Luca E

Wow! This was absolutely an amazing piece of writing. The narrative descriptions were a masterpiece. I stumbled upon it and honestly it's the best thing I've read in a long time. So many stories throw in sex scenes which probably don't belong, whereas this was all about an unexpected sexual encounter and was brilliantly done and very beautiful. Just plain excellent!

I just love the music and the film, guess I have a thing for perfume publicity. If you prefer the Amanda Lear original, it's here: https://youtu.be/b9YyPIiT2pM

On the list of things that made Sebastian himself, music cemented itself in the top position. I can't help but think there is something of the author himself in that line. He smiled again, warmly, but Sebastian felt like it was a smile meant to be kept for himself. It is exactly these kinds of intimate descriptions which permeate the narrative and exemplify your writing style adding detail and bringing the story alive, giving it feeling and emotion. Great chapter, developing nicely.

I saw that later when I did a web search and also saw all the rave reviews you got and that it's available as an ebook. I think you were even up for a prize, maybe you are being a little modest when you say,

This is a premium book, meaning you have to take out a subscription to read it, but you don't get any preview so although it looks really interesting, you don't actually know what you are buying. My question is: is this book original, fan fiction, or what? It seems strange to have a book with the same theme and name as the film. Paradox Lost Written and directed by co-star Dennis Curlett, a genre-bending love story about time travel, the end of the world, and long form improvisational comedy.

A beautiful story extremely well written, so much so that it shines like a rare pearl discovered by chance in an oyster. One boy's experience of finding himself in an era when love and peace invaded even those otherwise quiet and remote rural corners of America. A time when as the world changed, as it always does, a relationship developed which would last a lifetime, and this in some way by the grace of peace and love, a reefer and a beer, when a storm is brewing and will inevitably erupt. This is a little gem, an accurate and heart rendering tale of life, the world, and love. A masterpiece!

Really good story, well written (with a few quirks), refreshingly mature (it isn't about hormone charged teenagers), realistic and engaging. Plus the soundtrack chapters is innovative. The characters are engaging and I couldn't put it down, if the next chapter was published I'd have read that too.

Your question had me laughing 🤣🤣🤣 because if the ads appear based on page content, I was reading https://gayauthors.org/story/gdaniel/what-is-true-love-anyway/ when it popped up, and who was it who started the thread? But he does say in the summary: Lots of graphic sexual content. 🤣🤣🤣

Here is the banner I was talking about. It's actually animated with the young guy in glasses getting fucked.

Here is my take on the passage you quoted. Sammy was hastily ushered into the waiting room by one of the nurses. He took an empty seat opposite the family already installed there. The room was clean, bland, devoid of any life apart from the large television tuned to the Weather Channel and, of course, the occupants who like himself were subdued, overwhelmed by events. The woman he assumed to be the mother was talking quietly to a little girl who looked to be no more than four or five years old. Sammy glimpsed briefly the man's face, his eyes red, his face wet from tears, sitting unmoving, wrapped in his own thoughts, a sad mix of both hope and despair. Sammy looked down to his own blood covered hands. Abruptly, he stood up, an urgent need to wash Tony's blood from them. The little girl stared at him wide eyed, her mouth open, and he realised how he must look. He muttered an incoherent apology, apologising for... For what? Alarming the child, disturbing their grief? He turned away and moved to leave, but the man reached out, as if he would stop him. “Are you okay son?” the father asked, the concern evident in his voice. The question halted Sammy in his tracks. Once more he was looking at this man's face and he saw a kindness in his expression. “Yes, sir. My friend was hurt," he mumbled almost inaudibly. "I just need to wash, " he added, as an explication or excuse. The main points about this edit are, it aims to be more immediate, a change of tense from had been to simply, was. An extra description of the environment, the television tuned to the Weather Channel evoking a sort of animation to a sterile room which adds only a monotonous background, a soundtrack of no value which miserably fails to distract anyone from their thoughts, concerns and grief. My edit is simply my interpretation on the scene narrated, it might be too much of a change, I don't know. Maybe it adds something you can use.

