Christine

It seems as though I write a book a day!  By now you must know that I have been writing for about fifteen years, and I just have a lot of half-written manuscripts which I'm publishing as the opportunity arises.

This one: Christine's Amazing Musical Christmas (for lack of a more creative title) was written a few years ago —at Christmas time, obviously— when I was fascinated with the Bach Christmas Oratorio.  I had just sent out for, and received in the mail, a second version of the Oratorio, this time by John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists, and was thoroughly enjoying it.  I'm pretty sure I have little or no German ancestry, but the Oratorio puts me in a very pleasant German frame of mind, and I wanted to write a story around it.

This one is rated G: absolutely nothing adult about it; in fact, I strongly suspect that the audience for it would be teenagers interested in music, and possibly adults who know teenagers interested in music.  There are strong feelings, both romantic and Platonic between the characters, and in a follow-up book I want to resolve most of them satisfactorily.  I think one of the difficult things one has to deal with, growing up, is that it is possible to have very strong feelings for more than one person, but our society frowns on establishing more than one of them legally.  It does appear that for a large majority of people, especially those who want to have children, that it makes sense to establish a single relationship —heterosexual or homosexual, it does not matter— around which to build the family.  But I strongly believe that, while this is the simplest familial structure, it is not necessarily the only structure that can work.  We have to bear in mind that any new structures we invent must also make sense for the society in which this non-traditional family will live.  Kids will make friends in school, you want to have people over to play cards, whatever; friends will have to deal with whatever relationship underlies the family unit.  People, I feel, should be able to fall in love with more than one person at a time, and codify that love in some relationship.

The reason I bring this up is that the main character, Christine, loves four different people in this story, and I hate to have to make her decide on only one of those as the main relationship.  For the first time, I think I have managed to create a heterosexual relationship that I'm rooting for, but I think Christine's feelings for the three women in the story need to be taken seriously.  But, in any case, there is absolutely no sex in this piece of writing, and no intimacy beyond a kiss.

Kay

Helen vs. Handel's Messiah

Christmas is a special time for me.  My family has always enjoyed the days around Christmas, especially as my mother loved Christmas music.  Perhaps because of this, or for whatever reason, there are usually interesting episodes surrounding Christmas in almost every story.

My very first story, Helen, begins when Helen is about sixteen, and I stopped writing it when she was about 39, and was a partial amnesiac and Cancer survivor.  There were, in principle, some 23 Christmases I could have written about for Helen.  The first three are lost; they are trapped inside my first computer, which  went on the fritz around 2005.  About the 13th one was when Helen had run away with the two adopted girls, Gena and Alison, met Penny and her daughter Erin, and fled with them to California, where they remained hidden under false names for a year.  The 14th Christmas marks the point where Helen was mightily pregnant with James, and is given refuge at Ferguson School in Minnesota.  James is born in April, and after some adventures, Helen comes to Westfield to teach.

The 15th Christmas is spent at Westfield.  The next two were spent at Woodford, in England (16, 17), the next four in Philadelphia (18, 19, 20, 21).

The episode described in Helen vs. Handel's Messiah takes place after Helen has come to live in Philadelphia for one complete year.  I was writing at a furious rate, and pages and pages practically wrote themselves.  (I know writers often say this about one particular piece of writing or another, but having lived it, I know it really does happen.)  I was angry about something or another---probably about the hostility towards alternate lifestyles some years ago, and how certain conservative elements had a brief period of successfully vilifying gays and lesbians, and trying to 'heal' them by adopting various psychological tactics akin to deprogramming.

I've had difficulties representing Helen as a decent person.  Because she is a fictitious character, it would be easy to write her storyline as being that of a woman with no flaws in her character.  What happens is that I put her in perfectly ordinary situations, quite similar to situations that I have observed myself, and in my mind, I see Helen reacting to them just as I would, quite honestly, but more boldly.  Sometimes I create romantic opportunities for her simply because I'm bored, and then as the situation develops, it does look as if Helen is a lot more promiscuous than an ordinary person should be.  So she oscillates between being ultra-moral and responsible and decent, and a sybaritic slave to her hormones, because my life oscillates, and whatever I can't safely do, I sometimes make Helen do, and she ends up being just a little short of a hopeless slut.  This is why I burdened her with such a number of children, wanting to make her slow down!  But whatever makes her less than perfect has very little to do with her sexual preference. I honestly believe that, if a woman finds herself falling in love with other women, that does not make her a monster.  But certainly, trying to seduce a weaker individual, one who does not have the strength to withstand her emotional attack does make a woman (or a man, for that matter) a monster.  Taking advantage of those who are weak is always despicable.

