Cynus

I should note, deciding which reviews to use was incredibly difficult. There were a generous amount of really supportive people who read this story and shared their thoughts with me, and I appreciated every single one of them. Thank you to everyone, and I hope you give it a look!

You know just how to perk up my day. Thanks, Roman! I'm glad you enjoyed the story.

Thank you, A.J. You've been a great friend to me for as long as I've been here, and you've certainly pulled your weight as far as I've ever seen. You're an amazing person, and I wish you the best of luck with everything in your life. And I also hope you get some delicious cinnamon rolls from time to time, as a reward for all the sweetness you've given others. Enjoy the surf, my friend.

Try NaNoWriMo. It worked for me.

2,000 words minimum each day. I almost pulled this off two years ago, then failed miserably last year. Hopefully this year will be more like 2015.

As an LGBT ex-Mormon, I couldn't help but feel immediately drawn to this documentary, Latter-Day Glory. You can learn more about it here: http://www.latterdayglorymovie.com/ It's currently in post-production, and will hopefully be released sometime next year. Here's a brief synopsis: Jonathon Levi Powell, celebrity hair and makeup stylist, and Terry Blas, comic book artist and illustrator, both grew up in the Church of Latter Day Saints. While on a roadtrip journey of discovery, they’ll meet with former and current members of the LDS community including celebrities . Along the journey we’ll explore Terry’s life at home in Portland, OR with his partner Scott, and Jonathon’s life on the road living between New York City and Miami, with his partner Kai. We’ll interview Jonathon’s family, who have been extremely welcoming of his sexuality, and see his life growing up in Seattle. Jonathon will revisit, for the first time, the site of his mission trip in West Virginia and Terry will return to his site in The Bronx, NY. They’ll end the trip by catching a screening of “Book of Mormon” with a group of gay ex-Mormons discussing their futures and how it gets better. We’ll also go to the home of the LDS church in Salt Lake City, interviewing clergy and ex-gay Mormons while catching scenes from the gay nightlife in SLC. Both will look into the technicalities of having your name and records permanently removed from the church. With the current rise of suicides in the gay LDS community, we’ll address the issue through stories from survivors and families that have lost children, family members and friends to this devastating epidemic and try to find solutions and outreach to end the suffering through interviews with politicians, activists and experts in this subject matter. I was able to contact the Executive Producer, Brandon Deyette, and asked him how I could help with the project, since it's a matter close to my heart. He asked me to share the project and to also tell people about my own process of coming to learn that I was worthy of love despite what the church had told me. And so, I've come here to do just that. The truth is that I didn't love myself for a long time, and part of me still doesn't. Part of me still struggles with the feelings of complete unworthiness I embraced throughout my time as a Mormon. I have the most wonderful boyfriend in the world, the sweetest man I've ever known who treats me like I'm someone special. I don't know how much any of you are aware of our situation, so I'll act as if I'm telling the story for the first time. He's my favorite writer on the internet, the person who inspired me to get back into writing after nearly six years of avoiding it. He's a writer over at AwesomeDude and Codey's World, and some of you may be familiar with his work. He writes under the name "EleCivil", and if you haven't read his work, you should. I personally recommend Laika, We're going to come back to him in a little bit, but I want you to know where we're headed. Plus, I can't stop talking about him, so there's that, too. As a kid, the church pretty much consumed my life. Not by choice, mind you. In fact, I was rather resistant to the programming my family and community wanted to thrust upon me. I was always the kid who didn't do what he was supposed to do, who used his tithing money to buy ice cream on Sunday when I stayed home sick from church. But, that didn't stop my parents from trying their damndest to get me to conform. They were always preaching, always trying to convince me that I should behave as 'Heavenly Father would want me to behave'. It didn't stick, but the one thing that did stick was that if I didn't do as I was supposed to, I was sinning, and if I was sinning, I was bad. I was ten(a couple months shy of eleven) when I first really noticed I saw things a bit differently than my peers. I'd already found myself in a number of exploratory situations with some of my male friends by that point, but at that age I had a best friend who made me acknowledge a few things. I won't go into details for obvious reasons, what with this being a public place and all, but after some physical exploration we ended up in a ridiculous fight over him wanting to go further and me stopping him. Part of me stopped him because I knew I wasn't ready, but there was also that nagging thought at the back of my mind that what I was doing was wrong. I heard my parents saying something about how only men and women who were married were supposed to do the things he wanted to do with me, and so I resisted those advances. The argument