Mark Arbour

LOL. And I'm getting called on this being a cliffhanger. Which, as you noted, it isn't. It's always hard in a serial story to know where to end a chapter. Robbie takes a little more time than the others to come around.

Riley is already talking? He's not even one yet. LOL. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be Michael right about now.

I appreciate your thoughts! I think that this thing with JJ will draw the family together, ultimately. I think that Wade and Brad are probably interacting more behind the scenes; I can't write about everything.

We have to solve one drama at a time. :-) We'll get back to Wade and Brad soon enough. I think that these guys will have a lot of the issues you mention (guilt, etc.) but one can hope they move beyond that quickly enough, for JJ's benefit.

i think that a situation like this can either rend a family apart or pull it together, but as I mentioned before, I think this time it will pull it together. And I think that you're right, in that I think Will could play a big role in helping JJ get through this.

I think that much of what you're thinking must be what they're thinking right now.

See, and I think that if it was really going to be a cliffhanger, I would have had Will look at his screen and just scream.

Bah. He's still a little bitch. ;-)

I'm so glad I could surprise you! JJ's bitchy demeanor has been fun to write, but there had to be a reason.

I'll have to hope you guys humor me on the various possibilities of hidden files in 2000; I'm not a tech geek, but I do remember such things. If I'm wrong, let's chalk it up to poetic license. I don't think that Robbie will create problems over this. When the issue with Michael came up, he and Brad were pretty united in their approach. This is a little more cut-and-dried. Besides, it's unlikely that Brad will be able to go off and handle this without getting some consensus from the key players in the family. IMHO, that was where he really fucked up the situation with Michael, by keeping Will (and JP) out of the loop on how he handled that.

I picked out a few of your paragraphs to talk about. The pictures were on the disk that Will got and copied onto his computer after Norway, but the ones of JJ with his coach weren't visible; they were hidden files. So when Will looked through them, he didn't see the pictures of JJ with his coach. It wasn't until he copied them to his new computer that he realized they were there. I have to believe that Robbie's thoughts went pretty much how you mentioned. He was probably feeling like he really had nowhere else to go. Plus, it's Christmas, and that tends to be a time when people reach out to their families, or to people they love. How sad is that, to be alone on Christmas Eve? In his mind, as Will deduced, he probably thought that if he went home and apologized, everything would be alright. That it wasn't has undoubtedly impacted him in a pretty negative way.

Personally, I think that you tie Paya up, read the chapter to him, then torture him until he tells you what's going on. (I'll bet Paya likes it.)

I think JJ was looking at the camera in agony because he really doesn't want to fuck around with his coach. If you think about where Robbie was, totally focused on JJ and his issues, it makes sense that he'd be checked out of the reality of the situation. This should shock him back into it.

You're right about JJ, and I think that you're right about Robbie. If you think about it, the world he's been living in (with JJ) has been totally engineered so JJ could cope with this. This should help him pull his head out of his ass.

Maybe Matt told Wade that. I can't see Wade letting sex ruin his relationship with Matt, but I can see it eating away at him inside. I'm sure your option will come up as they contemplate how to deal with the coach. ;-) As far as Brad and Robbie goes, I think this will explain a lot of the forces that have been driving them apart. That alone is a huge help.

I agree: time to rally. I totally get why Robbie did that. He stormed out during the heat of the argument. He probably sat there in the limo, thinking about things, and started to pull it all together.

I think that it would be worse, too, because of the time-frame. This has been going on with JJ for at least a month, probably longer. Will had a day of hell.

I would have thought that you, of all people, would have understood what's driving Wade. :-) I think you're right, and this will be a unifying event for the family, even if it's tragic. And I think that this will help everyone get a handle on why JJ has been such a little bitch.

December 24, 2000 Escorial, CA Will I was hanging out in my room, just enjoying how awesome it was. I loved the décor, and the shower was totally kick ass. It didn’t have the slick features that my room in Malibu had, like the second level with the elevator, but it was much more livable. And just as he’d done before, Stef had carved out separate areas for me. I had my bed in one part of the room, a sitting area with a couch and a big leather chair in another part, and a sleek mo

Surely. :-)

I'm trying to get back onto a regular posting schedule, so I've designated Fridays as Granger day. I've got enough working through editing that we should be alright for the next 4 weeks.

Nice to see you doing some work around here! (SMILE)

October, 1797 Granger stood behind an outcropping of trees and stared out at the Pacific Ocean from his hiding place. There, about three miles off shore, was a small brig, sailing southward. She appeared to be nothing more than a merchant brig, armed with perhaps a few four-pounders for defense against any aggressive natives, so from all appearances, she seemed to be a mere trader. But there was no reason for a trading vessel to be in these waters, and the only d

You clearly haven't done much research in this area. Echo chamber? I wish.

I understand where you're coming from now. I suspect that you and I could spend an afternoon in a self-help section of the bookstore and laugh our asses off. That's very interesting. Science is looking for generalizations, and while certainly everyone has their own perceptions, those that fall outside the norm are outliers: unreliable predictors. That being said, I think that the issue you raise is one that I see quite often in economics, where a cause and effect relationship is hypothesized (and then usually grabbed on as true by the more dogmatic). It's so hard to make those generalizations, because there are so many different variables out there. Did the US economy recover from the recession because of the stimulus? Proponents may argue that it did, and point to Europe, where austerity has kept them mired in recession. But is that the only factor there? What about the natural rhythm of economics: recovery, peak, decline, trough, etc.? Or what about the Quantitative Easing measures? The variables are too numerous to reach, IMHO, a definitive conclusion. In the topic of corporal punishment, one might ask if the child became an asshole bully because he was beaten. Perhaps the child was also ignored. Perhaps the child also drank BigGulp sodas. Perhaps the child was bitten by the cat. It's possible that there are many factors in play here. But with enough studies, that are broad enough, yielding the same results, eventually one controls for those other factors. I think that in the case of corporal punishment, that's happened, but I can understand if you don't.