myself_i_must_remake

my imagi-boy fantasies usually pan out with becoming great friends with someone, finding out he's gay, then having my way with him. i think i favor this because once you know someone's gay, at least if you're in my situation where i meet so few, then there's immediate tension that for me does not resolve if i can't answer the date/willnotdate question. i need to get over that, but it's just the way things are for me. at any rate, the only way i could be myself is if i thought he was straight and that we could only be friends. those other, more realistic issues - i haven't had the humbling experience of one blowing up in my face so i don't worry over them yet.

it seems a little silly to me. you have the hormones and the drive, but you say you have no conscious desire of it. honestly to me it sounds more like you have a very conscious denial of it. there's something fishy about how in all these posts you sound not only as if you don't care about, but that you're better than it as well, and if i'm reading you correctly, you've never been in a position to enjoy it normally. my point is hard to clarify here, and i suppose that that's because i don't necessarily have one, i just think that a teenager who not only doesn't want sex and who is making a point of making sure a lot of people know is setting off a lot of alarms for me. this isn't meant to be an attack or anything, i'm just letting you know, the things you say seem like an attempt at transcendence and also kind of suspicious.

i love the way some guys smell, but i think for me it is a bonus that usually comes after they're more or less secured, as in pressed up against a wall or in bed. but lovely nonetheless! i like curve crush a lot. curve is popular, but i like a lot of their scents (except the most popular one, actually.) they have one called kicks that i wear as well so... if you ever wanted to know what i smell like, curve crush and curve kicks.

i agree with that last statement. people ask me for advice all the time and tell me i'm really objective, and i think it comes from being kind of forced to ourselves from perspectives other than our own. it feels good to fall in between the genders, or maybe a better term would be outside of gender. if we don't want to be macho, that's fine. if we don't want to act like girls, hey, even better. having an accepting environment is key to this, however. but i am happy to say that if there were a straight pill, i wouldn't take it.

new york new york new york. this side of the united states has been neglected for soooooo long.

we all knew it was only a matter of time next stop: hosted

on beauty and the god of small things were good if anyone needs something to read.

one of the heartbreaking things about morrison is a writer is that when she's on, she's on, but man she HAS some mess ups out there. some of her novels are really... eh... we'll just say she lost her subtlety when she got older.

now that i couldn't agree with more, which maybe leads to a revision of my first post. to those following the thread for whatever reason, i would say "see if any of these can make your story stronger" instead of "see if you can make a story to fit this," with regards to my "suggestions." as for your question, i'm going to say i don't see new-boy-at-school as a form really. i also hope it doesn't come off that i'm saying form is everything. plot can work wonders, but this is a given. to be practical, i think writers interested in catering not only to new readers but old ones too, should consider everything everyone has been saying, in a way: if your plot's been used before, come up with a new one. if you absolutely must use a kind of overused situation, make the most of variation (i think this is krista i'm quoting?) if your story can be brought out by a particular structure, use it. i feel like i'm slowly leading this topic off track.

and obviously i'll have to defend myself. form is extremely important. i'm not trying to sound preachy, but form should not be underestimated. hundreds of old writers would support me on this, if it comes to it, i can find quotes. want stories whose form is ESSENTIAL to their "moving" ability? here - heart of darkness, diary of a bad year, fall on your knees, the way the crow flies, dusklands, in the heart of the country, underworld, fifth business, atonement, beloved, 1984, the hours, mrs. dalloway, incidents in the life of a slave girl. ...and that's from a cursory glance at my bookshelf. i think too often people take form as something granted within the story itself. the ability to tell a certain story in a certain is DEFINITELY a moving quality of that story. want another example? people who have sold memoirs that became famous, have they necessarily had the most interesting lives in the world? not a shot in hell. but they know how to tell their story. i have mrs. dalloway listed above as an example, and i think it's worth more examination here because NOTHING THAT INTERESTING HAPPENS IN THE NOVEL. someone commits suicide. that's about the peak of it. but it's how the story is told that has that novel being taught and virginia woolf canonized decades later. so what i'm saying is... be weary of saying that sort of thing, because to it i can respond that highly original stories can be very unsuccessful as a result of poor form.

