aj

Blue said: A quality that will stand you in very good stead in the later stages of the coming out process... cheers, aj

I can't help feeling a little sorry for Sally next Sunday.... I don't think I'd do a direct add-on. It's too complete in itself--anything more would feel just like that: an add-on, imho. cheers, aj

#4 for me, as you might have guessed. LOL

a boy and his dog--who can resist that? nice first chapter...looking forward to the rest. cheers! aj

I guess i've got a pretty strong stomach, or i'm just pretty damn stubborn. Sometimes i stick with stories long after i feel like i should have quit just in the vain hope that something good will happen. A while back I wrote an endorsement for a story called "SpellSong" over on Nifty. I was four chapters in when i wrote the endorsement, and didn't really understand where the story was going...it was not at all what i expected. I thought it was going to be a typical story about the long lost prince returning to the kingdom held by the corrupt regents, who corrects the evils thereof and brings in a kinder, gentler reign. It has all the earmarks, I swear! Instead, it was an indepth discussion of the horrors of sexual abuse and how recovery from such brutality occurs, and the justice wrung from those who perpetrate such abuses. It went on ad infinitum, was amazingly graphic and descriptive and painful to read...and i didn't bail because the prose was so well done. If it hadn't been done with such obvious sincerity and artistry, i'd have bailed shortly after i left the note on this forum about it, but the language held me. There was no gratuitous sex or violence, but there was a great deal of love, and that carried the day. My one major bail point: stories that tell, not show. cheers! aj

I guess i've got a pretty strong stomach, or i'm just pretty damn stubborn. Sometimes i stick with stories long after i feel like i should have quit just in the vain hope that something good will happen. A while back I wrote an endorsement for a story called "SpellSong" over on Nifty. I was four chapters in when i wrote the endorsement, and didn't really understand where the story was going...it was not at all what i expected. I thought it was going to be a typical story about the long lost prince returning to the kingdom held by the corrupt regents, who corrects the evils thereof and brings in a kinder, gentler reign. It has all the earmarks, I swear! Instead, it was an indepth discussion of the horrors of sexual abuse and how recovery from such brutality occurs, and the justice wrung from those who perpetrate such abuses. It went on ad infinitum, was amazingly graphic and descriptive and painful to read...and i didn't bail because the prose was so well done. If it hadn't been done with such obvious sincerity and artistry, i'd have bailed shortly after i left the note on this forum about it, but the language held me. There was a lot of non-gratuitous sex and violence, but there was a great deal of love, and that carried the day. My one major bail point: stories that tell, not show. cheers! aj

Hey Graeme-- Nice work. All the mechanics are in place: engaging characters, great setting, strong plot and a sock-o beginning. I think this is gonna be a winner. i appreciate the social relevance as well. This is a story i could reccomend to a questioning young friend without hesitation, and that's a good thing. I keep a list of such works in a file on my desktop for just such situations, and i'm adding this one to the list. Thanks! cheers, aj

checked out the site--loved the song title "I Don't Want Solidarity If It Means Holding Hands With You."

I read L&L a few days ago, and loved it.

I've seen a few around and written a couple. I'll see if i can dig one out.

I understand from a number of aspiring publishees, that the whole publisher/agent conundrum is a bit of a vicious cycle: you can't get an agent, because you don't have an interested publisher, and you can't get a publisher interested because you don't have an agent. it bites.

there is a poetry form that should give all you versifiers out there a good challenge. It has a name, which of course I have forgotten (early onset alzheimer's, i suspect), but here is the way it works: What sets this form apart from others is it's use of repeating endwords (the last word in a line). It consists of six, six-line stanzas. It doesn't have a rhyme scheme. The word that sits on the end of each line, is then repeated as the endword of a different line in each of the succeeding stanzas, in a very specific pattern. The repetition pattern looks like this: first stanza, with endwords 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Second stanza: same endwords, but arranged like this: 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. third stanza: same endwords, but 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4. then 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3. Etc. at the end you tack on a four line stanza, using the endwords one, two, three and four, for a total of 40 lines. Hope someone decides to take up the gauntlet. cheers! aj

Gentlemen, literary criticism is neither character indictment nor an accusation of talentlessness. Clearly, Ryan is a talented writer--more so than I, i dare say. I don't criticize hack jobs...what would be the point?

