dkstories

More specifically, I might recommend getting an International Money order. Most banks can take those.

I wish I could afford the DVD because I'd definitely buy it. I've seen the movie a few dozen times (watched it in the theatre when it was first made). Definitely a classic gay romance story...once you get use to the thick accents. Oh, and Jamie is such a lucky boy to have Ste!

Oh my god...was watching this show on the Bravo channel that features Ewan McGregor (the actor playing Obi-Wan in Star Wars Episodes 1-3) in a roadtrip from London to New York. In Russia he takes a dip in a creek in the rural regions...and he's totally nude. Yeah, they blotted out his front parts...but he cuts a nice figure and has a very nice tattoo...

Yeah, Samuel Jackson said he was really happy with how his character died, and to my mind, what better way than at the Emperor's lightsaber?

Not really...the good news is that you don't have to wait for episodes 4, 5, and 6.

Okay, the Trailer for this movie is out, who has seen it? http://www.wayofthecommodore.com/trailers/episode3.mov Oh, and I believe that is Mace Windu fighting (and probably dying), against the Emperor with lightsabers!

Don't remind me...I need to get started on that myself. Oh, and I catalogued my books one time...it took me two days and totaled well over a thousand.

Thanks, my friends. Word this morning is that Aunt Carol came through the emergency surgery just fine. She's on a respirator for the morning but should be taken off anytime now. For now, it's back to the other grandparents and to see what new challenges Alzheimer's will pose for us today! Thanks for your prayers and good wishes. They really are appreciated.

Well, guys, I hope y'all enjoyed chapter 16 of Vampire Jarred. Things here aren't going too good at all. Aunt Carol has been in the hospital for about two weeks now. She went a little lunatic crazy straight out of the blue and we've been trying to figure out what was wrong. At first they thought she'd had another stroke. Then they weren't sure what was wrong. Finally the MRI revealed a partially blocked Carotid artery. (That's the big one going from the heart to the brain.) She has been scheduled to have surgery four times so far and until tonight they were cancelled and postponed due to overbooked doctors. It finally happened tonight (only four hours later than scheduled). She got into recovery and ICU just fine with a projected release date of either late tomorrow or Saturday. A half hour ago, we were getting ready for bed (I had to bring paternal grandmother and Aunt Carol's daughter Michelle home before going to check and make sure the grandparents with Alzheimer's made it to bed ok) when the hospital called. The ICU staff detected a clot in her artery and Carol is now being rushed into emergency surgery before it kills her. The hospital is in Turlock, twenty miles away. Now, Grandma Kirk has been extremely stressed out. Carol is her only surviving child (My dad died in 2000, Aunt Beverly in 2002). She's been frantic about going to the hospital and visiting even though she herself isn't in too good of a physical shape and smells just horrible because she can't control her bladder and doesn't clean herself properly. Michelle is stressed out too and part of her wants to drive 25 minutes to the hospital and stay up all night worrying there, but then Grandma would want to go and we'd likely have to hospitalize HER after this was all over. So, I've taken the burden and risk and decided we would NOT inform Grandma of the emergency surgery until the morning. Michelle can't drive (She's forty and never bothered to get her license), so she's stuck here waiting for the Doctor to call as soon as the surgery is over. Oh, and while I was typing this I just got a call from Ceres PD. Papa's wandered off again and was just found by a cruiser about a 1/2 mile from the house. He's being combative so I have to go pick him up. Pray for my family, my friends, and pray that I don't just give up...I never want to grow old now...

Thanks...Myr was asking if I was going to do a halloween story and I think I just might. Today we cleaned up my aunt Carol's bedroom. Now, from the smell we've known it was bad, but until we went in there today, there was no realizing just HOW bad. Imagine a sheetless bed stained with piss, sh*t, and about a half gallon of old ice cream that has been sitting there for weeks. Then imagine about two dozen empty ice cream cartons, well, empty except for the residue left over after most of it is gone, and they've been sitting there for months. Then dirty clothes, clean clothes, and general trash all on the floor, and then dog and cat piss and sh*t as well all over the floor, walls, and bed. None of us would look in there for the last few months and now we knew why. Six hours with bleach, lysol, and cleaners galore and it now smells good...yeah bleach and assorted cleaners, but that's so much better than how it was...still we have more cleaning to do...

