Altimexis

Nico, Your post wasn't lengthy. It was just like mine! 😀 I'm stunned that Incident is only your fourth story. It's an amazing work of fiction with well-developed characters and a complex, but easily-followed plot. Most of us have to write multiple stories before achieving this level of quality, if we ever do. Congratulations! Now, I expect to see you post new stories on a regular basis. Everyone has their own style of writing and genres that work out best for them. Few of us have Cole's talent for crossing over into numerous writing styles and genres and doing all of them well. I'll be interested in seeing what you're capable of. Incident is a well-developed, character-driven novella about high school drama. Most of Cole's writing consists of novellas - even some of his short stories would qualify - but I think his most memorable stories are his full-length novels. Tim, Josh, Evolving, Duck Duck Goose, Distorted Perspectives and Dust are stories I frequently go back to read again, as there's so much to unpack in them. Writing a story with over 100k words is challenging and requires a commitment beyond what many are able to give, yet the results can be incredibly rewarding. I'm not suggesting that writing a full-length novel should be your next goal, but I think you're capable of it and I'd love to read what you produce. I naïvely started out writing a novel for my first effort. It was apparently good enough to get me a spot as an AD author and it's still hosted here, but it was positively awful and I won't even reference it now. I received a lot of praise for my effort, but it was the constructive criticism from the one reader who took the time to tear my story apart that I appreciated the most. From that critique, I learned much about character development and the importance of developing subplots. I prefer writing short story series because each story has a defined timeframe and yet I can fully develop the characters as the series progresses. Short story series work well within the context of the unpredictable nature of my migraines. That said, only a full-length novel allows me to fully develop plots and subplots, complete with clues, deception and distractions along the way. My last novel, Brilliant Boy Billionaire, was nearly a half-million words long and took over a year to write, but I'm pleased with how it turned out and I'm satisfied putting those characters to bed for the time being. Still, writing it left a significant hiatus in my publications while I worked on the first draft. I'd recommend against writing something that long! I hope you will make AwesomeDude your primary home. We might not have the activity of some of the other sites, but we have by far the highest quality of online gay fiction that can be found. Incident is an excellent addition to our archive and I look forward to reading more. -Steve aka Altimexis

Remember the prime time soap opera, Dallas? They undid an entire disastrous season by simply turning it into a dream. Or then there was the TV series, St. Elsewhere. The series finale concluded with an epilogue in which it was revealed that the whole story had been nothing more than the fantasies of an autistic teenage boy. Talk about insulting the audience!

I'm not particularly crazy about epilogues either for a number of reasons. A well-written, concise epilogue can help to tie up loose ends and provide context. A long epilogue can bring finality to a story and in that regard, Nico did a better job than most. What I absolutely hate is when an author writes a lengthy story over a period of years, with scores of chapters, only to tie everything up in a single chapter. A good example of that is Ted Louis' Joel Series, which ran for some 20 years with more than 250 chapters, divided into eight books. It covered a period of only four or five years, but then ended the series in a single chapter that covered something like fifty years. That final chapter felt rushed and unrelated to everything that came before. It's much better to tie things up by covering a limited timespan, leaving it to the reader to imagine what happened in the lives of the primary characters after that. Cole and I have gone back and fourth over the years in our communications regarding the role of sequels. Cole generally likes to finish a story and then move on to the next one, and he very rarely writes sequels. I on the other hand prefer to write story series with open-ended stories that leave room for sequels. Once I breathe life into characters, I like to develop them as fully as I can and to keep them around for a while. As Cole would say, I have trouble letting go. I do ultimately end my story series in one way or another. I capped off my Naptown Tales series by jumping well into the future and writing an entire novel that covered the interval in a series of flashbacks. Brilliant Boy Billionaire was one of the few stories written in its entirety as a novel, with a concluding book that jumped 13 years into the future, but left room for a future sequel. Conversations With Myself was told entirely by looking back into the past in 7 separate timeframes, but then the main character kept melding with time, changing everything, so there was an epilogue to explain what really happened. Ultimately, there will be an ending to my New York Stories series as well. I guess what I'm getting at is that there are many ways to bring a story to a satisfying conclusion. I really enjoyed reading Nico's story, the Incident at Chastity Falls, but would have preferred a much shorter epilogue that left much more to my imagination. Then again, the story began with the premise of remembering a pivot point ten years in the past, so in that sense it was a fitting conclusion. More to the point, I think Incident was one of the best stories I've read at AD that looks at the moral dilemmas faced by a teen in high school. The context of bullying by gay rather than straight teens was different, but the way the situation resolved itself was all too realistic. Had Perry been a girl who was stripped naked, there would have been consequences that likely involved jail time for some of the antagonists involved. Because Perry was a boy, they essentially got away with it. The teens in the story handled it entirely themselves, leaving the teenage bullies to go on to become adult bullies. Not that time spent in jail would have changed that, but it might have forced the school administration to take a more hands-on approach. Nico, I hope you have more stories in the works, as I can't wait to read your next one.

