My best selling story: Prisoner!

It normally does not make sense for an author to review his or her own writing, but I have an especially warm place in my heart for Prisoner!  

Sometimes I have an embarrassingly teen sensibility; I often catch myself thinking like a fifteen-year-old, even if an unusually precocious one.  This makes it easier to write stories for young people, in the age range of 15-to-18.

I can't remember writing Prisoner! --or rather, I can't remember beginning to write it, though I suspect it was in the early Spring, when I was just beginning to have free time to write.  It is one of my favorite stories, though I must say I like all my stories, and read them often, just for kicks.

Made a whole new cover.
This is the old one.

This particular story is about a young girl of a royal family who disguises herself as a commoner during an invasion, and is hauled off as a slave with the conquering army.  I most definitely was influenced by G. A. Henty's The Cat of Bubastes, which I read as a teenager, a rare book that my parents happened to have left lying around.  In that story, a young man is hauled off to Egypt, with a whole lot of slaves from his fellow-countrymen, after they had fallen to the Egyptian conquering army.  He subsequently falls in love with the young daughter of the family to whom he is given as a domestic slave.  Prisoner! runs parallel; in fact a very close parallel, if you ignore that the love affair is between the girl and her princess owner.  I have sold thirteen copies of this story, in contrast to single digits of all the others (except for Jane, of course, which has been downloaded some 1300 times, for free).

I had been a little dissatisfied with the cover of Prisoner!, and I just uploaded a new cover.  I might have just killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, because it is just possible that it was the old cover that sold so many copies of this book.

Halloween
I had a lovely Halloween, which I spent with friends.  I sat in the back, reading, only coming out to observe the occasional Trick-Or-Treater, who was invariably simply adorable.  My friends handed out candy to an incredibly diverse cross-section of the population: black, white, Asian, Latino, girls, boys, kids from about a few months old, and still at the "goo gaa" stage, and older kids of around 13, who made wisecracks at the costumes of my friends, who had dressed pretty well, I thought.  I myself did not dress up, though I did carve a pumpkin, a little one.  (I might post a photo of it sometime.)

P.S. I made a completely new cover for Prisoner, shown at right.  This one has a rather plain girl, with strong, muscular legs.  I needed the face to be that of a girl who held her feelings tightly reined in, and I finally found such a face.  The fact that I liked her legs was a bonus.  The reason I texture the photographs so much is that I want the image to be sort of mythic, and not too much like the girl next door.  I would prefer if the features were completely unrecognizable, even generic, but without a tiny bit of character, the cover image wouldn't work.  This is a small file; the cover at full resolution is here.  Double-click to see a larger image; it is 1600 pixels wide, so keep going until you see the thing at full resolution.

Kay

Covers from Smashwords

As you know, making interesting covers for the books I have published on Smashwords is one of my pastimes.  I get just about as much fun out of making these covers as I got from writing the books!

The first one, and one of the least successful, was the cover for Sweet Hurricane, which was a rather pitiful attempt.  It was a complicated story, so I had to have a cover that was relevant.  If I get a better idea for one, this one will be dropped like a hot potato.

The cover features too many elements, from the general store motif (because our heroine Helen works at a sort of general store at the beach), to the dance motif (Helen meets and falls in love with a brother and sister pair, and they're dancers.  But the pair shown here doesn't represent what they look like in my imagination, or even in their description), to the kids on bikes motif, and the hurricane motif.  Worst of all is the title; if I had to do it all over again, I'd pick a different title.  Probably less adventuresome: "Helen and co. at the Shore: Hattie".

OK, well, I did go ahead and changed this cover.  Here's the new one.

The very next book I published was the amazingly successful Jane, with one of the best covers I managed to make, sultry and simple and sexy and colorful.

Jane is free, and has been downloaded more than 1,300 times, but I don't know whether it is because of the cover, or whether because it is free.  It contains some very attractive characters, but I'm not sure whether they connected with anybody.

The lesbian theme is front and center, both on the cover and in the introduction, and I wonder whether readers who like lesbian fiction are the only ones who download the books.  (I suppose that's an obvious "yes", because all the books are on lesbian themes...)

This is the book most heavily procured on the Smashwords site, written by me, but it is offered free.  There is a prequel: Jane, the Early Years, see below.

[I changed the cover a little.  You will recognize the image that is on the sidebar of this blog.]

The next book --I'm trying to list these in chronological order, but it is just a little too difficult--was Little John Finds a Friend.  This is a story about the kid brother of Helen, a character about whom I wrote an enormous book, which I'm publishing in parts.  (Sweet Hurricane is a --rather important, actually-- episode from the Helen saga.)

Little John is an interesting character, and in Finds a Friend, his relationship with his college friend Taylor becomes more intense.  The story is lighthearted, and actually not a lesbian themed one, despite what I wrote a few paragraphs above.  I like Little John a lot, and I like Taylor even more, and this story is a lot of fun.

In keeping with the tone of the story, the cover was a doodle with stick figures.  John is a tall, lanky fellow, and Taylor is a goth chick.  I did the best I could.

Helen versus Handel's Messiah was a sort of Christmas Special, but I keep it up all the time, because it is too much trouble to archive and unarchive.

Despite it's flippant title, it is a serious, slightly sentimental meditation on the reversals in Helen's life, especially the several years since she began to teach at Westfield College, a fictitious institution in Pennsylvania.  The model featured on the cover doesn't really reflect my image of Helen, but her expression was sort of interesting.  The score on the cover is an actual page from the manuscript score.

Alexandra was a major project, not in the sense of how serious the material is (the tone is pretty serious, for the most part), but because of how long it was, and how much effort it took.  I plan to rewrite the first fifty or so pages one of these days, but it stands at more than a thousand pages long at the moment.  The cover was a depiction of Alexandra and Genevieve, the royal couple who are the central love story of the book.  It isn't really a gothic romance, as the cover and the summary might lead you to believe.  It is a romance, an anti-war novel, a science-fiction fantasy (but no dragons), and in a perverse way a sort of social commentary.  I don't think it succeeds at every level, but do want people to buy it and read it, but I don't want to give it away.  I guess the thing to do is to give away coupons for it, and one of these days I'll put them here, below.

