Drew Payne

@Anton_Cloche, thanks for your wonderful feedback. I will write the sequel to this story, I need to give the central story an ending. I'm working on some gay history stories, several of them written about events that I remember, I'm just not the fastest writer. Writing about the past has helped me through this awful pandemic. I will write stories about Covid-19, but I need some time, I need to write about them in the past, at the moment it is all too real.

@Anton_Cloche, I love it!! I did think of finishing the story with a little exchange in court. Ryan's Father: As God is my judge, I am innocent! Judge: He isn't. I am. You are not. Twelve years.

@Anton_Cloche, thanks for your comment. I was raised a middle-class Protestant, in Northern England, and this was very much the attitude I grow up in, people just didn't talk about things they didn't like or understand. My parents couldn't understand my sexuality or we didn't talk about it. A friend of mine once said that I should challenge them and not accept their silence, he couldn't understand how I wasn’t able to do that. I wrote this story to explain that situation. I'm not the central character here but I lived his situation.

This is certainly a dysfunctional family. Richard is fulfilling the role he was has been told is his "duty", providing for his family, but he sees it as his wife's "duty" to run his home and do all the child raising. I hope Margaret will realise that she can be more than an unpaid cook and servant to this family. Reading The Female Eunuch may open her eyes or she may fall back into her old ways. Gary is so disparate to be an adult, way before he is emotionally grown up. Karl needs to get out of there and find himself a gay life as soon as he can, but back in the 1970s that was not easy to do. He'll have to move away from home as soon as he can. This might sound bleak but I was nine when this story was set and I remember how completely heterosexual life was growing up in the suburbs was back then. Thanks for the feedback, I was so worried, writing this, that I hadn't caught the different characters personalities/viewpoints.

@Talo Segura thank you. This story is set 45 years ago and yet is still within living memory, well within my memory. I remember sitting around the television, watching films with my family, watching them at the same time they were broadcast. Things were so different then to they are now, but things were so different 45 years before 1975. Things are always changing and it always seems so quick. Writing Historical Fiction (And this is certainly it) has shown me that it's a way to write about universal themes, in this case families who cannot communicate. If this story was set today the family's actions would be very different but would their worries and problems be different? Though they would all be stuck together in the same house, thanks to Covid and lockdown. I know about the film Sebastiane. I remember when it was first shown on British television, it was amazing to see to my teenage gay boy's eyes.

@pvtguy, thank you. I remember sitting through films like this with my family, as a child, all sitting in silence and I not knowing what to say to them. As a child I felt so distanced from my family and I hated it. As an adult I now know the reasons for our distance, they had their problems too, but we just didn't talk about it. I wanted to capture that awkward feeling of watching the television together and yet not communicating. This family does have different(ish) secrets and worries to the ones my own had.

1 Karl’s View They were all gathered around the TV that evening, as they always did on Boxing Day, to watch the holiday film. His mum sitting and knitting in her armchair, his dad with his unread newspaper by his side in his armchair, his older brother Gary slouched at one end of the sofa and Karl sat at the other end. That year the film was One Million Years B.C., the nineteen-sixties dinosaur fantasy with Raquel Welch in a shammy-leather bikini. Even to his eleven-year-old eyes the film wa

@Talo Segura, thank you. What amazing feedback and, in a way, what a great Christmas present. I have been thinking a lot about what you said and you're right. There's a lot to explore here and other characters to write. How does Jason's mother really react to all this (and what is her name), what was his father like, who are the other adults in his life. There's also Archie, what I could do with him. And Jason's grandmother is a very typical character of mine and yet we don't even see her here. There are some of the themes here that have been running throw my writing recently. There's only one, big problem though... I need the time to write this. I've got so many other things I want/need to write. I've finally started the sequel to my novella A Walk Along the Promenade, and I've several unfinished projects I need to finish. I need to win the lottery so I can stay at home and just write (It's taken so long to reply to this because I've been so busy with and tired from work). Well, give me time.

@Parker Owens, thank you. I wanted to write here about how the sins of the parents can screw-up the children. Though the original ending was much darker. Then a friend of mine read it, she suggested that I explore Jason's fear of becoming like this father and that gave me a different angle to write about. It also gave me something else to write about, something that I don't often see in stories, and as I wrote about Jason I felt I needed to give him the beginnings of an escape route.

