Kurt Vonnegut once said that you’re allowed to be in love three times in your life. I’m guessing that isn’t counting all those temporary infatuations you might have along the way, until you take a closer look and see they’re really not all that, or if you’re gay, until righteous godly people were able to step between both of you and put an end to it because you’re making baby Jesus cry. I’ve Had My Share of Those.

No. Pretty sure he meant three times to love truly, madly, deeply, as the Savage Garden song goes. Three times to go all in. Three times to lose yourself in it. But only three. Because a forth might kill you.

Three strikes. Strike one was the first. Setting eyes on him in high school yanked me out of denial. But it was 1971. Pretty sure his family found out he was talking to that queer kid in school and after that he kept his distance, and then they moved away so it would have had to end anyway. Strike two was a reawakening of hope. That first broken heart makes you certain it will never be (I nearly jumped off a bridge in front of a train…), and then suddenly it happens again and you believe again. But he was straight…

Pretty sure now that was the start of the Dark Time, though I’ve written before that my memories of that period in my life are so mucked up it’s hard for me to recall the timeline. I couldn’t pull myself out of it for years. I stopped doing art and turned to computer programming instead so I didn’t have to look at my feelings. Then along came strike three.

Strike three eventually told me we were just friends with benefits. Then he dumped me. I found out during an AOL Instant Messenger chat with him. This is how it’s done in the 21st century.

It could have been a lot worse. This graphic came across my commercial social media feed the other day…

I almost moved south to be closer to strike three. I had it set up with the agency I was contracting for. There were jobs to be had down there according to the agent I spoke to. But Three dumped me before I could set it all in motion. So I stayed in my apartment in Cockeysville.

Had I done it I would never have got the job at Space Telescope, and bought a house of my own. And he’d have dumped me anyway.

I have it pretty good now. But I never found a companion for my body and soul. I haven’t been whole for most of my life.

Don’t be telling me that I’m not the only one. Each and every lost one of us who failed at love, are the only ones. 

Someone should write a book on that. Anyway…I was curious how the author of The Martian managed it. From what I heard he’d first serialized it on his own website, and somehow that led to it actually being published. So I asked Google…

Andy Weir, author of The Martian, self-published the book in a serial format on his website, chapter by chapter, then made it available as a free ebook, and later on Amazon for $0.99, which led to its success and a traditional publishing deal.

This could work for me except that if A Coming Out Story is any guide I might be months between putting up new chapters of my Not Really A Ghost Story But Sort-Of. And I would need a good editor to finish it properly. It looks to me like Andy Weir didn’t hire one until after his serialize version took off and Crown Books bought in, so maybe that also works because I think it’s going to be another year at least before I finish the story.

I’ve done it before. I had a fantasy series I worked on decades ago up on this website: The Skywatchers of Aden. At the time I didn’t know Aden was an actual city in the middle east. I gave the nation that plays a key role in the stories that name to make it sound like Almost But Not Eden. So if I ever pursued it seriously again I’d probably have to give it a different name. But I think I’m done with those stories. There were other problems with them I’m not sure how to resolve. I had five short stories up and one novelette. If you look at the page source on some of my website pages you can still see references to it.

Anyway…there’s another problem with this plan. I’ve asked for people to take a look at what I have so far (seven chapters) of my story and nobody responded. My website gets next to zero traffic unless I put up more photos of Robbie Benson in cutoffs or instructions on how to draw sexy guys who wear glasses. I have no idea how Andy Weir got all the interest in his story when he was serializing it on his blog and I am clearly utterly incapable of self promotion or I’d have had photo gallery shows and art shows to look back on. My brother tells me frequently that I should self publish A Coming Out Story and I haven’t.

I know what’s missing. I’ve heard it said that behind every great artist is a lover. But…so it goes… I don’t need to be great, just get it out there somewhere it doesn’t die stillborn.

