cheated by Gore Vidal

I'm on about the 7th story in this anthology, "Gay Short Fiction." I only read the first couple of pages of William S. Burroughs contribution before I got bored and moved on to the next story, by Gore Vidal. I was interested, because I'm a philistine and have never read any Gore Vidal, and it seems people thought he was quite cool. (Although lots of people like William S. Burroughs, too, and I think he's usually quite amazingly dull. All description; no characters, no plot. In short, he needed a co-author to give him some direction.) Anyway, back to Gore Vidal. The story started out promisingly, seeming to be about a guy who thinks he's straight but is coming to realize he's attracted to men. I was very interested to see how he dealt with it because I'm trying to do a similar thing in a story I'm writing, now. But then suddenly his story veered off track - the reader finds out the guy actually had a sexual thing going with a male friend between the time they were both 12 to when they were 17 and somehow when his friend was killed (in the Marines) he just 'forgot' the whole thing. Then the story jumps to 5 years later and the main character is a flaming queen.

I just don't buy it. Vidal needed a beta who (as eor does for me) would say "Okay, nice. Now do the hard stuff."

in other news...

I did manage to write a little on this M*A*S*H*/Red Dwarf crossover the girl on the RD yahoo group wants. And immediately felt like I'd lost my steam on my Ray/Winston story. I know I had a bunch of things I wanted to write on R/W. Of course maybe the other thing that killed my steam was how busy my weekend was.:P We didn't go to the party the guy upstairs threw - instead we were old people and put in earplugs and slept. Like logs.

I realized yesterday that I haven't written in my paper journal for a week. Which may not be an entirely bad thing - I'm sort of feeling as though writing on paper and then typing it up years from now (as I'm trying to do with my high school era journals) is just a waste of time.