was extremely brief, and he walked away from me in anger. I decided to go home and think about it, then planned to come back and talk it over with him later, but as soon as I made it home I was grounded. My parents wouldn't let me go anywhere or do anything for three weeks (I'd ditched scouts to hang out with my best friend and also didn't tell my sister where I was for over four hours). By the time I had a chance to talk to him, he either wouldn't or couldn't talk to me. My memory is a bit fuzzy about how it ended, but he moved back in with his dad (He'd been living with his grandfather), and left the neighborhood, without me ever having a chance to have that conversation with him. Memories are a funny thing. That memory twisted on me over the years. Little details changed and morphed to fit my evolving worldview. What I knew for certain was that this experience, this painful, unavoidable separation from my best friend (and someone who easily could have ended up as my first boyfriend), changed the way I saw things. The pain and unhappiness from the separation took on the form of a demon as I tried to rationalize why it had happened. During the next few years, as I went through puberty, I was preached to constantly about the evils of homosexuality, masturbation, pornography, and premarital sex, all of which I'd come to associate with my best friend and a number of boys since then. I knew what I'd felt back then, I tried to deny it but there was no use. I'd loved him as much as a ten-year-old could love another ten-year-old, and if those feelings were evil, then clearly I was evil. The church hung over me like a shadow, and my earlier resistance to it shifted as I came to see myself as evil. Instead, I slowly came to latch onto the church as a lifeline, the only thing which could possibly rescue me from the darkness because, according to them, it was the only thing that could. I was depressed, suicidal, and wanted desperately to change who I was. I developed weight issues, something which I still struggle with. I developed an unhealthy addiction to pornography (Which, strangely, the Mormons are actually right that it can be addicting . . . I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day), and was looking for any way out I could find. For a brief time, Buddhism offered a bit of stability to me, giving me a chance to get outside of my head by separating myself from desire, but whatever complex emotions I'd developed proved too strong, and as I approached the end of high school and missionary age (19 for the Mormons, for those who don't know), I nearly lost broke down completely. I was already evil, I knew that without a doubt. Nothing I'd done had changed anything, but now I was expected to serve a mission; I, the most evil person i knew, was expected to go out and preach a gospel I didn't fully believe because my family expected it of me. The only hope I had was that the mission would change me, that by doing this good thing I'd be able to free myself from my sexuality and finally be able to live a normal life. I hoped God would heal me, so I would stop feeling that horrendous pain. I served for two years in South Korea. I worked hard, but I slipped up time and time again. I couldn't get those thoughts out of my mind (Thankfully I never had a crush on any of my companions. that would've been a nightmare which probably would've killed me). By the end of my time as a missionary, I was every bit as attracted to men as I'd been before I left, only now I'd had two years of forced sexual repression to add onto the list of things affecting my mental state. When i came back I knew my days in the church were numbered; God had failed me, and I no longer believed. Somehow I still made it almost a year until I learned that the Mormon church had spent tithing money, including money I'd contributed, during Proposition 8 in California. This was the final straw, the last nail in the 'Samuel's evil' coffin (There were other reasons I left the church, too, this was just the last). I was driving down the road with a friend of mine, and I remember narrowly avoiding an accident because the news had stunned me so terribly. I'd been raised on the claim(lie) that the church did not involve itself in politics(which I feel like an idiot for ever believing that). That Sunday I attended church for one of the last times, and I came home and told my parents I wasn't going to be attending anymore. This story is already getting long, but I have to say that my parents' reactions were somewhat damaging to me, but not as damaging as I expected them to be. I expected to be thrown out of the house, to be disowned and told I was evil. They didn't do that, although my mother cried for a few months whenever she saw me and to this day still makes a point of mentioning how my disbelief hurts her. They both deny it, but I still feel disappointment and a bit of contempt whenever they look at me. One of the things I still struggle with is my relationship with them, and it's hard to see it any other way, especially since they now know about my sexuality, and, although they accept that I identify that way, I've never had the impression they fully accept me. And that hurts, but it's not worth lying to myself over. This is the part where things get better, but not before a little bit more of struggle. After I left the church, things were hazy for awhile. There was a little bit of a high for awhile as I realized I'd finally stepped away from the chains which had bound me for so long. I