James Carnarvon

You both make excellent points. What can I say? Cosmo may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer. He saw what he wanted to see and heard what he wanted to hear. It was a poor experiment with hope. Yep. They're both as bad as each other. 😅

Cosmo was concentrating. Crouched on the submerged boulder, up to his trunks in sun-warmed seawater, he planned the tricky lateral dive. If he got it wrong, he was apt to break his bones on the next rock down. At his back, the little town of Atrani encircled a small sandy beach. Between two rugged, tree-crowned crags, an impossibly dense cluster of whitewashed buildings crowded into the foot of the Valle del Dragone, rising out of the terraced contours like crystals in a geode. The coast ro

Thanks for all the comments, guys! Cosmo might have to reveal a more attractive side of his personality for that to happen... Wow, I'm glad his situation rings true! The same response applies again! Of course, this is where Marco is now. There's a whole story ahead, and by the end of it his situation will be somewhat different... There was a time when Marco would violently reject the slightest praise from anyone who made him feel vulnerable, so, for me at least, he's come on a long way already! But, of course, as @Summerabbacat mentioned, melancholy and self-doubt are deeply entrenched in his character. These things don't change overnight (if ever...), even when you do find yourself in a new/improved life situation. Does Marco have hope? Does Cosmo have hope? How do their situations compare and contrast? These are core questions at the heart of this story. Ha! I thought this chapter would feel like a comforting hug compared to the slightly alienating reintroduction to Cosmo in chapter one, bringing back more of the familiar characters and romantic locations from the earlier stories. Sibling relationships aren't something I've explored extensively before, as a lot of my characters are only children for some reason. Personally, I always got on well with my sister, but maybe we weren't rivals in the same way. I don't think it's that unusual for relationships between teenage siblings to be strained like this. I've seen for myself the casual combativeness and lack of perspective that can arise over time. Marco himself is startled by the venom with which Luca talks about Cosmo... and yes, maybe Luca does resent Cosmo's arrival as an intrusion in his life. But, then... he felt let down by Cosmo before, and then they were locked down in a house together for three months, living in each other's pockets, sharing a small bedroom. I'm not defending his behaviour, but I get it... Not delusional at all, but these things take time. Gianni and Angelo (and I'll also give Dani a shout here, despite their romantic disasters) have done a lot to help validate Marco's great qualities and boost his general sense of self-worth, but that doesn't extend to romantic interest, in which his life experiences so far remain largely negative. I'm sure it would help Marco no end to feel genuinely desired by someone. It's hard to be the odd one out. Let's see what future chapters bring!

“Try this,” Marco said, holding up first three fingers, then seven, then eight. They were surrounded by the gentle, sociable buzz of a Friday evening in the cathedral square. The streets and bars were quieter than he was used to, but it beat the eerie silence of lockdown. The steady scraping of the cicadas in the pine canopy above them helped too: after the strangeness of the spring, the sound was reassuringly familiar, welcoming… normal. Beside him on the bench, Sami rolled his eyes.

Nobody has mentioned the Covid factor yet. Essentially, my chronology document was showing 2020 for this story, which gave me a choice: pretend that the pandemic never happened in this version of the world, or face up to the fact that the world changed in 2020 and acknowledge it in my story. I knew that I had no interest in telling a story about the pandemic per se, but I could acknowledge it in setting the story in the summer after the first lockdown was lifted. I could make some minor dramatic use of it; for instance, it was quite useful in accentuating the tension between Cosmo and Luca. Welcome back and thanks for joining me again! Yes, Cosmo and Marco do have that in common, and it's sort of why they're friends. The question is, do they have the resources to escape despair? Ch.2 will drop later today.

But that would spell “coollfc”… 🧐

Yeah, it's been a while. I spent the previous nine months or so working on my ongoing efforts to produce sellable children's fiction, but that was turning into a bit of a struggle, so I decided to take a break from it. My idea of how to 'refresh' myself as an author was to spend an intensive three months of late nights writing a new Ravello story (!). I think I WILL be able to take a fresh look at my other writing after this, but I need to catch up on some sleep first...

The bad habit of getting distracted rambling on in descriptive prose about how lovely Ravello is. I overdid it in my first story, although it suited the romantic atmosphere. Since then, it's become sort of... expected... but I've always aimed to keep it under some sort of control. (Oh, by the way, the cicadas are scraping. Did I mention that already...?)

