Bully the Bear and The Holy White Fire Updates

With the closing of Portals Publishing, I was given back the Bully the Bear manuscript and artwork. I haven’t yet seen it come down from Amazon, but it is listed as ‘temporarily out of stock.’ I won’t be putting that book back up. I won’t be revising it. The version that is now the proper version is The Holy White Fire. It is the first and second part of that story, now complete in one, with the edits as I originally had them in the text.

I took that opportunity to update the text of The Holy White Fire. I was only going to change a name of a character that shows up only briefly but has a bigger role in my current project, The Ivory Pick, but of course, I went through the whole thing. I didn’t rewrite anything except for the transition scene that leads from the end of Part One into Part Two. I wanted that to make a little more sense. I changed the one character’s name, and I went through looking at everything Word flagged as a grammar error. Mostly it meant me throwing about 500 commas at the text. I couldn’t believe how many and’s needed a comma. I’m not sure why Grammarly wouldn’t flag that, but there they were.

That’s the last work I’m doing on that text… unless a publisher wants to do something with it. Then I will overhaul it with a serious eye, but until that happens, this is the text and that’s it. I could work on it infinitely, and that gets me nowhere.

“No art is ever really finished. It’s merely abandoned.” - Mike Portnoy

I also know that if a ‘major publisher’ wanted Bully, they’d only want the themes and they’d want me to write a new story around those themes. Perhaps making Bully more a typical shape-changing hero - go Disney! For me, Bully in The Holy White Fire is what that story is supposed to be. It’s up close and personal to Bully. I put the reader right into his shoes. They will understand him inside and out as his body changes and as he matures. Does it have crazy fantasy elements and crazy horror elements? Oh yes, lots, but it’s very much centered on him dealing with all that. Not in a fun, ‘saved by the bell,’ ‘ain’t high school nutty?’ kind of way, but in the way of a boy having to deal with growing up, his sexuality, a chronic disease that overtakes his life, his fanatical mom, and his abusive father.

I’m not even sure Bully is likable. I think he grows into be likable. He tries very hard. (He’s very trying…) And that’s exactly what I wanted. At the time it was a response to the explosion of ‘girl power!!!!!’ books that were erupting everywhere, becoming a trope and a gimmick. Boy’s adventure was lacking at the time, and Bully started off in the vein of being a response to that. The more I worked it, the more personal it became as I drew from elements of my own life and many different characters that I knew growing up.

There is a lot of (mostly casual) nudity. The casual nudity in all the DoAB stories served the purpose, at the time and even now, that nudity does not equal sex, that male nudity is not ‘obscene’, and female nudity is not a commodity. (Unlike the 70s and 80s where a topless woman was in like… everything) I wanted the reader to be in the shoes of a character that is not ‘pretty’ or ‘typical’ to most media. I didn’t want him to be an X-Man that had godlike powers, huge muscles, and looked like a GQ model twink, (a blond, twenty-something with a swimmer’s build, naturally…). I wanted Bully to be someone the reader was kind of forced to have to be inside. They had to deal with the fact that he was far from a twinky superstar model, and often he was naked in the Green or while being taken care of. In retrospect, it became a little repetitive. I cut a lot of it out, but it’s still clear that you are up close and personal with this far from normal young man.

With that out of the way, I work now toward DoAB 3 - The Ivory Pick and the yet-to-be-titled DoAB 4.