everett Weedin jr

umm, your characters exist and live in your writing, no? and when one recalls the fundamental meaning of "just" ("just my writing"), well...I am very grateful to you for writing this story

Part of your story's fine craftsmanship is your uniting of the landscapes and cityscapes: "Atrani, it seemed, was a densely packed forest of tall, angular houses that bristled out...." "Gianni's first impression of Amalfi itself was of a forest of parasols." Your advancing of the relationship between Gianni and Angelo is similarly managed by making its narrative details occupying to the reader in the present while glancing ahead (and back): Angelo helping Gianni balance on the skateboard, for instance--a quiet reminder of his getting Gianni down from the high-perched wall. Such details of construction resonate quietly and effectively.

This story is a hard sort to write and a rare pleasure to read. Quotidian and mundane chronicle relies not upon the sensational, startling, and bizarre, but upon the author's detailed, responsive, and empathetic depiction of ordinary human life. The gothic novel and movie is far easier to produce than an attentive evocation of quietly important human events, thoughts, and emotions. Your attentive and sensuous portrait of hours filled by daily actions is a thorough delight. I hope that, though a lot of work, it was a pleasure for you to write. Perhaps you have already read Sarah Orne Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs? I think that you would enjoy it.

I am enjoying your story very much. Your descriptions of his surroundings--from the dusty, crowded, noisy urban ones to the jumbled, verdant town in which his grandparents live, and the many vistas of the valley and the sea--are beautifully detailed. I look forward to learning the life that he will lead in Italy, and discovering more of the past and present lives of his parents and grandparents.

It is a pleasure to be reading another story by you so soon after your posting of Between the Shadow and the Soul. The first day of kindergarten and the ensuing week arriving at Jace's overnight in Brody's home is thoroughly satisfying, The exchange between Brody and his parents about the advisability of Jace spending the night (especially the back-and-.forth of "Of course we're sure." "Sure of what?" "What?" "That's what I was asking.") is as skillfully composed a cat's cradle as Abbott and Costello performing "Who's on First?", but touchingly weighted with the family's loving and caring teasing. It's wonderful. I admire many details of your imagining. At one point in Chapter 28 of "Between" Greg speaks a monosyllable to Keigan: "It came out on a breath, like a word-flavored sigh." In the following chapter, when Greg locates Kyle leaning up against the house that he and his family are moving from to Florida, "Everything he wore was dark, blue or black from the look of it, and he was no more obvious than air." Umph!

Oh, it's engaging, as exquisite tension can be. The crafted shaping, particularly the rhetorical forms, provide some comforting reminders to this reader that these figures are characters, not friends who live down the street or consult with Uncle Farid. I'm thinking of such a paragraph as the one with the anaphora of "Feelings". "whirled around" indeed.

A few chapters ago Greg felt, suddenly and unexpectedly in the narrative context, "hopeful". This chapter has prompted me to realize that, with the singular and horrific exception of Nate's father, all your characters, including even such a minor one as Keigan's mother, are intelligent. The fact, then, that none of them can credibly run amok, gives me hope. An additional piece of comforting evidence, to me, Is a piece of Greg's inner voice while he is talking with Keigan: "Goodness gracious, was that peevish noise my voice? Egads!". Any character who can step away from himself and hear himself with such ironically bemused judgment reassures his reader.

One of the pleasures of rereading is foreknowledge acquired in earlier readings. I smiled in a wry way this time when reading the introduction between Noah and Jordan. ("Buckle your seatbelts; it's going to be a....")

Of all the finely and aptly telling words in this chapter, their epicenter is, I think, "precious". I clicked on "love" as a response in the sense that I have loved fitting performances of "King Lear".

This fine story is one that I look forward to rereading and rereading. Thank you for making all that reading possible.

The words "after the characters have already developed into people who'd do no such thing" interest keenly. A room inhabited by characters and people would be an intriguing, even unsettling, room to enter.

As I mentioned a few chapters back, I am rereading your novel. Because I'm rationing this second reading to only one or two chapters a day, I've just now arrived at this chapter. I "loved" it the first time, and now in this reading, for the last few chapters, I am noticing and paying particular attention to your development of the growing regard between Amara and Drew. Anticipating as I now can do the wonderfully complex love between Amara, Aria, and Drew that you will write after the kidnapping, I look forward to heeding that love (and other aspects of your story) as you create it. This is a thoroughly crafted and affecting story.

Well, since you ask us readers (as did Dickens, on occasion; you're in talented company), I wouldn't believe Noah's mother accepting him. For some people, I think, hating is a drug of choice. You have written so persuasively the mean-spirited, dusty-hearted, arrogant hatred that Noah's mother feels for him and anyone gay that she seems to me irrevocably immured by herself. But Noah's expressed wish that his father and the rest of the family get to enjoy each other's company and affection while the children grow up sounds like one that the author of NoJo would plausibly grant. And if there is room for some subplots' likely future to be included in the Epilogue, I make a plea for Adrien's to be one of them.. He is a wholly admirable character in his friendship for Jordan and his ready and warm acceptance of Noah as his own friend. You have him even play a thoughtful and caring role in NoJo's reconciliation. Yay, Adrien!

