PeterSJC

Index to the story: https://web.archive.org/web/20160524014345/http://www.themailcrew.com/tdeintro.html Part 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20160401082106/http://themailcrew.com/tde1.html Part 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20160401081958/http://themailcrew.com/tde2.html Part 3: https://web.archive.org/web/20160401083445/http://themailcrew.com/tde3.html Part 4: https://web.archive.org/web/20160401081916/http://themailcrew.com/tde4.html

Attempting to re-read Through Different Eyes, which has been linked from AD but hosted by The Mail Crew, I was taken to a web page that informed me that the domain name themailcrew.com has been listed for sale. Is there any chance that the story could be hosted here? I think it is an excellent story, and I've seen it referenced in at least one other story on a gay fiction site.

In today's news, citizens of Rienzi, Mississippi, say that they are taking a stand and fighting for their religious freedom. I suspect that if you asked them whether you they would like the society depicted in Please Come With Me, many of them would say yes: https://www.facebook.com/topic/Rienzi-Mississippi/103815086324265?source=whfrt&position=3&trqid=6383809462532531995

At the risk of straying even further from the topic of this story, I have to respond to the ranter linked in James Savic's post. I agree with his main premise—that the Democrats put up Clinton, thinking that anybody could beat Trump—but he oversimplifies. Trump got a sufficient minority of the votes because people hated Clinton in a way that no amount of discussion could have overcome. And this is fed by where they choose to get their news. Here in an Oregon town that voted 76% for Trump (and 16% for Clinton), I've seen this bumper sticker: "I don't believe mainstream media." And I visited a friend who had Alex Jones, IIRC, informing us about the child-sex ring that the Clinton's ran out of the white house. I spend a lot of my Facebook time trying to swat down bogus stories—from the left, as well as the right—that could be disproven by a simple visit to Snopes. We can't have the discussion that the ranter—who is that guy, anyway?—wants when each side has its "alternative facts." Trump was better than Clinton in tapping into fear. In a recent study, three UCLA researchers posited that conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe fake news that feeds fear: http://www.danielmtfessler.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Fessler-et-al-in-press-Political-Orientation-Credulity.pdf peter

Please Come with Me is one of my favorite stories here. Even while re-reading it, I was caught up in the drama of whether our heros would escape. I recently posted a link to it in a Facebook thread about current events. I don't really think we will get to how things are in the story, but I never thought we would get this far down the road to theocracy, either.

Mike, I just started listening, so I'll add my voice to the others. I sort of grew up on a lot of those songs, so hearing them again brings back memories. But now I am listening much more actively, paying attention to the words, and getting a feel for the style of each artist or group. I appreciate that you show the artists and title of each song, and I like the feature that lets me see the next song and what has recently played. Thanks!

"Is they coming?" they asked. I think that, even when they refers to one person, the verb is plural, to agree with the pronoun, rather than the antecedent. Thus, "If that person said they are coming, they are coming," not "If that person said they is coming, they is coming."

I am in the USA, with no VPN, etc., and had no trouble accessing it. As of today, the website says that it will be available for 25 days. I heard a little piece of it in the 1997 movie Wilde, so I will be sure to have some handkerchiefs on hand.

What a great exercise! If we do this again, I definitely want to take a stab at it. Reading the edited versions, I became aware of how far I have to go before I can call myself a really good editor. The skills that I have learned—fixing grammar and spelling errors, removing unnecessary sentences and pruning overly verbose ones, improving word usage, etc.—are the easy part. The editors who participated in the exercise did much more, especially when they commented on the strengths and weaknesses of the story. I did find it a bit difficult to read the color-coded edits, especially the dark blue on a black background. I would probably use just use bold for added text and strike-though for deletions. So, about 11 years later, I'd like to thank the editors and especially Graeme for putting this together.

At the risk of beating this to death, here is my final edit: A teacher correcting students should consider take their feelingsinto consideration.This happens to me fairly often—I concentrate on one problem and fail to see another. That's why I need to resist the temptation to send copy back to an author immediately after I "finish" editing it.

Without expressing an opinion about whether putting what you write on paper makes for higher quality writing—I have heard authors say that for them it does, because it slows them down—I have to say that I'll be glad to see the end of traditional cursive writing. When I was in elementary school, all the classrooms had, at the top of one wall, a green strip showing cursive letters (http://www.nstresources.com/cart.php?m=product_detail&p=153). A student who precisely duplicates those letters—a time-consuming task that demands more dexterity than most children or adults have—can create something that is more or less legible but does not approach the legibility of good printing. And the capital letters G and Q only detract from that legibility. For taking notes that only you will read, cursive is nice, because it can be done quickly, but for everything else, printing is better, IMO. The question here, however, is whether putting something directly to paper helps the writing process. For me, the answer is no. I constantly revise, while I write, and I can do that only with a computer. Writing the wrong phrase several times helps me find the right one.

I completely agree, but would generalize that to include subsequent drafts, and even in posting something in a forum. When I skip this step, out of laziness or impulsivity, I usually regret it.

Thank you, Chris: coming from you, that means a lot. Here, I was expressing something inside of me, which needed to come out, and perhaps expanding some horizons by pointing out someone who was part of our community and remains an important part of Latino music. I often go to YouTube when music plays a part in a story that I read or help edit, and in that way I have been introduced to many artists whom I missed when I was young and mostly limited to classical music. This kind of sharing is not unlike what I sometimes do on Facebook, linking to an article that I have found worth reading. I well imagine that you and other good authors are similarly expressing things that are inside of you. I have in my head some characters, people who have moved me in some way, as our paths have crossed. I would like to get them out, to explore them a bit. But I think a story needs a plot, a plausible one that also captures the reader's interest. So far, no plot has wanted to burst out of my head, nor do I feel a great need to contrive one. Writing is hard work, and I don't want to spend my time or that of readers, just so I can be an author.