Hey TR-- Nope, nothing wrong with the Camille/Doug storyline...I find doug to be fascinating, and the storyline is REAL, which i think adds to the depth of the tale. And pushing buttons on people is really a good thing in a story--makes people think in ways they're not used to (i.e.--should camille have an abortion or not). Ryan is a seriously icky dude...you're right about that. The way i see it with villains, you can do one of two things: have a charater that is despicable and disturbing and has your audience rooting for the hero and hoping that the villain will get his in the end, or you can do the "Miltonian Villain" where the villain is energetic and charismatic and sucks the audience into his world, and your audience finds themselves fascinated by him even as they hate him. The thing that i notice is that in a lot of stories, the villain is set up as a very two dimensional character--he's a bad person, and his motives are rarely explored in any meaningful way. You've got this angle covered, i think--we've seen some of the things that drive this boy, so it's becoming clear why he does the things he does--and it adds a lot to the story. So keep writing the hard stuff, even if you need to shower afterward. cheers! aj

Conflict within the gay community? Shirley, you must be joking! We're just one big happy family out here... well, ok--there's an occasional spat between the drag queens and the leather men, and between the twinks and the older guys...and the youth and everyone else because they feel disenfranchised, and sometimes the gay men and the lesbians have a few words...and let's not even get into the smoldering feud between gay people and bi people...and some people resent transgendered folks for insisting on being included, though I think the more, the merrier. I think the reason we all write so much about the coming out experience and first love affairs and so on, is that they are pretty universal experiences. And relatively noncontroversial. In my experience, when two gay people get together, after talking for a little while and deciding that they want to talk to each other, but that they aren't going to go straight to bed, one of the things they always talk about is "So, how did you come out?" It usually comes up after "What kind of work do you do?" and just before "Are you looking for a relationship?" BTW, i've noticed that no-one has taken on the challenge of writing a story about a transgendered character yet...it's just out there, waiting to happen. Having worked at Lambert House a little, i know that there are teens out there who are pre-op, but who live as members of the opposite gender... anyway, gpaul...I guess what i'm about is saying "Good question." should be an interesting discussion.

Just a quick note to TR to let him know that i'm still reading and enjoying the tale. It seems to be coming along swimmingly. I KNEW that Richard was a scumbag! lol I'm still not sure where the camille and Doug storyline is headed...i like it, as it lends some nice verisimilitude...but not sure how it supports the main storyline. Can't wait to see how Ryan will end up getting his comeuppance. Any case, i'm delighted with the story, and panting for the next chapter. cheers! aj

So much nesting going on, i started considering adoption. So how do you pull a section from another post to put it in your note? I know this should be obvious, but i'm kind of a computer idiot. cheers! aj

The journey is never over. How one makes that journey is the deciding factor in the quality of one's life...and is usually decided by the quality of one's being. i'm pretty sure that whether Dewey and Aussie had married and broken up, married and stay together with their wives, or never married at all, thier's are the kinds of journeys that i aspire to. Having said that, i will also say that i won't back away from my appelation of 'tragic' in describing the results of the situation i described in my earlier post. Please don't believe that i use the term lightly or flippantly...indeed not. You see, i too have experience in this area, only from a different side. I was the object of his affections, the one who waited for him to call, the one who came over and took care of his two most beautiful boys when his wife was out of town. And i saw, after a time, that whether i was making dinner for the three of them, or reading to the boys from a Hardy Boys book, or lying in his arms at night, it wasn't real, and none of it belonged to me. Oh, the love i had for him was real...and i think he loved me in some way. But it was all stolen--none of it was really mine, and never would be. So i left (ok, fled is a better term) and it hurt very badly. But i learned something, and that was good. I only seem to learn the real lessons with a lot of pain involved. i don't know if they're still together or not. I hope so...he loved his wife. He loved me too, i like to think. I haven't talked to him much, after explaining why i was not going to see him again. And that is why, when i meet confused young men like the guy who started this thread, and they tell me they don't know and are worried, i encourage them to try to be sure before they engage the affections of another and make committments that may later become impossible to honorably keep. cheers, aj

You're right, Blue. But i'm not going to let those of us in the community off the hook for it--and i include myself in that group. We know that we can't control how other people view us...only our reactions to it. And having the coming out experience under our belts, one would think that we would know that sterotyping and typecasting are wrong--we've all experienced it from the other side. And this is why it makes me crazy when i see the 'flamer' used as a foil for a 'jock hero'. We should be better than that. this fiction we write is an opportunity to explore these issues, and some are: In one of the stories i read (and the name escapes me, though it's well known) there is a character named Martin...a young kid, but smart and strong and very fem. He's a hero in the story for his survival, and the author doesn't try to make him straightacting to be sympathetic...he explores the stereotype and explodes it. anyway...more of that kind of writing is what i'm putting on my christmas wish list. If i've offended anyone with all this, please accept my sincere apologies. cheers! aj

