JohnN53

So correct. I would only add that it ends up for sale on the discounted books table only if you can even get it published. Remember the days you'd go into an adult book store - and that's what they were called, adult BOOK stores, and see rows of paperback books on racks? Not any more. You're lucky to find a small waterfall display of books in the corner of the store. Instead the store is now filled with videos, dildos, plastic breasts, gag gifts, and in the case of the best one in my town, marijuana pipes. The adult book market is in the toilet. It's very unlikely you'd get a paperback book published today. To get a hard copy of your work published, you better be able to plot like Tom Clancy, write about people like John Updike and be as smutty as Fanny Hill. There is hope and that's the e-books market. With an e-book, the cost of self publishing isn't the barrier anymore. I've thought often about taking my story, Messing Around With Mike, which is the length of a novella as it is, and expand it three or four-fold. I'd make it less of a dry narrative and instead tell the story of growing up in Southern California. My sexual growth with Mike would be the major theme but other aspects of young teenage life would come in. The story would slow down, have much more dialog and the pre-requisite bittersweet ending for a teenage coming-of-age story. That I could publish as an e-book and might even make some money on it. And through the simple expedient of changing the title, the fact that the core sex scenes would already be up on the Internet for free reading wouldn't make a difference. As long as I wait a few years, Messing Around With Mike will have disappeared into the aether. I can post it online now and publish it in the future.

Arse also sounds dirtier... ...and definitely hairier.

Modern. While I really enjoy both historical fiction and a good sci-fi book, and read both often, a tale about real people in our time is my favorite. I like it if they live in a region of the globe with which I'm not familiar. It's like taking a vacation.

Spring After a long, snowy winter, nothing beats when the trees have leaves. This last year I saw it happen in a day. Looking out at the trees on the other side of the Mississippi River from my house, I saw them go from brown to green in one day. I'd experienced that rebirth before but it always is moving. Here is the Mississippi River in front of my house on a different spring day. This was part of a magnificent double rainbow that stretched from horizon to horizon. I knew I couldn't capture the whole thing but I could get this part. I know where the Pot of Gold is hidden! The link is to a hi-res version of the same picture. It makes a great desktop background and is cropped to 4:3. Rainbow River

Duck season...Rabbit season...Duck season...

"that is called" I hear this phrase more in real life than read it but occasionally I find it in a story. A young salesmen in my stereo store would say to a customer, "This cassette deck has a feature that is called Dolby Noise Reduction." That piece of pure verbal garnish was like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. I had one salesman that used it all the time. I'd take him aside and say, "That cassette deck has Dolby Noise Reduction." It never sunk in. And intune, when I get done writing a story, I go back and eliminate almost every "just", "soon" and "next" I can find. Why did I put those in there in the first place? Maybe it's the equivalent of a writer going, "uhhhh..."

I'd like to be bitter about my ex-wife but I can't. Sure, there is some snarkiness that pops up on both of our parts but we broke up because we couldn't have children. Actually, I couldn't have children. I'm shooting blanks. She remarried, had kids, and while we rarely see each other, we are still friends and talk on the phone or email every month or so. We're not close but we aren't bitter. Even worse, though, is an ex-girlfriend who now lives in my town of 350 people. We've both travelled all over the country and here we both land, a quarter of a mile away from each other. Again, we are friends. Her husband is a great guy. We joke about her and the lack of sex I got and he now gets. I really should work on being angry with my ex's but I can't. It isn't within me.

It's a jazz fusion riff that I've been humming all night. I can't tell you the band but I hear horns so maybe it's from The Crusaders. The worst part is the turn-around at the end of the last measure that takes it back to the beginning. It's The Carousel From Hell that I can't get off of. I just keep riding it around and around. Anybody else remember the Issac Asimov tale about such an experience? In it, a scientist theorized that when we get a tune stuck in our head, it's because that tune is a fragment of the Ultimate Tune. If he could only figure out that ultimate melody, he could make a fortune selling it to jingle and advertising folks. A super computer was given the job and after months of computations, a bell went, "Ding!" and the song was ready to be heard. The scientist herded everyone out of the lab so that he could be the first one to hear the Ultimate Tune. Minutes turned into hours as his assistants waited for him to emerge. When he didn't, they finally went back into the lab only to find the scientist quite insane. He had the Ultimate Tune stuck in his head and he couldn't get it out!

