Seems I’m on a creative wave and I don’t want to get off. Wrote the outline—which is something of an exception to my normal writing technique—today, including naming the protagonist (Jacobus or Jac), childhood friends (best friend until death is Laconus or Lac), primary friends, secondary friends, lovers, and lovers under contract. The span of the story will be from age 5 to death at 106.

To the best of my chemically fuzzy memory, this will be the first time I’ve tried to write something in first person. This will be written as a memoir. Gore Vidal distinguished memoirs from autobiographies in that autobiographies are written as fact, while memoirs are written from memory, meaning that sometimes it might not be exactly as it happened.

The premise of the story is the development of a gay man from sexual awareness to death. Another stretch for me will be writing this without explicit sex, but still trying to be erotic enough to maintain interest. We’ll see. Primarily, this will be about men under paid contract to an older man (Jac) to provide household duties and bedroom duties for an unspecified period of time. It takes love and throws it out the window. Though, Jac will have lifelong male friends, including Lac, who will provide strong friendship bonds (including casual sex) that will be as close to love as Jac can get.

There is a part early on where Jac is seduced by Lac’s father and the father’s contract lover; these will occur in the year before Jac’s preliminary majority (on Hercules III age 15 is when someone can drink alcoholic beverages and have an active public sex life). Of course, these seductions will be noted by Jac in his memoir in the fuzzy memory of a man at age 100 (on Hercules III that is 747,116 years old), they will not be specific to the point of detailing what exactly occurred. Mostly, it will be Jac’s view that what happened was wrong and it might have had an effect on his later relations with younger men (early on after final majority at 18, later in their later 20s and early 30s).

At this point, the first few chapters are fairly well in mind. As is the last chapter and the epilogue (written by the adult son (straight) of a woman he met while a young man and her husband who Jac seduced and had an affair with (what the heck, this story is about sex, mostly)).