"It's gay porn, kid."

[elfs]

I was on the bus this morning, making an excellent strike deep into Matt's mind as he deals with his emerging feelings. A few days before this scene, Matt found the Bastet boy Nico lying in a railroad ditch, unconscious, bruised and bloody, naked from the waist down, and nearly frozen to death. Since then, Matt's family, who've never seen a Bastet in their lives, took him in, had the doctor set and plaster his broken leg. Matt's gone outside to chop winter wood, and to get away from Nico. Nico, who has no idea what's going on in Matt's mind, follows him outside:

Deliberately ignoring the yowler's presence, Matt lifted the sledgehammer and brought it down. It bounced off the wedge corner and rattled into the log itself, sending a hard shock up the handle into his hands. "Ow! God bless it!"

"You okay?" Nico said as he hobbled closer.

"Yeah, yeah. Happens all a time. I'll be right. Just, ow." He rubbed his bicep where the pain was greatest. Nico stood close to him. He was smaller than Matt, that wasn't entirely due to the crutches. And there was something else that didn't look right about Nico right now-- those clothes. Nico was too soft, too pretty. He wasn't a girl-- he wouldn't have looked right in Rebecca's clothes at all-- but he needed something else, something finer, than the old farm clothes they'd given him.

Matt imagined what Nico looked like with no clothes at all. He startled, jerked his head up toward Nico and said, "I'll be right. Really. Just... just don't stand too close. Lots a chips flying. Wood's dry and froze in this."

It really is Catboys of Brokeback Mountain. How sad am I? I've been to the library to get more details on what it was like to be a midwest farmboy in the U.S. around the turn of the last century.

Anyway, as I was writing this scene, this kid sat next to me. Probably a high school senior, he was reading a magazine read by rock star wannabees, full of reviews of software that'll make you "sound pro." He kept looking over my shoulder and I said, "It's gay porn, kid. I'm about to write the first sex scene. Do you plan to keep reading?"

He left me alone after that.

Comments

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Yayyyy porn! (Gay or otherwise) Hopefully you made the young whippersnapper open his eyes a bit.

[(Anonymous)]

Bwahaha! I've passed this along to LSB should he ever need to back someone off while he writes. I suspect, however, the blush on his face would belie the truth of the matter.

[lionman.livejournal.com]

So, ..are you just going to leave us with a cliff hanger? What did your shoulder-surfer do, or say in reply? ;-)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

He just went back to reading his magazine.

[lionman.livejournal.com]

Drat! Ah-well. When you write your autobiography, you can punch that up a little, make it more interesting. ;-)

Actually, I thought it was interesting that you were doing research on midwestern farm life at the turn of the century. As I read your scene, I started asking internal questions about how he was splitting wood, and why it wasn't doing it in a more effecient manner. But, that wouldn't be turn of the century.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Long-handled maul and wedge. And you actually do the splitting in winter, not before. It's very hot work, and the winter cold actually allows you to do it longer. Plus, the wood becomes more frangible, there are no mosquitoes or flies to bug you, and snow on the ground makes a better receptive surface for strikes than plain dirt.

Maybe I ought to read the Foxfire books more closely.

[ladyerin.livejournal.com]

If you are heating and cooking with wood, you wind up split it nearly all year round.

~Erin
time to milk the cows yet?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Well, true. The biography I found said that you did a lot more in the late fall and winter, and did the felling (and planting, even back then they thought about it) in mid-spring, to give the wood time to dry out and cure. It might have been idiosyncratic; I don't know. But it's clearly an authentic telling.

And Matt was feeding the chickens when he first spotted Nico tumbling into the ditch.

[ladyerin.livejournal.com]

The biography I found said that you did a lot more in the late fall and winter, and did the felling (and planting, even back then they thought about it) in mid-spring, to give the wood time to dry out and cure. It might have been idiosyncratic; I don't know. But it's clearly an authentic telling.

...and really, you do most of the chopping in the fall and winter (just remember not all of it), part of it is that the wood is cured, because it was felled to clear for spring planting, part is because that is when there is time to do it. The phrase "For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven" runs terribly true when you speak of farm life.

[blackcoat.livejournal.com]

I used to split wood in that matter as a Zen exercise (as well as a real workout). It really, really sucks.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I can't avid the thought that RAH was a farmboy (though if I'm remembering right he wouldn't have been born yet).

Still a lot of the technology didn't change much until the late Thirties. Motor vehicles became more common, but tractors didn't really ovewhelm horses until WW2. Steam was the machine, pre-WW1, for heavy road haulage, and companies such as Sentinel in the UK built successful steam lorries.

Again, British experience, steam ploughing was usually done with two engines, hauling the plough across the field on cables. American tech included more steam tractors, though that impression may arise from what happened to be at the dair my father visited, when he made his trip with my mother to meet her cousins.

(OK, so I have this thing about steam engines. You know it's bad when you can spell Walschaert.)

Heinlein a farmboy?

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Nah, his father was a clerk, and they lived in Kansas City, MO.

. png

[lynx212.livejournal.com]

HAHAHAHAHA ROFLMAO!!!

What you said to him was priceless!! Thanks for sharing!

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Hmmm - what would you have said if he had answered "Yes."

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Heh. I probably would have switched to writing something more innocuous.

You know what they're always telling writers?

[(Anonymous)]

Don't *tell* me what to think about something, *show* me.

So, I don't think you should have *told* him that it was porn. :-)