The Pecman

But did you see what I mean about the awful scaffolding, and graffiti, and city grunge? The Colosseum is really falling apart. I thought it was interesting that in that part of Rome, the entire street is about 20-30 feet lower from everything else around it, because for years the Romans had built on top of everything, including many incredible ruins. You can't dig anywhere in town and not strike a priceless archeological ruin somewhere. Note that the Romans are generally a very "live and let live" people, but some of them get their panties in a bind about gay marriage because they blindly follow the Catholic church. All the businesses there close on all Catholic holidays, no matter what. Plus a lot of the shops and restaurants are closed from about 3-4PM every day, because it's their equivalent of a "siesta" or "tea-time" (depending on your culture). Strange place. At least if I want to grab a sandwich at 3PM in NY or LA or Chicago or even London, you generally can do it.

Quite an epic tale. I have some Buddhist leanings myself. While I kind of wince at the mystical stuff in the story (which is not in the Buddhist beliefs that I know), the intentions are good and the story really draws you in, plus the characters are beautifully drawn. Great stuff. Anybody who knows me would immediately see I'm a very skeptical guy about a lot of mysticism in the world. What I will say is that I've experienced things I can't explain, including out-of-body experiences and some weird phenomena when meditating. I once turned the lights out, sat down on the floor, mediated for what felt like about five minutes, and felt like I was falling through space, just tumbling forward for hundreds and hundreds of yards. When I finally opened my eyes, I figured, "ah, just kind of a dream." And I looked at the clock and 45 minutes had passed. So there are strange things in the world. I also like the fact that Buddhism isn't a religion per se, but closer to just a philosophy and a way of life. The very idea that we have to take responsibility for what we do and what happens is pretty important. When I first read a book on Buddhism about 6-7 years ago, I thought, "wow, a lot of this is just common sense!" So Buddhism fits in perfectly with the story, and I also agree with a lot of how the characters behave and react.

No garden here! Just crab grass, dirt, and angry gophers.

Last four months of 2004. Maybe it's better now.

I swear, right now it's 85 degrees in LA. Ridiculous, stupid weather. Makes no sense. We dream of getting two weeks of snowfall. Like Cole says, we needs de water!

I have yet to hear a single reason as to how gay marriage makes straight marriage anything less. One argument used by the fundamentalist-idiots is, "well, that's a slippery slope. Today, ya got two men marryin' each other... next thing ya know, it'll be a man and a dog!" The error in this is assuming because one law is changed, it's inevitably going to result in a massive erosions of standards and common sense. I can recall in certain states when the drinking age was lowered from 21 to 18, some spoke up and said, "this is terrible! The next thing you know, they'll drop it to 15, or even 14! And I don't want my 13-year-old son allowed to drink!" An argument like that makes absolutely no sense. We're just talking two human beings... it's not that hard to understand. I don't give a fuck if they're straight, gay, shemales, young, old, or anything else. Two human beings of legal age who wanna marry... good for them. It's very simple.

And having lived in Rome for a few months, I can tell you that the Colosseum is totally falling apart. It's totally covered with ugly scaffolding and graffiti, just a total eyesore. The Italians are great at certain things, but building construction and technology are not high on that list. No one is better at food, beautiful women, and race cars.

I need to revise the PDF one more time, but yeah, it was a lot of fun to write -- only took me, what, five years to finish? I love these two characters, and I have plans for some interesting adventures in 1865 for both of them. The current thing with the carnival is going to have some surprises.

The really good religious nuts have an answer for just about anything you can bring up. For example, if you say, "I very much believe in Jesus Christ and I go to my neighborhood church every Sunday, and my minister totally accepts me and my gay lover," they'll say, "well, there are always false churches and liars who want to bastardize the teachings of the Lord." You can't reason with insanity. I do take perverse pleasure in the ongoing legalization of gay rights all over America (and in much of the world), because I know it drives the religious zealots absolutely nutso.

Yeah, this is an amazing story. I pray to god that the guy can get drafted onto a decent NFL team and have a good career. It'll be very telling whether the fans can deal with this or not. I tend to believe the (unnamed) NFL exec who commented privately, "I think this is about 3-5 years too early." I'm very skeptical on the mass public getting over very old prejudices and stereotypes. But I'm rooting for the guy and hope he does well.

And there's your title. One of the things I try to do as a writer is to remember to try to engage all the senses, and that includes taste, touch, smell, and time. An ongoing joke in my current novel is that our protagonist constantly worries about his appearance and bathes and shampoos his hair daily, while his boyfriend does virtually nothing and looks stunning 100% of the time. Pheromones are part of the sexual make-up of our odors, but I dunno... there's a point where I go, "uh-uh -- get in the shower, I'm not gonna touch you until you're spic & span." (And that was a part of one of the last chapters, too.)

No, that's an episode of Dallas!

So am I! I can't wait to find out what happens!

