Another Mystery Model

Saturday, December 21, 2019

Updates On "Prisoner!", and "Lalitha".

Well, first of all, I made The Lost Years:  Helen & Lalitha  a free download, and then I made Prisoner no longer free, but priced at 99 cents.  (I think it is one of my best stories, and easily worth more than the price I've set.  But stories that sell on Smashwords are, I believe, priced very low, and that's what readers are looking for.)
Immediately, of course, Prisoner stopped selling; in fact nothing has sold for the last few days!  The message is clear: I may give away my stories, but I may not try to sell them.  (On the other hand, there are a few steady sales on Apple Books, and Barnes and Noble, for which I'm grateful.)
Lalitha, meanwhile, priced to move as a free download, has not sold a single copy, which is frustrating for me.  I think that story, which is not an essential part of the Sharon story, except for establishing essential background for the character Sita, is nevertheless a lovely, romantic story on its own, with several fascinating characters, even though they're essentially adults.
Prisoner, which was downloaded enthusiastically, is certainly a great story, but it is set in a fantasy universe, and the characters are in their late teens.  I wonder whether that's the secret of the popularity of Prisoner?
Meanwhile, I commissioned an artist to supply for me a cover for Lalitha, and she delivered a few hours ago.  The main illustration for the cover is shown here.  It depicts the unofficial 'wedding' where Helen and Lalitha are informally married according to a Hindu rite.  I'm pleased with how Lalitha has been drawn, but in the story Helen has been a worker in housing construction, something which I did not make clear to the artist.  Still, I do see Helen and Lalitha in the artwork, and I think it is just perfect.  Whether it will help to make the book more attractive, I cannot say!
Kay

Wednesday, December 11, 2019

"Prisoner!", and Other Stories

My story Prisoner! is now being given away for free on Smashwords, and all the other books are being sold for 99c or a little more; as a result, only Prisoner is selling!  I'm a little annoyed, and I'm also not annoyed; it's complicated.
Prisoner! is an interesting story, because of the voice of the narration.  In a nod to the historical flavor of the story--not that it is historical, or even fictionalized history--it has a sort of dispassionate, matter-of-fact tone to the narration; perhaps this works really well.  The emotional relationships emerge well into the story, and there is a sort of objective flavor to most of the sex that is there.  (There is very little graphic sex.)  The main character is essentially a female security guard of the bronze age, who develops feelings for the princess whom she is assigned to guard.
If any of my blog readers have read it already, you will know the story, those of you who have not read it, well, what can I say?  It is as well written as any of the other stories, and better-written than most, really.  And, of course, it is being given away at the moment: 2019.  In fact, it has been given away for most of this year.  Unfortunately, none of the other books are like it; the story whose tone comes closest is Alexandra, which is set at a time when the civilization is like the late 19th century / early 20th century.  It is in the distant future, but technology has regressed, and so scientific knowledge is somewhat primitive.  However, Alexandra was an early effort, and I was not as experienced when I was writing it.
There is another story set in a bronze-age universe: Jana.  It isn't ready for publication, but I had put up episodes from it on this very blog; the last few episodes were mere summaries of the story.
Well, it seems common sense to change my strategy, and do two things: (1) charge for Prisoner, since if its sales take a dive, it will have no implications for the sales of any of the other books; (2) select another loss-leader, e.g. Helen at Ballet Camp, or Helen and LalithaBallet Camp is a sort of goofy piece of writing!  It is unlikely to lead anyone to follow it up with reading any of the other Helen stories.  Helen and Lalitha, in contrast, is a very strong story, with characters who are very real to me, and three-dimensional.
You know, literary coaches are always telling inexperienced writers to cut the fat in their writing.  Take out anything that isn't absolutely necessary.  Kill any inessential characters, and so on.  Well, I did this for Lalitha, and you know what happened?  I killed the vitality from the thing.  The interaction between Helen and Lalitha, which was one of the greatest events in Helen's life, and in Lalitha's life as well, which cast an immensely long shadow on their histories, just stands there, like a ruined castle.
In India, Helen fails to do anything consequential to prevent Lalitha's marriage to someone she does not love; in fact the ten years Helen spends in India (which is a little implausible, because certainly someone in Helen's family would have tried to find out where she was) is totally wasted; it accomplishes absolutely nothing.  Well, life is like that; some years only succeed in making you older!  (That's certainly true for the past three years of my life.)  On the other hand, Helen does become fluent in one Indian dialect, but that fact never has any bearing on what happens to Helen.
I'm not very motivated at the moment, so I'll get around to changing the pricing on Prisoner!  and Lalitha sometime, possible next week.  Because of the prices I have chosen: 99 cents or less, I cannot put these books into the promotional plans that Smashwords sets up for the Holiday Season.
Well, happy holidays anyway!  I strongly believe in enjoying holidays to the fullest, even if you don't believe in any of the mythology!  Don't let the bastards grind you down!  Broadcast love to everyone, even those rotten conservatives!  Nobody is at their best when they've got their backs to the wall.
Love,
Kay

