Adam Phillips

Chapter 15 of Crosscurrents has been posted. The thing Andy's been avoiding for years grabs the spotlight and refuses to be put off any longer. This was a bittersweet chapter for me to write, for personal reasons. I hope you like it.

Thanks, Barbara. We're rapidly moving toward events in the narrative that will be central to the entire story. And although it's been lurking in the background before, that "almost" is going to break loose in ways that change everything for many of the characters in the story.

Don't think for a minute he doesn't know that.

Chapter 14 of Crosscurrents has been posted. In this chapter, Andy's feeling the love...coming at him from a couple of places, and going out from him in a couple of different directions.

Chapter 13 of Crosscurrents has just been posted. Andy's off on another beach trip. This time, though, his attentions run in somewhat different directions, to his dismay. Still...it's the beach, and that does some powerful things to him.

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.

Then feel free to accept Version1 above, and understand that I wasn't being mean. I was being generous.

Thanks. I'm not trying for an hommage, or even a cop, but it's in the general mix of influences.

Version 1: Mean? That wasn't mean; that was covering over a little gap in your pop-culture education. I don't understand why you're not grateful. Version 2: Because, you snot-nosed little puke, your post was calculated to cause me some embarrassment. You thought you'd caught me in a mistake, and you thought you were rubbing my nose in it. You deserved what you got. Take your pick.

Yeah. And you clearly have more to learn than you have a clue about. In this case, as a person who fancies himself educated in American pop culture, you ought to know that board shorts have been around for around 45 years. Here's a little additional education on the matter for your ignorant ass. It'll even tell ya where they came from and why they're called that: "What is the Origin of Board Shorts?" Wikipedia--admittedly not always the most authoritative source--provides this little extra bit of data: "Boardshorts are longer than normal shorts for one major reason: Surfboards are covered with a layer of sticky wax; this allows the surfer to stand on the board without slipping off. However, this wax can rip leg hair off the surfer when he is sitting on the board waiting for waves. A long boardshort covers the back of the leg when sitting on the board, preventing the wax from ripping at the leg hair." Don't know if it's true, but it's an interesting thought.

Chapter 12 of Crosscurrents has been posted. In this chapter, Andy and Matt entrench themselves in the upper echelon of the freshman class, and set off on what looks like a Golden Adventure through adolescence. There's an asterisk to all that for Andy, though, as the chapter's final scene suggests.

I like the piece, but as at my Yahoo group, let me offer this one as a closer fit:

Chapter 11 of Crosscurrents has been posted. There are a lot of things to sort out when you reflect on how you feel about someone. In the segment of the story presented so far, Andy cherishes his friendship with his best friend Matt, and is happy to love him as a best friend. But in the last few chapters' worth of narrative, it's clear that Andy senses something else in his heart, a response to Matt that seems somehow "too big," somehow "not normal," and he's becoming aware of dimensions of that friendship that he'd just as soon not face. Chapter 11 continues along those lines. An innocent football game becomes a moment of revelation for Andy, throwing the door open to things within him he's not able to acknowledge. His head's still muddled and worried, but his instincts and intuition know something his head doesn't, and respond accordingly, which only adds to his confusion and dismay.

Another example illustrating why I hate labels. I'm not saying they don't have their uses. But on so many aspects of sexuality, it seems to hinder rather than facilitate understanding. I'm assuming that the guy thinks of himself as gay because he is more strongly attracted to men than women. It may be the case that women in general don't do it for him physically, except for his wife. Somewhat analogous to "Brian" in It Started With Brian. But as Fritz Klein suggests, "sexual orientation" involves so much more than what makes our dicks involuntarily hard. It's also about sexual behavior, about sexual fantasies, about emotional preference, social preference, lifestyle preference, and self-identification. Taking all these dimensions into consideration, the guy may indeed be gay...or he may not be. Personally, I tend to put a lot of weight on how a person identifies himself/herself. The individual has access to his/her own sexuality in ways that an observer doesn't. Sure, there's such a thing as being in denial, but in general, I tend to let a person choose his/her label and pretty much accept it at face value rather than telling him/ her that he/she is self-mislabeling. --Adam

