Adam Phillips

I spent the final spring break of my college years by myself. Instead of the standard beach trip this time, my crew--jocks, most of them, and their women--had gone to the mountains of Colorado. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't wanted to go when the plans first came up. And I'd have had a great time. Still, I'm not really a "mountains" kind of guy. No, for me it's the beach. The ocean. The sun and the surf. Specifically, the Texas Gulf Coast: Mustang Island, where I'd played as a child occasion

Only when I'm breathing. It and stupidity account for why there's gonna be a new addition to our household this month. :wacko: It's a good thing, though. The horniness and the new addition.

I hate typos, grammatical infelicities, syntax blunders, and other such things...in my own work. When I'm reading someone else's work--at least online--I tend to be much more charitable. I never see the point in tearing an author a new one, either in public or private, unless you think that some egregious problem in the writing seriously mars an otherwise fine piece of work (And yeah, I've written such an email to an author. Privately.). Generally speaking, three things strike me about an author's work. 1) The story--if the author has a compelling story to tell and a strong narrative sense, that covers a multitude of sins. I'll hang with an author who's deficient in other ways is he/she can spin a good yarn. 2) The mechanics--a story that's riddled with punctuation mistakes, misspellings, and bad syntax is generally not a story I enjoy reading. Unless the story itself is strong and compelling, bad mechanics will usually cause me not to care much for the work. 3) The style--beyond questions of narrative and mechanics, some authors' use of words, syntax, imagery--and hell, even punctuation, sentence-and-paragraph construction, dialog--take my breath away. I'm not necessarily talking about overblown or excessively florid writing; some of the most powerful stylists cut right to the bone in terms of their verbal efficiency. No, when I'm talking about style in writing, I'm thinking about guys who, beyond telling a story, clearly love the language, who give individual words and phrases thought and care. These are the guys I love to read. These are the guys who leave me wanting more. And more. And more. These are the guys who make me fall in love. With the writing, of course (but feel free to email me privately with additional proposals if you're one of those writers ). Unsurprisingly, writers who excel at #3 generally have 1 and 2 down cold. But not always: You can always have style-without-substance (I think of Edmund White's Nocturnes for the King of Naples) or powerful narrative with prose that leaves a little to be desired and/or needs a heavier proofreading/editorial hand (Two much-beloved Hosted Authors whose stories I love madly come to mind, but I'll pass on calling them out by name...mainly because I don't want to be universally hated here). When authors display mastery in all three areas...well, that's Reader Heaven, in my opinion.

Consider the source. It's always something we can count on from Graeme.

As you've doubtless seen, I've been posting Crosscurrents here at Gay Authors beginning with the first chapter. And as of this week, you'll be getting all new chapters from now on. There is little difference between the version at Gay Authors and elsewhere, but yes, I have been making small tweaks here and there.

Thanks.

Thanks, guys, for the birthday wishes. I'm having a great weekend. I got kidnapped to the beach for one final summer romp in the surf. Beach trip or no, I still promise to have the first new chapter of Crosscurrents in over two years posted by Friday.

I'm pretty much myself online and have been getting more myself all the time, to the extent that I'll actually talk on the phone occasionally to online friends. I've even chatted on cam with one of them, and I gotta tell you that when I first started doing this online stuff years ago I swore I would never ever get that "real" with an online acquaintance. My last name online is a pseudonym. I don't hide my online activities from the people in my offline world who are closest to me. They also know pretty much everything there is to know about me. On the other hand, while I don't know that I hide my real self from my other "realworld" friends and acquaintances--that is, if someone were ever to ask me if I were bisexual I wouldn't deny it--my lifestyle choices run pretty conventional "young-married-suburban-professional," so it never really comes up. I've been in a profession where I wouldn't really want people who know me reading my online stories, but these days I'm more or less self-employed in a line of work where my clients wouldn't give a shit because the work I do for them is essentially anonymous. That's made me feel so gutsy I recently actually put up a borderline racy PG-13 picture of myself--though I cropped out the upper half of my face and all of the interesting portion of below-the-waist --for my online friends for a while, then thought better of it and took it down. In gay/bi venues online, I'm more likely to be open and upfront about dimensions of myself that are generally known offline only by the people who are closest to me in life: my wife, my parents, my siblings, my bff. It's one of the reasons I participate online: To be with a community of people who "get it," but whom I don't have to look in the eye at work. Personality-wise, what you see here is pretty much what you get in real life. Kind of hyper, pretty gregarious, a little passionate, and frequently in-your-face and regretting it later. (Cf. "Evolution" thread )

You just been hittin' on the wrong straight guys.

