myself_i_must_remake

I know this was supposed to be a kind of melancholy, reflective piece, but I just got caught up in the part about wonderful sex. (Been a while since anyone really... did it right for me. Why is a good man so hard to find?) But if you liked Dancer from the Dance, a book that's pretty similar and set around the same time is Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library.

Your attitude is certainly better than mine. I think this election is a test case for a certain question: at what point does respect for the office of the President stop being enough to compensate for the holder of that office? I am glad some people, like yourself, have a positive attitude and are able to put their grievances aside and give him a chance, but for people like me, his chance was during the primaries and the general election season, and he already made so many threats to so many people, that I literally cannot imagine what he could ever possibly do to win back my respect. And I hope no one here finds that unreasonable. We already know who he is.

If there were ever a gay religion, and if its Bible-like text were a collection of stories, this would belong amongst those stories.

yeah!

Haha. So some of the book lists should really include: Hut-building for Dummies and A Field Guild to Plants that Can Kill You.

Nabokov's Pale Fire Coetzee's Disgrace Foucault's History of Madness Joyce's Dubliners Rushdie's The Satanic Verses

vacuous. there are few gays, few places to find gays, and scarcity makes us alternately nasty and needy.

I am speechless.

https://www.gayauthors.org/story/myself-i-must-remake/andpornography I updated some stuff and would love constructive feedback. I'm struggling to get this story to do what I want. I definitely have something in mind; it's just kind of hard to pull off.

Ugh. Rewind to 2006. Earlier tonight, I drove to Athens from Painesville in order to pick up my friends Brandy and Steve from Ohio U. Tomorrow I'm getting my black belt, and there's this whole extravaganza about it that I want them to see. As it turns out, a girl, Kaylee, who was a stumbling block to my becoming gay (and who turned out to be a lesbian herself) is also home from college this weekend. Kaylee and Brandy call me, ask me to come out to a gay bar with them. I hesitate and make excuses. "But you could meet a boy." I put on my camo shorts and black poker T-shirt, because unlike most gays I have no fashion sense, and because I don't understand that you don't wear shorts to clubs, at least not unironically. Somewhere we pick up another girl, Cate, who is an established lesbian. I remember seeing her against the wall with any number of genderless humans in high school. Cate drives us to Cleveland, parks us in a lot. Kaylee pulls out a bottle of 99 Bananas. Everyone passes it around. I take a few sips. It tastes foul. Kaylee, whom I'm still in the habit of trying to impress, tells me to drink more. I chug and chug. We get out of the car. During the hundred-foot walk from the lot to the front door of the club, I become extremely drunk. On the outside, the club has old brick and white pillars. "This place looks like Abe Lincoln's house," I say. Inside, we stand in a line where a man asks for our IDs and stamps our hands. The music is loud. Once we've all paid our five dollars, we take to the dance floor. I don't really understand dancing, so I just dry-hump my friends. All of us make out with each other. I use the restroom. I don't know why I am surprised to see girls in the guy's restroom. When I come out again, my friend Brandy tells me not to get mad. "I gave a guy your phone number!" she says. At this point in my life, I still don't have a cell phone, which means he would call my house. I defect from the group, and begin to black out. I stumble around asking guys to make out with me. At some point, I realize I'm making out with someone I don't even find attractive. I stop kissing him. "You're really cute," he says. "How old are you?" "Twenty-four." I walk away without saying anything. I seem to blink again and the bar is closing. I don't know where I've been. My friends usher me into the car. On the way home I vomit repeatedly out the back door, while we're going 70 on the highway. Somewhere, Kaylee has found Doritos and is throwing them everywhere. The next morning we wake up. In my pocket is a napkin. "Look guys, a napkin." The girls start laughing really hard. I flip over the napkin. There's a phone number with too many digits on the back. The girls feed me my night. I was witnessed doing strange Karate dances on a platform, and then running away. At some point, a strange lesbian had come up to them and asked if they were my friends. "Your friend Billy is in the bathroom. I think he needs your help." What I'll never know is 1) how bad I must have looked that a strange lesbian actively searched out my friends for me and 2) how I managed to describe my friends so that she was able to distinguish them from the hundreds of other people there. In short, it was horrible, but that was probably mostly my fault.

get it.

