I am going through a camping fetish stage right now, so bear with me as I dig through my old story bookmarks. I don't know why I feel like digging up the past, but there's just something interesting and reminiscent about reading old stories I used to like.

So let's review this story: http://www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/highschool/wilderness-survival/

To start off, I thought The Journey by Sunshine boy was dated, but pleasant and capable of being updated if the writer ever returns. This story is, how do I put it mildly "nifty"-esque There is a few good strands of story in here, call backs to the mid 2000's when gay writers like Brew Maxwell and our own Bill W. were writing story about kid rescues and showing us kids that we can find good role models and safety among our older peers without fear of getting molested. You can see that the writer was trying for that angle in the middle of his story, but it seemed completely out of place.

In the story, the key romantic gay couple are destined soulmates, who are young teenage boys with huge libidos. While I do agree that I love the idea of Soulmates and even used the concept in my stories; the conversations and sexual experiences of both boys (who are named Jim and Jimmy, another thing that bothered me) was just off. A major issue with Nifty's storytelling for erotic fiction is that sex rather than substance or character development began to grow around this period. While, yes, everyone likes big cocks and blowjobs (well, I might be bias ), when you are trying to tell a story, you have to figure out what you want it to focus on. Is it sex that will be gratuitous and fetish-y like 50 shades of grey or a romantic story involving eternal bonds and life lessons.

From the way the author began and ended the story, I got the feeling he wanted to do the latter, but he got distracted along the way. It's a shame really, I wanted to read about these boy's developing their relationship, learning things about their past lives as partners, become a naturalist story like a LGBT "Hatchet" (I was a huge fan of Gary Paulson's novels as a teen) , finding more kids to help in improbable situations (it works for a lot of writers, I've done it too), or simply explore the baseball element of their lives.

The last element seems to have been a focus, but it just got mixed up with all the rest of the unorganized plots and half finished ideas.

I used to like this story, but as I re-read it today, I find that it is missing a lot of critical details and story elements that destroy its plot. The obligatory Nifty sexploitation doesn't help, but there was a story here, it just got lost.

I must tearfully give this story my lowest rating yet:

3 out of 10

I'll try to review more old stories from my bookmarks and feel free to give me suggestions on any Non-GA stories or even GA stories that are from prior to 2006 for a retro review. The only exception I will have to this is Do-Over as my love for that story and arguments with DK over politics make it a difficult story to review, but I would highly recommend it.