Finished

So, the work in progress I began a few months ago – rough draft, people, not manuscript as a whole – is finally finished. Now, I wrote the final chapter a few months ago, but still had one chapter to finish to tie into that chapter that I wrote out of order. Part of this WiP can be found here – single chapter. Below are excerpts from the third to last chapter. For some reason, these brief passages resonate with me. Perhaps because, in many ways, they mirror real life more so than I might want to admit.

Life is never easy. Families – relationships – aren’t perfect. We move forward, ignoring the, well as my sister put it big gay elephant in the room. We don’t talk about things that make us uncomfortable. We move forward, but we don’t grow.

This work in progress has been about confronting the big gay elephant in the room and accepting – for the characters, maybe a bit for me – responsibility for actions taken and not taken.

It’s easy to write happily ever after in a book. It’s easy to make everything work out. Well, in this WiP everything doesn’t work out and fit in a neat little package. The end is the end, but not the end . . . for the characters still have to grow, to move forward past the point where they stopped moving forward, so to speak, twenty years earlier.

So, as you read the work of fiction below, understand that fact and fiction merged together into something . . . unique. At least I think so!


“I never, hell, I still don’t, knew what to say to you.” Derek gripped the rail. “When I knocked on your apartment door . . . hell, I was praying you wouldn’t answer. I mean, what the fuck was I supposed to say? I didn’t have a clue. Hell, I still don’t.”

“You were supposed to say I love you.” Seamus continued to look up at the sky. His family never said I love you to each other. They avoided those words like vampires – those of legend, not modern telling – avoided the sun. To say those words meant the world might come to an end and, like the vampires of old, they might explode on the spot. None of them were willing to take that chance . . . not even now, twenty years later.



“Well, some things never change.”

“No, they don’t.” He had changed, Derek had changed, their mother had changed, and yet Seamus didn’t feel any of them were that different from the people they had been before his big announcement. They – he – never gave themselves time to adapt and move forward from that one moment in time, the people they were before his announcement. He ran. They stayed behind. They didn’t work through his gayness. They stayed, so it seemed to him, frozen in time, unable to move or heal, unable to deal with the past so they could truly live in the present.