I have been writing professionally for years, just for other people. I still write for other people to pay my bills. But not long ago, I happened to read the free samples of some erotica books at Amazon, and thought I could do better. Many of the samples I read were littered with typos and poor sentence structure, and oftentimes got to the part about damp panties by the fourth paragraph. No character development, the thinnest of plots, no environment, and far too many writers that thought one sentence constituted a paragraph. I was certain I could do better, that I could write an erotic novel that had complex characters in interesting settings, and plunge them into steamy and sexy scenes.
While brainstorming about what those characters and settings might be, I happened to meet a man that told me he saw the entire world as a collection of machines, and the idea for The Eros Machine was born. I wrote a bio of every character, even bit players, then worked out a timeline for the main characters and where they would end up by the conclusion of the book. Then I set out to write.
Only when The Eros Machine was nearing completion did I even think of looking at the word count. A little quick research informed me that typically, novels run around 70,000 or 80,000 words, and my book clocks in at 192,000 plus. After my panic subsided, I thought of splitting it into two books, but the “halfway point” of the story is pretty dark, and I believe would be a terrible way to end a book. I could cut a couple of chapters out of it with a savage re-write, but this is how many words it takes to tell this story.
At one point, I considered trashing it and starting over. But in the end, I decided to go with it, and now I have begun to look at it as giving people their money’s worth. Dozens if not hundreds of so-called “books” on Amazon are actually short stories, three and five thousand word shorts that are being sold for $2.99. There are fifty-three chapters in The Eros Machine, and almost all of them have a steamy scene in them, if not more than one.
I have read a lot of the great novels, and while I don’t compare The Eros Machine to any of these works, Anna Karenina is 349,000 words, Gone With The Wind is 418,000 words, and War And Peace is 587,000 words… so I don’t think I went TOO crazy… but I will probably keep my next book a little trimmer.
I want to thank everyone who reads this work, and all future pieces I write. Please feel free to comment on my work, and I look forward to reading your feedback.
Kent Decker