Adam Phillips

Thanks, Graeme. Now if only I can figure out how to end the dang thing. ;-)

Hey, hooking up with you is ALWAYS like a first time for me. :-P

Damn. No respect! ;-) And for what it's worth, from start to finish, Crosscurrents took TEN years. I won't do that to my readers again. Brushfire will be finished before March is out.

I know. I like San Antonio, actually. But it's not your typical American metropolitan area (actually, I wonder if there is such a thing).

Thanks, Joann. As I envisioned Jeff, I saw him as a smart guy with a kind of dark sense of humor. Fitz is more upbeat, and kind of funny in his own way.

Thanks, Lisa, you've been a faithful reader for some time now. And thanks for your words about the Reader's Choice Awards. I'm honored to be nominated.

Thanks. I hope so. I started this story years ago when I was having some trouble with my writing in Crosscurrents. It seemed like my words were coming out clunky and crappy, and an author friend of mine said, "Get away from it and write something just for fun." I started Brushfire, and the writing flowed almost effortlessly. Once I got my groove back, I put Brushfire back on hold and continued with Crosscurrents. I'm ready to finish Brushfire now. Not bragging, but I think it features some of my best narrative writing. I'm glad you liked the beginning.

What I hate about this the most is that Michele was always good to me. You couldn't ask for a better wife. And she's beautiful on top of it. And little Scotty was always worth coming home to. Damn, I love that boy... Spilled milk, I guess. By late July Fitz was dropping by campus once or twice a week. I was teaching classes during summer sessions; the extra pay helped. A couple of afternoons during any given week, Fitz would stop by my office around three. Sometimes to talk about going back

I'm all about sport. Have been all my life. And I know it's valid to say that there are things worth going to the mat for... But I think about all the Olympians for whom this was Their Shot At It. And I'm glad we didn't deny them that. Because for what? What would we have accomplished over the long haul by a boycott? I'm glad we didn't. There are more effective ways to register disapproval, I think. Nothing comes to mind, I'll admit, but when I think about the athletes who have trained and strained and dreamed, beginning long before the venue was even announced...to trashbin those dreams for the sake of taking a moral stance is a price I'm glad we didn't pay. But I'm a jock. Used to be, anyway. So I'll admit to being ridiculously biased on this one.

I shudder to say it, but the kid is seriously cute. <clamping my eyes shut hard, shaking my head, and saying to myself, "no, no, no, no, no, no, NO!!!!"> Don't get me wrong; I dont go there. No. Effing. Way. I'm just saying.

Ugh. Effin' spiders. Hate 'em. With an atavistic, irrational hate/fear. And yeah, they are a reminder to me that I'm a little girl. Here in Texas, we really only have two varieties to fear: The black widow and the brown recluse. Both toxic. The recluse, highly so. When I was a kid, a colony of black widow spiders infested our woodpile. It was stacked up against an outside wall of the house. Texas doesn't much need functioning fireplaces, but we had one, and I was supposed to keep the logs in decent order. I was re-arranging it one spring, totally oblivious until I ran into them. Talk about your adrenaline jolt; I can still feel the fear that shot through me like a lightning bolt. Wonder what it is about spiders that inspires near-universal loathing and fear? It's a reaction that happens even before your brain has a chance to think anything. There's something kind of primal about that revulsion, I think. All I know is I hate 'em. Even the non-venomous ones sorta freak me out.

I can't believe I'm participating in this thread. I hate not being clean. So unsexy. But you don't have to travel to the diaper aisle and buy baby wipes. These days there are wet wipes marketed under the Charmin and Cottonelle brands, intended for adults, right there in the store next to all the standard-issue toilet paper. They're awesome.

Thing is, I don't think trolls are interested in proving that their view is correct. That's not their motivation. Their main intent seems to be that of insulting and offending people that they view as differing from them or their opinions.

Problem is, Tumblr's like the ocean for a person who only has a little bit of time for a dip in the pool. But the vastness is so inviting, you want to keep checking out sites. Especially since any given tumblr site will invariably link to a gazillion others... There's too much there. There's even too much good porn there. And it can use up a free half hour you had in the blink of a crazed eye. I don't go there much anymore. But I do go there.

Thanks to all of of you who put my 10-years-in-the-making-but-finally-finished story up for nomination! I'm honored, and gratified to be included in the distinguished company of other nominees, and just being recognized for my efforts will keep me churning out chapters of new stuff MUCH more regularly in 2014!

