Getting Clever About Readers: Coupons!

To summarize, I have published stories in Smashwords, one of which —Jane— is free.  I have sold a total of 8 books in my lifetime, all on Smashwords, and, let’s see: 866 copies of Jane have been downloaded, and a total of 6 books from all the other titles.  In other words, Jane is “selling” like crazy, and the others are not selling like crazy.

I don’t really worry about this, except that I’m not sure that all those millions who download Jane are actually reading it.  So I have decided to put a coupon at the end of Jane, offering 33% off Helen at Ballet Camp.  If I see a surge in Ballet sales, I can reasonably conclude that people are actually reading the free book Jane.

The next thing to do is to offer another coupon for another book, perhaps offering 90% off, to see whether there are those who will actually read a free book, in contrast to those who will download a free book, but not actually read it!  That seems like a mean trick, but I have to know!!  Are people just downloading the book, or are they also reading it?

While I’m at it, here’s a coupon for anyone who’s reading this!  It is for half off Sweet Hurricane, an important episode in the Helen saga in which I have succeeded in introducing some wonderful characters, and in which I might have made some horrible mistakes.  Still, Matt and Marissa are favorite characters of mine, even if they’re awkward.  You enter this code at checkout time.  I hope it works, or you’re stuck with a $2:00 purchase:  ZY24R

Kay

Kay's World: A peek into my life

Students
You probably know that I teach, but I haven't revealed much more than that.  Let's just say that I teach writing (you might not approve of my own writing, but compared with some of the writing I have to grade, you should be informed that my students have a long way to go before they're at the point where I can't help them), and one has to have an amazingly optimistic disposition to avoid falling into deep despair in the teaching world!

I have begun a story about an English teacher, but it has foundered on the threshold of the middle section of the story.  Anyway, once I get that published, you'll know a lot more about how I feel in regard to teaching.

Animals
I don't have pets of my own, but I have made the acquaintance of several animals that belong to friends.  I have few friends, but I sneak up and make friends with animals though I'm not supposed to!

One of these is a lovely dog, advanced in age, and with a grave disposition, but somehow I love her dearly.  She isn't very demonstrative, but she has a wag of the tail and a welcoming look every time we meet.  There are a couple of other dogs --wildly different in personality from the first one-- an all of them great characters.  Of late, I haven't met a single dog I don't like.  Oh, maybe one; it's more a matter of not understanding him than disliking him.

Another pet is a cat.  For some reasons, growing up we never had cats, but I had thought I knew all there was to know about them.  I was wrong; being around this cat, in the last year or so, I'm beginning to appreciate how entertaining they are!

A Facebook friend of a friend (most of the posts I see are from other people's friends) expressed the opinion that cats are very intelligent.  I don't know from where that opinion could possibly come.  Cats do the few cat things they have to do extremely well, but it is all instinct, not true intelligence.  Since they do not waste any energy on thinking about their environment, they can spend it all in pure play, which looks like intelligence, but is just practicing skills.

Human attitudes toward intelligence are naive and contradictory, and I suppose I'm as open to the accusation about jumping to conclusions about animal intelligence as anyone else.  But I'm convinced that cats are not as intelligent as dogs, for whatever that's worth, and whatever that might mean.

Books
Just this morning, I went to a book sale by a library supplier.  This company specializes in servicing libraries: supplying books, materials, processing, cataloging, everything.  Among other things, they help with cleaning out books that aren't seeing a lot of circulation, and selling them off, essentially wholesale.

I'm getting the distinct impression that there are consultants who think up titles for books.  We know for a fact that an attractive sexy cover gets people to pick up a book that would otherwise be ignored.  But the same must go for titles.  A clever title like The Bourne Identity could attract attention to a piece of workmanlike fiction.  (I'm sure there are those who would call my writing workmanlike, and who am I to contradict that?)  Since The Bourne Whatever has received so much critical attention, and has been made into a movie, titles of that sort are fashionable: The Hipster Proclamation, or The Terrified Turtle.

Anyway, there is such intense competition for display space in any bookstore that it is amazing that people want to write books at all!  I just don't understand the phenomenon, especially that people who can't put two words together to make a sentence are driven to write!  I don't feel bad about my own writing, since it is only published as e-Books, and do not contribute to the landfills in any way.

