Draft 1 of Becoming Monsters Book 2 WILL be finished in November!!

 

I've made a promise with myself. I want to not break it, but I've broken promises before. I am going to NaNoWriMo-ish the rest of the book and just obliterate this draft in the next month. Not a true NaNoWriMo, I'm already 200k words into the book and I don't plan on doing anything else as part of the challenge, but I plan on following the spirit of the event and get to writing. I say I've made a promise, but I'm scared I might not have the willpower to fulfill it.

Addiction is hard to deal with. Not the kind of addiction people talk about like "I'm addicted to this show!" or "I can't get enough of this cake!" I mean the hardcore stuff some people are just hardwired to need on a desperate and visceral level that changes brain chemistry and forces people into dark and terrible roads.

Despite what movies and media would have you believe, most people live their entire lives without becoming detrimentally addicted to something. There is an element of control and people can live their lives without the need to do some thing or take some thing. I envy those people.

Twitter has become an addiction for me. I probably should have stayed away from all social media, I used to Facebook so hard I had to completely delete my account just to have the willpower to remember to eat properly. Twitter is worse in some instances to me, but I can't bring myself to walk away from a marketing tool that might be the linchpin to gaining financial independence with my writing. In an ideal world, I'd have my butler handle all the social media-ing while I sipped fruity (non-alcoholic) drinks on my yacht. I'd just say some rando thing and Jeeves would hashtag away.

I've always known I had a thing for addiction. My father is a hardcore addict and only through decades of therapy has he been able to climb out of his problems and have a life. When I thought I might have those same brain wirings, I decided early to stay away from all forms of substances that would even be a little addicting. I've never had a single drop of alcohol, I've had caffeine a few times from soda but no more than a few sips. No drugs, no smoking, nothing. I don't even like to gamble.

However, like Jeff Goldbloom says, nature finds a way. At the age of 12, I found my mother's massager and discovered a whole new world. Over the years, discretely talking to women, then searching on internet forums, then using neurological data from my therapist and those fancy electronic diodes they attached to your head, I found out that I'm not just a little sensitive, I orgasm in the 96% percentile for women and just looking at a picture and thinking really hard for AS LITTLE AS A HALF HOUR can have me tipping over the edge and thrashing on my bed, depending on how horny I am.

For almost 20 years, sex controlled my life. And when I say sex, I mostly mean masturbation. I got married at 25, so having actual sex was something that centered me, but I couldn't stop myself. For a couple of years I was spending about 6 hours a day masturbating, sometimes more. I went into rehab where I got some help and had a therapist assigned to me. I still masturbated there, I couldn't stop myself, but I got into the habit of scheduling my habit instead of just jilling at the drop of a hat. A whole pile of daily anxiety meds helped as well.

Nowadays, I joke as Ai on here and Twitter because I think I'm funny, making the lewd and seeing who squirms the hardest. Because for all my problems with masturbation and sex, currently 3 people know I have this problem (spouse, therapist, Editor-kun). Coming from the family and background that I do, I can't bring myself to tell anyone else. I'm still gripped with the most powerful dread that someone is going to tell my family and then I think I might literally die from a panic attack. Yet, it is so liberating to just talk about smut and write smut and all of it feels so wonderful.

I'm Icarus, happy to be flying and feeling the warm sunshine on my face.

So, pulling back from this really long tangent, I've been spending too much time on Twitter. Before that, I was spending too much time rewriting little things that really could have waiting until after the draft was done. Before that I was spending all my time trying to frantically get a marketing campaign working so that I could get just a trickle of sales and use those $1 royalties I earned with $2 of advertising to congratulate myself for being an author. Justification, I might add, that I have attached a giant butt-load of to my own self-worth and I don't know how I would emotionally cope if my sales disappeared entirely.

It is all connected: I'm addicted to all these things and the worst one is that I NEED affirmation from readers that what I wrote has meaning, purpose, or just made them laugh. I know it is gouche to ask for reviews and I'm trying to do better, so don't feel like you need to do ANYTHING, this is all on me. Yet when I wake up and see a new review or get a DM on Twitter that someone out there is reading my book, I would say - without any actual experience - it is like shooting up with heroin and riding that bliss for hours. It is better than sex, and I hope you all can understand that when I say that, it must be something special.

Wow, running out of time here. To sum up, I've been lazy and strung out like an addict needing her fix. I got nothing done this week, I'm so sorry. I got hundreds of people to follow me on Twitter, I arranged 3 more interview over email and hopefully those will all show up on blogs, I entered a cover contest and started a few more ad campaigns with various websites all costing me hundreds of dollars I really don't have. Mostly I posted hundreds of links to my book while learning about proper tag use and might be dipping my toe into Twitter's promotional program soon. I even had the wonderful @SandsShay read chapters of Growing Problems out loud while edging herself with a vibe (hopefully her mostly-SFW review will be on the Amazon page soon). I've made friends I'd never thought I had and typed frankly about sex and lewd and the life of being an erotica author.

So what does this mean going forward? Well, if all goes well, on Dec 1st, Editor-kun will have the first draft of Becoming Monsters Book 2: Heralds. He'll get to work around his schedule and it will become a back and forth as he sends me notes and I do rewrites. When it is all edited up, he'll work on the cover and I'll work on the formatting for the Status boxes. Somewhere in there, I'll put the whole first chapter into Book 1 as a preview and set up the promotions for release, likely giving a leadtime of a month for presales and letting me get all the marketing in place for a proper release. I'm not going to do what I did with Book 1 and just throw it out there, this will get all the bells and whistles. Once the book is released, I'll work on the audioporn, a CENSORED version, then a Metric version for Books 1&2. THEN, after at least a month of doing absolutely nothing, I will work on the outline for Book 3 and get to work.

If all goes well, by this time next year, I have some hope that I will have actually managed to make enough money to get out of the red and trickle into the black. That way, once Book 3 comes out (TBA sometime before 2030), I'll have enough revenue coming in I can seriously consider quitting this job and doing this full time.

A girl can dream.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. I'll still do the blog thing through November, but the posts will be much shorter just so I can maximize my writing time. I'll probably also only get on Twitter once a week just to keep myself current but nothing fancy. Book 2 will get done!

Keep harmonizing!

#ailovestogrow #addictionispainful #book2willgetdone #masturbationproblems