Lucy Kemnitzer

I just wanted to say that I've noticed that I start looking forward to Friday's new installment on Wednesday or so.

I don't think it's a problem. Dom's not the only one writing these stories about young men and their relationships, where the stories are thoroughly embedded in communities and kinship/friendship networks. I think, actually, that a whole genre is being defined right here in front of our noses, and it's a good thing, too (I'd like to see the same kind of story in an urban setting sometime too, just for completeness' sake) Honestly, so far, this is my favorite of your stories. It's pretty clear you're really into this community and the people in it, and that the protagonist's back story and forward development are living breathing things, if I'm making sense. (I had only one problem, which is that at first I thought it was taking place in the northern Central Valley, and it was confusing when the pastor was said to come from California. Also that anybody would call a hundred-thousand people town "small" -- which I guessed the pastor or his wife must have done -- but maybe they said "a rural town" not a "small town" -- that would work for me: Salinas is what, 90K? and you could still call it rural for some purposes, though urban for others)

"Done with current projects" works for me . . . I hope the readers here do realize how much more prolific our online writers tend to be in terms of sheer wordage than all but the most driven print authors. It doesn't stop me from being anxious to see the next installment of something, but I know how much effort goes into every thousand words and I appreciate how fast these things come out (and I have been wondering if I could matrch the output if I were writing the same way).

It's just plain rude. No. Dan's right. It's election fraud, it's illegal, and you can't let them get away with it. Don't be put off by not knowing who the guy is: just call it in, with date and time and place. We're are a really precarious moment in history -- very like 1933 in Europe. We have a chance to preserve (our imperfect) democracy against the most organized anti-democratic, unjust, greedy, and dangerous clique the world has ever seen. It means we can't let the little things go. Edit: I gather by Dan's response that you're in Colorado, Dom? I've only been able to tell that you were somewhere in the middle of the continent.

Is it normal for it to rain like that where you are in the summer? Stay safe! Our summers are fire season, because it doesn't rain from mid-May till the end of October. But we get fog. I was thinking about "The Other Side of Me" today and I was wanting to ask -- once you said that writing in 3rd person was a stretch for you. How are you liking it? One thing I can say about this story is that I have no idea where it is going. It's hard to say which twin is odder, and the parents are plenty odd too.

It's in the sixties (Fahrenheit) here, except for a few hours in the afternoon when it may get to the eighties and everybody complains about how hot it is until the wind comes off the bay and everybody starts complaining how cold it is. Dom -- everybody makes that mistake at least once. It's easier to make thiese days because the movie makers have ratcheted up the scariness and anxiety factor in the movies. I think it's acceptable to bail if the kid wants to (but a lot of the time the kid doesn't want to because they have to know what happened!). I think it's interesting that the angst in hte coming-of-age stories gets to you like that and that you're feeling like writing about older people sometimes. I mean interesting in "what kind of story will that lead to?" way, not in the "let's psychoanalyze Dom" way. I'm having trouble finishing the thing I've been working on for a long time and I'm writing blog commentaries all over hellandgone to procrastinate and that's not good.

Think about the rhythm of the person's speech and find a way to represent that. Lars Eighner does this thing where he never uses contractions, and it perfectly matches the rhythm of Texas speech , even though Texans use contractions all the time. I wouldn't stick in a lot of comments like "he said in his Southern twang." I'd mention it a couple of times, max. And if there's a big pronunciation situation going on, I'd choose one or two words to demonstrate with. And I'd think about the consequences of the accent. Does the accent sound harsh to the narrator? Does it sound clipped, or slow-minded, or is it hard to understand? A funny thing happened in sixth grade when I moved from a rural neighborhood in California (where a lot of my neighbors were from Texas and Oklahoma) to a neighborhood in Philadelphia where most of my fellow students were black and from Virginia, and the rest were from Appalachia. The teacher had a student give me a spelling test for placement. I wrote down the wrong word for every word she gave me (but I spelled the wrong words right!). I didn't run into the Philadelphia accent until I went to high school. But I think the key principles are these: -- use the minimum clues to establish the accent. -- use clues that also reveal something else about the story, the plot, the characters, etc. -- let every detail have some degree of consequence.