A Smashwords staffer was unhappy with the depiction of nudity on the cover.  I'm crazy about nudity, and I think we should have nudity everywhere we could possibly have it, but I am unhappy with the suggestion that there is a lot of sex in the story.  There is a little, but sex is by no means a central theme.  Well, not very central.

Helen and the Flowershop Girl was a short episode from the Helen saga that I packaged and published last Spring.  I had a different cover for the first publication, until I came up with this one.  Helen is a tall, long-haired blonde, and the Flowershop Girl is a short, chunky girl, who wears shorts.  As you can see, I had trouble getting images that were appropriate, so the girl in shorts is a rather svelte young woman, while the girl in the dress is a brunette, and not particularly tall.  So what to do?

Neither girl is at all how I imagine the characters to be, except that the girl in the dress has that innocent look that seems part of Helen's personality, and her hair is very much as I imagine Helen's hair, except for being the wrong color.  I do imagine Helen wearing a dress on those lines, and the dress was definitely added from a fashion catalog, and I hope I don't get into trouble for it.

Prisoner! is a story set in the Bronze Age in an alternate Earth.  The original cover was based on a classical painting of a slave market, with clothes overlaid on (very clumsily).

The main character, Maia, is a war captive, so the image does not really fit the story.  Still, I imagine Maia's build and features to be roughly the same as those of this poor girl.  I love the colors, and they fit the mood of the story very well.

There are twin princesses in the story, and I wish I could feature a cover with them in it somewhere; maybe a summer project for next year.

There is also a character of a dark-skinned girl, with every inch of her body tattooed; that would be a fun search.

I grew dissatisfied with this cover (though the book had done very well with it), and eventually settled on this one.  The build of this girl is rather 20th Century; bronze age women, even the tallest ones, were not as firm-fleshed as she!  I struggle with trying to be authentic in terms of dress and other details, with trying to convey the essence of the character in terms of how she might look if she were to be a modern girl.  This is obviously a quest that can never be satisfied.

Helen at Ballet Camp  is the first book in the Helen series.  (There will probably be a prequel, which summarizes what went on before Ballet Camp, during Helen's freshman, sophomore and Junior years.)  Ballet Camp is a rather innocent teen novel, but that's how I had written Helen's character at that stage of her development, and the writing is as immature as Helen's character.  But it relates a part of Helen's story, as it happens, an inessential part.

If it isn't obvious, Helen had ballet training under a (fictitious) famous choreographer and dancer, Andrew White, no relation.  This establishes the background for a couple of stories in which Helen dances, later on.

Music of the Stars.  This work was a major project, which I doubted I could finish.  However, I recklessly published it in advance in August of 2014, and promised to have a completion in one year.

If I hadn't done that, I never would have completed it, so I'm happy.  Unfortunately, the completion shows signs of being written very fast, and I'm determined to rewrite it.  I won't change the story substantially, but I suppose it's inevitable that it's going to be a little different.  Mostly, because I'm so involved with so many of the characters in that story (talk about killing off your darlings) I can't bear to commit to particular endings.  Most of all, I'm depressed at being unable to fill out the character of Athene, Helen's daughter (in this story).

While we're on the topic, when I first started writing this work, some half a dozen years ago (I can't remember), I had almost decided to scrap the original Helen saga.  That was so dripping with sex and depravity that I thought it would have to remain just an indulgence of mine.  Since then, I have seen far more depraved things with no saving features whatsoever in print and online, and Helen came off looking practically like a nun.  So I'm cleaning up the Helen saga in little bits.  But Music of the Stars was an attempt to salvage the interesting character of Helen, and make something out of her.  To my horror, when I looked back at the original Helen story, it was obvious that the two characters could not be the same, because their histories diverge at about the age of 30.  So anyone who reads this book has to think: Oh, this is the Voyager Helen, and not the Saga Helen.

It is a very long work, close to 650 pages, and serious in tone.  As with all my writing, despite the mature themes, there are lots of juvenile characters, some of whom grow into roles that have sexual themes interwoven in them.  The cover is very generic, and I want to create a different one when I can.

[Added later: This is a new cover; I have gammaed it up (don't bother to find out what that is: it just makes it less dark) for the blog post.  It shows a girl swimming up through the center of the Andromeda Galaxy, which is, of course, impossible.]

Helen, The Lost Years: Lalitha.  This is a reference to an Indian girl (she starts out being about 17 in beginning of this story, and by its end, about 35.  Helen actually marries this girl in a civil ceremony; she is crazy about her.  But, while they're living together, Helen begins having affairs with a couple of other people, and Lalitha can't take it anymore, and they split up.  But Lalitha continues to be a significant presence in the Helen stories, and I subconsciously wanted them to get together eventually.  But they never do.

The Indian girl in my imagination is very close to the model in this photograph, but I did not have a good photograph of her in the collection.  And, to my amazement, the Western girl in the picture does come very close indeed to my mental image of Helen.  (Of course, what's important is that it doesn't clash with the mental image the reader has.)  But the cover is kinda crappy, and I have to work on it.

Jane, the Early Years.  This story was written shortly before 9/11, and was intended to be both very erotic, and very serious.  After some years, I felt the eroticism was a little too much, and I had to work hard to partially sterilize it.  It has some serious themes, such as HIV and terrorism, not to mention Xenophobia.  Those themes are explored in Jane, but they're also present in this book, of which Jane is a continuation.

I think this cover might be, along with the cover of Jane, one of my best, and I'm certainly not going to touch it!  I hope you love it as much as I do.