Jason took his time walking home from school. There was no need to rush. His mum wouldn’t be there waiting for his return, to complain at him if he was late. She was now working full-time, not just mornings, and wouldn't get home until after six o'clock. But since they moved from their old house to this flat, his journey to school had doubled in length. He would walk back from school, not bothering with the bus he took there. Walking home gave him time to be by himself and let his thoughts w

@bedseller, thanks for such wonderful feedback but I can't take all the credit. I attend a Writers' Workshop and the feedback I have received there has really helped me to write from characters' points-of-view, to get into the mind of those characters. I also have to thank @Marty for his wonderful editing. I'm afraid there are British Evangelical Christians who are just as "out there" as their American cousins, but they're not as well resourced or influential here. I grew up as an Evangelical Christian and we were so intense that it makes me embarrassed to remember it. I also had a colleague who was an Evangelical Christian who saw it as her mission to "save" me, and she failed . Making the father such a Christian was my way of introducing Simon's first real choice, to break from his father so he could be honest about himself. I'm afraid nurses and social workers are not that well paid. I'm a nurse, the same job as Simon's mother, though I'm at the top of my grade, and even with that I'm still not greatly paid, but I'm fortunate that I'm married to a Nurse Specialist. A colleague of mine, who's on the same grade as me and only two years younger, still lives in a room in a shared flat because that's all she can afford. Social workers are not in any better situation. We've both had ten years of pay freeze and below inflation pay rises. I haven't been publishing much lately because at the beginning of October my computer died and I thought I'd lost all my writing, including what I was working on. To cut a long and horrible story short, it took a month but I eventually got all my files back, all my writing, but I'm so behind with everything I was planning on writing. I will be posting soon(ish). If you follow me, I'll be posting updates when I do, but also do checkout my other writing and do leave feedback because that means so much to me. Happy reading

I thought this was the right place to end, plus I didn't want to write a love scene between two teenage boys (that would rather icky). I learnt long ago to end a story just a bit short and let the reader fill in the rest. I'm so glad you liked this story, I'm so proud that I actually finished it. I am busy writing more and will be publishing more soon(ish). I'm actually at the moment rather busy formatting my writers' group's yearly anthology, which be published soon. But I'm working on a long read, plus writing new short stories and re-writing some old ones. Thanks for your support.

It has taken me awhile to reply to you because I am so bowled over by your comment. Praise like that just makes me want to write as much as I can, and it makes me feel very humble. I really enjoy writing and there are so many different stories I want to tell. Writing is also my way of trying to make sense of the world around me. This story started off as a story about how isolated gay teens can still be, I'd been reading a lot about the subject, but as I wrote it, and read more about it, I realised that there was more to write about here. This story just snowballed into this long form story. It is a sort of story about how I would have liked to have come out, no matter what happed to him Simon never hated himself for being gay (I wish that had been my story but I'm a lot older than Simon and had a very different coming out). But I am so happy I was able to finish it because this time I knew what I was going to do with it, publish it here. I have quite a few other stories I want/need to finish and I will be starting that in the future, but I do have to say that several of them will be rather dark in tone. I'm fascinated by how traumatic events affect people's lives and how people respond to unexpected events. But at present I am second story in the trilogy I started with A Walk Along the Promenade, plus I'm writing a collection of short stories with a linked theme, but a rather weird theme. Thank you for your wonderful feedback, it did me the power of good to read it because I always worry about my writing.

