Thorn Wilde

One of my favourites! It's so adorable that I can easily get over how dated it's becoming.

I loved this movie. There's not much to add to what's been said about it, but suffice to say I enjoyed both the plot and the characters immensely. As it happens, I love historical settings. Not because I find such deeply class based societies attractive—I often find myself thinking, man, do queers, women and people of colour have it way better now!—but because I'm a student of history, and I find that placing interesting characters in historical settings makes it easier to understand the era than simply reading about the history itself. So, period dramas, sign me up. Gay period dramas, fuck yeah! Even better. Edited to add: I think you should watch and review Velvet Goldmine. It would be interesting to see what you'd have to say about it.

There are lots of words that exist in some languages but not others. It becomes really obvious when attempting to translate from one language into another. Suddenly you're faced with a word that has no counterpart in the other language and you have to make up some round-about way of describing the concept, or use an approximation. And you think, surely I can express just about everything in the world in my language? And it turns out, no, actually your language doesn't have its own word for this particular feeling, or it's lacking a slightly more nuanced synonym. When you speak and think in several languages, it's very frustrating to find that the language you're speaking doesn't have the word that you've got in your head. Me, I love all words, even the ugly ones. Especially the ugly ones. They add nuance and character to language. That said, there are some words I will avoid at any cost, namely annoying marketing terms. You know, words that are just so obviously made up by a marketing department somewhere. They're especially common in adverts for cosmetics. And then there are words that only interior decorators use. Colours that you've never even heard of and the like. Very annoying.

Agreed, a 7 is indeed generous. I watched Judas Kiss and found it entertaining enough, but it's far, far from a good movie. I think we tend to be too tolerant of poor acting and bad plots in queer films because we're so under-represented, but queer cinema should be held up to the same standards as other films, IMO, and at the end of the day I find that no amount of hot guys and steamy sex scenes can make up for that.

It was a crap imitation of a Brummie accent. And if she'd wanted to show how bizarre the accents of the West Midlands are she would have demonstrated Black Country rather than Birmingham, anyway. Dudley's the worst.

Letting strangers read your work can often be the best way of overcoming that fear. Strangers have no reason to encourage you to make you feel better if they don't actually mean what they say. If you post here and we shower you with compliments, we won't be lying. And if you post here and people tell you you should work more on your craft, then you've taken that first step anyway, and you'll be better for it. Good luck!

If someone calls something art, then it is art, at least to that person. I just think art is deeply subjective, really. The way I have come to define art, for myself, over the years is that art is storytelling. If you look at something and it tells you a story, with or without words, then it is art. If you go far enough back, everything that we call art today, from painting to music to dance, was first conceived as a way to tell a story. Stories needn't be advanced. And the story you hear when you perceive a work of art needn't even be the story the artist intended to tell. But if someone has created something, and that creation makes you think or feel or imagine, then the creation has told you a story and the creation is therefor art. So, that's the criteria for art to me. It has to be something that came from the artist's imagination, and it has to tell me a story in one way or another. As for Art School Stole My Virginity, I think it's art. It told a story. It did so in a manner that came from the artist's imagination. It made people feel things. It had several definite messages, both expressed in the performance and in the media hype that arose around it. I think it was very interesting, and well done. It was said in this thread that if anyone could have done it it isn't art. But art is in intent as much as execution. Perhaps anyone could have done it, but not many people would have, or even thought to do it.

I do tend to reread what I've written a lot. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't... Guess I should give it a go again.

Thanks, you guys. That's a lot of helpful advice.

When you've been depressed for a while, and you've found writing really hard, getting back into it can be a bit of a challenge. I'm feeling a lot better now. Going to school to study sound engineering this autumn, and it feels like my life is back on some kind of track. But the writing is still difficult. The problem is that I have lots of ideas, and I want to get back to writing properly, I really do. But I'm mostly motivated to work on my new ideas. So I sit down thinking, 'I'm gonna write now,' and open up one of the new, unpublished ones (my new viking story, my detective novel, the Pride & Prejudice pastiche). But then I remember that I should be working on my unfinished novels, Lavender & Gold or Nemesis 2, and so I open those and read through what I've written and get to the point where I've got more to write... and then stop, cause I don't feel motivated to write those things, I just want to write the new things. It's like my attention span is shot. And I have readers waiting for L&G and Nemesis, and I don't know what to do. So, I end up playing Skyrim instead. I know all I have to do to finish L&G and Nemesis 2 is just sit my arse down and start writing, but it's like when I try my fingers just won't move, and my mind wanders to Detective Inspector Templeton, or Trym the viking, or Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley. And nothing at all gets done. I have to find some way around this. I really, really do.