Once I made Helen meet Maryssa, I tried very hard to make her more restrained.  This episode is the beginning of Helen's fight to feed her artistic soul, as it were, and free it from the manacles imposed by conservative elements.  The production company that stands by her, Galaxy Studios, gets most of her creative energy, but a small fictitious community college is also a channel for her talents as a teacher.  And this Christmas encounter with a TV program based on Handel's Messiah, of all things, is what makes her determination to put herself in artistic hibernation finally snap!  I'm not a religious person, but the pivotal moment is an aria in the Messiah about death and resurrection, which is a strange topic, but a lovely aria.

I hope very much that anyone who reads this will at least read the first quarter or so of the short story Helen vs. Handel's Messiah, because it is one of my favorite episodes, and expresses strong feelings about being the kind of artist Helen is.

K. B.

I'm in Love!!

Just kidding!

You probably don't know, but ... I don't get out much!  I don't have TV, and I don't listen to the radio.  I mean, I do have a radio, but I only listen to it when I happen to know that a certain program is on.

So, the main point is: I don't know what's going on out there, for the most part.  Imagine my astonishment when I discovered the existence of this incredibly attractive woman!  The woman I'm talking about is Hope Solo, someone about whom everybody else on the planet is evidently very knowledgeable!  I'm going to post a picture of her for the sake of anyone who is just as much out of touch as I am, but I have it on good authority that, ever since the Olympics of, I believe, 2000, she has been the star of the US Olympic soccer team.  And, in my eyes, she is stunningly beautiful.  And, most importantly, this girl is almost exactly how I imagined Alexandra, down to the grey eyes, the streaky hair (though I imagined a girl a lot more blonde), and the beautiful, athletic body, (though, again, I imagined a girl somewhat less stripped, initially, though I imagined that she would lose a lot of fat on the voyage back from Belgravia).  And the smile is just how I imagined that Alexandra would smile!

There is just no way that I can use photographs of Hope Solo as part of my cover, and seeing her spoils everything for me, because I could never be satisfied with a model that looks any different than Hope Solo!  The only alternative I have is to actually draw a cover myself, by hand, loosely modeled on Hope Solo.

K. B.

A little dissatisfaction from Smashwords

As you know, I recently decided to publish Alexandra, a complete novel, at Smashwords, the online e-book publisher and sort of agent.  In case you didn't know, Smashwords sells the literature that has been placed in their hands directly, online, but they also market these books to Kindle and Barnes & Noble.  It seems that those efforts are far more lucrative for Smashwords than simply selling their titles on their own site.  They do invest a lot of energy in making their authors conform to standards that these major publishers (Amazon and B & N, and even Apple) have settled on.

Two Choices: Text Only, or Clothed!

My cover for Alexandra, which is not satisfactory, and is a temporary effort (but, of course, Smashwords doesn't know that) depicts two nude women, but a rear view, so that the nudity is barely objectionable.  However, Smashwords is pressing me to remove the cover in favor of one without nudity, because, as they explain, some of their partners (Amazon, or whoever) finds any sort of nudity objectionable.

Well, I have a couple of alternatives.  I can leave the cover the way it is, which will prevent Smashwords from more aggressive marketing of the book.  Or, I could put "clothes" on the women, just as they clothed classic nude sculptures in Victorian times, or I could try harder to find an image that I really want to feature on the cover.  (Or I could just make a cover with only text!  Ugh.)

Feel free to weigh in on which cover you would prefer!  Some of my more conservative (Straight) friends prefer the clothed version, saying that the cover with the nudes suggests that the story is pornographic, which is far from what it is.

Postscript: I worked on this cover (to the detriment of my other responsibilities) and finally came up with a compromise cover.  I don't think it's a patch on the original cover, but if I go through the process one more time, without smudging anything, I think I'll have a decent cover for the book.  What do you think?

Kay B.

