Adam Phillips

You know what? You're right about that. I can't bring it into 2013. And...I never squeal.

Yes. I was having trouble with Crosscurrents. It's not that I didn't know the story, heh..it's that the writing wasn't singing any longer. It was flat, heavy, and tiresome, and I just couldn't get the lead out of it. I was pissing and moaning about this to a writer friend of mine. He said, "Get away from it. Write something else. I promise it'll help." So I decided to. I started with an idea based on...based on...well, based on a guy who used to watch over the goat in my basement whenever I had to leave the house. (inside joke). I imagined a scenario involving him, and I starting writing. And it was as though someone flipped a switch. Writing difficulties over. I can honestly say that I think Brushfire features my best narrative writing. But once I'd cleared out the creative roadblocks with it, it had served its purpose. I had no need to finish it. I treated it like an exercise, or maybe as therapy, and I returned to work on Crosscurrents. But it was better than just an exercise. Hell, it was better than Crosscurrents, literary-quality-wise. The other thing you have to remember is that somewhere around all of this I took on the sacred task of trying to finish Sam's It Started With Brian before he died. So Brushfire just sat there abandoned. But I have a warm spot for it...and it will be one of the first two pieces I finish after the end of July, when I'm finished with Crosscurrents. As for the fact that it's now a period piece...yeah. Barely. I'm turning over in my head whether or not I need to update the allusions and bring it into 2013. It can be easily done without hurting the story in the least. Stay tuned.

I've posted an entry in my GA blog that, among other things, lets readers know about other stories I have in progress and other story ideas I plan on making into stories. Some are novels, some are short stories. Now that Crosscurrents is all but finished, I figured some readers might like to see where I'm headed next. Check it out here.

Well, I'm ready to finish up Crosscurrents. The final chapter and the epilogue will be posted no later than Sunday, July 28, at 11:59 pm CDT. I hope I still have a few readers who started reading when I started writing it, a decade ago. Wait. A decade? How did this happen? Let's see: In the course of a decade, I got finished with college, got finished with grad school, got a job, got married, started a business, had a kid, quit a job, went full-time at my business, took another part-time job, added another side gig...and had another kid. Whew! Along the way I met hundreds of wonderful people online and made some online friends that continue to brighten my life on a daily basis; I dealt (for the most part) online and offline with some internalized homophobia; I grew in my love for the two most important people in my life: I had my heart broken a couple of times twice through deaths and once through the loss of a relationship that meant the world to me; and I got a much better handle on my tendency to rip people new orifices when they piss me off. I'm not completely healed of that last tendency, but the signs are encouraging. Thanks, everybody who came along for the ride. I'm going to keep writing. And that brings me to the musings upon which I based this entry's title. The next works I post to Gay Authors (after I've finished Crosscurrents next week) will come much more quickly than CC did. I have two short stories already in progress at different places on the web. I'll get those finished first and bring the completed stories to Gay Authors. Then I'm going to turn my attention to the other story ideas I have. The two in-progress stories are called Brushfire and Tumbleweed Connections. Brushfire is about a twentysomething "straight"--and married-with-child--young college prof who is drawn to an airman at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. It's currently only at Tickie's place, though I've done a considerable revise which I haven't gotten him yet. Tumbleweed Connections is a scandalous little short about a twentysomething-young high school football assistant coach who can't get a certain 18-year-old senior football player out of his mind. There are four "chapters" posted to Nifty. There are one or two left to go. Those will be easy to finish quickly. I have several other short stories cooking in my head that I'm itching to get started on: One I'm going to call Piel Canela. It's about a staredown with a young stud behind a cash register at a local restaurant. This one will be primarily prurient in nature, so be careful who's reading over your shoulder at work. Lawnboy is an overdue literary keeping-of-a-promise to a longtime online friend. The title should give you the general ideal. As with "Piel Canela," there will be nothing morally redeeming about this piece. But hopefully it'll have a little art to it, if you're not too...busy to appreciate that kinda thing while you're reading. Remix will follow a young thirtysomething guy as he wakes up on some parallel Earth somewhere in the multiverse (think Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics) and discovers that the elements of his life--including some people--have been...well, remixed. Solve is a dark, disturbing story of love, obsession, loss, and pain, and of being driven toward a solution. A literal one. Small-Town Boys is a coming-of-age slice-of-life short that looks at four high school guys dealing with themselves, their peers, and small-town living. I think this a short story. I'll only know for sure once I start writing. Spunk is a triptych whose individual pieces are united thematically by that white gloppy stuff that gives this short story its name. This one may be the most abstract of all the pieces waiting to get written. Even so, it'll take the reader places. As you might infer. American Honey is about an unlikely love affair between a married thirtysomething artist and a small-town, newly-graduated high school guy who's headed toward the armed services. Although I have it in my head as a short story, this one may turn out to be a novel, and of all the stuff I'm previewing here, I need it to be the last one I get to. Some of it's already been written, though. I have another novel just barely begun. It's called Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters, and it's about that odd interstice between graduation from college and Starting Real Life. It chronicles one summer's misadventures between a Texas boy and an online friend from New York. Said Texas boy goes to meet said online friend at the top of the Empire State Building (oh, shut up; they're gay, okay?), and Mona Lisas lets the reader watch them live out and love out that summer (cue ABBA singing "Our Last Summer") (oh, shut up; I'm gay, okay? Or, at least I'm allowed to carry that card!). This is the story that's going to be the most difficult to write of all those I have in the lineup. But it too is a way of keeping a promise I made some years ago. I have one chapter of Mona Lisas--a prologue--up at Nifty. But I abandoned it years ago. I'll pick it up again and finish it off eventually. A novel that has some considerable life in my head already is Not to Touch the Earth, a book that explores the question, "what if you could go back and take roads not taken?" Better yet, what if you went back and the world actually accommodated some of those choices you were too scared to make back then? This story is something of a period piece and something of a science-fictiony piece. But the SF element is only a vehicle for the story, which isn't SF at all. Anyway, It's set in the early Seventies for the most part, with occasional intrusions from the 21st century. I have a great opening sequence in my imagination. Unfortunately, the way I have it in my imagination is as a movie. I'm not at all sure how to write that sequence. That aside, I have much of this story plotted out mentally. I'm anxious to get CC finished and to get on with all these other projects. The thought of it kinda jazzes me. Stay tuned and I'll let you know how it's all going.

