I'm still at work, finishing up the book that will, I hope, bring the Helen "saga" to completion. (By now everyone who reads these blog-posts knows that I hadn't planned to ever publish the Helen story, because it was (had been, anyway,) almost pure erotica. But without my consciously trying, I found myself writing decent prose in the Helen files, and my friends urged me to publish it, at least in small chunks.)
About half the way through the saga, Helen becomes a college professor, and her life settles into a sort of groove, where after each adventure, after she has met each interesting new person, she heads back to her nest, her house near the school at which she teaches.
While still a professor, Helen sneaks off and acts in a few movies under an assumed name, and it's that escapade that influences Helen's life quite drastically. So, if there was a central plot to the Saga, it was this fact, and its fallout, and that's what is being packed into Helen and Sharon Vuehl. If you're not desperately interested in how Helen's story works out, that enormous episode (Helen and Sharon) should suffice; you could imagine any ending you wish; it's fiction, anyway.
Many of the people Helen meets and become friends with, however, are characters whom I love; and Elly, Janet's daughter, and Tommy (Tomasina), the child of Grandma Elly's old age, both have interesting side-adventures, and I didn't want to lose them. Let's face it; I tend to publish the stories I find interesting, and not what my readers would find interesting; not because I'm mean, but because . . . I'm not really an author.
OK, it's time for a rant. A lot of young authors are trying to write what will sell. They learn how to do this in college, and some of them are very, very good at it.
Now I, too, want my writing to be read, but it is more for the sake of my pride in those depraved characters that I dreamed up (unfortunately, most of them very similar to each other! Oh, I hope nobody reads this blog-post; many of you readers will possibly be negatively influenced by my confessions here).
Meanwhile, I was weeping as I butchered the parts of the story that had to be inserted in the the Sharon Vuehl segment, and I was weeping as I read the finished product at home, because of all the darlings that I thought I had killed off. But nay; many of them live in
Helen at the Beach,
Little John Finds a Friend,
Helen and the Flowershop Girl,
Helen vs. Handel's Messiah,
and the one that I had forgotten: Helen's Eventful Summer.
To get back to my rant: I personally feel that there is a difference between the craftmanship that goes into creating a highly readable book or novel, in contrast to a piece of writing that seems to want to be written, and which is not crafted carefully at all. Admittedly, many of the most wonderful books that have been written do involve a great deal of crafting, which is so well done that there is no remaining sign of the craftmanship that has gone into it; one forgets about the art. I can never hope to write such a piece; I go along, reporting the action, trying to polish it at the sentence level, instead of taking charge of the plot lines. In literature it isn't so bad; in movies, the straining to make a movie more commercial is so . . . not good. Sometimes you think, They had to kill off character X right there, because they needed the audience to be horrified, before Y happened, and so on.
Well, you're thinking, those are the words of an author who doesn't have the guts to have anyone killed off in her story.
(Actually, I did. I had Pat Wallace---Lisa Wallace's mother---commit suicide in the back of a bus while returning from a performance of the COO. Well, she is dead shortly after Helen begins teaching at Westfield, but I don't mention it anywhere; It is present only in my handwritten manuscripts. Helen now has all Pat and Lisa's violins. Pat has a major role only in Helen Backstory: Cindy, Lisa, etc.) I had too much happening with Helen in that first year at Westfield, and I had to give up something. I also gave up Helen's first Carols with the Bands of the Armed Forces event, just because Helen had to go out to Woodford in the UK to meet Evelyn (Rain) Woodford's parents. I also gave up Helen playing in a celebrity tennis tournament in Virginia, with Sophie Cocteau!)
Well, if you're a writer, I herewith give you full permission to kill off anyone you need to, (fictionally, of course) because I really have no business giving people pointers about how to write. I leave that to the professionals. Of course, that (killing off characters) makes your story a little more theatrical; stage plays necessarily have small casts, for practical reasons. In real life, most people have more than a dozen friends, who interact with the person in meaningful and necessary ways. And author who (unlike me) wants to focus the action on a small cast has to resort to using clever tricks, such as conflating several characters into one. I suppose amalgamating is a better word.
To get back to the closing book of the series: I invariably get sidetracked when I start writing, because I feel the need to justify everything. There are so many women in the Helen story who need to be given a happy ending; they just cannot be allowed to have that ending with Helen. Helen will be a burden with so many of them; I want Helen and her woman to be independent and comfortable. I was trying to make Helen and Maryssa independent and comfortable---and they were, I think, before disaster struck. Maybe I should just have Helen killed off, and save myself a lot of trouble. As it is, I'm having trouble keeping myself from writing happy endings for people you readers have never even met! Yes; I'm hopeless.
By the way, I read that the ACLU was pioneering a two-week boycott of Facebook, to protest their complicity in the Russian propaganda onslaught against the Democrats in 2016. So I'm not visiting Facebook for at least another week. But nothing happens on Facebook for me, because nobody knows I'm on there. (I have a personal page, and I'm not visiting that, either.)
Added later: I just checked on the statistics provided by Google, and realized that there are more visits when I write political commentary on this blog, rather than when I write about my stories! So what should I do? Should I only write political commentary, or should I just settle for a half-dozen readers for each post? I'm going for the latter.
Kay
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