Volumes in Preparation:  Jana
This one was written completely, but not typed into the computer, so now I have to look for the sheets of manuscript, and my filing habits are worse than useless.  Don't tell Smashwords, but this story was partly serialized on this very blog: see the archives.  The graphic of a girl wearing a chiton that is on the sidebar was an illustration for Jana.  It's a modification of that graphic that I'm presently using as a cover.

Kay

New Ways of Showing Breast

There’s nothing less rewarding than making a general appeal for more tastefulness.  Good taste, or specifically tastefulness is considered to be in the eye of the beholder, so anyone can avoid taking the appeal seriously by invoking this fact.

A case in point is the recent interest in showing a (part of) the breast that has really been around since the seventies, when girls began wearing larger armholes, to show off a particularly erogenous part of the breast, namely the little of it closest to the armpit.  In this article, a blogger called Alexandra explains why she believes this style is ‘Not Cool.’  I have to say I agree with most of her points.

It is overdone.  This is where taste comes in.  Because young women have nowhere to turn to get an assessment of tastefulness, we have an escalation of breast-baring styles.  Evidently most modern women have never studied fashions of the past, to see how this style can be adapted to be perfectly satisfying.  Revealing a little of the outermost part of the breast has been around for centuries, certainly since Greek times, and there has been lots of opportunity for discovering styles that make the little that is shown flattering, rather than overwhelming.

A young person's style
There’s absolutely no doubt that typically it is a style that flatters women with firm breasts, which usually means young women who have never given birth, or women who have had surgery to insert implants or otherwise firm up the breast.  I don’t like the idea of elective surgery generally, and I dislike that so many women feel obliged to undergo it for the sake of their lovers, male or female.  But I think this particular style works well for girls who have had breast augmentation, provided it is done well.  (Breast augmentation does not always work out nicely; I don’t want to mention names, but some of the former Bruce Jenner’s in-laws have had unfortunate experiences with their body modification.  I feel that it is so unfair that a good boob job is probably beyond the means of the typical citizen; it outrages my sense of fairness.  On the other hand, I don’t think the Taxpayer can be expected to subsidize elective surgery unless [a] all other essential needs of every citizen are met first, and [b] elective surgery stops costing such a fortune.)

I’m dying to post some examples of what I consider tasteful exposure of the breast, but I’m reluctant to offend anyone on this front (or this side), because I feel that it is so unfair to rub its potency in the faces of women, who are subjected to an onslaught of these sorts of pressures already.  But I would hate to see the style die out, just because some women overdo it.  I have noticed that some men bloggers are appealing for restraint, which I think is fantastic.  Quite apart from the fact that I’m rather a prude (and not proud of it), I think dressing tastefully is just incredibly sexy, but I’m afraid that my opinion won’t carry much weight, just because of who I am.  Okay, well, I guess one little picture won’t hurt:

Down to the Skin is not needed
The style to which I refer (okay, let’s just come out and call it what they call it on the Web: side-boob) works beautifully if a translucent undergarment is worn.  Girls have worn sheer underblouses for a decade, when they set out to show off their midriffs.  (Some of them drew attention to their bellies by constantly tugging at the bloody things with fake coyness.  Fakeness is endemic among teenagers.)  Many of the more charming fashions do have a sheer panel that obscures the breast, while at the same time drawing tasteful attention to it, without the need for fake tugging.

A bra for the style?
The article suggests that the style does not work with a bra.  Well, with conventional bras, probably not.  It won’t be long before someone invents a sheer bra that supports the breast, but shows off the side of it.  How hard can it be?  There is mesh fabric available today that is pretty strong.  The panel can go fairly high, if it is made of mesh.

In conclusion, let it be known that Kay Hemlock Brown endorses side-of-the-breast-baring styles, as long as it is done with some taste.

Jane—The Early Years

I recently decided to publish the prequel to Jane that I had written about earlier, under the name Jane—The Early Years.  This should make my one (documented) fan happy!  It is not a sequel, as desired, but still, it tells you a lot about Jane, and how matters came to be.

I had a great old time putting a good cover together; in the end, I used a representation of Scorpia, Jane's alter ego, a personality invented by Jane and Co. who appears at Metal Fetish gatherings, in a mask, and goes about being a wise guy.  (Scorpia reappears in the continuation of Jane, after she meets Lisa Love, who persuades her to make a feature film.  This part has not been written yet; I suspect that it will be two parts, actually.  The first will be a protracted holiday in Canada, and the second part will be Jane acting her part as Scorpia, until Lisa finds out who's behind the mask.)

The cover is at right.  I imagined that the mask would be much more opaque, and cover up most of Jane's face, but that would have looked horrible on the cover of a book, so I used this sort of "wrought iron" filigree mask instead.

Unlike Jane, The Early Years is not free; but it is priced at about $2, and I'm hoping it will sell well.  I have only sold a total of 19 books, which makes me hardly an author at all.  Please go out and buy the book you all; it goes on sale on Saturday.

Kay.

[Added later:  I don't think I will ever succeed in designing a cover more attractive and more appropriate than this one on the right, for Early Years.  It is colorful --perhaps painfully so, to the taste of some-- and unfortunately it depicts one of two possible scenes that would be perfect covers.  I wish there were similar scenes in the other books!  I mean, there are, but I just can't pull them off with the resources I have.]

Scrivener versus Word

I recently bought a program called Scrivener, which helps writers organize their material.  I have used Microsoft Word for years and years, and have become sort of a minor authority on Word.  Before Word, I used WordPerfect, a word-processor that has largely gone out of use, and I had an almighty battle with Word to figure out how to use it.  Every time I get a new program, I have to really struggle to get to use it effectively, only to learn it so well that it is once again a struggle to use a different program, as becomes inevitably necessary sooner or later.