This same company which supplies libraries also sells off their wholesale library de-accessioned books to actual bookstores.  Even if the bookstore sells the books for $2 each, to make a profit of $0.50, I still feel that I ought to have a greater obligation to support the bookstore than to support the wholesaler.

Meanwhile, Barnes and Noble and Amazon have edged out almost all other book retailers, which is something that makes me very sad.  But I am annoyed when Barnes and Noble flood my e-mail with advertising.  But once Barnes and Noble are driven to bankruptcy, that leaves Amazon as almost the only source of books, which is a very dangerous situation.  So now, where should our allegiance be: to Barnes and Noble and Nook, or Amazon and Kindle?  Amazon already gets far more of my discretionary income than they should.

Fund-raising and Cookies
In a strange twist of fate, I was approached by a student club at our school to be their faculty advisor.  A lot of what they do is raise money for one project or another.  One project is to make T-Shirts for their volleyball team.  It seems crazy that the club should have to raise money to create a T-Shirt for a volleyball team, which will probably be worn only once, for the Homecoming Volleyball Tournament.  But that's what the kids do, and I don't have the energy to argue with them, so I'm playing along.  But I have to buy the cookies and the other junk that they want to sell to make their fund-raising target!

But if you've ever taught a crazy bunch of freshmen, or advised a College club, you realize that the sheer energy and intensity of the kids is like a drug.  I just sit there and listen to their carrying on, and it is annoying, and it is also insanely pleasurable.  I wonder how long I can stand it!

K.

Emily

Greetings to any regular readers of my blog!  I don't keep up with this blog very regularly, and I apologize.  I'm under no illusions that I actually have fans, but I sometimes imagine that people drop by just to see what I've been up to :)

I have shown some of my writing to people who are professional authors, who have actually sold books, and so forth.  At least one of them teaches writing, and I believe another of them has just started a blog intended for authors just setting out to write.

None of these professional writers are very close friends, so of course they're obliged to be polite to me, and not disparage my writing by being brutally honest.  When they're encouraging, I know better than to take the encouragement as high praise.  On the other hand, when they're critical, I'm not immediately crushed, either.  I'm beginning to really believe that writing is a very personal thing, and I'm going to be cautious with how I respond positively to negative feedback, if you know what I mean.

One recurring complaint was that my characters were all improbably beautiful.  I just come right out and say that so-and-so was stunningly beautiful.  I know this is a flaw in my writing, and I can jolly well describe the character as quite ordinary-looking, while I imagine to myself that the character is simply gorgeous!  What's going on here is that I started writing just to have an imaginary world full of my friends, and if I'm going to do that, why not be surrounded by real stunners, however imaginary, instead of the sort of people I do find myself surrounded with?

The big drawback is that women don't like to read about gorgeous women, at least the women whom I want to cultivate as readers.  I certainly like to read about beauties, but apparently I'm kind of alone in that regard.  I think, even if the character is physically beautiful, it's more important that the person's motivations should be plausible.  Or, in complete contrast, the person's motivations could be completely opaque, in which case there has to be something that the reader can relate to.  It's nice to have an enigmatic character, but too much of an enigma is a little hard to believe.

So, anyway, I started writing a story about a middle-aged woman who was a rather unsuccessful professor at a minor college, a situation about which, on the face of it, I knew a fair amount.  "Write what you know," they always say, completely forgetting that Jane Rowling could not have know very much about being a gifted young boy magician, nor could Tolkien have known much about being a Hobbit.  So, to be a mediocre writer: write what you know.  If you're going to be a fabulous writer, write about anything you please!  Isn't that silly?

Anyway, the story I'm talking about is called Emily, after the central character.  She is given a semester off by the Dean, just because her most recent classes were terrible failures.  Her ex-husband has just died, and left her a nice little car, but she gets a call saying that there is a claim on her car, and she has to surrender it.

That's the last straw.  Emily gets in her car, and heads out west, completely incommunicado with the Law, the College, and most of her friends back home.  The story is essentially about what she does on her spree.

[To be continued.]

Kay

The Music of The Stars

Readers will remember that my story I anticipated that would generate the greatest amount of interest and attention would be The Music of the Stars, about an alternate Helen, who is frozen—voluntarily—and put aboard a space vessel, called the Galactic Voyager.  In other words, I decided that what was going on in the TV show in which Helen starred, would really happen to Helen.