Do it! 😁

I tried it before with Toto, but it was more subtle and I fell back into bad habits. Most of my point of view characters have been impressionable outsiders to Ravello at first so the beauty of the place makes more of an impact on them. With Marco I have aimed to land somewhere in the middle.

There’s a heavy degree of perspective filtering at work in this story. We experience Ravello as Cosmo does, and the things that I/we and my other characters love about the place do not move him… so his chapters are not so soaked in that sort of atmosphere. I was trying to do something different in this story. I haven’t always loved writing it, and the result is darker with more jagged edges than you’ll be used to from this series. The good news is that this story is structured differently to the others, and my two ‘heroes’ will take it in turns to take the story forward. So the next chapter will be experienced from a slightly less jaded point of view: that of Marco. At its heart, this story is about contrasts and how two characters’ different state of mind allow them to take very different journeys from a superficially similar starting point. Anyway, thank you all for returning to Ravello with me one more time! EDIT to add: I’ll be adding new chapters every couple of days as usual, so the next one will drop on Monday.

Vincenzo revved harder and, with a throaty growl, the convertible shot out of the hairpin bend like a bullet. Cosmo felt his heart skip a beat, grinning in elation even as he gripped the leather seat so hard that his knuckles turned white. Bring it ON…! Far below, the open sea swept into view: a vast sapphire blanket receding to an endless, hazy horizon of powder blue. In the bright June sun, the landscape around them was a semi-desert of pale rocks and dry grass, dusted with silvery o

A novel in twelve chapters. Summer 2020, and the inhabitants of the Italian mountain town of Ravello are making up for lost time after three months stuck at home. Families are celebrating being reunited at last, and the appetite for romance has never been higher. However, two teenage boys are navigating this unusual summer alone. Cosmo, a lost soul, and Marco, a recently found soul, find their lives entwined by the fact that everybody seems to have a boyfriend except them. Both of them have experienced pain and neglect in the past; but can they both overcome it to find fulfilment in the present?

Thanks @drpaladin! Writing a story set on my own shores, in the cool of autumn, has a transformative effect on the atmosphere and creates a much more appropriate setting for a ghost story. Instead of the sunshine and sensuality of Italy in the summer, everything becomes more earthy and natural, the colours and descriptions more muted. The particular area of the Welsh coast alluded to here is also a place to which I feel profoundly connected, so it's easy for me to paint a picture. In one of my as-yet unpublished children's books, I set the story in the suburbs of a boring, grey British town (a totally made-up place for once), which created a different feel again. The idea was that extraordinary things happen in the most mundane of places, lifting the young hero out of an equally mundane life. From time to time, though, he gets out into the countryside and, even though the countryside I describe is quite bleak and empty, there's also a majesty to it. The big skies and open spaces lend a sense of tremendous freedom to some of those scenes, in contrast to the dreary monotony of home and the dismal primary school where a lot of the action takes place. I feel the location should always be a character in a well-written story. As to the ghostly aspects of this tale, I ended up dropping more clues to Chris' secret than I originally intended to, but I tried to add enough uncertainty to keep it from being a foregone conclusion until the closing scenes. As soon as Chris wakes up and Tom is gone, I was making no attempt to hide it.

As an intentional writing choice I can respect that, even if it didn’t work personally for me. On that basis I think you did a good job.

You know what they say, you’re your own worst critic. I felt this could be better when I submitted it - but, at the time, I lacked the energy to do any more work on it. It was fun to write something different. Now you all know I can do more than just write stories about Ravello!

Thank you to everyone who read, liked and commented on this, my entry to the 2023 GA Secret Author Contest. I was a little disappointed to only get one vote, but then I was up against some very strong competition and the ultimate winner totally deserved it. (Also, if the Eurovision Song Contest is anything to go by, I knew I had no chance of winning as soon as my story was posted in the dreaded #2 slot.) 😆 I had very little time to work on this, as I was editing The Summer of the Selfless when the contest was announced and I was also tired from it. While I think I got off to a very strong start, I felt the wheels came off slightly somewhere around the middle and I just about managed to pull things back together by the end. In writing Adrift I reused some ideas from an abandoned children’s novel of mine. In doing so I reversed things slightly (in the novel it was the friend, not the point of view character, who turned out to be a ghost). I totally failed to realise, at the time, how that turned Adrift into a clone of The Sixth Sense. Still, I could hardly be insulted by the comparison! 😅

And so all is revealed! I didn’t guess because I honestly had no idea for most of them. Thank you Cia for running a fun event. I was glad to be part of it.