"Alexandra" is to be published by Smashwords

After I had written several thousand words of Helen, just for my own amusement, for some reason I began writing a novel called Alexandra, and it was this one that was spotted by a boyfriend of mine, a knowledgeable fellow who had traveled the world and had read widely.  I let him read excerpts from the book, and (this was around 2003), over the next several years, I finished the story.  This is the only story that I have ever finished, though some of the other books ---notably Helen--- have complete stories embedded in them.

For some reason, Alexandra embarrasses me.  The tone starts out almost childlike, and the first few words are out of the mouths of a couple of thirteen-year-old girls, watching the ship bringing Princess Genevieve land.  Throughout the story, the tone continues to be earnestly idealistic, but then, I suppose, my stories tend to be that way.  But I love Alexandra and her friends, notably little Ninel, whom Alexandra adopts, and Lena and Elly, the lesbian couple who loyally stand by Alexandra through thick and thin, and the tempestuous Princess Baby (I've forgotten her name) [Added later: Briana of Skree], Alexandra's young cousin, who gets the young queen into bed when Alexandra is abandoned by her wife and consort.  And of course, there's the wonderful Lady Sophie, who is Alexandra's right hand man, so to speak, with whom Genevieve is infatuated, and who Genevieve blackmails Alexandra into allowing her to have as her lover.  Oh, what a web I have woven.  It is a simple, simple story in the main, and all the complexity is in the secondary plots.

I had the most unbelievably difficult time coming up with a Cover image.  I didn't want there to be any nudity; I wanted something like a girl dressed all in leather, holding a crossbow, a sort of Warrior Princess image, but I just couldn't find one!  All the Warrior Princesses were scantily dressed, and in the story, Alexandra and Genevieve are scantily dressed only in private, so having a sexy nude image of a girl holding a crossbow would not have had anything to do with the story.  So look what I ended up with!  It is a depiction of Alexandra and Genevieve on their honeymoon.  I'm going to try and get something more appropriate before the release date in late January.

Preview: Emily

Emily

Around 2009 I started a new story that had very little sex in it (except, of course, that pretty much everything has a little sex in it, if you know what to look for, and I'm not trying to be funny).

The story is about a middle-aged English professor at (again) a school in Pennsylvania.  Again, this is not me; but it does draw on some of my experiences.  I don't teach English, but I do find myself teaching a certain amount of writing.

What happens is that when Emily's ex, an older guy, dies, he leaves her their automobile (which he had taken when they split up).  Unexpectedly, she gets a phone call saying that the car belongs to a collection agency, and she gets so mad that she locks up her house, gets in the car, and drives off.  Her teaching has been going downhill for a few months, and the Dean had granted her a semester off to try and bounce back.  Now it looks as if she's going to spend the semester evading a collection agency.

It happens that Emily stumbles upon a very expectant mother and her 12-or-so-year-old daughter, totally indigent, whose ancient car had broken down on the highway.  Emily helps the women get to the closest hospital, at which the woman delivers, but the baby dies within minutes.  Emily appears to the mother and daughter as an angel, and they cling to her desperately, and beg to be taken with her on her open-ended run from the collection agency.

I have written up the story as far as California, where the trio spends Christmas at a campsite.  After that, I don't know what to do.  I'm a little tired of writing stories that only have women in them, and I think I'm ready to try and introduce a male character.  This is going to be very hard!

First off, I don't want to write a male character who is a typical guy, just a dick with legs, as most guys I know are.  On the other hand, I don't want to write a man who is sensitive an sweet, because those sorts of guys are so atypical.  To put it mildly, it is very difficult for me to get inside the head of the kind of guy inside whose head I would enjoy getting, if you know what I mean.  What we need here is a seriously flawed sweet guy.  Ideally, he should be someone outside Academia, because academic guys are both strange and somehow clichetic.  (I know some really nice guys who are college professors, but now we're cutting a little too close to the bone.)

I want Emily to be a woman who is essentially straight, but who is drawn to women very strongly.  Attraction between women is a complex thing, and sex is only a small part of it.  In Jane, for instance, I have her going to bed with women without agonizing over it very much; after all, pregnancy is not an issue.  If a child is involved, it makes sense that some restraint in indulging your sexual needs has to be used.  (That's something that's totally ignored in Helen.  Or rather, not ignored, but not taken into consideration by Helen.  I wrote Helen as very much a hedonist, but a hedonist with a conscience!  Ha ha.)