So. I basically hate social media. I had a "real" Facebook once before--you know, one with all my real pertinent data, my real name and the names of my friends, and all that other personal shit that manages to leak out to the whole world when you have a Facebook account--but it bored the snot out of me, and I realized I had all the contact with all the offline friends and family I needed to without the use of Facebook. And I had zero interest in becoming a Facebook zombie/addict like the rest of you are. So I deleted it, and I haven't missed it. But it seemed like it might be worthwhile to have an FB page for my readers and group members, on the outside chance they'd want to keep up with me somewhat or keep abreast of my progress with Crosscurrents (and eventually, my other stories). So I created one that included a reasonable amount of "real" stuff and almost no "fake" stuff (surname aside), and posted to it on and off. But I find FB mostly annoying in even that limited use of it as well, and it's never anything I feel like posting to. So mostly it sits dormant, except for when I wanna message Joe Hayes lol. I'm keeping it, and I'll make a halfhearted effort to post once in a great while. But... I used to make great fun of Twitter. I thought Facebook was light and shallow, and Twitter seemed like Facebook Lite. But over the past week, I've seen what Twitter's possibilities are. It works best at catching the ephemeral, what's-up-right-now aspects of our lives. And it struck me that this might even be more interesting and worthwhile for my online friends and readers than my FB page. I could tell you about a great idea I have for an upcoming story. Or what aspect of Crosscurrents is ticking me off too much for me even to look at it. Or what's going on in my life that I'm too dang busy to work on it. Etc. Etc. Ad nauseam. So, I've launched a Twitter account for my online friends. I'm still not tweeting my in-real-life offline friends. I mean, how stupid. They know how to reach me if they want to know what's up with me. But some of you out there who aren't offline friends, but we enjoy each other's company....or others who I don't interact with but who follow me or read my stuff and who just might want to know where the hell I'm at in the moment with getting a latest chapter finished, or what I think of this or that topic in a more compact format from my usual tomes...this could be right up their alley. So anyway...it's @AdamPhillips79. You're welcome to follow.

