James Hiwatari

Hi there! I live in the UK now, but I'm from Brazil. That counts for something, right?

My parents were definitely pleased when I told them I had a new girlfriend, and for the first time since the incident in the toilet we were able to have a normal conversation at dinner. It was good to see things slowly returning to normal at home. I did not dare tell my parents that the boy who had made me “act like a girl” was now a close friend, along with the rest of the school’s gay club, but it was an easy thing to omit if I could say my girlfriend and I were having a good time alone togeth

Hey, thanks for the heads up about the formatting problem. Hopefully now it has been sorted. O.o I'm glad to be back too. Thanks for sticking around! Henry is normally shy. It's Jean that makes it impossible for him to act normally when he's around =P Next chapter should be up in 2 weeks as usual!

On Sunday I texted Hannah to see if she was ok, but received no answer. Olivia, Henry and Jean could not reach her either, so on Monday we decided to meet at the school gates half an hour earlier to make sure that, if Hannah did come to school, we would be able to spot her and ask about her birthday before classes started. We saw her fifteen minutes later. She was walking alone, observing the conglomerate of nearly-identical two-floored houses that made up the scenery of the main road to school

Heh, yeah... That should've given Oscar some clue about who his real friends are. Now if only he listens... Thanks for the review and the correction. Hope you enjoy the next chapter too!

I quickly found out that if I spent all breaks with Jean’s group less people laughed behind my back or “accidentally” bumped into me so hard I almost fell. It also meant that Brandon and my former friends stayed clear of me, as no one dared to approach Jean at risk of being coerced into public love-making. On Tuesday I tried to talk to Wendy again during our German class. I wrote her a message in a piece of paper (in German, because that was the language of communication in class) and threw it

The story caught my eye after the words “troll”, “gnome magic” and “sorcerer” (and the keyword gay, if I’m being completely honest). I hadn’t been reading as much fantasy as I would like, so it was a nice re-introduction to the genre. The beginning of the story was very interesting. It set was seemed like the main plot and some gripping tension. There were a few twists, some unexpected surprises… Some parts of the story could probably be explored more deeply, particularly the “battle scenes”, but at its current size the story has the advantage of being fairly easy to read on one go. By the end of it, I wanted to know what happened afterwards (and was glad to know there would be one!). Because I have a chronic inability of writing small plots, I kind of felt at home when stories will carry on in another instalment. I like the sorcerer and his adult companions. Interesting people. It was interesting to see how the story’s toned morphed into different things to assimilate the plot twists. Sexy scenes, battles, adventures and magic-related scenes had their own particular character. Some bits were a bit too descriptive, but the overall flow of the story was good and the pace adequate for something of this size (speaking here as someone used to write 50+ for the smallest plots). This is the kind of story that is good to read when you don’t have much time on your hands and still want something that makes you travel to a fantastic world. It’s not exactly light-hearted, but provides a good dose of escapism from modern real life.

When dad finally left my room I could barely move. He warned me that if he ever heard of something like this again my punishment would be even worse; and that if he ever had to teach me the same lesson for the third time I would have to find a new place to live, because he absolutely refused to waste his money on a stupid freak of nature. Thankfully by the time Monday came around only a few bruises were still visible, and just one or two still hurt. Of course, the school uniform covered everyth

I listen to classical music that fits the mood of the scene or the chapter in general, and sometimes songs in languages I don't understand very well (for some reason a CD of Czech communist songs from the 50s turned out to be quite inspirational O_O). If it's songs I know well, I'll get distracted and start to sing them or try to play them in the recorder (yes, I have been playing that for the last 12 years and I'm not ashamed of that! =D). So I generally avoid them.

Ideally I like to have a few chapters ready before I post a story, so that I can take a while to write more and still be able to update. That said, it's a lot easier said than done. ¬¬

Now that I'm done with university (it's been a year, but I'm still enjoying the feeling!) I tend to read mainly humour stuff - usually with adventure mixed in. I'm now starting Discword novels. I like that kind of style. For writing, I don't like writing over-dramatic or hateful things. Probably because I don't know how to do that. I like more light-hearted stuff as well. There's enough drama in real-life after all...

Thanks a lot! I have most of the story planned out. One of the reasons it took so long to update was because I was trying to get the *whole* thing planned out before I got any further, but it was taking too long... I got some 42 chapters planned, and there should be a little bit more after that. Hope I can keep up with your expectations! (Also that chapter was a bit of a pain to write, took me a long time to be moderately satisfied with how it turned out. So I'm glad people actually like it! =D) As I said to Cia, Mr Smith acted the way he did because he knew Oscar and Jean well, so he thought he could be very sure of what had happened. I think saying "we're all guys" is a bit of biological determinism that might be a little limiting and "easy-way-out" answer, but well... as long as we don't beat our children up due to said biological determinism it's not that bad.