The idea for Emily, a woman who is not brilliantly beautiful, but middle-aged and sort of average, came from a friend (a fellow-author, if I dare consider myself an author of any kind), who was just sick to death of all my protagonists being drop-dead gorgeous women.  But in my head, Emily is beautiful in her own, way, and I have to try and get away from the image of her.  I sort of imagine her as being Emma Watson, of Harry Potter fame, aged twenty years!  But with a little more personality, and better diction, for heaven's sake.

More on this later.

K. B.

Interview

At the urging of Smashwords, I created an ‘interview’ for my readers!  Feel free to go over there and read if, if you can stand all the TMI!!!

It’s actually only a bunch of boxes I fill out, in response to questions they ask.  If I don’t like a question, I get to either write my own, or just skip it and go to a different one.  It is really quite interesting, because you think about things you would never normally consider interesting, such as: What was the first book you remember reading?

One question they asked --which I skipped over-- was: What is your approach to cover design?

This is tricky, because it is based on images I get off various royalty-free sources on the Internet, and which I then proceed to modify until they’re unrecognizable.  The faces in Hurricane were left more or less intact, but I keep thinking that it was a mistake to do so.  Both Hurricane and Little John have been given covers that are sort of abstract (come to think of it, Jane has been, too), so they’re none of them an actual scene from the story.  I just don’t have the resources to make a cover the way I would like to, which is to stage a scene from the story, take a photograph of it, and then stylize it and simplify it until only an abstract depiction is left.  Actually, the way I would really like to do it is to have the photograph painted in oils (or tempura, or acrylic, or what have you), and then use that.

The cover of Jane is essentially a picture of two nude girls kissing, seated quite decently across from each other.  I would be delighted to feature actual sex, but that wouldn’t be honest, because the story has very little explicit sex in it.  (If you would like to read explicit sex I apologize; I’m just terrible at describing explicit sex.  I’m just terrible at sex, period.  Why are we talking about this, anyway?)

The image I would have loved to use for Jane would have been the painting that is supposed to have made Jane into a millionaire, namely a picture of Heather/Diana kneeling in front of an ornate mirror, examining her body.  The problem with this image is that you just can’t depict both the back of the girl and the image in the mirror very well.  If the mirror is close enough to be plausible, the girl’s shoulder would obscure part of the image.  The answer would be to angle the mirror out more than how someone who is really interested in looking at themselves would hold it.  Or, we could use a transparent sheet of glass for the mirror.  (Sigh.)  But that would mean we couldn’t show the glorious blond braid that the girl was supposed to have, hanging down her back.  But I live in hope, as they say.

K. B.

What I'm Going to Do With This Blog

Thus far, of course, I have used this blog to do pretty much what I want, which is (1) post about women and girls whom I find attractive, and (2) post episodes from stories I have written.

Posts about women and girls whom I find attractive was not the original purpose of this blog, but a time comes when you feel so strongly about some person or other than it simply has to be put out there!  I do more of that sort of thing in the companion blog to this, Helen, to which there is a link at the top of the website.  I haven't been doing this for a while because of all the work that I put into getting the three stories I first published on Smashwords ready.  But I often watch a movie, or see something in the news or on the Internet, and for a brief while I have an unbearable crush on someone, and I have to post something desperately worshipful in the worst possible way.  Only having work to do, and classes to teach distracts me from this imperative.

Posting my stories here is more frustration than anyone should have to endure, both setting it out, and reading it.  I look at these stories, all in frustrating reverse chronological order, and I think to myself, this last episode looks like crap to anyone reading it without having seen the earlier chapters.  Context is everything, as far as any story goes, and a story has to be written very carefully if it is to be read in reverse chronological order.  (It has been done, and brilliantly, but that was not the intention with these stories.)  So I'm going to put the stories in Smashwords, for a nominal cost, all of them assembled into a few self-contained novels, which I plan to publish at around a dollar or two each.

But this blog could be more a place where I write about the stories, and my attitudes towards the characters and the stories, which really have no place in the books themselves.  (Piers Anthony has written a fascinating book, Bearing an Hourglass, about a person who becomes, briefly, Fate (or possibly, Time).  It is one of the books in the series Incarnations of Immortality (or something on those lines), and Fate sees time in reverse chronological order, so as to facilitate the coming into being of events that have been established already in the distant future.

