The Shrink, my latest erotic novel, is approaching 80,000 words and is being finished for the second time. I think I was at 60,000 words the last time I typed “The End,” but ended up soldiering on. I’ve got two chapters to finish before calling it quits, and I’m fixing to sprint to the finish line. Next weekend is Labor Day (actually, Monday is), and that will be appropriate for finishing it up.
My goal is to publish an electronic eBook and a paperback at the same time. Assuming QuarkXPress doesn’t fail me, I should be able to do that. What I’ve been working on is developing the methodology to publish my smut stories. Writing is only one hurdle to leap over when you kick your masterpiece out the door. The mechanics of generating the final package to publish is reasonably simple yet time-consuming. Automating the process makes the whole process a lot easier and less error prone.
Like a moth being drawn to the flame, I’m also irresistibly drawn to learning another desktop publishing program, FrameMaker. Just when I’ve pretty much wrestled Quark to the ground and hog-tied her, I’m itching to move on. The biggest problem I have with Quark is that I end up with two copies of the original document files.
Quark requires that you import the Word files into its format, which means that you now have two copies to deal with. The original Word file is used to create the electronic eBook and the Quark version for the paperback version. While this doesn’t sound like a big problem, the issue of dealing with changes rears its ugly head.
If you need to correct a mistake or decide to change the wording, now you have to do it twice, once in Word and once in Quark. Technically, you have to do it three times because my original version of the story is in Scrivener.
To do it properly, I have to open Scrivener and edit the story. Then, compile the story and export it into Word. Then, reimport the Word file into Quark. Possibly if I never made a mistake, this wouldn’t be a problem, but I tend to write long erotic stories, typically north of 50K words. So, every time I decide to make gangbang, one word instead of two means a lot of work. I’d like to end up with a Make program to automate the process, but it’s harder than it sounds.
FrameWork is a program that’s been around for about as long as Quark and is designed to create large technical manuals in a group environment. The nice thing about FrameWork is that the source Word file can be imported by reference. By Reference means the original Word file remains the master document, and changes in the Word file are automatically imported into the FrameWork document. Lisabet would understand “By Reference,” but it’s a programming term and probably Greek to most people outside of us nerds.
Anyway, that’s my current hill to climb. I’m trying to finish The Shrink in the next couple of weeks and figure out if I can make the leap to FrameWork.
The Shrink is coming together nicely, and I feel better about the latest version of the story. I really need to try to outline my stories, but struggle to do that. I’m like Stephen King and write from the seat of my pants. I simply walk behind my characters and write down what they do and say. I will have an idea of how the story will go but it often detours on a completely different track.
Now for something completely different.
Lisabet Sarai is offering to donate two dollars for every comment to Big Brother Mouse, an organization that helps children in the country of Laos to learn. Check out her blog post and help children learn to read.
https://lisabetsarai.blogspot.com/2023/08/charity-sunday-literacy-for-lao.html
I’m Larry Archer, and I write erotic stories for the huddled and yearning masses. Foxy and I are swingers in real life. I write about what we do and see, especially swingers, unicorns, Hotwives, and cuckolds. While the Lifestyle is not for everyone, it’s been fun for us. My smut is explicit and hardcore but with a somewhat plot. Larry Archer’s porn stories are generally positive and fun, as this reflects how enjoyable swinging has been to us. I publish at all the typical outlets if you want to check out my stories.
Kinky Literature
Amazon Kindle
SmashWords
Apple iBooks
Kobo
Barnes and Noble
Scribd
Gardner Extended Retail
Larry Archer on Medium: https://medium.com/@larryarcher69
Larry Archer on MeWe (Explicit Content): https://mewe.com/i/larryarcherauthor
Larry Archer's World (LarryArcher.blog) 
Yeah, it’d be better if you could do it in Word and any changes you make to the master doc gets pushed over to FrameMaker. The way you’re doing it now is my worst nightmare: Rework and if you change your master doc, you have to change the other entities and it’ll suck to be you if you forget to make all of the changes everywhere.
If you only have to do it once, well, is this something you might be interested in? I have Word on… four of my devices: My desktop, Surface Pro, laptop, and iPad. I can open the story I’m currently writing on ANY of those devices and if I change something on my desktop, it gets changed on the other devices – but that’s a cloud thing but I only have to do it once… somewhere.
If I had to change it everywhere, I wouldn’t write anything because I despise rework with a passion. Work smarter, not harder.
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I use cloud storage to keep files synchronized on all my devices as you do but I probably wasn’t clear in what I was doing. I made the change to write in Scrivener instead of Word several years ago for a number of reasons. But writing in Scrivener means that I have to convert the Scrivener document to Word in order to submit the story to be published.
This means that the conversion from Scrivener to Word is always required and one I have to accept as Amazon and SmashWords require a Word file to publish. Now I could potentially go straight from Scrivener to ePub but I haven’t tried that.
Publishing a story requires that all the references to either Amazon or SmashWords be limited to where it’s being published. In other words, publishing to Amazon means that all links and references be to Amazon. If I included a link to SmashWords, then the manuscript would be rejected as the file is scanned during the submittal process for unapproved links.
A story is comprised of the front matter, body, and back matter. The body or actual story is the same for any publisher, but the front and back matter are customized for the publisher. This is where Scrivener shines.
I have one set of documents that comprise the story. It also includes different sets of front and back matter for the various publishers. Scrivener compiles or creates a final document by combining the front and back matter for a particular publisher with the body, which is constant. I used to do the assembly by hand, which was a pain and required three separate documents to assemble into a finished product. Keeping track of the parts was error-prone and easy to screw up. Scrivener keeps all the parts in one package, which is a lot simpler.
My looking at FrameWork is to allow my Word file to be linked by reference. This means that if I change the Word file, I just reexport the FrameWork file, and it automatically is updated with any changes in the Word file.
Hopefully that makes more sense.
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It does.
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Hello, Larry,
Thanks for the shout-out of Charity Sunday!
I loved the title of this post, because it’s so true. Some people think it’s easy-peasy to write fuck and suck scenes… you and I know how wrong they are!
When The Shrink comes out, PLEASE send me a media kit so I can give do some promo.
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Lisabet, love you girl from halfway around the world. Foxy likes to tease me about how good you would taste and I know it’s true!
XOXO – F&L
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