The story told on Rock Center was done with amazing sensitivity.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/46958940#46958940

Jill

I've had a head cold the last few days so I read the Hunger Games trilogy.

1.) What's with the present tense? The author evidently thought it would heighten our intimacy with the narrator. Has anyone ever verbally told you a story in present tense? I don't think so. After a bit my mind simply ignored it and changed everything to past tense.

Best wishes to Erin and all of the Elfettes of Big Closet.

Jill

A giant redwood fell over the other day and was featured on the daily evening news. It seems this tree was old. Older than me. I wonder what it figured out about life that caused it to uproot itself.

After I posted my last story I asked myself . . . What the Fuck?

You see -- I never quite get around the idea that my next story will be my best.

I never see the rejection coming until Lucy's pulled that GD ball out from under my swingin' boot.

Is anyone aware of a TG story that is based on the RL relationship between Ping Jiang and Andrew Tong?

Thanks.

Jill

Who REALLY cares?

A few months ago one of the "writers" on this site asked if anyone minded if he rewrote their stories and published them under his name.

I stated flatly I didn't want him to go near mine and to my knowledge he hasn't. Of course I don't read his stories all that often so . . . when a tree falls in the forest????

However -- a whole gaggle of authors told him they didn't mind at all if he doctored their stories. To a confused person what sort of license did that provide for "rewriting"?

You’re sitting at your group’s favorite table, sipping scrumptious mixtures of coffee, ice, chocolate, and cream. Everyone has spent two to three minutes each sharing stories to “catch up”. It’s your turn.

You’ve got a great story to tell them, but they need to know quite a bit of background information for your story to make sense. As you go through that necessary information you notice your friends are becoming increasingly bored with what you want to tell them.

Cross-dressing isn’t all that hard to understand.

Somewhere along the line the word fetish took on a negative connotation.

A fetish is an inanimate object that is felt to have magical or spiritual powers. What is negative about that?

Comments on this board about “not understanding cross-dressing” have made me go back to the basics.

The FAMiLY LEADER is a political organization whose president propelled Mike Huckabee to a win in the Iowa caucuses.

They've designed a pledge to vet presidential candidates.

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/The-Fami...

Two candidates have already signed it.

The pledge vows protection of women and children from "all forms of pornography".

Last night I watched an enlightening documentary on homophobic, college coaches.

Yes, the villain in this film is a woman.

Rene Portland, a women’s basketball coach at Penn State for twenty-seven years, openly had a “no lesbians allowed” rule. She not only consistently ran off girls on her team who came out, she also did what she could to make sure they didn’t play for other programs.

It’s been forty-one years since I last taught a high school class. I went into business rather than to make the kind of “mistake” I watched everyone else in my family make.

My mother and father were teachers. My three older siblings all were teachers . . . and I watched year after year while they struggled to make ends meet while suffering daily abuse at the hands of immature and unruly children.

I’m sorry, but I watched the video of the boy who cross-dressed and was suspended. He’s appears to be an egocentric brat!

For many who frequent BC, a goal has been to achieve the unattainable.

We come to BC frustrated. We deem ourselves to have too many male secondary sex traits to succeed in a physical transformation.

For a while we read TG fiction to lose ourselves in a world that somewhat resembles where we ache to be. We closely identify with the protagonist and for a moment . . . know what it would be like to magically cross over.

Don't you ever get tired of angst, whining, and self-pity?

There has to be something positive in your life.

You are in charge of your attitude. That's a fact. It isn't just a bumper-sticker.

Life is about change. Good stories are about change. Life is about redemption. Good stories are about redemption.

When your stories lead to oblivion you've violated the contract you have with your reader. Readers are looking for that Hollywood ending where good prevails and bad is punished. It happens. Really -- it happens.

Recently an author asked if her writing sucked. Since writing is such a personal journey let's make that "Do I suck?"

Every author on Big Closet should look at Sue Brown's latest story . . . the second book of Football Girl.

It is as good as there is on BC. Yet, her latest chapter which was posted over two weeks ago has "only" attracted 1,475 hits, 88 kudos and 14 comments.

Many, many stories attract two to three thousand hits within the first two weeks of posting.

Let me the first this year to reprise that awful pun:

"Don we now our gay apparel."

I first saw it used in a trans reference in Playboy over forty years ago.