Well, I got impatient.  The book is barely completed —actually it is incomplete— but I decided to pre-publish it.  This means that it goes up on Smashwords, and customers can read the first so much percent of it (20%), but the book can’t be downloaded in its entirety until the Publication Date, which is August 15, 2015, right after the holocaust that is to come!!!

When I wrote Music of the Stars, some of the things that happened to Helen in the regular Helen story had not happened yet.  So, in Stars, Helen has not suffered the last really horrible amnesia with which the regular Helen story climaxes.  Also, James was not born, so the Helen in Stars is childless.

Don’t think of this as a disaster; think of them as two mostly different Helens.  I could have called the Helen in Stars “Patricia”, or anything I wanted.  But I wanted her to be a charismatic celebrity, so it made more sense to call her Helen Nordstrom.

So if any of you are interested, go ahead and read the first 20% of the new book, and I hope you enjoy it!

Kay

The Popularity of Jane

I just read on my Smashwords "dashboard" that I've sold a total of seven books, in my entire career.  [Added later: we're now up to 9 sales!]  My greatest success has been with the book I have given away free, Jane.  Six hundred and twenty-odd copies of Jane have been downloaded, and I suppose that if readers actually read and enjoyed Jane, they would come back to actually buy some of the other books!

Jane is a light-hearted story, though it starts out with tragedy and death.  Since the only feedback I get is the raw numbers of downloads and sales, I have no way of telling how readers are reacting to the stories.  (There's little I would do about the stories; it is difficult for me to write to order, but I am interested in comments about other aspects of the writing.)

I suppose I do feel something of a success, because people do download so many copies of Jane.  Two copies of Alexandra were sold, the most expensive book I put up for sale, and that's heartening.

My creation with which I'm most concerned is Helen, and the only Helen story I have sold is Little John Finds a Friend, in which Helen does not appear at all!  I wonder what that says about the personality of Helen, if anything.  But one thing is certain: Jane has the most attractive cover of any of the books, and I'm beginning to believe that nothing is more important for a book than its cover.  People do judge books by their covers.

Kay

Can anyone identify this model?

I would appreciate any information on these models:

She appeared in an advertisement for e-readers, but I forget where I found it.

I love her skirt!