Thanks guys...a further update...we rushed my Aunt Carol to the hospital earlier this week. She had a bad Urinary Track Infection and is now pretty much delirious 24/7. She's been forbidden from driving, and really won't likely recover much mentally even if the infection is cured. Aunt Carol lives with Grandma Kirk who is the one who sprained her ankle several months ago and has several non-mental health problems. The Beachwood Zoo (grandma Kirk's house on Beachwood Drive) is where my computer is and where I've been living since April to help take care of them. Since then I was hired to take care of my maternal grandparents, the ones with Alzheimer's, who live right around the corner on Myrtlewood. Aunt Carol not being able to drive anymore means I'm the only person in either household who can drive...and that means even more problems for me. How we're going to get through this, I'm just not sure, but we will somehow.

Ethan, my prayers are with you and your mother. I've been through that with my mother both when she pulled through, and when she did not. May things go well for both of you.

Yep, it is official...another Harry Potter character is going to DIE in book six. My bet...Dumbledore.

Boy, things are getting interesting for me right now. I've never been so stressed, so sad, so happy, or so totally exhausted in a long, long time. As most of you know, I'm taking care of grandparents who both have Alzheimer's. It's not easy, it's not pretty, but it is rewarding because the alternative is to put them in a nursing home, something none of us want. Nanny (my grandmother), is moving into stage two of the disease and has just begun taking Aricept. Thanks to that drug, she's starting to come out of the dementia she was consumed by for the last two months or more. The bad news is she's realizing she's facing a major disease that drastically affects her life and has been getting very testy. She's also facing a loss of hunger from the disease and getting her to eat well has been a challenge. Papa is in the latter stages of Alzheimer's, but over the last two months, thanks in part to my care (according to his doctors!), he's improving. Just today I took him to the grocery store and he reminded me we needed toilet paper. Sometimes he remembers who I am (his grandson), and other times I'm just a neat guy he likes to have around the house (his words). Adding another wrinkle to this situation is my cousin's daughter. She's lived with them ever since she was born, and is now 18. She's spoiled rotten, and has no idea of the seirousness of the situation. I've been trying to teach her a little discipline and so on, but it's been slow going. Adding to the complication is that she likes to have her friends over a lot, and Nanny won't let me forbid them from spending the night. Some of them are downright worthless, but a few of them are good people. Now, most are between 15 and 20, and at 33 I'm somewhere in the middle of older sibling or parent figure. Instead of going ape over them being there, I've been doing my best to be friendly and inviting, and it's turned out to be a good thing with most of them. It seems that a few of them have latched onto me emotionally now, especially after this last week. They felt comfortable enough with me to share some things going on in their life and to say that I was outraged is an understatement. One young man had not eaten for the last two weeks except when he came over and I fed them all a big meal (Nanny LOVES big meals with the table full of people so having them there and eating dinner was GOOD for her and for Papa who also enjoys big family meals. I've told them as long as they are respectful and friendly to Nanny and Papa, they are always welcome.). His mother disappears every night and doesn't buy groceries or leave him money for food. He flinched when I angrily stated that was child abuse, and we spent about an hour tonight discussing ways he can go about changing that aspect of his life. Meanwhile, he knows when mealtimes are and Nanny thinks he's funny because he always jokes around with her. Another young man and I bonded over the weekend after his mother pretty much threw him out on last Tuesday. I found out on Thursday that he'd been sleeping under a bush and put an end to that for the weekend. We talked a lot over the weekend and he decided to make some changes to himself in order to finish high school and is actually thinking about college or the military instead of trying to live off of the street or trying to catch a train out of town. On Monday, he went to school for the first time in a week. Monday afternoon I had him call his mother and step-father (about three weeks ago his step-father grabbed his throat hard enough to leave bruises. Police had come to the scene but accepted the step-father's explanation the young man had choked when his t-shirt had gotten hung up.). Since he'd been gone, they'd realized the mistake that is child abandonment and predictably reported him as a runaway. They didn't tell him that, just used caller i.d. to locate where the call came from and then called the police. Twenty minutes later an officer showed up at the door. He took the young man to the police station, while his partner and I talked. The officer started off with the old 'kidnapping' warning and got an earful (respectfully) from me. He started taking notes by the second sentence and we talked for over thirty minutes while I showed him around the house include the private room with its own lock that the young man had slept in over the weekend. When the officer returned to talk to the officer who had taken the young man downtown, their notes compared and made much more sense than the story the mother told them. Now, the young man didn't get off scot free. There's some community service involved, mandatory attendance at a program designed to help teens from troubled homes, and the CPS is doing an investigation. The step-father DID apologize for his assault, and they will be going through counseling to help with anger issues. Now, the young man involved is NOT totally blameless in all this, he made some mistakes too. The big difference is, HE stepped forward with the officers and juvenile PO and discussed them first. Not only that, he told them that after the weekend he'd decided what he wanted most NOW was a stable home so he could finish high school (Yeah, his words, his decision after about six hours of constant conversation and questions from me.) Today, J stopped by with his mother after school. She asked if I'd mind him coming by during the week, after school and hanging out/getting help with homework. I was surprised at how...direct she was about things. According to her, she's blown away by the changes in her son's attitude, and when he said he understood there would be some punishment for the argument that led to him leaving the house she decided to not ground him. She also liked my brownies. (Nanny has a sweet tooth so I always have brownies or a cake at the house - I make a fresh set almost every day between her and the kids going in and out.) Now, J is one of the younger ones, sixteen, and is one of the best of the kids that friends with my cousin's daughter. Today, Whitney (cousin's daughter) was gone all day, but half her friends came by during the afternoon. When I told them she wasn't home, they all shrugged and said they weren't there to see her. I let them in, and yeah the drank kool-aid, water, tea, or soda, had some brownies or fruit, but they spent more time talking to me and my grandparents than anything else. Looking back, I have to admit I was worried they were seeing this as a 'feeding' point and little more, but as I reviewed the conversations with them, I don't think it was. Why? Well, most of the talk was about their days, about school, about work, girlfriends or boyfriends (yeah, they all know I'm gay), and stuff like that. They actually wanted me to listen to what they were saying, and wanted to hear what I thought about things. Most of them (it was about seven total through the afternoon/evening) also asked about how things had gone with Nanny and Papa. Two of them were going to walk to a nearby store, and asked me if I'd mind Papa going with them. At eighty-six, papa is physically very healthy and likes to sneak out for a walk. Since this was a great chance for him to get out, I told them to ask him and he readily agreed. For the past two nights, he's snuck off and we've had to go looking for him. Tonight he didn't sneak off because these guys took him for that walk. I didn't ask them to, didn't expect them to even think of that, but they did and he was happy as a clam when he got home from the walk. Over the weekend, two of the guys had also helped me pick up all the garbage Papa had strewn over the yard. I didn't ask for help, but when I told them that was what I was doing, they offered to join in. When these guys come over, and when they leave, I get a big hug from them, not by my initiation, but by theirs. Several of them do the same with Nanny and Papa as well, and I wonder just what their parents are thinking. Most of the kids have some sort of problems with their parents, ranging from simply not being home when the kids are, to drug and alcohol use by the parents. One of them blew my mind away today when he told me that he was glad he was welcome over here because he never got the attention or home-cooked food at home.