FUCK YEAH ENGLISH!

I just hope you feel like you're being honest to yourself. Fuck audience, man!

As a teenager, I threw boomerangs, did flips, climbed shit, and was whiney and annoying. I -was- Yuffie.

I don't know if I'd throw out being cerebral completely. My favorite authors can be appreciated on multiple levels. You can always take the story straight, but if you did and reread, you notice all these patterns. It depends on your target audience or, if you're like me, whether or not you really even want an audience. I guess I'd say always put your needs as a writer before your audience's needs as readers. But then I'm not a business person, and it shows.

BECAUSE WE ARE TOO MENNY. You have to admit that part gets you.

Nick McCrory has got something tremendous going on in his speedo, and he's rooming with Ipsen. I can't. I just can't.

there's more to come. it'll make sense.

I want to dramatize mental illness without falling back on suicide, violence toward others, or fairy-tale sudden recoveries. It's hard to show the struggle of mental illness, because staring at the wall hating yourself just doesn't make great reading.

Hello, GA! Some of you might remember a version of this story I had posted several years ago. I got mad at it and took it down. I thought I had put it to rest. But, this summer the characters reappeared, and I'm giving it another go. Hopefully I'll be kind of speedy about getting it out, and hopefully I won't do what I always do and give up after the first few chapters. Something that online posting isn't quite conducive to is the annotation section at the bottom of the chapter. First of all, it is part of the story; it's not me commenting upon it. Second of all, it looks better in Word because it's spread out through the chapter instead of in a big brick at the bottom. Anyway, enjoy! and Pornography

i do get a high, and like most highs, it is followed by a low. i go from loving it the day i finish it to hating it within the week.

Happy Belated!

This was such a nice surprise! I feel motivated now. Thanks, MJ85.

I found your entire post very illuminating, but this paragraph in particular makes it seem as if you've been reading my mind lately. When the shootings happened last year in Arizona, a lot of people pointed at Sarah Palin because on her site she had a map of the United States with what looked like the crosshairs of a gun focused on what her camp considered overly leftist areas. One of those had been on Arizona, and some complained that Palin's map had encouraged the violence. I don't particularly believe that account, but Palin's response to that accusation was, I thought, flawed and symptomatic. I remember she said something to effect of acts of violence "beginning and ending with the perpetrator." To me, that sentence is typical of a lot of right-wing thought: that societal outliers are products of only themselves, and that society can wash their hands of them and disabuse themselves of any evil performed by those outliers. Study after study, of course, indicates otherwise: environment seems to be more powerful than individual agency, especially because it's one of its major constituents. I ask myself, when individuals take violent action, what events sent that person down that road, and often I conclude that the perpetrator was in many ways likely a victim of others, and felt that he only had one available option for recourse against them. You bring up a lot of good points about the sloppiness of my prompt generally. One of the things I was hoping, however, and your response sheds light on this, is that some responses would reveal whether he could adapt to city culture, or whether, as you suggest, we could only expect him to adapt to a rural setting. I disagree about your argument about shared language being an indicator of his culturation. Language does carry a residue, but sometimes people are unaware of it. For example, "sinister" has etymological connections with the Latin for "left," and left-handed people used to be pressured to become right-handed because of Christian mythology's associations with left being evil, but now people use sinister without being aware of the strange cultural history of that word. You made me realize that the prompt I wrote was pretty characteristic of someone who speaks English. Because my language is so widely spoken, I don't tie language to culture the way people who speak other languages might. This is another aspect of the prompt that was designed to see how possible my project was. If you "love" your islander, then you help him grow with something besides just knowledge and information, and I want to know if it's really possible to culture him without that fostering care.