this is a very interesting topic because of what it says about itself. oh yeah. the question presupposes that gay fiction is a subset of romantic fiction, which reflects on 99% of the stories on this site, which i've made rants about in the past (see my blog). in fact, one of the things that i don't like about the eFiction is that when you submit a story, one of the things it asks you to define is the "primary couple." interesting indeed. but yeah, i've said it before, and azure is saying it in this forum: the writing on this site, from what i've seen, as mostly stale. there are a few people running around with their heads cut off trying to do something new. so i guess if i had to answer the question above (which i didn't because i disagree with the responses) i would say that it has gone stale, but not because we've reached the limits. we've set up our own fence out of stakes connected by a single rope, and we refuse to take the effort to step over or under it. (dependent on stature) my remedies to this problem fall under two subheadings. a ) what gay fiction must be. -a story about gays with the gay element having some impact on the plot. this does not demand a couple. no no no. write about seeing life from the outside, being an "other," which is a HUGE term in literary criticism right now. write a story about being a gay and a lesbian living together who have decided to rear a child together and who develop some sort of family that way. b ) what any fiction must be. i can hardly define what makes a story, but i want to say this: it does not have to be a first person account of something that already happened. miraculous things could happen if more authors tried: -a third person point of view. (not the mental rantings of a teenage boy who's smarter than everyone and has the world out to get him) -the present tense (oh yes. much more thrilling) lets move past tense and perspective. lets acknowledge different ways of telling a story, different forms. need examples? -a historical document -a letter (this is what i'm doing for my next story) -a contradictory series of events that show the limitations of the narrator -a single event from multiple persepectives (not necessarily HUMAN perspectives, say, what a camera would see if it were fixed to a certain object in a room where the event was unfolding) -a journal (a little overused, but not so much as the typical story format) -multiple narrators, but not the lame stories told by two boys who eventually fall in love and in their perspective, seem only to acknowledge each other. no one wants to hear the same predictable love story twice. -an entire story basically in quotes. anyone read Heart of Darkness? the first few pages come from a narrator, but then the actual story comes from another speaker. i won't get into what this accomplishes here. -a perspective from a young child or someone who is mentally deficient. here we confront the issue of first person narrators who are allegedly, say, fifteen-year-old boys, but who have a story-telling capability and vocabulary far beyond what the average fifteen year old could have. -read Diary of a Bad Year by j.m. coetzee and see how that story is told. each page is divided into three sections, the top of which are essays by a man. the middle is the diary of that same man. and then the bottom is the diary of a woman that man becomes interested in. but wait! it gets better. it turns out that the woman's boyfriend has bugged the man and the woman's computer, so the way the text is presented is essentially how the boyfriend sees it. four perspectives on each page! i hope you get the point i'm making. documents whose purpose is not to tell a story, may still inevitably tell a story, and likewise, stories may fail to tell a story, and too many authors fail to acknowledge those limitations, and unfortunately, the readers fail to ask themselves questions about the narrators. what do i mean? i mean people are silly if they read a story from the perspective of a fifteen-year-old gay boy, and see what he endures at the hands of others, and assume that he does not cause problems himself. what is not being said is just as important as what is being said. oh yeah. so yes. gay fiction is stale. but it does not have to be that way.

yeah take as long as you need. i can do school work on my mom's laptop so it's no biggie.

so assuming there's a problem with the MBR, what do i do? (almost right after i put up my last post, it said there was a visual run time problem or something and i'm back to my background being up with no icons and just this browser window to work with. bah.)

haha ok so update. i think i'm making slow progress. or this is what i'm telling myself. i've run the spybot search and destroy a bunch of times and it claims to eliminate them, but then i run the scan again and they respawn. now when i do it in safemode, it gets rid of a bunch but then says that there's one it can't get rid of without restarting. so i restart. and then when i sign in, it shows my desktop background and that's it. and i try to use task manager but that's been disabled so i have to restart, and when i do that it's like all the problems are back. now why do i say i feel like progress is happening? well the first time i ran spybot s&d in safe mood it found over 70 problems, but the last time i did it, it only found 30ish. and now i'm running AVG (again) and it's also finding less than it did last time. so... either there're less problems left... or they got better at hiding from the programs. i'm not noticing any difference in performance yet, and i do suspect that eventually i'll have to fold and reinstall windows. but i'll keep trying. i think graeme is right about the trojans because this all started (or at least got severely worse) when i accidentally clicked a pop up on myspace and the computer got out of control, and shortly after there were all these things telling me i needed to get spyware removal and yack yack yack, and i know for sure one of the things i took as my computer helping me was actually malicious software. so maybe i'm not making progress. who knows? thanks so much for helping though, everyone. i'll leave another thing if anything happens.