started a new job, where I opened up to my coworkers about things I'd kept silent for years everywhere else, like my sexuality and a number of my political leanings. I finally told my three best friends about my sexual orientation (two of them pretty much already knew. Those three are the three reasons I survived high school and didn't kill myself, so thanks, guys!). They accepted me openly, and I had the beginnings of a support group. New job, great friends, and my heaviest secret now off my chest, I was able to start enjoying life. That lasted until my new job ended, and I got sucked into nine months of unemployment, where I started to question if I was being cursed for my sins. I didn't want to believe that, but everything went wrong so quickly, and less than a year after I left the church, it was hard not to think that way. During this time, I went a little crazy to say the least. I was struggling to understand, to find meaning in my existence. I remembered my best friend from when I was ten, and I went to his grandfather's house since he still lived in my neighborhood. I learned my former best friend drove for a trucking company and in my warped way of thinking I latched onto that concept like the pseudo-lifeline of the church I'd latched onto before. I decided to become a commercial truck driver and join the same company. First of all, I should never drive a semi . . . I get anxiety behind the wheel of anything larger than a minivan. But, I borrowed some money and somehow managed to get my CDL anyway. Then I went down to Phoenix for my orientation and new career as a truck driver for the company I'd had my sights set on for months. Of course, once I was down there, I had a complete nervous breakdown because it was the wrong move for the wrong reasons. Once again, I was running from myself, from the darkness which had shrouded me since I'd first admitted my sexuality. By leaving my support network behind at home, I came face to face with my complete loneliness and had nowhere left to go to hide from it. A complete stranger, who I only know as Jim, helped me in that moment. We were sharing a hotel room while we both waited to be assigned to trucks. He's the first person who set me back on the right track when he taught me the most important lesson he knew. If you spend your whole life doing something wrong for you, you'll spend your whole life unhappy, and that's the worst way to spend it. I came back home with Jim's words fresh on my mind. I saw a counselor at my father's expense a few months later, and he gave me the next piece of the puzzle. I related everything I saw wrong with my life, how I 'should be in college', or how I 'should be doing something with my life', and he stopped me and said, "I want you to stop and notice how many times you've said the word 'should', and I want you to try something. For the next week, until we meet again, I want you to replace the word 'should' with 'could', and see what happens." It was like a switch was turned on which hadn't been flipped for years. I began to see everything as a possibility, not an absolute. I came to see that there wasn't just one way to make it through life, that my truth didn't have to be, and in fact would never be, the exact same as any other person's truth. I'd crashed as I left the church and confronted the reality of what I'd seen as a wasted life, but I started to see it as what it was: a clean slate with a nearly infinite range of possibility. A couple of years into my healing, I rediscovered some of the LGBT fiction I'd come to love as a teenager, one of the few things which had helped me realize I wasn't alone in my way of thinking during my darkest moments. And, after some time reading through a number of different stories, I discovered a story titled "Lives In Periphery", an unfinished(still . . . get to writing, my love! ) story which spoke to me in ways I can't completely describe, at least not in the time I have left to write this story. I emailed the author, telling him it made me want to write again, and he emailed me back encouraging me. And I rediscovered writing. Fast forward three years to the time of writing this, I've taken journey after journey as I've dealt with unresolved emotions through the written word. I've come to accept my sexuality, to accept my uniqueness, and to love those aspects of myself for what they are. I came to love the LGBT community, and truly feel like I was a part of it. I've made friends who've become family, and made connections which have changed my life completely. And seven, almost eight, weeks ago, the author who encouraged me to write emailed me to tell me he'd loved my most recently completed novel so much he read it in one night. We started talking, and haven't stopped yet. It's the same conversation, it just pauses for sleeping and work . . . those pauses are the most unfortunate thing in the world. Sometimes, the darkness still gets me. Sometimes I still feel like I'm unworthy of acceptance or love. I used to have to pick myself up out of that, and I'm grateful I have someone else, my dearest love, who is now always beside me when i need him most. So, one last word for anyone reading this. It does get better. It gets better when you learn that your truth is your own, and no one else's. It gets better when you realize that life is full of possibility. It gets better when you realize that you are fine just the way you are, and nothing is wrong with you for feeling the way you do. The world needs you, and you are loved. ~Cynus