Walking away without saying something is not the best thing to have done, but considering that it came out of left field for you, I can sympathize with your having done so. Don't beat yourself up about it, but try to use it as a learning experience, and do try to mend whatever fences may have been kicked over with your nephew. What your brothers did by sending him to you, without warning you first was not funny, and if I were you, I'd have some words with them, including "If you're going to send your kids to me for THIS talk, please warn me in advance." Talk to your nephew, let him know you are not mad at him, but rather his father for not telling you in advance. Let him know you care for him, and be ready to answer his questions. There's going to be a lot of them beyond that first one, and try to prepare for them. For instance? "But why are some men attracted to other men and others aren't?" "Does it hurt?" "Can't you just date girls instead?" "Can't you change if you want?" "Why do people talk so bad about homosexuals if they aren't bad?" You've got a great group of people here who can help you answer these questions, and there are some great websites out there that can help as well. To start with, I recommend: PFLAG as a resource for YOU and for HIM (and your brothers as well). Seventeen is a little young for some of the questions you're going to get. Don't be afraid to ask those here and elsewhere for advice, and DON'T be afraid to talk with your nephew. Tell him you needed to prepare for his questions. When you are prepared, talk. If he still asks something you're not ready to answer, tell him you'll get some information and answer him soon...and then DO IT!

