Lucy Kemnitzer

I'm in a mood today and I'm disagreeing with the ugly vs beautiful thing on all counts. Right now -- oh fooey, this is going to sound trite and cheesy but it's how I feel right now, okay? If it has a human genotype, oh hell, if it's an organism, and it doesn't have nasty associations for me, it's beautiful. I saw my father's wives (the living ones, and including a person who gets called wife sometimes but was really my father's best friend) washing his body Friday morning. So you can see what's going on here. Hell, slime molds are beautiful to me right now. Bad example, they already were. Okay, mildew. It's alive, right? Life is beautiful. Oh ick, I'm the sentimental one. But I'm nbound to tell the truth and there it is.

Well, I'm probably the wrong person to talk about Valentine's Day. But although I adore romantic fiction, I'm really not into it in real life. I like more domesticated kinds of affection. Like family and friends. I think the real success of a romance, for example, is when the couple stops being lovers and starts being family (I don't mean have kids necessarily, though I'm all in favor of that when it's appropriate). Anyway, I'm leading up to saying, yeah, the paper frog from the kid and his mom, that's the best kind, even if it's not what most people have in mind when they think of the day. (my father is in the hospital, probably dying, and I've been observing what his family consists of --it makes me glad he's in the hospital in San Francisco, where you don't have to explain how he's accumulated this huge "immediate family." We did designate his best friend as his daughter to get her complete access, but other than that, well, we're all paper frogs together here)

Actually, have you browsed the YA section at the bookstore lately? (At least the YA section of an independent bookstore in a reasonable-sized town,) Yankee is actually very similar to some books I've seen there. And 80K is a perfect length for YA. It used to be that webpublishing counted as prior publishing and editors would be skittish about producing a book from a manuscript that had been onlione, but at least some of them have sort of figured out that online and print publishing are quite different and online exposure actually only helps print sales. Yankee would make a great YA book, I think. Do you have a really good bookstore -- or a good library -- where you live? The thing to do would be to browse the YA section and look for books like enough to this story, and notice who published them, and if possible who the editor is. Then you want to look up the publisher online and find out what kind of contect they want -- do they want just a query letter to start with, or the first three chapters and an outline, or the whole manuscript. And then -- submit it!

Huh. I'd bet it's more the mainstreaming of being gay. It's not nearly so much a big deal, in a way not enough to actually warrant a genre as such -- the fact that the protagonist and his love interest are both guys isn't remarkable as such, and while it's necessary and drives the story, as the problems are partly unique, in a lot of ways they're not gay problems so much as just people problems or growing up problems. May just be the fact that the basic assumption is we're just people like everyone else. Or, y'know, maybe not. . Well, looking at the history of gay coming of age stories, and going back before the internet serial, you can definitely see a mainstreaming tendency. You've got your old print stories, which are almost all tragic (even most of the purely stroke stories, honestly), and the tragedy is inherent in the gayness -- there's no chance in those old stories that a resolution can be other than despair, destruction, and diminishment. There are exceptions, but very few, and they seem in most cases to be self-consciously perverse. Then you get a long period when the stories are kind of bittersweet: where there's a resolution that's about a kind of guarded self-acceptance in the face of tremendous outside pressure, but the relationships hardly ever end up in happily ever after. Then we get the early text files online -- mostly flat-out short stroke pieces -- and at the same time, the beginning of the print gay romantic comedy, which at first is kind of rooted in Stonewall giddiness and rollicking excesses. There's a growing sense that happy endings are possible and therefore desirable (I'm going to get back to the special case of stories like Yankee in a moment), and a real sense of joy in both physical pleasure and emotional satisfaction. The serial develops somewhere along here. First they're just returning to a satisfactory fantasy, and piling on of sexual acts one after another, more and more participants, etc. Then they somehow develop story arc and plot, and growth and change for the characters, just like literature! And that's what it is (if you let go of the idea that literature is something that only happens in the past). It's a literature. The "fantasy" gets more elaborate and rich: it's no longer "Protagonist gets off:" no longer even "protagonist finds true love:" it's "Protagonist finds true love, family, and community." It's mature enough to spin off variations. Which is where Yankee comes in. Justin is a modern gay coming of age story protagonist: Rob is an old-fashioned one. Justin doesn't have the communication skills to explain what all Rob could have -- what is right there in front of them, and what Justin accepts as normal. Rob's issues are less about being gay, as you've been saying, than they are about being afraid of life. Yankee doesn't violate the concentions that are developing, it enriches them.