Jean has a long story of getting people into trouble, but saying any more at this point would spoil the fun! Well, Oscar's parents were upset he got in trouble at school, but the *way* it happened made it a little bit worse. It was not like they would *not* do the same if Oscar had been "top" and started the whole mess... It should be clearer later on, but it's not a huge spoiler, so I can risk an explanation and see if it makes sense... Oscar's parents are not the religious sort. They're in fact die-hard atheists. But they believe there is a natural order to things, that females are naturally build to be seduced and have children, and males are naturally build to chase women and make them have children. So basically Oscar is screwing with nature and becoming an abomination because of it. Not *only* it was with another guy, BUT he was playing the GIRL in that sense (even if not on *top*). Hope it makes sense now, if not, there will be a further attempt at explaining this later on! And the next chapter is ready for publication! I'm just giving some more time for the readers to digest everything (and being a little evil by making people wait, but oh, well... =D). So don't worry, it will be a couple more days!

Well, let's just say Mr Smith was acting based on his assumptions about two students he knew very well. There will be more on that later on, so I won't say much more just yet! =DThe rules probably make sense, but I need to digest them first. Thanks for the comments! Next chapter should be coming up soon! It will definitely take less than a year...

Mr. Smith and the other teachers took us to their office, forcing us to pass through corridors crowded with students. Jean seemed to be enjoying the attention, even though we were laughed and pointed at by a most of them. He waived, winked and sent flying kisses to any guy who acknowledged his existence. I, on the other hand, was hoping the Earth would swallow me before the situation became even more humiliating. At least none of my friends was there. As we entered the office Jean went straight

It's not safe reading this while drinking grape juice either... I shall follow your advice when I write my next story.

I believe you, actually. My mother did maths at uni (did not graduate because I was born - then she came back and did counselling) and she tells me about the more "interesting" aspects of it. It doesn't make me like maths, but I do see your point. The thing is: you really have to be into it to get to the good parts. The stereotyped, overused view of maths and exact sciences is that of black and white and one right answer. And this view is used to justify why more people should do more of it then they should other stuff - and then there is no fund for Humanities, and life gets boring. Maybe if more people realised that what you said is true I wouldn't need to write such a long rant...

