[DomLuka] Domluka's Extreme Hiatus

[Kitt]

Damn well told Mickey!  While it would be nice if Dom, or any missing writer, could let us know, sometimes that simply is not possible. I had an online friend with whom I had become very close disappear. At first I waited patiently, then railed, and finally accepted that what ever his reasons, he would not be back.  To my surprise one afternoon a lady came into the chat room where we had met asking for me. It was the gentleman's daughter, and she wanted to let me know that he had been terminally ill and had finally passed. I thought it very sweet that he not only thought of me in his last days, but also told his daughter about me, and that his daughter would take the time to track me down and let me know what had happened to him.

 

Here's hoping that Dom and the other missing authors are missing for good reasons, and someday will come back to us.

[Ron]

And even if it isn't, he still doesn't owe any of us a damned thing.

 

Anyone, author or no, who adopts this attitude in life as to how they deal with others, practices the highest form of arrogance. This is something for which I will not make allowances, even for someone I respected or admired, if I were to become knowledgeable about it. It is unacceptable.

 

Having said that, I don't ascribe this to Dom or any of the other authors who have dropped off the radar. As has been said, over and over, there are many reasons that someone may have disappeared that is beyond their control. However, if that isn't the case, a heads up, a shout out, whatever you want to call it, would be both appropriate and acceptable, and they shouldn't be given a welcome home cheer without a damn good explanation.

 

There is no hate here from me and after going over the posts to this topic again, I find that many if not all of the negatively spirited posts are there merely to vent frustration over the loss of someone who was highly regarded. I find no fault with them, not everyone can be eloquent in expressing themselves, especially when they are sad.

[methodwriter85]

   We're verging on 3 and a half years at this point. Maybe DomLuka is dead. Do we have any confirmation that he's still alive?

 

    There was this one online buddy I had...he had some emotional problems, and he just abruptly stopped going online in the fall of 2009. I still think about him, and wonder what happened to him.

Edited March 1, 2014 by methodwriter85

[mickey1952]

We're verging on 3 and a half years at this point. Maybe DomLuka is dead. Do we have any confirmation that he's still alive?

 

    There was this one online buddy I had...he had some emotional problems, and he just abruptly stopped going online in the fall of 2009. I still think about him, and wonder what happened t ohim.

I've had the same unsettling thought for awhile now. It just seems that if he were alive and well that he would have poked his head out by now. Makes me sad.

[LJH]

His work on other sites has never been updated.

 

Literotica

Dom's profile offers nothing substantive. He's over 18. Interested in "nothing". Has no pets. Yet he likes dogs he said in an interview with Rising Up From The Ashes - a blog by Phoenix in March 2010. He joined Literotica on 23 March 2005 and has only one story with them: The Spirit of James. It was posted on 12 April 2005.

 

Apparently he is a landscaper. Somewhere.

 

He also said in the Phoenix interview that if his lover ever read his stories he would stop writing. He did not give a reason.

 

Goodreads

Has noted his disappearance with dismay.

Http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1313388-domluka

 

He disappeared without warning 3 years ago and left his last work unfinished. This suggests that his disappearance was unplanned according to Goodreads.

 

Indeed "With Trust" was nearly finished. I also question (as do others) why he would leave without finishing "With Trust".

 

GA

He states he is male. He is probably close to forty now. Maybe younger. His email address is domluka@yahoo.com. Maybe only yahoo will know his real name. I say this because if he was picked up by a mainstream publisher, he might be using his real name. Also, he would have proudly announced this and his fans would have followed and bought his work.

 

He had 209 followers on GA.

Something like 19000 plus views on Goodreads or Literotica I'm not sure.

His AIM addie is down and not working.

 

On the 12 March 2010 he stated: "Taking 5". He was last active on GA on 28 March 2010 when he stated in his blog that he had been ill. This was his last blog entry.

 

Never heard from him again.

 

Sadly.

 

All my digging has come up against a brick wall. The only clue we have is tbat he practises landscaping. Where? It's anybodies guess.

