LJH

Happy birthday frosty.

The Poet has the strength to go where ordinary writers do not wish to go. I'm not saying that ordinary writers don't ever visit these places, but a poet understands more...sees more...feels more...feels the inuendos, feels the rythm of the emotion and you certainly do. This is a simple poem. No superfluous words. No dramatic moments. But what it does have, is emotion, and I felt it in bucketfulls. Nice.

As with CH1 this next is brilliant in concept and understanding of the gay condition. By the end of third chapter you will need to offer something more than his heartache. He must not wallow thru his grief forever. Something is about to transpire and i hope it will be the first of many surprises.

Yes. A place to reflect. No self flagellation. A testimonial memorial to a loved man. This room - your piece - is A place of strength. It carefully draws the line between life and the full ess of it and the unknown hereafter. The point that life must go on is clear. no matter the loss. Even stars die. Well written and heartfelt.

Beauty shines from within. Inside. Body is the shell that holds the beauty. In many instances, a handsome man can be ugly inside. Some are handsome inside and out. It's the quality of heart. It's the bloom of the soul. It's the purity of giving and the softness of being gentle. Beauty is always in the eyes of the beholder. Always.

Billy When you write fiction, you start with character, the heartbeat of the novel. Characters are interesting people in terrible difficulties. Readers read books for stroy and for intimacy. They want to move into a character's life, live inside his thoughts and emotions, take on his goals and problems. So, fictional characters must be flawed and vulnerable. Bigger than life. So think about your favourite fictional characters and how large they loom within your imagination. Scrooge, Madame Bovary, Holden Caufield, Atticus Finch, Don Corleone, Lolita, nancy Drew, Jay Gatsby, Scarlett O hara, Harry Potter. All these characters have stature, presence, flair; they are memorable. You start by knowing your characters as well as you know your own family. Create a biography, a sketch of an imaginary life with the traits and background important to the story you are telling. The leading role is the person the reader most cares about. The story is about him or them and we want to know what happens to them at the end. Their motivations drive the story. As authors, we need to know everything about the lead character/s. Having said this, I'm not sure I understand the crux of your question. In my eyes, you stop only when you reach the last word. How much of yourself do you slip in, well, that's up to you, the reader will never know. Most novelists start with their own life experiences. This means that they will use their personal lives and their careers as a potential place to draw ideas from. But, we can also draw from everyday experiences. Family. Friends. Colleagues. Neswpapers. Places. Dreams. So to answer your question, there is no stopping. You simply take what you can and write. Hope this helps

Bravo!!!! You aim at a framed moment in time, click the aperture, and deliver a moving snapshot account of the angst, the pain and the deep, intense hurt that gay guys feel when betrayed. It is hard for me to believe that a woman can ever understand the feelings of deep hurt we feel when hurt, and here comes Renee Stevens to shatter that belief so completely. The intensity of the work is overwhelming and emotional, for it is a story I identify with and brought back a memory I had hidden and folded away for so many years. I am glad you wrote this. I never had the courage. Finding another man in your bed is worse than being stranded without clothing in Antarctica. It is everything you describe and more. The hurt lingers far longer than the event. Sometimes for years. In this work, you have covered the heartache of discovering a "mortal" lie. I felt intimately involved with Jordan from the moment he opened the bedroom door. The structure of the work created tension by giving the impression that I was watching the drama unfolding minute after excrutiating minute. In this work, I found that the action is not physical action but rather deals with what happens to and inside, Jordan's mind and the physical world within which he moves is coincidental to the main issue of the story. You raise some interesting moral questions. Is the deed worth saving the relatioship based on a mistake? Will Jordan wake up in the morning with tears flowing out of his eyes and want Mitch back? The ethics involved is much the same as in a straight relationship. Ethics controls Jordan's motivations. The work manisfests itself as a tragic end to what seemed to be a perfect relationship. I loved it. I was moved by it.

Absolutely beautiful. You have the power ma'am. This is one of those stories that become, over time, a treasure. You want a full on review? You gonna get it and how! So let me dry my eyes first and refocus. It is going to be a review that will be a pleasure to write... Hugs Louis

Ryden and Luke hmmmm ok tears streamIng down my cheeks like a river. Oh, the angst. Oh the emotion. Like some powerful force of nature. The aesthetic qualities you bestow uPon these characters on an emotional level beggars me to read on . I think he was pushed ... We shall see. I so am in love with your style of writing ... Especially real life drama .

