Talo Segura

I was sixteen. My mother opened the bedroom door. I was stark naked lying on top of my "best friend" who was also naked and we were... I think she said, "Oh! Sorry," she closed the door. I said something like "Oops!" And we carried on... quietly. Afterwards my friend was more embarrassed than I was and he sneaked out. My mother only said, "You'll have to tell your father." My parents were separated and my father living in a different country. I did tell him, but sometime later, I don't know if my mother had already told him, but I think so. It wasn't a surprise. They were okay, I guess, I'm still not certain about what they think.

Great story, well told, moving and emotional!

The original title of this book is Altri Viaggi, which translates as Other Trips and the author adopted Life Is A Journey as the working title, because it better described the content. Finally, changed to Lost Inside My Life, a poetic and worthy title. The story tells of a journey through life, the life of Paoletto and Roby. The reader does not discover the narrator's name at the beginning, but it quickly becomes apparent as we listen to his introspection, he is lost. Later, as we follow the story we discover how lost the central character is and to what depths his life plummets. This is without a doubt a beautiful and melancholic history of a profound love amidst tragedy and disaster in a hostile world. A struggle to overcome, accompanied by desperation, solitude, and the darkness of the soul. Yet, above all, even as it broke my heart I rejoiced in the time spent discovering the life of these two boys for as long as it lasted. Their story is ultimately a triumph, a magnificent joy, which they managed to share while destiny permitted. The author's writing was often quite exquisite and provoked emotions and tears. The narrative reflection on life, love, their relationship, and that of those around them, as well as the world as it was in Italy in the seventies, was both absorbing and educational. Readers' commented: " ...incredible beginning — sensitive, evocative. Strong character development and storytelling." "You have succeeded in allowing me to actually feel the emotional rollercoaster here! Excellent work!" This story is a Shakespearean Tradgedy, or as close as I've ever found in an online gay themed story. It has all the elements. A tragic hero who is cursed by fate with a flaw, he's gay and loves a younger boy. There is a struggle between good and evil. However, you look at it, a terrible fight is going on between love, desire, and what is right and good. This struggle looks likely to lead to a tragic waste. The good risks being destroyed along with the bad, and the bad is only a perception of evil. The external struggle with what is acceptable to society, friends, and family. The internal struggle our hero is tormented by. There is catharsis, a lack of poetic justice, things look like ending badly for everyone, including the good guys. Their love touches the spiritual, although there are no ghosts or magic (which Shakespeare was fond of). There is perhaps a little comic relief, at least an occasional light moment. All the ingredients of a Shakespearean tragedy. After reading this book, I feel I have lived the lives of the protagonists along with them and grown to love both characters, with all their faults and their good points. The consummation of their love for one another was moving, the end devastating, but this was a love affair that was ultimately a triumph!

This chapter brought everything together, Paoletto and Roby, a relationship in a time when it was not easy, not simply because of the attitudes of others and the society around them, but the internal struggle that has to be confronted and overcome. I feel I have lived their lives with them and grown to love both characters, with all their faults and their good points. The consummation of their love for one another was moving, the end devastating, but this was a love affair that was ultimately a triumph. Great chapter!

It is amazing how much the author has written in so few words! A very deep emotional piece described with perfection.

I have a good friend who is sixty-five now, he was nineteen or twenty in 1975 and living in London, and that's exactly what he did. Left school, left home, found somewhere to live, and hoped, not to get a gay life, but simply to discover himself and be free to be who he was. He did! At least that's what he told me. So it wasn't all dark, dour, and bleak in the seventies. Judging from some of his other tales there were opportunities which existed forty years ago, that have disappeared from today's world. I guess the universal truth is it is all about living your own life however or wherever you find it.

@Zuri it is a very good portrait of someone emerging from a coma and your translation into English is as good, if not better than a lot of English speaking writers. Okay, there are a few errors and an occasional translation difference. I say difference because it comes down to a choice of words. The story offers an intriguing start and it was enjoyable to read. I was wondering if you have posted this on any German site, only you are not the only foreign author or the only German to post here.

I think @W_L is bringing a lot to GA by publishing his series of stories which as well as being works of fiction, also explore another way for relationships and interaction to work and give an insight to different aspects of sexuality. It's ambitious, courageous, and enlightening.