Yes, well done. There was some stiff competition! The winning story was powerful and, I thought, very original.

I really enjoyed this. Being about a horse made it feel really fresh for some reason. This is my sort of detective story - there’s a personal arc for the main characters, not just a procedural with a case to solve. There’s clearly more of a story to tell. Perhaps it can be worked up into a longer story once the contest is over. As @Hero observed, some aspects of it are a little rushed so maybe the whole thing could be both fleshed out and extended.

This sort of thing isn’t really my genre. As far as I can tell, a decent police procedural, but I agree with @Mrsgnomie about the clinical writing style and the ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing’. I want a story to engage me on an emotional level. All I really felt while reading this was standard issue moral outrage at the nature of the crimes committed. However, it was a good twist for the perp to be a gay man with a mental illness.

I'm a writer who would prefer to receive some constructive criticism, rather than have readers keep silent on things that haven't worked for them so I end up making the same mistakes over and over again. The sort of criticisms I find most useful are points that go (directly or indirectly) to my technique in a more general sense, which I can take into account to help improve my efforts the next time I write a story. Criticism that suggests changes to something I've already published is of less value because, once a story is finished enough for me to begin publishing it, I'm unlikely to make significant changes - other than to fix obvious errors (there have been one or two exceptions to this but, generally, that's how I approach it.). I've noticed that it's rare at GA for a review to award less than 5 stars. People who haven't wholeheartedly loved a story seem to hold back from posting at all for fear of discouraging the writer and, because that seems to be the culture here, I've been guilty of the same thing myself. However, in another life, I have had some experience of reviewing things critically. I feel the middle of a scoring schema (in GA's case, 3 stars) should really mean 'average' in the true, non-critical sense of the word, and that 3 stars should be a solid foundation to build on, not a failing grade. After all, if everything's always given 5 stars, where's the room for improvement? As far as this secret author contest goes, I'm afraid I'm incredibly behind on my reading due to a shortage of time lately. If I were to give honest ratings for what I have read so far, they would probably vary from 2 to 5 stars; but like @Hero said above, it's partly because some of the genres have not been to my taste. I might hope to catch up on my reading in time for voting, but realistically I'm not sure I will. Nonetheless, I thank Cia and all the participants for their efforts. It's been a fun event.

I'm a little late commenting on this one due to time, and there's little I could say that hasn't been explored eloquently by the commenters before me. Speaking as a parent whose teenager has flirted with mental health issues but has, on balance, just about managed to cope so far (I think the age of Covid and TikTok has been an incredibly tough time to grow up), I found this story a hard one to read. Had Maverick and Sloan known what happened to Avery when he was little, and had his Asperger's been diagnosed sooner, maybe they could have prepared themselves a little better for the challenges that would follow and sought appropriate help from a young age. As it is, they do the best they can, but without some of the key pieces of the puzzle it sadly isn't enough. I suspect this is what many parents probably fear most - that, despite all their best attempts to love them, their child could end up going down a self-destructive path that they cannot follow. Children with trauma tend to end up passing half of it onto their parents; it tests Maverick and Sloan to breaking point, and there comes a point in this story where they act to save themselves; I can't really blame them for it, tragic as the consequences appear to be. There but for the grace of God go us all, to coin a phrase. I commend this and all the other contest entries so far (including the next one, which has already been published as I write) for their emotional weight but, like others, I can't help hoping that we get to enjoy something a little more light-hearted soon!

Reading this story made me glad I grew up in a place where attitudes to homosexuality are, overall, less backward than this. That this can and, indeed, does happen - as even the comments on this story indicate - is so hard for me to even comprehend. How can anybody who has raised a young person from infancy turn their back on their child so completely and, seemingly, irrevocably, just because of one aspect of their nature? In my opinion, Mom is a monster. A society that raises people with these kinds of attitude has a lot to answer for. I totally understand our protagonist’s feelings in this story and he’s lucky that a seemingly kind person came by at the right time to stop him. Like others, I’d be interested to read a continuation of this story to see if there is any kind of reckoning within the family. Dad seemed more sympathetic, if too weak to argue with Mom. Not for the first time, it might fall to the youngest (Cody) to speak the truths the rest of the family need to hear.