Adam Phillips

I'm not commenting on any of the previous discussion, except to say that there are a couple of things in all them words that are probably correct.

The conclusion of Crosscurrents won't make you want to slit your wrists. That's all I can promise. Surely you must realize from the Prologue that it's bound to end with at least a touch of bittersweet... But lest that scare you off the story, I should tell you that there will be a 10-chapter-or-so sequel to Crosscurrents that I'm going to call Finding Home.

Thanks for your patience, everyone, regarding CC Chapter 28. My life has been on a little bit of a roller coaster ride over the last couple of weeks. I just didn't feel like sitting down and soaking myself in this angst-ridden story during all that. I have gotten a start on it, and it won't be a difficult chapter to write. I'm going to try my best to get it written and posted this week.

I'd say something shockingly rude and insensitive to methodwriter in reply, and he'd get it and laugh, but I'd probably get kicked off the board, hosted author or no, and I have no doubt I'd enrage everybody else participating in this discussion.

My Kindle. And the Kindle app for my Droid phone. And Kindle will read a variety of formats. You're not restricted to only what you buy from Amazon. Although the features always change, I originally went with Kindle because it would deal with HTML documents. Last summer I put Mark Arbour's Academic Predator series on my Kindle!

My listening tastes are all over the map. Ask me on any given day and I'll tell you something else. For more or less "mainstream" acts in a couple of different genres, I like these guys: (country-pop) (I'm actually gonna write and post a story inspired by this song and a young man I met this past summer) (rock) A Rocket to the Moon (emo-tinged rock)

Amazing personal stories, everybody. Thanks for sharing them. I've never considered suicide. I've had a pretty exceptional life, happiness-wise. I tend to run melancholic, though, and I tend to cover that over with a kind of over-the-top gregarious, uptempo personality...but I do walk around chronically aware of how the world is awash in heartbreak. It's an odd concatenation of characteristics, I guess: the upbeat melancholic, but that's just kind of how it is with me.. I guess that when a person considers suicide it must be that the pain-to-gratification ratio is so weighted on the "pain" side that not-existing anymore seems preferable. I guess I haven't been there. Even when stuff gets bad, I want to see what's going to happen next. I had a female friend from high school who committed suicide when I was off at college. And I have a young friend now whose best friend committed suicide. It must be awful to be in so much pain that you decide you can't go on. It's also bad for the people who love the people who commit suicide.

Little Buddha's Someday Out of the Blue. Still have a warm spot for that story in my heart.

Some of the volunteers moved this story over to GA Stories in my behalf since I've been so busy...and I guess they didn't realize it had a Postscript, so it didn't get ported. I'll try to get on it quickly. I am a little concerned because I'm not sure I saved a copy....but it might be in my emailbox still...and it is probably still in John's. So we'll get it there. Just have a little patience.

I've now corrected and revised all the extant chapters of Crosscurrents. You'll find this version at GA Stories. I've tightened up the writing a little again...and to the best of my ability to catch them, I've gotten rid of all the typos. Now I'll get right to work on Chapter 28. I know you've been waiting patiently. Well, most of you. <gazes into the night sky and whistles at random...> I'll be posting new chapters to my web pages at the "traditional" Gay Authors and to the new GA Stories until the "traditional" site is shut down...

I promised I'd let people know how things are going, so here's an update. You're not going to like it. I haven't done any writing to speak of on Chapter 28. It shouldn't take long to write, but it hasn't been started. I've been working on getting the typos out of the existing chapters of CC. Occasionally here and there, I alter the wording or change a sentence a little bit to tighten up the writing a bit. But in the new G A Stories the authors will be responsible for posting their own chapters. There's an upside and a downside to it. The upside is that it makes it easier to fix things. The downside is that it's one more thing to do. Don't ask me my opinion of this new development, by the way. I am endeavoring to be a team player. Talk to Arbour about it if you want opinions. He has a big mouth sometimes. I just finished proofing Chapter 19. Obviously that means I have eight more to go. As soon as I'm done with that, I'll get back to Chapter 28. As a way of saying thanks for your patience, let me give you an overview of what's coming up in that chapter. Andy meets a guy on the college baseball team. Then spring semester finishes out, and Andy goes home for the summer. Home, of course, is where there's unfinished business to take care of. And college students are all going to be home for the summer, mostly...anyway, among the former schoolmates Andy runs into at home will be Cole, his old high school football "big bro." And that summer Andy begins to discover the Internet as a place where he can find support and friends, friends at a sufficient distance to let him feel safe about opening up and sharing parts of himself that he's not yet sure anyone "gets." Lest anyone think that we're ready to be done with the angst, though, I should tell you that down the road Andy refers to this summer of his life as The Awful Summer. I say this for my readers' benefit, especially those who are pretty much weighed down by the story's already-considerable "angst quotient." Praemonitus praemunitus, right?

