Drak

Interesting. You are so internet-savvy, I assume you must be familiar with Piers Anthony's critique of online publishers. If not, do visit http://hipiers.com/publishing.html, press ctrl+F and find your "Dreamspinner." Nowadays some of these outfits, like Torquere, want me to submit a marketing plan and flog my book myself on social media. I would not know how to begin. Writing is hard enough without mastering sales and marketing too. I mean why not self-publish, if one must do all that? I listened carefully to all critiques and treasured them. Obviously they haven't stopped me, only made me aware of the pitfalls awaiting a novice writer. You know what I am talking about. Once the ego is dead, it rises again like the phoenix, a more resilient entity than before. I'm tempted to offer other writers critiques or edits, but I don't know whether that sort of thing is appreciated. It is pretty common for writers to perceive their work as their babies. I notice most reviews on GayAuthors are of the polite praise variety.

Wow, imagine having a billion, let alone two. I suppose at that level, the world is one's oyster. I just hope they do the right sort of things with all that extra, like Carnegie did.

My parents were English professors. When I was a university student, I showed them my prize science fiction story. Mom refused to comment. She was always of the opinion that if you haven't anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. Dad used diversion. He said my talent was clearly in non-fiction, and he praised the A+ papers I had written for my classes. "But Daaaaad! What about the story?" "I've got to grade some papers, son. Maybe another time." I asked my best friend, Blobbo, to give an utterly ruthless line-by-line critique, telling him I wanted nothing but honesty. Boy, was he honest! From my friend's helpful line-by-line critique--and yes, he remained a dear, dear friend--I discovered to my dismay that every single line in my story was bad. Nothing was right, absolutely nothing! Although the grammar checker and spell checker were satisfied, those things are elementary mechanics, which all writers must master first of all, but they represent a low level of skill. There were errors in logic, far too much passive voice, horribly common cliches, airy verbosity, lazy disorganization, outright contradictions, and other blunders of style, taste, sense, and clarity. My ego was slain. Buzzards circled. Years passed. Ego is a funny thing. It just keeps getting resurrected somehow. If one enjoys doing something, one is likely to find an excuse to do it. Writing turns me on. I purchased some books on the art of writing, practiced, and possibly improved a little bit. I may know nothing, but at least now I understand that writing is a difficult art that takes time to master. I take comfort from reading Mary Renault's early works. Wow, did she improve! Well, there's some hope for us all, perhaps.

Wow, u read that far? lol! I didn't know there were readers. I agree, though, and am very suspiciacal of reality shows. I saw that documentary on how fake they are, "The Hunger Games," I think it was. Rigged!

Words aren't the thing anymore. Everyone I know looks at videos or images all day long. They could care less about words, unless those words caption an amusing image. So ours is a dying art, mainly of interest to the old. Bless the readers, for they are few and declining in number. I was struck by Myr's call for young males to get involved with the site. I wonder how they can be lured away from videos, images, and games. I think that will not happen. Images are more immediate in their effect upon the audience and a much easier medium to convey thoughts and feelings. There are people who will never read The Lord of the Rings, but they saw the movies. I don't think words are better or worse than video. It's just different. It's a matter of taste. I have my own personal preference, but my friends disagree. I hate videos online, and if a site starts playing one immediately, I bounce. Youtube is something I might visit once a year. Especially with how-to articles, I haven't the time or patience to watch a ten-minute video to obtain information that I could read in five minutes. The rest of the world feel differently. Maybe my reader here prefers reading (notice I did not use the plural form), but dear Reader, you know we are in the minority, and being gay, in a minority of the minority. Videos seem to bring a soothing social component to many people, making them feel they are not alone anymore but engaged with others. One lonely lady I knew kept the television playing all day long at low volume simply because she liked to hear comforting voices of news anchors and weathermen in the background. That is a very human need. I find the people on television a little bit annoying and don't entirely trust them. I don't want to find myself repeating the things they say or using the same cadences or styles or believing what they believe. When I get lonely, I have my cats, my memories, and my husband. Today, I think prose still has a purpose. It is the precursor to film. Every video starts out in life as an idea, and prose captures that idea. I don't think anyone has abandoned the use of scripts except producers of reality shows, which may be going out of fashion from what I've heard.

