Excavation2! Helen Archeology

To continue the previous post about Helen manuscripts I have unearthed:  I have to say that finding them is one thing, but going through them is quite another!

So far I have found several threads (I'll put the number here when I finish counting them):

1. The story of 'Helen's' Early Music Festival, a TV event that Helen was responsible for at the end of her Freshman Year.
2. Helen's involvement with the world-famous tennis coach, Gary.  This story, too, is interwoven with a story of a woman called Inez, from Argentina, who invites Helen to her home, and some tense adventures there; stories of Helen's work as a photographer for a men's magazine; Stories of Helen's appearance as a nude dancer at a unusual nightclub in remote Florida, and her long affair with the star of that troupe, Leila.
3. The details of Helen's meeting with Lisa Wallace.  Lisa is a high-school student, the daughter of the President of Helen's undergraduate college, and of Pat Wallace, who gave Helen her first violin, a priceless 17th-century unconverted violin with a Baroque bow.  This story, too, is interwoven with how Helen met Cindy O'Shaughnessy, and how Helen became a singer of Lyric Opera, through singing in The Magic Flute, and The Marriage of Figaro.  This is also the story of how Helen discovered her mother's family, the Johnsons, including her cousins Ingrid, Marika, and Heikki, who appear off and on in numerous stories, most importantly in Helen On the Run.
4. The story of Janet's brief second marriage to Scott Forrester, a pastor in North Carolina.
5. Helen's encounter with a teenager called Michelle Smith, who appears in Helen On the Run as a grown-up woman.  The two Michelles have rather different personalities, and if I publish the story of the youthful Michelle, (which isn't very interesting), I'll have to rewrite it quite heavily.
6. The story of Helen's Christmas Special a few years later.
7. The details of the account contained in Helen at Ballet Camp.  This story is mixed in with the story of Helen's Tennis Camp in the Canada wilds, in a reserve owned by Sylvia Tedesco (also known as "Nurse", since she is the nurse for the tennis camp, in addition to being the owner),  Helen's year-long stay with Sylvia, Helen's pregnancy with twins, who were subsequently stillborn, and Helen's affair with Marsha Moore, the Hollywood movie star.  (BTW, if you find the name Sylvia familiar, it is also the name of Helen's mother, now dead for about 4 years.)  This is also where Helen meets Dr. Nadia Van Der Wert, who ends up being Helen's academic advisor for a number of years, and is hired together with Helen at her job as a professor, before she gives that up.

I enjoyed re-reading the Lisa Wallace / Cindy O'Shaughnessy story so much, I'm getting it ready to publish it independently.  I decided at one time to number the stories in sequence, but at that time everything before Ballet Camp seemed so giddy and un-salvageable that I numbered Ballet Camp 0, in the Helen sequence.  Helen and Lalitha--The Lost Years comes in at 1, and Helen On the Run--The Lost Years at 2, and so on.  So this "prequel" will have to be given a negative number, or just a name, and the tag Helen BackStory.  So this one would be Helen BackStory--Lisa, Cindy, and the Violin.

Obviously, it is pretty annoying to have 25 pounds of stapled manuscript lying around, so once I was able to sort a number of them into contiguous pages, I unstapled them, and scanned them into my computer (and, I think, I should also upload them to the Cloud, somehow.  That's going to cost money . . .).  The trick is to scan them into a form which makes them easy to read, but not take up a lot of space on my hard drive.  So far, I've found a way that results in about 400 Kb a page, which is satisfactory.  (Of course, once I type them in, they'll be just a few Kb in size.  I should check out exactly how much . . .)

It is definitely easier to type the material in while looking at a page of manuscript, than switching back and forth between a photo viewer and the word-processor!  But typists must do something similar, so why not me?  Now if I find software online that can convert handwritten notes to text, I'm going to be so annoyed . . . and also happy, because the bit I have transcribed is just a drop in the ocean.

I did it, and the size of a page was 11Kb!  That just shows you how economical ASCII coding is, and HTML.  That was really three pages, because one page of manuscript converts to about 3 pages of HTML.

Kay