Nigel Gordon
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Posts posted by Nigel Gordon
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This book is available from Amazon as either a paperback or on Kindle. Currently there is a special offer for it on Kindle, but I am not sure how much longer that will last. I will say it will be worth buying still when it is up at its full price.
This is the story of Tia and Emmett, and Tia's escape from a dependent and emotionally abusive relationship in Boston, which results in him ending up in Burlington, Vermont, with $300 and a tube of lip gloss in his pocket. Within hours of waking up in Burlington, Tia lands a temporary job with Emmett, the local vet, a widower with a ten year old son. From here the story is of course predictable as any gay romance of this type is.
The thing is just when you think you know what is going to happen next, Jay Hogan does something slightly different to what you expect. It is these small twists in the plot which make what could have been a run of the mill gay romance into something that is well worth reading. It has strong and believable lead characters in Tia, Emmett and Emmett's son Leo. It also has strong secondary characters.
The only reason I did not read this in one go was my tablet run out of power last night and I had to recharge it. I did finish it off this morning.
A good story, well told and highly recommended.
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8 hours ago, Rutabaga said:
Johnny's familiarity with Cockney money slang obviously betrays his misspent youth skiving off to the streets to London. But it surprises me that he would not have become aware of the Thompson family and its influence in the area from those times.
What makes you think he was not aware of them. He just had not been in contact with them. Unfortunately, you are going to have to wait for "An Interesting Young Lady", to find an explanation about that and I'll not get around to working on that book till I have completed both Joey and Johnny 3.
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On 3/19/2022 at 3:31 PM, Cole Parker said:
I noticed the rhythm, too, but don't read German and so onlyh knew that it suggested some other natigve lalnguage.
I don't speak it or read it, but spent over six years working in German speaking areas of Europe, so got a feel for the language.
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On 3/19/2022 at 3:45 PM, Rutabaga said:
And now this latest chapter sent me running to Google to figure out what UCAS points were.
As a response to an email I got from one of my readers, I had to check how many points a US Advanced Placement examination was worth. It turns out to be half that of an A-Level, roughly equal to an AS paper.
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On 3/16/2022 at 9:35 PM, Cole Parker said:
What language was this originally written in? Anyone know?
I suspect it was originally written in English but by somebody whose first language is German. The reason I say this is that when reading it, I find that it has they rhythm of German. If it was a translation from German to English, I suspect that rhythm would have been lost. Though I could be wrong, it could have been originally written in German and had a very good translation.
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On 3/16/2022 at 8:13 PM, Rutabaga said:
For that matter, what business did the police have in staking a constable at a "former crime scene"? How is it that no one has found anything suspicious about that?
Highbury and Islington have some of the highest levels of police patrols in England. Not because of the high crime rate. There is hardly any. It because so many politicians live around that area, so if anything goes wrong the police really get it in the neck from their political masters. Not to have a policeman to have a policeman patrolling an Islington square would be suspicious. Finding one there is quite normal.
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I was delighted to see this story appear in the Dude's "Picks of the Past". Although not my favourite Chris James story, it is one which I have always loved and enjoyed. You can find it here: http://awesomedude.com/chris_james/the-woodlake-house/index.htm
If you have not already read it, I suggest you do. It's a fine story told by one of the best writers. If you have read it, then read it again.
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On 3/2/2022 at 2:21 PM, Rutabaga said:
Once it was the Henderson family; now it's the Elmchurch family. At this point we readers can be excused for being skeptical about every apparently accidental death of family members.
R
Yes but with the Elmchurch family you are dealing with English Gentlemen. They will always clean the blade of the knife before they stab you in the back.
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You can find it in the Newest Story List about five entries under Donner & Blitzen Redux. Mike does not post things to the author's page until they drop off the home page.
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I wanted to reread another David MacMillan story which a friend had reminded me of. When I went to his list of stories, I saw this one, which I had not read. So read it. Highly enjoyable. It is also a warning of what could easily happen. If you have not read it, I suggest you should.
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1 hour ago, Rutabaga said:
Ch. 2 -
It seems like Trevor must know something that the bad guys don't want to have pursued.
R
Thank you Rutabaga. I was struggling with a reason for a sequence of events that have to take place in book three. You have just given me a way to explain them.
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18 hours ago, Rutabaga said:
Well, I have made it (again) through all 60 chapters of "Living with Johnny," and as threatened have made my own character list. The spreadsheet has 255 lines in it, and some entries have more than one character in a line. I am pasting it below.
There is actually a full listing here: http://awesomedude.com/nigel_gordon/being-johnny/being-johnny-character-list.htm
Although it is the listing for Being Johnny, it contains the Living with Johnny characters as reference is made to them. I thought there was a character listing up for Living with Johnny, but it does not appear to be there.
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3 hours ago, Merkin said:
I applaud this incredible effort, Rutabaga. Having the thumbnail bios and the chapter reference will be invaluable. Thanks.
BTW, Nigel, don't you plan on posting twice a week?At the moment it is only being posted once a week and will be until the editing process has been finished on all 61 chapters. At the moment only 33 chapters have been through the full editing process and only 9 through the full review process. Hope to be through the full editing process about the end of April.