I was driving to work that morning three years ago and thought it was a joke by the radio DJ's (they were known for wild jokes). Then I got to work in time to watch the towers collapse and knew it wasn't a joke. Like the Shuttle Challenger exploding, the first time I was shot at, and many other major events in my life, I'll always remember where I was and the initial feelings. I've been doing a LOT of thinking over the last few months, and a lot of studying on terrorists and believe now that neither Bush nor Kerry can win the war on terror with their current or proposed tactics. To be blunt, the invasion of Afghanistan was spot on, and the invasion of Iraq undid all the good done by our troops going into Afghanistan. Iraq had turned into a hotbed of terrorism, and now provides those who would kill our people with reasons, training, and money. All across the middle east there are madras schools teaching large amounts of children that we are the servants of satan and must be killed, and they show pictures of our troops torturing prisoners, shooting crowds of children (as happened just a few days ago when those children surrounded a damaged humvee and tried to stone the surviving troops inside), and corpses of women and children being carried out of bombed-out houses in Fallujah. Education is key to the war on Terror, and we are providing our foes with all the education they need to bring up their young on a spearhead of holy war. These children will be the suicide bombers in Iraq, in Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and some day even here. They will have been raised with images of our soldiers killing their women and children in Iraq as we went after insurgents, and they will hate us even more than they do now. Don't mistake what I'm saying. Most of the women and children being killed in Iraq are guilty of supporting the Insurgents if not downright participating like those in the crowd around the damaged vehicle in Baghdad. Those dying every time we bomb the houses in Fallujah or cooking the food for the insurgents, washing their clothes, and cleaning their weapons for them. Except for the really young ones, they aren't really innocent, they are part of the war effort. This is the end result of the Bush invasion in Iraq: Increased hatred and terrorism against the US, both now and in the future. We have given those calling for Jihad all the images they need to convince more and more of their people that it is necessary, and those images will drown out every school built, every hospital supplied with medicine, and every sewage plant completed. They won't care they can safely drink tap water when they are scared we will blow them up tomorrow. Continuing the path we are on now, when we stand nearly alone on the main stage, is going to hurt us in ways we cannot imagine. We didn't have this problem in Afghanistan because of several things, including: 1) We went in with more than one FIRST-World nation at our back (Germany is there, as is France and other major European countries), 2) The country was ready for change and willing to welcome anyone who was not considered a 'main' enemy. If Russia had tried to go into Afghanistan, the entire countryside would have erupted much the way we are seeing with Iraq. Why? Because Afghanistan hasn't forgotten years and years of war with the old Soviet Union. Just like Iraqis remember the Gulf War and over a decade of sanctions and bombings in the no-fly zone. It's a very messy situation, and I'm afraid there's only going to be one answer now for our country, because of the Iraq invasion. The answer is a scary one: Genocide. We have to be ready to commit Genocide against an entire race because they are becoming more and more united in their hatred of us. Hopefully we'd never have to finish it, but we'd have to be ready to start it and carry it through. Japan was ready to fight us to the last breath on their islands, until we showed them that we were ready to kill every last one of their people before we invaded. When they surrendered, they knew it was either that or see their entire race and homeland destroyed. Our new enemies don't think that will ever happen to them, so they will continue to fight, and fight, and fight, no matter what we do. Let them see that they face imminent destruction as a people, and see what it brings.

FYI - Myr/Comicality...every time I try to access Comicality's pages my browser crashes...any suggestions?

For some reason, probably typical author ego curiosity, I chose to sort stories in the archive by the number of 'views' and came across quite a few surprises for me. My first surprise was that Dawn of Tears is the sixth most popular story in the archives (Comicality, Bill W., Freethinker, and Gymnopedies all have the top 5, and since all their works I love, it's quite heady to think one of my stories might be up there with theirs. There's a large amount of stories between Dawn and my next most popular story, and I was quite surprised when I saw what story that was. Phone Call was a story that I never had any real intention of writing, and in a way different than Vampire Jarred, was another 'guilty pleasure' I indulged in. I've met, and gotten to know a few Hollywood types over the years, and had read a few stories in the Boy Bands sections of Nifty a few times. Let's just say some of the things I saw in there made me cringe, and one of them (I don't even remember which), made me say "no...this is more realistic". Somewhere along the way I stretched things just a little, but kept things mostly in line with things from personal experiences. An interesting side-not on that story, Phone Call, is that while I was writing the story I got to meet one of the main characters in that story in real life. You want to imagine a feeling of unease...try meeting someone who is a real-life person you are writing a fanfic about, and trying to hold a conversation with them while sipping on a drink. Then try doing a few shots. Myr's been bugging the hell out of me to get Phone Call up on the board here, so I guess he's been right. I'll have to get those files cleaned up and sent to him. It's a long way down to my next-most popular story, Mists of Fate. Mists was the first story I ever posted on the web, and it seems like ages ago since I wrote that. I've got a spin-off stories that I never published, several half-written that I think I'm going to have to go and finish some time. Now, my question for y'all...How important are the # of views a story has had in choosing what to read? What exactly do y'all look for that helps you pick the story you'll look at? What methods do you use to pick stories from the Archive to read? I know that if I see a story I really liked I'll do a search on the author's name to see if there's more by that author. Is that what some of you do? Have fun!

