My Devon Layne books have not been banned in Texas or Florida

I wish to point out that this is an oversight on the part of book burners in every part of the country.

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My Devon Layne books contain explicit descriptions of sexual relations.

Of course, I wouldn’t expect to be banned for that. What middle age white male in America doesn’t thrive on a good explicit description of sexual relations. Gotta get it up somehow!

"Photo Finish" book 1, to be released October 2, 2022.

Ah, but my books also include:

1. Strong defense of racial equality in all aspects of life, including relationships with people of other races, voting rights, and acknowledgement of racism in our everyday life in America.
2. Strong defense of women’s rights, including rights over their own bodies (Yes, including abortion) and access to medical services and prescriptions regardless of the bigoted religious beliefs of the provider or their employer.
3. Strong defense of non-“traditional” marriage, including same sex marriage, polygamous marriage, interracial marriage, and group marriage.
4. Strong support for those suffering from depression and any other “invisible” illness that incapacitates them or leaves them too weak to meet others’ expectations.
5. Strong support for LGBTQIA and non-binary humans, including their right to choose and live the life they want and or need to.
6. Strong opposition to gun violence, whether in civilian or military situations.
7. Strong denunciation of child trafficking and sex trafficking in every permutation in which it raises its ugly head.
8. Strong support for religious freedom, including my right to think all of them are pretty stupid and to be able to choose to ignore them without having their peculiar beliefs foisted off on me as law, science, or medicine.
9. Strong opposition to abuse in every situation, whether sexual abuse, child abuse, mental abuse, or physical abuse. Or animal abuse.
10. Strong support for science, medicine, and the teaching of history, the non-regulation of teachers (especially by concerned parents who have their heads stuck generally up their asses so far they can see the empty cavern where their hearts should be), free education of the masses, open libraries, and utter literary freedom.

"Photo Finish" Book 2, to be released January 15, 2023.

I believe these pretty much account for the main reasons books have been banned. Hence, I submit to you that not banning my books has been an oversight in Texas and Florida.

However, Amazon has blocked two of my books, causing me to not release three more on their platform. They further made releasing Bob’s Memoir Volume 1 so difficult that I did not attempt to release Volumes 2 & 3 on their platform. I would count this as a banning, but all seven of those books are available on both Bookapy and Barnes and Noble.

"Photo Finish" Book 3, to be released March 26, 2022.

So, I consider it critical that everyone rush right out and buy all forty of my eBooks currently available on https://bookapy.com/a/59/devon-layne before an illiterate Texas or Florida fanatic has a visitation by an angel and gets around to banning them. Literary freedom and the rights of authors and readers everywhere are at stake!

And don’t forget—in two weeks, book number 41, Full Frame, will hit the eBook shelves, as it begins serialization on SOL. Enjoy!

How time flies when you're on the road!

I'm on a summer journey of some 5,000 or 6,000 miles and I forgot to update the First Exit blog! Well, I won't try to catch up everything in one post. Suffice it to say that I've spent time with the family in Seattle, visited friends in Minnesota, done research in Iowa for a story that I've already completed--but I might as well find out how good I did--researched another story through northern Illinois and Chicago, visited my sister in Ohio, and am currently creeping westward back to Las Vegas. Current location is just slightly east of Kansas City where I camped so I could eat a Porterhouse Steak and some great Barbecue.

Yes, that 30oz Porterhouse is bigger than my head.

But in all fairness, it will make three or four meals.

The Porterhouse is from Jess & Jims Steakhouse in Martin City, MO. I remembered it from when I was training in Kansas City a couple of weeks a month. Served with a twice baked potato with all the fixin's, Texas Toast, and pickled beets. Yum!

What would Kansas City be without barbecue???

This rib lunch (and tomorrow's breakfast) from Zarda's Barbecue.

UIndy Class of 1972 Homecoming Reunion

Okay, now on to two important bits of news. First, I've bought my tickets and reserved a room in Indianapolis for my UIndy 50-year class reunion the first weekend of October. It's going to be an expensive weekend, but I figure it might be the last time I get a chance to visit the alma mater and I'll possibly see some friends and classmates. David? Are you going to meet me there?

Full Frame is about to release!

Second, I'm getting ready to release what will probably be my biggest Devon Layne book ever. It will be the first in the Photo Finish Trilogy and is titled Full Frame. The release date is October 2, 2022.

This is the Web edition cover for Full Frame. A story set in the 1960s.

Nate Hart, class of 1968, has just been uprooted from his lifelong home in Chicago by his mother’s new career: Methodist minister. Moving to a small town in northwestern Illinois just before his junior year in high school, is going to mean starting over in life. But Nate’s passion for photography will lead him to other passions as he becomes his new school’s official photographer. It seems the girls in his school think it’s okay to expose themselves more than current standards would allow, because he’s just the photographer. No one else will see them, right? What Nate sees in the full frame of his photographs, however, will change the town. This story contains explicit sexuality as experienced and related by a teenage boy in the 1960s. Adult audiences only.