It was a little window into another epoch and felt very real. If it was boxing day this year it would certainly be very different. It's interesting how the family were connected around the film, today they would be totally disconnected, the kids would be on their phones, if they were even all together in the same room. So, even if the family interactions were at odds with each other, they were still a family in 1975. It must have been difficult for Karl, but he was emerging into a burgeoning gay world, next year would see Sebastiane, Derek Jarman, (Google it), although still too young to see an X rated movie it certainly would have been a change from Rachel Welch! Nice piece of writing.

@Cia what do you do if you have a chapter already in the post dating queue to be published in the future?

It's A Sin - 1980s Young gay and AIDS.

This story is a Shakespearean Tradgedy, or as close as I've ever found in an online gay themed story. It has all the elements. A tragic hero (Roby) who is cursed by fate with a flaw, he's gay and loves a younger boy. There is a struggle between good and evil. However, you look at it, a terrible fight is going on between love, desire, and what is right and good. This struggle looks likely to lead to a tragic waste. The good risks being destroyed along with the bad, and the bad is only a perception of evil. The external struggle with what is acceptable to the society, friends, and family with whom he lives. The internal struggle our hero is tormented by. There is catharsis, a lack of poetic justice, things look like ending badly for everyone, including the good guys. Their love touches the spiritual, although there are no ghosts or magic (which Shakespeare was fond of). There is perhaps a little comic relief, at least an occasional light moment. Like I said, all the ingredients of a Shakespearean tragedy.

There is only one big thing wrong with this story... it doesn't continue. You drew me into Jason's life, you mentioned his crush on Alfie, his problems with Harrison and his crew, his loneliness and isolation. The tower block council flat was a perfect description, been in a flat just like that one. You added the misery, piled it on, even poor Beckham got murdered. Absolutely no one cares about Jason, and he still dragged himself through the wet precinct on the way home to the tiny flat and TV soap operas, dragging himself through life. Like I said, only one thing wrong, this was chapter one and I really want chapter two. It was a good theme to explore, like father, like son, and if there is one thing everyone in Britain hates, it's a paedophile, which makes this a heavy drama. Yet, even without the drug rapes of his father it is a legitimate reflection, will a fourteen year old boy who is sexually attracted to another fourteen year old boy, always be attracted to fourteen year old boys? You have the start of a very good story and one with several themes: the crimes of the father vested on the family and son, the isolation and bullying at school, the reflections and fears of a fourteen year old. And how would it continue? I kept wondering what was on that laptop. They say nothing completely disappears, supposing the tech wizards reformatted it, but did a quick job, because it was a freebie, and Jason finds sonething on there. And, I know you tend to the dark side, but suppose his father didn't do it, what then? The possibilities are endless. Do please think about continuing, even slowly. I'd like to see what happens and get to know Alfie as well!

Guess that's what you call auto-medication!

I felt the same. This story has a certain style all of its own and merits to be read, if simply because you get insight into another culture, another country.

Will wrote to Father Christmas with something he wanted to ask him... Will asked Santa if he could speak to God and tell him he loved him, and did God love him for being gay? Doesn't it just break your heart? (Tweeted letter to the US Postal Service).

Thanks for this. I downloaded the ebook. It's next on my list.

REVIEW Discovering Love by Rick Beck. This story was first published in 1997 and like many similar stories from that same era, there is a certain formula or perhaps you might say the recipies have many of the same ingredients. That said, this story is different enough to remark upon, because whilst looking at teenage relationships, the kind of friendships in this story are perhaps more real and honest than in those many other teen romances. The fictional element of the story can obviously exaggerate the reality, but nevertheless, there seems to be a lot of real life drama and experience in there. As they say, it could have happened that way. A number of life questions are examined about what is a relationship, what is loyalty, how do you live with a group of "friends?" Who are your friends, who might simply be using you, and what is your own role in all this? These are some of the questions that Martin, our protagonist, asks himself, and asks others: "...he was trying to get a better understanding of why men loved men, even if they thought they only loved women." The road to happiness and fulfilment twists and turns, never straightforward, it holds surprises, revelations, and angst, at each turn and intersection. Over time everyone grows up a little, inevitably, although does everyone change and truly become an adult, or are we stuck forever in the patterns created by our past? You may never have met the kinds of people and situations Martin encounters, or you may have been one of those boys who walked away. Whatever the case, it cannot be denied, even if you never experienced it yourself, that most everything in this story is founded in real life. As an early work by the author and given the recipe of the epoch you will need to forgive, forget, and get over the lack of editing, along with the amount of graphic sex. For my taste the author was a little heavy handed with the sex, but then again the story is entirely focused on teenage relationships and very much on those sexual experiences. So, you couldn't really have the story without the sex. This is certainly a story that stands apart from the crowd, and as such is well worth picking up. I enjoyed reading it, it was almost non-putdownable, as I was drawn into the complex relationships of all the characters. The many secondary roles are drawn with skill and enough background description to bring vividly alive the whole story. I would recommend it. Here is a link: http://iomfats.org/storyshelf/hosted/beck/ I started reading on Castle Roland where it is currently publishing, but switched to IOMFATS as it is complete on there and I couldn't wait.