But I’m liking how the story is working out. Got a lot done on it today in fact. I might start to serialize it here. I actually do get some traffic here on A Coming Out Story. It isn’t a lot but it is still very gratifying. Especially when it looks like someone just stumbled onto it and then they go through all the episodes.

Today is I Have To Stay Inside My Comfort Zone day, and for the occasion I’m going to spend time with my artwork, fix the electric tiller, take a few lazy walks around the neighborhood, possibly smoke a good cigar, have a nap, and if the weekend parking weather improves go to the hardware store and see if I can get some more solar mushrooms for the front yard.

Now that one of the Japanese maple trees out front isn’t there anymore, and the neighbor’s tree probably not by the end of this year, there’s plenty of sunlight on the front lawn for solar lights. I picked up a couple new ones for the front the other day in fact.

The backyard is already full of solar lights that I put out when the weather gets consistently warmer. Now I get to try doing the front yard. Only problem is being more visible from the street they’re more likely to get stolen. I live in the city after all. But so far my solar walkway lights haven’t been taken, and I kept them up all winter.

I see by my Google Calendar that tomorrow (Sunday the 23rd of March) is I Have To Stay Inside My Comfort Zone Day…

The day I asked if we could do something together on his own time and he told me no, “I have to stay inside my comfort zone.” This should be a special day for making myself comfortable.

That’s two Very Special Days in March! I think I shall have dinner at La Cuchara tomorrow…

If only that technology in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind was a real thing. Except…

Joel re-experiences his memories of Clementine as they are erased, starting with their last fight. As he reaches earlier, happier memories, he realizes that he does not want to forget her…

Joel comes to his last remaining memory of Clementine: the day they first met, on a beach in Montauk…

No. No, if that’s what you go through on the way to forgetting then I don’t want to do that.

I’ll live with it if erasing the memories are more painful than living with them.

And make myself comfortable inside my comfort zone.

I heard Ed McMahon on Johnny Carson tell your usual lounge lizard joke once, that I still think is kinda funny. He said if you’re ever hiking in the wilderness make sure to bring along everything you need to make a martini. That way, if you’re ever lost, you can make yourself a martini. And while you’re mixing it up someone will tap you on the shoulder and say “That’s not the way to make a martini,” and you can ask them how to get back to civilization again.

As I said…a lounge lizard joke. But a good one. And it probably works for making a margarita. I think I finally have the right mix of ingredients to make that perfectly smooth Italian margarita I’ve only been able to get sporadically at various bars and restaurants. And along with that, a silky smooth basic margarita. And probably someone will tell me this isn’t the way to make a margarita.

Whatever. I’ve wondered for so long why some places make their margaritas so tart I can barely sip them. Pretty sure now it’s too much lime.

I’ve seen the bartenders use all sorts of things…sour mix, Grand Marnier instead of Cointreau, simple syrup. It’s been hit and miss. Last summer my brother took me to Avila Beach golf club, just up the coast from Pismo, and there I watched a young bartender make me a margarita from scratch…a good tequila, Cointreau and a fresh lime she cut and squeezed herself, plus something in a mystery bottle that I thought might be sour mix or simple syrup. It was the smoothest, nicest margarita I’ve ever had. But when I tried to do that myself it came out way too tart.

I’ve tried ready made margarita mix. The Kirkland stuff is very good. But I can’t make an Italian margarita with it. I’ve tried a bunch of different recipes all to no avail. Your basic margarita follows a 321 rule. Three parts tequila, 2 parts Cointreau (some substitute Grand Marnier) and one part lime. I think that one part lime is where a lot of bartenders get it wrong and it turns out too tart. But just fiddling with the amount of lime wasn’t working for me. I bought some fresh limes to try and duplicate what I had at the Avila Beach Club and could not.