i'm sure there's a topic like this elsewhere on this forum but it's kind of urgent so i don't have time to dig. but anyway. since about the start of the new year my computer's been a piece of crap and contracting every single virus it trips over. it never used to do this! like a month and a half ago i reinstalled windows because it got so bad and it behaved for a while, but then it got everything back again and now i get nonstop pop-ups and it's telling me i have serious spyware threats... SO. i even avoided downloading limewire after i reinstalled windows because that one was a problem causer. but is there anywhere i can get GOOD free anti-virus/spyware stuff? i can't even do a system restore because it was clever and disabled all the previous restore points. help?

regarding rand though, it's always go to be a good critical theorist and look at WHY she is so capitalist. and oh jee, a quick wikipedia search reveals that she was born in russia during all that ugliness with the bolsheviks and communism. is it surprising she backs capitalism so much then? it's not like she was born and saw all the facts in front of her and then from her godlike, unbiased viewpoint, decided that capitalism was the best of all systems, all of which she had fairly evaluated. oh no. she'd been grinding an axe from as early as she could know enough to. i also have another bone to pick with rand. i feel like the size of her books, literally, i don't know which version you have, but many editions of her novels are HUGE, but i feel like making them so large was an editorial decision because it makes the reader feel more intelligent, reading something that large. though that i have no back up for. still. something to think about.

yeah i always thought i had these sharper teeth near the front for a reason.

not to stereotype... (actually to stereotype extensively) but let's consider who's probably reading demon slayer or hunter or whatever stories. 90% of the mystical, magic, science fiction type demographic are acne-ridden, athletically challenged, eternally virgin males, yes? and what do males do? we assert ourselves in all the worst scenarios. anything to show that manliness. so it's probably not worth your time. if he's that fired up over it, he probably doesn't have a ton to live for, so spare him the rebuttal (buttle?)

i was twelve. there was a definite 'oh shit' moment when it happened and from then on i "knew" i guess the way you "know" when you find out someone important to you has died. meaning there was a denial period of six years. but still, i started thinking about it actively when i was twelve. there were little signs of it before then that i guess in retrospect seem quite telling. i was always extremely curious about what other boys looked like, and i remember i had a big sleepover in the fifth grade and i wanted to sleep next to this friend and i kept moving closer to him but passed it off just as like a friend deal. and maybe it was. i mean i can't say if straight boys act like that or not.

my spring break just started so i'm trying to finish some books i've started and then gotten annoyed with or had school get it the way or ran off and had an affair with another book while reading. so i have to finish reading: underworld, don delillo. beloved, toni morrison. (third time through, but my school's obsessed with her. we think because she applied and was turned away because it was before she was a big deal and she didn't have a master's degree even.) the hours, michael cunningham. and then as for ones i haven't started yet: life and times of michael k, j.m. coetzee. heart of darkness, joseph conrad. (second time through, but i have to reread it in relation to...) season of migration to the north, tayeb salih. sula, toni morrison. (second time through, but what have i said, she saturates our curriculum.) oh goodie. no fun for me over break.

masturbation/crying. i kid.

not nice to say BUT most people who haven't experienced it put it on this pedestal where it doesn't belong. although, i'm practically a materialist so... i take the fun out of everything i guess. but our days are numbered, why not enjoy them? (of course, not to the extent that we lose some of those, but you've all already had that conversation)

i like to believe i speak french (hence my forum name, created when i was sixteen and thought i was so cool) and i have some limited german at my disposal. don't we all wish we knew more? and as everyone else is saying, the international forum won't happen just yet. GA's not that big of a deal yet.

if you're cool, you should watch these two:

there are millions of new plots to make. don't be silly now. you'll see this yourself if i ever get my ass up to the post office and send that book. but i am lazy, and it is far.