still making a mistake, although damned if I know what it is. I want to bring more than ‘average’ and ‘conventional’ to the erotica table (on so many levels, not just physical), but if all people end up seeing is freaks getting it on, I’m doing something wrong.

It’s a dilemma. My biggest fear. It keeps me awake nights. But I don’t want to be so afraid that I don’t share what I think is a good series of dark stories to tell. A voice too afraid will always be silenced.

Then there’s the slightly smaller fear that no one will read them, and all this worrying is useless because I might as well be silent.

…So all of that was a deep, dark sense of where I am after the completion of the first three novels, since three are needed for the cogs to start turning for series publication. It just makes it real.

Aerial itself, though, out of the context of those fears… It’s my first foray into primary MM fiction and a male protagonist. I think it turned out quite well for that. I’ll have to read over it again to see if the male voice sounds convincing, but I believe I did all right in that respect.

Like Carousel it didn’t end up nearly as long as I thought it would. When I look back on Fortune (Arcanium Book 1), the reason it was longer was because it acted as a sexual introduction to more than just Bell but many of the other characters. As a result, the stories following Fortune could narrow their focus, so future stories can be projected around 90k, I think. I hope. :)

Also, it has less of a horror element to it than Fortune or Carousel. Just how the story ended up, I guess, unless having to contend with queer desire after a lifetime of straight identification qualifies as horror – which one might legitimately argue, speaking from personal experience.

At this point, I’m glad that it’s finished. The pace I held myself to in order to finish, especially with the bad days of the illness, was exhausting. It’s good work, but still exhausting. And like reaching the end of a long race, I’m thrilled with the effort but quite ready to be done. :) I’m also looking forward to December or January, when I’ll tackle Kitty’s story in book four, Ringmaster.

I wish I could do this all the time, not just these last two months. Alas.

But take heart. It’s stat time!

Aerial Stats:

Word count: 88,918 words

Projected word count: 110,000 words

Days to write: 26

First lines: “Cameron, who’d already gone to the circus with a few of his friends, had given it a high recommendation. He said that the Bearded Lady’s tits were amazing—just ignore all the hair, and the rest of her was a real piece—and that you could see the outline of the snake charmer’s nipples and pussy lips against her leather bikini. ”

Largest number of sexual participants at once: 5. When your primary couple can’t separate and their secondary partners also can’t separate, it leads to a lot of foursomes, as you might imagine.

Number of sex scenes: 8. Two of those scenes are quite involved, though. Again, you have to expect that from foursomes and moresomes. Also, there’s a lot of sexual thoughts and angst that don’t qualify as a sex scene. Like I’ve said before, Aerial returns to the raw carnality of Fortune.

—–

Up Next: A few months off from erotic projects, then editing Carousel and Aerial. After that, depending on how much time I have between finishing those edits and NaNoWriMo (when I’ll complete the Sanctuary trilogy with Call for Blood), I might write something else. I’ll just have to see.

Aerial (Arcanium Book 3): Day 23

Tags

aerial, arcanium, carnival, curse, demonic circus, erotic horror, erotic romance, erotica, jinn, lars, m/m, mffm, novel, series, seth, wishes, work in progress, writing

Title: Aerial

Series: Arcanium

Summary: Seth and Lars are drawn into the world of Arcanium after Seth makes a throwaway wish in front of the circus fortune teller, who decides Arcanium needs a little something extra in the ring. Seth and Lars are torn from their lives of intermural soccer, on-campus parties, and bright futures. Instead, Bell curses the two men to never separate, forced to remain in constant contact at all times.

Now they perform incredibly skilled and beautiful aerial acts for the circus, but these two otherwise straight men must also adjust to always touching – how to sleep together in the same small bed, how they never have any privacy, and how the curse alters the way they express and experience desire for others, like their choreographer and the Arcanium contortionist Valorie as well as conjoined twins Joanne and Jane.

And – to their chagrin and confusion – themselves.

Word count: 76,026/110,000

Notes:

According to my strike-out outline of scenes to come, I have to finish this scene, then I have three additional scenes to tackle. My projection of 110k words is looking to be too long. What is wrong with me? I used to guess too short every time, and now on Carousel and Aerial I’ve guessed too long.

If I had to guess at this point, it’ll be closer to 90k, but even that’s fuzzy. I’m hurtling toward the climax of the novel, which in my experience doesn’t take up as much wordage as I usually expect.

I think it’s because of plot momentum doing its thing. I forget about plot momentum when I keep pausing for erotic interludes. I swear, there’s nothing else like erotica in literature for pausing forward momentum and that being just peachy to a reader. That’s why I compare erotica to musicals. Without all the sex interludes, my mainstream novels feel like bullet trains even though they tend to be longer.