Tuesday, November 26, 2019

What Does Sharon Vuehl Look Like? New Artwork

One of the things I now enjoy the most about publishing an e-book on the Internet, is creating cover art for the books, with the help of young artists on DeviantArt, a website and an organization that supports artists.
Helen & Sharon is a book that recounts the story of how Helen starred in several hit movies masquerading as a new young talent, Sharon Vuehl.
When I first published H & S, I just threw together a cover picture depicting an Amazon (from a sculpture), as well as a picture of the goddess Saraswati (also from a sculpture), since Sharon Vuehl's co-star, Sita Maunder, was a devout believer in the goddess.
It was well past time to replace this placeholder with an appropriate piece of cover art, and when the artist whose work I prefer announced that she had some free time, I described what I wanted.  She had it ready within a couple of weeks (which is very fast indeed), and here it is:

What's going on here?
On the left we have Helen, perhaps a few months after her little boy James was born, dressed for a concert, holding a baton.  Presumably she is about to conduct the performance of an orchestral work.
On the right, we have a depiction of Sharon Vuehl in her role of Merit, the principal character in the most high-grossing movie in which Sharon starred, namely Merit and the Princess.  Merit is a high-born young woman in a society in which the coming-of-age ritual has the girl going on an adventure, leading a team of women warriors.  Merit and her band are skilled fighters, and in the picture, Merit is in a fighting crouch, ready to take on some antagonist that is not visible to us.
According to the story, Helen secretly trains and exercises, to build muscle, and her disguise involves straightening her curly blonde hair, and having it colored red.  Sharon Vuehl, when she goes into the studio, looks both more muscular, and younger than Helen, and has blue eyes and red hair.
The artist was instructed to make the two figures plausibly the same woman, except for the blue eyes and the musculature.  We would expect that Helen's disguise made it impossible to recognize Sharon as being Helen, whereas in the artwork, Helen and Sharon had to look convincingly the same person.

Kay Hemlock Brown

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

A Drastic Change: Charging for All Books

Just decided to charge (more or less) a flat rate for each of my stories on Smashwords: $0.99.

The reason for this is to ensure that only one title is available for free; this way I have a better idea whether people actually read the books, and if so, which ones.  My basic assumption is that people who pay for a title are more likely to actually read it, in contrast to those who download a title at no cost!

I'm not sure whether this decision affects people unduly; I doubt whether there is anyone at all who has read all the titles --18 of them--that I have put up on Smashwords, or who was planning to obtain and read all of them.  Well, until now, most of them would have been free, except for maybe two or three.  From now on, they would cost around a dollar each, and if you think about it, it isn't too outrageous to get 18 books for a little over $20!

If there is anyone who was planning to buy a number of my stories (wow; that would really knock my socks off) and has been put in the position of actually having to shell out big money for them, please contact me with a good sob story, and I'll work on arranging for you to have the books you desire for free!

By the way, Prisoner! is still available for free, for no good reason.  I just want to see all the sales statistics flatline, except for Prisoner!, which would perversely cheer me up.

Kay

Friday, October 25, 2019

Baffled In Pennsylvania

I'm not sure what I did on August 29th, but I sold 44 books that day.  I'm not overjoyed only because most of the books were being offered for free, but it is certainly nice to see that there is some sort of interest in the books!
Here is a capture of the graph that shows how many of each title was downloaded each day; it is a little bit tricky trying to figure out which date goes with a particular point on the graph.

