Graeme

I don't know if James is serious or not, but I am. I have a five year old son, and I've read LOTS of children's books to him. If you can find someone to illustrate that story, you have one damn good childrens book there, Codey. Catchy rhymes, with a simple story to tell -- it is EXACTLY what kids love to hear. Graeme

Using chicken enchiladas for a duel is almost sacrilege. As one of my all time favourite foods, anything except eating them is a total waste. Now Haggis at five paces sounds more reasonable. The only thing is that Scots object to using their national food for frivilious purposed (I know, because a Haggis throwing competition was recently forced to find fake haggis to keep the Scots happy....) Graeme

My first idea for using the hyperlinks was to try to be non-linear, but I just couldn't get it to work. I don't know if that was because I was still thinking in a traditional story sense, where you had a plot that started at A, continued through B and D and eventually ended at E. That doesn't translate into a non-linear model. Hmmmm, what would? (without thinking of something completely weird). It would have to be almost a snap-shot of a single time/place. The reader could wander through the place, looking at different parts as their interest takes them. The next "chapter" would be another time/place. That was my original attempt at FCL -- the first time/place was the car trip up to Falls Creek. As I've said previously, it was a complete disaster.... Graeme

I was thinking the same thing yesterday. However, I would suggest we move this thread to the Writers Workshop where it is more appropriate. I rarely use them in books that I read, but that's because I usually read them in one setting. For chapter-by-chapter publication, it's easy to lose track of who is who, and this sort of thing could be quite useful. Graeme

Actually, I think I might be a little older than you, Blue.... Don't forget Ryan (author of the Kayden and One Life stories) as another young author with a lot of promise. Aaron has been editing for me for a few months now, so I'm glad to see that at least one person thinks I've corrupted him enough to allow him to pass as an Australian.... :-D Graeme

Well I have to occassionally show that I'm reading this stuff. Seriously, it was very well done. The key is in finding the time to quit the race, even if only for a short while. That's why I live out in the country, while I work in the city. When I get home, the mobile phone goes off, and I can forget about the rat race (most of the time). Graeme

Should this be "lose" instead of "loose"?

The words are great! Do you have a melody to go with it yet? Graeme

Another poet! I'm having trouble keeping up with the ones we already have..... :oops: Welcome, James! :D Graeme

Thanks, Passive! The way it's looking at the moment, the story will go to ten chapters, though it may stretch to eleven. Some of the characters tend to keep talking way too long, and won't shut-up when I tell them to.... Graeme

Was the word "bourne" chosen deliberately, or should it be "born"? I looked up "bourne" and the definitions are all nouns: 1. A small stream; a brook 2. A destination; a goal 3. A boundary; a limit The first fits the talk of a flash flood further down and underground percolation, but the word "born" seems to fit the sentence better. :? Graeme

Another good chapter! I'd express frustration about still waiting to find out what happens after Nathan leaves, but I've just had a reader express the same frustration to me with FCL, so I won't say anything about that.... I liked the section with Jerry. It follows neatly from the previous chapters where he is expressing frustration with Nathan paying less attention to him than he used to. Well done! Graeme

Come on, guys! This is Aaron's FIRST story, and you're already trying to hijack the thread. I've already given my feedback to Aaron directly, but I will admit that I saw several iterations of the story before this final one. Each time, the story improved based on the feedback he'd been given, and that showed me more clearly than anything else how important it is to provide constructive criticism. Passages that I thought were fine became stronger still, based on the feedback from other reviewers. So, well done, Aaron! I'm looking forward to seeing whatever you come up with next. Graeme :D

My two editors have been doing a great job of teaching me how to improve my writing (Aaron, Blue, please take a bow). I really need to go back to the early chapters and work out how to completely re-write them, but I'm leaving that as an exercise for if I ever decide to try to get the story published. Anyway, thanks for the compliment! Graeme

Thanks, Passive! You can appreciate, though, why I gave serious consideration to switching to Randy's POV. While David's struggles to understand and accept are still on-going, Randy is about to go through some interesting times.... Graeme

Hi, Jeff, WBMS will be very pleased to hear you say that. In another thread he mentioned that the counters he had indicated it had three hits, and was disappointed when one person said that they had read it three times.... If his counters don't show four hits, he'll finally realised that their faulty and that LOTS of us have actually read and enjoyed it. When I read it, he was still working on his "director's cut" version, and I was too enthralled to wait, so I tracked down the original version and finished by reading that one. Graeme

Thanks! For the record, the TV show and book are both called "Bootleg". The book is by Alex Shearer, but it's not clear from what I could track down if the BBC TV drama was based on the book, or if the book was based on the BBC drama. Graeme

Does anyone have any guidelines on the difference between plagarism and inspiration? To make it clearer, I'll give a concrete example of what I'm thinking about. Yesterday, I saw a British TV show about a time in the future where chocolate was made illegal. I was busy at the time nursing a sick child, but as far as I could gather, a political party called "Good For You" had gained control of the country. They deemed chocolate to be bad for you, and therefore made it illegal. I was intrigued by the concept, and given exit polls from the recent USA elections where "moral issues" were high in the list of concerns for a lot of voters, it wasn't hard to consider a time in the future where a "Morality" political party took control of a country (not necessarily the USA) and made anything they considered immoral illegal. If I was to write a story on this basis, is this legitimate inspiration, or is it plagarism of the original idea from the TV show (which in turn was based on a book)? Graeme