History has overseen increasing democratization in the arts. I know the big shots disapprove of the motley-grotley, but too bad. We live in an era when even a nobody like me can find the time and means to compose whatever possesses my fancy without any regard to remuneration. That is a strange thing, and I don't expect everyone to understand it, but then I don't understand why other people do the things they do. I guess each of us picks a little niche in which we specialize for better or worse. I don't know why I write. I think there is a desire to create something with a permanence that I lack in my trip from existence to annihilation. Most of me will return to the earth, but maybe the remnants of my imagination will persist as, I don't know, electronic charges on a drive somewhere. One thing I have a nerdy faith in is the persistence of data, collected and maintained into perpetuity because people can never be sure whether the data may have some as yet unexploited value, whether for secrets lurking within or aggregate research. One never knows. There will be archeological value if nothing else, increasing every year, and storage is cheap. Many stories can be fit into a terabyte. So the technology is helpful there. And if it doesn't last, then so what? Neither do I. My stories are my pets, and I like to visit them. They have problems. Some problems are hidden from me. I have difficulty capturing images with precision. The image may be clear in my mind, but knowing how to paint the picture is a different story. I'm a sketch-artist. But I do love my pets. I suppose some of them seem rather bizarre, even if I myself am mundane and ordinary. But why should I plow the same field that everyone else does? That soil is overused, spent, every possibility explored. I prefer to pioneer a different acre of land. The little weird things that have occurred to me over the years that I haven't seen explored in story form, that's what I like to write about. Other writers have covered other topics in an adequate way and I've no desire to compete on their turf. My pets, the flights of fancy and crystals of truth that I have, these are what I like to see preserved, so that I can recapture them whenever I wish without losing any of their details. When I finish a piece, then begins the laborious process of compressing and clarifying the words. I tend to be verbose at first, but then I go back and mercilessly cull all the unnecessary verbiage. Less often, I add details to the story that I neglected to mention. Sometimes I forget to transcribe some important detail from my vision to the page. Some people have liked my stuff before. I know because they told me so or gave a rating somewhere. A little bit of water keeps a cactus thriving year after year, even through drought. I appreciate criticism. Perhaps criticism is worth more than vacuous polite praise. At least with criticism, one receives direction. Some things we writers are too near to see, you know. I don't consider myself hostile to criticism, a common stereotype of writers. I remember many big shot writers who just hated their critics. I'm the opposite. I may agree or disagree, but information is a zero sum. One can use the information or disregard it, depending upon one's evaluation of its quality. I have had people tell me harsh things before. It is a zero sum. Of course one should be sensitive to criticism in the sense of receiving all the information transmitted, but not sensitive in the sense of reacting in an emotional way. The reality is none of this matters. All is vanity. We are dust. Once one accepts that, all is simple.

If you want to go really old school and be a dinosaur like me, give Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup a try. In my opinion, it's the best Dungeons & Dragons - type simulation in existence today, extremely detailed and diverse, with every game different. It requires very little in terms of computer hardware. On the downside, the graphics aren't fancy, but old-school, but I like that and count it as a strength rather than a weakness. There are no sound effects. It's basically like Rogue or Larn of yore, though those names may mean nothing to you. But the developers have created a Tiles version that uses graphical representation for monsters and players and treasure, instead of using ANSI (color text) characters. This is a huge improvement over Rogue and Larn. They offer their hard work for free, and it runs on any operating system, including Linux. I don't know why software developers offer up their work for free, but then again, why do we?

Imagine the physical appearance of a god. Does it take the form of a man, woman, dragon, moon, sun, or black hole? However appealing these forms may be, they pale in comparison to the ageless One, possessed of the secret and the power of Creation. Our human experience as mammals living for a brief time on a wet rock confines our imagination. Why should an immortal god require a form at all? Forms are confining. A body is not a strength, but a weakness. All that is physical is transitory, desti

In another time and place, I knelt before him and said, "Master, is it true what they have told me, that death has many splendours? The answer I was given cannot be translated into this world, because the knowledge is forbidden.

I remember the first time I met him. Someone came to me at recess, when I was sitting under an oak tree reading a book, and told me there was a new boy in school that was beating everyone at chess. I said, "Oh yeah? Well, he may beat the others, but he can't beat me. Who is this upstart?" I could now beat even my father every game we played, though my mother advised me, in private, to let him win, both as a kindness and a shrewd political move. The classroom had no teacher during the recess hou

There was always the risk of a chance meeting, as I knew when I strolled down Queen Street in my hometown for the first time in decades. From my research, I knew he lived there now, which was wise because it was also close to where he worked. I had seen his photograph and thought he looked pretty much the same as he did back then. When I saw him bolting down the street on a bicycle, I could not believe my luck, but was not sure whether my luck was good or bad. I turned to face him. After a momen

When I first met the widow, she regarded me with the deepest suspicion, as she did all new people, and spoke to me sharply on occasion, but I perceived she was kind at heart and only protecting herself. I studied her boundaries and observed them scrupulously and upon encountering new ones, marked them and did not transgress. For this, she rewarded me with a certain regard, because I had exceeded her initial low expectations. Out of her shell did I draw her, even out of her house and onto the str

I didn't know this was erotica until about the stage where the sales clerk says, "THIS, Sir, is very nice!" I kind of skipped around after that. Pretty good, albeit some subject/verb agreement issues here and there, and I'm not really sure what area of the world the story takes place in or what the people look like.