Kay

Helen at Ballet Camp, Helen and Lalitha, and Helen On The Run

Helen at Ballet Camp is to go online today; I'm not sure whether Smashwords has unlocked it yet.  It appears that it has.
Helen and Lalitha: The Lost Years was completed a couple of weeks ago, and has been looked at by a few readers.  If you've bought it, my thanks; I would give it away free, except that putting a price on it enables me to ascertain whether readers are seriously interested.  I tend to download free books fairly freely, if you know what I mean!
Helen On the Run: The Lost Years 2 is what I'm getting ready now.  I started writing this one from memory, because, like Helen and Lalitha, I had lost the text.  But I came upon a pile of manuscripts halfway through, and now I'm just transcribing it, and editing as I go along.  As a result, the texture of this book changes abruptly in the middle.  My style has gotten a little different since I started writing Helen.  The material that is in my oldest style is On the Run, though as am editing it, and to some degree, censoring it.  Someday I might lay the whole thing out there, but it would be very close to pornography, and I would not put it on Smashwords, because they want their site to be 'Family Friendly'.  I don't know; some of the stuff I have found there must definitely be classed as erotica.
Background: Ballet Camp
This one has a really kiddie tone.  Somehow I had put myself into the frame of mind of a teenager, and had taken all my self-censorship off.  I can't remember why; I think I might have been reading some teen trash novels, and gotten too deeply into that groove.  The story up to this point is all typed up and ready, for the most part, except for the bits where Helen meets up with Leila, a nude dancer girl, and they fall madly in love, and then Helen meets up with two sisters, the Baker Girls.  Helen's year in Canada is also missing completely; I think I must have thought it too fantastic to keep, but I can't think of any way to bridge her history between her College years, and the Ballet Camp except with that year with a woman called Sylvia in what I vaguely called the wilds of Canada.  The rest of it is all carefully typed up.
Anyway, Helen goes off to Ballet Camp, a little episode that is completely unrelated to the rest of the story, and none of the characters in that story ever re-enter the rest of the saga.  Still, we learn that Helen is a fair dancer, which helps her to relate to Lorna, a younger girl, who enters the story in Lalitha.
Background: Lalitha
This is a somewhat serious episode.  Helen, so far, has had several serious loves: mainly with Janet, Leila, and Marsha Moore.  At this point, she had dropped out of college at the end of her junior year, to go off and live with Sylvia, but the latter had learned that Helen was a musician, and does not feel comfortable encouraging her to live in the woods, doing nothing.  So she and Marsha Moore (a movie actress) begin working on Helen to send her back to College.
Lalitha is about how Helen goes back to school, only to meet a pretty Indian girl called Lalitha.  They fall in love, but Helen keeps at her schoolwork, mostly because Lalitha herself is a serious student.  But after Lalitha's freshman year, her domineering father yanks her back out to India, where she is married off to an uneducated drunkard.  Helen manages to get a ticket out to India, only in time to witness the wedding, which throws her completely out of her mind.  She wanders around India, until she finds herself in a Roman Catholic convent, where she remains for ten years as a lay sister, quite unbeknownst to Lalitha.
There is a huge fire at Lalitha's home, but she and her little boy escape, but her husband dies.  With the help of missionary friends, Lalitha travels to the US, hoping to find Helen.  But Helen, of course, is still in India, which Lalitha doesn't know.  But she has a kid with her, and she buckles down to earn enough to support him and educate him, having made contact with some of Helen's friends, who promise to let her know if Helen surfaces.  The rest of the story is how Helen finds her way back, very much the worse for having a brain tumor removed, resulting in some significant memory loss, and how Lalitha hunts her down.  But, by the end of the story, Helen's roving eye is just too much for Lalitha to cope with, and Helen is on her own, a graduate student at Penn, while Lalitha works at a drugstore in Baltimore.  But the story introduces us to Helen's adopted children, Gena and Alison, who are major characters in the rest of the Helen saga.
Background: On The Run
This part is about Helen's kids.  A Philadelphia court rules that Helen is an unfit mother, based on the fact that she was a nude dancer at an adult entertainment establishment in Florida (in the year with Leila, as I noted above).  The kids are taken away, and given to foster parents.  Helen plans suicide, but before she can go through with it, Gena and Allie turn up, having run away from the foster home.  Helen, happy, but obviously fearful of being accused of kidnapping, goes into hiding with the children, and this story is about their adventures on the run.  One of the most important developments is that they are joined by Penny, a woman who signs off as Helen's housekeeper and sort of general assistant, and her daughter Erin.  The three girls become firm friends.  A second development is that Helen has gotten pregnant during an impromptu fling with a student, and throughout most of the story, she is getting increasingly visibly pregnant.  Helen winds up at a boarding school, teaching music.  But she is recognized as soon as the baby is delivered, and her shape returns to normal, and is taken into custody.
Problems
One of the minor characters in the story is a beautiful high school senior called Barbara, whom Helen meets while she is disguised as a man.  The girl is beautiful, utterly innocent and very repressed, and completely sex-crazy.  I had clearly had a good old time exploring the process by which both Barbara and Helen rationalize their increasing attraction to each other.  On Barbara's part, there's no increasing, really; she's completely infatuated with Helen (disguised as a man, of course,) right from the start.  In the manuscript, they start kissing in corners, and progress to what we would call heavy petting, but it's very one-sided, because of course Helen doesn't have the equipment to allow serious exploration on the part of Barb.
When Helen starts to 'show', things get complicated, but I'll leave you to discover how that is taken care of when the book comes out.  Unfortunately, I take most of the sex out of the story, so those of you who would have looked forward to that will have to wait until I publish the uncensored version sometime, if I ever do.

Kay

A New Helen Book In Preparation

As I have said in earlier posts, my first piece of creative writing was a story called Helen, about a girl called Helen, whose father has been in a state of depression after her mother gets killed in a freak accident when she's a teenager.  But Helen gets a choir scholarship at a well-known college, and has to get there without help from her father.  A young couple on vacation, Janet and Jason, picks her up on the highway, and they're just about to take up a teaching job at the same town as Helen's college is in, and they ferry her out.

Janet and Helen fall in love, and Janet, Jason and Helen live together for a couple of years, during which Helen become famous as both a singer and an instrumentalist, and as, well, various other things.  This was all written by me just for my own entertainment, and the plot is fantastic, or at least, seemed fantastic at the time.  I was at a fairly low point when I was writing this stuff, and it more than served its purpose, looking back.  I discovered that I was fairly good at writing fiction, which gave me a boost, and it brought be through those bad years, culminating in 9/11, which was a bad time for most Americans.