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR - I hate waiting for a B5 theatrical release...I loved that series to death...and even loved the fifth season. I WANT a B5 theatrical release!

"I'll take two for delivery." Jarred says. he's hungry

My thanks, and I did. What I got in return was an article...here, let me paste it in here, describing how since gay marriage started in the Netherlands, the society has gone downhill. As America moves closer to embracing same-sex "marriage," one can almost picture people in the wedding industry rubbing their hands in delight. After all, if we legalize gay "marriage," we'll have more weddings than ever, right? Wrong. We will end up having fewer marriages, not more. Just ask the citizens of Holland, where marriage is going the way of typewriters and buggy whips. In the Weekly Standard, Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, points out that in recent decades -- a time when parental cohabitation was sweeping across Northern Europe -- the Dutch clung to the last, ragged remains of their religious traditions. Yes, they engaged in cohabitation -- but when Dutch couples had children, they usually got married. Not anymore. During the mid-1990s, the rate of out-of-wedlock births began to shoot up. By 2003, the rate of increase nearly doubled to 31 percent of all Dutch births. What accounts for this phenomenon? Gay "marriage." These were the years, Kurtz notes, "when the debate over the legal recognition of gay relationships came to the fore in the Netherlands." The debate came to an end when Holland legalized full same-sex "marriage" in the year 2000. The conjunction of these two social phenomena, says Kurtz, is no coincidence. During Holland's decade-long drive to legalize same-sex "marriage," gay advocates openly scorned the idea that marriage ought to be defined by the possibility of childbearing. Love between two partners -- any two partners -- was the real basis of marriage. Thus, as one gay "marriage" advocate told the Dutch Parliament, "there is absolutely no reason, objectively, to distinguish between heterosexual and homosexual love." Dutch leaders bought this argument. Marriage would be reduced to -- as Kurtz put it -- "just one choice on a menu of relationship options." In marriage, as with cheeseburgers, you could have it your way. Then a funny thing happened on the road to redefining marriage: Dutch people simply stopped getting married -- even when they had children. This really ought to come as no surprise. After all, Kurtz writes, "Spend a decade telling people that marriage is not about parenthood, and they just might begin to believe you. Make relationship equality a rallying cry, and people might decide that all forms of relationships are equal." The ease with which the Dutch jettisoned marriage happened in large part because the Dutch had already abandoned their Judeo-Christian heritage. The few religious voices raised in defense of traditional marriage were drowned out. And as a result Holland is now going the way of Scandinavia -- where acceptance of gay "marriage" has led to the continued deterioration of marriage. What's happening in the Netherlands gives us clear evidence of what gay "marriage" does: People stop getting married, and children suffer. Let this serve as a warning to Americans. Marriage between one man and one woman must be protected and strengthened. If it isn't, then American families -- already deeply damaged by divorce and illegitimacy -- will be destroyed. This caused me to go to the UN web page and pull up statistics on Marriage in North America and Europe. What I found was that the Netherlands marriage rates were still higher than the US rates, and the divorce rate was LOWER in the Netherlands than the US, as was the birth of children out of wedlock. While the rates in the Netherlands were not among the lowest in Europe, they were equivalent to countries that didn't allow gay marriage. Those bits of information kind of blew their argument out of the water and they've been quiet on the topic of the article since then, although there were like twelve guys all jumping up and down and pointing the article as proof of their claims. When it was debunked, they just shut up and said it's not really the issue here... Got to love 'em, but even more, got to love winning the argument.