Get one of your vamps to exterminate the animal that is his father. Intense. Emotional. Full review after third chapter

Forgiveness comes from the heart and lives in the soul. Joey has a special bond with forgiveness. He's different to Andy, who gives just as good as he gets. Joey, in my view has an enormous role in Andy's life, and that is to teach him something. What it is I do not know. I hope, that when the lesson is learned, Joey does not move on, but sticks around with Andy. They make such a perfect couple. On the other hand, it seems, from the divine intervention, that Andy has also been set a mission. The mission began in chapter one, not in CH14. We all, as humans, are leading somewhere, every move we make, every turn we take, every smile we smile takes us closer to our destinies. There may be many destinies, and Andy's destiny began in CH 1. I'm loving this story. It deals with the violence that many of us have faced as gay people. Even thoughts, targeted at us, are violent in nature and thank the lord we do not need to answer or respond to a person's private thought, for if we could, there would be chaos in this world. Divine intervention in the form of Andy's mother, is dream like. It's not far fetched. It happens all the time in operating theatres in hospitals across the world. People have out of body experiences. Visitations from the spiritual world, especially from the Lord, cannot be defined in terms of language. The writer has taken dramatic licence and he is entitled to. We all, when writing our own stories, make homo fictus larger than life, Billy hasdone just that. Billy.

Bravo! This is Writing at its very best. This is going to be a difficult journey for you, but bear in mind your talent as a writer is up there at the top. I am sucked in by the colours you so vividly describe, by colours i mean Chris's persona. I was hooked from the first word and hurled into the story from the moment Chris realised exactly what he was up against. The sentences are like some wonderful drug and worth every minute spent reading. This is akourney i will not miss. A journey where i will get to meet homo fictus in all his glory. A story worth the effort.

Ja and i woke up a heterosexual this morning after drinking rooibos tea last night. Altered states. Lol

I fully agree with Carringtonjr and recommend this story. I found the same emotive qualities and could not stop weeping. I was disappointed that the story ended, I wanted it to continue forever.

I enjoyed this story immensely based solely on the technical challenge this kind of story presents to the writer. In a sense, this is a "confession story", similar to "True Confessions", a magazine sold in the UK and mostly written by women for the confession market, except, of-course, this is a gay confesssion. Technically, it has all the attributes of a confession story. Let's look at them for a moment: 1. You begin with the main character, a typically normal gay man about to be married, in conversation with his confidant, the person who knows his secret. 2 You immediately establish a character weakness. A flaw (aren't we all flawed). Now, as the reader, I was wondering well, what is it? Is he a lazy person? Bad tempered? Bitter? Jealous? Over ambitious? Slovenly? Mean? A criminal? I find out, very quickly that it is none of these. Instead, he is not to be trusted. (He is keeping something from his husband to be.) 3.You have placed your character in a dramatic crisis which has been brough about by his character flaw. He is about to marry the man he loves, but has not told him everything there is to know, and if they do marry without the truth being told, the marriage could dissolve into disaster. 4.You allow him to tell his confidant in dialogue the moment he reached this dramatic crisis. 5. In order to resolve the crisis, the truth must be told. You bring in the man he is to marry and they begin to discuss the crisis. 6.You allow a moment for suspense where the result of his confession is met with doubt. 7.The crisis is resolved when both men resolve that there will be no room for infidelity in their marriage 8. The marriage takes place. Of-course, this is just a quick plan for what has taken place. The deeper meaning, and to quote Billy Joel: Honesty, is such alonely word, everyone is so untrue... I think they will live happily ever after. So, from the technical aspect, the formula whther you knew that or did not, is almost flawless. Nice work.

Im far too emotional right now to respond... Save to say that i read all twelve chapters nonstop in one sitting. Give me a few hours to calm down. .... Eish .....overwhelming...

I read this because I wanted to see how the writer deals with Stream O C writing. I abbreviate this to SOC. But, before I offer any thoughts on SOC let me say that Caleb is really messed up. Intentionally. The conflict he harbours races along at a wild pace. The results of which are filled with humour, and later, maybe a coming of age. Essentially this is a coming of age story. All stories are built on conflict and there is enough here to speak volumes. SOC writing is very difficult to master. It requires discipline and passion. The original thought, the concept can change twenty five times in a single paragraph. Even tho this piece is similar to SOC, what i see is a well writen story about a lost teen who will struggle to find himself. I certainly look forward to the next chapter.