I think the point is not to think of yourself as an A or B author. Personally I think the example given as B is not a good one, because it displays the very worst of the kind of thing you're trying to characterize. Narrative can be poorly written as A or as B, and brilliantly written as A or as B. The real question is how to love the reader with the words. How to make the words enhance your story. How to utilize them to make them sing. How to catch the reader up in your narrative world. There's no one way, but either style can and should serve those aims. In general, I do think those of us who tend toward B should be careful that we're not merely indulging in our love for words. The words have to serve the story. But when B is well-done it can be effing transcendent. I'm not saying my writing embodies that ideal. Once in a while if I'm lucky I achieve a temporary moment of it. But it's a struggle. I don't know that I could call myself A or B. I do admire the power of the understated and the unsaid. That being said, well-executed lyricism is very attractive to me.

I have a reader who calls my story "angst-y." She has a point. Anyway, we already have a thread here on sad songs, but seeing as how I'm stuck in a car on a long trip and bored until it's my turn to drive, I thought I'd see if anybody was interested in participating in a thread on "angst-y" songs. There's a difference, I think, between "angst-y" and "sad." What are some of your favorite "angst-y" songs from the pop world, past or present? Here's one from before I was in elementary school. It feels plenty angst-y to me. The Motels, "Only the Lonely"

So many ways to slice this. And everybody's mileage varies. I like sex scenes. I like them to be explicit too. But they have to be well-written, and I don't think it's easy to write them. That being said, I don't require them.

I agree. But then I'm totally on board with full-on stroke pieces if they're written well, and apparently we have members here who are too refined for that sort of thing. Every author here has to answer the question you asked on his/her own. But you might ask yourself the following question: Who are you writing the story for, primarily? Are you writing it for yourself first and foremost? Or are you writing it so that it will be liked by the maximum amount of readers? Or are you looking to make an impact on a smaller subset of readers who embody a certain characteristic? A person could make a legitimate case for a variety of answers here, and what you decide to do will depend at least in part on how you answer the question. I write for myself. If others like my stuff, that's great, and I enjoy sharing it, but I'd never let what a reading audience might think determine what I write. In fact, if I were to do so, I think I might lose the "voice" that in fact gives me the readership that I do have. I tend to like authors best whose work is clearly self-directed, and not written with a view toward what people might like. I cringe when I hear of an author changing a chapter after-the-fact because of reaction from an audience. It's a little ironic for me to have said that, because I wrote Mark Arbour an incredibly nasty email about his story 1968 because I didn't like what he did with the plot. On the other hand, I have all the respect for his authorial autonomy. If he were to have asked me beforehand and I could have prevented him from killing off Jeff, well and good. But once he'd written it, I didn't like it but had to concede that it was his narrative universe in which he could do what he wanted. I feel the same way about sex scenes. Do you want to write them into your story? Or would you rather not, and are simply wondering out loud if maybe you should? If your sex scenes are too explicit, there are some readers you'll lose. If you don't have any sex scenes, there will be other readers who don't stay with you. So you can't base your decision on what the readers want. Unless, of course, there is a certain type of reader you value keeping above other considerations. If that's the case, you'll have to try to anticipate what they'd like and write accordingly. Decide what you want to do. Then do it, and do it well. And having done so, you will be able to stand by your decision without regret.

