Tomkin Watts

OUT AT SEA ON A DAY LIKE THIS, with the horizon only broken by a distant passing ship, you might fancy you can see the curvature of the earth. It was like that here too. Around me in every direction, reaching out to all points of the compass, the land lay flat, stretched out and featureless but for the dead stubble in the cornfields—all that remained from the recent harvest. It was a lonely place: like the emptiness far out at sea, a large place that seemed to have no bounds; the horizon only br

Today, with modern treatment and prevention, we often forget about AIDS and the toll it took upon the gay community. At the end of a long trip, Robert's final stopover is Minneapolis. There, he encounters a friend of a friend who had fallen to AIDS twenty-five years earlier. This is a sad story, and was difficult to write, and I've kept it on the back burner for over a year. Dedicated to a close friend who passed thirty-two years ago on his favorite holiday, Halloween. This story completes a trilogy, following "A Class Reunion" and "Love, In the Ashes of Time."

I Lost my pearls in the tunnels of San Francisco a long time ago, and now I don't remember what it's like to clutch them. (Or was it in an alley South of Market?)

I use "just" too much as well. I was working through that earlier today. But with a lot of dialogue, as long as it goes with the natural and vernacular flow of conversation, I don't worry about fixing it. I tend to write long, multi-clause sentences, internally segmented with varied punctuation, but try to either follow or precede them with very short single-clause sentences. Even then, my paragraphs always seem too short. I realized I use "seem" too often, too. Right now, I'm focusing on my style more than anything, and I'm opting for economy, and that's why the sentence I quoted by McEwan (the first example) stood out for its economy. For me, it pops.

This chapter is gut-wrenching. Down the unstoppable, bottomless vortex of despair. It defies the laws of physics: going clockwise, then counter clockwise, then clockwise again. Wow!

No... I didn't say it very well last night, and yes... my brain was more than a little addled last night after racing through an intense story about AIDS from start to finish in a 48 hour span--record time for me. Whew! It would have been clearer if I'd used "porn" and/or "smut" instead of "spicy--there's at least a little spiciness in most of my stories--at time a lot. It seems there is a progression running from porn, through a wide range of spiciness, ending up with excellent writing that grants us a privileged, intimate peek at the character(s), so intimate that it carries us off into a place we otherwise only know from within ourselves. I wish I could write like that, but I keep trying. And I doubt AI could ever take us there. But what I failed to say last night was that what you don't say is often more important than what you do say, especially in "good" writing about sex. The unsaid stimulates the brain and excites the reader's imagination. The meaning of sex, within the context of the story, is more important that the act itself. You modulate the detail to increase the intensity; the reader fills in the unsaid. Case in point: In Jeff Burton's story, the kiss--and, oh yes, indeed--that "ass grab," between" Skylar and Gabriel. The detail is only sparsely sketched out, but the feeling is intense. Boom! Like a shot across the bow, it cuts across the linear, inexorable forward motion of the story, generated by the sexual tension between Skylar and Ryan, that simmers beneath the surface from the very beginning. The contrapuntal, cross-current intensity of this scene grabs me--I can feel everything Skylar feels, both sensory and emotional. Little is said, but much more is left unsaid, and if that is spiciness, it is there, welling up, cutting deep. Well done, Jeff!

Sorry... Am I too late for the (sex) party? I was deep into a new story that has no sex scenes. Okay now, I'm back. My tablet miraculously wiped out the paragraphs i just wrote-lol! But back to what I was saying: In a nutshell, for me, spicy writing is easy (I'm not shy about it either), but good writing about erotic encounters is extremely difficult. I'm not there yet, but i keep on trying. And when I read it, spicy is often bland and impersonal. I want more than just titillation. I want feeling, emotions and everything that makes a sensual or erotic encounter between characters convincing. Above all, I want it to stimulate my imagination. If it's well written, the detail is superfluous. The reader's imagination fills it all in. The reader sees what the characters see, feels what they feel. The emotional intensity should be so real it might almost be scary. But it also has to be integral to the story, not gratuitous. And AI can't do that. I know I did say this very well--it's getting late on the West Coast and I'm signing off. I just wanted to put something out there...

Well done! But I can only read one chapter at a time, and only before 10 am. Stories like this always make me feel like I am getting sucked into a vortex of despair. Tomorrow, on to chapter two... I love your vivid, tight style--I noticed that in "I'm Gay: A Nifty Story." In this story, the narrative voicing reminds me of Philip Marlowe's in "Farewell, My Lovely."