Looks like we are in for a ride here with Mark and Dillon. I like the way the sentences have been structured ; short sentences. One word sentences. Long sentences. Your attempt at SHOWING vs TELLING is admirable too. So many young writers cant get away from essay type telling. It takes a lot of work and passion to Know where and how to show action and the flow of the story is easy.

Do not tell until after college. Bugger morals and ethics. Siphen every penny he can. He does not need prrmission to be gay, Did they ask permission to be straight? Take it all. And more. Dont pay it back. Homophobia is an illness. Rather put them away in a mental institute. Back to the moral issue. What moral issue. With homophobic parents err on the side of caution.

I see the pathos and the hope in this prose. It builds up through images we all see clearly, the darkness of not being accepted and the light when we are. The euphoria of being treated as equal, the sadness when equality is shifted and negated. There is more of a positive feel to this piece and we can see this by the words used: boundless ambience, flickering illumination, omniscient star, universal liaison, transcendental expression,lucent beams. Vivid images comparing what the the Queer I is perceived to be. One line makes the impact: morbidly thorned.... This impact is felt powerfully because it pricks at the "I" conscience where there is a battle for good and evil, the queer I will always be centre stage. The center of attraction. The "I". How much better will this world be if the the "i" can co exist with the morbidly thorned. But if this were to happen then there wiould be nothing thorny or painful, and certainly nothing to write about, because all fiction, and in s sense, all life is based on conflict. A powerful house of prose, when one pairs the parts of it to a cry for acceptance in a cruel world in an undiscriminating universe. Nature itself cannot discriminate, only humankind....

Here in sunny South Africa, the republic's 6th Prime Minister and founder of Rhodesia , now Zimbabwe, was thought to have had gay relationships. This taken from Wiki Rhodes never married, pleading "I have too much work on my hands" and saying that he would not be a dutiful husband.[27] Some writers and academics have suggested that Rhodes may have been homosexual. The scholar Richard Brown observed: "there is still the simpler but major problem of the extraordinarily thin evidence on which the conclusions about Rhodes are reached. Rhodes himself left few details... Indeed, Rhodes is a singularly difficult subject... since there exists little intimate material – no diaries and few personal letters." Brown also comments: "On the issue of Rhodes' sexuality... there is, once again, simply not enough reliable evidence to reach firm, irrefutable conclusions. It is inferred, but not proved, that Rhodes was homosexual and it is assumed (but not proved) that his relationships with men were sometimes physical. Neville Pickering is described as Rhodes' lover in spite of the absence of decisive evidence." Rhodes was close to Pickering; he returned from negotiations for Pickering's 25th birthday in 1882. On that occasion, Rhodes drew up a new will leaving his estate to Pickering. Two years later, Pickering suffered a riding accident. Rhodes nursed him faithfully for six weeks, refusing even to answer telegrams concerning his business interests. Pickering died in Rhodes' arms, and at his funeral Rhodes was said to have wept with fervor. His successor was Henry Latham Currey, the son of an old friend, who had become Rhodes's private secretary in 1884. When Currey got engaged in 1894, Rhodes was deeply mortified and their relationship split. Rhodes also remained close to Leander Starr Jameson after the two had met in Kimberley, where they shared a bungalow. In 1896 Earl Grey came to give Rhodes bad news. Rhodes instantly jumped to the conclusion that Jameson, who was ill, had died. On learning that his house had burnt down he commented, "Thank goodness. If Dr. Jim had died, I should never have got over it." Jameson nursed Rhodes during his final illness, was a trustee of his estate and residuary beneficiary of his will, which allowed him to continue living in Rhodes' mansion after his death. Rhodes' secretary, Jourdan, who was present shortly after Rhodes' death said, "Jameson was fighting against his own grief ... No mother could have displayed more tenderness towards the remains of a loved son". Jameson died in England in 1917, but after the war in 1920 his body was transferred to a grave beside that of Rhodes on Malindidzimu Hill or World's View, a granite hill in the Matopo National Park 40 km south of Bulawayo.