"Amara frowned, then shrugged. 'I guess. I mean, we did rip out his heart, break it then handed it back with, what, a pink ribbon I think he said.'" "Now it was Aria's turn to frown. 'Where did we get the ribbon from?' he asked seriously, then brightened, 'Probably Jay.'" Such writing is thoroughly crafted, and thus variously satisfying. You seesaw surely between the figurative and the literal, joining them aptly through the twins and using them in ways that are true to the characters of Aria and Jay. Such attentive and active writing is a special treat for the reader. Thank you.

I clicked Wow instead of Like because you wrote the cascading momentum of the last dozen or so paragraphs. I greatly admire the courage and honesty of an author who imagines, who acknowledges the existence of that for which there is no single, perhaps no at all resolution. An author who gestures eloquently and discerningly toward what he may not be able to conclude to the satisfaction of all the involved characters. And, as well, the longing reader. And possibly even the author.

Fiction that prompts, even requires its reader to think closely, even work hard in order to read it; fiction that makes complex, nice distinctions by circling and regarding its subject from many angles is a thorough and felt delight. In one of his monographs, Kierkegaard says to the reader: I want to tell you something very important, but I am not able to tell you exactly what it is. So I am going to tell you as precisely as I can what it is not. And the space that is surrounded by what it is not--that is what I am trying to tell you.

Whatever you write in the future after this novel (and I fervently hope that you will keep writing), please please let there be affectionate bantering and horseplay in it. They are your consummate authorial strengths and should be exercised for the delight of your readers (and you as well, I would think). It's not just your narrative, your plotting, that brings Noah and Jordan back together in this chapter. You write them together. They are believably and beautifully together in your writing of their dialog and their physical interactions and their attitudes of concern for each other and for Brody. In no passages is Brody "together" with Jordan. He is never more than physically proximate. You imagine the union of Noah and Jordan thoroughly and therefore convincingly. And now for a question about yet another (I assume) Canadian idiom. After the splendidly detailed grocery shopping and cooking and dining, Jordan asks Noah: "Soap or wash?". Noah, unfazed, replies: "I'll soap. You wash." Hmmmmm. ""Wash or dry?" would make sense to a USAer's ears. Or even "Wash or rinse?". Can it be that in Canada, "wash" means "rinse"? I realize that the English and Americans are two peoples divided by a common language. But Canadians and USAers? When Canadian and USA diplomats confer, are there two interpreters in the room with them? Inquiring minds want to know. Thank you.

This is another splendid chapter, in ways that I hope you know and enjoy writing. Just one snippet of an example: Nate's ironic and sincere scenario of the conventional life that he hopes to live some time in his future.

There are many pleasures to rereading that first reading can't offer. I just exclaimed "Jay!" with a surprised grin upon meeting him here after noticing and, as I've remarked, admiring him in later chapters. I'm hoping that he'll appear at additional times before his crucial words and actions after the kidnapping. And I'll just add while I'm here that Drew's reply to Aria that he "would sit here and judge you and disapprove" are heartwarrning.

This chapter is thoroughly beautiful in every detail. In each aspect the figures' compassion, love (including Amara's sternly demanding and truth-telling love), need, and passion are completely congruent. Entirely affecting and inspiriting.

This chapter put me in mind of slithering Uriah Heep. It must have been unpleasant to write.

This is another remarkable chapter in your uniquely affecting and thoughtful story. I've never read another one like it. It was Jay who first got me noticing your making a character, a human being, as both singular and a unified composite. When speaking of their self, Jay uses the singular pronoun "I". But the narrator, recounting Jay's actions and words, uses third person plural pronouns. After such a passage in Chapter 27, I was struck in the following paragraph by "they" referring to Aria and Amara. In a way, I'm musing, Aria and Amara are two imaginings of Jay while they (Jay) is a synthesis of Amara and Aria. As I am now reading Aria Graice, you are imagining the human figure as simultaneously an integrated "gathering" of human qualities and separable into the component parts. I apologize for those awkward sentences and their muddled, tentative thinking. And I am sorry if you think that your splendid story is badly read and even mangled in them. I do feel more confident that I am feeling your story aptly. The paragraph that begins "Aria moved his hands..." and concludes "...far more than he deserved." is as tenderly moving and touching a paragraph as I've ever read. Its closing words are, as you probably intended, one definition of divine and human gra(i)ce. (Just a proofreading note: "him him" near the end of the paragraph perhaps should be "in him"?) I thank you again for a story that expands and intensifies the reader's feelings and thoughts.

Written with splendid and affecting craft.

Love JBR's renaming Sebastard!

If you do any rewriting of this chapter, I think that Geoffrey's observation that Noah's face is not recognizable in the video should be taken into account. I, also, read back to be sure that you had made clear that the other face besides Jordan's can't be seen to be Noah's. How, then, could Sebastian manage to out Noah to his mother? He's already told his mother that he has a gay friend. Her realizing that Jordan is that friend can't, in her mind, "taint" Noah. The argument between Noah and Jordan is such a vexed and distressing matter that the reader should not, I think, be distracted from it by any confusion regarding the video's possible agency in making Noah's mother discover her son is gay. I do realize, and even sympathize with, Noah's reasons of affection, home, and finance for not wanting to tell his mother that he loves Jordan. I am, however, losing regard for Noah as a character while my regard for Jordan is growing apace. Right now I think that Jordan deserves a better beloved. I hope that Noah in time merits Jordan.