As is so often the case with any kinds of attempt to categorize, a person can always find good reasons to question the accuracy of any proposal to define a category. Your examples are good ones. There's a sense which the character's sexual orientation in such an example is critical to the narrative. But if we're to take examples like that, then do we categorize every narrative by the salient characteristics of its main character? Do we make separate literary categories for each? Are there to be left-handed novels, or ADD novels, or black novels, or sailor novels, or architect novels? I ask because as I thought about it, it didn't seem to me that a story like Jim Grimsley's Dream Boy, which is explicitly about a couple of adolescents coming to grips with their sexuality, had a whole lot in common with a story like the one you propose. Is it correct to lump them both into the category of "gay novels"? Or, more to the point, is anything to be gained, either conceptually or in any other way, by putting them together in the same category of "gay novels"? They're very, very different. It's an interesting set of questions, though, and everybody would probably make the call differently. I think if I were responsible for shelving these things in some imaginary bookstore I'd put the novel about the gay detective in a different place from novels that deal with characters working through their sexuality as the main narrative. I'd probably put them with "crime fiction" or something of the sort. Either that, or I'd put all narrative fiction in a "fiction" section and not make an attempt to categorize. In any case, it does seem easier, somehow, to separate out romance fiction, for example, or "fantasy," as distinct genres, than it does to separate out "gay fiction." Romance can easily be seen as a recognizable "type," because "romance" is not an individual's characteristic and can easily serve as a unifying theme for stories which proceed somewhat similarly, simply because there are things that "romance" embodies that are common to many, if not most, romances in "real life." "Fantasy" is similar in that regard, although there the range seems larger. But "gay" is a personal trait that doesn't say anything inherent about what the story's going to do, and the potential range seems so wide, so undetermined, that one begins to wonder what qualifies a novel as a "gay novel." "Gay coming-out fiction" is more of a recognizable genre, seems to me. Likewise "gay coming-of-age." Those seem easier to peg. What would the necessary baseline ingredients be for something to be called a "gay novel" rather than just considering it a "regular novel" that features a gay character whose gayness may in fact be significant in the story? Thanks for the thought-provoking question.

I think you're wrong--just expressing my opinion--but it's not because you don't read enough. I'm not disagreeing with your assessment of this aspect of "gay fiction." It's just that many published books fall into specific genres; there is such a thing as what you're calling a "regular novel," one that doesn't seem to fall into any given niche, but I'll bet that various kinds of "genre fiction" actually outsell "regular novels." You know what I'm talking about: Romance novels. Mystery stories/whodunits. Westerns. Fantasy/Sword & Sorcery. Horror. Etc. Each of those genres circumscribes, to a greater or lesser extent, the range of plot and theme available to a writer within the genre. Readers of books within those specific genres are interested in having typical themes explored, and the author works within the confines of those interests; it's likely he or she shares the interest or he wouldn't be writing in that genre. Unless he/she's merely making big bucks, which isn't likely. I don't see a thing wrong with that. Just because a novel qualifies as a "genre" novel doesn't mean it's inherently bad. The same thing is true of gay fiction. Just because it explores endless variations on the theme of "coming out," for example, doesn't mean it's bad. And just because it explores endless variations on the theme of "coming out" doesn't mean it has to be boring. I'm not even particularly opposed to gay (or straight) erotica. There's always a place for hi-quality written porn. What becomes boring, in my opinion, is when a person reads in only one genre. Then you'd expect to become bored after a while. And as for the notion that "gay fiction" would be somehow improved if it told stories not centered around the gayness of this character or that...well, then it wouldn't be "gay fiction," would it? It would just be what you're referring to as a "regular novel." For a story to have a gay character doesn't mean it's gay fiction. There are many novels out there that have gay characters but that doesn't make them gay fiction. Just as the presence of romance in a novel doesn't make it a "romance novel." Now if you mean that a novel should have a gay protagonist and tell a story about that person, but not one in which his or her gayness is central to the narrative, I think I'd agree that it would be nice to have more stories like that. Personally, I'd like to see that kind of thing involving a bisexual protagonist, but we won't go there, LOL. Still, I'd have to say that in my opinion that would not be gay fiction. That would just be a "regular novel." None of this has anything to do, I should say, with the quality of gay fiction out there, ebook or otherwise. And I'll agree that, with some significant exceptions, the quality is dreadful. I've enjoyed Steve Kluger's work immensely. I also love J. G Hayes, although he's not everybody's cup of tea. Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys--which, by the way, is available in Kindle format--is some of the finest writing I've seen in any genre, and it's a gay love story. And in my opinion, Jim Grimsley's Dream Boy is a small miracle. But then there are writers out there--too many writers--like Mark Roeder...