But I really Really like that Italian margarita. So recently I tried experimenting with it in ernest. I started subtracting lime from the accepted recipes but too little was no good either. A good margarita is a balance of sweet and tart and while I lean toward sweet in just about everything (my go-to tequila for making margaritas, Tres Generaciones plata, is a slightly sweet and very smooth tequila) the lime needed to be in there. Then I got a tip: use agave sweetener, but sparingly, to balance out the lime. Instead of one part lime, one half part lime and one half part agave sweetener. Or maybe two-thirds part lime and one third agave sweetener. I am stil fiddling with it.

But it works!

Now I can have my Italian margaritas at home whenever I want. Which isn’t often because at my age my body doesn’t take alcohol like it used to. I go out for dinner now I’m more likely to have a mocktail as an actual drink. In fact, a new gay mocktail only bar has opened up near the DC gayborhood I’d like to try sometime soon.

• I find myself anxiously checking first thing in the morning that my Social Security check was deposited when expected. Now I’m instantly paying bills with it I don’t have to until the first of the month, on the theory that if Apartheid Clyde decides I died several months ago like that guy in Washington State, he can’t claw it back from my bank accounts if it’s already in the hands of someone else and at least my bills are paid while I’m wandering through empty Social Security offices trying to convince the system that I’m not dead yet.

    I’m not. I feel fine. I think I’ll go for a walk.

• The Not Run Flats I was talked into buying at Costco last time, because they said they couldn’t get the right ones for my car, didn’t last any longer than the run flats would have anyway, and they didn’t ride any better. So I will have run flats put back on. The Costco in Owings Mills says they can get the right ones for my car now. It’s about 500 bucks more for a set of four but I can avoid the constant the anxiety of running with only an emergency tire plug kit in case I get a puncture.
• The Disney+ Percy Jackson series has already been renewed for a third season which means we will get to the introduction of Nico di Angelo and hopefully see him through the rest of the first five books of the series. But the big reveal during the fight with Cupid doesn’t happen for six more books after that one and I have serious doubts that Disney is going the distance there. If they just let it end with the last of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians books then they don’t have to deal with that big reveal in The House of Hades that it wasn’t Annabeth Nico had the crush on.

The best fan art there is of this scene and imo much Much
better than the official graphic novel adaptations, by 
alessia.trunfio

• Pretty sure going full time isn’t going to work for me, given the very low energy levels I have. I would just be working and sleeping all week long with maybe a little energy left for housework on the weekends. I need to make visit to the GP again, which I haven’t in a couple years now, to talk about this, and also verify my measles vaccine status and get the next updated COVID shots before the lunatic currently in charge of our public health services takes vaccines off the market in favor of Draino cocktails.

Germans like you probably saw this coming but I never thought I’d see the day and I am scared for you. Never mind all the water under this bridge I am scared for you. Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and he is using it to deport even green card holders like you without any sort of appeal or legal review.

I’m watching my country going down the tubes. It’s just stunning. I’ve no idea what I’ll do to get by but I reckon I’ll cross those bridges when I get to them.

I hope you’re somewhere safe. Please be somewhere safe.

-Bruce

It looked for a while like Meta had paused it’s pro Trump counter attack on Facebook posts that weren’t passing politically correct muster with the Donald. I was thinking this was because Facebook’s censorship campaign worked well enough that Trump got his bloated ass back in the white house and all was right with the world and whatever the libtards were saying didn’t matter anymore. But no.

I shared this graphic on my Facebook page back on March 5 and now it’s being “Fact Checked”, along with probably everyone else’s posts who laughed at Trump’s confusing transgender mice with transgenic mice…

The hair splitting being done this time by ersatz Meta/Trump fact checkers “Lead Stories” is that it wasn’t just a case of Trump confusing transgenic with transgender but that he referenced several studies that studied the effects of hormone treatment in mice for the purpose of evaluating the safety of certain kinds of transgender healthcare. But it was never about making mice transgendered, and yes, he did also confuse a study on transgenic mice with the studies on transgender healthcare.