Publishing a novel (whether you do or don't) is in some way a guide to where those big numbers of readers are. Publishers want a book that they can sell in sufficient quantities (to make money). What are publishers looking for? They are not normally interested in anything less than 60,000 words. They are looking for a strong plot which is based on characters who are seen in depth, and for an original approach. They want authors who use words well, who understand such basics as spelling, punctuation and grammar, and whose prose is easy to read. Thet want authors who will be able to write additional publishable books or stories or features for them. They prefer an author who continues to write books in the same genre as their first work, rather than one who is a jack-of-all-trades. To summarise: a successful book is: 60k plus words Original Easy to read Has a strong plot and characters All these pre-requisites are stated in this article https://www.writersservices.com/resources/what-do-publishers-want by Michael Legat. My personal thought is that many stories lack that important strong characters and plot, because they focus entirely on the protagonist and his lover, those more successful novels expand to include sub-plots and additional important characters. When talking about a strong plot, that seems to me difficult to achieve if nothing is planned, simply sitting down and writing the story is likely to produce a simple two person love found, happy ever after, still popular, but never a great original story with intriguing plot and twist, turns, and surprises!

@astone2292 idea of what was the readers fav book of the week is a good one, but requires too much work (for you). I'd keep it simple, change the book list, example: On going story selection (random): Inherited by lomax61 "A very original contemporary mystery" (reader comment). Stories have enough chapters that you don't need to list every on going story every week, but adding a comment is more interesting , takes readers to the book, and every book on the list of o going stories can get a mention, only not all in one go. You could add: new stories this week and final chapters if you like and perhaps a completed story and review link and quote. For me that's better than a bland list. The spotlight, Prompts, Ask an Author are self promoting and don't need repeat mentions unless there's some big change. The Goals stats are a waste of time, if you want stats put in site stats, numbers, countries, etc. of visitors.

If anyone else here uses WPS for word processing then you need double line spacing to copy and paste resulting in single line spacing on the site, or you paste from the clipboard in which case you don't need the double line spacing.

To be precise about the Gay Games banner ads: they vary and the one illustrated by @northie previously is fine, no problem. There is another example of a Gay Games ad ( I'm not going searching for it) which is a gif (an animated banner) of an older hunk ass fucking a youngster wearing glasses. NSFW not safe for work is a warning to people who may not want someone to glimpse over their shoulder a young guy getting fucked. Gay Games is gay porn. Looking at the site at work (on your break, on your phone, or whatever) is not the point. The gay porn (explicit, and yes that banner is explicit) is the point and users deserve a warning, so as not to be taken by surprise. Remarks about working at work and the ads you get are due to your web browsing history are not helpful, even a little insulting. Buying a subscription to remove ads is a solution, but doesn't warn users of the free version of the site, which are the majority. Being seen on a Gay site is not a problem (for most people), but being on a Gay porn site or site with gay porn ads (explicit) is a different matter altogether. At least now users are aware they may get a Gay Games porn ad, which may be fine, but could be pretty damned explicit.

No, you are not alone, the site has become NSFW, with these explicit gay games ad banners.

If you are still following the Quantum Shift series or maybe you forgot it or didn't see a new book and chapters pop up in the notifications... well it's online: This is the third book in the series. It's short, easy to read, and progresses the story. Happy reading!

There are stories with sex in them and sex with stories, if you use the 80:20 rule, this falls into the latter category with 20% story. I'm three chapters in and that's the format, the story is good, the sex fantastic, it's absolutely a M/M Gay Romance and there's a huge audience for the genre.

The whole song without the cinematography and publicity (which is actually very well done) is here: https://youtu.be/xo7gptsrD10

It feels odd commenting on a story people read over two years ago, but it wasn't bad as an opening chapter. Maybe I'd have liked to have encountered the other three band members, because I'm interested in how they will react to this, but I guess that will come.

A word about inadvertently gay spiders, current songs and recipes worth trying. That's a wild ass and the most shazamed songs of the week, although, inadvertently gay, that's not sure, perhaps we should have stuck with the big assed super hero? Now that really is a wild recipe. Oh crap! We forgot the spiders...

"I know very little about homosexual relationships, but I know a lot about love." That's all that matters.

