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Hi Jim! I know that's also the name of my other "critic", but I think I can tell you guys apart! I really appreciate someone taking the time to read and comment. I'm an uncivilized American, so some of my vocabulary might be a bit different from yours on the other side of the Atlantic, but I think I express myself pretty well. You know, I didn't set out with the idea of actually writing a novel. This story did actually come to me in a dream. Not all of it, but the two main characters with their chess/running and their bad academics/music, their needs, all that just came into my head, and I decided to start writing. And even though I'm an ancient fossil, (north of 40 years old!!), I do remember what it was like to be that age, the joys and the insecurities, everything on overdrive. I'm intrigued by your comment about the only slight suffering of the heroes. Yeah, I didn't think about that, but you have a point. They do suffer, but perhaps I let them "off the hook" too easily, too quickly. From Tom's life-threatening accident to him joining the track & field (you uncouth people call it 'athletics', I think!) team, there are only a few pages. A few very intense pages, I think, but yeah, I guess the resolution of his situation and Ricky's was too easy. Maybe I was in too much of a rush to get to the next set of events in the story, namely the beginning of track & field season and the Old Man Cropsy expedition. I hate to just write pages for the sake of pages, but I agree with you, the description, the agony, could have been drawn out better. Some of the other stuff seems like small details to me. His parents didn't want to tell him about the move until everything was 100% sure, and with Dad's demanding and perhaps dangerous job, the uncertainty was there. That seemed reasonable to me. I thought of translating the Spanish, but then again, it seems artificial to me, like movie subtitles. I think the meaning of most of the Spanish is pretty obvious from the context. Your description of part 9 is very, very beautifully written, wow, but well, when I dreamed this all up, and when I set out to write, I really didn't see this as a sex book. There's a very small amount of sex in mine, but the kind of detail you put, interesting as it is,,I just don't see that fitting into my novel, my own style. And I believe that the rules of this forum don't permit erotica (though that term itself is open to interpretation). With the Christian thing, well, I happen to be one, but I didn't want to make that a central theme. I just felt like building different things into each boy's character, try to make each boy a whole human being, not just have one aspect. It just seemed to fit with Ricky, him being a southerner, his music, etc. I picked aspects of the boys' characters that I know about myself--the chess, the running, the folk music, the academics. I couldn't have really made them into, say, skateboarding, computer games, certain clothing styles, etc. because I don't know anything about these. I hate to overuse this analogy/metaphor, but I saw this book as like a river, tracking the boys' lives through fast parts, slow parts, happy and dangerous parts. I wanted to put different scenes in along the way, mix different characters, have various bends in the river opening onto new landscapes. I didn't intend it to be a book where it builds to something "happening", more as a glimpse into lives of kids who I think could really exist. Emotions and actions that really could be part of boys' lives. All right, enough from me for now! Again, I really appreciate your reading and your thoughts. As you can surely tell, I've never written anything in my life before this. But it was fun writing, and I'm glad it's given you some joy. Hey, if it's given someone some joy, what else can I ask in this world? Take care, and I'll post the next part soon! |