When you write a serial and post it as it's written, that's what happens. I've seen a lot of serials change in character as they go and the writer has other ideas. Some stories lose their integrity as the writer decides they really want to write a different story (I'm too kind to name names here, but there's a writer I keep giving up on because he does that: the story starts out interesting and then weird crap keeps happening until there's really no story). Yankee does not lose its integrity, so, as my son says, you are The Win. I've had trouble with the serial form: a fiddle player became a banjo player, and various identifying characteristics got mixed up a little and I had to do some emergency surgery. Not to mention I'm two months behind on it (doing other things, mostly, but also struggling with family illnesses, plural). But I think the form is really exciting and interesting, and the interactive aspect of it is revolutionary. I mean in unexpected ways, really.

Hang on to your story sense. This worked well as a story. The genre you're writing in is really new -- I've been watching it develop and I think it's less than five years since it's really split off on its own. I think the genre is the child of the stroke story and the traditional coming of age romance, but there seems to have also been cross-pollination from elsewhere. Anyway, whatever you write now is on the ground floor of a developing genre. In other words, you're contributing to making the rules, setting the conventions, and building the expectations. Any genre worth reading is not monochrome: it has threads of other colors running through the weave. It became pretty clear about half way through that there was a strong possibility that Rob was going to get more messed up rather than less. But, except for the warning at the beginning of each chapter, it did not look inevitable: right up to the end there was this feeling that maybe it would work out, maybe Rob would be okay, and maybe Rob and Justin would be together -- especially since Justin did mention in his first-person narration that he and Dan soon figured out they weren't suited as lovers. So seeing at the end that Rob is broken like that is hard. But the story has integrity this way. I do have a quibble with some details at the end of the story. When Rob's mom says he's gone "away" -- I wanted her to say either "he's gone to live with relatives," or "he's gone to a boarding school for troubled teens," or "he's in a mental hospital." Or for Justin to at least ask and not be told, or to realize later that he didn't ask. And I disagree with Conner about Justin as a point of view character -- I think his very cluelessness makes him an excellent point of view character, because (1) his cluelessness makes things happen and (2) his clelessness makes people explain thigns to him that might not otherwise be brought forward and (3) his cluelessness gives him something to learn. And I think the inconsistency of his cluelessness is consistent with what I've actually observed. The fact is that he can figure things out if he brings all his attention to bear on other people's behavior and analyses what he sees and hears step by step and point by point. If he tries to go on instinct he's unarmed. I would actually like to see Justin and Rob meet again as fullgrown adults, and either get together or develop a friendship (possibly after failing in a relationship again). There's a lot of potential there, with such heavy and lumpy baggage to carry between them.

After Chapter 1, all I can say is, Nels needs to get himself some new friends. Definitely. This is sort of inverted from the social structure of earlier stories, isn't it? Instead of having a dangerously dysfunctional family (well, mom being dead counts as dysfunctional) and supportive friendship network, this kid has an apparently supportive, well-integrated family and dangerously wacky friends. This is interesting. I think these stories are, all of them, less about first love than about family and community -- what they are, how they act, and how they develop. And that, I think, is what makes them so good.