To get started, let me say a little about WordPerfect.  It was a perfectly good program for everything I wanted to do.  Obviously, I used a lot of different styles, starting with italics and boldface, and various colors, and tables, and margins, and so on.  If you don't want any of this, you should just use an editor, like Notepad (or Emacs, which you've probably never heard of).

Small to Medium Documents:  WordPerfect and MS Word
Let’s start with Italics.  In WordPerfect, when you want Italics, you select a portion of text, and turn it on.  Inside the program, it places a sort of invisible marker that says Italics starts here, and then at the end of the selection, it puts another marker stop italics here.  In addition, WordPerfect had a split-screen mode, where you could actually see where these markers were.  The screen looked like this:

The two tags in the lower screen that show where Italics start and stop are just there to help the user.  I could delete either tag, and the whole Italics thing would go off, and the text would be plain once again.

Then I started using Word, because many computers I had to work on only had Word, and I was frustrated because I did not know how to get rid of Italics precisely, because I could not see the tags.  In later years, Word made it possible to see these things, and my comfort level went up.

As my writing projects grew larger —and they grew enormous— the WordPerfect implementation of a wordprocessor which actually placed those invisible markers in the text, became too clumsy.  If something went wrong, which it does most of the time, the program would go insane, looking for italics tags that had got accidentally deleted, without WordPerfect knowing about it.  (Don’t ask.)  Word, in contrast, flags every character as either italicized or not.  It therefore doesn’t have to go looking for tags, which is a point in its favor.  As WordPerfect got harder to find, and as all my friends started using Word, and because PowerPoint and Excel came along with Word, I decided to use Word, just about the time when Word started implementing “character”-type attributes, like Italics and Bold, and “paragraph”-type attributes, like margins and indents, which WordPerfect had done long before.

With Word, you can get your (short-to-medium-sized) document to print out almost exactly how you want it.  Word is a good general-purpose word processor, especially if you take the time to learn all its features (and if Microsoft stops fooling with it every so often).

Large Documents: Scrivener
Once I started writing really large documents —or when my short documents became enormous documents while my back was turned— I had to resort to keeping them as entire folders of chapters, which were later combined into a single book.  Word (and WordPerfect, for the record,) has a method of “linking in” subdocuments, to make a longer document, but somehow that doesn’t work as well as it should.

Enter Scrivener.

Scrivener is more of a document organizing program than a document creating program, and furthermore, I haven't still learned how to use it well.

To give you a quick overview, Scrivener looks like PowerPoint, where you see the list of slides down the left, and you usually see one slide on the rest of the screen.  Lots of other programs are like this, for instance such things as PageMaker, or QuarkXpress, where you have immediate access to any portion of your project.  There is a panel along the left (called the Binder) that contains lots of documents and folders.  Each folder would normally be a chapter, and inside each folder, you get a number of scenes.  This allows you to rearrange the scenes as you prefer (not trivial, but just needs careful dragging, really), just as you would rearrange slides in PowerPoint.  In fact, there is a view very much like Slide Sorter View (that you get in PowerPoint) in Scrivener in which you can just rearrange things pretty much by dragging things around.

If rearranging your scenes within a chapter is a central problem in managing a large writing project —and it is, for me— then Scrivener will help you immensely.

You can even do your writing in Scrivener.  It has a rudimentary editor that can do most of what you want: Italics, Boldface, Colors, etc.  However, once you apply a certain style to a piece of text, Scrivener forgets that the block has that style, unlike Word.  In Word, you can modify the style, and then all instances of that style will change throughout the document.  In Scrivener, you have to go back and change each instance —if you really want to.

You can put all sorts of text into Scrivener, e.g. Word documents, RTF documents, plain text, HTML, Open Document format text, etc, etc.  Getting text into Scrivener is not hard, provided you don’t already have a structure in your document which you want to preserve.  If you do, you have to work harder, and find out for yourself how that is done; I don’t want to set myself up as a Scrivener authority, because I just don’t know enough.  There is a website forum, where you join up, and ask all the questions you want from people who really know.

Compiling
Once you’re ready to take a look at your document, to print it, or read it through, or send it off to a publisher or anyone, you make a single document out of it by Compiling.  At this stage, you can get Scrivener to make anything in the document —that it recognizes— look any way you want.  You can tell it to make the Chapter Titles look like so, and the paragraphs look like so, and so on.  I’m still trying to figure how to make an excerpt from a letter look the way I want.

Scrivener can compile your project as an Ebook directly.  It does a really good job of this.  It can also compile to pdf format (to be read on Acrobat Reader).  It can also compile your project into the form of a Word document!  And, as a bonus, your styles will be a nice, minimal set, just the way Smashwords likes it.  (Smashwords doesn’t like millions of different styles throughout your document; if they find too many styles, they ask you to fix your book.  Consistency of style is one ingredient of a professional-looking piece of writing.)

The software you use really affects the outcome of what you produce to some degree, so I hope this blog post helps you choose the appropriate tool for your writing.

Kay

Helen's Eventful Summer

Well, I did it.

For whatever reason, the latter part of the enormous Helen saga was written rotating among several threads very rapidly.  For one thing, I had introduced a large number of fascinating characters, and I did not want to abandon them, so they keep having interesting and related adventures.

So, I published —actually pre-published— an enormous chunk (90,000 words, give or take) just a few minutes ago.  This has some stories that I just love: Helen meets a call-girl, Melanie; Helen meets Jana, the intense Czech girl; Helen and the gang hear of a Tornado attack (completely fictitious) in Kansas, and go on a mission of mercy; Crystal, a Freshman in college, falls in love with Janet; Vicky, another call girl stalks Helen; Tommy meets a girl in Chicago, and falls in love; Elly meets a girl in Philly.  Marcus and Gena have sex for the first time, which results in a bed being destroyed.