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"

Here's a very terse summary of their work (too terse in the case of Storms, I think...there's much more to be said, but it's a starter at least) http://www.endhomophobia.org/BeyondGay.htm

Yeah, what complicates the picture and keeps me from being able to call it denial is that Andy's genuinely mystified about what's going on with him in that one area. After all, though the culture gives lip service to the idea of "bisexuality," all of us know that at the everyday level we tend to oversimplify relentlessly and paint the sexual world as either "gay" or "straight." Andy's freaked out about his response to guys, and especially to Matt, because he doesn't know what "place" to give it in his self-understanding. It's clear to him that it's females that get his juices flowing primarily...so what the hell is this all about? It confuses and worries him but he doesn't even know what it is or what it means, so mostly he tries to ignore it. And that's easy to do for him, because things work so well for him with the ladies. And they're always on his mind and libido, so this weird incongruent shit becomes relatively easy to push aside. For now. There are a couple of other realities at work, too, I think. Probably in those mid-adolescent years guys' sexuality is pretty volatile, if only because of its intensity. The other thing is that the experience of loving someone is not limited to one gender, I'm convinced. And love can take a person places sexually that his "orientation" might not otherwise take him. I've had many discussions with John, the real-life "Brian" from Sam's story It Started With Brian, about his love for Sam. John is about as straight as a guy could get...except where Sam was concerned. In any case, your comment led me into a consideration, once again, of how casually we apply the labels. In my opinion, the "gay" and "straight" talk is hopelessly reductionistic. I don't know who y'all are reading on the matter of sexual orientation these days, but for me the writings of Michael Storms and Fritz Klein were real eye-openers, and helped me to understand what a complicated and many-faceted phenomenon sexual "orientation" is. Yes. And keep in mind he's 15. What the hell does a 15-year-old know about such speculations? Thanks for the post. Andy's a head-case. I think I've already established that. It's one of the two things that make him an interesting protagonist for me.

Chapter 10 of Crosscurrents is now up. This time out, Andy's hormones are in action (again)...and we get to see more of the interplay and interaction that characterize his friendship with Matt.

Don't even get me started on Texas and education. We spend little and, apparently, want to rewrite history for the whole nation. Be that as it may, there have always been exceptional schools in the suburbs.

Then you probably get it better than Andy's getting it at this particular stage of the story!

It's just what you're used to. Get over it. Hurting can do interesting things to a person. It can give you depths. Or it can make you decide you can use your hurt as an excuse for not trying. It's all about individual decisions, and maybe says something about a person's character. Yeah, Matt's a good guy. As for cliches, it's an interesting school as I picture it in my head. It has the jock/cheerleader/drill team culture, but it also has first-rate academics, a first-rate music program, and a first-rate drama program. Some day it may actually launch somebody into Hollywood. Yeah, that whole thing is still under Andy's radar. He's not really sure what's going on with him, and he's in I'll-think-about-that-tomorrow mode.

I've just added Chapter 9 of Crosscurrents. This chapter takes Andy a number of places, some light-hearted, some serious. There's a little touch of grey making itself seen here and there, but Andy's pushing it out of his view whenever it shows up.

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've tried to suggest in the narrative that there's a certain amount of guile to Andy's public persona, and that although he's a good kid, he's not necessarily a complete "nice guy." He's playing people, and he's doing it to gain what advantage he can. It softens the realization of such to know that he's not trying to hurt anyone by playing them, but it's a misreading to see Andy as some total nice guy, and I believe I've "written" him with some shadowy undertones, and not as totally made up of sunlight and good will. In this neck of the woods, when I was in high school, club soccer games got played on Saturday; high school football got played on Friday. And there were a lot of guys who played football and club soccer. High school soccer season happened in the winter, so there was no conflict there either.

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.