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.