Thank you for such wonderful feedback. I always worry about the characters I create and do they work as actual people. Niki was the easiest character to create here because she has so much of me in her, she has my views and the insights I've developed over the years. Simon's mum was based on a couple of women I've worked, one especially who left her husband for her female lover. Simon's dad I wanted to be an antagonist, someone who didn't welcome news of Simon's sexuality, but I didn't want him to be a one-dimensional villain. I remembered when I was an Evangelical Christian (A long time ago) and the straight men who found an identity through it, I could write so much about them, and based Simon's dad on them, just as screwed up. Freddie and Vee were based two people I knew, when I was coming out in Liverpool, and their dialogue was such fun to write. I've written comedy sketches in the past, and I put what I learnt about finding comedy in dialogue into their conversations. Plus Freddie provided such an important plot device, he is Simon's guide into what being gay involves. I also wanted to make him fem but very sexual, two fingers up to the lie that no one shags the fem guys. Simon was so hard to create, I had to repeatedly remind myself that he is sixteen and very naive. I couldn't give him much insight, though it was fun writing Jeff's romance with him, having Simon not reading any of Jeff's signals, though they weren't very loud signals either. The last chapter was easy and hard to write. Easy because I had been thinking about it for months and rehearsing their dialog in my head, but hard because it was finally ending this story. It was a strange feeling leaving this world. I'm so grateful for all the support I've found on GA, @Marty's proofreading/editing has been amazing and given me so much confidence. The feedback I've received writing this story has been invaluable, showing me I was on the right track and helping me refine the characters as I replied to people's comments. It has also been wonderful watching the number of views of each chapter increasing, people actually wanted to read what I wrote (!!). I will be publishing more here, I'm already busy writing, but it will be very different stories. Creating Simon was such hard work that I'm really happy to get back to writing about adults with insight, okay really screwed up adults. I'm writing some short stories for a themed collection and boy these characters are not the happiest of people. Thanks for your support.

Thank you. I wanted write a hopeful ending. The story is about Simon developing his own gay identify and how beneficial it is to him. I know giving him a new boyfriend, at the end of the story, is a bit of a cliché, but I didn't want Simon ending up with the Head Boy or the Captain of the Football Team. Jeff is just as much on the fringes of college society as Simon is. It was also interesting to write Jeff's attraction for Simon but have Simon not realise it. The challenge was to try and make that realistic. I never gave up on writing a novel because I didn't know where it was going or how I would get there. I'd get demoralised because I wouldn't know what I would do with it once I'd finished it. My writing is too gay for many ordinary publishers but not romantic enough for gay publishers. Who would read it once I'd finished it? And when I couldn't answer that I'd get demoralised and give up on writing it because there didn't seem any point. Posting on GA has really energised me because readers are so ready to engage with me and that is amazing. I've posted on other platforms and been lucky to get one or two comments for each story. Here I've so much contact with readers and it has been great, it has kept me going because I can see a purpose to writing this story. I can now go back to those unfinished stories and finish them, one at a time, because I know what I can do with them and they will be read. I'm not writing without any purpose. I know what you mean about hearing your characters' voices in your head. I could hear these characters so well when I was writing them. Of course, I now hear other voices, the voices of the characters I'm writing now.

Thanks for your great feedback. I did enjoy writing Simon and Jeff's awkward relationship. Jeff obviously fancied Simon and, bless him, Simon didn't have a clue. That was fun to write, and to deny like hell in all my comments in the previous chapters (Yes, I lied but it was all in the name of not giving away the plot). It’s a great satisfaction to have actually finished this long form story. I now have to get busy and finish those half-written novels I have tucked away. Thank you for your support it has meant a lot and has helped me finish this story.

Tony, Thank you for your review, it did me the power of good. I always worry about what I've written. It does me good to hear that my writing works. I know that people like to hear some of the background behind a story, and this is the first long form story I finished and I'm proud of that. I don't feel it’s giving away any "writer's secret" because so many of my "secrets" are rather obvious, I listen to people and I research a lot. In my early twenties I did read a lot of coming out stories, I was trying to develop my own gay identity, and a lot of them were formulistic and so shallow. When I started to try and write novels, I promised myself I wouldn't write one. Well, the first long form story I actually wrote is a coming out story. Before I started this story, I did a lot of research and reading about other people's coming out experiences, and I took the most common themes from them and used them here. Not that scientific but it gave me an insight into the coming out experience (my own was so a-typical that I used none of it here). I have several unfinished novels and I am going back to them and finishing writing them, one by one. Some of them of horribly over-written (I did that back then) but I can correct that. The problem is that I have a lot of ideas for other stories too. I just need the time to get them all done. But GA has given me so much confidence with my writing, readers seem very happy to comment on stories which is so helpful. I'm certainly going to be publishing more on here, I've already begun the two projects I mentioned in the Afterword. Don't worry me and Covid. I'm a nurse by profession and I know way too much about Covid, and my husband is an Infection Control Nurse and he knows even more. Social Distancing and wearing masks are automatic with us. You take care of yourself and thank you for the feedback. Drew

Thank you. That does me the power of good to hear.

