Helen at Ballet Camp was repaired, but I designed the headers to be in green. Smashwords hates that, apparently, and they refuse to send the book to their premium publishers (Amazon, Kobo, Nook and such places) unless I de-colorize Ballet Camp, which I'm not going to do. My goodness; what a reason to censor a book! I understand that they must have standards, but these standards seem rather arbitrary.
I also noticed problems with Lost Years: Helen and Lalitha; I repaired that, which was, in my mind, a serious episode, and it is now uploaded.
I also fixed some problems with Helen on the Run, and it is on-line. This is one of my favorite episodes; I urge you to read it! Please, please!
Helen and Sharon, unlike the other Helen and X stories, is not about Helen having an affair with Sharon. It is about a complex escapade that Helen and Marsha plan, in which Helen impersonates an entirely fictitious actress, Sharon Vuehl, and acts in several movies. The masquerade is so amazingly successful that Helen has to deal with a whole set of relationships that various people begin with Sharon, not least her costar Sita Maunder, the sister of the aforementioned Lalitha. While Helen lays the Sharon escapade to rest fairly quickly, the ghost of Sharon keeps popping up to haunt Helen long afterwards. Only Marsha, Lorna, Maryssa and eventually Sita, know about the masquerade.
Then, after many awful incidents that take place to hurt and injure Helen, she has a relapse of her brain tumor, and loses her memory, which means that she does not recall ever having been Sharon.
Helen and Sharon is the account of all this, in sort of Novel Form, because I despair of actually writing up the Helen story in a nice rounded form. The Sharon theme is actually the main plot line of the story, so after this sub-project is completed, I'm going to call it quits. In theory, I can replace the brief descriptions in each chapter of Sharon with the entire text of where it has been taken from, because I'm trying to strip out all the non-Sharon detail from them, because in a Sharon-centric universe, all this other material would seem irrelevant.
I also started work on the completion of the Helen story. It is called Helen's Concerto. Some of the most satisfying parts of Helen that I have written have to do with Helen's life while at Westfield, the college where she goes to teach. (Readers will only know about the school from occasional references in Helen at the Beach, and Helen and the Flowershop Girl.)
One of the most interesting characters that enter the story in those years, the three years preceding Helen's meeting with Maryssa, is Isolde Wells, a very young violinist and multi-talented instrumentalist from England. Isolde visits the US, and plays several concertos with the Impromptu Ensemble and Chorus. Of course, Maryssa, the daughter of Diane Brooks, and Sita, the sister of Lalitha, are also major characters.
Well, I wanted to whine about the difficulty of extracting a thread from a larger work, but I'm running out of whining steam. A lot of the chapters in Sharon are a little dull, because the excitement often comes from minor characters, which I try to remove. I should say tried to remove, because the book is now complete, and uploaded, and has evidently not made a single sale! Well, one reason is that the cover is not very sexy, and another reason is that it isn't free! (With free books, I don't really know whether anyone has actually read it, though it is reported as a sale by Smashwords. I suppose I could re-price it at $0.99, which is their minimum price.) I can't do a sexy cover, because I can't afford professional artwork, nor can I afford (yet) digital artistic production equipment!
Kay
No comments:
Post a Comment