As some of you are aware, I started writing and posting Crosscurrents in the spring of 2003. It's been a long, strange trip, and that trip has almost reached its end. Over the years, my work on the story has been glacially slow. I imagine there may be a hundred or more readers who started reading and ultimately bailed because I have been so terribly slow at getting it written. As you'd expect of a person over a decade's time, I've been through some changes. Above all else, my life situation has resolved in ways I couldn't have predicted at the time I began the story. One of the major facets of my life reached a sort of final resolution in 2007, and that left me with something of a dilemma regarding how to conclude the story. I don't make a secret out of the fact that CC is essentially autobiography, and the future I was looking at in 2003 was hazy and indistinct. By 2007 it had resolved, and resolved in ways that presented me with a dilemma for the story that I couldn't have foreseen in 2003. CC opens in 2003, really, with the narrator reflecting back on his experiences from childhood up to the present. That means that I have to conclude the piece in a way that doesn't go beyond where it started. And it's been a challenge to figure out how to do that in a narratively satisfactory way while remaining faithful to my own authorial intentions. I'm mindful of the requirements of good storytelling...and I'm also aware that life doesn't really imitate art, and that good art doesn't simply lift a slice of life out of the whole and lay it out for inspection. But from the standpoint of story, the place where I began the story doesn't give me a very solid place to end. There's so much simmering in the relationship between Matt and Andy still, and Andy's situation in the spring of 2003 is not the situation of a guy at the end of a story. But I painted myself into a corner from the very beginning with the Prologue. The writing itself demands that Andy end the reflections on his life at the place--and mindset--from which he began them. So, from a literary standpoint, there needs to be an epilogue that brings us back to Andy's final spring break of his college days, as he sums up his thoughts and feelings on everything he's just remembered. The epilogue won't be hard to write. The chapter that comes before it--which will, naturally, be the last one to advance the narrative--has been bugging the s**t out of me. Because I didn't know how to make it read like the conclusion of a novel. Novels don't have to end with "happily ever after" or "the heroes die and everyone mourns." They don't have to avoid ambiguity and haziness. But they do have to be emotionally satisfying, and they have to present a conclusion that makes narrative sense, one that has compelling internal rationale. I've had the last full chapter written for a long time, but I haven't been happy with it. I just haven't been able to satisfy that last demand. The demand that requires a story to end like an ending. One that doesn't feel as though the author merely pressed the Stop button before the final cadence sounds. And it's been bugging me. So I've stayed away. I took a beach trip with my family the weekend nearest to July 4. If you've followed the story, you'll know why, lol. I had some fun time with the family, some fun time with old friends, and some alone time to walk the beach and reflect. And while I was there, the way through all of that mess with the story just sort of came to me. So...if I can squeeze out an hour or two, I'm going to rewrite that final chapter and get it finished so I can post the dang thing. The Epilogue will be a piece of cake. It'll be short, and I'd essentially pre-written it the day I wrote the Prologue. But it's that dang Chapter 35 that's been beating up on me...and I finally have it figured out. You won't see any special brilliance in the conclusion. Nothing that suggests that there was an ongoing problem that I've solved in a stunningly creative way. All you'll see is a shutdown that makes some sense. Makes some sense in the story, and makes some sense in terms of what we need stories to do. I have a short sequel to Crosscurrents that needs writing. But that won't be my next project. Over the decade that I've been working on CC, I've had some other ideas spring up, ideas that wanted to work their way into stories. I'll be turning to those next. I need a break from Andy and Matt, and I have a feeling they need a break from me. And the next things I write should go considerably faster, because they won't be so heavily autobiographical. They won't weigh on me quite as heavily. One thing I do know is that Matt needs to narrate the sequel. And so he will. But that's a story for another day. Thanks for staying with me over all these years, Intrepid Reader. Your loyalty is about to pay off.