Oh! That sounds autobiographical! No, it really isn't. The setup probably sounds like me in my teens, but I assure you, there is no character or actual action in this story that bears more than a passing resemblance to just about everyone in the 1960s. But you have to start someplace and as I looked back on what it was like to move to a new town in the mid-sixties, it seemed like a fertile field for me to plant a completely fictional story in.

Please don't assume that either my life or the lives of any of my classmates or relatives are the basis for anything in this story. You'd only be insulted.

I'm looking for reviewers for the massive tome (260,000 words!) In fact, I have an Advance Review Copy eBook (ARC) ready to send to reviewers now. (Officially September 1, but it's ready now.) If you are a reviewer on any platform that reviews adult content, please let me know and I'll get you a copy. If you know such a reviewer, please put us in touch.

Why is this book so long???

Well, I write for a market that reads serials. They get two chapters a week and demand that those chapters contain a sufficient amount to keep them satisfied for three days between chapters. They want long stories that will get them emotionally involved with sympathetic characters. They want a hero who has some great talent or skill on which to build his life. And they want love interests that develop beyond the point of holding hands. Well, beyond.

What I find interesting is that the five to ten thousand readers in this format also want something that truly tugs at their emotions and I assure you, this story has moments that will make you laugh out loud and moments that will bring you to tears. In all, it is an uplifting story of coming of age in an uncertain era. We were dealing with racial tensions and civil rights, the war in Vietnam, the draft, presidential elections that had no good choice, and an era in which women were just beginning to discover they had equal rights with men--a battle that continues today.

• In the 1960s, pantyhose first became affordable and popular. They did not exceed hose in sales until 1970!
• Birth control pills were first approved by the FDA in 1960, and the Supreme Court affirmed the right of MARRIED WOMEN to have access to them in 1965. Birth control access was not affirmed for all Americans until 1972!
• Passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 followed protests like the Selma to Montgomery march led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, who was assassinated in April of 1968.
• The Supreme Court in 1967 finally ruled that people had the right to marry people of different races.
• 2.2 million American men were drafted between 1964 and 1973. 58,220 died there and countless others suffer the continuing death of Agent Orange yet today.
• Riots broke out during protests in Harlem, Watts, New Jersey, Detroit, and Chicago (where police rioted during the 1968 Democratic National Convention). 
• Beatlemania hit in 1963 and we had good music for almost ten years!

I had a lot of great material to hang a story around. I'm looking forward to this release!

Well, that's the extent of my ramblings for this August afternoon. Tomorrow I'll be moving my camp westward to Salina, KS for the weekend. Whoopee!

Ready to migrate

It’s been a while since I updated the blog. No promises about whether I’ll be more frequent in the future. By the time I finished getting my Patreon members updated, which involves updating my websites and getting new stories up for patrons to read, it was time to go out and get a few groceries and refill my water jugs. Got back and gobbled down some of Albertson’s roast chicken and suddenly realized it was six in the evening. How did it get so late so soon?

Well, here in Las Vegas, spring has sprung and it’s summer now.

It was up to 87 earlier in the day. Dry and gusty winds make it fire weather. Quick start and quick spread. Who knows what comes next? It is definitely time to start considering my northward migration and I expect to head out well before the end of the month. I still have another dentist appointment to get out of the way on the fifteenth and then I’m free.

April 23 was #UIndyDay and I participated by wearing my Alumni shirt and posting pictures of life on campus and a history of greyhounds. Here’s a sample:

Visit to UIndy campus in 2014.

With Lucy and Bliss in 2009.

My sophomore year in 1969, as the Player King in Hamlet.

My set for King Lear in 1971.

I posted quite an album on Facebook, so you can pick up the rest there.

April was a very productive month. I did a book layout for one of my clients and it’s ready to go as soon as we have a cover. It was also April Camp NaNoWriMo. My newest complete endeavor, Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon, volume 3, was all written in April as part of camp. 88,600 words.

As if that wasn’t enough, I got stung by the new great idea bug and started writing a new coming of age story set in the ’60s, called Full Frame.

So, on top of my 88,600 for NaNoWriMo, I wrote 68,900 on this new story! This takes an autobiographical setting and then totally upends it as a fiction. Pretty much none of the actual details of the story happened in real life. Only the set-up.

When sixteen-year-old Nate moved with his family to a small town in northwestern Illinois, he thought he’d been moved to the edge of the world. One more step and he’d fall off into Iowa. Joining the class of ’68 in a new school was going to present a lot of challenges, including how to keep his passion for photography alive. He’s about to discover how fast word of a new kid in town can travel.