So once more Meta/Facebook is stepping up to the plate to sew doubt and confusion about legitimate criticism of Trump’s behavior. There are lies made of false facts, and there are lies of omission, where some or all critical facts are hidden behind a lot of word salad. But they are all lies and you can’t build a nation out of lies.

We’re on dangerous ground right now, because of our secrets and our lies. They are practically what define us. When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. 

-Valery Legasov, Chernobyl 

Meta is once again covering up Donald Trump’s lies. He must be feeling the heat. Good.

[Update] This from a Reddit user: I guess that’s why it reads disingenuous to me. What Trump said is still wrong and the White House is trying to defend what he said by referencing useful science that is worth funding. His words are anti-science and anti-transgender people. Hormone research and gender affirming care also applies to more people than just transgender people. I worry people would simply read the headline of the Lead Stories article and follow along with his anti-science narrative.

That’s the entire point, to keep the anti science narrative alive, and also hatred toward transgendered Americans. Because otherwise how are they going to keep winning elections.

I had this wee adventure on the way back home to Baltimore from Disney World last Sunday. About ten miles into my trip the car’s message system beeped at me and the center console told me I only had 10 starts left. Above that number was a small icon indicating that the complaint was I had run out, or was about to run out of DEF.

I understand why they’re doing that countdown thing when it comes to the emissions control system, it’s because lots of drivers will simply ignore it otherwise, but I absolutely hate it and I think it’s a potential life threatening thing to just shut down the car when the count runs down to zero. When it started happening to me a couple years ago on my way to California, because my catalytic converter failed, I was in Grand Junction which did not have a Mercedes dealership and the nearest one was in St. George Utah, which meant driving several hundred miles through empty roastingly hot desert.

My car is a 2012 E350 Bluetec that I took delivery of December 2011. I am its first and only owner, not counting the factory and the dealer. It has that OEM 642 engine everyone seems to hate but I’ve had no trouble with it (ironically not counting the emissions control system which I’ve had to have worked on Lots, like the DEF tank heater replaced which cost nearly two grand, and both NOx detectors replaced). This is probably because I give the car every service the factory indicates except the oil changes. Those I did twice as often (every 5k) until the car reached 170k and now I do them every 3k. I do them myself except at the 10k service intervals where I let my mechanics do the oil change too.

And also top off the DEF tank. So that nominally gets done every 10k, but if I need to visit the mechanics in between those service intervals, like I’m taking a cross country road trip and I want the car checked over first, I’ll ask them to top off the DEF tank then too.

My car currently has 209k on it, most of that road trip driving. I am able to walk to my office, and to most day to day things I might need right here in my city neighborhood. So the car does not get commuter miles. I do a lot of pleasure road tripping in my cars and this Mercedes makes a wonderful road trip car..

Only once before have I had a problem with the DEF tank running low and that was because a shady dealer didn’t do it, or change the fuel filters like they were supposed to either, and I had to find out, that time also on the way up I-95 from Disney World. Good thing you can get that stuff at any any truck stop.

So this time I thought it was another case of the mechanics not topping off the DEF tank. But the guys I use now are really good and very trustworthy. So I gave it some thought.

I did the emissions recall two Julys ago, got a check for 2k from MBUSA…and lost 4 mpg (why??). I wondered if the car was sipping DEF more since then and maybe that 10k interval just wasn’t cutting it now. I had the car looked over several times before taking a road trip to visit family in California and asked them to top off the DEF tank then. So I might not have noticed the DEF tank was draining out faster than before since the emissions work.

I stopped for some road food and checked to see if I still had a countdown. I did. Now I only had 9 starts left. I had a reservation for the night a South of the Border, which yes is barely a two star motel but every room has its own private covered car port which makes it worth it to me. I figured I would buy some DEF at a truck stop along the way, get myself to South of the Border and my room. Nine more starts would be more than enough. Once I was there it would be easy to empty the trunk and add some DEF to the tank.

I stopped at a Flying J and bought a cubetainer of two and a half Gallons of DEF. When I started the car again it said I had 16 starts left.