Well, also, eating is like sex in terms of what it does for stories (except there are some things sex can do that eating doesn't). When characters in stories eat, there are a lot of little details you can put there to advance the story in various ways. Who do they eat with? or do they eat alone? And where? How do they eat -- in a hurry, savoring every bite, furtively, or ??? What does the taste of the food tell you about the characters, their situations, their state of mind? There's a lot of potential there. Am I the only one old enough to have seen the movie "Tom Jones" at an impressionable age? (if you haven't seen it, do, and wait for the dinner scene. You'll know what I'm talking about)

I also had a blood pressure situation very young, but it was what they call "labile" meaning it went up and down. Nowadays I think I might have started on blood pressure medication fifteen years earlier than I did. I kept it below the cutoff (which was higher then than it is now) mostly by eating moderately low salt, engaging in informal meditation, and wishful thinking. Now I take a diuretic and a different blood pressure medicine. I was on lisinopril for years until my doctor said "oh hey, the lisinopril causes a chronic cough in some people -- maybe it's part of your coughing problem." (this is of no relevance to you unless you develop a chronic cough that you can't get rid of by other means) What I'd say about the salt -- temporarily, go all the way to no salt at all, to reset your taste for salt. When you've done that for a while try adding the allowed amount of salt at the very last minute (i.e., don't cook with salt at all). What will happen is that you'll taste the salt more and you'll be able to get that salt enjoyment from a lot less salt. Do you see what I mean? You love salt. You have a condition which can often be improved by eating less salt. So you get yourself used to almost none, and then eensy weensy amounts are suddenly enough.

Yeah, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the climactic conversion moment when he understands himself and reforms. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/storiesvi/ It's chapter thirteen of Summer of Change. He's been really busy doing other writing, so it's extra cool that there's an update.

I've been in a monogamous relationship for 34 years, I don't ever flirt, not online, not in person, never, however . . . I think the answer to every single one of those questions is "it depends." 1. Is it understood by everyone -- both correspondents and their mates -- to be play only? Is it open or hidden? Is it wordplay, or is it a devious little way to mess with somebody's head? Or escape activity for a person who's not honestly happy in their relationship? 2. Does it feel like cheating to any of the people involved? 3. What were the understandings of the couple in the first place? How exclusive were they intending to be? What did they consider to be sex and what did they consider to be conversation? 4. Is the person saving all his best lines for his correspondent, and ignoring his actual sweetie, or giving them only perfunctory attention? As for why people stay: -- maybe they don't think fidelity is as important as you do. -- maybe they expect the situation to resolve reasonably soon. -- maybe they are afraid getting into the single world again. -- maybe they think the guy has more advantages than disadvantages. -- maybe they're two-timing themselves and feel guilty. It all depends . . .

Can you be with your dog when they do the deed? We were able to do that: three of us (my younger kid didn't want to) sat on the floor of the examining room with the dog between us, and the vet gave her an injection to make her sleepy and another that actually killed her. It made things so much easier. And in this case, the cremation service had connection with a piece of land where the ashes are scattered in the forest, and we could have even gone to where the ashes went if we had wanted. The reason you're grieving your dog more is that your dog is the thing you have to deal with on your own, and with your uncle you're busy being the go-to guy.

I consider myself a feminist but I also consider myself a "masculinist" The problem is that this word already has a meaning, and it isn't what you mean here! Even though "feminism" has that root meaning "woman," it's not about securing rights and possibilities for women only: it's about deep equality. Well, I should qualify that -- of course we know there are people who think feminism is about whether there are women CEOs, period. But we know better than that, don't we? We want to see everybody get their fair share, and decent treatment, and the opportunity to reach their potential, and to have friends, family, and lovers as it suits them.

So, I submitted a story and it's here.

Lots of newbies to introduce to your satorical splendor. Is that a cross betweensatirical and sartorial and does that mean Vic has to make fun of their clothes?

It was a primary election, and nonpartisan local elections, except in the San Diego area where they were voting for a replacement for Duke Cunningham, the Republican who had to resign because of a huge raft of indictments for various kinds of big-money corruption. Francine Busby, the Democratic candidate, ran on a platform that she was honest and competent, and didn't run on the issues. So she lost. The era of Democrats being able to win by saying "I'm just like the Republicans except I'm honest" is over. Both of the propositions went down -- the bond for the libraries and the tiny tax on rich people for preschools. Tonight when I'm not on dialup I'll put up the links for more information. The guy I voted for in my county's supervisorial race lost by a big margin, but I don't mind. The other guy's almost the same: I was voting to indicate which policies I wanted in those few places where they differ.

Yes, tomorrow's the big day. My son and I, both being underemployed, will be pollworkers tomorrow. It'll be a long, long day -- we leave the house at 5:30 in the morning and we don't get home till after eleven.