I stumbled across this interesting topic. I have not exactly translated in the traditional sense, but edited stories into more readable English, which have either been translated by the author, written in English when that was not the author's first language, and with one story translated automatically, then tidied up. I would hazard to say that it is virtually impossible to write correctly in a second language unless you are truly bilingual, which means not simply speaking and writing in a second language, but knowing the culture, having lived in the country. Some authors get close when writing in another language, but still need editing, to polish the story. The approach, should I believe, always be to try to maintain the author's style and not impose your own style on the work. This is important because foreign authors bring something new to the party. Which means the translation or polished version walks a tightrope between normal readable English and the style of the author. It is difficult to explain and difficult to do, I can only tell you that you know when you have got it right. You know, because the author speaks and understands English and tells you, thank you, that is so much better. If the author doesn't speak the language the book is being translated into you can only rely on trust and other people's comments, and people may not always agree. There is always a degree of interpretation, but usually if you are in-tune with the author, it is possible to know what they intended and reform it without losing the original intention. It is a challenge, but can be very rewarding. I have polished stories on GA by German and Polish authors and on other sites from German and Italian authors. If you think about it, in the sense of what I have done, it is simply editing. Perhaps the most interesting aspect now is that auto translation by the likes of DeepL has become good enough to provided a rough translation that can be polished into good English, or presumably other languages.

Yeah, I agree with that sentiment, but I do still enjoy discussing writing, how people approach it. You can learn a lot just listening to people.

This is character led writing. You get inside the heads of your characters and let them speak, then the story follows. I don't do that. I plot the story (more or less) and the characters play their roles. That doesn't mean they aren't real or have nothing to say, but they don't lead the story. They react to what happens to them, the situations which arise. Although the characters can influence what happens with their actions, the reader follows the story (plot) and not the characters. Of course, there are always the protagonists, there in the story, all the way through, but the story is only a little part of their lives. It is about something that happened to them or which involved them. I need to know what the plot is to write the story, it's the frame which encloses the book.

To be clear, Covid-19 is nothing like the flu, number wise. In the USA, 2019, 35.5 million people got the flu, 34,200 died. 8.19 million people have been infected with Covid-19 and 220,000 have died. Those numbers paint a bleak picture, you are very much more likely to die from Covid-19 than influenza.

This series of four books, titled after the four seasons, follows the relationship which forms when Luca, the youngest of four brothers from a working class family of artisans, meets Alessandro, a boy a little older from a noble and rich family. The contrasts are stark and confrontation presents itself from all angles, not the least being within Lucas's own family. An epic struggle and a classic love story, the setting, history, and art, of Italy provides a magnificent backdrop incredibly well described by the author. Despite the formatting, most probably a function of this being published in 2011, and notwithstanding the at times oddly written phrases, English is not the author's mother tongue, this is without any doubt a masterpiece. Four books which standout from the usual as wonderful works of fiction with so much more to them than simply the love story. A whole host of friends and enemies are conjured with equal skill and the story tells the lives of more than only the two protagonists. At times sad, at times exuberant, sexy, and emotional, the story simply can't be put down. The books live and the characters are as real as anyone you may have met. They have their good points and their less good points, each has his or her own character, and they develop over the period of a few years, just as each of us grows up, grows older, and changes. This series of books were recommended by a friend, and once I started reading I could not stop. I quickly got past any imperfections, and despite it being not polished like the finished carvings in Lucas's workshop, or the marble statues which adorn the Italian city of Florence, it rose above all this by its shear quality. Despite it being a series which can always be daunting to start, in the end you will thank the author for it being long, because like all good books, you don't want them to end.