Krista

He seemingly has survived the first day. It was a short, not-so-deep kind of first day, with everyone settling in. But, he also bolted. I wonder how long before Trace and Celia are told about him just running off like that... small towns and all that.

Yeah, a lot of his convictions are coming from a negative place right now. When that happens, we tend to make a mess of possibly good things. I just hope that I've not overdone it.

This is the comment that made me think that I've unintentionally put a lot of weight onto his Grandfather, a character that we don't even know. I don't even think I've given him a name in the writing. But, I see him now. There's so much of him in the writing as it progresses. But yes, kind of makes me sad that I didn't intentionally put more of him into the writing, but I also can't remember where or if the grandfather in question is still alive or not. So there's that too. And yeah, Joel has had to make a lot of quick decisions. He's made a mess of a few of them. But they were decisions he didn't see himself having to make. And he's still having to make them not knowing if he's even okay with the decisions he's already made. It is a but of a loop he's been on since that night. He's had to make them through loss as well.

Arguably, there's also been people in his life for almost eighteen years that's shown him time and again that he needed to be careful, that meeting them more than half-way is a step too far. His own mother and older brother being the most glaring examples. And maybe he's his own worst voice in the mix of all this. There's conflicting voices and ideas at war in his head and until one of them win out... we don't really know where Joel is going to land.

You're perfectly fine feeling the way you do about Joel. I do seem like I'm defending the guy. But, I don't set out to write characters that are universally likeable. I don't like writing them in "golden" scenarios to where there's more weight in comfortable universal thoughts. I knew going in that Joel was going to be exhausting for a few people. That he's going to do and say things that's going to annoy people and make him seem selfish, or at fault. I think that gives him a lot of humanity. If you've ever read, "The Best Year," then you got a good dose of me going out of my way at attempting to make a character unlikeable for a large stretch of the writing. I wanted people to be tested on whether or not they will ever think that asshole Jackson was worth their time and trouble. It is also true that hurting people hurt people. They mess things up that bystanders will look in at and wonder why or how a person who had that right in front of them manage to mess it up. He's done that a few times in the writing. At least with the example you provided, it was inward, he hasn't lashed out on poor Roy too heavily yet.

Yeah, very much still under a month in the timeline. I get twitchy knowing we're twenty chapters into this story and so many words in.. and not even a month in... You do make a point though. We wouldn't be telling Joel to get over it if his family had all died tragically and he was the only survivor. We wouldn't tell someone how to get over their fears or grief in that moment. We most certainly wouldn't be doing so in less than a month of that happening. Joel's family is still very much alive. His world 'is still' three counties down. He just can't go back to it, not in any way that would be healthy for him. There are some elements of self-inflicted roadblocks there, but they're there only because he is hurting enough to keep them there.

Baseball was a safe area for him. Some place where all he had to show was how good he was at it. How the people around him are all on the same playing field. He had nothing to prove to them. It was a lot for him to lose that too. He kept himself at a bit of a comfortable distance with his teammates as well though, but it was comfortable. We saw some of his high moments and rock-solid memories as well. Hitting a game winning double, defeating your biggest rivals in the post-season. That had to have him feeling a couple miles high that night. He does have to do it on his own. I also can see how he could have lost himself in the process of all this. He lost his family, his school, he's worried about losing a legacy he's built since he was thirteen-ish years of age. Before that if you count learning the fundamentals that built him in little league. He definitely doesn't like being linked romantically to Lorianne, despite that possibly being something that he could settle behind. But, it is a very precarious thing to do... as it would be yet another lie. Rissa... I'd be scared of her.

It would be such a twist if he was never actually gay and was just having this bit of a curiosity streak because he got caught up in a pair of brown eyes that was completely unexpected... and decided one night to see what that could look like? Then have a nosy older brother with bad intentions sell you completely out for it... It is human nature to self-sabotage, we've all done it. He's had to crawl back from his rock bottom though, it isn't easy finding new level ground again.

Yeah, there's some small hints here and there that does seem to point to him being good. He's played Varsity baseball since the 8th grade. He's won district and regional post-season things. He could still be a bit of a big fish in a shallow pond, but the colleges within the state 'have' to know who he is by now, they've had enough years to notice him by now. But.. has even thought about that? I'm not sure that he has put a lot of weight to that idea.