Some people just don't understand the proper order of priorities. I've met far too many people who put careers and wants over love and needs, and they always end up unhappy when it's all said and done. Mrs. Thompson's priority was her lifestyle first, husband second, kids third, and with priorities as fucked up as that, it's no wonder she made horrible choices. And, on a tangent... Go tiger moms! Thank you for all the reviews and taking the time to read this story. I've appreciated all of your feedback.

Thank you for the review! Although I'm not overly fond of Zane's mother myself, I'm quite glad to see a differing opinion offered on her behalf. Certainly, in the end, it was better for Zane to leave (in my opinion, anyway). I don't know what relationship Zane will have with his family down the road, but I think that's part of what this chapter is about, you know? It's about how the story continues even if it's no longer being written. Maybe he'll even reconcile with his mother some day. There's a strong stigma against mental illness here in the US as well, or at least in my region, but especially regarding depression. Having suffered from it for many years myself, I've often had to wonder if I could trust someone with the problem or if they'd just throw it back at me. Sadly, empathy and compassion are sorely lacking, as you said, but there are also, thankfully, many good people in the world. I'm grateful for your review, and I apologize for taking so long to get to it. Thanks again for reading!

I'm sorry for the perspective shift. Hopefully you've had a chance to visit the forum by now and see why I wrote the chapter the way that I did. I had to let go of this story, and this was the only way how. Bittersweet to the end. . . That would be another part of what I had to let go of. I've been bitter for so long . . . Zane was about healing for me, and this ending was no different. I hope you'll return for the next tale! Thank you for all the reviews, brother. I appreciate every comment and insight.

Zane's mother was something I was trying to figure out from my own side for a long time. People kept on telling me that they thought she was being terrible for staying with Stan when he was treating Zane so poorly, and I thought "yeah, but they don't know the whole story". Turns out, once I reached this point, I had to admit some things to myself, too. I didn't realize how much of myself I put into Zane. How much i was rationalizing to myself about these people. I thought I'd written Zane exclusively from the perspective of tying him to someone I'd once known, but it turns out I put a lot of my own naivety and cognitive dissonance into the character. Sometimes we want to believe the best in people even when they're screwing us over, I guess. And that was a place Zane was stuck for a long time. Thank you for all the beautiful, long-winded ( Not really) reviews. I've appreciated your comments and insights throughout the story. Thank you, also, for reading to the end.

Thank you for the review, Petey! I am, in general, in support of destigmatizing mental illness. In fact, that's why I showed the results of someone thinking they needed to keep it hidden, here. I believe we all should be much more open to talking about it. Especially since a staggering amount of people in our society are depressed, yet we never talk about it? Why do we never talk about it? I'm glad you enjoyed the story. I hope you'll check out the forum post I made regarding the final chapter of this story. Peace.

You may never know how much it means to me that the first review of this chapter was a positive one. I'm grateful, incredibly grateful, that you took the time to write this review. I hope you'll check out my forum post regarding this chapter. It explains some of why I took the approach I did, and I hope it'll answer any questions you or anyone else might have about why I wrote this story in the first place. As for new stories . . . there will always be new stories, but I haven't yet decided where I'm headed next. I'm going to play around with a few things tonight and see what happens. Thank you for the review!

I have love in my heart, but it wasn't always so. Perhaps a glimmer of it occasionally burst within me, at times when I felt most connected with the world, but for many years I did not know what the word meant. I could feel it on occasion in the embrace of a friend, or in the peaceful sanctuary of water, but overall the tremendous burden which weighed on my heart prevented me from acknowledging that sweet peace which connects all of humanity. This may not be what some consider a happy e

Could be as early as next month. Could be much longer. He's trying to find a job out here (And, if anyone is worried that it seems fast, he was already planning on leaving his current state and look for work somewhere, I just gave him a destination. It's coincidental, but fortuitous). He's a teacher, so it's really a matter of when a school out here accepts him.

