I'm not sure why I'm doing this, but I guess I'm starting a blog here. Maybe it's because I've heard from a few of you in response to my work on the late Dan Kincaid's eFiction story It Started With Brian, and I figured it might be fun to get to know some of you a little better.

I should tell you a little about myself. I'm 29; I'll be 30 in August (yikes!). I'm married. To a woman. I have a two-year-old son. I have no idea what to call myself, orientation-wise; nothing seems to fit. I guess I'm bisexual. I'm more strongly attracted to women, but I do like the guys. A LOT. I was an athlete all through school, played all the sports, but really concentrated on football, baseball, and soccer. I went to college on a soccer scholarship, so that really paid off. I love to read; I usually have about three books at a time going. I play a little piano; and I listen to every kind of music under the sun. I'm a teacher at the college level, in a math-and-or-science field. I also have a little freelance work on the side involving commercial writing. By commercial I don't mean "advertisements." I mean, you know, commercial. LOL.

In addition to working on Dan's story now that he's gone, I've also been writing one of my own. It's called Crosscurrents. Like Dan's, it's autobiographical. I used to admit that right upfront, then I had a disturbing incident with a fan who used some of the information from the story to figure out exactly who I was and where I lived. After that I changed around some of the details of the story and took out all the "author's comments" that admitted it was a true story, and began treating it as a fictional piece. Finally, this winter, I said "screw it" to all that (I would have said "f**k it"--am I allowed to say that on this blog?). I don't really advertise CC as autobiographical, but I'm not going out of my way to hide that fact anymore.

I started Crosscurrents in May of 2003 (!!!!), the spring of my senior year in college. I was moving on with my life, going on to grad school. I had gotten engaged to the woman to whom I'm now married. And I was facing the fact that in all likelihood, my relationship with my best friend, a relationship I'd had since I was eight--a relationship that had survived a real rocky patch--was probably going to be dwindling to nothing, as we each began to settle into our "real" lives. My friend had graduated the year before (I took five years because I changed majors), and had gotten married; I was moving even farther away (we lived about four hours apart during most of college); and I know what happens to old hometown friendships. They go away and never come back. People get involved in the direction their lives are going; and the common paths they used to walk, well, those paths diverge.

All that was on my mind when I started writing Crosscurrents. In that year I felt the need to sort of...well, sort of Say It. I needed a way to put some closure on the things I was feeling about my best friend. Crosscurrents started as a way of Saying It, and as a cri de coeur, and as a love song, I guess, to my best friend. A way to acknowledge what he had meant to me, to Say It, and to move on.

I wrote three chapters and submitted them to Nifty. I'd never written any narrative before; I'm a math-and-science guy. Jayne Finn wrote me a very complimentary email, and told me that she'd pointed Nick Archer to my story. I posted two more chapters to Nifty, and it wasn't too long before Nick also sent me a complimentary email, and a few days later, sent me another one inviting me to let him host Crosscurrents at his website, Archerland. I took him up on it, and to this day, whenever a new chapter of Crosscurrents comes out, it shows up at Nick's site first.

Why did I want to put this very personal story up on the Internet? I don't know. I think I had a sense that there must be other people out there who had experienced something similar. Not long before starting Crosscurrents I'd read a true-life-based Nifty story that had really touched me, and I struck up an e-friendship with the author. It began to occur to me that I could maybe touch other people through my own story as this guy's story had touched me.

The response from my readers has been overwhelming. You wouldn't believe how many people have written me to say, "Man; your story could be mine, this happened to me too," or "I had a best friend like that, too, and I never told him how I felt, and I've regretted it ever since," and on and on like that. I've met so many great people, and made so many great e-friendships. It's how I met "Dan Kincaid." He was a reader who came to be a good e-friend as we shared and compared life stories.

Crosscurrents is now hosted at far too many places. Not to denigrate any of the great hosts who have asked and received permission to post the story, but I now wish maybe I'd have limited it to Archerland, and maybe crvboy. A few years back I tried to get gayauthors to host it, but I guess I'm not good enough for them, and in any case with my sorry-ass posting schedule I'd have just that many more readers angry at me for leaving them hanging.

I'll be finishing up my work on Dan's It Started With Brian within a month or so, and after that I'll return to Crosscurrents. It's been over a year now since I last posted a new chapter. The last year has been incredibly busy for me, and when Sam got sick I knew I had to help him complete It Started With Brian, because he so badly wanted it finished. There will be one sequel to Crosscurrents, because my life and story moved on from where it was when I started Crosscurrents. I also have four pieces of outright fiction posted here and there and at various stages of completion. I'm itching to get back to those.

Anyway, I'll post here from time to time. I have a Yahoo group, but maybe this is a better place for me to ramble on. I hope some of you stop by to say hi, and I'd love to get to know some of you a little better.