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
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