Recently I was forced to go through my stuff and get rid of anything I didn't need desperately. (It had to do with emptying out a closet, so that some complicated rewiring could be done inside it. It appears that a lot of wiring in older apartments goes through closets. Who knew?)
Well, imagine my surprise and delight to discover that one of the boxes contained nothing but the lost Helen manuscripts. Close to 20 pounds of the stuff; some stapled, others simply loose . . . some written on both sides, and some only on one side; some in two columns! I have devoted an inordinate amount of time to that piece of fantasy. You are about to discover some of the seamier aspects of that project. Some of the sections were carefully numbered, others had been numbered at a later time, as I tried to sequence the thing, so that I could type it into my earliest computer.
I had started writing the story when I was in my teens. Everything I wanted to do, I made Helen do, for me. Now, a dozen years later, I am hammered by emotions that come to me as I read various parts of these sheets. And when I take a packet out to read, it could be from a dozen different places (but all --or most-- chronologically before Helen goes to Ballet Camp).
When I give the back-story to any of the episodes I have put up on Smashwords, I try to remember how Helen met some of the characters that figure in the stories. One of them, who plays an important role in Helen and Lalitha--The Lost Years, is a former nun called Cindy.
I did remember that (I had created her this way:) she was, in fact, a former nun, that she had been kidnapped and drugged, and suffered total amnesia. But now I'm reading that she had a rather different personality than I remember today. Today, I describe Cindy as a long-suffering, quiet, earnest person, who loves Helen, and would do anything for her. I did remember that she was an excellent figure skater, and a string player (a musician), who actually gets Helen started in violin playing. But in the manuscripts, she is an eager, vital woman whom they initially think is about 25, but who ends up being significantly older. And I had written samples of the poetry she had written! She and Helen had met online, in an old-time Chat Room, and she spoke essentially in poetry, always fearing that she would be interrupted by the fellow who abducted her, and was forcing her to be a prostitute. The manner in which she gets rescued by Helen is described in detail, and is quite different from how I remembered it, until just a couple of days ago. I think I must have intended for Helen to someday return to Cindy, because I had given Cindy the characteristics that would enable the little nun and Helen to be suitable foils for each other, according to my teenage wisdom.
Janet is depicted as too much of a rug on which Helen walks heedlessly. As I was writing about Helen after her College Professor days, her new beloved is Marissa Brooks, who first appears in Helen at the Beach, and---spoiler alert---Marissa has inherited some of Cindy's personality. Marissa meets Cindy in Helen Versus Handel's Messiah (or maybe she doesn't; I might have cleaned up that story to reduce the number of stray characters for the reader. There are literally hundreds of characters, mainly because I was writing just to entertain myself, and it was not intended for anyone else's eyes), and the account of that meeting---as seen in the imagination of my adult self---somehow seems really plausible. But now Cindy is just part of the furniture, a very background character, and she deserves better.
A character called Michelle, a model, is reintroduced in Helen on the Run, an important and long innings in the Helen saga. I'm still trying to get this one ready to publish; if I take too much longer, nobody will ever read it, I suspect.
I have remembered that I always hated writing verse. I would supply it when it was necessary, but never voluntarily. But here, as Cindy and Helen corresponded, both of them did it in verse! I can't even imagine my mental state that could have led to such a thing. It isn't very good verse, but it . . . maybe I'll include a little of it, as I get more comfortable about revealing details about myself.
K.