Experienced authors, of course, always insist on writers weeding out all except the most important characters in their novels.  I categorically reject this advice; I am special, and I want to write my way!  (Who do they think they are, anyway?)  It isn't just that I want to make money; I just want to make my writing available, just in case someone likes it, that's all.  I have made a total of $25 from all my writing, and I'm not very upset.

I need a nice cover.  I don't have a cover at all, and that's my project for tonight.

Kay

P.S. Well, I created one, but I'm not sure I like it.  Here it is, at right:

If you read the book, you will learn that the last several episodes is about Tom (Tomasina, Helen's half-sister, the child of Helen's Dad and Grandma Elly, Janet's mother), who decides to appear in a adult video.  One scene has Tommy riding her Honda bike along an abandoned highway, with this Italian teenager seated in front of her, when suddenly the girl decides to stand up on the bike.  This is practically impossible, especially if the girl is wearing a loose antique wedding gown.  But I wanted this for my cover so bad!!!  I have numerous photographs of girls riding motorbikes very sedately, but I want one with a passenger seated in front of the rider, at least on her knees, on the way to standing up, while the rider herself is clothed only in chaps and a vest, or completely naked.  I don't think I will ever be able to find one ..--Kay

How Helen continues to torture me

Many years ago, I started writing Helen.  It was simply a diary of my fantasies about an amazing, impossibly talented woman.

Initially, those fantasies were so impossible that I never even thought that Helen, or even parts of it, could be allowed to see the light of day; they revealed far too much about myself.  So I wrote and wrote and wrote, with nothing to hinder my amazing and disgusting creativity.  When I stopped, Helen was in love with five women at the same time, all of them wonderful people, and I could not see how the story could continue, because, well, how would Helen keep them all happy?

Then, of course, a friend of mine, a guy, and his daughter read little bits of Helen, and were delighted with it.  They laughed at my problem with the plot, but they loved the little bits that they had found lying around so much, they urged me to do something with it; change the story around; whatever.  Obviously, that was a lot easier to say than to do.

I decided to abandon Helen, and began to write other stories; some less salacious, others even more salacious.  But now, I knew that there were at least two people who would pester me to show them what I was writing.  Even worse, they had a cousin who was an award-winning writer, and they had told this person about me, and this author very gently, and very charmingly, offered to read something that I had written.

Soon I was corresponding with her (it was a woman; I suppose it would do no harm to confess that) and she wrote back that the large unfinished story I had written was excellent in some ways, but she pointed out some problems that I was going to encounter very soon.  But what struck me was that at least three very insightful people were endorsing my writing style, and genuinely liked a lot of the stuff I was showing them.

About this time, I was getting comfortable with computers, and I summoned up the courage to type large chunks of these stories into my very first computer, and, in the dark of night, I printed out Alexandra, which I had painfully sterilized, so that the little sex there was in it wasn't obviously gratuitous.  I looked at the printed pages, and I was hooked.  I loved how it looked in print!

Then the real world intruded, and I had to get busy, I was teaching more challenging courses, and I had to write whenever I had time, and my friends gave me constructive criticism, and I was beginning to actually see myself as an author, even if unpublished.  Meanwhile, I had started this blog, and I began to trickle bits of stories into serialized form, and put them here.  Jana  was the first one, but I kept losing the manuscript.  (I haven't thought about Jana in a long time; I should make a serious attempt to finish it.)

Then e-books and tablets and Smashwords came along, and finally, I decided to publish a really important chunk of Helen on Smashwords.  (This was Sweet Hurricane, a rather desperately saccharine title.  It should be called Helen at the Beach, or something more serious, because it is where she meets Marissa, the woman who supports Helen in the later, sorrowful years.  I love Marissa, because she sticks by Helen even when it appears that Helen has very little to give her.)

Then I went back to Helen, and began to write some more, which I finally set aside for the Jane project.  A quick aside: almost the only reader who wrote to me about Jane asked me whether I had written the next part yet!  Unfortunately, I have written several hundred pages more, but not enough to finish the story, and some of those pages are lost!  I had better publish what I have pretty quick, or I may lose the only documented fan I have.

After Jane, which I made into a publishable packet and put on Smashwords about a year ago, I went back and continued writing a science fiction story that featured Helen, who is on a spaceship that is looking for a colonizable planet.  But when I got writing a few thousand pages of that, I went back to look at the latter part of the original Helen story, only to find that Helen had progressed to the point where she could not have possibly been put on a spaceship: she had lost her memory completely.  So the Helen on the Spaceship and the Helen of the Helen story are two different people, who share a history up until about the age of thirty, at which point they diverge.  If you're a stickler for logic, simply assume that they are completely different people.

But now, since I invested in Scrivener, a text organizing program for writers, I am finding that the last several hundred pages of the main Helen saga rotate among several different threads so rapidly that it is difficult to even break the narrative into chapters.

At first, I thought of publishing each thread separately; I have gone ahead and done this in Little John finds a Friend.  But the Smashwords managers do not like material to appear in multiple documents.  If you've ever read the Darkover series of stories by Marion Zimmer Bradley, you would have seen just this situation taking place, with multiple stories relating different aspects of the same action in the same period.  Zimmer Bradley, of course, writes incredible stories, and she can do what most ordinary mortals cannot dream of doing.

[To be continued.]

I wanted Music of the Stars to explode today

August 15^th was the date I had set for myself to complete the story of Music of the Stars, which I had published in advance one year ago.  As the day drew nearer, I had planned out the end of the novel in broad outlines, but did not have the details fixed.

I had bought a copy of the software called Scrivener, which is an organizing tool for writers undertaking large projects.  Scrivener both helped and hindered me, mostly because I did not read the documentation in detail, and did not know how to use it.  Still, I boldly went where I had not gone before, and early this morning uploaded the conclusion to the story to the Smashwords server.  I am very unhappy with the end, but I am also amazed that it is as good as it is.  It could be so much better!

