Friday 28 July 2006

Pic of the day: An understandable reaction when a teen boy finds a teen boy in his bed. Here from the inspirational anime Kyou Kara Maou.

Scribbling again!

Just when I was starting to catch up, I am almost certainly going to lag again. This is because I need the time and the wrist for my new shounen ai story. This, as regular readers (and then some) will know, means "boy love". In fact, the Japanese prefer to refer to this kind of fiction as "boy love", whereas Americans like to call it "shounen ai". Evidently it is a bit embarrassing in their native language, which I can totally understand. Also there may be a bit of "euphemism treadmill", that is to say that you have to change the words from time to time because they change meaning. Kinda like when I was young, people who lacked arms or legs were called handicapped, and those who lacked intelligence were called retarded. These days this is an insult and you have to use other weirder names, like "differently abled" and "special". It is the same with this, I think.

Anyway, as regular readers would expect, this is a very family friendly, heartwarming boy love. As in, boy loves boy. Or in this particular case, boy is loved by boy. There is a difference of viewpoint. The main character is 16 years old when he learns that he is the love interest of another teen boy, and has been since they both were 7. This would have been complicated enough normally, but it doesn't get easier when he needs to live with the other boy and his parents permanently. Also, to further complicate things, the main character dies in the first chapter.

This is my first story set in the imaginary world I described in my July 20 entry, the one with the ancestor worship and two different human species. To help the reader get used to this world, I used a well known plot device: To take an ordinary boy from our world (or at least a world indistinguishable from ours), and send him to the other, parallel world. The way I did this was to let him die heroically while trying to not run over a small child with his bike. Then his spirit gets brought back to the world where it originally came from, before he was incarnated as a human here. He has no memory of his earlier life in that World, and thus of the love bond between him and the other boy in his earlier life.

A different world filled with ghosts and magic should help cause enough distraction so it doesn't become just a boy love story. Because, frankly, that wouldn't be all that exciting. Or perhaps that's just me.