All right, I think it's about time I sat down and gave everyone the full rundown of what happened. Over the past two and a half weeks I have lived a romance novel as deep and epic as anything I've ever written. I wouldn't have believed it if it hadn't happened to me, yet here I am, and oh what a story it is. It begins three years ago, before I found myself back in writing again. I was twenty-five, almost twenty-six, and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I'd occasionally spend my time reading stories on several sites which host LGBT romances, because it at least ignited some form of passion in me. And then I started reading a story which had only posted a few chapters, but it sounded intriguing. The story was titled "Lives In Periphery", and was hosted at AwesomeDude. I was enthralled by the time I'd made it a page into the story. The characters spoke to me, the dialogue felt real, and I remember reading it and thinking 'This is the kind of thing I want to do. I want to tell stories like this. I want to write'. I emailed the author, and as a joke I included the subject line 'I think I've fallen in love', then in the body of the email I wrote 'with your writing'. The irony of that statement now is not lost on me, but we'll move ahead on this lovely story. I told the author, C. (Protecting his name because of his profession), that his story had inspired me to get back into writing. He responded with a rather trained and automatic response at the time, thanking me for my email and wishing me well. I didn't think much of it, I was just psyched to get into the game again. So I wrote a couple of short stories and both ended up on AwesomeDude, and I set to work on my first novel, "Rumors of War" during NaNoWriMo. I received an email from C. halfway through November 2013, congratulating me on my short stories. Despite the formulaic nature of his first reply to me, he'd been watching for my stories and read them when he'd noticed they were posting. We talked briefly, during November and then time moved on. In December I was struggling to finish my novel, and I again reached out to other stories for inspiration. I discovered C.'s other stories, most notably "Laika"(Although I like everything he's written) and read them all in December 2013. When I finished Laika, however, I emailed C. and told him how much I loved it, and how it had impacted me. It is still my favorite story on the internet to this day, and the one which has probably shaped me the most as a writer. I was inspired enough by reading it that I became bound and determined to finish "Rumors of War" no matter what. In my emails to C. regarding "Laika", I started to notice a bit of chemistry. I'd already developed a small crush on him just from reading his work, but the emails were quickly solidifying that crush. I told him I thought we'd make great friends, he accepted, and then . . . He disappeared off the face of the Earth for three years. There was a point, probably four to six months after he disappeared, where I decided I was probably never going to talk to him again, since he was gone and didn't appear to be coming back. I didn't know what had happened or why he disappeared (I do now), but I had to let him go, and so I did. And I moved on with my writing. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, and occasionally my mind would drift just briefly to thoughts of "Laika" and a friendship that would never be (An incredibly poetic thing if you're familiar with the story). It helped me keep going through some rough patches, because I was determined to write something that would be as meaningful to someone else as "Laika" was to me. I don't know if I've ever succeeded in that, but it's still the goal. 2016 was a shitty year for me. I don't know if I was burned out or emotionally drained, but this year I've found writing difficult. It was a struggle to write 100,000 words over the course of this year, which, if you know how much I've written in years previous, this is an incredibly small amount. I say it 'was' a shitty year because it isn't anymore. In October (2016 in case anyone reads this significantly later than when I wrote it), I made a commitment to myself that I would be writing full-time when I was thirty, even if I had to struggle financially to do it. I made plans to expand my Patreon and redouble my efforts at getting published traditionally. I was determined that this would be the last year I'd let my dreams wallow unrealized. I made this commitment around the middle of the month, and I was going to mark the beginning of my new year at Samhain, October 31st-November 1st. Samhain is a New Year's celebration in many ways, but specifically I like to focus on the aspects of giving up the old to make way for the new. I was so filled with dedication to my goals as I approached Samhain, I was going to give up something particularly big in order to show my dedication to my writing. I'd already lived several years with short-term oaths of celibacy, but I was ready to commit to a lifetime of it if it meant I could focus exclusively on writing. And so, as night approached on October 31st, I started to prepare myself mentally for what I was going to give up. I planned on making it a matter of ritual, and so I intended to go and get a candle to meditate on the flame. Before I left for the store, I checked my email. There, in my inbox, was an email I never expected to see. C. had emailed me after nearly three years of silence. I was so stunned I stared at it for ten minutes before I finally opened it. This was the first paragraph: "So, I've kind of ghosted from the internet fiction scene for the last two or three years or so, but the other day I was in the mood for a story (maybe because NaNoWriMo is approaching?), and I ended up reading through all of Fearless in one sitting. It kept me up waaaay too late for a Sunday night and I ended up spending the day at work looking like a zombie...but it was Halloween, so I guess it was appropriate." The author of my favorite story on the internet, as well as the unfinished story which inspired me to get into writing, had just emailed me. Not only had he done so, but he'd told me he'd enjoyed my work enough to read it all in one sitting. After a year of absolute hell with my writing, it was exactly the validation I needed. I was so excited my entire demeanor changed for the night, and I forgot all about Samhain and giving up anything. I couldn't concentrate on anything other than the incredible experience of my favorite author liking, no, loving my work. I emailed him back and said, "Please tell me you're going to keep talking to me?" I said more, but that was the way I started everything. I wanted to put it out there that I desperately wanted to have this conversation. My crush wasn't back yet, but my desire for friendship with the guy who'd started me down my writing path, THAT was back in full force. And so we talked. Oh, have we talked! We emailed back and forth over the next few days, sometimes multiple times a day. We exchanged phone numbers on Thursday-Friday, and we started talking even more. Friday going into Saturday there was a question of mutual romantic interest hanging in the air, and by Saturday afternoon it was confirmed. We texted back and forth after I left work on Saturday, and I knew how I felt. I'd known since our text conversation on Friday, but on Saturday I had a bit more courage. I told him I 'really really liked him' (you know, that phrase you say when you're testing the waters and don't want to risk the other 'L' word?) and he responded immediately by saying it back to me. And so I went for it. I knew what it was, what I felt for this beautiful soul who made me happy with every single word he sent me. I told him I thought I'd fallen in love with him, and, to my wonderment he responded in kind. I know it sounds crazy that five days after we started talking that I would feel that way, but I do. It's also crazy that he'd feel the same way. But he does. Since then, we've emailed, texted, called, written and sent letters by hand, had dates watching Netflix while talking on the phone and planning what happens next. It's been beautiful and crazy and maddening and everything love should be; it's been scary at times and a bit daunting as we try and figure out and understand what we're feeling, wondering if we're crazy for going so fast, especially when we haven't met in person. But not a bit of those doubts has made me feel any different about him, and in fact we've only grown closer as we've worked our way through them. He's everything I've ever needed, except for being 1600 miles away, but that's an obstacle we'll overcome sooner rather than later. It's made me crazy, it's taken up all my time, but I wouldn't change a moment of it. It's, unfortunately, dropped my productivity to nil, but that's the Honeymoon stage of love for you. I know in the long run my writing will improve by this, I just need to get back to the point where I can control myself a bit more. Hopefully I'll at least be able to focus enough to finish the next and final chapter of Weightless soon. So that's the story. Feel free to ask me questions. I love talking about him, so how could I possibly feel bad about answering questions?

