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
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