A teacher correcting students should take their feelings into consideration.

Cole, it is when I fight valiantly to uphold rules that I know I'm on the losing side. But I also enjoy breaking rules. Like the one about not starting sentences with conjunctions. Thanks for commenting. I am one of your fans.

Thanks to Mike the Dude for providing this community space and letting me in. Name: Peter Age: Old Sex: Yes Orientation: Gay Skill level: Decent editor with no identifiable talent writing fiction; passionate and somewhat articulate when oversharing my views. I have written a very few short and plotless porn stories, sufficient to get my (creative) juices flowing, and the Nifty Archivist was kind enough to post them. Hobby: Editing Wikipedia articles. Frustration: Finding errors on web pages that are not wikis. Editing skills: An innate (but not infallible) sense of when a word looks right, and when it seems to be misspelled. A shallow knowledge about a huge number of things, and the inclination to look up things that I don't know. Average ability to see when something in a story doesn't seem true to life. Editing style: I track my changes, using the Review feature of MS Word or OpenOffice/LibreOffice Writer, so that the author can see each proposed change and decide which to accept. I add comments to explain, point out ambiguities, etc., and sometimes to link to web articles that explain a grammatical concept. I hope the process will help the author learn, as it does me, and I am very gratified if I see these changes reflected in chapters that are sent to me subsequently. Favorite fora forums here: Writers' Workshop and Editor's Desk. (Hmmm—are there several writers and only one editor? See Frustration, supra above.) Goals: Improve my writing and especially editing skills. Learn when and how to relax the rigid punctuation and grammar rules that I learned in my youth, without feeling as if I am completely selling out to the barbarians. Improve my ability to write dialogue like what people actually say. Non-goal: Becoming a good enough fiction writer to create something that would be good enough for AD. I am in awe when I read wonderful stories by Chris James, Altimexis, Mihangel Hwntw, and many others here, and I gratefully celebrate the ability of those writers to create them. Grammar preference: Prescriptive. However, I like to remind myself why the Appendix Probi, a late Roman list of correct and incorrect versions of words, is still important to students of Romance languages: all of the "incorrect" ones evolved into words that are now valiantly defended by royal language academies. Language changes. Oxford comma: Usually, unless it creates ambiguity. Punctuation inside quotation marks? Only if it is part of the quotation. That's a hard rule for me to follow, with American grammarians on the web still advising that periods and commas should always go inside, but the British (and the Wikipedia style guide) have this one right. Subjunctive mood: Yes, please. Even the least educated speaker of Spanish knows how to use it correctly in that language. I lament that it is disappearing from English. Singular "they": Ugh! If "he or she" is too awkward, the sentence can usely be recast without resorting to "they". But I know I'm on the losing side of this one, too.

When I heard Amy Goodman say that Mexico's Elvis had died, and I came into my brother's living room and saw Juan Gabriel on the screen, I had to find a private place to lose my composure. I like Amy Goodman's passionate blend of journalism and pursuit of justice—but "Elvis"? I haven't really followed Mr. Costello's music that much, but ...oh, wait, did she mean the alleged heart-throb from Tupelo, who made a name for himself while turning black blues music white? No, that doesn't seem right, either. I mourn the Divo of Juárez, aging, diabetic, and overweight with multiple chins. His almost shuffling onstage movements were a mere shadow of the fluid motion of his youth, and in 2012 he frightened everyone by falling off the stage. His fans' adoration was undiminished. Juan Gabriel laughed off rumors of his death, "I had to look for a mirror to make sure they weren't true." I mourn the unapologetically gay man who, while his orientation was known to everyone, did not make a career out of it. I never figured out whether his nickname Juanga was meant affectionately, or as a slightly homophobic epithet, or a little bit of both. The passion of his singing, the romance of his songs, and his genuine affection for the divas with whom he appeared onstage—Rocío Dúrcal and Isabel Pantoja, for example—made him the heart-throb of women and gay men everywhere. I mourn the man whose concern for orphans and the children of poverty led him to do 10–12 benefit concerts per year and to found a home in Juárez for school children, aged 6–12. Juan Gabriel's own body of work was considerable, but in his recordings and his live performances at Mexico City's Palace of Fine Arts, he paid frequent tribute to the great songwriters who preceded him: José Alfredo Jiménez, Augustín Lara, and others. I mourn the starry-eyed 16-year-old who got himself smuggled into the Noa Noa nightclub in Ciudad Juáez, to sing and captivate the crowds there. The club was still there in the 1980s, when Héctor took me around Juárez to see his old haunts. I mourn the boyish, 30-something man of the 1980s, the time when Héctor introduced me to his music. We would listen to it on our record-player and on Radio Romántica, and those songs became part of the fabric of our lives. The station was renamed Recuerdo (Memory), and happy tears sometimes come to my eyes when I hear it playing "Así Fue" or "Siempre en mi mente." Musical memories do that to me. Years later, sitting in Stanford Theatre, watching Charlie Chaplin's City Lights with Héctor's successor Richard, I heard the theatre organ begin to play "La Violetera," and I was transported back to times when Héctor played Sara Montiel's rendition of it on our phonograph. When I began to weep, Richard understood. He mourned his Omaya, and Tony, and the others who had left him behind. My relationships with Héctor and Richard were complex, and I really wouldn't want to go back there, but I miss them both, especially Héctor.