This is number one hundred one in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
SOME OF THE BIGGEST CHANGES in life go unnoticed. I am not even including in that a spouse’s new haircut, glasses, or weight. There are just things that people don’t notice, no matter how modest or life-changing they might be.
Take this blog, for example. This is the eighth posting of 2025. Yet no one noticed that the date of the previous seven was listed on my site as 2024! Not even my very careful editor, even though it was at the top of every draft I sent him! It was simple to re-upload all the posts this morning with the corrected date, but if I hadn’t just called attention to it, no one would have noticed that, either.
In fact, several of my books, both by Devon Layne and Nathan Everett, have had characters who swore they would pay more attention. Tony Ames in the Model Student series constantly fought to be more aware of what was going on around him. Brian Frost of Living Next Door to Heaven constantly struggled to even remember what day it was or the names of all his girlfriends. Wayne Hamel in The Props Master had a constantly muddled mind, kept that way by the witches who were ‘training’ him.
I think the most obvious of these was probably Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) City Limits and Wild Woods. Gee Evars, suffering from dehydration and exhaustion, stumbles into Rosebud Falls just in time to dive in a rushing river and save the life of a drowning toddler. And to lose his memory.
In this duology, I had to consider what memory loss meant. I didn’t deal with a deterioration like dementia or Alzheimer’s, but rather with the instant erasure of his past. And one of the things I think no one who read the book noticed was that he lost his memory when he crossed the city limits into town, not when he dove in the river.
So, what did he actually lose? He still had good language skills. He had good math skills. He could work in a variety of settings. He was a natural philosopher whose question was always whether a decision or an action would make him a better person.
After saving his nemesis, a preacher who attempted to have the town rally to drive Gee out, Gee is asked why he didn’t just let the man drown in the river that attempted to claim him. He asks, “If I had left him… had let him drown, would that have made me a better person?”
When children who had been drugged, brainwashed, and sold into slavery in the Wild Woods began showing up in the town, it was only a man with no memory of his own who could reach them and could understand the pain they were going through.
City Limits and Wild Woods are available as eBooks on Bookapy, and in paperback at other online bookstores.
I forget things, too. And I fail to notice things. So, I was a little taken aback when I was asked, “Has writing and publishing a book changed the way you see yourself?”
In a mirror?
Like several characters I’ve written about in the past—notably Art in Art Critic and Trayce in Soulmates—I avoid looking at myself in a mirror as much as possible. What I see in a mirror does not at all match what I see in my head.
I don’t think there is anyone of my generation who hasn’t met a high school classmate or walked into a class reunion and stopped to wonder where all those old people came from.
So, when you ask how writing has changed my life, I struggle to remember what life was like before publishing and what it is like now. The obvious answer is that I am older now.