At any rate, this is probably the best place to give an inventory of the stories that I have begun, and most of them, never finished!  (I understand that there are individuals out there who find it difficult to get started with a plot, and have no compunction about stealing a story from another writer.  if you're one of those, feel free to steal the plots, but I would be grateful if you credit me with the idea for the story!)

Helen.  This is a story (episodes of which have been serialized in Helen, another blog) about a girl who is adept at singing, the violin, art, dancing, and, well, Tennis.  While this story was started, semi-consciously, for the sake of company --for many months, Helen was my only companion-- subconsciously I made it all about a girl who could do everything.  In that sense, Helen is an extension of myself, though I want to make it clear that I can't do many of the things Helen does, and none of them as well as she can!  But I'm frustrated to be surrounded with people who keep saying: Oh, I can't do that sort of thing.  Jeeze; why not?  I can't stand it when I sit at a piano and doodle on it a little, and someone looks at me with sheer envy!  It didn't cost much to rent a piano; it was, like $30 a month, which I could afford with even my grad school stipend of, like $900 a month.  So get a grip, all you young parents out there.  Give up the frikking Cable Service, and rent a piano for your kids.

Alexandra is an amazing story; it is set in a planet far far away, in the distant future.  Ships from Earth have colonized this Earth-like planet, and now it is thousands of years in the future of the landing.  (Countless Science Fiction stories have bases very much on these lines.)  But, from here on, the setting may as well be Earth, set in the late 1700s.  There is a twist: in one continent, there is a larger-than-usual proportion of citizens who are homosexual, and, get this: two women can use a certain type of gadget to get one of them pregnant.  So female-female couples can have kids, with no additional expense.

Alexandra is a young girl, of about 18, who finds herself Queen of one country, Norsland, but is immediately faced with invasion.  She has just been married to a princess from a neighboring nation, but the young couple gets separated during the war that follows, and half the story is about how the young princess helps the war effort, while Alexandra is in hiding in exile.  When the war comes to an end, the young couple find that they have become different people from when they were first married, and they cannot continue the sham that their marriage has become, but neither can they face the thought of a formal divorce.

Jane.  This is a story of a girl who finds herself a porn photographer.  She has been "straight" all her life, but now she begins to be attracted to her models, until she completely falls in love with one of her models, and then finds herself established in a semi-permanent menage-a-trois with her lover and yet another girl.  At about this point, I had a change of heart, and instead of pursuing the entirely erotic possibilities inherent in the setup, I found myself examining some of the psychological relationships between Jane and some of her more interesting models.  Disaster strikes, in the form of the AIDS epidemic, and 9-11, which were the backdrops against which the story was begun, and soon Jane finds herself all alone, with both the other girls dead.  But Jane is an artist, and before things go to hell completely, Jane manages to paint and sell prints of an erotic painting that becomes wildly popular on Ebay.

In the second part of the story, Jane meets a fashion model called Gillian, who wants her portrait painted.  Gradually Jane puts her life back together, finding work, in addition to being a portrait painter, as a makeup artist for fashion modeling, and later for movies.  She also creates a fictitious character called Scorpia, which is a role she plays at Metal Fetish gatherings.  Pretty Wild.

Jana  (I'm obviously partial to these two names: Jane, and Jana.)  Jana is a girl who grows up in a nomadic nation in a sort of desert belt in an alternate Earth.  She is put in a troop of militia, who function like a cross between bronze age Texas Rangers and border guards.  Jana's troop take into protective custody a young man and his older companion, who are later revealed to be a prince of a neighboring nation, and his tutor.  She is assigned to return them to their home, in the process of which, the young fellow falls in love with her.

Jana finds herself asked to remain in the country of the young prince, and finds herself emotionally involved with not only the prince, but his sister, as well.  After many adventures, Jana returns home, and accepts a post as the leader of another squadron, just in time to have to deal with a massive invasion of robber hordes across the border.

Prisoner  Maia, a princess of a city state in an alternate Earth, is taken captive, and into slavery in a barbarian land ruled by a king and his twin daughters.  Maia earns the trust of the two princesses, and finds herself being trained as an elite guard.  She is also the focus of the sexual attentions of one princess, but falls in love with the other twin.