Wait…what…???

I didn’t think that was in anticipation of my putting DEF in the tank and now I’m wondering if it wasn’t some glitch in the system and the tank had plenty of DEF in it. So I kept on driving hoping the next time I stopped I’d still have some starts left. Periodically I checked the messages. I had one message, I had 16 starts left. I checked again. Same story. I stopped to take a bladder break. When I started the car again there were no messages, no indication of a countdown happening. I double checked the message list. Nothing.

?????

Now I’m thinking maybe the sensor that tells the car the DEF tank is nearly empty was glitching and now it wasn’t. Or now it was telling the car the DEF tank was okay when it wasn’t. I had no idea, but I promised my car I’d add DEF to the tank when I got to South of the Border and I was going to do that.

So I get to South of the Border, check in, drive to my room (those private carports are Really Nice, you drive right up to your room door and even if it’s pouring rain you can unload the car for the night no trouble) unloaded the trunk, took out the trunk liner (the car has to be a working member of the household so I bought one of those when I took delivery) and uncovered the DEF tank.

The cubetainer of DEF came with an extendable pouring spout that fit snugly into the DEF tank filler. I started pouring. The tank took nearly all two and a half gallons. I think maybe there’s a pint or less still in the cubetainer.

The next morning I drove the rest of the way back to Baltimore without any trouble or new messages. As I read it, the DEF tank in my car has about a six and a half gallon capacity. So there was probably still four gallons of DEF in it. I don’t think that should have caused any problems.

Anyway…new rule: when I do my own oil changes from now on, I will also top off the DEF tank. And it would be nice to have a feature that lets me see how full the DEF tank is. But the sensor that’s in there might not be capable of that.

The chatter I’m getting on the Mercedes forums is the sensor in the DEF tank that tells you when you’re about to run out is getting flakey. Oh well. I’ll ask my mechanics about it when I do the next 10k service in a few weeks. I love my car, but that countdown thing sometimes makes me wish I had a 1973 240D. With a four speed stick.

An article about this TV show came across my Facebook feed this morning, and for a moment it took me away from MAGA America back to a better time and a better America. It’s memories of that better America that are the most tormenting now. But if anything they need to be held even more dear if we are to stand any chance of prevailing, and winning our country back.

Before there was Bill Nye there was Mr. Wizard. This was a favorite Saturday morning TV show back when I was a kid.

Lounging in front of the TV set back then I would have been about the same age as the kids who came to visit Mr. Wizard.

It was a different time, the post Sputnik period of the Cold War, and providing school kids with a grounding in science was important for the national defense. So science was considered to be a subject even elementary school kids should learn as part of a comprehensive education, along with geography and math. I remember doing my science projects with classmates in 4th, 5th, and 6th grades. But there is also this: I grew up in Maryland, in the Washington DC suburbs, and I have to wonder what my grade school memories would have been had I gone to school elsewhere, especially the deeply fundamentalist south. Let me explain…

There was another science series I used to love watching, which were the Bell Lab’s Science films. You knew it was going to be a good day in class when they brought out the Bell & Howell 16mm film projector, and especially when you saw the film cans had one of those Bell Lab’s titles on them. The episodes touched on different subjects, such as how the sun creates light and heat, how blood moves through the body and brings oxygen and nutrients to the cells, and what cosmic rays are and where they came from. Every one of the episodes Frank Capra directed ended with a plea to regard science and religion as not just compatible, but that science itself was an expression of mankind’s faith in God…

From the beginning of the project, Capra had insisted that the films would explore the relationship of science and religion. In his autobiography, Capra paraphrased his early comments to a meeting of the scientific advisory board assembled by AT&T and N. W. Ayer: “If I make a science film, I will have to say that science research is just another expression of the Holy Spirit that works in all men. Furthermore, I will say that science, in essence, is just another facet of man’s quest for God.” At a later stage in the project, Capra wrote that the films would have “the obligation to stress or at the very least to acknowledge the spiritual side of man’s make-up—to acknowledge that all good things come from God—including science”.

