Publication Day 3rd, March 2023 Came And Went!

I started writing the book in August 2021 to ask questions of why I and people like me are interested in erotic art, photography and stories. It started as as an A4 page of handwritten questions and answers, but as almost always happens with anything I create, be they lyrics, stories or just simple spreadsheets, they generally get a little out of hand. This simple piece of A4 paper with questions and answers written in black fountain pen ink led to a forty chapter book of approximately 215,000 words.

How and why did it grow so much?

I only write to challenge and entertain myself. I very much doubt that I can change anyone else's values or opinions, nor should I. We are all products of our own upbringing's and experiences, through the times in which we have lived. My opinions are and probably should only be important to me and no one else.

The characters already existed in scenario's I had created in various stories mainly in the 1990's, although I had never written them down. These characters only got written down or put on paper to answer very basic questions about the relationships we all have with friends, family and girlfriends and wives or boyfriends and husbands.

Why does the book include such detailed and graphic text concerning sexual, erotic and BDSM situations. These themes are themselves sometimes regarded by some as almost taboo subject even in today's enlightened times?

I originally wrote the book in the third person which didn't work as I couldn't achieve the level of intensity, tension and anger as a narrator, so in September 2021 having binned the originally few chapters, I rewrote it from the lead male character Alec's point of view.

In October 2021 I binned the second attempt because it was originally set in Oxford because it is geographically quite central, but was set in a large upmarket apartment which soon didn't suit the storyline. I at this point didn't know whether to stop writing the book at all because I began to doubt why I was writing it and hadn't written the sex and bondage scenes as graphically as in the final manuscript. This caused an imbalance in the book because as always I had written about everything, the characters and the relationships and situations in a very detailed way but had almost passed over the actual sexual and bondage parts as they made me a little uncomfortable as they probably would some readers. Also I had never actually written about the acts of sex or bondage before and found it initially quite challenging.

In the end I decided to just finish writing it, which I did, the final twenty-five chapters being finished on Christmas Eve 2021. I spent five months packaging it and deciding whether to do anything with it as regards trying to get it published. Eventually on the 1st of May 2022 I sent it to Austin Macauley Publishers having already chosen them as my first choice publishers. On the 16th June we signed a partnership agreement to publish the book. After editing and having already chosen the title and theoretically designed the front cover, the book got published as per the agreement in paperback and in e-book.

That is where we are now, I will now finish the last three-quarter's of the next book in what I suppose could be called the 'Gifts' series and we will see if it leaves 'The Inner Sanctum' and is ever published. That I suppose is down to the readers and the publishers!

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