I’m enjoying Aerial. Not quite to the level of Carousel, but that’s only because Carousel is a more fun book in general. Aerial has straight-man gay-sex angst, plus the curse of contact. So though the sex is made interesting around the boys’ limitations as well as the conjoined twins’ limitations, it’s hard to forget said limitations, you know?

Also, I think my word count quota tires me. Even when I’m fading, I still crank out the words in a numbed-out haze. I’m not drunk or anything. Just…streaming. It yields good results, just wears me out so that by the end of the day I’m ready to decompress.

That’s a job for you. And it’s a good thing, because it means I’m taking the work seriously in this in-between time of no legit work. When it comes to discipline, I gots it. That’s not a question for me anymore. It’s a matter of whether anyone wants to read my shit that will determine whether this is something I can make a go of as a rent-paying job. Don’t worry, I’m so fringe that I’m not holding my breath. I write what I love, and that often backfires. :)

But unlike your average job, this work is so deeply fulfilling I don’t mind the mental exhaustion (and part of it is allergies anyway). It’s the kind of tired you get after a good run, except in my head (because Miss Evans doesn’t run). It’s good for me. I’ll continue to do it as long as possible.

And the faster I get one written, the faster I can get the rest of my ideas written. No, I don’t sacrifice quantity for quality. The increased word counts are about taking up more of my time (writing for more hours) instead of compressing the word count into the same amount of time (writing more words per hour than before). So I spend most of the afternoon and night writing instead of just the afternoon or just the evening. That’s all.

As it is, with all the time in the world, I’m going to have managed two long novels in two months, plus a long novel (or serial) edit. Not too shabby for something that probably would have taken me three to three and a half months if I was working a real-world job at the same time. My window of free writing time looks to be closing soon, though. (Unless I need surgery. I never hope for that, and it’s entirely possible they won’t do the surgery in my case.)

That’s part of the reason I wanted to finish both novels so quickly in the first place – to get them out of the way before work starts gobbling up writing hours. I need the money, though. Unless some wealthy patron swoops out of nowhere, hands me fifty grand, and says, ‘Hey, Miss Evans, write anything you want for a year, no strings attached,’ I’m going to need a steady source of at least some income.

Know any wealthy patrons? If you did, you’d probably keep them for yourself, selfish bastard.

All right, I’m starting to type out of my ass, so it’s time to go to sleep, arise relatively refreshed, and start the next 5k words. I’m hoping to finish out this scene and get the climax scene started so that I can finish the book around Friday or Saturday.

Aerial (Arcanium Book 3): Day 17

Tags

aerial, arcanium, demonic circus, erotic horror, erotic romance, erotica, lars, novel, series, seth, work in progress, writing

Title: Aerial

Series: Arcanium

Summary: Seth and Lars are drawn into the world of Arcanium after Seth makes a throwaway wish in front of the circus fortune teller, who decides Arcanium needs a little something extra in the ring. Seth and Lars are torn from their lives of intermural soccer, on-campus parties, and bright futures. Instead, Bell curses the two men to never separate, forced to remain in constant contact at all times.

Now they perform incredibly skilled and beautiful aerial acts for the circus, but these two otherwise straight men must also adjust to always touching – how to sleep together in the same small bed, how they never have any privacy, and how the curse alters the way they express and experience desire for others, like their choreographer and the Arcanium contortionist Valorie as well as conjoined twins Joanne and Jane.

And – to their chagrin and confusion – themselves.

Word count: 50,162/110,000

Notes:

I’ve slowed down a bit since the last progress report, mostly from a combination of nodding off at night due to allergies and possibly medication messing with my sleep and the fact that the pain and discomfort are usually worse in the evenings. So sometimes I just have to put the computer down, lay on my back, and watch TV or a movie until I can’t stay up anymore. There’s just no getting around it.

However, I’m still meeting my minimum of 3k words a day (5k is my goal) and still hoping to reach 100k before the end of the month. The next two weekends should be quiet, which will help.

Seth and Lars are having some absolutely wonderful angst surrounding the questioning of their sexualities. Since they’re emphatically straight-identified men, that means that 1) they don’t talk about it with each other more than they have to, and 2) they don’t acknowledge the existence of a sexuality spectrum. There’s a lot of binary narration, even though I want to throw a Kinsey scale at them.

But Seth’s angst is delicious to write, since he’s the more bisexual of the two and didn’t know it until now. I still go through a lot of my own, ambiguously oriented as I am and raised in a conservative Christian environment, but I’m a bit removed from it lately, so it doesn’t hit too close to home to write it. What was it that Wordsworth said about writing poetry? Paraphrased: To write of passion when you’ve calmed down.

Also, I find that I tend to write emotional turmoil when I’m experiencing physical discomfort and go all out on the physical torture when I’m emotionally compromised.