Has anybody else on here read a tale called Songspell on Nifty in the S/F Fantasy section? I'm on section 6, and it is flat out amazing--as good as anything i've read in print. I would urge you in the strongest way to consider hosting it on this site. cheers! aj

I'm inclined to agree, emjaycee. I haven't seen such ruthlessness with a character since i read the latest installment of George RR Martin's political fantasy series--I think it's called A Storm of Swords or some such. In it, the author cheerfully whacks long established and very sympathetic characters left and right, but it is used to establish the harshness of reality in the world he has built. In One Life though, it felt gratuitously cruel. If i hadn't invested all the effort of reading all the previous chapters, i'd have bailed. I read the epilogue hoping for something to give the whole thing meaning, but like you I felt short-changed. Further, i think you hit the nail headon when you suggested a reason for that feeling--no forshadowing. I understand that this was probably in the nature of an experiment for Ryan, and that's cool, so enough about all that. So, while i join you in saying to the author that it was a well crafted tale, i didn't like it. And there was something else that i saw that bothered me too...and it isn't exclusive to this piece by any means, but seems to run rampant in a lot of stories i read (time for a personal rant): Why are there a lot of examples out there of studly young men who are "straight acting"--and not just incidentally straight acting, but very specifically described as being very "Not Gay Acting"--and the fem boys are the objects of derision and jokes? "Princess Sparkles" is a good example of this phenomenon, but only one example. True, by the end of the tale, he was part of the inner circle, but only after he had rehabilitated himself by getting a boyfriend and falling in with the "relationship party" line. This is by no means a problem exclusive to the gay teen romance genre, but this is where i see it a lot because i read a lot of this genre. Kudos, btw, to Tragic Rabbit for making his hero in Drama Club a makeup wearing queen. In the real world, this problem crops up as a feeling of contempt for those who are 'bottoms' from those who are not which is absolutely one of the most idiotic prejudices i've ever encountered, right up there with straight men who are mysoginistic. But enough spouting from me. Thanks, Ryan, for a good read even if the last chapter was not to my taste.

At the risk of sounding insensitive--shit happens, dude. Sorry that happened to you...but i'm pretty sure that if they're quality guys, they'll understand and be willing to reschedule. If you're not feeling your best, it's pro'ly better to get a raincheck. Don't worry--this or something much like it will happen again. cheers! aj

So I decided to take UTH up on his suggestion. So this is a villanele that i wrote after reading a couple of others by theodore roethke and of other guys. I had read the famous Dylan Thomas piece many years ago, and have played with the form before, but never very successfully. Luckily, this poem is entirely hypothetical in nature and has nothing to do with the so-called reality of my realtime life. :D The End of the Affair Too far, two thousand miles away. Perhaps it's true that you don't know What I feel but cannot say. How can I tell you, what can i say? Where is the kindness in this cruelest blow? Pain is the price we both shall pay. Words on a screen in gentle play Cannot cover what I am and fear to show-- What i feel but cannot say. Oh gods, if only I were made another way, Deeper of heart, and not so shallow: Pain is the price we both shall pay. Will it mark you for life, the pain of this day? Will you hear it in my voice, so halting and slow, What I feel but cannot say? A knife to the heart is how I will repay The joy and love you have given me, and so For what I feel but cannot say Pain is the price we both shall pay. AJ, 09/04

Hey blue-- Don't be blue; i also submitted a rather dandy little poem to Nick and haven't heard anything either. He's busy, i suppose. Tien, this is the core of a good poem. With some corrections to grammar and spelling (see Blue's suggestions above), this could be very nice. cheers! aj

Yes, you too could be making millions and millions as a gay fiction writer on the internet...just send $29.99 to aj@makemerich.com and i'll share my secrets for instant wealth...lol. I read the first two chapters of "Journey" some time ago, and i still go back and check in from time to time, hoping to see another installment. If fan mail can motivate him to get back on the keyboard, then here it is: i liked what i saw in the first two chapters, and i wanna see more. cheers! aj