Grumpy grandpa

For fifty-three years I had been looking forward for 2001, the beginning of the 21st century. It felt like something special would happen, the start of the era of Aquarius. 
          
          2001 came and I felt cheated. People had already celebrated the 21st Century in 2000, which was in reality the last year of the 20th century. Aquarius was not what I had expected in my hippie youth. The internet and artificial intelligence shattered my dreams of an interconnected humanity. We are being played and we don’t realise how the new media are playing us. 

Sloppy English turns me off. I wrote about the confusion with verb tenses formation. When I asked an author why these errors were so frequent, she claimed this was dialect. I went to google it. Reliable sources confirmed that this was grammatically incorrect and that this was not a dialect issue. If it were dialect, it would be occurring within a social group or a specific geographical region. 
          
          Two reasons for people making this error I found. One was a lack of formal education. The other explanation stated that the error was found merely in rural less densely populated rural regions where social pressure to speak correctly is not as strong. 
          
          English is not my native language though it is the language I usually speak during the last 30 years. When I hear or read unusual expressions I go searching in Google. English changes over time a lot so I want to know and keep track of those adaptations. 
          
          It has changed quite a great deal since I started learning the language. The most striking change was the shift from ‘may’ to ‘can’. A new occurrence from the last decade is the use of ‘be sat’ and ‘be stood’. Grammatically this form would be a passive voice like ‘somebody has sat me’ for ‘I was sat (at the window)’. Though more common in the US, it has appeared in newspapers, even in British ones. Does this still count as sloppy language? I must admit when I read this, it catches my attention. I get the feeling that something is wrong here. I may however get used to it if this is a genuine evolution in the English language. 
          
          Wattpad novels written in sloppy English also tend to mix up the difference between ‘then’ and ‘than’ and between ‘farther’ and ‘further’. They all to come about together. 

Why is it that in most books I read on Wattpad, all meals are limited to three: pizza as the most frequent one, followed by mac’n cheese and exceptionally lasagna. 
          
          In my house, we serve pizza like once per month to please my grandchildren, mac’n cheese is probably a fast-food version of macaroni with ham and cheese and is an exception on the menu. I am the only one in the family who can prepare lasagna and therefore is only eaten when my wife goes to visit family in the province because here, men are not supposed to do the cooking and I have always a female trying to snatch the kitchen tools out of my hand to take over whatever I’m doing. 

I’ve read tons of stories on Wattpad now, all boylove stories. Some I liked, some I found boring, some were annoying. Time to try to figure out what it is that attracts me and what repulses me. 
          
          First of all, I like stories in which the boylove element is not the sole focus. I am looking for stories that contain a storyline in which boylove is just one of the elements. A good whodunnit, an action story, a mystery, a fantasy, anything that would be a good read without gay characters but then with gay characters. 
          
          The stories need to be written in proper English. It’s not that occasional typing errors may not occur, but consistent grammar errors are a turn off. The most frequent ones are those where the past tense of an irregular verb is used when a past participle is required, like in ‘he couldn’t came’ or ‘he had gave’. 
          
          What also make me give up on a story are those alternating points of view when the story is written in the first person. If an author wants to describe the thoughts or feelings of several people, using the third person allows me, the reader, to choose a character I can identify with while I enjoy the story because that’s what happens when I read a story. It becomes my story, my experience. 
          
          That’s also the reason why I want happy endings. My gay experience was a disappointment when my long-time soulmates told me “I never want to see you again.” Now in the dusk of life, the bxb stories allow me to live a fantasy that never came true for me, to have a man to grow old with. To sit on a bench under the apple tree with my soulmate and to revoke memories of the life we spent together. 

Just added a paragraph to my profile to make a few things clear. 

I love your profile info  

Hi there! I'm from Belgium too, great to find someone with the same nationality :)
          
          I saw you in the comment section of some BL stories, and I really reccomend Flawsome (no grammar mistakes). It has a nice plot and no smut!
          
          -P. H. Seth

Thank you so much for reading Wandering Fireflies! I really appreciate it and hope that you enjoyed my story :)

I would like to find some good bxb mystery stories, the type of classic whodunnits. Happy endings, lots of fluff and easy on the smut (not required), good storyline and proper English (I hate grammar errors like “he did went” or “he couldn’t have came”). 
          
          Any advice?

Thanks for adding "Alliance by Marriage" to your reading list! I hope you'll like it!