everett Weedin jr

What a remarkably fine chapter. The crisscrosses at (and under and across and over) the table (and of which Greg's "internal conversations" play a crucial part) are richly orchestrated and variously stitched. Even more important, perhaps, they are making and driving an increasingly tense narrative. More and more I long for Greg to find some contentment in his life, while of course I want the story to go on as long as possible, delaying any final resolution. The tension is bearable because Greg is surrounded (in his chapter even physically) by a growing bunch of characters who variously care and want to care for him. I want satisfaction for Kyle, too; he's an engaged and engaging figure. Thank goodness Nate is there. Whatever his father did to Greg must have been horrific. The fiery rebirth of the Phoenix can illuminate and or consume. I look forward to your story's composition. And in the midst of all that you continue to prompt a good deal of (releasing) laughter.

I've enjoyed your story from the start. But for a while I found it to be just brilliantly exotic. Lately I've caught on to the fact that it's far more important and satisfying than that. It is a remarkably thrilling and romantic novel with a beautiful range of characters. Entirely splendid. Just a couple of brief remarks: "There's realistic and there's bloody stupid" is one of the best lines ever spoken with love. And I have liked Jay ever since their entrance into the story. Every time they speak or act, they are thoroughly admirable.

I think the this is an especially beautiful chapter. Beginning with a number of quotidian episodes (trying to get Jordan to clean the bathroom, cooking the cilantro-mush dinner, cooking a meal that Jordan fails to arrive for), the narrative pulls the quick visit to a gay bar, the Valentine's evening at a not-too-pricey (for Jordan)-or-too-romantic (for Noah) restaurant, the sweaty and PDA hours in the gay dance club, and the romantic exchange of thoughtful gifts and culminating lap dance on the way to the bedroom into one continuous diurnal orbit. Their daily shared life is becoming convincingly ordinary and particular to themselves. It is credible and inclusive. Thoroughly satisfying. A finely crafted and imagined achievement.

Teresa Barton is a charming and exhilarating hoot. Your own style of writing helps to account for the ellipses in her remarks. I very much enjoy that you do not spell out just what your characters are thinking while they are talking. For instance, I have some notions about what Nate is saying to Greg at the close of this chapter; but I, happily, do not know, even after going back and rereading the close of the preceding chapter, precisely where "there" is. What a satisfying and occupying story.

I'm enjoying your story a lot. The more that you reveal (and create) the dynamic of the twenty-year friendship between Greg and Nate, the more complex and absorbing it becomes to read. And Kyle as a sort of fulcrum between the past and the present extends and deepens your story's charge. Also, all three are engaging characters whose lives matter to the reader. And I really enjoy specific pieces of your language: "...to limit Kyle's ability to see the crazy dripping from my pores..."is so fine, and Nate gesturing his hand in front of Greg like "showing off a new appliance" on TPIR is laugh-out-loud funny. Thanks for such a satisfying story.

Craftingmom, you created the beautiful chapters of Ripped. No one has a better right to reread them. I've reread all of them. You're in for a very satisfying read. Enjoy!

It is a great pleasure to read the first chapter of a new story by you, and to be anticipating the ones to follow. "No, grief wasn't within his reach on this day" works so well. And the snowy scene of Jordy buttoning up his coat on Chester is one of tender affection given and accepted. Jordy could be a caring parent buttoning a child's coat before he goes out to play in the snow.

You are entirely welcome. Excellent writing prompts attentive reading and thoughtful response. It is all of your readers who thank you.

"Nick hugged Dave, who smelled like Dave, and turned,,,," It is hard for me to analyze just why that inserted "who smelled like Dave" is splendidly affecting and superb writing. But it quietly and emphatically is. Earlier chapters have made clear just how Nick inhales and loves the scent of Dave. inhales Dave like life-giving oxygen. So your dropped in clause, at once defining and non-defining of Dave in Nick's life, is a center of their radiating love. It sums Dave as himself and as the vision and experience of Dave that is Nick's. A cartoon in The New Yorker magazine once showed a couple in front of the desk of a marriage counselor. One spouse is a cat and the other a dog. The caption reads: "We're fighting like....Well, let's just say we're fighting." The one person in the world whom Dave can't smell like is Dave. Is can't be like. Just like equals is. So your deeply affecting and signifying clause presents Dave as Dave and as Nick's embrace of the Dave that he imagines and loves. Saturated, thoroughly active writing. A gift to all of us.