I'll say it again. You're a punk.

<gulp> I didn't know the practice was frowned upon; I just did it without asking. But obviously I can see why it's not ordinarily allowed. I was working with Sam on It Started With Brian while he was alive. He'd told me that he needed to discontinue the writing so as to manage his time wisely. I knew how much he'd wanted to finish it, so I offered to help him do so. He gratefully consented. That was some time before he died, and the prognosis was uncertain. I was writing the chapters from his notes, beginning with Chapter 12, I think. I'd write a chapter then send it to him for feedback and reaction. I'd rework whatever he felt was necessary, send it back to him, then he'd post it. At a certain point he gave me his logon and password information for eFiction, saying, "If something should happen..." When he died, there was no question but that I'd continue from his account. It just seemed natural, and fitting. I appreciated--and appreciate--the Gay Authors Administration's understanding. It was a privilege to know Sam and a labor of love to finish the story for him. He wanted so much to have the story finished, and I was honored and humbled for him to allow me to finish it in his behalf.

I've found the Myers-Briggs somewhat useful in understanding myself. But I do worry that its inherently reductionistic nature distorts more than it clarifies. And beyond that, people seem to use it like they use horoscopes. You know, "I'm a Libra; therefore..." We love to categorize and pigeonhole. It's understandable; the world out there is chaotic and if we can get for ourselves a simple handle on things, an assist in understanding easily, we grab onto it. And that's well and good, up to a point; categorizing is a valuable tool in helping us understand. The problem is that life and people aren't simple. Even trying to generalize about the array of characteristics supposedly assessed by the Myers-Briggs can cause you to become more zealous for the label than the realities it seeks to illuminate, and that in turn can cause a person to overlook realities in his/her own character that don't conform to the template. This is especially problematic because the Myers-Briggs commentaries often spend a good deal of time saying things like "ENFJs are characterized by...". I have a concern that once an inventory tells a person what he/she is, that person will then decide he/she is just the way the commentaries describe. That's troublesome to me.

I've taken it before. ENTP. Big names from that tribe: Michaelangelo Richard Feynman Thomas Edison Hypatia of Alexandria

I don't know from raves. I was a Texas-suburban kid. We did field parties instead. I can't speak to raves. Never experienced such a thing. So obviously, Jeremy, I can't speak to what was happening with that scene when I was in college. I ran with two crowds in college, and some members of them, oddly enough, tended by my upperclassman years to intermix at the focal point of my apartment. That would be the jocks and the brainers. The jocks liked alcohol, weed, sex, and sex, and the occasional athletic romp. The brainers liked weed, getting stoned and talking philosophy, sex, occasional forays into vegetarianism, getting stoned and playing chess, sex, sex, listening to classical music and John Coltrane and Miles Davis, fungi (the revelatory kind), sex, the outdoors, talking about epistemology, romping with funny kittens, and sex. Occasionally a guy had a dual membership like me, and occasionally a member of one group came to appreciate the way the other group partied. There wasn't enmity between the two groups. They got along fine. They just didn't always "get" each other fully. But the vibe between them was pleasant.

Doesn't particularly surprise me. I've seen how this feature gets used here. I have no beef with the Powers That Be and their decision to enable this feature; but let's be honest: It's a cowardly, yet seductively easy, way to take a swipe at someone without having to suffer any consequences, since you can hide under your little rock, safe and anonymous, instead of standing behind your neg with your name and identity. I think it's a terrible feature that serves to bring out the worst in us, and I've decided that the only time I'm going to use it is to give someone a positive, or to neutralize someone else's cowardly negative. And when I have a beef with someone's post, I'll say so and put my name to it. That's what grownups with a shred of integrity do.

I have a novel idea. What if he were his own distinctive person, and not a guy who's "like" anybody else?

Can I vote for JP and Stefan? I'm pretty much done with them. ;-)