Stephen King has been asked many times, "why do you write these godawful horror stories?" And he shakes his head and answers, "do you think I have a choice?" I agree with DB that sometimes, we're trying to recapture a moment in our lives and examine a "what if" scenario (or a "do over" as he puts it). For me, I like to think I got that out of my system, and now I'm examining different characters and totally different scenarios that are completely removed from who I was and what I was back when I was a teenager. My observation is that the very first loves you experience as a teenager are some of the most powerful feelings you'll ever have in your life, so that's one of the reasons why I'm fascinated with the coming-of-age story. I do think there's a danger of falling into a rut in this kind of plot, particularly when the characters run around in circles anguishing over what's gonna happen if somebody finds out they're gay. Partly for this reason, I've abandoned that and went with a new character who came to terms with being gay when he hit adolescence, and has friends at a modern, contemporary school where being gay isn't that big a deal. (I don't dispute that this is very different in different parts of the U.S. or the world.) Cutting that angst out opened up a lot more potential plots for me. The other kind of plot that makes me crazy is the "is he or isn't he" plot, where our lead character is head over heels in love/lust with another character, one who puts out mixed signals. I liked this the first 4000 times already, but I kind of think this has been exhausted to the point where nothing new is happening in this direction. I do think there are always new spins that can be placed on old ideas, but it takes a lot of skill and time to pull that off. I don't worry about why or where the ideas come from. I'm just grateful for being able to sit down in front of a keyboard and come up with a story that satisfies me (and sometimes, a handful of readers as well). God knows, I had some hellacious moments as a kid, but there were good times in there, too; as dorky as I was, I still had some occasional affairs with schoolmates going back to the 1960s and early 1970s, when being gay was as far submerged in the closet as it could be. I figure, if I could get laid a dozen or so times in junior high and high school, damn near anybody could (given the right circumstances). But I agree with DB's point that we kind of live vicariously (to a point) through our characters, and all of them -- even the really bad ones -- represent a tiny piece of who we are. We've had some raging debates about sexual content, pro and con, before on AD. I find that if you get reduced to describing how "part A gets inserted into slot B," then it descends into pornography. I like to think that what I write are adventure stories that have layers of romance and occasional erotic moments, but it's more about the characters and story than anything else. But I won't hesitate to write a detailed sex scene if I think the story warrants it. I think it's insane to believe that two healthy kids thrown together for X number of days, who get romantically involved, aren't going to at least talk about sex or even have sex at some point. To ignore that seems very foolish, even priggish to me. I do agree that there's a line to toe in terms of getting very explicit to the point where it becomes an anatomy lesson. The essay I wrote more than ten years ago (along with my fellow authors Nick Archer and Keith Morrissette, neither of which are around these days), pointed out that the key is to isolate how the characters feel, rather than what their bodies are doing. I think it's possible to write an entire sex scene without using a single four-letter word, and it's also kind of interesting to keep things a little vague. But the sex is gonna be there, simply because I think it's part of life.

That sounds like a Stephen King story! And the non-coma twin wakes up every so often and discovers he's living two lives... including having sex with people and waking up in the bed, having no idea how he got there! That's an interesting idea.

Hmmm, if you're cheating on your twin, does that count as cheating? What if he falls in love with a woman and decides to get married? I still like the "gets hit by a truck" angle, because the tragic aspect of it appeals to me. I've read interviews with twins where one of them died, and they were so devastated they felt like a part of them had died, almost literally like losing an arm and a leg. If this happened to teenagers, even more so.

Ah, and my thanks to my partner Rod and also Cole above for helping out with proofreading and editing. It was hard getting back into the groove, but I think I have a grasp of where the story is headed now. Now, all I have to do is to get there!

Hey, but the mayor of Sochi insists the town has no gays! http://sports.yahoo.com/news/sochi-mayor-claims-there-are-no-gay-people-in-sochi-080120594-olympics.html

And just to update this thread more than six months later: I have started working on the second book of the series, which we're calling Shattering Fate. This continues the setup from the last page of the first novel, continuing on only a few days later. The link for the first chapter is here: http://www.awesomedude.com/pecman/shattering_fate/index.htm

I think we have a story idea here. Perhaps we have two gay twins who have sex with each other... then one of them is hit by a truck and dies, then the survivor has to grieve but eventually finds love with somebody else. Sometimes, you can fall in love because of your differences, not in spite of them. It'd be a good starting point for a novel, if it hasn't been done. Maybe the dead twin comes back as a ghost and taunts them... maybe the ghost is jealous. This could go in a lot of different directions.

Yep, I touched on that in my last novel, Pieces of Destiny, but didn't go into the details. I think it was different many years ago, and the situation I depicted was two lonely abused brothers in a loveless household set in a rural town. I think some fooling around is bound to happen, but crossing the line to real love and affection is a tricky area. Having said that: the recent American made-for-cable movie Flowers in the Attic depicted a very sexual relationship between a 16-year-old brother and a 14-year-old sister, and the ratings went through the roof. (The kid in the show was really, really good-looking, too.) In a special case like this were four kids are basically imprisoned for years in a house and prevented from going to school or doing anything, I can understand it. Two lead actors from Flowers in the Attic. As the great songwriter Brian Wilson once wrote in his song "When I Grow Up to Be a Man": I dig the same things that turned me on as a kid. You're as young as you feel.

Ah, that was a wonderful commercial that told a complete story, Gee. I think you have to be born to have a love of reading, and that was something I had I think from the age of 5 or 6 on. I believe I had a library card from the public library when I was maybe 8, and was making regular trips every week to check out several books at a time. It's hard to grasp the idea that somebody could be illiterate, but it's a warm thought that people can overcome their limitations and eventually be a whole person. The idea of living without being able to read is beyond any experience I can imagine.

F.T., send the file to me and I'll be glad to convert it to whatever you want. Right now, I'm using MS Word 2011 (just switched from Word 2004), and once I finish the draft, I cut and paste it all into Dreamweaver to convert to HTML and preserve all the italics and boldface formatting. I keep it real simple because that's my style.

Ah, thanks for the alert, VWL. I'm glad that JPM has finally hit the endgame, and we have a sense of where the ending is going. The last few pages of this chapter were cryptic, and I'm not sure if I agree with the structure, but the essential writing is very good and thoroughly compelling.

The young man in question has only made 2 or 3 short films (maybe 10-15 minutes each), but he clearly has... talent. SeanCody.com. The kid's just average in my neighborhood.