By the time Helen's junior year is drawing to a close, Helen has fallen in love, and had sex with dozens of girls.  My own private life was pretty much a desert, so I had a lot of sex vicariously through Helen.  She was never just about sex; she would fall madly in love with each girl, or some girl would fall madly in love with Helen, and she could never turn her face from any pretty girl who fell in love with her, and so they always ended up in bed, or making out on a bike while going at top speed, or things like that.

Anyway, the multiple relationships ---and they were definitely relationships--- and Helen's schoolwork, and her musical performances: opera, concerts, recitals, all began to tear her apart, and Helen snaps, and she wants to give it all up, and go live with a certain girl, Leila, whose mother owns a sort of classy nightclub in Florida.  (I have never been to Florida, so I wrote about it as if it were some fantasy land where anything could happen.)  Leila was crazy about Helen, but what was more, Leila and Helen performed nude at this nightclub, and Helen loved it.  (Unlike most nightclubs, the nude dancing was just that: dancing; the customers were not allowed up close to the girls, and there was no sticking money in the belts of the girls, and so on.  It was very high-class.)

But Helen has made friends with this mysterious woman called Sandy, who seems to be in the business of helping people have all sorts of adventures in disguise.  Sandy has a lot of people working for her, who can supply wigs, hair color, costumes, makeup, so that they can disappear for a time, and do things they couldn't do normally.  Sandy suggests that Helen attend a tennis camp for nudist girls, in Canada.  Helen goes along with the plan, with her long, curly blond hair straightened and cut short, and colored pink.  She has a great time, but becomes a captive to the spell of the camp nurse, called Sylvia.  Sylvia wants nothing to do with the camp kids unless they fall sick.  But Helen pursues Sylvia relentlessly, and Sylvia gives in, and lets Helen stay with her after the camp is over, for a whole year.

Once Sylvia finds out that Helen is a musician, and a girl who has dropped out of college, she and Sandra want to send Helen back, to finish her education.  To encourage Helen in that direction, they first urge her to assist at another camp; this time, it is a ballet camp for girls in the French Alps.  This episode is in Helen at Ballet Camp.

Then Helen returns, goes back to College, where a surprise awaits.  There is a lovely girl from India who has just arrived as a freshman.  They fall in love, and when the Indian girl is asked to go back home to get married, Helen follows her.  The girl is married off to a fellow she barely knows, and Helen is broken-hearted, and bums around in India, gets sick, and lives in a sort of Indian convent for ten years, where she gradually loses her memory of her life in the US.  She is discovered to have a brain tumor, and the nuns at the convent seek help from the US Embassy, which decides to ship her back to the US for treatment.

She is recognized at the hospital, and after the surgery, returned to her family, which has had no idea where she has been for so long.  Meanwhile, not knowing all this, the Indian girl, now a widow, has come to live with friends in the US.  When she finds out that Helen is back in the US, and has lost her memory, she hunts her down in California, where Helen is now a construction worker, having lost all her memory of being a musician.

After a lot of interesting adventures (well, interesting to me, because, as you can imagine, all the things that Helen is interested in are exactly the things that I am, and I can honestly expect few of my readers to be interested in all of them!  This is why I can only hope to put these stories before the public in the form of e-books, because I expect the readership to be minute, at best), Helen has acquired two daughters, Gena and Alison, who are tragically orphaned.  The Indian girl (Lalitha, now a woman, with a son of her own,) manages to bring Helen, who regains her memory, back to the College, and then to graduate school in Philadelphia, where they settle down for a couple of years of relatively stable existence, the kids going to school, Helen doing well, and as usual, taking on a lot more than she can handle, and lusting after various women, until Lalitha in her turn snaps, and walks away.

This part is so fantastic that I despaired of ever writing it down.  It was all on my very first laptop, but the computer died, and I had a terrible time salvaging the parts of Helen that I had typed up out of various floppy discs on which they had been saved.  But, unfortunately, this part of the story simply had to be published, not least because it give the origins of Lalitha, Gena and Alison, and a context for a great deal of the story.