[lin]

Dom once said he is from the Denver, Colo. area, I miss him.Also his name is Dominick, and he sometimes goes by Nick or Nickie. He and dkstories wrote a story together. Maybe he would know?

Edited February 28, 2014 by lin

[Leftcoast]

I started editing for Dom in 2005 and he was in his early 20s then, which would make him in his early 30s now.

 

And I suspect his age has a lot to do with his disappearance.  When he was writing, he had winters off because he couldn't work outdoors when it was cold and snowy, and writing was a way to fill the time.

 

But both emails and his blog revealed him to be a brainy, industrious and ambitious guy who wouldn't be content to work part-time for the rest of his life, so I suspect he's either moved somewhere where he could work year round, or expanded his skills so that he could work indoors during the winter.

 

The last time he had an extended absence, he found it difficult to get going again--a little unsure of himself, even talking about getting a beta group going to help him get in the groove again.  That didn't happen, but it was an indication that he needed an extended free period in which to write; he couldn't just turn on the switch and find the inspiration he needed to construct a story.  I don't think he was someone who would enjoy working full-time and also putting in a stint writing at the end of the day.  He wanted a life.

 

All this is just speculation, of course.  If he were still living where he lived when he was writing, and something happened to him, I'd hope that his friend Ann, who used to be a moderator of his forum, and who lived nearby, would send us notice.

 

So, I suspect he's OK, just busy.

 

Jim

[Leftcoast]

As an addendum to LJH's post above, Dom also posted several of his stories to the Stories On Line site, and everything there has been edited.  That Spirit of James story is edited there, and all of Desert Dropping.  About two-thirds of The Long Way is edited there, but longtime readers should be prepared for something of a shock reading it.  Dom had become a much more sophisticated writer by the time it was being edited, and readers should be warned that he was a bit ruthless in dealing with his earlier writing self.  The story's the same, but the presentation is different.

 

You do have to register on the site to see everything that he's posted there--I think without registering, you can only see the Spirit of James story.  For some reason, his name is shown under the D's--something like Dominick Lucas, if I remember correctly.  I've been registered there for years and never had any adverse consequences from so registering.

 

Jim

[Gene Splicer PHD]

Thanks for the updates, Jim - I hope Dom's well. Do you have a link to the stories on line site? 

 

Thanks!

[Leftcoast]

Assuming I can figure out how to do that, here you go:

 

http://storiesonline.net/home.php

[Adam Phillips]

Assuming I can figure out how to do that, here you go:

 

http://storiesonline.net/home.php

 

Thanks for the link. I registered, and I'm interested in reading the versions of the stories as Dom posted them there.

 

You have to admit, his absence is a little unsettling. I know people come and go from cyberspace all the time, but without any kind of reliable info, anything could have happened, from he-just-got-bored-with-it-all to the unthinkable.

 

His mechanics weren't perfect, but he had a hell of an instinct for good storytelling and good characterization. I miss his contributions.

Edited March 1, 2014 by Adam Phillips

[clumber]

In all honesty, I sometimes wonder if it was his following on GA which could have driven him off.

 

I remember when he was first writing on GA - while The Log Way and Desert Dropping was being written - and he always struck me as a little seperate, possibly shy, then. He wasn't massively active on the forums and very rarely went into the chatroom (which was massively central to GA at the time). He finished those stories, hung around for a little, then faded away from the site.

 

He came back later and started writing again but had clearly already lost a lot of affection for his earlier writing. In The Fish Bowl always struck me as being very unfriendly towards the The Log Way, almost as if he was going out of his way to re-write that story. If he has re-written his old stories for other sites and set up some actual editing for then, that sounds to me like he's lost any affection he may have had.

 

But on GA? It wouldn't work. People worship his writing to a unnerving extent, calling it 'life-changing', and label him a genius for having created it... and that's a massively high-pressure enviroment to return to; perhaps even unfriendly-seeming.