Another beautiful chapter. Devon's You still love him and he still loves you so why can't you two get back together inquires with the direct charm of a child. Makes me think of the Beatles's "Can I take my friend to bed?" All us confused and confusing adults know the many answers to Devon's question. But they don't blot out the question. I'm going to read back over the words exchanged between Dave and Nick after Dave figured out the cheating and Nick admitted it. Right now I don't remember that they said a lot to each other. So there aren't a lot of words they need to dislodge from their ears. Some harsh words are hard for lovers and friends to stop remembering. Glad you're in charge of such complex matters here. The author of Still You Want Me is Mrsgnomie (I think I've got that spelling right.).

Another beautiful conversation between Dave and his mother. Their closing remarks suggest a possible future for Dave and Nick. (Have you read Still You Want Me, another fine story posted at GA?). History needn't keep replicating itself. Nick and Dave broke out of their fathers' mutual animosity. Perhaps they can grow from their present dynamic, painful to both of them. In one of his late poems, William Carlos Williams writes, in that loping meter he devised, "What power has love but forgiveness?/In other words/by its intervention//what has been done/can be undone./What good is it otherwise?" His poems are not given to wishful sentimentality.

I much admire your insisting (really) that no character be wholly villainous. It reads so true that (with the glaring exception of Dave's father) each of your characters is mixed, with complicating and mitigating qualities being developed and revealed over time. I never would have expected Brian to say No, and was touched when he did. And a bit rueful that Nick was willing to "shag". (That's a British term for "fuck", right?) Anyway, with you in benevolent charge, there is hope even for Dear Old Dad.

This chapter is not only a warming pleasure, but even a relief after the ones detailing Nick's downward spiral of self abuse. Abigail continues to grow in her independence, an amiable evening of cider and darts, telling off the bullies, and lovemaking between two sweet and sensible guys. Your fair-minded writing does make me feel sorry for Nick, but he's still responsible for making very bad choices. I'm confident that Dave won't throw over or otherwise hurt Patrick just to get back together with Nick. So---necessary narrative tension, but not depressing or nerve-racking. A really good chapter. Thank you.

I do admire narrative sections from which every imaginable succeeding narrative path seems likely to hurt some likeable character. I admire the auctorial honesty and even courage. 'There's no one I'd rather be celebrating with than you' is such an achingly poignant statement from Dave, summoning as it does for the reader Nick. Dave has every right (and good sense as well) to have stopped seeing Nick. And you do account credibly for Nick's continuing to turn to Brian the Slug for doped up solace. Matt and Alan (who would have thought? well, you) turn out to be a very comforting plot line. Thank you for that crumb of comfort.

I like Parker Owens's comment because it, in a way, replies to your comment at the close of the chapter. The dynamic that you are developing between Noah and Jordan, and Jenn for that matter, is action, the slow discovery of and regard for another character (and one's self). I especially enjoy Noah's attention to his own thoughts and even wardrobe (" everything I own apparently is blue"). Sometimes you give him a stream of consciousness in which a sentence in his mind replies to or notes the preceding one. I enjoyed this story a lot at Nifty, and am glad to have the chance to read it here, somewhat modified.

'So how was your summer, Dave?' asked Matt, shooting a zombie in the face. That sentence, I think, is a very effective crossroad in your story. Dave and his mother have previously joined in a fine, human, caring conversation with each other. Matt and Dave will have a similarly honest and concerned conversation in the chapter's closing scene. And meanwhile there are zombies to be shot on some screen amongst the ordinary household's other furniture. Parallel universes crisscrossing. There's a fine essay by de Quincy, I believe, on the effect and significance of the knocking at the door that the Porter answers early in the morning after the night in which Duncan has been murdered. De Quincy argues that the knocking suddenly reminds the audience that there is an ordinary, everyday, mundane world going on outside Macbeth's castle and his fevered, horribly imaginative, phantasmagoric mind (and now actions).Your characters are encountering and dealing with fundamentally important matters of human life on planet Earth. And killing zombies, too. What a world.