Dedicated to a pesky hermit and his habit for distracting me. A bright light woke me from my slumber, and blinking, I lifted my head, immediately looking around for Clint. He was still sleeping next to me, his face towards the floor and buried in his arms, seemingly unaffected by the light. I glanced towards the front of the pool room, looking for whoever flipped the light switch. Before I found the culprit, strong hands roughly grabbed me from behind, scooping me up and lif

My first instinct immediately upon opening the door was to reach for the light switch, but my arm didn't make it halfway before I stopped and gasped. Besides the dim illumination of the emergency lights in the pool, a soft glow permeated the room, coming from the walls and floor and even from the water itself. Hundreds of glow-in-the-dark stars carpeted the tiled floor and had also been stuck to the wall. Several larger stars had been placed in the water itself by a careful hand, and would be ea

The television was still on, and by the sounds of it my mother fell asleep in front of one of her favorite late night talk shows. She watched them all, depending on her mood, but they weren't to my taste so I couldn't tell them apart merely by listening. I needed to wake her if I was going to sneak out, because otherwise she'd hear me regardless of which door I left through. I needed a lie, a reason for being up, but thankfully she'd already provided me with that because of her predic

Gabriel Montgomery has been granted access to a magic spell to summon the devil on Halloween and make a deal for his heart's desire. No desire is greater than the one he hold's for his straight best friend Brandon. Will he sell his soul for lust?