 

(Especially when you remember that most of the people he knew have left. If someone's shy, then returning to a community where they're praised by a large number of strangers and know nobody? Very intimidating. And If the source of that praise is fiction he wrote in his late teens, considers in dire need of editing, and which he doesn't like much? Downright unwelcoming.)

 

I wouldn't be at all surpised to find out he is still writing. But I suspect that if he is, he's doing it under a different name, with no connection to his old fanbase - in the hopes of escaping it.

 

Martin

[Mark Arbour]

In all honesty, I sometimes wonder if it was his following on GA which could have driven him off.

 

I remember when he was first writing on GA - while The Log Way and Desert Dropping was being written - and he always struck me as a little seperate, possibly shy, then. He wasn't massively active on the forums and very rarely went into the chatroom (which was massively central to GA at the time). He finished those stories, hung around for a little, then faded away from the site.

 

He came back later and started writing again but had clearly already lost a lot of affection for his earlier writing. In The Fish Bowl always struck me as being very unfriendly towards the The Log Way, almost as if he was going out of his way to re-write that story. If he has re-written his old stories for other sites and set up some actual editing for then, that sounds to me like he's lost any affection he may have had.

 

But on GA? It wouldn't work. People worship his writing to a unnerving extent, calling it 'life-changing', and label him a genius for having created it... and that's a massively high-pressure enviroment to return to; perhaps even unfriendly-seeming.

 

(Especially when you remember that most of the people he knew have left. If someone's shy, then returning to a community where they're praised by a large number of strangers and know nobody? Very intimidating. And If the source of that praise is fiction he wrote in his late teens, considers in dire need of editing, and which he doesn't like much? Downright unwelcoming.)

 

I wouldn't be at all surpised to find out he is still writing. But I suspect that if he is, he's doing it under a different name, with no connection to his old fanbase - in the hopes of escaping it.

 

Martin

 

I don't see that at all.  Dom always seemed to appreciate the feedback he got, and in his own introverted way, he seemed to thrive on his fame.  In my e-conversations with him, which were admittedly limited, I got the impression that his readers were the reason he wrote. 

[clumber]

I don't see that at all.  Dom always seemed to appreciate the feedback he got, and in his own introverted way, he seemed to thrive on his fame.  In my e-conversations with him, which were admittedly limited, I got the impression that his readers were the reason he wrote. 

 

 

And if his readers were the reason he wrote, and with the level of praise put on his stories... that is a LOT of pressure. Like, the amount of expectation to finish perfectly and to write more and for it to be equally popular and...

 

I could easily be wrong. But still - I remember what the forums were like when he was writing. I'm sure he really appreciated how popular his writing was, but that doesn't make it any less stressful to write for those fans.

[Krista]

With any level of fame there are those that praise the work and respect the writer... and then there are those that threaten them if such and such character and such and such story no longer fits their idea. Back when I had my Yahoo group I got a few threatening e-mails from readers threatening my life if I did certain things to characters. Being the stone cold bitch that I am, I just shrugged it off.    But then if you're taking a break and stories are left unfinished, you can get those same adoring fans and move them into the other side of the spectrum that no longer respect the work you are doing and are getting fussy about your absence.

 

The fact that we're still talking about Dom's extreme hiatus so many years down the road should be praise for the work that he has. But I wonder at what cost all this has had on him as well.

 

Not saying that GA is responsible.. if anything like this ever came to light staff would act on it. 

 

Realistically, he's probably still out there. A lot of writers do as much writing for themselves as they do for other people. If he has moved on with his life to where he's limited on time and well.. has a better life that doesn't have him living in fantasy or looking for an escape. Then he's likely not writing as much anymore. People write for different reasons, maybe Dom wrote when he needed to. 

 

So I like picturing him on romantic picnics with a Frisbee and a puppy.. not cowering in a corner because he can no longer take the pressure. I think he could, but it's not out of the realm of possibilities.

 

Just goes to show that readers should be thankful for the time they have with some of these authors. Enjoy and *review* their work. Discuss it with them.. praise them, criticize them when they need it. etc. Because life sometimes makes it too easy to leave something.