Maia's beloved is sent to marry a neighboring prince, and Maia is part of the honor guard that conducts the Princess to her new home, after which she returns.  Graduating from training, she is just in time to witness the sacking of their capital city by a strange tribe of giant warriors.  The King is killed, and Maia and the (unmarried) Princess escape into hiding, accompanied by two other slaves, a couple.  The princess tells Maia that she is no longer a princess, but is Maia's servant, and over the next few days, as they continue their flight from the invaders, she begs forgiveness for sexually harassing Maia.  After many adventures, they come to Maia's homeland, now overrun by yet other unsavory elements, and now the princess must help Maia restore something like stability to her homeland.

A New Adventure: E-Books

Well, dear readers,

I got tired of watching my stories remaining almost totally unread!  If you've read any of them, by now you've discovered that they're from a few books I wrote over the long winters out here: the two I have featured on this blog being Helen, about a musician and singer, a book of some 1.3 million words, most of which is quite silly; and Jana, an almost complete novel of a bronze-age fighter-girl, serialized right here.  However, because of the nature of blogs in general, and how I maintained these two blogs in particular, my readership was tiny (but no less cherished, for that fact).  Then I stumbled upon the Smashwords site, which appears to be --at least at present-- the most significant place for self-publishing.

Anyway, by accident I started putting together this post both here and on my companion blog, Helen, and ended up writing a full article about my recent experiences over there.  That should have appeared here instead.  (I'm going to copy some of that over here.)

[Excerpted from Helen, another blog by the same author:]

I started writing because (A) I had these awesome fantasies that I got while driving long distances all by myself.  I just had to do something while driving for, like 6 or 7 hours at a stretch, which I had to do frequently.  Then, (B) I had some unhappy experiences with my partner at one time, and we decided to move into separate apartments.  When I found myself spending hours and hours by myself with only my coursework assignments to do, I decided to actually put some of my stories down on paper, beginning with  Helen. As I gradually got accustomed to thinking of myself as a sexual animal, and less fearful about appearing so to the outside world, I began to think of a story where the sex was a little more objectivized, and Jane was born.  9-11 plays a role in Jane, but the excerpt I published is taken from well after that event, and is not concerned centrally with it.  Jane could end up being the only true book I write.

There is another book, called The Music of the Stars © 2012, which is very promising. In Helen, it so happens that our heroine is invited to star in a weekly prime time series called The Galactic Voyager. It is set in the not-so-distant future, where an enormous space vessel, called the Galactic Voyager is launched from Earth, with several hundred volunteers on board, including a famous musician and artist called Cecilia. Helen is invited to fill the role of Cecilia, who is put on board in a state of hibernation, which is to say in a deep freeze, to be resuscitated as needed. But a couple of dozen years into the mission, the young people who were born on board the vessel are becoming disoriented, because they really don't have a context for living on board a space vessel. I mean, imagine growing up in deep space, and being told that your parents had lived on an actual planet at one time, but now all you have is this cramped spaceship? So Cecilia is revived, to provide them with some meaning in their lives.

Anyhow, I began to think that this story line (which I dreamed up simply as the basis of an incidental TV show in Helen) might actually be better as the basis of a novel than almost anything I have written up to now, though of course, it is squarely in the area of science fiction. So I began to write a new story, and in this one, it is actually Helen who is put in stasis, on board a vessel bound for deep space. She is revived, and then they find themselves in the vicinity of a star system that has a planet that promises to be inhabitable. Meanwhile, Helen's diabetes has taken a turn for the worse, and furthermore, she is the only diabetic on board. In order to ensure that Helen's genes are preserved, they clone her, without her knowledge.  (She is distraught, until she delivers the child, at which point, of course, she is delighted with it.) So, to make a long story short, this has been written at some length: some 225,000 words.

Most interestingly, one of the greatest difficulties I'm having with publishing on Smashwords is --you'll never guess-- creating attractive covers for the books! I am pleased with the cover of Jane. The cover of Little John is a goofy little thing I put together in PowerPoint, which captures the mood of the story amazingly well. (The difficult part is to represent the characters not too closely, because that would spoil it for readers with a strong imagination, whose conception of a particular character might be at odds with the depiction on the cover.) The cover I created for Hurricane is probably the most awful cover ever created by man or woman. Here they are!

Kay