So I wrote down all this over the last month or so, and I'm getting it ready to put on Smashwords in the near future.  As usual, I had trouble trying to find a photograph of an Indian girl whose face would come close to my mental image of young Lalitha.  Lalitha ages from a youthful 17 to about 30 over the course of this story, but I have a fairly good prospect; I need to work on it a little.

Kay

Complexities of the Lesbian Life: Role-Playing

[Apology: because of my preoccupation with privacy, and general all-round paranoia --which, I have to say, seems to be gently waning-- these remarks are going to sound a bit hollow, simply because I cannot put in any illustrations from my personal life and experience.]

When two women fall in love, and try to put a common life together, the question of role-playing comes in.  I'm not using the word "playing" in a frivolous sense: this is not a game, and it is not theatre.  It is the totality of the body-language that one human being has to adopt when in the presence of another human being, and when the two people are in the presence of others: in public, or among friends.

Some people are quite comfortable acting as though they are a new type of human being, and as though the usual --ostensibly clichetic-- behavioral conventions do not apply to them.  "This is me," they seem to say, "take me as I am, or fuck the hell off."

Well, that's fine, but if I were to have to be in public with a woman, I would not care to act that way.  Not, I have to make clear, that I can't carry it off.  But it would be inconsiderate, and I would have to act a lot more harshly with my partner just to override my natural desire to express a certain amount of emotion, and affection (discreetly), and even protectiveness, and that indefinable "couple-ness" that is almost the entire point of going out together.  (It isn't the entire point, but is a substantial part of the pleasure of doing it.  After a while, you simply have to stop acting like newlyweds, but it seems awful to have to give it up altogether.)

At this point in the development of our Western Society, or even our global society, the behavior of couples consisting of two women --let's call them women couples-- is still partly borrowed from the behavior of mixed couples.  But, we have to realize, the possible models range from extremely old-time chivalrous behavior on the part of the man, and ultra-feminine behavior on the part of the woman (which could be moderated to merely being 'ladylike'), to very 'modern' behavior, where the couple behaves almost as if both of them were ignoring the gender of both of them.  Both extremes are uncomfortable, the former more than the latter.

I have always felt an outsider to the butch/femme model of lesbian behavior.  I don't want to trivialize it, though you must forgive me for regarding it as being driven by the needs of women who style themselves as butch.  I must find out more, but it seems to me a combination of not being attracted to men, or actually being repulsed by them, being attracted to women, and wanting to be attractive to them without taking on a feminine persona, and general frustration.  Going solely on the basis of the haircut (which is probably asking for trouble), I'm only aware of four women out there who might qualify as butch : Rachel Maddows, Ellen De Generes, Pink, and Miley Cyrus.  All of them seem feminine to me, and very attractive indeed, and, generally speaking, all of them seem considerate and essentially decorous in their behavior (not decorous to a fault, which practically nobody in the public eye is), and perhaps Miley Cyrus is the least "well-behaved", and she seems to be the one least likely to actually be a lesbian, though she might take up the lesbian lifestyle just to generate publicity!

I recently read a piece about Butch Chivalry, and it got me thinking.  Wait: let me go read it again ... Ok.  We need new words for these things, because the word chivalry (and perhaps the reason that it is so convenient and useful) is used with several meanings:
* The extra-protective way people (traditionally men, and now, certain women) perform certain routine services for women, such as drawing chairs, opening doors, lending them cloaks or coats when the weather turns unexpectedly cold.
* The obligation for men to treat women differently than they treat each other.
* The cheerful politeness and considerate behavior that anyone has towards anyone else, especially those who are weaker --or in a weaker position-- than yourself, kindness beyond the call of duty.
The article I was reading was all about gender-specific chivalry versus a more personal code of behavior, especially towards someone to whom the writer was attracted.  I don't think that chivalry-with-a-purpose really falls under the same heading as chivalry towards all who are weaker than yourself.  Being chivalrous to an object of your affection is still called Chivalry, but in a different category.

So we're talking about a couple of different things.  Firstly, there is the general decent, considerate and kind behavior --holding doors open, allowing someone else to speak first, etc-- which was associated with "gentlemanly behavior" in the past.  Today, I think it should be the norm, unless someone is feeling definitely ungentlemanly and cranky.  Even women are expected to be gentlemen today, and we had better get over the use of the word.

