Finding the Balance

I know I’ve been relatively quiet on twitter and Facebook these past few years but that’s primarily because I’ve been tweeting under my legal identity. Writing about the appalling state of politics in the world doesn’t feel appropriate on my author site or accounts, even though it’s something I did regularly in the past.

Truth is that politics in both the UK and the US has been so toxic for the last five years or so that it makes a real difference. We seem to have gone from a society that generally agrees about who to organise things but disagree about how to achieve that to a society that is so fundamentally divided that it may be decades before we even come close to healing the wounds that those divisions have done.

I heard it called the “footballification” of society—you pick a team and stick with it no matter what that team does. We really are living in a world where the team captain could shoot a person in broad daylight live on international television and it wouldn’t make a difference, their supporters would still cheer and support them.

It’s a frightening time.

I often wonder what the historians in forty or fifty years will make of the second half of the second decade of the third millennium. I think they’ll probably look back and think, “What the hell were you doing? What were you thinking?”

The answer is probably that we’re not thinking. And that may be the problem.

Anyway, moving on. If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that the past few months I’ve been updating the covers and content of some of my older short stories. So far I’ve been able to update Sun, Sea & Shagging, Bus Stop, Banging my Teammates, The Slumber Party, The Big Four Ohhh!, Holodeck, Scratched, Claire and Sophie’s Tutor.

And just yesterday I submitted updated files for Our Memorable Holiday and that update went live overnight.

I’ve also been working my way through a ‘clean-up’ of Kissed by a Rose, so that I can re-release it after the closure of the firm that published it, Phaze.

I’ve also been trying my best to finish the first draft of The Truths We Live, which is the sequel to The Lives We Lead.

The Truths We Live explores Bobby and his girls’ new business venture in the Adult Entertainment industry and because of that I’ve been spending time this past weekend “running the numbers” and in particular looking at Bobby’s business plan.

I know it’s the kind of detail that most readers won’t pick up on or care about but it matters to me, which is why I’ve been trying to work out how much Bobby charges to rent or purchase a video and what kind of sales they need to break even or make a decent profit.

It’s important to me because Bobby discusses the business, sales and shareholdings a couple of times in the book and I want to be consistent throughout.

I think I’m nearly at the end now. Yes, there’s a lot more story to tell, but I’ve already decided on a third book in the series to deal with that—provisionally titled The Facts We Face. All I need to do to type those two lovely words The End (or possibly, To Be Continued) is to find a way to wrap up this part of the story without it seeming too abrupt.

Because that is my fear—making the ending too abrupt.

I need to leave these characters in a place we’re comfortable stepping away from them and letting them live their lives for a few months before we re-join them for the next instalment of their story.

And it’s hard to find that balance.

As an aside, if there are any British porn stars out there who’d like to read the first draft and tell me just how inaccurate my fiction industry depiction is compared to real life—I’d love to hear from them.