I've never read many addiction recovery stories, but this was good, not too dark for me either. Seeking treatment shows courage and initiative. I wish you were specific about the drug, because I wasn't sure what it was or what all your habit involved, but I think the memory may be too painful or may be something you are blocking. This is mighty real, as real as it gets.

That's what I'm talking about. I spent countless hours playing Civ 1, 2, and I think 3. Civ is definitely a true classic turn-based video game. I remember all the heads of state trying to appease me and then getting upset and bitter because I kept double-crossing them and taking over their territory. I play Civ like Risk most of the time.

There are cross-winds...the Northern mid-west suffers, but the rest of the country profits...I know that everyone in my state, including me, has more money in their wallet due to lower prices at the pump. So maybe massive layoffs in the boom towns, the boom states, but otherwise good news for hundreds of millions of Americans and also people around the world who have more money to spend on other things. The stock market likes what it sees, too. U.S. stocks are really outperforming global stocks big time. Not that that impacts me in any major way. btw I need to change my nick or something, because Dark and I have awfully similar names. Even down to the cat in our avatar.

I know guys that devour kilowatts powering their video games, but I get by maxing out around 45 watts, because I like turn-based games where a pause is granted after every move, as in chess and other board games. These games tend to require a lot of strategy but little or no reflexes. In fact, they are better for old farts that may not be as quick on the draw anymore. I don't like real-time games because of the pressure to remain always in the game. That can be really engrossing. I like to quickly tab to another window and visit a web site or answer the phone if I need to without worrying about having to hit the Pause button. Some turn-based games I like are online chess at chess.com, a gay-friendly site, where one can play with people all over the world, and the Battle for Wesnoth, which is pretty cool. Both of these are free, by the way, and run fine on all kinds of computers with minimal resources. You can check out the Battle for Wesnoth here: http://www.wesnoth.org/

I'd love to get rid of my car, but I'd have to get rid of my job then, too. Maybe one day if I relocate somewhere with trains. Like San Francisco. Just need to have the lucky lottery number come up.

I think the Englishman is pulling our legs there, thinking we Yanks don't know that a pound sterling is worth more than a dollar. If he paid 500 pounds, then he must've bought a month's worth of groceries along with the gas. Maybe he just added one too many zeroes. I could almost believe 50 pounds.

After my friends had gone to sleep, I walked into the dark woods, because I knew what was waiting there and wished to parley with it. A fell voice that I recognized called unto me. Although I was afraid before, I was not afraid this time, because the old hermit had prepared me. In the darkness, I stood with my arms folded, head bowed, eyes closed, because the thing that spoke to me could not be seen with mortal eyes. Perhaps it perceived the change in me or had been forewarned, because in a syru

With a .20 / gal. discount based on my grocery shopping, I paid $1.889 / gal. at Kroger's gas station. Lowest in years. Now I've more money to spend on chocolate bars. This will have a huge impact on the U.S. economy, because the U.S. is a nation of cars, without as much mass transit as Europe.* *Let's be careful now and not digress into multi-parasite, poly-ticks.

I've been lucky. Tolkien was my main thing when I was a kid, and the recent movies only enrich my memories. With a remake, one can take it or leave it, so I don't see any problem. If someone likes a story enough, they will research and find its originals. "Downton Abbey" had a precursor in "Downstairs, Upstairs," so I watched that show recently. The remake is better.

My sad song playlist includes "Sara" by Fleetwood Mac. "Time" by Alan Parsons Project. " "Jeremy" by Pearl Jam. "1963" by New Order. "New Star in the Sky" by Air.

Hard to say what is true and what is not online. We have no visual cues, no body language. Maybe he was drunk as skunk when he wrote a few lines about the reason he drank. One thing I'm sure of is that his basic plot is realistic. Maybe he just testing the waters for a future fantasy for posting here.

I walked about day and night and at no time did I feel unsafe in San Francisco. But perhaps I did remain in the tourist district, come to think of it. It is a lovely city, simply lovely. The hobos are not shy, but they are not threatening either, and in one instance were quite useful in making my trip a splendid trip.