I'm going to elaborate, but first, I want to emphasize I'm not looking for a fight. It's a sort of cultural and sort of political and sort of esthetic thing I've been noticing. Oh another thing I want to say before I start is that I live in a place which itself is neither urban nor rural nor suburban or maybe it's all three: a fairly sophisticated college town in a region which is largely agricultural, with chunks of wilderness, very close to a major urban center. So I don't have a position about what's better, urban or rural. I have affection for city, town, country, and wilderness, all of them. But when you look at the more reactionary news and culture venues they'll frequently do this thing where they "get back to the breal America" and it's some old white guys, my age or older, sitting around a small-town coffee shop with a view of fields out the window. And they're expressing some completely bizarre nostalgic point of view that doesn't reflect anything but the most right-wing propaganda about what the country supposedly was all about at some time or another. But why are they the "real" America? (at this point I cut a long disquisition on the demographics of America). They are real people, that's true. But they're not realer than anyone else. We're all real. Another place I notice this is in mass market print romances, which I've been delving into lately for various reasons. There's frequently this woman who's fleeing a false and unsatisfying life in the city and she ends up ina perfectly awful-sounding "perfect" small town and all her problems are solved by meeting the right man with an extended rural family. Now, I have to repeat: I don't expect this to be a problem here. I expect this story to be, like the other "Little Buddha" stories I have come to love, a story about specific people in a specific situation -- real, true people, for all that they're fiction. I just accidentally tripped my own trigger, and in public. I don't think it's even a problem if our little goth guy decides he likes the country and wants to stay there forever, because that's something that some real people really do. (here's a story that expresses how I truly feel about the country and the city:city-mouse-country-mouse) And to repeat, I really like the story so far: I think that our little goth guy and his cousin and his aunt ar e all interesting people, so far.

This looks promising. The characters are interesting and I can tell I'm going to like them. Only do me a favor, okay: don't do that thing where the urban protagonist discovers that the Heart of America Is In Its Rural Small Towns -- just let the story be about the specific people involved? Actually, I trust you to do that, based on what I've read so far. Just wanted to blow off steam about what I've been running into elsewhere.

I don't agree that Harris talking about the woman's grief is just an attempt to cover up his error. I think he's really trying to give Cameron a way to see the situation that allows him to feel less of a target. He's a man whose job takes many hours, but he also puts in many hours of volunteer community service. He takes in Cameron when all he knows about him is that he has screwed up badly and his father doesn't want him -- he doesn't really know how completely alone Cameron is when he makes the decision, it comes out later. There are parents who are always harder on their children than other people not because they don't love the children but because they are that hard on themselves, and they treat the children the same way as they treat themselves. Harris treats Kyle very much like he treats Cameron, but notice that Kyle does not feel insecure or oppressed -- just a little annoyed now and then: I don't think this is because Kyle is a saint but because Harris, taken over a lifetime, does most of what a dad ought to. This is not saying that he's not an ass in many ways. What I expect is that he's going to keep being too hard on Cameron and Cameron is going to break and do something stupid and it will explode in his face. I expect that things will get very bad before they get better.

I'm not reallyb into forcing things in general, but I wish someone had manipulated me into going to certain funerals when I was given the choice not to go, and I wish I had been allowed to go to a certain funeral that nobody thought about me going to (a fifteen year old I admired, when I was thirteen, and n ot going to the funeral sort of cut me out of the whole grieving process and I don't think I ever got over it). It was the right thing for Cameron to go -- even with the horrible things that happened there. But it would be nice if Harris could figure out how to be warmer. He's an ass in many ways but he really is trying to save Cameron's life. Vance -- I think this story is the best you've written. I think it's a leap forward, actually. I look forward to new Cameron chapters almost more than anything.

Not that long ago: just before he started With Trust. He did say he was having trouble writing the two points of view and the third person, so I don't think he's likely to return to it for a while. There's some other things about the story that I think are unusual for him, and maybe difficult: that whole thing with the nerdy outsider point of view -- if you look back at Dom's stories, the protagonists are usually fairly extroverted and socially apt, and well integrated to their local mainstream, at least before they get to their coming-out crisis. And Harrison Polk, while not socially inept, is marginalized, picked on, and shy. I really like the points of view in the story (though in general I'm getting a little tired of the alternating viewpoint story, and as soon as I say that all I can think of is alternating viewpoint stories that I like a lot, like vi's stories).

Dom -- I remember when you were sort of burned out on "Desert Dropping." You wrote some other wonderful stuff for a while and then came back to it refreshed and did very well. You can take that two ways -- either it's a hint that you might want to take another look at "Harrison," or something else, or it's an expression of confidence that all will be well. Choose the interpretation that suits you better.