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18 minutes ago, James K said:
Does anyone under sixty use Cockney rhyming slang, and Polari, which have/had a very minority usage even in the past
Actually there are signs that Polari might be making a comeback. It seems that some of the younger members of gay society are taking an increasing interest in it and are trying to revive it. There is also a lot of academic research going on into it. Shortly before Christmas I was meeting a friend a local gay pub, there were two young men (about 20ish) in there and they were using polari. Turned out they were part of a group of polari speakers who met regularly to try to keep the language alive.
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1 hour ago, Rutabaga said:
Meanwhile, the time has come to point out that in the U.S. we virtually never employ the word "whilst" whereas it seems fairly common in British usage.
R
It seems to me that Americans have a particular dislike of the word "whilst". My editors and proofreaders on "Being Johnny" have made a pretty good job of getting me to remove all occurrences of the word. Though I think I have managed to sneak a couple of occurrences past them.
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35 minutes ago, Rutabaga said:
A more clear-cut example is "quieten" which I see regularly in British writing but is not in general use in North America. Here we would never say that a class of students "quietened" or that the teacher "quietened them down"; rather they would have "quieted" or been "quieted down."
R
I think we would use silenced rather than quieted. Quietened implies a process by which the volume of sound is reduced over a period of time. Quieted to us implies an immediate cessation of sound, so we would say silenced.
"He entered the room and the sound quieted, a death like silence pervaded the room."
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Hi Rutabaga
There is a link to the character list at the bottom of Chapter 1 of Being Johnny. It also covers the characters in book one.
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12 hours ago, Bruin Fisher said:
Incidentally, the headline of the article claims that Louis, rather than William or Harry, is in line to inherit Diana's mansion, Althorp House.
Given that the Althorp estate is entailed it belongs to the Earl Spencer, so it will go wherever the title goes.
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Whoopi Goldberg has come under a massive amount of criticism and attack over her comments on the holocaust. She said it was not about race but about man's inhumanity to man.
As a somebody who has in the last couple of years done a lot of reading about the holocaust, I find myself agreeing with her. Yes, there was a racial element to the holocaust, but that did not apply to a significant proportion of those who were killed in camps. Many were ethnic Germans. There was no racial element in their persecution and their deaths. They suffered because they did not fit with the majority view of the society they were in. They were the gays, the disabled, the Jehovah Witnesses, the socialists, and any others who did not fit with the narrow Nazi view of the perfect member of society.
In book 2 of the Johnny series I have raised the issue of the holocaust and the treatment of gay men in the occupied countries. There was a lot of background research that I had to do before writing about this. What I became aware of doing that research was the wide range of social groups that were victims of Nazi persecution.
There is a danger in denying the holocaust. There is also a danger is viewing the holocaust as simply a racial issue. It is far more complex. Gay men and woman were victims of the holocaust. If we allow the holocaust to be defined as a racial thing, worse still a strictly anti-Semitic programme, we are denying the persecution of those others who suffered. We are denying the persecution of gay men and women by the Nazis and those that supported them.
Whoopi Goldberg is not denying the holocaust, she is identifying its true underlying cause, man's inhumanity to man. If we allow those who strictly want to define the holocaust in terms of the persecution of specific racial groups, we are denying justice to those gay men and women who suffered under Hitler and his supporters.
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42 minutes ago, Bruin Fisher said:
Cack-handed is, I think, a Northern term and is rather derogatory, originally referring to left-handed people, and by derivation to clumsy people. Cack is muck, dirt, possibly even shit. Cack-handed is someone who can't do something neatly, cleanly, and makes a mess of things. Cruel to identify left-handers that way, I think.
Bruin, cack is either old English or Anglo-Saxon for shit, I can't remember which. Historically, you were supposed to use your left hand to clean yourself after defecting. This was because you ate with your right hand. Remember forks had not come in yet so you used your fingers. Therefore, the left hand was the cack hand.
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Book 2 of the Johnny series, "Being Johnny", will start to be posted shortly. I am still in the process of dealing with the editing and proofreading of the later chapters, but as each chapter gets the final sign off I am sending it to Mike so it can start being posted.
Being Johnny takes the story of Johnny forward, from Trevor hanging himself. I can't say very much about it otherwise I will be giving too much away. Just let's say that there are a lot of new characters introduces, some of them not particularly nice, there are also some old friends who appear.
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I suspect that in Britain the use of get/got/gotten is something of a North/South issue. In my youth I heard gotten all the time but it seems to have got used less in recent years. One thing I have noticed is that it is used more in the North of England than in the South of England.
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17 hours ago, Merkin said:
There is very little room behind my ear these days what with my eyeglasses, hearing aids, and now the damn Covid masks. Consequently I forget about almost everything.
Bliss.
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To "put something behind your ear" means you are likely to forget about it. It was a common practice when I was growing up to see tradesmen, specifically carpenters, with a pencil stuck behind their ear. Something that is very rare these days. It was surprising how often you would see somebody looking around for a pencil having forgotten they had put it behind their ear.
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So THAT'S how they do it!
in Awesome Youth Performances
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Still not as good as Richard Dimbleby's Swiss spaghetti harvest. Though I will admit it must be up amongst the top ten.