jkwsquirrel

Thanks akuhata! I saw my "like meter" going up as you read the story! I'm glad you enjoyed the story. Thanks for reading it!

Thanks Lisa! Sorry I missed this comment earlier. I'm glad you enjoy my writing!

Thanks! I appreciate the compliment!

Thanks! Sorry I missed this kind comment earlier! I'm glad you enjoyed it!

The appeal of writing this story in territory we've already been through was seeing Billy and the other boys through the eyes of someone who wasn't part of his circle. This entire story is taking place all around Billy and he's oblivious to it. From the outside, Billy's an egotistical jerk. Only the people who know him know he's a jerk with a heart of gold. Seeing Brett in the role of big brother just seems natural to me. He's still a doofus, of course!

There must be trouble coming or it wouldn't be a WAR story, right?

Aiden's just trying to navigate his way through tenth grade, looking for someone to fill the void left by his father. "Big brother" Brett has a heart for losers. He collects them like pets.

And now we'll get to a side of him that Billy never saw.

Every scar has a story. My back has a couple of them. They’re reminders of what ignorance combined with power can do. The scars were the only gifts I could remember my father ever giving me. There was this kid at school, his name was Dustin. On his wrists were some gnarly scars that had to have had quite a story. It certainly looked like he’d given those scars to himself. But why? Why would someone do something like that to themselves? The mystery was very attractive to a loser like me

Thank you! Hopefully we'll shake the rust off and keep things entertaining!

Thanks! I'm afraid the Billy bashing will continue. Aiden's vision of who Billy is is part of what drives him in later chapters to do certain things. Yes, if Aiden got to know Billy he would understand the stand-offish behavior better. But Billy doesn't make it easy. Billy and Brett will always be lurking around, but watch out for a certain red head!

Glad to be back! It's fun to play around with a different perspective of these characters we know so well!

I always said that from a different perspective Billy would be the villain of the story and not the hero. From Aiden's perspective Billy's life is perfect and he has no business complaining about anything. The interesting thing to me is that we know things about Billy that Aiden doesn't know. We know Billy's inept social skills aren't because he wants to be rude to people, but because he can't understand the way he comes off to other people. We'll be seeing a lot more of Brett soon, and a certain red head. Billy? He'll always be lurking around causing trouble for poor Aiden.

I also find it funny that many of the things he complains about Billy are things he is doing himself. Billy had a bit of an ego though, so that whenever anything bad happened to him he pitched a fit and protested. Aiden just lets people use him and walk all over him. What will happen to change that? As for his mom? Yeah, I agree, it's nice to have at least one good mother in town!

Life is unfair. That was the most important lesson I’d been learning in high school. Life is hard. Life is cruel. And life will kick you in the balls every chance it gets. Oh, and people are assholes! It hadn’t taken long to learn those lessons the hard way. If life were fair, I’d be six foot, four inches tall. I’d have gorgeous blond hair and perfect six-pack abs. I wouldn’t be five foot five and barely a hundred thirty pounds. I wouldn’t have messy brown hair and glasses. I wouldn’t have goda

Aiden Jackson just wants to survive his sophomore year at Mon Valley High School. Unfortunately, even though he just wants to be left alone, Aiden has attracted the attention of a few bullies, some senior boys with their own agendas, and a charismatic teacher with plans on taking over the whole school - with Aiden's help. Will the boy who's been bullied his whole life become a bully himself?

I usually waited a day or two before I began responding. I wanted the readers to have the opportunity to discuss the story without my interference. It also gave me a chance to relax and enjoy the experience without having to respond to everything. After a day or so, I'd reply to each of the comments. Sometimes, comments of multiple readers could be grouped together and addressed with one reply if they touched on the same theme, or a group of comments from the same reader could be responded to with one reply. It wasn't so much "I have to reply to every single comment" as much as it was "I want to make sure every reader knows how much I appreciate their response."

It is fun, knowing the way it all went, to read them again! My favorites are the really controversial chapters!

I prefer to think of Mike as a young man who got sucked in to a situation he wasn't prepared for. Though medically and psychologically Mike's actions aren't pedophilia, culturally and legally a man in his twenties engaging in certain activities with teenage boys could get him into serious trouble. And culturally, people tend to mistakenly call that activity pedophilia, even though a few years ago that activity was not only considered normal but was encouraged by societies.

Hey thanks, dude! At this point, I can let you in behind the scenes and explain the long wait from a story-editing perspective. Simply, I f'd up. lol! See, I originally had Cold Winter and Broken Boy much closer together, making this part take place four months after Cold Winter. However, I wasn't satisfied with the ages of the boys, so I bumped this story back a year, aging the boys to 15 rather than 14 year olds. The only drawback was that long gap between the park kiss and anything else happening. It did reveal some important characteristics of the boys though, Billy is much more stubborn than he appears and Brett is more patient than Billy gives him credit for, at least when it comes to Billy. These characteristics, particularly Billy's inability to read Brett very well, will become important later. Glad you like the story!

Thank you! As I write this, the boys would all be around thirty-one years old or so. What will they do with the time they have? Well, that's in your hands now. "Then what happened" is up to you. That's one of the best things about writing, I can give you the gift of imagining together what the future might hold. Would they have children? I don't know, but it's fun to explore that together. Would they make the same mistakes? Would they have learned from their own parents' mistakes and do things differently? It's fun to think about what impact an George had in the boys' lives. He was such an important part of the story. He got involved and he cared, and that left an imprint that you could see in the boys in this story. One of the subtexts in DW is that Brett is becoming the next generation's George. He had a troubled past but he's learned from his mistakes, he grew up in a single parent household and had a messy break-up with that parent, he knows everybody, he's dependable, and he's always in the background helping people because he gets involved and he cares. So in a way, Nate has experienced life with George, only he's experienced it through the boys who learned from George directly. I could go on, but I'll just say thanks again! I'm so glad you enjoyed the story!

Thank you! I appreciate the love!

Thank you! I'm glad you liked it!

Thank you! Yes, this one was almost not meant to be, but it wouldn't leave me alone. I think it showed the positive trajectory of the boys' lives. Commencement ended with the bad guys winning for the most part, DW revealed the real winners.

Thank you so much! I'm glad you liked it!