I'm still a listener and buyer of vinyl records and I have had "Back To Black" on vinyl, unopened, sitting in the "to be played" pile for a number of years now. This last weekend, with the tragic news, I finally played it to see what the the original buzz was all about. I should have left it sealed, or better, in the record store bin. Sonically, it sounded thin and compressed - no surprise there - but I expected to find a song or two I liked as much as "Rehab". Nope. It reminds me of when I finally read "Catch-22" in the late 1970s. I kept going, "What did people see in this book?" I just didn't get it. Some art is a work of its time and seems trivial later on. The movie version of "Jesus Christ Superstar" is almost unwatchable now. It took a timeless story and turned it into a flash in the pan. If you owned a Salvador Dali, I hope you sold it forty years ago. You would have made the most money then, and not just because his work has been so heavily forged. Melted clocks just aren't as fashionable now as they were in the trippy 1970s. Amy Winehouse was a pop singer perfect for 2007. Nothing more. I'm certainly sorry she passed away but she doesn't deserve to be enshrined as a rock 'n' roll legend.

I'm a relatively heavy sleeper but I can wake myself up whenever I want to. I just tell myself what time I want to wake up and I do, maybe a few minutes early. I worked on this skill during high school and college, and it is ingrained in me by now. Unless I have to do something extreme like wake up at 3:45 AM for a plane flight, I haven't used an alarm clock for decades.

What's the square root of 69? Ate, something.

I can't get too upset about this because music will change as people change. I'm a big fan of Loudon Wainwright III, having seen him many times in concert. I recently got some of his vinyl records from the 1970s and '80s and imagine my surprise when I heard many homophobic songs, or at least songs where gay stereotypes were played for laughs. He has an effeminate character in one song that you can almost hear swish as he passes and there is a joke song about breast feeding called "Rufus Is A Tit Man". I'm sorry, Loudo, but in the long run, Rufus did not turn out to be a tit man. If you hear LW III talk about his children in concert, he has nothing but the nicest things to say about both Rufus and Martha. He is obviously both supportive and proud of them as people and artists. All these rap artists need is to have a gay child and things will change overnight.

I don't get this thread. Mired in last place in the American League Central, with a record of 22-37 and 11 games out of first place, the Twins are dying many days...and nights. What makes one rotten day of playing baseball different from the rest?

I record and produce music. One of my favorite lyrics stories is told by members of a band while they were in another studio in town. They were struggling over getting the lyrics just right for a song and had been stuck for a while. The owner of that studio said, "You guys are trying too hard. You're over-thinking it. Let me give you the lyrics to a great rock 'n' roll song. It's one we've all sung along with at some point. Classic lyrics." The studio owner then gave the band the lyrics to Led Zeppelin's D'yer Mak'er: Oh oh oh oh oh oh, You don't have to go oh oh oh oh You don't have to go oh oh oh oh, you don't have to go. Ah ah ah ah ah aye, All those tears I cry ah ah ah aye, All those tears I cry oh oh ah aye, Baby please don't go. When I read the letter you wrote me, it made me mah mah mad When I read the words that it told me, It made me sah sah sad, But I still love you so I can't let you go, I love you, ooh baby I love you. Oh oh oh oh oh oh, Every breath I take oh oh oh oh, Oh Every move I make hey hey, Oh Baby please don't go. Ah ah ah ah ah aye, You hurt me to my soul oh oh oh oh, You hurt me to my soul ohh ohh, Darling please don't go. When I read the letter you sent me, it made me mah mah mad When I read the news that it brought me, It made me sah sah sad, But I still love you so I can't let you go, I love you, ooh baby I love you. Oh oh oh oh oh oh, You don't have to go oh oh oh oh, You don't have to go oh oh oh oh, Oh baby, baby, please please please please ah ah ah ah ah baby ah ah I really love you baby oo oo oo oo oo darlin' oooohhhh oh Oh baby I still love you so, Oh baby I still love you so ohohoh, ooo, oh oh oh oh oh yeah (Why?) ah ah oh ah ah ah oooohhh (Why?) ah ah ah ah ah, oooooooooooooo (Why?) Ohhh baby.... There are some great lyrics.

I joined last week, made a quick post, and left until today. Imagine my surprise when I found two welcoming messages when I returned. I've never seen that on an Internet board before. Thanks, Nephylim and jian_sierra, for your warm hospitality. So what's the appropriate netiquette? Is responding here sufficient or should I also go their profiles and return the welcome? I need advice, but I think my best source is dead. She was called Emily Post for a reason. Here's something from me. A few years ago, I took this picture out my front door of a rainbow going into the Mississippi River. This was actually part of an amazing double rainbow but I took this pic because it shows where the pot of gold is. Who's got scuba gear? Here's a high rez version. I've used it as a desktop background.

I had a doll as a tyke which everyone was against (this was the 1950s). They didn't like it until they found I'd named the doll Gracie after a beloved next door neighbor. Then everyone thought it was so cute. As was said upthread, I outgrew the doll stage and went onto a bike and toy train era. Freud should have said sometimes a toy is just a toy.