Then there is the special way you treat your companion, the way you hold her eyes, the way you lean your head towards her, that certain indefinable something that brands you as a couple: the things you do in addition to "gentlemanly behavior",  each to the other; I think I would prefer that behavior to be quite symmetric between the two people.  Any role-playing that goes beyond that, any artificial asymmetry that might be adopted to move the body-language of a lesbian couple closer to that of a mixed couple, seems unnecessary and artificial, and, well, silly.

Kay

Miranda Kerr: A woman with a lot of charm!

I'm not quite sure how I got on this kick about Miranda Kerr, the beautiful Australian model (who apparently now lives in the US), but I watched her on a talk show on YouTube, and I was totally taken.  She simpers and she giggles, but she comes across as totally real!

Just in case you don't know whom I'm talking about, here's a photo.  It looks very much as though she's sitting on a bicycle, but it's hard to tell, but the angle looks very bicycle-like.  I love those crazy dimples she has, and she looks wonderful with lipstick, which is rare for a woman.  I mean, most girls look a little less than their best unless the lip color has been applied by a professional.  With Miranda, she has such a wide smile that it's just as well that lip color works for her.  (As soon as I find a photo I like of her with makeup on, I'll post it.)  And she has pretty eyes, and beautiful manners.

She has separated from her husband, Orlando Bloom, but the interview I saw was still pre-separation.  The news said that she was continuing to speak kindly about her husband, which is something I appreciate.  I really dislike ungracious people, and if I'm ever ungracious, I hope someone will remind me of that fact.  And Miranda plays the piano, which is all right in my book!

I have to say that I like to hang around with guys more than with girls.  I like the way that guys --at least, the guys I like, not romantically, but just as buddies-- act, once you've straightened it out with them that we're not flirting, and turned their attention towards other girls.  It's only the exceptional woman who can leave aside being a full-time woman to be a full-time human being.  Miranda Kerr comes across as most definitely in the world of being a woman.  She's an insider to all the makeup, and the feminine walk, and all that goes with being a traditional attractive woman, but she seems to have gotten it down so well, that when she talks, she isn't busy being a woman, you know?  People who're busy being women make me nervous, and make me want to escape!  (If you're one of these, let's hope that, if we meet, we have something super interesting to talk about, in which case I get distracted, and I don't obsess about all this sort of stuff.)

I saw Miranda interviewing a musician on YouTube (can't remember his name), and she was utterly relaxed, but not so much that she was being careless about her guest.  I would love seeing Miranda interview a woman.  I have to look for one, but right now I'm finishing up the end-of-term business with my classes, and I really shouldn't be taking time off to have fun with my Blog.  But Miranda sure is cute.

Kay

A new book at Smashwords

I decided to upload another episode from Helen today.  It is an early episode, in a period where Helen had dropped out of school, and had been living with a reclusive former nurse, in the Canadian wilderness.  (There is not a lot of actual wilderness in Canada, but I assumed there was more in Canada than in the US!)

The story is that Helen decides to be an assistant at a ballet camp in France.  There is more sex in this story than in any of the episodes I have uploaded thus far, and I'm not sure how it will be received.  But I love the characters in it, and Helen is really sweet and affectionate in it, and for anyone who likes a sappy story, this is a good one.

I think the cover is beautiful, and I hope everyone agrees.

Kay.

"Alexandra" is now for sale

My complete book Alexandra was available for purchase on Smashwords on January 28th.

No matter how many times I go through this book, there are always mistakes and grammatical errors I keep finding, and it makes me furious!  But I'm proud of the book; I think it stands up to other books in the genre, even if it doesn't have a brilliant plot.  I love the characters dearly, even though it seems to grind to an unsatisfactory halt, with everyone only moderately satisfied with their lot.  But this is the way the world is; it seems stupid to me to write a story that ends with everybody deliriously delighted with the outcome!

In all my stories, I end up falling in love with all the principal characters, and Alexandra is no exception.  The adults, the teenagers, the kids, are all delightful, and the few people there are who aren't wonderful, are at least understandable, and have understandable motives.  I would certainly like to make the beginning stronger, but this book was written so early in my writing experience that changing anything really hurts.  This is why I'm publishing it privately, and not letting a commercial publisher massacre it!

While I'm not desperate for everyone to buy it, I can't bring myself to give it away free; it is some 300,000 words of effort, so you're getting about 500 words per penny.  If you don't think that's worth it, read the first 40% for free, and let me know how you hate it!!!

Regards,

Kay