 

And just as much Dom was part of GA, his biggest fan Vic was too, I miss him terribly.

[clumber]

So I like picturing him on romantic picnics with a Frisbee and a puppy.. not cowering in a corner because he can no longer take the pressure. I think he could, but it's not out of the realm of possibilities.

 

 

 

I'm not saying he's cowering in a corner, either. (Although mentioning a puppy might be dangerous - we're risking a multipage flamewar about whether he was a dog person or a cat person there )

 

But if he did take a bit of a break and then there is this level of pressure...? It could make it very easy to just never quite come back. (Especially if his own opinion of his old work has dropped, because then it would just feel really awkward as well).

[Leftcoast]

I can’t relate to the picture of Dom not writing because of pressure he felt from GA.  Assuming he’s alive and well, I suspect it’s all about his livelihood.  We didn’t talk about his life much in our emails, but I do know that in his late 20s he was already a businessman--had a partner and they employed quite a number of people.  There was something in the news at one point about illegal immigrants in Colorado and I asked him if that was a problem for him and he said no, and then broke down for me the number of employees they had and where they were from.  No longer remember the details but there were more of them than I would have guessed.

 

And I suspect the Dom who worked so hard to improve his writing skills is someone who would also work hard to improve his construction skills, and that the business he and his partner started has expanded its services so that they’re working year round.

 

The Dom I worked with was happy to have readers, but wrote to please himself.  He’d written three coming-out stories and wanted to write something else. He worked to master telling a story in the third person so he could write In The Fish Bowl in the way he wanted.  And when he began With Trust, he deliberately added more visual details in the story, trying to change his style a little bit, maybe to correspond to a story in which visual art was so much a part.

 

As to In The Fish Bowl being unfriendly to the Long Way, in one of his emails, Dom said:

 

 

            Basically, things in the story in chapter seven are different than

            what's going on in chapter twelve (obviously) and I'm getting a

            little tired of the feedback I'm getting for the earlier chapters.

            The most popular are people who tell me that they're loving the new

            story, but they skip everything that's not about Owen and Aiden.

            It's hard not to tell them that if that's the case, they can't love

            the story since they're not reading it. I understand that it's their

            choice, but seriously, I don't need to know about it, since this

            story isn't just about Owen and Aiden.

 

In The Fish Bowl wasn’t really so much a sequel to The Long Way, as it was a new story featuring most of the same characters as the earlier story.

 

His idea in posting his stories to the Stories on Line site was to have some place available where all his stories had been edited.  There were some that he imported directly from GA that had already been edited and these were unchanged as far as I know.  We worked on the first 8 or 9 unedited chapters of Desert Dropping first and I don’t think, aside from punctuation and spelling changes, that there’s a lot of difference from the original version (although, somewhere in the middle of the original DD, he brought in a character from The Ordinary Us which I annoyingly didn’t catch, and I gleefully changed it in the copy that’s on SOL).

 

The changes he made in The Long Way were because he’d changed a lot as a writer by then, and thought the telling of it could be improved.  And I suspect if he’d gotten around to working on The Ordinary Us, there would have been a lot of changes to that, too.  Like eliminating hundreds of “frowns.”    I’d already edited the story for him and highlighted all the frowns in it.

 

Hopefully, someday Dom will have a free block of time and feel like writing and finish the stories he started.

 

If you do, Dom, appoint a new moderator for your forum, please.  I really miss Vic, too.

 

Jim

[Trebs]

Dog person... Had to have been to have written Valentines Day Goes to the Dogs ;-)

[Krista]

Dog person... Had to have been to have written Valentines Day Goes to the Dogs ;-)

 

Yes. One of my very first stories I read strictly on GA, was this short. Definitely a dog person.

[PaulP]

His were among the very first online gay stories I came upon - an experience many have had. After reading his existing work, I started following his ongoing writing regularly, eagerly, in fact.

 

Soon after In the Fishbowl started, it became clear to me that he'd made a major advance, both in characterization and narrative; I think it's the best thing he wrote (though I haven't seen any of his unfinished Premium work). That he'd been experimenting, and putting a great deal of effort into doing so, was, I think, shown by The Other Side of Me.