My alpha reader had this to say:

"I can see why you’re excited about this one.  Based on the first few chapters, this has Team Manager already beat, hands down!!!"

My first line editor has been snatching pages as they come out of my virtual typewriter. He asked how long this was going to be. I just said, “Long.” His reply:

"No shock for one of yours involving teens. I suspect these kids will do what most characters do—take over and insist on all their stories being told. And why not? That gets to be even more fun."

So, I’m churning out three or four thousand words a day on this new story obsession of mine. It’s not like I don’t have a draft of Team Manager CHAMP! that needs its polishing rewrite, or the just-finished Bob’s Memoir that my editors are waiting for. But there are so many stories to be told and I’ve told so few of them so far!

I’m also contemplating creating a calendar for 2023 that has covers of my Nathan Everett and Devon Layne books as illustrations for the months. Kind of an old fashioned idea in this electronic age, but I’m thinking it would be fun to put out a paper calendar. Just need to find a good POD calendar maker. Or maybe I’ll order a couple hundred and mail out signed copies. Interested?

Guess that’s all the news from windy hot Vegas today. I’ve really enjoyed seeing shows this winter with my neighbors and with friends and relatives who came to visit while I’m here. Last night we saw up and coming comedienne Zaidan Johnson. Great! Hoping for a repeat next winter.

Mapping my route north now.

 

Hearing Renewed

The big news is that I got new hearing aids this past week. Wow! I had no idea y’all were so noisy!

I guess that goes for me, too. I always considered myself a rather quiet person. Now, I can hear every breath I take and sometimes I think I hear my heart beating. Imagine being trapped inside an old time radio show where sound effects are the major clue to what is going on. The author sits at his typewriter and you hear every click of the keys as he frantically types out the climactic scene. He pours a cup of coffee and you hear the liquid gurgling into the cup. He walks across the floor, pacing up and down—clump, clump, clump. The neighbor’s chihuahua at the end of the block barks and half a mile away, someone starts a leaf blower.

Get the idea? It’s like having all those miscellaneous sounds pumped into my head through amplifiers in my ears. Would you people be quiet?!!

Nonetheless, I’ve been able to have an intelligent conversation with friends and attended a live comedy show in which I was forced to understand all the jokes. This comedian was so old he’s still making Covid jokes. I’ve turned down the volume on my television, my computer, my phone, and my stereo. I’m getting my music from Pandora piped directly to my hearing aids and I had forgotten what I was missing when I listened. Phone calls? I can hear the person on the other end without putting it on speaker phone and holding it against my head. The conversation is pumped directly to my hearing aids. No, Medicare Advisor, I still don’t want to talk to you.

I won’t say it is a whole new world, but it is certainly a world I hadn’t experienced for some time. I’ll take it.

But seriously, shh!!!

I released the third book in the Team Manager series this week. Team Manager COACH! is selling well and will go into serialization at StoriesOnline.net on Tuesday. It’s not at quite the pace of the previous two releases, but still selling well. I’m working on a final volume, which will disappoint some readers that I’m not taking the story further, but the longer a series goes, the fewer readers it has. Team Manager SPRINT! ended on Saturday with about 7,000 active readers on SOL. That’s down from 9,000 for Team Manager SWISH!

In the meantime, I’ve nearly finished the rewrite of my 2021 NaNoWriMo effort, Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon. Unlike most of my rewrites, this one is growing instead of shrinking. I wrote 150,000 words in November and now it’s closing in on 200,000 and well over fifty chapters. And my alpha reader, Les, keeps telling me I can’t end it there. It needs to be longer. Bob can’t just ride off into the sunset never to be heard from again.

Well, 4,000 years of history certainly gives me plenty of opportunities for more stories from Bob’s experiences. Maybe there is another volume coming. So far, Bob has had encounters with the Olympian gods, the Sumerian gods, Jesus, a goddess in Indonesia, a couple of feuding Maori gods, and a few gods of the Caribbean and the Mayans. He’s met Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar, Xerxes, Alexander, Caesar, and Kublai Khan. He’s built palaces and temples in Crete, Mesopotamia, India, Japan, China, Mali, Italy, Chicago, and I probably missed some. He’s fought against slavery and trafficking for 4,000 years and has still only made a small dent. And he joined the space program. He’s had sex with Helen of Troy, Aphrodite, and Cleopatra. He’s been on every continent except Antarctica. I’m sure I can come up with a few more adventures for him.

I expect to start pre-releasing Bob’s Memoir to my patrons in a couple of weeks with public release in about mid-March.

That’s the highlights for this month! Stay tuned.