The thing you gotta understand is, I was gunnin' for trouble. I mean, c'mon. I never colored outside the lines before: Always did my homework. Played the right sport (Football. This is Texas, okay?). Picked the right major. Married the high school sweetheart, found a good-paying white-collar job, and started the family. Good ol' reliable Jeff. What a family man. What a stand-up guy. You can always count on him. The classic southern-boy-betters-himself-and-does-right-by-everyone. How long c

Jeff, a young married university professor in San Antonio, sips a beer at a bar and runs into Fitz, an airman from Lackland Air Force Base. He doesn't know it, but his life is about to burn out of control.

As I said in my email to you, the story is narrated by a young adult. You wouldn't expect him to narrate his childhood from the point of view of a child. And as for ADD and how it manifests, it appears to me you don't have a lot of personal familiarity with ADD. I do...about as much as a person can get, if you get my drift. And trust me; there are a lot of high-intellect achievers out there who have ADD. Having it doesn't mean you're not capable of focusing, and it doesn't mean you do poorly in school. It does, however, mean you can't ever find your keys. ;-)

I hear what you're saying...but one of the main threads running through the story is that Andy has a couple of demons. Matt does too. Figuratively speaking, of course. And when those are at the helm, all bets are off in terms of what people would "ordinarily" do. In fact, it seems to me very much the case that "what friends would ordinarily do" is something of an abstraction and that real, individual cases invariably deviate from that "ordinarily." I know guys who are friends and who have behaved in exactly the way I narrated. ;-) It's maddening, and it makes life frustrating, but if friends always behaved the way you say they always do, it would be a very different world. And many of us wouldn't have anything to write about. :-)

You should be aware that this study was done by J Michael Bailey, former chair of the psychology department at Northwestern University who was ultimately forced to give up his post because of ethical problems associated with the making of his book about transsexuals, The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender Bending and Transsexualism. In this book, Bailey espouses that postoperative transsexual women are either (i) effeminate gay men who underwent "sex changes" in order to have sex with lots of men, or else they are (ii) sexual paraphilic males who "changed sex" for bizarre autosexual reasons. The book especially defames trans women who are attracted to men, calling them "homosexual transsexuals" as if they were men themselves. There were numerous complaints from interview subjects in the book, complaining of deceptive practices used by Bailey in the interviews. The science of the book has also been called into serious question. Bailey also did a study on bisexuality in which he concluded that there are no "real" bisexuals. There are gay people and straight people, and gay people who claim to be bisexual but whose sexual responses are either strictly heterosexual or strictly homosexual. This study and its methodology have also been widely disputed. Bailey is also convinced that homosexuality is primarily genetic, and he has proposed that once a test has been developed that will allow you to determine if your unborn child is gay, couples who don't want a gay child should have the option to abort the gay fetus. He has been associated with advocates for eugenics and has associated himself with professionals who have clear ideological axes to grind. His theses tend to run along consistently social-conservative, gay-unfriendly lines. He claims that he's fine with gay people; it's his research, he claims, that demonstrates problems with homosexuality. He is a strong believer that gay men are effeminate, that bisexuals are deceiving themselves, and that transsexuals have serious gender dysphoria that are really ultimately about their homosexuality which drive them to the drastic solution of gender reassignment surgery in a desperate attempt to cure their neuroses. He is regarded in the field as well-credentialed, but his studies are often assessed as seriously flawed and ideologically compromised. It doesn't surprise me that he'd put another study out there that concluded that gay men had stereotypical gay childhoods as regards the type of sports gay kids participate in. He may be an intelligent man, but he seems to have a passion for "finding" in his research that gay people conform to the most common stereotypes the culture has of them. And while there are a number of peers who respect his work, there appear to be an equal number who have serious questions about the legitimacy of his research.

That's because in general I'm not a grammar Nazi and care little about such things in casual conversations, lol, and I wasn't so much correcting him as highlighting differences in usage just for the fun of it, given that we'd been talking singluars and plurals. I have a good friend from Australia who calls it "maths" as well, and as a guy who loves words, I've always been intrigued by that one.

I didn't like it. The acting was flat and emotionless. And I thought most of the singing was bad. Especially the choral music.

Dang. I'm late to the party. Typical. Did I miss the cupcakes and beer?

You're worthless. But Happy Birthday anyway.

Speaking of singular and plural...you're aware that in the US, we call it "math" and not "maths," right? Not calling you out. Just saying. Actually the British term is probably righter, if you think about it. After all, we don't call it "mathematic."