In Brazil if you want to have any chance at succeeding at all, you need to go to university. We have public universities that are free, but have very competitive entrance exams (which is to be expected), and loads of private universities where you pay loads of money for a degree that in most cases is not worth the money you put on it. Their entrance exams are a joke - they basically pass anyone with minimum IQ as long as they can pay for the course. Thus High School education is solely devoted to make us pass in the public university's entrance exam. The best schools are the private ones (also expensive), and they offer the better preparation and give you the highest chances of passing that entrance exam. Public schools, the free ones, are not very good. Most of their students are the poor children who can't afford a decent private school. Thus they finish school and have very little chance of getting into that free university, because their preparation for the entrance exam is less than adequate. What this means is that we get lots of well-off students in the public universities because they paid for their schools. They could probably afford a private university, but the public universities offer better quality learning (despite problems in infra-structure) at very little cost. And the poor people, who should be the ones getting on free education, end up not being able to go to university at all because, despite the fact that we have free higher education, the competitiveness of the entrance exam keeps them away from it. All of this is to say that I think higher education should be free for everyone. I'm living in the UK now, and because I'm an overseas student I pay £10,000 a year to study here (EU students pay around £3,000, UK students pay nothing, at least for now). I'm not going to comment on the unfairness and prejudice involved in that system (overseas: mostly developing countries with poorer people in them. Make the fees higher, they are less likely to come! Yay! We're "ethically" dis-encouraging the foreigners to come! ) - I would be here for hours. The thing is, the university is not that great. I did six months of university in Brazil (I was one of those students who went to a good private high school - paid for by a relative, because I'm not all that well-off - and managed to get into the good public university) and frankly, it was much better. I was given more things to read and more choices of subjects in those six months than I did for the first two years of my degree. The uni in Brazil was lacking in infra-structure (not many computer rooms, small-ish library, no toilet rolls in the toilets, and a new two-store building had no lift, and only an external staircase to go from one floor to another - oh, the wonders of architecture!). Had I stayed in Brazil, I would have studied much more things (much more INTERESTING things as well) in the same four years. But no, I'm in the UK in an Scottish university hoping money will someday grow in trees because I don't know how to pay for the rest of the course. I've been struggling every since I came to afford those damn £10,000. And is it worth it? Sadly, it is. Because I'm in the UK, any degree I get here will be much more valuable than the degree I would get in Brazil, just because it's from a university in a developed country. Despite the fact that I would probably learn much more in the Brazilian course. And a funny thing I realised having had experience in those two universities: a great number of my classmates also lacked general skills in writing, spelling, grammar, maths, and doing presentations in public. I had better grammar and spelling than quite a few fellow students I met here in Scotland. ME, the FOREIGNER who hasn't got English as his first language. It's more to do with people not learning basic grammar at school, but still... if a foreigner who has only been speaking your language for a couple of years knows more about it than you, you should feel ashamed. In Brazil we have grammar at school. "Portuguese" is the class were we learn about grammar. We have it from Primary 1 to the last year of High School. We also have "Literature" for, you know, literature. This way we learn about the books and we learn how to write properly (in theory, at least). Now back to the main question. A degree should be useful. If not for helping people get a job, than at least to make people have a bit more of general culture. "Knowledge for knowledge's sake" is a good thing. The more educated people are, the more they get exposed to different opinions and different people and are, in one way or the other, forced to think about things and get to some sort of conclusion about the world around them. The more information you have before making a decision, the more beneficial this decision is going to be. There are a lot of degrees that don't say more more than common sense, yes (psychology thinks it's a science! ), but it doesn't mean all higher education should be focused on "practical things" either. It's good to have engineers, mathematicians, physicists and the whatnots. It's good to go to university and get a job related to the degree you did later on. Of course it is. But if it wasn't for philosophers, historians, geographers, and all those "intellectuals" that seem to be doing nothing useful - or teaching nothing useful - then, well... We wouldn't know about the Greeks and their civilisations. We only know about them because a) Arab historians found their writings, translated them to Arabic and, because of wars and commerce with the Christian world, brought them to Europe and because GREEK historians wrote about their lives and the things happening around them (one of the things I studied in Brazil but never saw in here was the history of History as a discipline - it was quite interesting). Had the Greeks not decided to record their past, the Arabs would not have discovered their writings. Had the Arabs not discovered their writings, they would never get to Europe. And then Europe in the Middle Ages would have very little knowledge of Medicine and Astronomy, to cite a few examples. It was the Greek's knowledge of Astronomy that allowed them to cross the Atlantic (Vikings had done it too, but the rest of Europe didn't like them very much) and colonise Europe. My university is one of those that is cutting the Humanities department to allow the "sciences" and "research" to flourish. I think it's ridiculous. This way they are making higher education completely career-orientated, much like the High School in Brazil is public-university-entrance-exam orientated. If the only reason you go to university is to get a certain "practical" job, then we are at risk of learning nothing apart from the "practical" applications necessary for that job, and forget there is a world out there and that in real life nothing is really "practical" like they teach in the textbooks. History and other disciplines that are not seen as "practical" are the sort of disciplines that teach you to think. There is never a right or wrong answer in History - because you have to think and arrive at your own conclusions about things. You have to use your brain and get your own answer. In maths there is only one answer, and to get to that answer there is some deduction, but also loads of linear thinking and "a should inevitably follow b". No wonder science guys panic when something unexpected comes up. ; ) Anyway, university is worth it. It should be free for everyone because "knowledge for knowledge's sake" should not be a privilege. It's not good only for getting a job - or at least it should not be. I think I went on for too long. My apologies to those who didn't have the patience to read it all - congratulations for those who did!

I might not be able to use my computer until Monday... And right when I was inspired to write the next chapter of Be Myself!. At least it means I get to study during the weekend (yaaaaaaay... ). Or draw...

Thanks! The next chapter should come along soon.

Ok, then! I hope you'll like the next one too!

I have just one comment about number 84: You are ignoring non-straight people in that one.

It depends on the people involved and the rules they set. Sharing a partner is not everyone, but there are people who are happy doing that (and people who are happier doing that). I have never been in an open relationship before (I haven't been in that many relationships, in fact), but I know people who are polyamourous and I've learned a few things. I would probably consider poly - though I find it so hard to get together with one person that I don't know if I would ever manage to be with more than one!

Wow, many thanks. I'm a bit short of words now... I just hope I don't disappoint you with the rest of it!

I got three reviews for my first story! Yay! This is helping my inspiration a lot. I finally know what to do with the next chapter! (Because I have bullet points for all chapters up to chapter 31, but writing down the scenes is something else entirely...) So I'll probably work on it once I have some lunch and my brain cells have received their fair share of glucose. So far I was right. Posting a story here is doing wonders to my motivation!