On revisions to Just Hit Send--The High School Years

[Rigel]

November is the first anniversary of my discovering Gay Authors; I found a lot more of "Do Over" was available here than on Nifty. (Sepaking of which--dkstories--it's time to resume writing on "Redux")

 

And Thanksgiving Day (US) Weekend is also an anniversary of sorts--it was one year ago that I first discovered "Just Hit Send." Thanks to my job, I had (and have) both Thanksgiving Thursday and the following Friday off of work, and it was Thanksgiving of 2004 that I first encountered Grasshopper's story. I stayed up all night Wednesday and again all night Thursday reading it, breaking long enough for a turkey dinner with the family on Thursday afternoon. I remember the story very clearly. [i also remember some of the music on the radio/webcasts that accompanied my reading of it--for instance, being introduced to Tobias Picker's "Old and Lost Rivers," a classical work of modern harmonic structures with an arrangement that out-Coplands Aaron Copland, but I digress].

 

This year, I thought I would revisit "Just Hit Send" in honor of the holiday, and discovered that "The High School Years" (at least) has been extensively revised, and I'm not sure it's for the better.

 

To begin with, let me say that I don't think any story has affected me quite as deeply as "Just HIt Send," and when I finished reading it, I sent a very long letter to Grasshopper. of almost short-story length. Beyond here, I'm going to discuss some changes in the story, so there's a warning:

 

SPOILERS AHEAD

 

I'm also going to have to rely on my very vivid memories of the original drafts (and they remain very vivid, and I've revisited them this past Spring), since to my knowledge, the original versions are no longer available anywhere for checking against.

 

The original began with several wonderful short chapters which grabbed my attention immediately. They've been expanded, and some of focus of the immediacy of the on-line exchanges between Jordan and Danny has been lost. Moreover, the story places explicit depictions of sex (beyond kissing) much earlier in the text, and this distracted me--the original version was very much a story about love, and not sex, which was clearly a secondary thing by virtue of being referred to obliquely, if at all, in the early chapters.

 

In the original version, Jordan's inability to prevent his brother from falling out of the treehouse (and the subsequent problems) was introduced much earlier, even before Jordan had to tell the details to Danny. This event is fundamental to the understanding of Jordan's character--it's the motif that underlies his motivation throughout the entire series, and I wish it had retained its first appearance as a foreshadowing of things to come. It makes plausible Jordan's determination to take care of Danny from the first meeting, even when he discovers Danny's in a wheelchair--even Jordan's pre-meeting internet conversations are colored by knowledge of his desperate need to do the right thing and make up for his not being there for Adam at a critical moment.

 

There are still some problems with Florida geography. For instance, coming from a little above Orlando, one would not cross the Skyway Bridge to get to Tampa (as they did to get to Adam's hospital). earlier chapters put the Lawrence farm about 45 minutes off the I-4 corridor two hours out of Daytona (somewhere north of Orlando), and later Interim year chapters move it to someplace south of Tampa.

 

Perhaps the biggest and most problematic change is the character of Jordan's father, who was an unrelenting homophobe in the original version, and now comes off as much more reasonable. While he may be more likeable, he's a much less effective villain for it. One of the things that makes Huckleberry Finn such a great character is that he starts out life as a racist (N-word and all), and has to overcome deep seated prejudices in order to decide to help his friend Jim escape. The prolonged tension between his belief system and his need for friendship provides poignancy and greatness to the novel. In the revised Just Hit Send, Mr. Lawrence gives in too easily. The original unrelenting father provides a truly tragic figure in the story--a man so caught up in prejudice that he can lose his only remaining son over the issue. And the College and Interim Years tales are predicated on Mr. Lawrence's objections to Jordan and Danny's relationship. At the end of the College years into the Interim years, it's this unease with the relationship that drives the plot, and provides at least one critical motivation that separates Jordan and Danny for years. Even if Mr. Lawrence is going to have a change of heart, it comes too quickly too early in the series and at too little an internal cost. So while Jordan;s father becomes a more likable character earlier in the novel, I think it does harm to the structure of the novel as a whole. Indeed, without revising the rest of the story in improbable ways, I think the change of heart can't be complete until near the end of the Interim years--when Jordan goes home to confront his father--that's probably the time for him to realize that he's lost his son, and do whatever he can to make amends.

 

And the narrowing of the religious basis of homophobia to a particular brand of Southern Baptists--while it's admirable for an author not to blame ALL religions for intolerance, it doesn''t come across as realistic for the character of Jordan to do so--what experience with alternative religions does he have as a 15-year old kid. The religious argument that's made is the sort of argument made by someone older with more worldly experience. At the very least, I''d like to see evidence in the story of Jordan encountering other religious attitudes before arguing with his father. (When I first read Just Hit Send a year ago, I originally thought the Trainors were probably Reform Jews, until a reference in a much later book had Danny going home for Christmas had me revise my guess.).

 

One of my greatest wishes would be for the availability of "Just Hit Send" --the Unrevised High School Years as an alternative somewhere (probably on IOMFATS), so we can be reminded of the brilliance of the 14- or 15-year old author Jamie, without the not-entirely successful editings of his 18- or 19-year old self.

 

Given Grasshopper's scarcity of internet time and lack of any other way of contacting him, I hope he doesn't mind the public posting of these comments; perhaps they will engender further thoughts by others. Perhaps he will get down to the feed store to read these comments sometime soon. I put them up on the forum at IOMFATS, but wanted to share them with my other gay-author friends here, many of whom would never get to see it there.

 

Here's hoping Thanksgiving has been a good time for those who celebrate it.

 

--Rigel

[Rigel]

All right, my memory IS playing tricks on me, and the apparent reconciliation between Jordan and his father in Part I-Chapter 19 so jars with the later progress of the story that I couldn't believe it when I reread it. But I researched and then found a version of the story as it was within a couple of

days of when I first discovered it in November 2004, thanks to the Wayback Machine web archive:

 

http://web.archive.org/web/20040607011329/...end-pt1-19.html

 

And I see that nothing changed other than a few names being corrected, except in the polished version my memory retained of it.

 

--Rigel