The Gym Incident Writing Contest

A Naptown Tales contest from Altimexis

Dear Reader,

Naptown Tales chronicles the lives of a fictional group of mostly gay youth growing up in the modern-day equivalent of the city and school where I spent a great deal of my youth. A more full explanation is contained in the Introduction to the Naptown Tales Series.

One of the things that makes the series of short stories so enjoyable is the fact that, even though these stories take place in a fairly conservative Midwestern city, the outlook of the teenagers portrayed is liberal and, for the most part, the gay characters find acceptance. A lot of this is because of two characters, Jeremy Kimball and David Reynolds — a couple of high school freshmen who have infectious personalities, are enormously popular, and just happen to be gay. Their ability to disarm even their staunchest foes goes a long way in paving the way for even the older gay youths in the series.

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 plausible 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Basically, I needed a way for David Reynolds, a once gregarious boy who'd become shy and withdrawn as a teen once he'd realized he was gay, to suspect that Jeremy Kimball was also gay.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:

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 plausible 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.

Once the characters of David Reynolds and Jeremy Kimball were fairly well defined in the Naptown Tales series, I decided it was 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.

What I came up with was a contest. I decided to let the readers decide what happened to poor Jeremy Kimball, and invited them to submit their own stories for inclusion on my hosted websites. Although the response wasn’t overwhelming, there were some really excellent submissions. Unfortunately, most failed to follow the rules in that they either included graphic sexual acts, making them inappropriate for inclusion at Codey’s World, or they directly contradicted key elements of one or more of the stories comprising Naptown Tales. Although I certainly wouldn’t expect my readers to be intimately familiar with all of the stories, one would expect contestants to have at least read all of the stories that had been posted at the time of the contest deadline.

I also found that I had to send out a reminder to all of the people who submitted entries that their stories should attempt to integrate with important aspects of the stories that comprise Naptown Tales as much as possible. For example, none of the stories made mention of the fact that Jeremy went through a period of depression after he was outed, even though this was prominently mentioned in Broad Ripple Blues. When I sent this “suggestion” out to all of the entrants, the responses I received ranged from enthusiastic rewrites to people asking me why I was changing the rules in the middle of the contest. I am still dumbfounded as to why anyone would think giving away helpful hints would amount to changing the rules.

In any case, at the end of the day, there was one clear winner, but there was also a very strong second place entry that was worthy of seeing the light of day. I have therefore decided to post both on my site, along with an explanation of the reasons for choosing each of them.

Firstly, I should probably mention why I chose not to disqualify the winning entry, which was written by none other than my editor, David of Hope. David has been my editor practically since I began writing. I asked him to be my editor when he sent me fan mail after I started posting my very first story, Love in a Chair. Not only did he have some excellent thoughts on the story, but he wasn’t afraid to provide constructive criticism — something that very few readers will do. David’s thoughts are perfectly in sync with mine, and he has been an invaluable asset to my writing.

Although many editors are not particularly good authors in their own right, David is unusually talented in writing in the style of the author he edits, and I think he was able to use that to his advantage in his contest entry. Some might say he had an unfair advantage, particularly because he had inside information on the series, but the reality is more the other way around. David is my editor precisely because of his abilities. Most editors I have met are not particularly good at developing an original story. David clearly demonstrated with his entry that he is capable of breaking the mold, and he did so in a big way.

In The Gym Incident — Chronicles of a Lonesome Teenager, we see the story of Jeremy as told through his journal entries, recorded on his computer. Touchingly, Jeremy’s boyfriend comes across these when he is forced to use Jeremy’s computer, while downloading a large software upgrade some five years in the future. It’s nice to think of them still being together as boyfriends in college.

The story David tells is a very intricate one with a well-developed plot and new characters that plausibly disappear before the start of high school, so that they are conveniently out of the way for the rest of the Naptown Tales series. Everything is very well thought out and exceptionally well integrated with details of the other stories, right down to Jeremy’s love of swimming. There are a few minor inconsistencies, but these are easily forgiven.

I would like to congratulate David on a job well done!

The second place entry is excellent in its own right, however, and could have easily been the winning entry, had it not been for David’s submission. It was submitted by none other than Cole Parker, who has an established track record as one of the finest authors of gay high school fiction on the Net.

Cole’s version, The Gym Incident — The Spare Jockstrap, takes a much more direct approach in which David asks Jeremy to recount what happened. In it, Cole makes use of his trademark short sentence structure that works so well for bringing out the thought processes of young teens. Beyond a doubt, the David and Jeremy of Cole’s version seem more age-appropriate.

The one criticism I have of Cole’s story, and it’s a fairly significant one, is that David was in Jeremy’s Gym class, so he should have been there. Even if he were out for the day — hell, even if he were in another gym class, he almost certainly should have known exactly what had happened through the rumor mill. It may have been a large middle school, but a rumor like that would have left few students in the dark as to what had happened. David might not have known all of the details, but at least he would have known the basics of what happened. The story could have been rewritten to take this into account, but Cole chose not to do so. I respect his decision, but still feel his story is more than worthy of seeing the light of day.

This was also a job well done.