I had an aunt always saying: "Don't stress yourself out too much, it'll give you wrinkles." Joel:

Are they glad to have him? Or is he just a new curiosity? 😮 New gossip, not the same old... Some people are really thrilled to have him there... Gavin, Davin, and Coach Finn, even Roy, for different and obvious reasons. He's walked through the day in comparisons, old with new... old fears with new, how they mingle and how not much has changed. We'll see how much of that is just him over thinking and how much of that is 'actually' true. What he knows for sure though is that he shouldn't be there. It was the last thing he ever thought would happen to him, even with his underlying self-preservations and cautious nature he never saw himself as anything but a student at Tempton. Now he's a Warhawk... rather jarring. I think I also unintentionally put a lot of weight on a grandfather character that we never really knew. A lot of Joel's most treasured things have come from his grandfather, someone we don't know a whole lot about. His love of baseball seemingly came from him. He was driving his grandfather's truck, and actually liked the old beat up thing, he didn't see it as an unwelcome burdensome thing, even after it broke down. Mind you, it was also his grandfather's gun that he took from his father's nightstand table... but the grandfather keeps popping up in this story. And yes, he chose his grandfather's number to wear through little league all the way up to now. He thought he'd also be the last Tempton Tiger to ever wear it.

Endured is probably a good word to use. I think it was like a window that has a small crack, every small knock making it larger until the window shatters completely. By the end of the day, all the small annoyances, stresses, comparisons, new... added up to a whole lot of stress for him. He had enough. And yeah, talking to the coach presented a new set of issues that he probably only had in the back of his mind. It took that interaction for him to start painting that picture in his head. Right now, we don't know if he's painted the right one or not, he didn't give them much of a chance to prove him wrong, unfortunately. Maybe meeting the coach on his first day wasn't the best idea for either of them... but yeah, until he figures out where he wants to be, how he wants to live, and what he wants to allow himself to reach for... these things are going to keep creeping up on him, I'm thinking.

Fletcher County High wasn’t any larger l than Tempton as the student population went, but as soon as I walked through the front doors my stomach turned. I wasn’t greeted with the hall of trophies that lined the entrance on both sides, so familiar to me that I barely paid any attention to them. The main offices cutting into them on the left side, that I would ignore to reach the main hallway, which was a crossroads. Ahead of me should have been the freshman wing, where they had all th

I've always thought that it is low-hanging fruit to be fair. Yes, the story can have elements of religious nutcases using religion as a weapon. And there are cultural, regional, time periods, and modern thinking, stereotypes, and etc feeding such things. But, humans are never predictably living in either/or depths. It is far easier and more rewarding to write characters that have very human and 'self' convictions than just throwing them on the opposite side of the spectrum as the main character and slapping, "villain," on their ass and calling it a day. Some stories require such a thing if that's the message that someone wishes to tell... but most usually, it is just lazy. Although with the character you may be struggling with --- I think the entire premise with her is to be that stereotype. Since it seems most of the characters are leading with stereotypical elements with subtle depth wiggling around them. Which, I found really fresh, but if you're worried about taking 'her' too far, or too far in one direction, to where she becomes too 'heavy' for the story you're wanting to tell.. then let her continue to be a walking stereotype, but maybe settle into the middle ground of... she's a super villain, but she doesn't do it very well... so it tends to be comical than anything. At least that's what I got from her with the posted writing so far. I have no idea what your future plans are with your story or characters. I only know I've been waiting far too long... far too long. No pressure though. lol Lisa Benton isn't religious. She thinks she is, but she isn't. She can't be. Faith and all of that takes practice, forethought, understanding of the word. It is a journey. So she's prejudiced and homophobic to a fault, and she may or may not be using her misguided notion with religion to back up those convictions. What makes her a monster though, is that she can look her kid that she's loved for eighteen years in the eye and say things like, "He wouldn't have done it..." after hearing that he had a gun, on a secluded bridge, and hurting. She's a monster, because Joel broke her heart, but Joel didn't do anything. She pushed him out of her heart and she seemingly never will have room in there for him again. So, she may seem Either/or, but those small things moves her a little past that. She is not the story though, she is the catalyst to Joel's... if I had written him staying with his family, then I would have to write her a lot differently than I have. I would have to give her a lot more flexibility. Find more layers to her than what I've shown with her. She might have been a bit of a 'miss' in the writing for that, but I didn't want to focus on her. I wanted to focus on Celia and Trace instead.

Yeah, if Joel was to ever come home and explain the reasons for him losing his family and home, I think the Bentons will have a lot to answer for... it would do them some good to see that a lot of people do not think the same way Lisa Benton does. But, that's the fear that also keeps Joel where he is... in the off-chance that they do. So, yeah that probably added to why Joel was vague with his coach as well. Telling him to ask his family the reason, because he wasn't going to offer it. It would have given the coach all the explanation he needed. I didn't want to write the Coach with the idea of him being only concerned about his line-up being messed up with Joel's unexpected disappearance. I wanted him to read legitimately concerned. I didn't want everyone aside from Cody in Tempton to read negatively in that moment. Otherwise, it kind of gives a lot of weight to the stereotype of small out of the way towns... that they don't have much to redeem them, including the people. I mean, when I remember that I still needed to write that phone call/conversation anyway. *whistles innocently* And yes, like Davin said ages ago: Celia needs to be protected at all costs.

