JoelInSpace

Not gonna lie. I loved this story. Loved it. I had opened about 8 tabs with different stories, planning on giving each one a cursory glance to pick something to read and fall asleep to. Cut to five hours later, me trying to keep my eyes open, wanting to finish the story before nodding off. Didn't happen, but I finished it over breakfast, apologizing to my partner for not being able to chat while he got ready for work. By the way...now he's reading it too. This was really a sweet one. Kudos~! -- Joel

Hey there GaryK... Well I sure do appreciate that! BTW... a couple of y'all steered me over to dkstories's scifi short stories, and specifically Do Over. Whoa! What a great story! I'm gorging myself on it, can't stop eating up the chapters. I'm about to finish chapter 4 now, and I guess I'll keep telling myself that I'll step away from the computer shortly and do other things, but... But I might end up totally geekin' out on this story and read it straight thru. I'm lovin' it. I'll take some time to post specifically on this story when I've finished the whole thing. But just wanted to say again a big thank you to everyone who's taken the time to make me feel welcome and included. I'm impressed with GA. And also, for the recommendation to read Do Over, I owe at least a pizza to whoever mentioned that first. Unless it has be delivered to Belgium or something.

Regarding the revelation I shared with some (many?) of you about Hollister being a fragrance as well as a store... I must confess that i was not a patron of Hollister as a rule. I felt like it was a store for a younger crowd. But damn if that store doesn't just smell SO GOOD everytime you walk by one in a mall. So I finally decided to just walk in and ask somebody if you could buy the scent that wafts out of their storefronts. Turns out the answer is... NO! The Hollister cologne is similar, but not the same scent at all. In fact, that tantalizing store smell is a specially made "ambient" fragrance meant for use on the store walls, floors and furniture only. It's not meant to be sprayed on clothing or skin, any more than Fabreeze is. I was crestfallen when I learned this news. I smelled a tester bottle of the Hollister cologne and found it a far cry from the store smell. But my boyfriend actually went back and bought me a bottle, told me to try it away from the store. It still doesn't smell like the store to me, but I do love that scent now.

To paraphrase an over-used cliche', the rumors of my untimely departure from the GA community have been greatly over-posted. And while I wish I would have been around to reply to all of your warm, funny and smart welcomes, I must admit that I was rather touched to see the accumulation of so many responses when I was finally able to log back in today. Which reminds me: I'm struggling with a wifi issue right now (that and also another problem, but something far too technical for me to get into, but which I'll just call "Microsoft Vista.") The issue is that my internet access is provided by the owner of the house I rent. He lives across the street along with our router. Most of the time, no problem. But occasionally, my bandwidth just nosedives down to nothing, and then I'm kicked off the net for a few hours. Though I have no proof of this, I suspect my landlord is occasionally grifting huge video clips from peer-to-peer sites. My silence, then, is the result of the annoying but rather harmless internet connectivity interruptions which have made life at my current residence so charming and rustic. Definitely not as a result of my short time among your GA folk. And in the future, if any or many of you find that I have suddenly just stopped replying, it's probably because my landlord is trying to download another full length Falcon film. **********Now that all of you know why I went silent yesterday, I'm going to try to compose another totally different, but equally feasible, explanation. All in the spirit of working to become a better author, right? So here goes: The (Alternate) Reason I went silent...************** Oh hey guys! Yeah, sorry I kinda disappeared right after establishing my profile and making my initial posts yesterday. But it was for your own good! I decided to use silence to teach ya'll a technique for successful relationships! So did y'all enjoy that? Pretty good, huh? I call that my "silent treatment" routine. Let me explain. In grown-up relationships, we sometimes have to find subtle and often petty levers with which to wrest control from our partners back into our own steady grip. If arguing or crocodile tears don't work, sometimes a good long dose of cold absence can be just the thing to inflame our loved ones' insecurities and force them to kiss our asses. Before y'all start asking, I'm not a professional advice-giver! I'm just really good at relationships. I also believe that God wouldn't have given me such a head full of great ideas to maintian a healthy, happy romance just so I could keep them all to myself. No, it's my duty to share them and help people. Next time, I'll explain how to use something I call "Verbal Abuse" to ensure your partner will never leave you! ***************OK, just to be clear, them was jokes! Good-natured, self-depricating jokes! And, while I am often the gay author of jokes later judged to be unfunny, I can say with utter certainty that my jokes are in no way direct or subliminal reflections of any issues I have ever had with any previous or current romantic partners. However, my boyfriends do have to put up with the actual jokes themselves, if not their fictional bases. And it's been argued that this may actually be a form of abuse on it's own.****************

See this kind of topic is exactly why I joined GA. So I love the fragrances we use as a matter of course. But I gravitate toward the lighter, fresher, powdery "daytime" scents. My boyfriend and I have started to kind of make shopping for interesting fragrances a fun little project when we travel. The trick is for us to find something that we both like because (1) we want to like the way each other smells and (2) we found that when we wore individual colognes, when we got close enough to smell each other, sometimes our two respective scents smelled kind of weird and funky together. Kind of like how awful it can sound when two perfectly good songs are played atop one another. So now we shop for scents that we can both wear when we spend time together. And it encourages compromise sense there are some fragrances I would never pick for myself, but somehow they seem to "fit" us as a couple. I have a couple of bottles of stuff that I wear when we aren't spending time together, but more and more I find myself just picking one of our "shared" scents even on days when we aren't gonna see each other. Just that little shift in my behavior feels kinda nice. What we've been wearing: Hollister, Tom Ford, Diesel, Bugavi Aqua

Well now see that there is nothing but friendly! Thanky for that warm welcome, Bob! I won't prattle on about it, but since you ask what kind of stories I like the most, I'm obliged to mention just a couple of things... Here's the thing about "gay" fiction. To me, it isn't really a genre; it's a point of view. It's a lens (or a filter). So if you want to read about relationships, adding gay characters or using a gay voice just makes the story more interesting, more unpredictable, more... fun! I suppose my fiction of choice is science fiction, but like all story-telling, sci-fi is really still all about interplay among characters, just in tantalizing, unbounded new settings and circumstances. So queerness fits easily into that framework, at least for my tastes.

I stumbled upon GA while I was searching for some perspective on issues I'm having with my boyfriend. How bad is it that after I read the posts which spoke directly to our friction, I found myself moving through post after post... and then I started reading the stories. After that, I was a goner. This is a great site. Happy to have found it, happy to meet y'all.