Rosie on her best behaviour, sort of, Niki policing her and Simon and Jeff very tired, yes that would be an interesting Saturday lunch; but I knew this was the right place to stop. Simon has moved on 180 degrees from when this story started, he has come out and is starting to find his place in the world. Thanks for your great comments. I'm already writing my next stories and they are VERY different.

Simon stepped out of the back door of Aunt Kate’s car. Niki was sat in the back seat, next to where he’d been sitting, and his mum was sitting in the front passenger seat, with Aunt Kate behind the steering wheel. Aunt Kate was still dressed in her work clothes, but his mum and Niki had changed before leaving home. Niki was wearing black jeans and green shirt, while his mum was wearing her smooth, blue and figure-hugging party dress. “Thanks Aunt Kate,” Simon called into the car, as Aunt Kat

Tim, I was in two-minds about starting the themed, sci-fi collection of stories, some of them will be on difficult and challenging subjects, but I'm going to start writing them, well I've started one of the stories already. I can use sci-fi to explore some of my favourite themes. Happy writing and thanks for your encouragement.

Oops, my mistake. I am still fascinated by that idea, two husbands with the same first name, I've just got to find the right story for them. I use fiction to write about real things because it is easier, it is one step removed from me, or more, and therefore it isn't me. His Story is a good example of this. The narrator in it isn't me and his journey isn't mine, even though we both went through the same emotions because of the same source. Fiction gives me the chance to write about the things that are important to me, that I feel strongly about, without laying my emotional self bare. I couldn't write an autobiography, that is way too raw and unprotected for me. Though I admire people who can. I am so sorry about what happened to you. Abuse is abuse is abuse, and its shit. But it makes me so angry that the Christian Church's default setting always seems to be to cover it up. I am so glad you found Michael. I know several people who are very happy being single. I am not one of them. I was in a bad place when I met my husband, Martin, and he has made my life, and I am so grateful. My favourite fantasy novel(s) is His Dark Materials trilogy, and even though it is full of fanciful things (I love the idea of having your own daemon) the people in it react with very human emotions. That's what I want to do with my writing.

A friend of mine runs a gay story email group. I posted several stories to it, none of them had happy endings because of the nature and themes of the stories. Suddenly other men were emailing and complaining to the group about a lack of happy endings in my writing, one said that a happy ending was the author "rewarding" their characters, another man demanded a happy ending because it was gay fiction. I just sat back and read all those emails. It was fascinating because no one talked about the characters and situations in my stories. They just demanded happy endings at all cost. It was fascinating. I learnt a lot from all those emails, but it was all about those men posting them. It didn't change my writing one degree. I so agree, the ending must be appropriate for the story, it must be honest, and it must NEVER be contrived. The nature of His Story cried out for a hopeful ending, an ending saying that there is a way out of this awful situation, but if I'd ended it with the narrator finding his soul-mate it would have been so dishonest because he had just begun his journey out of this mess, he was in no place to have a successful relationship.

The H word was originally a medical term, and so like many medical terms it's a bloody awful word and it’s a mixture of Latin and Greek. I much prefer gay because that was chosen by gay men. I think gay history is so important because it remains us of where we came from, and reminds us of what we need to fight for and fight against. Over recent years, I've become more and more interested in gay history, and I've been writing stories based on events from gay history. So, watch this space and all that.

@northie, I couldn't agree more. Life doesn't have nice and neat endings, why should fiction have to have it? I've just written the final chapter for the first long-form read I have managed to finish, and I knew quite a few people won't be happy with it. It's a happy ending, well I think it is, but it’s an ending that moves the central character onto a new place, and that's where I leave it. I'm looking at writing a collection of science fiction stories, with a linked theme, but the important thing in those stories, to me, will be writing about real human reactions. That's what I really enjoy writing about, real reactions and emotions, and trying to understand them.