vwl

As moderator of this forum, I share some of the same frustrations that have been exposed in this thread, plus others that I'll lay out here. 1. AD inherited the Best of Nifty list from who-knows-where. Many of the stories reflect the quality available as much as ten years ago and reflect the tastes of the originator at the time. 2. I attempted to weed out unfinished stories--and largely did so--but made no attempt to erase any that were complete even though I agree that some do not stand the test of time very well. At the same time, I established a rule that all stories had to be complete. 3. The Dude and I tried to set up a committee of reviewers for new nominated stories to add, but for whatever reasons we got only intermittent replies--reading the better stories takes a long time. For example, Alone/Together, my all-time favorite is about 1000 pages long. Then, some of the nominated stories were frankly not very good, in my opinion. Granted, the Dude or I could simply add the stories that we wanted, but that course seemed a bit arbitrary. 4. The next step was to ask certain authors and editors to name what they thought were the best of the best. You'll see my list, Pecman's, Sharon's etc. on the site, and when people on the web ask where to find recommendations, I usually refer them to those compilations. I still think such compilations are a good way to go. 5. As Pecman points out, the quality of Nifty stories, on average, has dropped, and many are available at other sites such as this one. So, the BoN by its nature omits some really good work. 6. Ideally, I think, something like the Rotten Tomatoes site would work best, expecially if it was designed for the best of the Web. Ideally, one could click on a story name and find out what percent of the reviewers thought it was good. Getting a group of better writers and editors to rate stories is not such a hard task. However, having software to total the reviewers findings, to display them and even to refer to indivual reviews ? la Rotten Tomatoes is, to my knowledge, not available. Having such a rating system would allow me, with my frugal endorsement bent, to be counted, but not be in effect a censor on everyone else. [i'm inclined to recommend only a handful of stories a year as worthy of "best of" consideration.] Any other ideas on how to make BoN more valuable are more than welcome.

Back to the announced topic of this forum, chapter 19 of Lem was just posted at nifty. It is very good. I usually skim quickly past sex scenes, because they are mechanical and boring, but the one in chapter 19 is so well written that it was truly erotic. I don't know what made it so; perhaps it was the minimalist approach and the attention to side details. By minimalist, I mean two things: 1) the proportion of story to sex is high, and 2) the anatomical details are fewer, leaving much more to imagination. There are so very few writers that can do sex scenes well. I know this is a genre in which such scenes are at a premium, but I wish other authors would study stories like Lem. I'm sure that there are others that people here can recommend, and if I had more time, I would name some as well. UPDATE: Corrected to be Chapter 19.

I am going to recommend (once again) Twyla Tharp's splendid book The Creative Habit - Learn It and Use It For Life, which discusses the issue of planning (outlines) versus creativity. Quoting Twyla Tharp: The most productive artists I know have a plan in mind when they get down t work. They know what they want to accomplish, how to do it, and what to do if the process falls off track. But there's a fine line between good planning and overplanning. You never want the planning to inhibit the natural evolution of your work. Replace the word planning for outline and you have good advice for writing. She goes on to say: A plan is like the scaffolding around a building. When you're putting up the exterior shell, the scaffolding is vital. But once the shell is in place and you start work on the interior, the scaffolding disapppears. That 's how I think of planning. It has to be sufficiently thougtful and solid to get the work up and standing straight, but it cannot take over as you toil away on the interior guts of a piece. Transforming your ideas rarely goes according to plan. In other words, an outline should be a scaffolding that gets the writer started, but it is not a straightjacket. Too many internet serial novels seem to go on and on without a scaffolding until they peter out. Even fine writers such as Driver Nine suffer from not having the scaffolding for their story, so the story simply ends, like a jogger running out of breath. Twyla Tharp's book has hundreds of ideas on how to be creative, but within a context of structure, and many of those ideas apply equally to writing as to ballet, her specialty.

Just to let you know that I sent you a private message. vwl

I have all the final chapters, so if you email me, I can attach them in a return email.

I forgive anyone who lives in a large city in an apostrophe-shaped state.

Thanks, Graeme. I thought so, too. By the way, I mentioned to Milos tha he had been recommended at AD when I sent a note regarding his latest chapter. He replied that he would be interested in being a part of AD.

Set in Montana in a youth rodeo environment. As an aside, I much prefer naming real places (by and large) to the generic "nearby town" or the "state university" etc. If a town is large enough, writers, make it a part of the story.

I, too, found the subject matter of the first story distasteful. I haven't skimmed the second story. Mostly, however, I didn't find that the writing and story-telling quality that good to overcome my qualms. So, I would vote no, as well.

