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