For those who aren't familiar with the story, The Galactic Voyager is a sort of space ark, with several hundred colonists who have been sent off into the unknown, to find a habitable planet.  The Voyager itself is in some ways an artificial planet, and the book explores how it starts out with an awkward militaristic governance, and evolves as the needs of the population changes, and the project matures.

The central character is Helen Nordstrom (no relation, or not much of a relation, anyway), a multi-talented musician and teacher and lesbian, who is put on board in a state of hibernation.  The Voyager administration is faced with deteriorating social situations, and revive Helen on route.  The early part of the story has to do with how Helen affects the mood on the ship, and certainly the tone of the leadership.  This is obviously new ground for me, because my focus has been, thus far, personal relationships, romance, and gender issues.

The second part of the story is driven by the pivotal fact that Helen Nordstrom was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes before being put on board.  But the colonists--the regular people on the Voyager--have all been selected to eliminate known genetically transmitted diseases, to maximize the success of the project.  So Helen finds herself the only diabetic on board.

In spite of the fact that the premisses of the story are so mundane, I think the story is interesting, not least because of several fascinating characters I invented --or who invented themselves-- and their relationships.  One of my favorites is Summer, a button-nosed, freckle-faced little blonde girl who is a character in every sense.  One of my greatest regrets is that I did not create a satisfactory conclusion to the story that gave her something interesting to do.  Lena is another one.  Lena is Summer's little buddy, but Helen adores little Lena, who is a classically lovely brunette.  But being just about 9 years old at the start of the story, Helen relates to her as to a beloved niece.  But for various reasons, Helen is put back in hibernation, when they run out of ideas to stabilize her health, and she is revived twenty years later.  You see the possibilities?

There is not what I would call a strong plot, but there are story elements that are (in my humble opinion, of course) very creative.  I'm convinced that if, someday, such an exploratory vessel were to be populated and sent out, things will happen very much as I describe them, except that, of course, what they actually find cannot be predicted.

Kay

Perhaps I should have taken Marketing Instead

This Blog was intended for me to write about writing, and, of course, girls.  But it's getting impossible to ignore the bigger picture out there.

Let's not talk about me, for a moment; the big thing I notice is how my students really struggle with everything: classes, choosing courses, focusing on their schoolwork, dealing with their parents, and fear of graduating.  Some of them are actually unhappy about visits from their families, and the seniors —whom I don't teach, actually; I usually teach underclassmen, though I help some senior friends informally— actually regarded their impending graduations with dread.

Graduation is over, now; we're looking at the new year, and freshmen —the gender-neutral word is "frosh", which I find perfectly dreadful— are coming on campus.  I have little or nothing to do with freshmen at this stage; I will certainly meet them in class soon enough.  But I'm now brave enough to hang around the lounges during orientation, and occasionally get talked to by parents, and some freshmen —OK, frosh, then— themselves.  Of course, some of the girls are just beautiful, but I know that if they take their looks too much to heart, they're going to be very unattractive as people very soon.  I was an attractive kid, I know now; the people who took note of me then I learned to despise, as soon as I got sophisticated enough to be able to understand how they thought.

Getting ready for life, when I was just out of high school, was very easy for me: I would go to college, and then to grad school, and train to be a college professor.  Some of the other kids who graduated with me wanted to capitalize on their looks, and became flight attendants, or secretaries, or salesgirls, or got into advertising, or became actresses, or reporters; they had to artificially beef up their personalities (well, some of them had pretty big personalities already, I have to admit), put on makeup, dress fashionably, suck money out of their parents, and went out there to do their thing.  (I didn't put on serious makeup until I was thirty, and put on a little lip color before I went in front of my first class.  These days, I've graduated to doing a little more with my face, but nothing beyond lip color, eyebrow pencil, and a soupçon of eye makeup.  Just a tad.)

These days, especially with guys, things are different.  I guess things were always different with guys; I just never paid any attention to them when I was younger.  My eyes were always on the girls and the women; they were just more interesting, the ones who were interesting at all.  The others I just ignored, or despised.  As I got older, I despise fewer and fewer people, and I have some insight even into the minds of boys and men.  The lines are blurring, and I don't think it's entirely subjective.  I think guys are beginning to think a little more like women, all of them, except for a few rednecks (or maybe a whole lot of rednecks; thank the universe I don't encounter rednecks in great numbers), and the rednecks on campus are just redneck wannabees.  They wear their necks like a uniform; it is something they have to put on in the morning, just like girls put on their faces.  The more vulnerable they feel, the louder they rev their motors as they drive off.  It's all an act.  Mostly.

But kids have no idea what courses to take.  The brighter ones are constantly second-guessing themselves even when they're in class: is this class a total waste of time?  Perhaps I should have taken Marketing instead.

One thing is certain:  You have to learn to write properly in college, and you have to learn to talk properly.  For all the million purposes your future employers want to put you, and for which they want you to be a college graduate (you would think that they want a college education, but you would probably be wrong), being able to write well—Okay, moderately well—and to speak well: those are the most important.  There is a good possibility that your employer might not be able to tell the difference, but don't take the risk.

What should you put on your bucket list for your college experience?  Make no mistake, college is an experience, though it could be used as a sort of boot camp.

Basic reading, writing, and being able to use a calculator.  Any high-school grad should have these skills, but the environment of high school is too fraught with silliness—on the part of the students, the teachers, and the parents—to make this very likely.  When I graduated from high school, I could write better than most college grads of today.  And I went to a very poor basic rural neighborhood high school, nothing special.

Use a computer, and use Word (or Open Office, or whatever), use a printer, use e-mail, use a browser, and maybe make a web page using HTML —you know, the usual italics and bold tags, nothing fancy.  Maybe a hyperlink or two.

Good interpersonal skills.  Listen to someone with interest; be able to keep up your end of a conversation with intelligence; be able to chat to a big shot without being too obsequious.  Be polite even to someone who is obnoxious.  (I sometimes fail at this; I was pulled up for snapping at a student.  That was the first and last time.)

