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time, and my friends gave me constructive criticism, and I was beginning to actually see myself as an author, even if unpublished.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