I hope "getting bored again" is a sort of global thing and not specifically bored with our Arizona guys, who get more interesting to me every minute -- though I think they're getting very close to that not-quite-resolved point where you like to end their stories. Your feelings might reflect that. I read "In Trust," and it's attractive (with the extra added charm of truly amazing HTML errors, at least on my browser -- I'm almost reluctant to report them, because after they get fixed there won't be any story anywhere that has Chinese characters instead of apostrophes and abbreviations!). But the one I'm anxious to see is that other little bit you were running in the side bar for a while. I've had a little ennui the last month myself, but it's reaction to health issues in my family and scary happenings in the Capitol, mostly. I keep telling myself that tomorrow I'll get back to it.

Dom -- people say "left coast" when they are talking about the west coast and they're implying something about politics and culture: it's an analogy with "Left Bank" which is a part of Paris which is south of the Seine and has traditionally been a center for arts, literature, left-wing politics, outrageous behavior, and -- other stuff. Yes, I know, South is not West, and "left wing" comes from yet another thing (seating arrangements in the French legislature around the time of their Revolution). But that's how language is. (and here I sit on the left coast)

No answer so far. But I go all incommunicative for months at a time myself, so I don't think it's necessarily significant that Matt hasn't answered.

I sent Matt a hello-are-you-ok note a few hours ago.

Oy, do not, do not, do not, take age as an indication of safety when deciding how much precaution to take when having sex, please, please. After steadily dropping, the rate of infection is going up . . . among the young, especially. Did your health teacher tell you that every time you have sex with a person you're also having sex with every person that they've ever had sex with? And that you don't know who those people are? People who mean well and intend to be honest can "forget" to tell you about that one time at that party they went to and got kind of blasted and got it on with somebody that they never saw again, and really they're not the kind of person who does that and they were pretty sure that they didn't do anything really unsafe and the other person was probably nearly a virgin and couldn't have picked up anything scary anyway and it was the only time they ever did anything risky because they're really responsible all the time. And that's all it takes. (My stepmother is an AIDS outreach and education person, just came home from a stint in Africa helping to develop local programs for HIV positive self-care, mutual aid, and peer education/counseling: had a stroke in Tanzania, is recovering at home now: she practically invented her field back at the beginning of the epidemic: so naturally I'm more conscious of this issue than you might expect)

Gee, these questuions are sure prompting long answers. I'll try to keep mine short, but I fear it's not a simple one. I'm seriously an old lady now but I remember vividly what my teenaged years were like. Oy, do I ever, and I am very glad I don't have to do that again, though I can say I wish I could undo some things and do some things I didn't, but not much because regret is a waste of time. Where was I? No story ever made a kid go out and shoot themselves up, even if the kid thinks so. Kids live in a milieu, with a lot of influences. That being said, I agree that writers have some responsibility to contribute to the milieu in constructive ways. But those constructive ways are not "show a negative consequence for every single act of drug use --" it's just not that simple. You could write a story in which the main character uses several heavy drugs several times unscathed and still, because of the whole story and all the things in it , end up with a conclusion that he probably shouldn't have done it and probably shouldn't do any more of it. Or you could not promote a position about the drugs at all because your story is busy being responsible about something else. There are more realistic stories and less realistic stories. You write in the more realistic corner. And that, I think, is your answer: if the character you're writing about tokes or drinks or does whatever, it's probably going to show up in the story. I'm going to tell you not to second guess yourself when you're writing what "really happened" (I think you know what I mean by that -- there's ways that fiction can be more true or less true, and when you're writing you sometimes have this burning clear vision of what's more true). You can read it over when you're revising and editing to make sure it feels right to you, but don't try to force a message: you already have one built in to your stories as it is, and it's important and positive as it stands.* When I was first writingThe Donor I had some bad moments that a person could read it and think I was making a metaphor for certain relationships, and comparing them to the predations of a monster. But I stopped worrying about it when I realized that I really had, unknown to myself, built an entirely different metaphor, all about caring for each other and being responsible. I had thought I was just writing this story that had popped into my head full-blown when I was a little girl (eleven) and kept around until I was old enough to write it. *I will only tell you what this message is if you insist: I'm not sure you really want to know.

