Rilbur

Poor guy, lol. Good story, but... poor guy. And much more likeable now than he was before, though not quite as much as he used to be. Sue me, but I like 'good guys'... at least when it comes to drugs.

Thanks Neph, I was hoping to get some fresh eyes, but it's much appreciated. I know how hard you're finding reading lately.

I have a .pdf version of the hardcopy edition, but I've run into a small issue. My editor and I have read this story to death preparing the .pdf file, but I need to make sure the .pdf file in question is actually right before I put it up. So... anyone care to get a look at the 'cleaned up' version a bit early?

I haven't posted as much as I should, but I have to say that this is a great story. Of course, the problem is that when it makes the least sense, I see some kind of logic anyway. Makes no sense, but there's logic to it. And I just can't handle it. GAAAH!

Sorry to hear that Cia! As time passes, maybe there will be something you can help with -- I know that I have a few other ideas I want to run with that I'm just not ready to start pushing (a 'blog' consisting of articles from various others with the subject of 'on writing -- advice to aspiring authors', for example).

Mari, condoms don't suck quite as much as you seem to think for oral. (Sorry about the pun...) In addition to the 'plain' latex-flavored ones, they also offer a variety of 'flavored' condoms, or you can use flavored lube to help remove the taste. Sure, bareback would be 'better', but... safety first.

Because I want to include authors from other sites, I've opened up my own forum to run this affair at forums.rilburskryler.net and set up a workshop forum specifically for workshopping. If you'd like to sign up, please register for an account there and PM me so I can include you in the authors group.

I actually meant me Guardians Spoiler: Oh, and perhaps here's an even worse bit, though I don't think I can count it as a cliffie.

'No pain, no gain' comes to mind. Coaches everywhere tell their athletes to just keep pushing, no matter what. And on one level, it's a good idea -- most minor aches and pains can be safely ignored, and learning to push through them is important. In this case, sounds like it was a mistake.

There are some scenes in my work that I can not reread. Look at chapter 2 or so of Guardians -- the rape scene. I can not reread it.

Yup, very relative.

How about ending right after you killed off a major character? With no hope for 'redemption' as it were...

/me blushes. Thanks Nephy. Thanks for not giving me a pointed hint that Redemption is overdue for an update in the process, too... I want to finish off my rewrite of Trillion Dollar Family (hopefully coming out with GA.Stories) first.

dkstories, especially his Do Over series. Hands down the best i've read.

Possibly Kyle Aaron's Kandric cycle, but I think it was dkstories's works that were the first ones where I actually noticed where I was rather than just following a link and enjoying the story.

Lugh, I'm planning to let the genres be pretty open to whatever the authors want to write, though 'decency' limits would still be necessary (e. g. no raping of children allowed). I suspect I'll also need to be fairly strict on the use of sex scenes -- i. e. nothing rated 'NC-17' allowed. Let me quote a post I made elsewhere... OK, it sounds like we may have enough interest here to get such a group off the ground. The question is how many people who are going 'sounds like a good idea' will actually get involved I'm going to start investigating the various options (setting up an IRC group or a forum), and I'll try and get back within a week or so. I'm leaning in the direction of a forum, since syncing our schedules is likely to be difficult, but if we could set it up via IRC (or Skype) that would be nice too. It's possible we may receive support from the board to do it here, or I may run it through my own website assuming I can get some kind of forum software running. With NaNo coming up next month, this is probably a bad time to get it started, so the 'due date' on any stories is likely to be mid-December, or probably later; maybe new Years. So there is still plenty of time to write up a story. Here's a quick sketch of what I think the rules would be: On the writing: 1. All stories should be submitted by January 1st, 2011 2. Stories should be between 2,500 and 15,000 words in length. (Approximately 5 to 30 pages) These are to be short stories, which does imply a certain concision. Some authors (we know who we are) will just have to deal will the 'cramped' space they have to develop and finish a storyline. 3. These stories should be reasonably well polished by the author -- put the time in that you'd expect from others -- but they do not need to be fully edited / beta read. 4. To help reduce the 'personal' nature of the exercise, all stories shall be submitted anonymously -- the only person able to connect a story to it's author will be the administrator (i. e. me). See below for a caveat. On the workshop side: 1. Each week on Monday, a story shall be posted. 2. Within one week, every group member is responsible for turning in a written critique and a copy of the story 'marked up' with notes. Arrangements will be made to get these to the proper author. 2a. (Optional) The author himself will provide a similar copy along with the story, which will be posted when the floor is 'opened' to allow him to ask questions. The purpose of this is to help expose your writing process so that others may learn from it. 3. Each week the floor shall be open to discuss various aspects of the previous week's story. 4. The author of the story shall refrain from posting anything in the discussion about the story -- the idea is to silently receive and accept the criticism of your peers. This will naturally reduce the anonymity factor, but it's a necessary trade-off for the process to work. 5. At the end of the week, the author is free to ask questions of the group. No one is required to answer, but the 'golden rule' applies. I'll probably try and recruit an independent moderator or two just to keep an eye on the situation, I'll need to consider that. Assuming we could make this a recurring thing, I could see having 'two' stories in play at the same time; one slot would be for a new story, while the other could be given over to a rewrite of a previous story. If anyone is firmly, concretely interested in joining under those terms, feel free to announce that fact or PM me with the information. If you have any comments or concerns, feel free to make them known. I'd appreciate all the help I can recieve from anyone interested in being involved.