As some of you are aware, I started writing and posting Crosscurrents in the spring of 2003. It's been a long, strange trip, and that trip has almost reached its end. Over the years, my work on the story has been glacially slow. I imagine there may be a hundred or more readers who started reading and ultimately bailed because I have been so terribly slow at getting it written. As you'd expect of a person over a decade's time, I've been through some changes. Above all else, my life situation has resolved in ways I couldn't have predicted at the time I began the story. One of the major facets of my life reached a sort of final resolution in 2007, and that left me with something of a dilemma regarding how to conclude the story. I don't make a secret out of the fact that CC is essentially autobiography, and the future I was looking at in 2003 was hazy and indistinct. By 2007 it had resolved, and resolved in ways that presented me with a dilemma for the story that I couldn't have foreseen in 2003. CC opens in 2003, really, with the narrator reflecting back on his experiences from childhood up to the present. That means that I have to conclude the piece in a way that doesn't go beyond where it started. And it's been a challenge to figure out how to do that in a narratively satisfactory way while remaining faithful to my own authorial intentions. I'm mindful of the requirements of good storytelling...and I'm also aware that life doesn't really imitate art, and that good art doesn't simply lift a slice of life out of the whole and lay it out for inspection. But from the standpoint of story, the place where I began the story doesn't give me a very solid place to end. There's so much simmering in the relationship between Matt and Andy still, and Andy's situation in the spring of 2003 is not the situation of a guy at the end of a story. But I painted myself into a corner from the very beginning with the Prologue. The writing itself demands that Andy end the reflections on his life at the place--and mindset--from which he began them. So, from a literary standpoint, there needs to be an epilogue that brings us back to Andy's final spring break of his college days, as he sums up his thoughts and feelings on everything he's just remembered. The epilogue won't be hard to write. The chapter that comes before it--which will, naturally, be the last one to advance the narrative--has been bugging the s**t out of me. Because I didn't know how to make it read like the conclusion of a novel. Novels don't have to end with "happily ever after" or "the heroes die and everyone mourns." They don't have to avoid ambiguity and haziness. But they do have to be emotionally satisfying, and they have to present a conclusion that makes narrative sense, one that has compelling internal rationale. I've had the last full chapter written for a long time, but I haven't been happy with it. I just haven't been able to satisfy that last demand. The demand that requires a story to end like an ending. One that doesn't feel as though the author merely pressed the Stop button before the final cadence sounds. And it's been bugging me. So I've stayed away. I took a beach trip with my family the weekend nearest to July 4. If you've followed the story, you'll know why, lol. I had some fun time with the family, some fun time with old friends, and some alone time to walk the beach and reflect. And while I was there, the way through all of that mess with the story just sort of came to me. So...if I can squeeze out an hour or two, I'm going to rewrite that final chapter and get it finished so I can post the dang thing. The Epilogue will be a piece of cake. It'll be short, and I'd essentially pre-written it the day I wrote the Prologue. But it's that dang Chapter 35 that's been beating up on me...and I finally have it figured out. You won't see any special brilliance in the conclusion. Nothing that suggests that there was an ongoing problem that I've solved in a stunningly creative way. All you'll see is a shutdown that makes some sense. Makes some sense in the story, and makes some sense in terms of what we need stories to do. I have a short sequel to Crosscurrents that needs writing. But that won't be my next project. Over the decade that I've been working on CC, I've had some other ideas spring up, ideas that wanted to work their way into stories. I'll be turning to those next. I need a break from Andy and Matt, and I have a feeling they need a break from me. And the next things I write should go considerably faster, because they won't be so heavily autobiographical. They won't weigh on me quite as heavily. One thing I do know is that Matt needs to narrate the sequel. And so he will. But that's a story for another day. Thanks for staying with me over all these years, Intrepid Reader. Your loyalty is about to pay off.

I'm not finished yet, Jack. There's one more chapter, plus an epilogue, left.

OMG. Who'd want to read all this crap more than once? j/k. You know I love you.

Good points. But it's not only posts and short texts that are open to misinterpretation. Texts of any length can be misread. I just got into a pretty obnoxious "discussion" at my Yahoo group because a reader had misunderstood a fairly long political post of mine, and because I'd misunderstood his response. The written word doesn't give us the visual and aural cues we rely on when we're talking to someone face to face. And except in the case of instant messaging (or, possibly, phone texting) it also doesn't give us the opportunity to re-direct immediately when we can tell we've been misunderstood. I think that means we have to work extra hard to make sure we're clear when we're writing. And when we're reading, we have to consider the possibility that we've misread, or that we haven't gotten the whole picture or point, when we find ourselves reacting negatively. And above all, I think it means that we have to hang in there and not bail prematurely on the communication or the relationship (if you can call it that) on the basis of a couple of written transactions.

Umm, not sure how to tell you this, but there's only one chapter plus and Epilogue left!

The next chapter of Crosscurrents, which is the next-to-last in the story, not counting the Epilogue, has now been posted: https://www.gayauthors.org/story/adam-phillips/crosscurrents/34 Andy and Matt juggle student life with real life and loving each other with loving their two other SigOths...how does that all work in the real world? I hope you enjoy it. The next chapter, God willing, won't be near as long in coming.