I'm not sure I want to commit so much time when I'm in the midst of writing one of my stories. I'm already behind schedule on that one. I remember Microsoft FrontPage, but as a Mac user, I never was tempted to try it. As I recall, it generated code that was marginally better than MS Word,. In some ways it was even worse. Microsoft's take on compatibility was to use brute force to make the text appear as the author intended it, and if the browser didn't handle it well, then the user should just switch to Internet Exploiter. Case closed. FrontPage predated smartphones and was never intended for use on a screen that small, nor for today's HD or UHD displays, for that matter. Only Microsoft would think it was a good idea to generate hundreds or even thousands of style definitions, and then to generate dozens of lines of code to format each paragraph. It's a wonder IE functioned at all when it had to deal with all of that code. Of course if you bother to inspect any commercial website today, you'll find it loaded with trackers and other useless code, all aimed at collecting and utilizing your private data.

I sent an email to him at the address listed on the site, but haven't heard back. I'll try resending it from my Gmail account, as some people have trouble receiving mail from Yahoo!. It may be that he just isn't monitoring his author account anymore. I'll let everyone know if I hear back.

I was about to suggest once again that we attempt to contact former CW authors who might have an interest in generating new content. Then it dawned on me that one of my favorite CW authors, Grant Bentley, is a high school teacher. Even if he isn’t willing to take over running CW, he might be a good person to provide input into the future direction of the site. He might also be able to recommend someone who could become the next Colin.

My sentiments too. CW fundamentally changed when Colin took it over, yet we knew him and could trust him to remain true to Codey’s vision. Whoever takes over will again change the nature of the site in fundamental ways. Arch Hunter is a young author at GA and not yet a Promising Author, although he certainly has the potential. He might not want to take on the responsibility of editing a site until he’s more established. I’d be more interested in him as an AD author who might eventually move into the role of managing CW. Perhaps therein lies the best approach - recruiting new talent to AD to carry on the legacy of AD and CW. GA is huge and it takes luck to build stature as an author. AD offers a more individual approach.

My nephew and his husband live in a suburb of Columbus, just inside the path of totality. He sent me a grainy smartphone photo taken from his driveway. He didn’t have to travel anywhere or pay thousands of dollars to stay in a fleabag hotel. He just stepped out the door and looked up. Lucky dog!

I briefly considered visiting my family in Indy for the eclipse, but I'd rather jump out of an airplane than stay with my sister. As I'm still recovering from prostate surgery, traveling any distance isn't an option just yet. Besides which, with greater than 60% cloud cover this time of year, the odds of seeing totality were only fair. As it turned out, the view from Indy apparently was spectacular. The eclipse as seen from Indy is on the front page of The NY Times. So I settled for watching a 90% partial eclipse from the terrace of my apartment in NYC. I bought a $20 pair of Wirecutter-recommended solar binoculars and a $14 solar filter for the tele-zoom lens on my camera. As thin, wispy clouds started to move in, I wondered if there would be anything to see, but the clouds remained sparse and high in the atmosphere until just after the eclipse ended, at which point the sky quickly became overcast. We were lucky. I would've loved to have seen totality. I would've loved to have seen the corona with my own eyes. I've never seen a total solar eclipse and the next opportunity won't happen until I'm around 90. That said, seeing a 90% partial eclipse was impressive as hell. My photos don't look like much, but they clearly show the sun as a tiny, thin sliver of light against a dark sky. The solar binoculars were one of the best purchases I've ever made. While most people saw the sun as a tiny dot through solar glasses, I saw the crescent sun, magnified by several times. The binoculars were so powerful that it took a lot of patience to actually find the sun in the sky, but I learned to aim it first and then look, with good results. Today was a real celestial highlight. All said, the most spectacular celestial happening is one that very few people are able to see anymore. Just getting away from the city lights that seem to be ubiquitous, even in the countryside, and the view of the night sky that awaits is nothing short of spectacular. I remember as a kid, looking up at the sky from my back yard in Indy, before there were streetlights in the suburbs, and seeing the Milky Way stretching across the sky. Going camping was even better. Nothing made me feel so tiny and insignificant. There are still places like that, but they're fewer and harder to find, even in the National Parks. I do hope one day to see the Southern sky. I've been to Sydney, Melbourne and Buenos Aires, but all suffer from extreme light pollution. I hope to get back to Australia and New Zealand within a few years, and this time I'll have to be sure to visit places where the sky's still dark.

Don't look at me. I taught and mentored medical students, residents and graduate students. Although maturity was sometimes in short supply, they were adults.