I too am a great offender in overuse of "was," and thought I'd share my experience. I worked on a story and felt it was close to finished, perhaps with a few last checks for grammatical errors or other small items I needed to fix. Then, I read it to myself, aloud. Appalling, I thought, almost every time I read my story. My sentences didn't sound right, and so often, due to overuse of "was." Or "were." I rewrote every sentence, trying to expunge almost every "was." Then, I read it aloud again, then rewrote; read, rewrote; read, rewritten again... After so many rewrites, I realized the solution had more to do with my style than grammar. The obvious solution is to replace "was" with another, more expressive verb. But there are more options: For example, moving clauses around within a sentence can sometimes eliminate a need for a "was;" it's already understood and doesn't need to be there. Combining two sentences with "was" as clauses within a longer sentence also might work. A few minutes ago, while reading Ian McEwan's novel, "Atonement," this issue popped up in my head. I stopped reading, glanced at the page, and scanned for the next usage of "was." Here, a little girl, an aspiring writer, ponders symbols, using a castle as an example: "You saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith’s forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green shade." (page 35 in the Anchor Paperback edition) I noted that there's only one "was" in the passage. The rest are understood. And as to that single "was?" It works, quite economically, and does the heavy lifting for the rest of the sentence. That throws the emphasis back to "saw." (Wow! I wish I could write like that!) But what if McEwan had kept every "was" (or "were") in place? It might have read something like this: "You saw the word castle, and it was there, it was seen from some distance, and the woods that were in high summer were spread before it, the air was bluish and soft and smoke was rising from the blacksmith’s forge, and a cobbled road was twisting away into the green shade." I am already bored--that cumbersome version doesn't work. You forget what it's all about by the end of the sentence. But in my first draft of a story, every "was" is there, weighty and cumbersome, to be dealt with through layer upon layer of rewrites.

I am with you there - 100%. I've waited 50 years to start seriously writing, and at my age am not about to let a stupid machine deaden my mind! The brain is indeed like a muscle: i go to the gym and strengthen my muscles, then come home, work on a story and strengthen my mind. Use it or lose it, as people like to say.

Another indicator of AI generation, I recently read, is frequent usage of tricolons: "Red, white and blue," for example. I asked Claude to identify tricolons in one of my stories, and it looks like I'm in trouble there! But unsurprisingly, it also pulled up bicolons and tetracolons, which i hadn't asked for. But in any instance when fictional writing becomes extensively descriptive or lyrical, those will occur organically.

In business or academic writing, no. And yet, in fiction, beginning a sentence with "And" works. I don't see it as any different from "But," "Still" or "Yet," as long as we don't over it (an argument for running a word frequency count as part of the editing process.) But before answering your question, I flipped forward through the pages of Ian McEwan's "Atonement," which I started reading last night (beautifully written). And there it is: "And so she lay there..." And after a gazillion sentences beginning with "But." (Page 63 of the Anchor Books paperback.)

I am probably more of an "old bore" than you-lol! But after reading your comment, I'd better watch my writing! Ever since 8th grade I've loved the "art" of punctuation, and have never been skittish about using semicolons, colons, em-dashes and even ellipses--even in the many years I only did business writing. And long winding, grammatically correct Proustian sentences that i had to break up so as not to lose the reader (the client).

Jason Rimbaud - Thanks for the tip about Grammarly. I'll check it out. I agree with everything you've said. ReaderPaul - No, i have no intention of using AI for writing, either. I haven't used it more than a few times for other types of queries. All I am interested in is a grammar check and word frequency count. My writing and my style of writing are purely my own, and still evolving.

Has anyone followed the "Shy Girl" controversy? "Shy Girl" is a horror novel, self-published in early 2025. It sold so well that Hachette picked it up and published it in Great Britain in late 2025, with plans to release it in the US this year. However, amid strong suspicions among critics that it had been AI generated, Hachette cancelled US release and pulled it from bookstores in GB. Which led to some questions in my mind in regard to GA: * What is GA's policy regarding AI generation of stories? * Are those of us who write the old-fashioned way--laboriously, that is, at least for myself--unknowingly competing with AI generated content on GA? * Have any of us on this forum used AI for any purpose related to writing, how do you use it, and what are your thoughts about it? When I read about "Shy Girl," I was curious about AI, having never used it. I'd been wondering how to develop a word frequency count for my stories--to catch over-use of "was," for example, as well as other key words that might have too much repetition. I downloaded Claude, Anthropic's product, and it produced exactly what I needed on my first prompt. Being a perfectionist but a horrible editor, and working on a story that I had just switched from first person to third person point of view, I asked it to run a grammar check. Pronto--it delivered what I needed: all the incorrect pronouns, etc. that I had missed in my editing. Overall, I was pleased with the results from using this tool for those two purposes. However--Claude did more than just what I'd asked for: It offered re-writes to my sentences, expressed opinions about my style, offered substitutes for words I used that it didn't like, and then at the end said, "The prose is otherwise grammatically sound, and the long, winding sentence style — clearly intentional — is handled consistently and well. The story reads as polished and publication-ready with those small fixes applied." Now that is downright scary. Horror Novel ‘Shy Girl’ Canceled Over Suspected A.I. Use - The New York Times.pdf