-Wikipedia, The Bell System Science Series.

I’m sure Capra firmly believed all this, but it’s probably the only way those episodes could have been shown in the deep south.

And now look at where we are…

My initial impressions about returning to DVC have not been wonderful. In my previous incarnation I would spend February/March in Saratoga Springs because it gave me walking access to Disney Springs, and my birthday week at Boardwalk because that gave me walking access to my two favorite parks, Epcot and Hollywood Studios. I have fewer points this incarnation, but more than enough for a week in Saratoga Springs, which is now my “home” resort. This trip I shelled out extra points to get into a room I thought would be right next to Disney Springs. But no…the extra points put me right next to the main building, which I guess was a premium spot but not what I wanted. And the view off my balcony might as well be a brick wall.

So maybe extra steps to Disney Springs benefits my overall health. Fine. Whatever. It’s not crippling, just annoying. But I came back into this expecting better than I was getting now.

This morning I attempted for the first time to use one of the laundry rooms here, only to discover they don’t put nearly enough washers and dryers in them here. At Port Orleans Riverside they have lots at every pool. I reckon the thinking here is there are enough rooms that have their own washers and dryers in them they don’t need a lot of those in the common laundries. This was an unpleasant surprise. 

Previously I either wasn’t staying long enough to need a laundry or, if I was staying on hotel row for a few nights and then going to my DVC room, I would use the excessively long time between DVC check-in and check-out to go to a local laundromat and get my things clean. I would pack lots of clothes for my birthday week at Boardwalk because Septembers in Florida can be sweltering. This was so as not to need to do the laundry until I got back home. My birthday falls on peak hurricane season…hahahahaha…but the points and hotel stays are cheaper then so…okay.

When I discovered how easily I could get into the laundry at Port Orleans I decided to pack fewer clothes and use the resort laundries instead. I’ve been trying for years now to limit the amount of luggage I take with me on my road trips, all to no avail. But fewer clothes in the main luggage helped a bit.

I began checking out the laundry rooms after I got here, and discovered they were tiny by comparison. But also mostly empty. So this morning I tried getting into the laundry across from my room, which was somewhat larger because it’s in the main building and pool complex. It was fully occupied. But there was a web app I could use to tell me when the machines became available. I figured that app was also how you paid, similar to payment to use the machines in Port Orleans, and other hotels nowadays. (which is Very Nice because you don’t need a lot of quarters…)

Oh great…now I can do my laundry!

So I kept checking the app to see when the machines in that laundry room were available. But it kept reading zero machines available. So I checked the other Saratoga Springs laundry rooms and the only one showing any availability was way on the other side of the resort. I began to think I’d need to go to that Laundromat in Kissimmee again, and what the hell am I spending all this money to be back in DVC again??

Get me started on the pathetic welcome package they gave me when I rejoined…

So I decided to walk over and check. Sure enough the web app was broken and all the washers were available. There was a couple using the dryers (there were Lots more of those) and I asked if they’d tried the app and is that how you pay. Oh no, says they, the app isn’t necessary and the machines are free.

Well okay…that’s a perk. I guess it makes sense given that some rooms have washing machines in them, so maybe it isn’t fair to those of us staying in the studios to charge us for using the ones in the common laundry rooms.

So maybe now I’m not so unhappy being back in this thing again…

Am I really the only one noticing the appalling symbolism that the most technologically advanced and record holding fastest Atlantic passenger service ocean liner, bearing the name SS United States, was towed to a scrap yard for partial disassembly so it can eventually be sunk and become an artificial reef!?

I had a surprisingly nice dinner at Biergarten yesterday. I say it was surprising, because I’d just assumed that all the servers I used to know there (excuse me…Cast Members) had either retired or left Disney by now. But no…several who remembered me and a certain someone were still there and I got to talk to a couple of them about what was going on with me, and what was not going on with me and a certain someone. One of the servers came over to chat with me for a bit and congratulated me on my return to work at Space Telescope.