This chapter's comments definitely got me re-reading all these upcoming chapters all over again. It is a double-edged sword, hormones. I think Joel and Davin would have fooled around in his bedroom before Gavin and Colt got home. Then the fear of a possibly drunk Gavin coming to look for his twin, because Davin wasn't where he expected him to be. There was no guarantee that Gavin would just collapse on the bed forgetting he even had a twin to be looking for... The horror of a drunk Gavin stumbling into the middle of 'anything' could have stopped them. I doubt he wouldn't have been quiet about it.

There's a bit of fear tied to Joel. He's always felt that he can feel loved, but it comes with a small fine print of: Only if they don't know who I am. He found that out. So that fear won't go away all that easily. It will resurface every time he meets someone and decides that he wants to move forward into something with them. He did it with Celia and Trace, he'll do it with Colt, Lacey, Davin, Gavin, and so on. It won't go away until he realizes that these people are not like his family. Unfortunately when someone hurts us that badly, we tend to weigh the rest against that kind of person who caused the pain in order to protect us from ever having to go through that again. Good people are judged unfairly and harshly, mind you in that frame of mind. It was his mother, father, and older brother. Three people that shouldn't be the cause of that kind of pain at all. We're still not over a month into him learning this lesson either. I sound like I'm defending Joel a lot. Maybe what I need to be doing is poking him out of the nest a bit more. Also, sexual chemistry in the writing... *new fear officially unlocked* Yikes.

Yeah, this chapter had a lot of flowing from up, to back down, to up, to down again. It was a lot of words, one of the larger ones that I didn't break up into different parts. I added the phone call to the end, because mostly I forgot to *whistles innocently* and thought it needed to be more than an 'afterthought' for the progression into the next chapter. I also noticed that I do need to go back and edit some of the writing in that section. But yeah, by the end of it I think Coach left that phone call a bit confused, but also a lot of his questions answered. He may not know what prompted Joel's family to seemingly abandon him, but he also got enough of a conviction from Joel that there's no sense in pursuing it a lot further. If Joel wasn't that committed to staying with the Connleys I could see the phone call being a lot bigger than it was. Good thing he waited until he was absolutely sure in his decision, otherwise, I could see him breaking Celia's heart and leaving for Tempton again. 😮 We can't have a broken hearted Celia, it most certainly wouldn't do. There's still some things he has to figure out though... decisions still yet to be made...

Thank you, the last thing I wanted to do with the writing of these scenes was to detract or... bog it down too much. I know they're in their own heads and in doing so, they're in their own way. I also know that hormones, urges, desires, etc... can impact that thought process and send their minds elsewhere for a little fun times.. And that Men and Women approach such dramatics somewhat differently. I think a large section of you all thought that Davin and Joel would forego their thinking for sexual intimacy, whatever scale that was. And I thought it was teetering on that idea, but there was just enough new, fear, and reluctance to stop what happened 'this time.' Would it have been different if Gavin and Colt were ten minutes later than they were and they were a lot farther into the action... possibly.

Well, when you put it that way...

I guess he was blindsided, because he probably did reach out and got nowhere via calling Joel's cell. Then Joel's parents provided him little information. Then one Sunday afternoon he's minding his own business and an unknown number calls his phone and he decides to answer it... and it is Joel. Blindsided is probably a good way to describe what happened to him. He's been rather blindsided through Joel's entire disappearance. Joel seemingly opened his eyes to the extent of that absence as well. The coach did ask Joel multiple times if he was safe and out of trouble, he needed to hear Joel answer that the same way each time. If there was any faltering or change in that answer, I could see him doing a lot more. It was nice that his concern for Joel overshadowed Joel being the "star" short-stop at least. And yeah, they are a little scared and in their heads a lot. In their own way maybe a little. They are bumbling their way through these early stages.

These youngins running around don't know how easy they have it. They should all be made to fold a map back exactly how they opened it, down to the creases. Although, admittedly, I've never done that either. But, you paint an interesting picture and only being on the tail-end of that, since I did get the internet... slow and dial-up that it was at a fairly young age. It would make for an interesting character study, but one that I'm not equipped to really write. They don't have any practice in any of this. The most they've done... they've done alone and to themselves.

You frightened me. I can sense a lot of frustration with them both this chapter from more than a few of you. I know I sort of... kind of... almost.. went there 'twice' with them this chapter and they successfully managed to not do anything with any of it. And I say all of that knowing that maybe teenagers of their age probably would have done it... twice and without blinking.. and that the frustration is entirely because they blinked when they shouldn't have.

Yeah, lets not wish that on me either. I don't know if I have another decade of writing in me.