I strongly recommend that AD pick up Milos as an author, though to date he has done only one story, which is complete apparently but not all posted. The cite for Lem is Lem

I'd like to suggest that when a good reference like this comes along that it be put in a section of the forum that is permanent--that is, where it can readily be found by a writer or editor. Anyways, just a suggestion.

Chapter 4 was just uploaded. There is no falloff in quality in the later chapters. A really good story, perhaps for a first-time author.

Depending on how much material you have, you could write two novels--one from each point of view. Lawrence Durell did that with The Alexandria Quartet--in Justine, Balthazar, Mount Olive and Clea--where each book represented a different take on the central events. I did that with Jake's Side, which followed Jake's Hand, my novels that are hosted at Gay Authors under my pen name REC. I had thought Jake's Hand complete in and of itself, but some reader comments pointed me to other aspects of Jake's personality that I decided to explore--in a parallel time period. In Jake's Hand, I used the character Robbie's point of view. In Jake's Side, as the title indicates, I switched to Jake and supplemented the events of Jake's Hand. You might find it interesting to explore the possibility of two novels with a large component being the intersection of their two lives, but with one or both characters also having their own key events. vwl aka rec

There are lots of ways to handle your problem. I too find that switching points of view can be disruptive, especially if the sequences are short. Without having read your story, I suggest you consider a "restricted" third-person narrator. By restricted, I mean that you retain the inner thoughts of your characters along with their limited information on the rest of the world. For example: 1) The first thing he saw was an ugly scar on his step-father's shoulder. "Where did you get that?" XYZ asked; or 2) What an ugly scar, XYZ thought. "What happened to your shoulder?" he asked. In short, with some reworking, you can attain some of the advantages of first-person POV without its limitations. There are techniques for differentiating dialogue from inner thoughts including the use of single-quotes or italics. By the way, you may not find all the POV inconsistencies until an editor gets his/her hands on it. When editing Skin or Sky's the Limit, I don't remember which, I found a number of first-person POV references that didn't get caught by the author.

Sorry about that. I thought all the unfinished stories had been identified. vwl

Though the characters are older in the works of Rock Lane Cooper, the series that starts with Two Men in a Pickup is one of the best. They can be reached through the Best of Nifty listing button at the top of the AD page. Also, Desert Sons and follow-on by Mark Kendrick--through the links page at Crvboy.org-- and Ron Donaghe's Common Sons trilogy are very fine (at rldbooks.com)

Many of the Nimier stories are at www.rcwp.homestead.com in the authors section. Each chapter/book is an extended piece. They're also at Nifty athttp://www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/relationships/two-distinct-divisions/ vwl

DS has a fine use of medical information in Alone/Together (one of the Best of NIfty) in the second story arc, that starts about chapter 13 or 14. The author is well versed in the illness in the story, which I won't reveal here. He is able to use very detailed information with quotes from medical notes.

I think "plodding on with reading" happens more frequently than we realize because the stories start out so well. Good as Brewdrinker's Tim/Kyle series is, good as Driver Nine's Everyday Love is, the stories just seem to peter out until the author just decided not to go on. I think the problem lies with the perpetual addition of new characters, who, though interesting, keep dragging an otherwise coherent story in new directions--with loose ties to the orginal story. As readers, the problem we have is that we become hooked on the early parts of the stories and keep plodding on until, blessedly and sadly, the plug is pulled.

One difficulty with editing serial novels is that the editor doesn't always know why a character does something in an early chapter because he doesn't where the story is going ultimately unless he's been provided an outline of it. In other words, with serial novels the author bears most of the responsibility of making sure that each chapter moves the story forward ? la Pecman's criterion, or whether a scene should be moved from on-page presence to off-page reference. With serial novels, the editor is relegated largely to punctuation, word usage and grammar. As you can surmise, I am most helpful to an author, I think, when the whole novel/story is sitting in front of me.

With the frequency of McAfee updates this past couple of weeks, I think there be major virus/etc. attacks that are affecting many, many sites. McAfee updates normally come every couple of weeks, so something is up.

I voted no. I found the mixed tenses unpleasant--that is, the switching between present and past. Sentences like "I was glad to find that my new key worked and I let myself in," are dull--that is, not fresh at all. Who cares if the narrator is happy that a key fit? Though annoying, the punctuation problems are fixable by an editor, but to me there wasn't enough underlying story interest to excuse the run-on sentences and the like.

I haven't started Duck Duck Goose yet. It's up there on my list. I follow what I am now calling he Domluka Rule--don't start anything good (or not-so-good) until it is finished, which it is. I've read most of your previous stories, so I really look forward to this one.

This discussion really socks, er, sucks.