A good point, even if I disagree on a technicality. A pediatrician wrote in a book I read once. "I've never met an average child, but I've met lots of normal children." Normal covers a lot wider range of possibilities than does the term "average". In our particular case, I agree with Codey in that normal is wider than the "majority". Homosexuality is normal -- a fact acknowledged by the medical community when it was taken off the list of mental health illnesses. My disagreeance is on a technicality. There are "abnormalities" in the world and we should acknowledge that. But these should be determined on scientific/medical basis, not on a "majority/minority" basis, as you point out. One thing that struck me in recent news articles was the comment from Canada that they don't put civil rights to a majority vote, because they will always lose. This supports what Codey is saying. One of our problems is that the medical/scientific acknowledgement of homosexuality as "normal" has not filtered through to the general community. So when we are seeking "normalcy", we are asking society to recognise our "normalcy", something already done by some sections of the community, but not others. Graeme

I don't think I can answer this one properly, because I don't think I can satisfactory address the identity of what "our differences" are. If you restrict this to one of sexual orientation, then I think it is better for gay people to be treated just like everyone else, as it is essentially a private activity that distinguishes us. However, it is not hard to push the definition out further and look at the differences that a family with same-sex parents can bring to society. Yes, that's right -- a family. If we are accepted, then the ability to adopt, or to have children by artificial insemenation (for lesbian couples) must be assumed. There is a reasonable amount of research that indicates that children with two parents of the same sex do not suffer when compared to a more traditional family. I know this is acknowledged in the region I live, as the local paper had a series of articles last year on the problem of a lack of foster carers, and the agencies concerned explicitly stated in the newpaper articles that they were happy to have homosexual singles and couples as foster carers. Do families of this sort offer something different to society that should be acknowledged? Or is it just another family structure, to go along with the nuclear family, the single parent family and the extended family? Are there other areas, ie. outside of the bedroom, where being gay offers something different to society? I can't think of any myself, but then I haven't considered the question for very long. I am explicitly ignoring the various sub-cultures that we have talked about before because they are not unique to the gay community. ie. There are straight effeminate men, there are straight butch women, there are straights into leather, etc. At the moment, I have to tend toward saying I want society to treat us the same as everyone else, but that's because I can't think of a difference that can be offered to society as a benefit to be celebrated. If someone offers one, I'm happy to change my mind. The only thing I've managed to come up with is simply diversity -- in other words the difference itself is one that could be acknowledged by society, rather than just accepted. However, it's not like a racial, ethnic or religious difference, where it can enrich the experiences of those around us (the sort of thing I'm talking about is an Aboriginal Corrabaree, a Maori Haka, a Native American Ceremony, a Buddhist Wedding, etc). Our essential difference appears to be a private matter. It would be like society acknowledging people based on their favourite sexual position.... My opinions only, and none of them are particularly strongly held. Feel free to try to change them :D Graeme

Well I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who keeps having scenes change on them while they're writing. :D Graeme

Definitely a favourite with me, too. It sums up so much in a delightfully simple way. I'm really enjoying this, even if it sometimes takes a while for me to get around to reading the next chapter when it comes out. In many way it's the little touchs that make the story, such as the ending of the restroom scene in chapter 9, where he's checking his pockets. It makes all the characters really "alive". Keep up the good work! Graeme

Gabriel, Thank you. If I've understood you correctly, you are acknowledging that not everyone can do and be everything. Not all of us, young or old, can be the person who stands up to a potentially hostile world and says "Here I am. This is me. I'm not hiding it, anymore." But all of us have our place and things that we can do. If, for whatever reason, we can't be that front person standing up to the world, we can provide them the support they need to stay there. It is healthy to try to push the boundaries of what you think you are capable of, because you will sometimes find that your limits are not what you thought they were. But we all do have limits; limits placed on us by our personality, where we live, and the people around us. For some, those limits are less restricting than others. I will disagree with you on only one point. Words are important. I have been in more arguments than I care to remember, simply because we had different interpretations of the same words or phrase. If we do not have a clear understanding of what our "key" words mean, we are in constant danger of either internal fighting over them, or being ambushed from outside over them. I will give just one example, one that I posted earlier. What defines our "community" or "tribe"? We want unity and solidarity, but if we don't know who that is with, we can be trapped by hostile forces. Recently in the USA, there were news articles about legislation in one of the states that proposed banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. One opponent of that legislation said it would open the door to pedophila, necrophilia, bestiality, incest and other "perversions". My first reaction to this was, "Yeah, but most, if not all, of these are already illegal in their own right, so they don't count." But then I remembered that it was only as recently as 1997 that homosexuality was decriminalised in the Australian state of Tasmania. As I said, words, and agreeing on what they mean, is important. Otherwise, our message gets diluted and confused. I believe this is part of the problem of what happened to this thread -- it lost it's way because we didn't understand the same things for the same words. Thanks again, Gabriel, for bring it back into focus. Graeme.

When I came out to my wife, one of the questions she kept asking was "What does it mean to be gay?" I kept answering with the simple response of being attracted to someone of the same sex, but she didn't seem to accept that answer. Eventually, I learnt what she was really asking: "How does being gay make you different?" Some of the things she wanted to understand was how it was to grow up hiding my feelings; how it affected the way I interacted with others. In short, she wanted to know the psychology of a gay person, not the emotional/physical differences. This is a lot wider question than the one I was answering, and it's one that I don't have an answer for, because it brings into play the interaction between the gay person and the society in which they live. This varies from place to place, even within the same country, as attitudes vary from region to region. The only thing I can add at this point, is something I said to her when we discussed a long term plan to have a foster child. I told her I'd like to foster a gay teenager, because: "I want that child to have the life I was never able to have." Graeme

With delightful eyes I peruse, all the wonderful ?to?, ?too? and ?twos.? Making powerful rhymes, On him for all times. Surely that not something to lose?