vwl

I haven't seen Bully at the local theaters but this review from Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303404704577311351616032244.html certainly makes it look worthwhile.

I have to agree mainly with Cole. The writer's art is to have the reader know who is speaking at all times and not have him or her have to search back through the dialogue to parse out who is speaking. As nearly all newspapers have recognized, the use of "he said" quickly becomes background information not interrupting the content of the discussion. The use of such words as "exclaimed", "shouted", "gloated" and on and on forces the reader to take note of the verb and interrupts the flow. While many writers constantly insert the name of the person who is spoken to within the quote, as an editor and reader I find that practice causes artificial dialogue. For example, "Well, Ed, that's nice" "It sure is, Jake." "Did you make it yourself, Ed?" "I did, Jake." True, the name of the person spoken to -- spokee? -- can clarify, especially in a long set of dialogue, and when used judiciously is helpful to the reader. All in all, the he said/she said/he exclaimed/she exclaimed, use of spokee's name, etc. is a matter of judgment, but the beta readers' views and the editors' changes probably reflect their lost-in-dialogue concerns.

I just purchased A Love to Hide, a French movie taking place during WW II. The movie is about a Jewish woman and two gay men in occupied France, where any of them could be taken away by the Vichy government or the Nazis. Excellent film, but not an upper.

The latest chapter, 34, was just posted at Nifty under adult friends. Still engrossing.

I don't know if you consider African-Americans as the religious right, but it African-Americans were the largest bloc of voters supporting Proposition 8 in Califonia. I suspect Obama fears losing some of those voters with a too-strong gay-rights position, since those voters are crucial in states he needs to win in November.

The decision may backfire and have bad effects on civil-union legislation and therefore bad effects on gay rights. As I understand the decision, in part it says that because California has a civil-union law that provides gay rights, it is discriminatory to prevent the next step: gay marriage. That is, once the civil-union step is taken, the gay-marriage step has to be allowed. The effect, I think, is to set back the cause of civil unions, which probably are easier to have enacted. If approval of civil-union legislation is equivalent to gay-marriage legislation, then the battle for civil unions will be fiercer and therefore harder to have passed into law. Frankly, I don't think governments should be in the marriage business at all. Let marriages be the symbolic act that, to some, consecrates a civil union. Since any denomination can have a marriage ceremony, there is nothing preventing one from performing gay marriages, as some do today (however, without the civil-union benefit).

The predecessor book is here: http://www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/highschool/cover-and-book/

I still find Love on the Rocks one of the better stories. Sure, the protagonist singer is probably too sweet a person. But the family story, the kindness to the boy with cancer and the relationships among the people are good. For a while, the author seemed to think that every chapter needed an explicit-sex scene. I wrote him and said that I found such to be distracting from the story, that the sex should be more subtle, and I think he responded. Thus, the story still holds for me.

With respect to System Check, I got warnings from Windows Defender and McAfee, I had those programs clean the viruses out, but I didn't immediately reboot. I don't know if that delay was enough to allow the malware to spawn. Maybe somebody who knows more about computers and viruses could answer that question. I believe my virus checkers have been on constantly.

Somewhere in my perigrinations on the internet, I acquired a vicious malware program called System Check. It may be a relatively new malware program since my various malware and virus checkers didn't catch it or, in the case of Windows Defender and McAfee, eliminated it temporarily. The symptoms start with System Check starting up immediately upon bootup into Windows 7. Then it gives a number of varying messages about how your hard disk is corrupte, is running hot, etc., etc., and the program offers to fix the problem. The program cannot be deleted or closed down, partly because it disables Task Manager. The program produces a limited Start menu, with most options not listed. It disables malware utilities, Task Manager, and I think System Restore. It removes the Internet Explorer icon and program listing. I was able to delete the program file from the Program Data directory, but it reemerged with a new name. Really frustrating. Ultimately, I got onto the internet by typing 'ie' in the "search programs and files area" and downloaded SuperAntiSpyWare, ran it, and System Check was eliminated. I was so grateful to the anti-spyware program that I bought a for-pay version. After System Restore to an earlier version -- maybe it was needed -- I reran the spyware program, and it found another virus-affected file. I don't know if it was another instance of the nasty malware, but it might have been. I'll do a few scans in the next few day to make sure everything stays cleaned up. Beware the ides of System Check.

I am overwhelmed by Now Is the Hour, a novel by Tom Spanbauer [available new (expensive) or used on Amazon and probably at your local library]. It is the story of Rigby John Klusener's coming of age in South Idaho in the 1960s and the realization of his sexuality. To me, it ranks with Catcher in the Rye in quality and the prose is often like poetry.

Revive Esperanto! http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2011/12/23/english-pronunciation/

If you are writing a period piece, a yearbook -- high school or college -- will give you names popular when your story takes place. A large school likely would have more interesting alternative names, or course.

I attribute my finding of the story to the title. Nifty usually has around 40 submittals each day, so having an interesting title, Cover and Book, struck me as fresh and worth looking at. This does not mean that there aren't good stories with more mundane titles or poor stories with interesting stories, but I think a serious author should spend some time on his or her title (as well as the first few paragraphs) in order to attract the type of readers that they want.

Cover and Book by the same author as Rebound is well on its way to a worthy story at Nifty. Recommended, even though it's not finished.

Marcus McNally's Love on the Rocks, now at Chapter 29 continues to be a fine read. When done, I would recommend it for BoNN.

Entitling the last chapter Epilogue would have made it more understandable from the beginning sentence.

I'm on the fence on this story. One of the reasons I liked it is because I'm very familiar with the setting -- the riverside path, the buildings, etc., so my opinion may be too colored by my liking of the setting.

The story Rebound is well done.

What I appreciate in a story such as this is the amount of historical research that has been made. Thank you, Chris. As an aside, the epitome of such research-based novels is the Aubrey-Maturin British Navy series that takes place during the Napoleonic Wars, written by Patrick O'Brian. Of course, there is a much more extensive written history of that period. The movie Master and Commander was based on these novels, and Peter Weir, the director, made special efforts to make his movie realistic, including filming the sea at the latitudes and places used in the novels. [The ship in the movie is a prop with the seascapes edited into the final film.]

Based on my conversation with an attorney friend a few years back, there is no prohibition on using the same title for a book (or a movie). Just go on Amazon or IMDB.com and search for a commonly named title. I just searched for "The River," and two exact matches appeared on the first page on Amazon. The contents, of course, can be copyrighted.

I'd seen this earlier, Bruin, and its very good. I wish the Its Gets Better videos would separate out the celebrities from those who have real stories to tell as does Oral Roberts' grandson. It's fine that the Boston Red Sox or Seattle Mariners or Hillary Clinton support the cause, but the real stories may do more to save lives.

IOMFATS is reporting that Richie Ryan, author of What We Are, has died from a heart attack. His stories are at the Best of Nifty, IOMFATS.org and CrvBoy.org.

Camy's probably right about the sex scenes, though I haven't reviewed them. Most sex-scene writing is pedestrian and eminently forgettable, which is why I usually skim over those portions and move on to the meat of the rest of the story, basing my judgment on that. I consider a well-done sex scene as a rare bonus but not something I look for or expect.

De gustibus non est disputandem. At least, we both found a good story.