I had a few other people sound interested elsewhere, but is there no one in GA that would be interested in joining such a group?

Take a look about 100 years ago... or 200, when slavery was widely supported, and even many of those that rejected it still thought blacks were 'inferior'. Because, after all, if they weren't they wouldn't have been made slaves, or they would have had civilization already, or another dozen reasons. (Mind you, the civilization point has some false legitimacy; as badly screwed up as Arabic culture is, African culture is quite possibly worse... and was worse then)

As an FYI to anyone else who has a habit of cross-posting their stories to Nifty, something came to my attention today thanks to a reader remail. Nifty appears to have run an automatic conversion process over HTML files to add a 'social' functionality to the top and bottom of every existing HTML page. The only problem with this is that the process was not infallible. At least one of my chapters, and possibly more (I have a lot of chapters to check), has been broken by the change. I would suggest that anyone who cross-posts using HTML should go and check and see if any of their chapters have been broken, and if so inform the nifty archivist.

I just went through an incredible experience today. I thought I was a pretty good writer, with very well crafted stories. In truth, that's probably fairly accurate. But boy do I have a lot more to learn than I would have thought; and the best part is, now I have a better idea of what. I'm taking English 43 (Creative Writing) this semester, to help 'fill out' my course load. That was a great decision. For most of the semester, we've been reading published author's works, short stories to be specific, and talking about them. Today, we did something different. Today was the day we started 'work shopping' stories. And I volunteered to go first. One one level, it was really nice to have an 'enforced' 100% reader feedback thanks to the teacher; I heard a lot of viewpoints that I probably never would have. But then the discussion in class really helped reshape my view of the entire story. As a result, I'm probably going to rewrite -- as in delete everything I have, start a brand new outline, and work from there. And that was before the teacher chimed in with a number of very helpful, useful comments. If you ever have the chance to get in a writer's workshop, take it. It's amazing. That said... would anyone be interested in trying to get one going 'online'?

What an ending... and people accuse me of cliffhangers!

Is 'very' an option?

I have to side with Graeme. There are a lot of reasons someone might not realize it until late in life. And the bit about not recognizing anything until he had sex also makes an (unfortunately) large degree of since from my perspective. I didn't even imagine I could possibly be gay until... call it 22ish. Part of the problem lay with the delay in my general sexual development (embarrasing, but unfortunately informative for this discussion, I didn't learn about masturbation as anything other than a dirty word until I was nearly nineteen, and graduated from high school); without that particular formulative aspect to connect 'horniness' to sexuality, I didn't even recognize I was horrendously, and continuously, horny. And without masturbation to help me 'develop' and realize what I tended to think about, I had no way to start to recognize I leaned towards men instead of women, especially since my first (and more or less only) crush was for a girl. (?) Perhaps the theme for the upcoming Anthology says it best: people are wierd.

I prefer EPUB, or HTML, format over PDF. PDF has many advantages, but... frankly, it sucks. PDF is designed to replicate, page-for-page, whatever document / design you want. All the 'features' of an image file, without the excessive size. What it doesn't handle is reformatting to fit the device you use. It's designed to take a document and put it on screen without any changes, or to print it and know exactly what will print with ease. No thank you. Anyway, just as a plug, I'm actually planning to provide E-Book, HTML, .doc, and probably a few more formats to my readers once I've finished cleaning up Guardian. (So close... just a few chapters left, and then doing all the final formatting, all too much of which is format-specific).

1 in 20 isn't that bad a number. Not as 'good' as 1 in 10, but... I guess we have to let the woman have some of the good looking guys. Edit: Couldn't let that one lie there, unanswered. There are three major problems with this. First, not all males have a strong sex drive; there are occasional individuals who don't. (Meh, so small a percentage I'll grant you them). Second, it is possible for someone to satiate their sexual needs with a partner, and therefore not engage in masturbation. Third, not everyone learns early. Some people might not learn until after they graduate high-school, right around the time they turned nineteen for example. (*cough*, slow learner, I know, but there were reasons that probably tie into some 'medical' concerns that came up later *cough*) This third group would really benefit from improved sex ed in schools!