Specialize in something.  But this something need not be what your job is in.  You could be a small time office manager in a car-repair shop, but your degree might be in music.  Ignorant people always assume that you have to get a job in your major.  They're surprised that a music major can write, or that an art major can do math.  It's too complicated (and sort of old news, actually) as to why it's important to specialize in something, but trust me: it's important.  Given that, you must not specialize in that something to the degree that you don't know anything else.  That's the big mistake people sometimes make: college kids are too specialized.  No; unfortunately, they're sometimes not specialized at all.  Shh, it'll be our little secret.

Good speaking skills.  This means that you can present some idea efficiently and effectively to a gathering, that's all.  Oratory is not needed.  You must be able to prepare, and give, a presentation on some assigned topic.  If you've never done it, you will never have any idea as to what is required.  You should not depend on PowerPoint.  You should be able to use any equipment that is available.  If complicated visuals are essential, well, that's different.  But a small presentation should be well within the capabilities of a college graduate.  This means that you can teach if you have to, or if you would like to.

Have an appreciation for people significantly different from yourself, and the people you grew up with.  A job could require you to relate to people from other states and countries, other religions, other sexual preferences, and other economic conditions than yourself.  This is why most colleges insist on their graduates learning a foreign language,

Have an appreciation for art, music, dance, theatre, and literature.  You have to talk to people about what they're interested in, and it helps if you happen to be interested in those things too.  In addition, the Arts help you relate to the world, which is a more important thing that people will tell you.

Above all, be willing to do any work that's necessary.  I have no respect for people who consider themselves above necessary work.

Now, it comes down to these big questions:

(1) Should I go to a big expensive college, or go to a community college, or go to a professional school?

(2) Should I do a major in a subject I like, or in something like Business, to get a job, or like education, to become a teacher?

(3) Should I only do my major, and the degree requirements, or should I do courses just for fun, as well?

Frankly, I don't know.  When I went to college, these were not important issues —for me.  We were a poor family, but our thinking was big, because my mother had a middle-class upbringing, and my dad had many middle class friends, though he himself was from a working-class family.  In fact, many of our friends were college professors, because we lived in a university town, and both my parents were adjunct (part-time) college professors.

I would certainly have gone to college, though I could only afford a middle-level college, and I got a lot of scholarships.  But for today's kids: I just don't know.  This is a very different world from that into which I was disgorged after college, or even when I was home for the summer.  It makes me mad that kids have to choose, because that's almost like selecting their social class soon after high school.  Never mind that some of the richest people today belong, as far as I'm concerned, in a very low social class, lacking the cultural education that qualifies them to be true citizens.

If you choose to go to college, I would say: postpone choosing a major as long as you can.  The typical high school graduate—and this might not be you—has no inkling about what there is within any subject at all.  You should have found out in high school, but in the world we have now, you will probably find out—if you're lucky—in college.  By Junior Year, you will have reliable opinions about what subjects and disciplines are interesting to you, and then choose something interesting, which is my answer to (2).  Like I said, what you choose should not have huge implications for your job.  But hiring and firing has now been outsourced to so-called "Human Resources Experts", who seem to select people for jobs based on criteria that I certainly would not use.  Because of how unreliable college education is becoming (on top of the unreliability of high school education), businesses should administer a test to their hires before signing their contracts, or they should hire for a probationary period.  So, if you expect to work for an idiot who thinks that if you're going to work for a business, you need a Business degree, I suppose you should do a business degree.  That will pretty much doom you to working for idiots for much of your life, because Business majors have a bad reputation.  In fact, up to a few years ago many MBA programs did not even accept Business majors.  But it may be that things are different, because Business Schools have strong Business lobbies, which endow Business Departments in small colleges, and they push for businesses to hire their Business alumni.

By now, you should know that the answer to (3) is: take courses for fun, too.  You should certainly take courses that will make you a useful employee, e.g. using a database program, or how to use a spreadsheet, or how to create a webpage, or conversational Chinese.  I never did these things, and I am just amazingly lucky—so far—that I haven't had to work outside my expertise.  My background is in music, religion and history (go figure), but I teach writing, and luckily, that's sort of within my competency, because I did a post-graduate course in teaching writing.  Still, I took other courses for fun: computer programming (yes, it was a lot of fun, but computers have gone beyond my comfort zone), piano (which is still useful), and art.  I had to teach myself Spreadsheets, and I still don't know Database Systems, and I learned Web Programming in college, as an enrichment course.

Kay

Swimsuits and Pretty Girls!

Okay.  This situation is totally getting out of hand.  The price I'm paying for clicking on that ad on facebook is that I see nothing but swimsuit ads everywhere I go.  If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.  Here are some of the cutest outfits I have encountered.

This is one of my favorites, though I probably don't have the legs for it.  And I love this model; she has a lovely smile!

Another pretty dress, but an even prettier model.  Can you tell I like long hair?  Streaky, medium-brown, sunbleached is my favorite, I think.

It's the same model, looking like a teenager, which is probably what she is.  I love the sandals, but she seems just a little too thin for my tastes.

I think this young lady looks lovely, but I don't know whether I approve of the style of the bodice.  I know it's now a mainstream design, but ...

Our model doesn't look quite as startlingly thin here.  I love the rear view very much, especially her grave expression when seen from the rear.

I think this is the same person, modelling a really pretty swimsuit.

Another really pretty swimsuit, with a rather cylindrical model.

This young lady looks spectacular from in front, and I also love her face.  Again, a little too thin for my unqualified approval.

And finally, a lovely model, pretty from both angles, and a fabulous suit.

Two more; these dresses really looks like something I would wear.  It appears to be a really light fabric, but I wonder whether you could wear it more than once, just because they dressy enough for an afternoon out, and you know how that goes.

