The Masked Emotions Redux: Linger

Why a Redux

    When the Masked Emotions Series was first published back in 2016 online, I was excited. This was a story that I did an excruciating amount of research on which nearly cost me my marriage because my wife saw this story as the 'other woman' which at the time I thought to be ridiculous, considering that she knew how I got whenever I was writing a story. I was obsessed with the world I was creating, as well as the story of Lana and Enzio. I wanted to make sure the contracts, scenes, and the relationships were as accurate as possible. I interviewed many people in the lifestyle, read actual contracts and getting not only a great understanding of it but also newfound respect for these people.

    I'm not a great writer and I don't try to be. I write as a way to escape or to vent out my frustration. I write because I find it to be very therapeutic. Yet, I was still immensely proud of this story, so proud that I submitted my first draft and I was overwhelmed with joy when a small publisher picked it up. Then shortly afterward, I was dropped by the same publisher. The reason: "It wasn't in the first person." However, I didn't give up and I shopped it around and by my third submission, it was picked up yet again.

     I presented the first draft and informed them that I have the outline of the entire series prewritten and would like a bit more time and insight to fine-tune the first draft. Then, to my surprise, they just publish the first draft as is. Sure, I was shocked when they did it and there was little to no back and forth with the publisher. Now I am not talking smack about the publisher. They gave me this wonderful opportunity and I was ever so grateful to them for giving me a chance, but I had this assumption on what the road towards publication would be. I thought it would be this back and forth conversation of fine-tuning chapters, taking away what is not working and expanding areas of the story.

     So instead, I had to rely on my wife and niece to help me with this and with their suggestions, I finally completed the final draft and as I tried to submit it – it went ignored. The first draft was still published. There were missing chapters and certain plot points that wasn't fully fleshed out and I was slightly annoyed that certain chapters were restructured, chunks of the story and side plots taken out and there was editing errors or lack thereof – but I trusted their judgement and I was just happy that I was being published.

     They stated that they did the changes to avoid the harsh Amazon censorship as well as 'too much story between the sex, readers will get bored.' However, still, it bothered me, I mean there was nearly a two-hundred-page difference between the first and final draft, but I digress. As I stated before, I was just excited to be a published author. However, it messed with my mind that my real vision wasn't there. It was made apparent when people commented on how stupid Lana was. Yet to me, she was a character that grew the most. Or how terrible the writing was, as well as the inconsistency in character hopping even though there were character labels within the chapter that were removed.

     As the series progressed, these instances continued to happen. The publisher wanted the rest of the series to be completed in six months. So, I wrote within an unreasonable deadline, trying to make sure as I wrote that it was both a first and final draft which was extremely difficult, especially since I couldn't structure the chapters as well as I would like. All in all, I was amazed by the outcome. Despite my complaints. The publisher really allowed me to evolve as a writer by writing a five-book series in six months and I would always be thankful for that. I didn't make that much money, but I didn't really care. I was just happy that my book was out there. Yet, in the back of my mind, it bothered me that it wasn't my final draft, it wasn't the full story.

     Of course, I cannot forget the massive amount of hate mails I received from so many people who basically told me that I had no right to write in this genre. How my book sucked. How I should kill myself, how I should be ashamed for 'mansplaining' S&M and so on and so on. I did receive actual fan mail, but they were few and far in between. My favorite was actual fan art that I received in an email. That was an awesome moment and recently I found out that there's an unauthorized graphic novel of my book series in Norway and to me, that is frickin awesome that someone took the time to bring my story to life. Currently, I am trying to find it so I could frame it. I even tried to find the publisher, but it was a dummy corporation. However, reading all that hate in combination with the stress it was having onto my marriage really got into my head. I even had to look up what a 'cis' was considering the phrase "a cis male shouldn't write erotica." was a very common thing in several emails. Look, I just wanted to write a story, a soap opera really.

     Yet as the abundant of hateful mail, Facebook IM messages, and it just made it extremely difficult to write anything else. I would start a new book and then all those negative comments would flood my brain to the point that it was all I could think about. On top of that my wife was really on me about my writing. So, I stopped. I stopped everything really in order to make her happy and to save my marriage. Yet asking a writer not to write is the same as telling a bird not to fly. It goes against their natural instinct and soon they yearn for it.

     I went to work, live my life while I had to pass over on renewing the publisher contract in order to make her happy and every once and a while cyber stalked my book series, seeing the sales and became a bit resentful as it became popular. As time went on, I began re-reading the emails and notice how stupid they were, and I couldn't understand why it got to me at the level that it did. So, I deleted them, keeping only a few to use as inspiration. I opened my original manuscripts for the Masked Emotions Series and compared it to the published versions and waited until they were no longer in print.

     Now that it has happened, I am re-releasing the first book as it was meant to be, cleaning up the grammar errors to the best of my ability. To the people returning to this series, thank you for coming back. To the haters, I hope my original final draft would change your perspective on the series itself. If not, I understand. 

- V. E. Campudoni