I love the way you guys so quickly pulled together so much useful info. Depending on where one lives, the public library is an invaluable resource for young gay teens. Nearly all libraries offer on-line books that can be 'checked out' for free. Offer void where prohibited, such as in Florida, Texas and other red states. When Cody founded CW, he was himself a teen and he wanted to provide a resource for young gay teens and even tweens to access age-appropriate stories they could relate to - stories that could give them hope. The overriding imperative was that the content be sufficiently benign that it could get through most nanny filters. In other words, young teens could access content, even if their parents had blocked content from explicit sites. Sadly, Cody was a very sick teen who gave us so much, which is why a Codey memorial must remain a significant part of the CW site. Much has changed since CW began and being an out gay teen is much more acceptable than was the case when I was growing up. However, the fact that some states are banning any gay-themed content from schools and libraries reminds us how fragile our gains really are. There's still a role for CW, but accessing it could be more daunting than ever. The one positive is that most kids today access content on their smartphones rather than by computer, and most parents don't even bother to even activate the content filters that are available in Android and iOS. Most parents don't even bother to check on which sites their kids visit on their smartphones, which is pretty scary, actually. With the spotlight on social media, most parents wouldn't even think to check their kids phones browsing history, but there's still a risk. I hate to sound like an Apple snob, but the best advice I can give to kids who have the choice is to buy an iPhone and use a privacy-oriented browser such as Brave or Duck Duck Go. Antitrust issues aside, Apple makes their money from selling hardware. Google gives Android away and makes money from amassing and selling data. Most people don't seem to care but gay kids have reason to. Since kids don't always have a choice in what phone they use, helping kids avoid peril in using their phones is a must. But I digress… I'd love to see CW revitalized and made more modern, with moderated, high-quality gay-themed stories for young teens and perhaps late tweens. Our more recent approach of allowing AD authors to post the same content to both sites won't meet that standard, so we may need to ask authors to go back and edit their stories appropriately for posting on CW. The most important thing is to have a young adult, preferably in their late teens or early twenties, take charge of CW and to make the site their own. I'm days away from turning 68 and although I'd like to think I'm too immature to be this age, I can't relate to kids who have grown up in today's world. I'd be happy to mentor someone who's willing to take this on, but I'm not the right person to run the site. We're never going to find a new Top Dog to run CW by posting the request here. We need to reach out to other sites and maybe even social media to recruit someone with the right demographic and skill set. Perhaps we could read some of the existing content out there and identify promising authors who might be interested in taking this on.

I think that by definition, most high school students are sociopaths in a sense. Kids tend to be self-centered, but there's a key difference between a true sociopath and an ordinary teenager. Sociopaths are incapable of relating to how other people feel. Kids are obsessively focused on what other kids think of them. I think Dante, for example, might well be a sociopath, with the others falling under his spell. Without getting into the abusive nature of the American criminal justice system, had a group of high school boys cornered an underage girl, taken her against her will to a clearing and stripped her naked, I think that the lot of them would be looking at some serious jail time, either in Juvie or possibly in adult prisons. This is well beyond the level of parole with counseling and community service. I doubt the situation would be treated any differently when the victim is a boy. The first priority is to find Perry and keep him safe until the 'authorities' arrive. When faced with actual arrest, I think there's little doubt that the kids will turn on each other. The parents will lawyer up to the extend they can afford it, and those kids not directly involved will plea to lesser charges in return for testifying against Dante and those most directly involved. I can't say how things would be handled in Vermont as opposed to New York, but my guess would be that those directly involved would be tried as adults and those on the periphery would be treated as juveniles, with the possibility of having their record expunged when they turn eighteen. However, I'm not an attorney, so what do I know? I do think the school will have some serious soul-searching to do. Let's hope Perry's okay.

Thanks for a wonderful story, Cole. The French horn is one of my favorite instruments - to listen to, obviously - not to play. It's not as brassy as the trumpet nor as bold as the trombone. It's far more versatile than the tuba. Although seldom played in the foreground, when it is, it shines like no other wind instrument.

Nico, Thanks for posting a bit about your background. As you've gathered, a lot of the authors here are 'seasoned' and so you and I are among the young set. My 68th birthday is coming up the middle of next month. Whereas you've lived your entire life within a radius of less than a hundred miles or so, I've lived on the east, west and north coasts, plus two months in Houston. The smallest city I lived in was a summer spent at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, when I was sixteen. I grew up in Indianapolis and have lived in the SF Bay area, Washington DC, Rochester NY and Detroit. Now, I live in Manhattan. I've been to every state in the U.S. except for N. Dakota, and to many cities around the world. Many of my experiences from my travels have made their way into my stories. As a fellow author, I love hearing about other people's thought processes and how they construct their stories. Clearly, Incident is a character driven story and if you write much as I do, the characters you created are largely responsible for the direction the plot ultimately takes. Given well-constructed characters, the story literally writes itself. Not that you didn't have an idea of where you wanted to story to take the reader at the outset, but the interaction of the characters you create often dictates how the reader will get there. In my stories, that can lead to unexpected detours, but then real life is like that. You've indicated that your characters' motivations are never fully explained and I like that. Although all of my characters have a backstory, keeping hidden secrets isn't my forte. I'm more like a magician, doing things in clear sight while using distraction to keep the reader otherwise occupied. It's fun to bury clues, but keeping things just under the surface as you do is much more interesting. Keep up the good work, and I look forward with trepidation to the coming incident. A.

Perry might as well have said, ‘This is where I intend to commit suicide.’ Unfortunately, Ross is too young to realize it. For all the misgivings he has about ratting out his former friends, this is way beyond what he and his accomplices can handle. That said, Perry would never again trust Ross if he went to the authorities, who might not even believe him.