This model is sweet, though those platforms are scary.  Another lovely dress from that island beauty I love so much.  I might wear a dress like that, if I could afford it ...

That's quite enough of that.

K.

New Distractions

Our school is winding down our school year, and my work is mostly over.  I need to work furiously over the summer to get a manuscript ready for Smashwords (Music of the Stars, which I have written about before).

On Facebook I happened to click on an advertisement for a dress, and pretty soon I was sent to the Nordstrom website, and I started looking at various clothes.  I have no hope of ever wearing any of those, because I just don't have the figure for them.  (I used to pretend that I did, but if I ever did, that time has gone!!)  But the models were cute, and so I couldn't resist looking at one dress after another.

From that day on, my Facebook page always has something from some clothing manufacturer.  The models look pretty much the same, and some views of them look so uncannily similar that I suspected that they simply photoshopped their clothes on them.

I just have to tell someone that this model, from this angle, is completely irresistible.  Most of all I love her hair, which is the color I wish my own hair was!

These days, they get young kids of about 17 to model, some of them as young as 15 or 16.  I'm not sure how I feel about that; it seems just a little too exploitative to me.  It encourages them to think of modeling as a career long before they have an opportunity to think of other possibilities.  It is such a temptation to micromanage other people's lives for them, but I suppose it is a parent's right to ruin his or her children's lives, until the kids are adults, at which point, the kids have the right to ruin their own lives, or submit to the ruining plans of their parents.

In conclusion, I would like to place on record that, if I were seventeen again, I would totally wear that swimsuit.  It is called the Mia crocheted one-piece swimsuit by Robin Picone.  Do not tell Robin Picone that I endorsed her blasted swimsuit, or Google will not leave me in peace, for urging me to "monetise" my blog.

Kay

Time for a Little Rant

You probably know that I teach part time.  I want to make it quite clear that I do not consider myself a lot more intelligent than my students.  In fact, not a semester goes by that I don't remark to myself that more than a dozen of my students are clearly brighter than I am, and I secretly wonder whether I come up to their expectations of a professor.  I go into a vague diatribe sometimes about how a professor often sees students pass through her hands who seem to be destined for greatness, based on their insight into language, their ability to see through past the surface of a question to its crux.  They look gratified, but unable to quite see the point of the remarks.

The reason I say this at the outset is that I find it necessary, despite my points above, to point out to my students the most obvious things.  They're great at getting at difficult ideas.  But they totally suck at obvious things.

What is it?  Is it poor observation of the people around them?  Is it a lack of reading?  Is it poor listening skills?  Is it their closeted upbringing?  I don't know.  It could be a little of all of these.

One thing I do know is that all of them, most of the time, do not interact with the ideas and the information they're being given while it's being dispensed to them.  There is the occasional question (with its obvious answer), but for the most part, they sit there passively.  When I ask them, out of class, one-on-one, why they don't seem to be really absorbing the material, they quickly protest that, yes, they are!  But a little probing reveals that they'd rather wait until they're home, and have had a chance to look over their notes.  So in class, they're preoccupied with getting the notes down.

Now, I do not hand out class notes.  So they do have to write down a lot.  My suspicion is that they will not read copious duplicated class notes--I certainly didn't, when I was in college.  So, some of them might be reading their notes at home.  But I suspect that the majority of them do not interact with the material in class, and do not interact with the material at home, except perhaps just before an examination.

The exception are the foreign students.  They do listen attentively in class, even if some of them struggle with the language.  And they usually read all their notes at home, and approach me with questions privately, which is unfortunate, because they always ask the good, meaningful questions.  So, if there is one thing I want to pass along to college students: listen to your teachers.  They should know their stuff, and they love it.  How better to learn it?

K.

A Milestone Approaches: Jane

I just learned that I'm a book away from the 1,200^th copy of Jane being downloaded.  Since more copies of Jane are being downloaded than anything else I have written, I assume that most of you have read it.  (For the rest of you: it is the story of a girl who drops out of college with her boyfriend, only to find him discovering that he is gay.  She moves into an apartment in NYC, and takes up glamour photography, with the help of her former boyfriend.  After a while, she, too, realizes that she is attracted to women.)

At this time, I merely want to thank my readers for downloading Jane in such numbers.  If only those 1200 readers would go on to read my other stories!

Anyway, I wish you all a happy spring!  Keep reading, and treat you neighbors and your world with kindness.

Love,

Kay.

Emily

I recently lost a very beloved friend.  She was the youngest of a family of three.  She was talented, musically and academically, but without the financial resources to take on a college education, like so many others in that position, she decided to pursue professional training as a nurse.  But her true love was music: she played guitar, and was constantly experimenting for new sounds she could make on her awesome Washburn.  But she was a chronic asthmatic, and a smoker, and I believe the smoking aggravated the asthma, and a few days ago, she had a massive attack, and died before the ambulance could reach the hospital.

Everyone who knew her was stunned; especially because she was so young; not very much past the age of twenty.  She had a mischievous sense of humor, and loved animals, and had several pets.  She loved to travel, but could not really afford to get out of her hometown very much, but greatly enjoyed every sortie outside the confines of her usual round.  When someone elderly passes away, we're not so stunned as relieved; their time has come.  But for this child, her death seems very much as if she was stolen from us, a mean theft.

In the story about Emily, which I began to describe some months ago, I had a death early in the story.  Emily's divorced husband takes ill, and comes back to her, and she takes him in.  He dies, and I describe my feelings about death there.  It is a bit of writing that is dear to me; I'm sure greater writers have conveyed those same feelings a lot more successfully, but this piece is mine, and I want to present it here, in memory of my little songbird, whom I miss very much, and it has hardly been a few days.  To everyone who feels cheated of enjoying a reasonable amount of time with someone we love: I hope this piece helps.

I will put it up as a document, and link to it once it is ready,

Kay