On October 30th, 2016, I will take the first true vacation from work I’ve had in five years. I specify it as a ‘true’ vacation because I became terribly sick during each of the times I’ve taken off prior to this one. I’m crossing my fingers that this doesn’t happen again. I need a break, from work, from writing, from the internet; I need a break from everything, really. I need some time to reflect, for introspection and spiritual healing. Last year I heavily researched Samhain and discovered the spiritual core of the three day holiday, and thankfully I was able to schedule my vacation surrounding this holiday. I intend to celebrate it as well as I can, and with that in mind, I’ll be doing a few things. I’ll be unplugging, for one. I won’t be spending any time on the internet over that time, and I’ll be avoiding most phone calls as well. No Netflix, no Facebook, no email, no corresponding on my writing sites. I may decide to write some, but only as the spirit moves me, and definitely not before that happens. I’ll also spend some time going through some of the stuff I’ve been holding onto for years. I have a gigantic suitcase full of old papers, notes, cards . . . things I wanted to remember, but that I’ve never gone back to review. It’s time to get rid of some of my baggage. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. With any luck I’ll also spend a good portion of this time around a fire, contemplating the renewing energy of flame and hopefully gaining some insight into my life. I’m ready for a change, and I’m eager to figure out how to do it. Please be patient if you try to contact me during the next week. I’ll be rather difficult to find. But in the end, hopefully, I’ll be somewhere closer to where I want to be. Peace and love, Samuel(Cynus)

Nothing made sense anymore. I didn't want to move, go anywhere, or even get out of bed. Thankfully, because of the school holiday, I didn't have to. I tried to text Clint a couple of times, but he didn't answer me. I tried to tell myself that everything would work out, and that Clint would let me apologize, but I had a feeling things were really over between us. And so I wasted away in my room, staring at my ceiling more often than not, avoiding everyone and everything. Between Thursday

Haven't made it yet. Need to buy rice and payday isn't until tomorrow.

"Good morning." I rolled over and looked at Clint. He smiled at me, watching me with a content expression and love in his eyes. It was certainly a great sight to wake up to. If I had to choose a view to see first thing in the morning, it would definitely be this. We had spent the night together in my bed, but did not spend any more time engaged in sex play. We didn't need it. The brief physical release we experienced in the pool was enough to sate our appetites for the even

Yes. And now I'm going to make me some kimchi bokkumbap. I have been craving this food for years yet for some reason never bothered to look up a recipe until now. I totally relate to the young man in the story. http://www.maangchi.com/recipe/kimchi-bokkeumbap Here's the recipe: Kimchi fried rice Kimchi-bokkeumbap 김치볶음밥 This simple, simple dish is super, super tasty. It’s just a few ingredients, but it’s a dish much loved by Koreans. This version is simple, but you can dress it up with a bit of beef or pork. I posted a version of this recipe a few years ago that included the leftover sauce and drippings from a simple version of bulgogi, but the recipe was without a video. Eventually I made a video for moretraditional bulgogi, and now I made a video for kimchi bokkeumbap too. Many Koreans also like to put a fried egg on top, but my family prefers this simple version. When my son lived in the school dorm, visits with him were rare. I talked to him on the phone before he came and I asked: “What food do you miss the most? I’ll make it for you when you come.” I figured I would need some time to prepare and shop ahead of time, but he answered: “I miss kimchi bokkeumbap.” “What? That’s it? Is there anything else?” “Just kimchi bokkeumbap, Mom.” As you see in this video, you don’t need to prepare much in advance for kimchi bokkeumbap if you have kimchi and rice on hand. So of course I made it for him, along with grilled beef and lots of high protein food. As soon as he came home, I was ready to stir fry. He loved it! Ingredients 3 bowls steamed rice (3 cups) 1 cup chopped kimchi ¼ cup kimchi juice ¼ cup water 2-3 tablespoons gochujang 3 teaspoons sesame oil 1 teaspoon vegetable oil 1 green onion, chopped 1 tablespoon roasted sesame seeds 1 sheet of kim, roasted and shredded Directions Heat up a pan. Add the vegetable oil. Add the kimchi and stir fry for 1 minute. Add rice, kimchi juice, water, and gochujang. Stir all the ingredients together for about 7 minutes with a wooden spoon. Add sesame oil and remove from the heat. Sprinkle with chopped green onion, roasted gim, and sesame seeds. Serve right away.