This qualifies as tomorrow, I thought, as I climbed in through the window. It was too dark to see, but I knew where I was going, and I needed to get there fast so that the alarm wouldn’t go off. Heading in the direction of the control on the wall, I made it halfway... ...and banged my knee hard into the corner of Ms. Price's coffee table. I clamped my eyes shut and bit down hard on my lip so I wouldn't moan or gasp or swear. Sitting down on the floor to give myself recovery time, I took a f

You suck. But JP sucks worse, and Sam sucks worst of all. I hope JP and Sam die of dick rot. Slowly and painfully. Said with all the love, of course. :-P

Ok, so I'm wanting to read your latest stuff, but I feel like I have to remind myself of Cramptonworld by starting from the beginning. Couple of things: 1) The historical detailing is a strong point, for the most part, though I caught some anachronisms in the dialogue. But for the most part, the writing immerses the reader in the period. 2) The characters come through nicely...and they're not cardboard cutouts. JP in particular comes across as a fascinating, complex character. 3) On a related note, THIS reader, at any rate, fell in love with Jeff. He's entirely credible, and pretty much irresistible. Which, given the fact that I've read subsequent books on the series, pisses me off all over again. But then, I have a soft spot for football players, so maybe I'm not qualified to have the definitive word on Jeff. Just sayin'. 4) I'll email you some additional stuff. I know this first book in series is history, but I have some thoughts on it I didn't have the first or fifth time through it ;-)

After a long, long delay, and a difficult year in some ways, I've just sent Chapter 34 of Crosscurrents to my proofreaders. That means it will be posted very soon. After that, there's a final chapter and the epilogue to go, and that will be it for Crosscurrents. For those of you who enjoy my writing, I want you to know that I'll be starting a new story. This one won't have any autobiography to speak of in it. There is at some point a 15-chapter sequel to Crosscurrents that I'll be writing. But I need to leave the world of Andy and Matt for a while and write some other stories that aren't quite so demanding to tell. It's tough turning autobiographical material into narrative. I love writing but could use a relief from autobiography.

It's not a "website," per se. It's my Yahoo group--http://groups.yahoo.com/group/adamstories2/. Or, actually, there's a link just below my signature here. Membership takes moderator approval, but if you apply, I'll let you in.

They're doing fine, Moonie. I texted with "Brian" a bit just last week. We don't talk as much as we used to, but we do keep in touch. Sam's son has turned out to be an exceptional young man, like his father. And John ("Brian's" real name...he's used it himself at this forum, so I'm not giving anything away) is doing just fine.

Yep. I hear ya. It's a good thing we don't live in a world where the only things that ever happened were things that we all found easily believable. How bland, predictable, and lifeless that world would be. :-)

Thanks, Lisa. Like most of the authors at this site, I do this writing for free and for "fun," more or less, and unfortunately, as important as it is to me, it's the last item in a long list of things that are important to me, so there have been long periods where I just couldn't get to it. I don't rush through the writing of a chapter. I want not only to tell a story, but to pay attention to the quality of the prose as well. I can't really give it what it needs unless I have blocks of relaxed time where I can settle in and say it like it needs to be said. Nevertheless, it's been far too long in the telling. Crosscurrents is heading toward being a decade old. It's time to get it done. Stay tuned this month.

"Selfish tard." Yeah, I get that a lot. What can I say? Andy is who he is. He's afraid. From somewhere--certainly not his family--he's sucked in the notion that Sean couldn't possibly want him if he really know how Andy was feeling. And once he got over that, he just knew Matt would never forgive him for being so cold that senior year. So, yeah...he's a selfish tard; but he just doesn't get it. In his defense, I gotta say he's never experienced anything like this and he's not prepared for it. He doesn't know what it means for his life or how to handle it. And...he's not even 20.

For what it's worth, I've just revised The Confrontation a little bit. There were things I didn't like about it, and so I unpublished it for a while. But it's back now. The revisions aren't just mechanical. They change the story slightly. I like the revised version better, because it adds to the unanswered questions that were already there in its original form. And it actually inserts just the hint more of a story there. Before, the story was barely more than a stroke piece with a little narrative dressing to keep it from being shameless, lol. As revised, the story is still complete in itself, but I can see that this one could be made into a larger story. Not yet, though. I have two chapters and an epilogue to get to on Crosscurrents, or somebody will surely stick pins in a voodoo doll bearing my image. I'm on it, I promise. The next chapter will be here soon. And by soon, I mean that my proofreaders will see it by the end of next week.

I've revised this one a little, and with a few changes of phrase, changed the story somewhat. It's still complete in itself, although it's more a snapshot than a story...and it sure feels as though there's a longer story it's part of. But I won't be getting to that story for a while. People are about ready to shoot me if I don't hurry up and finish Crosscurrents. lol

I PROMISE it's not permanent. And it's not really a block; I just haven't had been in a place where I've felt like writing on this story. I write for a living these days--not narrative stuff, but still--and that makes the thought of sitting down with Crosscurrents feel like work. But it's weighing on me. I've written one-third of the next chapter. I'll get to the rest of it eventually. After that, there's one final chapter plus an epilogue, then the story's finished.