Richard Lyon

This is a most interesting piece. The free association style is an imaginative approach that lets us see the inner workings of the mind of the narrator. His quirky personality makes that a refreshing experience.

This strikes me as a very interesting piece of rather experimental writing. The free association style gives us access to the inner workings of the narrator's mind. His quirky personality is sufficient to make that a refreshing experience.

The media world is changing rapidly. Sales of books and newspapers are in a long term steady decline. There's still money to be made for mega stars like J K Rowling, but the opportunities in traditional publishing for the middling novelist who produces a reasonably good read are drying up. The people who designed Authonomy and most of the users there seem to still be fixed in the world of traditional hardcopy publishing. The net is creating new opportunities for writers. They look, feel and smell different from the old opportunities. Up until now there has not been much non-porn mainstream fiction available on the net. Gay fiction was a notable exception. My theory about that is that there are a lot of people interested in reading gay fiction who would be afraid to go into a book store and buy it. I don't know how Authonomy will develop, but its mere existence is a sign of change. I am currious as to the reasons that Harper Collins invested what has to have been a lot of money in the development of this site. Most publishers just refuse to accept unsolicited mss. I suspect that they may have some notions about ways to generate revenue from the site. Then again, maybe they are owned by a conglomerate that's in the real estate business.

The site is quite new. It's only been open to the public about a month. Prior to that it had three months of invitation only beta testing. As it attracts new users the make up of the place is likely to change. I doubt that anything could really be considered "standard" practice there yet. It's always interesting to watch change on the internet. People who registered for a site more than a month ago consider themselves old hands and get their feathers ruffled when newbies come along wanting to change things.

I've been exploring the Authonomy site. Of the top 20 books for the entire site two of them are tagged as gay. This seems to indicate that it is a mainstream site with a user community very open to gay writing. The forums have some interesting discussions on the nuts and bolts of writing and publishing. Even for people who don't want to put their stories there, it's worth a visit.

A most interesting story! I has nice detail that constructs a "believable" alternative reality. Jensen faces enough constraints and hurtles in using his powers to make the suspension of disbelief easy. The visual imagery is rich and fluid. The ending gives me the feeling of the lovers being united for eternity, sort of like The Flying Dutchman or something.

http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulb3tZU8vsk I just watched this clip on YouTube. It is the perfect sendup of straight guys and their "intimacy".

On the basis of having read the prologue, I am prepared to make one firm conclusion. This story is not going to suffer from drama deficiency

I think that serious female novelists have tended to focus on the details of relationships more that serious straight male novelists. Gay male novelists do seem to be similarly concerned, if not perhaps obsessed, with relationships.

You ain't Michael Phelps either.

These kind of pop psychology gimmicks always rely on fairly lame gender stereotypes. I suspect that if you ran it of works of famous serious writers of both genders, you'd get very mixed results. To the extent that books are written to appeal to specific pop gender markets, such as women's romance and men's action adventure, it ought to work better on them.

It wouldn't be difficult be difficult to find families like that in the San Francisco Bay Area. There's a political push on here the eliminate Jr. ROTC from the high schools.

It was a nice chuckle and that appears to be what you intended it to be. If you wanted to develop this into biting satire, the driving irony could be that there are indeed parents who would rather see their sons march off to their death in war than have them caught sucking a cock.

That's a very clever idea. It might benefit if it were expanded a bit to set the family in something like a Berkelyesque context. There's the notion that young men typically need to rebel against their parents. Since most middle aged parents have become somewhat conservative, rebellion usually takes the form of being liberal. When you are a family who is determinedly liberal, rebellion has to go the other way. Obviously this is meant as a satire on the classic coming out scene. However, going to war isn't exactly the conceptual opposite of that.

Maybe what you are missing are the voices she heard in her head.