Twenty-five years ago, when I began writing queer SF, there were over a dozen gay bookstores in the United States... ...if you didn't find what you were looking for on the shelves, you could learn about new books in the pages of Christopher Street or The Advocate or the gay newspapers that every major city in the United States supported. ...one would think homophobia did not exist in those days. But it did: bookstores were vandalized, patrons were thankful for paper bags hiding the books they bought, and if you were not a young white male who moved to San Francisco or New York City, you likely found a distance between yourself and the characters in the books. Nowadays, while independent bookstores are recovering, gay bookstores are all but extinct. So too the daily newspapers, the print literary magazines, where you could discover a good book. ...in 1986 a man in a small town in a conservative state might happen upon a book in the library or if he traveled to a large city, but now he can purchase any book from Amazon.com with the confidence of anonymity. And how many choices he has! I'll mention the elephant in the room: no, you do not have to be a gay cis-gendered man to be a successful author of gay fiction. This has never been an issue. Kushner considered herself straight when she wrote Swordspoint. Mary Renault had a tremendous following for her historical novels (and likely still does). Annie Proulx and 1997's "Brokeback Mountain" . . . need I say more? Do not think either your gender or sexuality limits your writing. Gay anthologies are rare and most are romance-themed because that reaches, arguably, the most readers, who also do not happen to necessarily be gay men. The genre of m/m fiction has become a popular one, and its target audience is not gay men but female readers, many of whom identify as heterosexual. General gay fiction novels remain a hard sell. Social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, is full of authors trying to promote their own books. Rather than shout into the abyss an Amazon.com link, start a meaningful dialogue about gay life that your book touches upon. ...do you fret about your book having too much erotic content? Obviously among the small presses, some are more tolerant of sex scenes than others. But I don't know any gay man who has ever said, "Whoa, there is a penis in this book and I found I had to stop reading." Are you worried that you'll be pigeonholed? Don't be. I can give you the names of dozens of acclaimed authors (Laird Barron, Kelly Link, Holly Black, Paul Tremblay) who wrote the occasional gay-themed story; ...ask yourself why you are writing a gay-themed story... because I want to write a tale where I can see myself as the protagonist, where gay men can have adventures, find love as well as heartache. Too often gay people are confronted with negative representations in media and entertainment. You have the opportunity to change that depiction, and today is as good as any other day to try. Extracts from the blog by Steve Berman - Strange Horizons http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/some-advice-from-a-gay-publisher-on-writing-gay/

...gay fiction is about living life as a gay person (or bisexual, pansexual, asexual, the term gay is used because that's the term most used for this fiction)... the goal of the story is not romance. The story realistically touches on just living life with a sexuality that is not heterosexual. ...a romance, whether you enjoyed it or not, you probably noticed a lot of unrealistic things about the novel. The characters constantly think about each other, there was likely a Happy Ever After or Happily For Now ending, they fell in love very rapidly, the sex was wildly passionate and amazing. Obviously, not what most people experience in real life, right? Not to say that all romance fans are female; ...m/m romance is not an exception; it's written for women. Some of you are probably going to reel back like, No way, it has gay characters and they're men, you can't seriously be writing for women, that's not possible. Actually, it is. (Gay fiction books) books are typically published either in small niches of mainstream companies or from small LGBT presses, many of which are now online. "Gay" is put in front of fiction, and the genre describes gay fiction. When you put "gay" or "m/m" in front of romance, the genre describes romance, ...many of these novels (published by publishing companies) take place in alternate universes where being a man and having a man for a partner are not only not looked down upon but normal and even expected. Romance Characters Act One Way; Realistic Characters Act Another. ...most hetero romance features these large, muscled men... m/m romance can and has featured everything from these guys to smaller, more effeminate twinks to the über-amazing, heavyset and often cuddly bears. Gay fiction, as said before, is realistic fiction and therefore the goal is to make the characters and their lives as true-to-life as possible while still telling a dynamic story. In a genre (m/m romance) that does not focus on the real lives of realistic characters, almost anything goes. What might be best for the gay fiction community is that it stops criticizing romance for not being realistic and, just perhaps, starts to work on accumulating more realistic stories to better reflect its culture. All the extracts are from an article published in Mibba Creative Writing, the full article is on this link: http://www.mibba.com/Articles/Literature/6535/Gay-Fiction-vs-M-M-Romance/

Try to paste from the clipboard instead of copy/paste from the document. For me this preserves the correct new line spacing and new paragraph spacing, one blank, two blank, lines respectively. Italics, bold, are not saved and copied and need to be edited in online or don't use them because editing online is not too easy.

If you take a look at the stats on book reading you get some interesting information: The median number of books read by Americans is less than 4 per year. 14% of Americans cannot read, that's 32 million. More than 60% of high school seniors (USA) read below grade level. Most popular fiction genre is Romance, followed by Crime/Mystery, Religious/Inspirational, Sci-fi/Fantasy. Most popular genre with young adults is Fantasy. Romance novels raked in $1.44 billion in book sales last year. Non-fiction outsells fiction by nearly 3 to 2. Source: https://www.tonerbuzz.com/blog/book-and-reading-statistics/