It's been awhile...

Yes, I am still working with Bayne & John. I want perfection. I want people to see that love between men is...still love. Perhaps I am asking too much of myself and of the general population, but I demand it just the same.
I feel as though something important is added with each pass. I feel as though the love is stronger with each touch. There is pain, death, and drama in nearly every chapter - but I also demand love and beauty. I want human emotion and artistic prose.
I want a novel.
I hope to be done by May 2012. Beyond that, I am just dragging my feet and experiencing artistic denial. Here is a "snippet" from the book, for your entertainment :)

“Feel guilty?” Bayne murmured against my still closed mouth.

“Yeah…” I sighed, and finally parted my lips to him.

“Don’t, John...” He said, and then sucked my bottom lip sharply between his own lips, and nipping lightly, before having pulled away just enough to speak again. “...do you honestly think that we are the first two men to have ever kissed?”

A story to tell.

What makes for an interesting story? What do you remember long after you close the back cover of a book? Is it the conflict?

Check.

Is it the romance between the characters in the book?

Check.

Is it the conflict, internal or external, within the representation of fictional lives?

Check.

The book that I am working on, Still Love is its working title, has all of these elements. I think that what matters the most to me, in a fictional piece, is that I am able to identify with one or all of the characters in one fashion or another. Still Love is a piece that came to me through the ideals presented in a song and a hefty dose of "what if". I hate "what if" in real life, but I've found that with fiction, "what if" is a hugely important question.

What if he loved, what if he lied, what if he died...

What if it is all love?

2012 will be pivotal. Civil rights is far from a done deal, if you have deluded yourself into believing that race, cultural, and sexuality are all accepted, please don't. When one set of beliefs is attacked for its core basis, bad things happen. Do you think that I am wrong about this? Remember Hitler?