 

I think this goes along with what Jim has said - writing the way he wanted to took a lot of time and effort, and that was competing with the growing demands of his real-life livelihood. I can also understand his disappointment with some of the reader feedback for In the Fishbowl; I read it at the time, and I felt that it completely missed what was really going on in his writing. But what effect - if any - that had on his decision to stop writing there's no way of telling. The real life/free time conflict seems most likely to me.

 

As for my emotional response to his disappearance, it's one of regret that I won't be able to enjoy any new work of his, but that's it. That being said, I'd be thrilled if he took up writing again.

[Former Member]

LOL A MultiPage discussion if Dom was a dog person or not. Well it's really simple Dom was a dog person clearly as his most lovable character for me was Cheyenne the dog. To the point that starting to come to terms with my own mother and living with my aunt and her pitbull that when i moved back with my mom i convinced my mom to get us a dog. And hence Bailey my Shih Tzu Bishon Frise came into my life. A few months later i had a second dog Brandy. This lady at the Liqour store loved to make jokes about my dog names and that if i had a black dog it would be called Zambuca. Rumor has it through my sources that Dom actually has/had a dog named Zambuca. Many times i have had Dog conversations with Dom also with Vic about Vic's dog Myrna and how Dom owes me Vet Bills Because for me Dom was like a modern day Bob Barker instead of "Get Your Pet Spayed Or Neutered" it was Get A Pet. As Luke and Rory had Cheyenne who seemed to attract men for them i was hoping Bailey would do that for me, Hey i was young and impressionable. Maybe if i get a 3rd dog one day i will have to name it Dom after such a great man.

 

Both Vic & Dom will always have a special spot in my heart for everything they both taught me.

[Billy Martin]

After reading most, if not all of Dom's writing here on GA, and after reading through all that has been said here, from the beginning of his absence and ending with Mattie's warm heart-felt comments, I personally respect him as an awesome author whose talents were clearly maturing. I would love to read new work by him and feel I wouldn't be disappointed. However, like they say, it is what it is.

 

I will take from the information given by Jim, that Dom is well and is enjoying a good life that doesn't, at this time, include time for writing; but that he may take up writing again sometime in the future, if life permits him to do so.

 

Like Krista said, "The fact that we're still talking about Dom's extreme hiatus so many years down the road should be praise for the work that he has.". That says it all concerning how good of a story teller he is.

[Celethiel]

After reading most, if not all of Dom's writing here on GA, and after reading through all that has been said here, from the beginning of his absence and ending with Mattie's warm heart-felt comments, I personally respect him as an awesome author whose talents were clearly maturing. I would love to read new work by him and feel I wouldn't be disappointed. However, like they say, it is what it is.

 

I will take from the information given by Jim, that Dom is well and is enjoying a good life that doesn't, at this time, include time for writing; but that he may take up writing again sometime in the future, if life permits him to do so.

 

Like Krista said, "The fact that we're still talking about Dom's extreme hiatus so many years down the road should be praise for the work that he has.". That says it all concerning how good of a story teller he is.

nope Luka left because he's mad at you, and won't come back until you appologize for that thing you did that one time Bad bad billy

[Billy Martin]

nope Luka left because he's mad at you, and won't come back until you appologize for that thing you did that one time Bad bad billy

 

You could be right, I can be a bad bad Billy. I had forgotten about that thing I did that one time. But if I appologize, I could make things worse, because I wouldn't want to "P" too much about it. So maybe, I should just apologize?

[Celethiel]

You could be right, I can be a bad bad Billy. I had forgotten about that thing I did that one time. But if I appologize, I could make things worse, because I wouldn't want to "P" too much about it. So maybe, I should just apologize?

yes yes, you must get on your knees and appologize and beg for forgiveness, I know it'll hurt. but you must sacrifice yourself for the greater good of all the dom Luka Fans out there, and every one else who misses him.