This is a 'stacked' line graph, which means that the number of books sold for a given title is color-coded, and stacked on top of the graph point for the book below it.  For instance, the graph (dark blue) that lies under the whole lot corresponds to Helen at the Beach, presumably because it has the most 'sales' overall.  Above it is the graph for Helen's Concerto, and so on, all the way to Helen Versus Handels's Messiah. 
Forgive me for trying to explain a graph, to explain which I have no special training, but which everyone really ought to know how to read!  For example, on the right, we see a blown-up detail of the graph shown above, of which one 'peak' is shown, marked with an 'X'.  That corresponds to October 17th.  Only 7 different titles were downloaded that day: one each of Helen at the Beach, Helen's Concerto, Jane, Jane the Early Years, Helen Backstory: Lisa, Cindy, etc.; Helen and the Flowershop Girl, and Alexandra.  On other dates, multiple copies of certain titles were downloaded, e.g. 9 copies of Beach on August 27th.
I know you folks are not too concerned about these 'sales', but I like to see these books 'flying off the shelves,' or rather, burning up the Internet!
When I'm not careful, I feel a certain pride in having written so many titles back when I was still teaching a full load!  It isn't easy to write fiction while preparing for classes at the same time; obviously, I wasn't doing either the writing or the preparing very well!  (Neither one, actually.)  Also, I remember that most of the stories are extracted from a single story: Helen, and published some ten years later, so now you know that your blogger is not such a furious writer as it might have appeared at first.
Kay

P.S.: Actually, using this form of graph to represent sales is somewhat misleading.  They should use a stacked bar graph, which uses rectangular bars.  Then the total area of, for example, the dark blue rectangles would represent the total sales for the period.  With these zig-zag graphs, this does not happen, though the graph looks attractive.  (This is the problem with putting a graphic designer in charge of a data project.)

[Added Later:]
I found out that on June 27th, I had sold a total of 49 books!  The most number of copies was of Helen at the Beach.  The second-most-downloaded title was Helen's Concerto.  Now, of these two, the popularity of the latter is easy to explain; I had been talking about it for weeks before that date, and I suppose some readers had been waiting for the book to come out.  But for Beach, I have no explanation, certainly nothing that I did.  Must go through the blog and see.  I suspect that there is some word-of-mouth advertising going on.

Monday, October 14, 2019

Touching Base: News About Galactic Voyager, Plus Miscellaneous Thoughts

I find it difficult to edit my stories, which is something I really need to do.  I decided to try a new method, namely to read the story as I usually do: on a e-reader, and note down the points that need editing with bookmarks.  I'm sure I have thought about doing this often, but I'm really doing it for the first time.
I just fixed about a dozen minor details, and uploaded the new manuscript to Smashwords.   If any one of my readers is reading this, and has not finished reading, please feel free to hop over to the publisher's website, and get yourself a new improved version, with fabric softener and added Vitamin C.
There are only a couple of full-length stories (novels—I still feel bashful to describe them as novels, though they just can't be anything else) of which I'm really proud.  I'm fairly proud of the whole lot, but these are serious contributions to these genres of literature:
Alexandra, a long story with characters I think are truly admirable and attractive, and with human failings that are entirely forgivable;
Music On The Galactic Voyager, a truly awesome (stop me!) science fiction story.  The science in this one is not close to being magic, as many sci-fi stories become; it is just 20th-century science.  (Ultra-futuristic sci-fi is boring.  And you may quote me.  I mean, anything can happen, and the author can shrug and say: it's future science, kiddos.  Yeah, right.  This is my quarrel with Japanese sci-fi fantasies.)
A couple more are waiting in the wings: Jane, for instance, which really needs to be re-written to have a satisfactory ending; Prisoner, which had a huge following at one time, and Helen, of course.  But these are all projects that are still under construction, though I have recklessly thrown them into publication.  Helen's Concerto only needs polishing up; I'm writing a front-end to Helen & Sharon, after which I will tidy up and slim down Helen & Sharon.  At that point, the trilogy: Helen at Westfield, Helen & Sharon, and Helen's Concerto will be a good piece of writing.  At the moment, there are too many flaws in the Helen saga, though in its large plan, it is already complete.
Kay Hemlock Brown

