Dear Reader,
I'd like to give you the opportunity to contribute to my ongoing Naptown Tales series by helping to write a prequil, if you will, for the one event that is critical to all of the stories I have written in the sequence. You may recall that nearly all of the stories have stemmed from the budding romance of two boys, David Reynolds and Jeremy Kimball, who met on one steamy July afternoon.
It's always fun as an author when you're trying to come up with a premise by which to make things happen. Your premise has to be plausable or the whole story falls apart, and it has to be simple. But sometimes the more you try to come up with an explanation for why your characters would do certain things, the less they make sense. That's what I faced when I was writing my first short story, Broad Ripple Blues.
Basically, I needed a way for David Reynolds, a once gregarious boy who'd become shy and withdrawn as a teen once he'd realized he was gay, to suspect that Jeremy Kimball was also gay. What I came up with was the infamous gym incident, alluded to in the following quotation from the story:
“Wait a minute!” I said as it suddenly came to me. “Aren’t you the kid that . . .”
“Please don’t remind me. That was sooo embarrassing.”
“But didn’t . . .”
“Hey, I’m not gonna say anything more. Alright?”
“Sorry, it’s just that . . .”
“Believe me, I know. Scarcely a day went by in school when someone didn’t remind me about it. I just hope things die down over the summer, or the start of high school could be a real drag.”
Remembering what had happened, I couldn’t help but wonder if the rumors were true. Was Jeremy Kimball gay? That certainly was the obvious explanation, but it could have been an innocent mistake, as he’d claimed.
I alluded to the incident again in several of my other stories, but I never actually said what that gym incident actually was. Well, there's a very good reason for that. As they say, sometimes less is more and, well, the less said, the better. I felt that the less I said about it, the more plausable the incident sounded. There are many ways to imagine Jeremy doing something in school that could have made him appear to be gay, but any of them would have defined his personality in some way, and I wanted a blank slate with which to build my character.
Now that the characters of David Reynolds and Jeremy Kimball are fairly well defined in the Naptown Tales series, I think it should be fairly safe to come up with a scenario for what might have happened to poor Jeremy in the eighth grade that resulted in his being outed, even if, as he claims, it was a complete accident that had absolutely nothing to do with his actually being gay.
So here's the deal. I'd like to give you, the reader, an opportunity to come up with a short story that tells us about the infamous gym incident. I'm therefore holding a contest. The prize will be fame without fortune. The winning entry will be posted on all three of the sites on which my Naptown Tales series is hosted - Gay Authors, Awesome Dude and Codey's World. The rules of the contest are simple. Because the winning entry will be hosted on these sites, it muse be acceptable for posting and must therefore meet criteria of all three sites. The criteria can be found here, here and here. Please note that graphic and gratuitous sex should be avoided.
Entries must be between approximately three and ten thousand words in length. All entries must be fully proofread and edited in advance - although I reserve the right to edit all entries prior to posting, any entries that contain significant typographic, grammatic or spelling errors will be discarded. If English is not your first language, I suggest that you team up with a native English-speaking person who can edit your entry before submission. Finally, I reserve the right to not select a winner if none of the entries are suitable.
All entries must be submitted to me at Altimexis@yahoo.com by midnight, Eastern Daylight Time in the USA on May 15, 2008.
Good luck!