You guys are like my daughter, who just warned my son off a young woman he was interested in because she is a friend of hers and she didn't want to hear about her brother's love life in the gossip mill. Grossgrossgross, she said. Poor guy, I think he decided to let it go.

Dom? Weren't you just now utterly floored by the possibility that your sisters could have such a feeling as lust?

Dom, lighten up. One: your sister is undoubtedly worthy of being your sister, so that means she has some sense and ability to take care of herself, right? Two, she's entitled to make her own mistakes. Three, so what if the boys she's seeing are interested in having sex with her? Maybe she's interested in having sex with him . . . don't be shocked! These are her decisions to make. Now, if you want to be your little sister's confidante, you'd better be a trustworthy one -- that means not freaking out when you hear about things. If you're judgmental and excitable, she's not going to tell you things. (I'm a little sister, can't you tell? My brother was cool, though. And my son likes my daughter's boyfriend. We all do: he's a sweety)

my fascination with shoe shopp[ing is that it's hard to do -- I have weird feet: nothing wrong with them but they are wide and tall and I can'ty get them into shows in the regular stores so I'm always giving a glance in case I find a shoe that's wider and taller or more stretchable than average. So I have a pair of boys' sandals (a relief as I like the way Birkenstocks feel and fit but the cork always breaks on me), a pair of fake Uggs (real Uggs don't fit), a pair of funny-looking Birkenstock oxfords, a pair of orthopedic Mary Janes for dress up, and a pair of orthopedic black leather high tops, sort of halfway between boots and shoes. And some old Birkenstock Mary Janes (t straps I guess to the moderns) which need mending. What I want is some knee boots or waders so I can volunteer to monitor water quality in Elkhorn Slough, one of the biggest bird nesting areas in the world and only a few miles down the road, but I can't find any I can get into. Coyotes: (1) they're sneaky bold buggers and they'll do anything. (2) dogs and cats really really like the smell of human feet, so it's not inconceivable that coyotes would feel the same and run off with shoes.

You might have more in common with her than you think . . . I keep discovering similarities I didn't perceive before, and my mother's been dead for fourteen years. On the other hand, I see my kids do "me" things, and I just want to apologize to them.

Well, I just looked all around and could not find anything labelled "sneak peaks." Where exactly is it?

I LOVE "Out with Harrison Polk" !!!!! For my fellow Domaholics...go read it..you will be hooked..I hope Dom decides to write it.. Dom said it would a short story..I bet it could be a long great story..but either way....Please Dom, write it and hopefully post it for us to read:) The sidebar is where Harrison Polk used to be. It's a column on the side of a printed thing: it was on the right side of Dom's blog. Now I go look in the forum like Ann said -- I haven't been reading there much because it's too much!

Sidebar went away! I hope that means you've got other plans for those boys. I thought it was interesting -- and you're not writing three stories at once anymore!

I just wanted to say I found the "practice" third-person story on the sidebar. I do like it a lot. It does read really differently from the first-person pieces. For one thing, you've got really different people than your usual range of characters -- they're more iconic, which I think is interesting. I'm looking forward to seeing where you go with it.

I trust you. Remember at the beginning I thought you weren't sure what you wanted to do, and you said you knew exactly what you were doing? It's been obvious to me since the next bit you posted after that that you really are completely in control of what's going on. I thoroughly enjoy stuff like this, actually: pulling back layers after layers revealing new truths that contradict the former ones. That is, when th author plays fair and the stuff isn't flying in from nowhere. I can see, looking back, that the clues about Seth were there all along: there's no actual inconsistency with what Rory saw and heard and what Seth says about it now. So don't worry. And those things that feel like flames? They're just your readers getting drawn in and reacting instinctively. If you can be tough about it, you can realize it's all good, because it's a measure of your effectiveness.

You know, that stuff that belongs in the mountains. In less reasonable places, they allow it to spray all over the lower parts too. (yes, I know what you were saying)