Running: Consider it. I did. Considered it and chose it, truth be known. If a guy runs hard enough--fast enough--he can get so caught up in the mechanics and the rush that he forgets himself. Running: The wind in your hair, the rise and fall of your chest, the burn in your lungs and your legs...it clears away the clutter, the complications. You throw yourself fully into it, and no explanation or justification or additional consideration is needed. All the truth you

I spent a lot of time on studying and a lot of time on soccer that first semester in college, but sex occupied as much of my attention as those other things. More, maybe. I scouted out and got with all the available ladies I could in September and October. Then, on the heels of outing myself to Trey, I decided to make a stand for the other side of my sexuality. After that, having made my point in November--both to myself and to others--about the sexual availability and malleability of some str

I spent some time in the aftermath of the "porn event" reflecting on the things a guy could pull off if he'd display a little audacity. I'd always been a ringleader and instigator, but I didn't expect that to allow me to pull off a gay pornfest with a room full of straight jocks. Athletes aren't known as the most enlightened cohort on the planet. Granted, soccer isn't American football, so I wasn't dealing with long-on-brawn-but-short-on-brains Neanderthals who regularly put on pads and pound e

Brad didn't know how to fuck; he only knew how to make love. He hid it well that first time--the time where I paid off on the bet--but I should have realized it anyway. It's just that I wasn't in much condition to realize anything in the aftermath. I hadn't given myself much opportunity to reflect on it. I was busy, and anyway, thinking about it did things to me. The memories of that first time with him weren't clear and clean and decisive, because the experience wasn't. When I thought bac

He was doing it again. Shane had become hyper-vigilant about avoiding the showers when Kyle was anywhere nearby, but he'd come off the practice field on a post-workout high after Coach Miller had heaped an unusual amount of praise on him, and the afterglow was causing him not to be paying as much attention. He'd been holding court with some of the other guys as they came off the field together; the banter continued as they reached the lockers, and he was still running his mouth as he stripped

When I reached the campus, I walked around for awhile, trying to get my head right. I needed not to get back to my dorm room right away. I needed not to think about what I'd just done with Dean. In the night air, you could feel autumn getting ready to banish the ghost of summer. As I strolled aimlessly across the quad, coherent thought was replaced by sensation and tone: the breeze playing on my skin and making the trees whisper. Sounds of laughter in the distance. The stillness of the evening

When it finally happened, it came from an unlikely source. It was a Sunday in mid-October. Earlier that afternoon we'd lost a double-overtime heartbreaker--on penalty kicks--against our main rival in the conference. I was pissed off because I hadn't played well, and I didn't want to go back to my dorm room. Halfway through the game Coach Miller had benched me, and he'd sent in my roommate Trey to replace me. Coach had recruited midfielders heavily the previous spring, so we were crowded at tha

I could talk to you about the mind-expanding experience of taking on rigorous academic studies in the context of an institution committed to the liberal arts ideal; and I could talk to you about the joy of coming to a new place and making it my own; and I could talk to you about a dozen other things that were integral parts of The College Experience. But what I really want to talk about is Sex Any Time I Wanted It. And if, when I bring that up, you don't get it...well, you haven't been to co

"Okay, you're freakin' me out here, so I'm gonna have to fuckin' call 'bullshit' on you." Trey searched my eyes with his, looking for any kind of sign that he was right. He wouldn't be getting one. I held his gaze; my face was locked in. I had on my best "you-think-I'm-kidding?" demeanor. Trey was a down-home Tennessee boy, and he was my roommate and my teammate. We'd known each other for two months and had hit it off from the moment he'd first walked into our dorm room and thrown his suitca

Throughout the spring semester, we saw each other once a week or so. We worked hard on keeping it fun and keeping our mouths shut. We'd enacted a conspiracy for the new year, and we both did what we could to keep it going. It was a fucked-up mess. His part in the conspiracy was not to challenge my attitude that everything had been all his fault; to pretend, by declining to call me out on my passive hostility, that he was now changing his ways so we'd get through the rest of the year without

On Sunday night the next weekend, I was working on a math assignment when Danny stuck his head into my bedroom. "Hey, buttface. Phone's for you. It's Matt." He stood in my doorway, waiting for a response from me. I gave him a middle-finger salute and said, "Okay, already. I got it. Go do whatever it was you were doing. Then get some Kleenex and clean up the mess." He laughed and said, "Fuck you," then turned and left. Immobilized, I stared at my phone for about a minute. Danny called out

Up until the moment she picked up the phone, I wasn't sure whether I was going through with it or not. I was nervous. Me. Nervous about calling a girl. So nervous I decided to use Pre-Cal as an excuse, in spite of what I'd said to Matt. I couldn't believe the butterflies in my stomach. Ridiculous. Angie ran with the crowd I ran with. She was probably the only girl in that group I hadn't ever dated. Not because of her looks, though; she was every bit as beautiful as any of the girls I'd bee

I skipped most of school on Friday. I'd gone to math class first period, because I told my parents we'd be leaving after I got home from school. But I hadn't told them we wanted to make sure we made it to the beach in time to soak up a little sun the first day; that meant the school day was going to have to be severely “edited.” So after first period I walked outside as if I were headed toward the building where I had my next class...and kept right on walking until I got home. I figured that sin

It was sort of like a magic act: "Ladies and gentlemen, for your evening's entertainment, Matt Price and Andy Sharpe present The Vanishing Interception!" My connection with Matt on the football field continued to be a thing of beauty: Passes that should have resulted in picks frequently ended up in my hands and brought us yardage. As time put some distance between me and that troubling night we played the Hurricanes, our on-the-field connection became less a source of turmoil for me and more a