Tomkin Watts
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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
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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."
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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!
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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."
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I disagree with the observation that "this format doesn't work." Unorthodox, perhaps, but if handled effectively and imaginatively, it works as well as a single first person narrative. (I am currently working on a story with a similar approach, but in limited third person.) Technically, it's more complex to pull off successfully, but It gives the reader more insight into multiple characters. So why not?
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GAs Newest Promising Author: Jeff Burton
Tomkin Watts commented on Graeme's blog entry in Gay Authors News
Congratulations, Jeff! I just read "I'm Gay: A Nifty Story," and loved it. The best story I've read so far on GA. -
Aftermath: Rumors, Repercussions, and Really Bad Timing
Tomkin Watts commented on Jeff Burton's story chapter in Aftermath: Rumors, Repercussions, and Really Bad Timing
Loved it so far! I'm wondering what happens to the drawing Skylar made of Ryan way back in chapter 1. -
Regarding Paul... yes, a dolt at times, and clueless too. We've all known the type, and sometimes, we've fallen in love with them. I know I have.
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Thanks! Stories have a way of writing themselves. I worked up the first few drafts of this story about a year ago, then put it aside. The thematic structure of the early versions was completely different; then, after returning to the drafts that ultimately became, "A Promise, Unbound," which also came out entirely different from the original conception, I returned to this story, and the phoenix theme emerged, completely changing the fabric of the story. During the time this story was "on the back burner," I read James Baldwin's "Just Above My Head" and re-read Mishima's "Forbidden Colors," both of them gay novels that influenced me.
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WHEN WE WERE YOUNG, we were all beautiful, the odd thought comes to mind as I glance at my face, like him. But I didn’t think so when I was his age… I turn the tap and run hot water over my razor, then look in the mirror again. Almost sixty now, Robby… but you still don’t look too bad. And still pretty buff for your age, too… taking good care of yourself. Hm… the silver hair works well for me… I’m glad I’m still not going bald. And my beard looks pretty good too… I glance in the mirror to check
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During a stopover in London, a youthful encounter triggers Robert’s memories; almost sixty, he muses about youth and middle age, love and time.
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Thanks! That might happen in future stories, but one of the named characters in this one first appeared in a previous story, and he might show up again... At this point, who knows? In my short shorts, typically, the fist-person narrator goes unnamed (unlike the secondary characters); partly for brevity and to keep it uncluttered, and partly to allow for more leeway in my larger stories as they emerge.
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Thank you very much! I've been experimenting with "short short" stories--one definition I ran across is anything under 1500 words. This one went over, slightly, but then, stories have ways of writing themselves, and all the moving parts have to be reined in to make it work. I've been trying to move away from first-person narration (to me, in novels the narrator can get tiresome and solipsistic), but in a story as compact as this one, it is most effective and efficient.
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It seemed to me that he was everywhere I went; it was uncanny. When I stepped off the Metro at Montgomery Station on my way to work downtown, he was stepping off the car in front of mine. Grunting through my dumbbell curls at the gym, he was near me on one of the cardio machines. When I walked out of the steam room, he was exiting the sauna. If I went to the supermarket looking for bargains in the canned-goods aisle, he was around the corner having pork-chops cut in the meat department, or
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Wars have been fought over obsessions, and millions have died; but not all obsessions produce effects that severe or lethal. Most only affect a small group of people. But what personal obsessions often have in common is that trivial, careless remark, or an unknowing or uncaring act, that triggers them in someone of an impressionable age. A small thing, perhaps, but it can last a lifetime, as our narrator discovers.
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Hopefully, someday... But that's getting into the scope of my novel, a much more complex undertaking.
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Perhaps it was the tonic of a brisk walk in the refreshing, open air that sparked the vibrance of Robert’s imagination—in stark contrast to the fusty dullness of the Library, where he had spent the evening studying, ensconced in a tight carrel. Crossing the quad on his way back to the dorm, his mind flushed with new ideas that he might work into his story. Perhaps she’s not the wrong woman for his hero after all? What if she has secretly loved him all along? So close to consummation, but yet so
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In the melancholy that often pervades a Sunday evening—this time, imbued with the regret of a sunny spring weekend too quickly depleted—Robert began revising his story. Still mulling over the problems with it, Robert debated about changing the plot, adding a twist—perhaps his main character isn’t truly in love after all? Just an irrational obsession? There might be some possibilities there... Robert’s concentration came and went; his thoughts kept circling back to Paul, with wave after wav
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This actually happened to a friend of mine when he was in college; we had a good laugh years later when he told me about it. Sadly, he passed away of AIDS. In part, my intent in using it here is to memorialize an amusing but poignant tidbit of his life before it is forgotten.
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Out of season, the afternoon had quickly burned through the last vernal chill of morning and seamlessly shifted from spring into summer. It was a warm spring night, but, the thick, old brick walls had greedily sopped up the hot afternoon sun, and inside, now gave off an unrelenting heat that hinted at the coming of summer stickiness, thickening the still air in the dorm. Perspiring as he sat at his desk parsing “The Taming of the Shrew” for his paper comparing several Shakespeare comedies,
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The word rebounded through the chambers of Robert’s ear, tinny and shrill, the shocking pierce of a too-close bullhorn. Streaking! “You want to do something far out, Robert? I’m getting together a group of us guys to go streaking tomorrow at noon. You free?” his friend Paul had just half-whispered in his ear with a mildly English intonation, although he was Dutch. “After all, we can’t be outdone by those women!” “Streaking!” Robert laughed skittishly, shocked and made uncomfortable by Paul’
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Everyone who comes out has a different story to tell: with some, it comes with a sudden flash of revelation; with others it may have been a long, slow, sometimes painful process of unwinding internalized constraints. For some, it is a matter of recognizing what they have always enjoyed; for others, it is an entry into entirely new experiences. As college seniors in the mid-70’s, Robert and his best friend Paul come out, each with a different story.
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It would have been the '50's when the parents got married, a very different time. Perhaps I should have made the timeframe of the story a bit clearer.The beginning of the story would have been in the early '70's, the second part in the mid '70's, and the final section twenty years later in the mid '90's.
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In novels I had secretly read by the time I was fourteen, my mother would have been called a fallen woman. Ever since I turned twelve and realized I understood barely half of what adults talked about, I had been sneaking books out of the living room bookshelf, one by one, rearranging the rest to hide the telltale gap on the shelf, then eagerly scouring each one, not for the romance, but for the key to unlocking adult mysteries. Soon, I was proud of my parents; they weren’t like other kids’ paren
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Perhaps childhood memories are not always about what we think they are. Through a chance encounter, a young physician learns things he didn’t know about his late parents.