I did that thing I do now when I’m about halfway through a novel and wrote a list of what scenes come next, which I do in order to cross them out as I leave each scene in the dust. And it helps me know where I’m going if I’m having trouble figuring that out. At around the halfway point, you usually want to know where you’re going. Also, it’s satisfying to see more and more things struck through on that list. If I average 5k words for every scene on that list (a scene is not necessarily a chapter, which tend to be longer than that), that’s at least 40k more words I need to write. Aerial may make it under 100k, which isn’t bad.

Aerial (Arcanium Book 3): Day 10

Tags

aerial, arcanium, demonic circus, erotic horror, erotic romance, erotica, lars, m/m, mfm, novel, series, seth, work in progress, writing

Title: Aerial

Series: Arcanium

Summary: Seth and Lars are drawn into the world of Arcanium after Seth makes a throwaway wish in front of the circus fortune teller, who decides Arcanium needs a little something extra in the ring. Seth and Lars are torn from their lives of intermural soccer, on-campus parties, and bright futures. Instead, Bell curses the two men to never separate, forced to remain in constant contact at all times.

Now they perform incredibly skilled and beautiful aerial acts for the circus, but these two otherwise straight men must also adjust to always touching – how to sleep together in the same small bed, how they never have any privacy, and how the curse alters the way they express and experience desire for others, like their choreographer and the Arcanium contortionist Valorie as well as conjoined twins Joanne and Jane.

And – to their chagrin and confusion – themselves.

Word count: 25,069/110,000

Notes:

It’s taken me a week and a half to reach 25k words, mostly because I didn’t make a lot of demands of myself the first week. I’d just finished editing Bloodbound, which entitled me to some days off, but I was bored, so I started. My concession to being on break was that I didn’t have a quota, and I didn’t write on Tuesday or Wednesday last week because of some medical procedures that meant I wasn’t supposed to exert myself. I worked up to my higher quotas by Sunday, and even though I’m back to square one with the discomfort and pain, I’m still writing that much every day.

Part of it is that I don’t know when my wealth of time is going to end, but I suspect it’s soon, and I’d like to be finished with Aerial before then. The other part is that this story is just flowing from my fingers. I was really excited about Carousel, but when I started Aerial, I was distracted by the upcoming medical procedures and hadn’t planned things very well. Once I had a handful of scenes to look forward to, though, the words started pouring out, those handful of scenes my personal carrots. So even though I’m still feeling as badly as when I wrote Carousel, writing Aerial is more of an escape than before.

And it’s funny how quickly this is coming out, because Aerial represents a major set of firsts for me. I’ve written MM in the past, but in short stories or as a secondary or tertiary part of a narrative. This will be my first MM novel, although there will be a good bit of MFM. (That’s why I dislike calling my stories gay, bisexual, lesbian, etc., because orientation lines tend to be blurred.)

It’ll also be my first novel written from a male perspective. I’ve written scenes from male perspectives, but this whole novel is Seth’s. I’m still not sure whether I can pull it off, but I’m drawing on my own more masculine side as well as the part of me that likes women, so I think I’m doing okay? It’s definitely a stretch.

What I do like about this one is that it’s got the same nearly non-stop carnality of the first book, Fortune. What I also like about it is that I finally get to write about some of the more cursed of Arcanium’s cast. Maya (Fortune) was wished in by her boyfriend, which meant Bell didn’t directly curse her when he added her to the cast, and Caroline was a voluntary (an accidental voluntary, but voluntary nonetheless). In Aerial, Seth and Lars are cursed in, and they’ll eventually develop a working relationship with similarly (but worse) cursed conjoined twins Joanne and Jane. I won’t write from a cursed perspective again until Book 6 (cursed books will be Nymph, Arachne, and Silk, with room for growth).

My questions at this point have more to do with how I introduce Arcanium. Will devoted readers be turned off by the repetition of Arcanium’s introduction? I change it in every book, but it’s essentially the same information. On the bright side, the next two books are written from the perspective of people already in Arcanium rather than people accidentally wishing their way in, so that much introduction won’t be required.

Another question is whether readers are as interested in the different performances of the same characters as I am. The biggest difference is the POV reaction to it, but the characters also change their acts every once in a while to keep from getting bored, which means that every performance I describe is unique. But would series readers get bored themselves?

The Arcanium series is one of standalones. Each story needs to function on its own, so that requires a little bit of repetition, which I hope works as long as it’s done in new and interesting ways every time. But it’s still something I’m concerned about. Those might be questions to ask a street team. Or since I don’t have a street team of beta readers, my editor. :)

Right now, the story’s going strong, moving fast, and I haven’t yet hit the point where I think I’m awful and never going to be finished with it in my lifetime. Who wants to predict that it happens this next week?

(And why that picture? Because I don’t know what else to use, and Aerial‘s color is blue. That’s the light they perform in.)