I’ve had the theme song for the first series of The Littlest Hobo (the one I grew up with, not the second series music) going through my head all night for some reason…

Aging sneaks up on you slyly. Unless you have a bad illness that ages you rapidly, or genes that do the same, you hardly ever notice that you’re loosing things like stamina and flexibility. Until you pull a muscle doing something you did a zillion times before and your body didn’t complain about it. There’s a character in a Hemmingway novel who is asked how he went broke, and he replied “Gradually then suddenly.” Growing old is like that. At least it’s been like that for me. 

And I’ve noticed I have it good by comparison with a bunch of my kidhood peers. I still get a lot of complements on how young I look for my age (71). But that might mostly be because of something a shrink I went to once told me, that I “present young”. Mindset does affect appearance. In many ways I still have this inner point of view that I’m a teenager or at best a young adult.

So this morning at Disney world, as I’m coaxing my stiff body into my clothes for a walk around Saratoga Springs (I did a lot of walking yesterday and I’ll probably do that again today), that I have to realize once again that I’m Not a young adult. I’m an old man. It still mostly doesn’t bother me, or at any rate I can ignore it most of the time. It’s when I can’t that I wish I had my twenty-something body back again. But this morning I had a thought: what if I actually could be transported back into my twenty-something body again, even if just for an hour or two while I stroll around the parks here. Would it be a pleasant couple hours, or would it shock me to actually see how much aging as taken away from my body over the decades, that I haven’t really noticed because it all happened so gradually?

Maybe its just as well I don’t have that kind of magic.

I really dislike doing this because it seems so much like begging for attention, but I have a story I’ve been working on for years and I would really like some feedback on it.

It’s a sorta-kinda ghost story but in the vein of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House where the frights don’t come cheaply from blood and gore and monsters that pop out at you, but instead some strange creepy occurrences and things that go bump in the night. Sorta-kinda.

I play with some tropes. The story takes place not an old victorian mansion but a modern office building. The timeframe is the worst of the subprime mortgage collapse which is important to the background of the plot.

My main characters are a young gay male couple going through a bad patch due to money problems brought on by the meltdown, and also the spending habits of one of them. That one accepts a part in a cheap reality TV ghost hunter show to make a few bucks, but also he’s a computer geek…I play some with that trope too…and a rationalist with an obsession for debunking what he considers occult balony.

There are also a handful of other characters, amature ghost hunters and reality TV charlitans. And lurking in the background, a bunch of brutal predatory capitalists involved in building this luxury office building that nobody, including themselves, wants to spend the night in after it was completed. Or any other time of day.

What I’d like to know is the writing good enough it doesn’t bore you to tears reading it? Do my characters seem realistic? Is the dialogue convincing? Does the story make you want to read more as you go along? I’ve only finished (somewhat) six chapters of it and it’s hard to keep going without any feedback. And truth be told I’m still working on the middle part. I know what it has to do, not just how to do it.

The first chapter, which I’ve posted elsewhere, and got some Very good feedback on, is only one page. It basically tells you what the story is about. If it doesn’t interest you it’s okay to bail after that. The second chapter is background for my two main characters and why they got themselves into this reality TV thing. If they don’t interest you go ahead and bail there. The third chapter is exposition, as they’re driving to the site, on the history of the building that’s allegedly haunted. Does this interest you? If not go ahead and bail there. Things don’t really start happening until the fourth chapter and maybe that’s a mistake but I wanted to set the stage and lure the reader in.

Comment on this post (it’s the React! link) or email me if you like at bgarrett@pobox.com (the brucegarrett address is whitelisted so I would need to add you first) and I’ll send you the links to the Google Docs.

Otherwise…pointers to a good editor I can hire to look it over would be welcome too.