Cowboys were heavily exploited and usually brutally treated until such time as they became able to beg, borrow, buy or steal a gun. They were used not only as cheap and disposable labor, but also for sexual release by older and stronger men. Such adult men used the pretext of a scarcity of women to establish enforced homosexual relationships in remote camps and ranches comparable to the relationships for which today's prisons are notorious. The high incidence of pederasty and homosexual rape is the great dirty secret of the Old West frontier--and yet this is not from any lack of contemporary accounts which document or hint at it, including the famed woodcuts of men dancing with boys, descriptions of the practices of multiple men sleeping in single beds (as if there wasn't room enough out West for everyone to throw down his own bedroll), jokes about turns in the barrel, and the lyrics of certain Old West songs in which young men seem to be given women's names. Indeed, the macho attitude traditionally affected by cowboys and gunfighters may have reflected the personal sexual insecurity of young men who often had little contact with women from the time they were first sent out on the range in their early teens, until a decade or more later--if they survived long enough and developed skills sufficient to get work back in town. Meanwhile, many were "used as women" as the phrase of the day put it, unless they dared resist their masters, which could require murder. Such may have been the beginning of the story of Billy The Kid, among many others. Taken from www.sharkonline.org

aWWW Man. Mark you and Stu are great. Your story touched me and made me realise that there is so much more to people than just the one dimension I was always receiving. You made me believe in myself again, even tho I never said that, and you don't know my story except that I cannot get over my first boyfriend's suicide. Your gentle nature assured me that I can, if you can move on, so can I. You are worth far more to this community than you will ever know. Society is unforgiving, but I know you are, and Barry, this sure was a prank that should never have gone so far, but it did, and you, in my eyes, are more than a man by publishing this for all to see. People like you, Barry, are hard to find. You are one of a kind. This must have eaten you up, and it is plain to see that you "love" Mark, of-course not like Stu, but there are variations and levels of love and you respect him. I would gladly give up everything to be like you, Barry. It is clear, from all of this, that the insensitive person who posted the link to GA is an unworthy person. He should have asked permission from Mark. You guys are not to blame. On the other hand, it has driven Mark back. Mark, and Stu, please stay positive. Positive thoughts bring positive things. You guys are worth much more than the sum of those pics. Much, much more. One thing I know, even tho I do not know you personally, Mark, your story changed my way of thinking. Be strong. You are in my prayers.

All right, I'll let you know. All right So many writers use the word alright. Much like they would use the words, already and altogether. But alright is wrong. The words should always be written out seperately. There are no such forms as all-right or allright. All right simply means that all is right. So, 'The scout's report was all right.' and "Is he all right?' and 'All right, you shall hear of this again." and 'Oh, I know this off pat, all right.' Even if we are prepared to admit alright for some uses, for instance in 'That's quite all right.' and 'I'm quite all right.' We should spell it out. Alright will eventually establish itself in the long run, but it is hoped that it will be restricted to adverbial uses such as, The difficulty can be got over, alright. Even here, it is at present barely justifiable since the vocalic value of all is usually retained and no marked differentiation of meaning has yet taken place. Taken from: Fowler's Modern English Usage.

There is a point where I was drawn into Baz's world, and compelled to read the rest. That point was the mousetrap scene. Not a pleasant way to start any day. I wanted to see how Baz handled the situations and I was not pleased. Oh, don't get me wrong, the mechanics and structure of the piece are first class. It is not easy to write humour. But i wanted Baz to sock Mark. Now, i'm not a violent guy, but i would have placed his face at the end of my fist. Then i realized, but Baz works for him, and i thought, hmmm, lucky devil. Not only have you used humour to describe Mark's character. You have also used it expertly to communicate Baz's character. Both are down to earth guys working on a farm, but Baz is the conduit for Mark's pranks and Baz feels used. As we say in South Africa, "Ag shame man!" I laughed. If that was your intent, you succeeded. But, there is a cul- du - sac of a genius at work here. Look at the story carefully. I did, and I was like Wow! As an editor, I would usually spot over- usage of a character's name and flog the writer for not using pronouns. In this case I realized there is something cynical to the way Baz repeats Mark's name, and that is due to ANGER. He's not at all pleased. I would not be pleased! Another moment of genius is this; it doesn't matter that the receiver of these pranks is Baz, if he were to leave, Mark would cause someone else to endure his silliness. But, there is one line that caught me, and it is that his father was a prankster too. Hereditory. I laughed. All which goes to prove that there is more to this piece than meets the eye. The last prank, the last line, brilliant. A direct link to the theme of the anthology. It got me thinking. If this prank was not set up by Mark, then who? There are no other characters in the story. This got me thinking; Mark is now heading in another direction with his pranks. He's leading Baz into the twilight world called Insanity. It happens so often in real life where a person is set off course. Employ me, Mark. I'm ready for you. I'll set you right!