A crucible's fire can consume destructively, but it can also burn away the dross. And by so doing it can reveal, even make, that which is precious (and I mean that word entirely). Matt could well be right that Dave won't forgive Nick, and Dave and Nick could nonetheless love each other in the future: a different Dave loving a different Nick. Or not. 'Nick felt the tears pressing on his eyeballs again.' I've never read that sublime sentence before. Such wordings make a Novel novel. And excitingly instructive. Your novel is a significant pleasure. Do you read Marvell's 'Eyes and Tears'? The first stanza is pure Marvell winking at the reader, I think, and the last three thrill at every reading.

You are an extraordinarily honest observer of and writer about the human animal. I love Alle's attention to and ruminations on language.

Well, as T. S. Eliot asserted, every writer writes in the company of every other writer--past, present, and future. So that's how I read every author. How could one not? You're all there in the archives of our minds. I'm reading a novel by Leslie Ford these days (The Simple Way of Poison). When the first person narrator says of another character's face that she hasn't seen for a day or so that it looked as if it had covered some acreage in Hell during that time, I of course thought of Satan shitting in Dave's (wasn't it?) mind.

What I especially admired in this chapter is Stuart's remarks to Nick about learning human feelings, such as caring. In The Tempest, for instance, Shakespeare seems to suggest that the human species is uniquely subjunctive. We are not automatically human(e). Every time that we seriously want to be ourselves, we have to go through a syllogistic process: If I were to be human in my present and particular circumstance, then I would need to speak and act the following words and actions. And then we have to try to speak those words and perform (as in a play) those actions. And, inevitably, succeed fitfully and incompletely. As a writer, you must notice this frustrating ( but enlivening) experience every time you scratch or tap your fictional words. I reread often the conversation between Prospero and Ariel in the play's final scene in which Ariel is urging Prospero to feel compassion toward the characters who have attempted to depose and even kill him. Ariel: "...if you now beheld them, your affections/Would become tender." [that necessary and trying word] Prospero: "Dost thou think so, spirit?" Ariel: "Mine would, sir, were I human." Prospero: "And mine shall." As you write Stuart, he is, in part, a magnifying lens for what Nick and Dave must (and shall, if they will) now do: imagine caringly and lovingly the pain that the other is feeling, and then speak and enact to each other their sympathetic love. No pressure on you, Thorn!

A brilliant chapter: complex and yet intense, satisfying and still edgy, and with a whooping-out-loud surprise. And one of the best lines ever: "they could kiss my waxed ass." What a thoroughly felt and thought and crafted accomplishment.

Two beautiful scenes. Mandira and Dave at the dance: cheering and affecting. And Dave, Alan, and Susanne in the park: so touching. I am very happy for Alan.

Mandira's mother is entirely lovable.

I much enjoy an episode in which characters declare themselves for justice and affection. Dave's mother has interested me for quite a while. You've poised her nicely between conventions of deferential wife, distant mother, and the possibilities of thinking and feeling on her own. Her limited concern for Dave here is credible and encouraging. Dave and Matt are truly caring and supporting characters. Thank goodness they and Zoe are there for Nick. Dave's father could well fit into one of Dickens's novels as a mean spirited martinet of a school master or avaricious guardian. As a number of authors have realized, being himself is his own worst and appropriate punishment.

I'm very glad that that the major characters in N1 are continuing in this story. It is a pleasure to anticipate that you will imagine distinctive relationships between them. Would you be willing to take the time to tell me what "lining" means in British clothing? Some clothes here in the USA are lined, but you mention more than once Dave's hand being on the lining of Nick's jeans, even while Dave's hand is on the outside of the jeans. And, if I remember correctly, once a hand was on the lining of a t-shirt. That one really puzzled me. Sorry to be such an iggorant colonial.