Jill

The blog this morning about dropping your phone in coffee made me stop and think.

I’m a living, breathing anachronism.

The only phones I have couldn’t be dropped in coffee . . . unless you had a massive urn.

Please Help Me!

It seems like more and more often we are hearing in blogs from people who are very unhappy because they will never be the ideal feminine person their mind tells them they were born to be.

When I go to the mall – which is almost never – even though I live just miles from Mall of America – I look at the women and try to decide which ones I would want to be.

Why is it many discussions regarding transitioning seem to careen off into nonsense?

What compels us to argue over whether or not a person can reassign their gender without having surgery? I suppose it’s a logical extension of the internal battle we’ve waged since first becoming aware of our gender dilemma.

But . . . do we have to go the route of Frank Butler and Annie Oakley?

Here’s a verse from their famous duet:

Anything you can wear
I can wear better.
In what you wear
I'd look better than you.

I've run into a problem and can't finish an editing job for Wren Phoenix. Her story is compelling, quite romantic, and is running in excess of nine chapters.

I'm more of a stand-alone story writer, but someone who has experience with serials would enjoy editing for Wren.

If you're interested, contact her directly.

Jill

I have so many things to be grateful for this year. This has been one of the most stressful years of my life, but much of what caused that stress has been resolved and now all that angst seems so . . . meaningless.

There were many days when RL pressures became so intense I had to escape . . . and I came here.

Sure – there are those on BC who I think are laughable for a variety of reasons. And -- sometimes the rules are overbearing and the administration of those rules is heavy-handed.

All that being said – BC has given my life more purpose again and again for over a decade.

It’s hard to believe that it has been over thirty years since some of my darkest hours. I was in a horrible work situation and also trying to lose too much weight too quickly through a diet of mainly caffeine laden diet cola.

Out of the blow I started having full-blown anxiety attacks. They were of such force that I thought I was being hit by an electrical charge when the adrenalin rush started. It got so bad I couldn’t leave the apartment where we lived with our two-year old child.

Irony can be described as an incongruity between what is expected and what actually occurs.

On the left side of the screen this morning is a message discussing the apparent demise of Storysite. On the right side is the display of contributions to Hatbox.

First of all -- Storysite has been "gone" before and seems to come back every time.

Just a general observation. It seems to me that blogs lately have mostly been leaning toward negative. It also seems like many comments are chippy and launched rather than offered. Someone commented on a story I wrote over a decade ago, telling me it's "sick". That's not "friendly". That's not constructive. In retrospect the story (Dick on Jane) was sick. I write it in anger after some idiot told me my stories were too hard to understand. So I write one even a moron could appreciate. It was sick in that it didn't give suicide proper care and handling.

Sometimes you just don’t feel like making all that much effort. You know the feeling – when you know you should look good, but all you can manage is a brush or two through your hair and a little lip gloss. It’s the same thing with writing. You get a good idea for a story, sit down, and finger regurgitate onto the screen.

I’m more likely to heavily research a story before I start writing, but once in a while I’ll just wing it. The first two stories I entered in the Halloween contest were light-hearted affairs that took very little time or effort to construct.

Dimelza has noted that Mister has been up long enough. She has asked that I take it down, so I will honor that request and delete it.

I will leave it up for one more day to allow everyone that last chance to read it.

Jill

Today another fine writer paused at the threshold to BC, spun on her high heels, and chucked in the towel.

Even though this ink-stained wretch. . .er. . . carpal-tunnel pained, sometimes kvetch. . .never employed clichés in her writing, her reason for ending her story mid-stream was shop worn – “general indifference”.

For the last eon, or longer, I’ve posted the following message in a variety of forms:

Noah Lukeman has written a number of excellent books on writing. He is a successful literary agent and has decided to give back to the community with free advice on his website and with his ezine.

I get the ezine and enjoy his comments go to the following site and click on "contact".

http://lukeman.com/def2.htm

You might like it as well.

Jill

As disclosed in another blog this weekend, Erin is $100 short of what she needs for the month for BC.

In the past Hatbox has worked best when there are a steady stream of new pieces being offered for the subscribers.

I've never bought into the numbers put out by Fictionmania. Fifty-seven million hits in the last dozen years seems a bit much by several fold.

What does it mean when contest after contest draws dozens of entries and Hatbox hasn't had a single new story contributed to it in months?

Jill