Well, while I'm enjoying a short vacation with my best friend in San Francisco, I did manage to check out the site and story about this. The thing to remember is that in each of her books so far, JK Rowling has introduced some major aspects of the Wizarding world that we haven't seen before, and that has always been a major part of the book's plot. I think that we are very likely to see the chamber of secrets again in this book, with some additional stuff from there that wasn't found in Book 2. She's stated that some of the plot points for Book 6 were originally going to be a part of Chamber of Secrets, but she realized they really belonged in Book 6 instead. Exactly who the Half-Blood Prince will be, I'm not too sure. I'm fairly sure it won't be a character we've met before, but rather one we've heard reference to in some vague way. I'm also fairly sure that this HBP will be a key part of the war with Voldemort and might even be essential to Harry's victory in Book 7. Well, we'll have to see

The very best stories that I have read, or that I have written, the characters have been living, breathing individuals that I love, hate, like, dislike, sympathize with, or otherwise can accept as being 'real'. Beautifully crafted plots, wonderful settings, and awesome concepts pale when they are not placed together with characters that can take on lives of their own. I once had an instructor who said 'breathe life into your character, and your story will work." The stories of mine that have worked the least have been those where the characters did not breathe on their own, where they were little more than extensions of my own thoughts. Most of the time when I can't write the next chapter, or hit some other stumbling block, it is because I want a character to do something they WILL NOT do, or will not accept. There's been times where a character has said "I would rather die than do X" and I end up killing them because the event is central to the plot line. It hurts whenever I do that, and I've been known to cry over that death. As a reader, I have to use the example of the character Javan Haldane in the Deryni series by Katherine Kurtz. In the book King Javan's Year, I fell in love with Javan, a clubfooted young man who overcame huge disadvantages to claim his birthright. All through the book I hung on every word of this young character, every action, and was happy at every victory he achieved. If you haven't read the book and are likely to read it, stop reading this paragraph right now. Near the end of the book, the bad guys in the story manage to draw him into a trap, a fatal trap. I don't think I've ever read a story where the main character dies quite that way, where not only does he die with a sword in his chest, but so does EVERYTHING he works for. His heir, and younger brother is captured and forced to be a puppet king for the men who killed Javan, and a royal stud to bear future puppet kings. The defeat was near-absolute, and everything I'd read, everything I'd cheered, everything I'd loved was GONE with the stroke of the pen. Literally, when I read the chapter where he died, I screamed so loud the neighbors came to check and see what was wrong. When the book ended with the younger brother, Rhys-Michael captured, drugged, and facing the future as nothing but a puppet, I picked the book up and threw it across the room before stomping it a half-dozen times. Okay, spoilage over What KK did there was spectacular, and so very dangerous as a writer. Taking a character that was involved in two earlier books, that people had come to love, and who HELD the front seat so very well and doing what she did was a great risk and it worked, because I loved the character and looked on him as real. What makes the character real is a combination of things. Just saying "Mike is 6'1, 195 pounds, has blond hair and blue eyes" may tell us what he looks like, but does not make him real. To make a character real it isn't even necessary to describe their physical attributes, but rather to reveal the character over time. When we first see Mike, we notice he's tall and lean. Later, as he's talking to Jennifer, we might notice that his dark brown hair has a habit of falling over his left eye, and that when he looks into the sunset with a longing gaze, the light reflects off of the blue in his eyes and makes them shine, as if with unshed tears. When Mike talks to the caretaker, his deep voice trembles slightly, and the dozen red roses also tremble slightly from his shaking hands. As he bends over the gravestone, and we can see the drop of liquid fall from his eyes we notice that his left leg seems stiff, as if from an old injury. After he places the roses on the gravestone, we notice his long, thin, and pale fingers lovingly caress his sister's name before he stands up again with a look of resolution on his face. Later that night we see him at a party with his best friend, who is shorter, closer in height to the rest of the people. Mike is smiling again, but somehow it doesn't quite reach his eyes, and we notice that look of resolution again as he turns down the offer of a beer. When he speaks, only to ask for soft drink, we hear the firmness in that deep voice, the resolution to not accept the drink again. Obviously that's a rushed way to introduce the character, and not exactly how I'd introduce all the features at once, but Mike, a young man whose sister died when he drunkenly ran off the road becomes more real than if I'd just stated all those things in a sentence or two.

Oh, and if you go to sean biggerstaff's site, there's this AWESOME picture of him in his quidditch uniform (Oliver Wood).