Heya! Welcome to GA! Don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions!

Welcome, Jimmy!

Stargate is one of my favourite sci-fi movies. I watched it with my dad when I was 10 or so. Good times. The linguistic aspect was what appealed to me the most. I tried watching SG-1 and hated it. Never watched Atlantis, though I've been told I would enjoy it. Universe I thought was good, but as previously mentioned it was canceled. In the reboot I hope they'll allow themselves more focus on the linguistic aspect. If The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones have taught us anything it's that audiences are perfectly capable of relating to other languages and reading subtitles.

Hi, November! Welcome to GA! We love newbies here, and we don't bite unless you ask nicely.

Beautiful!

Bobby McFerrin – Blackbird

Thank you! So glad you enjoyed it!

I don't feel old at all. I still gleefully look forward to every birthday, and long for the day they finally stop IDing me when I buy booze. (They're supposed to check you here if they think you look under 25, just to be safe, and I look younger than I am.) Most of the coolest people I know of are older than me. I have brothers in their 40s, and they're not old. I do look at people significantly younger than me and think they're very young, though. Used to be I thought anyone born in the 90s was just a kid. Then it became people born after '92, and then after '94. Now that kids born in '00 and '01 are teenagers I am forced to concede that even those born in the mid-90s are no longer children, but I don't like it. It still doesn't make me feel old, though. And I refuse to think of myself as an adult.

We'll see whether I have enough material for another story, be it a sequel, prequel or inbetween-quel. Thanks so much for this review! I love the long ones.

As it is now nearly 5 am here, I declare this live chatting session to be over, but if anyone has any more questions or comments, I'll be sure to address them when I get up.

After a long line of unfortunate affairs, Ollie meets a great guy clubbing in Brighton one weekend when he's about 27, and they live happily ever after.

When you're depressed, as Marcus is, you don't really need a reason to crash and self-medicate, and Marcus has always been prone to self-medication. It's Christmas, and instead of spending it with his mother, he chooses to wallow in his misery. It's not really as case of simple cause and effect. Rather, it's a case of multiple events leading to lack of self-esteem, inability to cope and thus allowing oneself to fall. There may be a story or two more to come, but I'm not sure yet. They do still talk to me occasionally, and there are definitely little scenes and moments that I know exist and that I haven't shared, but I don't yet know if they're enough to build another story on. So we will see. Thanks for leaving such a long and awesome review! It's always appreciated.

Basically, 'I love you.'

I feel very connected to British culture. I've always been a bit of an anglophile, and I've read more in English than I have in Norwegian. Writing about Norway in English would feel kind of weird, so I use Britain as a setting. It feels natural to me. I have lived there, travelled there, have so many friends from there, watch British television more than any other, read British books... So it just seems right.

If they do, they're either not aware of that being the reason, or they don't tell me. Though I have sometimes sensed that certain readers' criticisms of my stories might be based on cultural differences. I think a lot of readers were put off by Firsts, for instance, because of the very distinct sexual experiences I described of a boy who would be, in many readers' opinions, too young to have those experiences, coupled with language that's 'inappropriate' for someone of his age group. I think that attitudes like that are perhaps more common in American readers. It took a really long time before anyone reviewed it at all, which was unusual. I do set most of my stories in Britain, and I intentionally choose not to use expressions and words that are more international, because I don't like underestimating my readers. I'm pretty sure that most readers are smarter than that, that they can figure it out from context and maybe learn something from it. I also think it adds to authenticity to be uncompromising in this respect. I hope that at least some readers, like you, are drawn to a different cultural setting and find it interesting to read.