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

General Griping About Anything But Politics

Greetings, readers!
As you know, I'm a reclusive sort of person, with few friends (and few acquaintances, too, for that matter, outside those I used to know at work).  As a result, I have no outlet for my griping, so you're it!  This is admittedly dangerous, because a little bit of my griping has to do with the writing, Helen, etc., and the last thing I want to do is to alienate you folks, who I assume are the ones who most of all appreciate my writing!
The first, and most interesting, problem I have is with my nom de plumeKay Hemlock Brown is not my real name, since I do not want it known that I am an author, even if my writing is really quite sterilized, compared to the raw form in which it sat in my computer.  Secondly, I began writing a few years ago--actually a couple of decades ago--when alternate preferences were not as widely accepted as they are now, and some of the hangups I had with being identified with those alternate preferences are now stuck in my mind well and truly.  Lastly, I think I have a tiny bit of name recognition, and there's no way I can get anyone to pick up a book of mine under any name except Kay Hemlock Brown.  Remember: it used to be just Kay Brown, but I could never find my stuff, on Barnes and Noble, or anywhere else, because of all the other Kay Browns who cluttered up my search results.
Anyway, because Smashwords got a nasty letter from the Internal Revenue Service, saying that they could not find a decent Social Security Number associated with my pen-name, and that Smashwords is forbidden to send me any money without a good SSN.  I had not given them my actual SSN, because of my desperation to remain anonymous, even to Smashwords, who could turn into blabbermouths any minute.  So, from the time my paycheck was frozen at the level of $23.26 (Tee hee!  I don't earn very much at this racket!) I have been offering the books for FREE.  Those of you who have gone to the Smashwords website already know this, of course.
There is a way around this problem, I believe.  I have to create a formal business, and the Federal Government will assign a SSN to that business, which I can then give the IRS, who will gather taxes on my $23.26 with great delight, to which they are perfectly welcome.  I do not write these books for the income, though pretty soon I might find the additional income very useful indeed.
One reason I want to charge a nominal amount for the books is to find how many of the books are actually being read.  I suspect that people obtain free books, and never read more than a couple of pages!
I went through and figured out how many books had been actually sold, and it is a grand total of 631.  If you're among those who actually shelled out cash for my books, I am sincerely grateful.  I'm even more grateful if you read the book, or books!  I wish there were some way to allow you to tell me your thoughts.  I mean, there is; you can write to me privately, via this Blog, I'm pretty sure.
There were far more downloads of samples : a total of 8363.  I have been having stories published for seven years (I counted), and even that statistic is not impressive for such a long stretch of time.
I know the reason, and I have blogged about it before.  The net I cast is too narrow.  You have to be interested in classical music, and within classical music, early and Baroque music;  you have to be interested in violin; you have to be interested in soprano vocalist, and out-of-control lesbian ones; you have to be interested in kids; you get the idea.  If you're interested in all these things, I would probably really like to meet you!  Just kidding; I'm a people person only in my mind; I purge myself of all my people fascination by all this writing, and then avoid people as hard as I can.

Helen at Westfield
My latest project is a story called Helen at Westfield, which describes the first year or so after Helen starts teaching at Westfield, a fictitious college in the imaginary wilds of northwestern Pennsylvania.
So many things happen to Helen during this period that it is impossible to fit all of them into the periods I have allotted to them.  This happens because the school year is a quite rigid time-frame; various things have to happen: tests, Homecoming, Thanksgiving, and so on, and all Helen's excitement has to happen around these landmark events.  (I think I'm succeeding, but I'm not sure.)  What I have to do is--I thought--just shuffle the material I already had, maybe re-sequencing it a little, and there you go!
For this purpose, I think I have the ideal tool: a piece of software about which I have written before--Scrivener.  This is a program like a cross between PowerPoint and Word, in that you have a window on the left that looks like the PPt outline pane.  (Or even the Index Pane of Acrobat Reader.)  Then, you write your story in little packets, and each packet becomes an independent file.  It is given a name, and the Outline is a list of all these little files, which are actually called Texts.
When you're finished, and you want to combine the whole lot into a single continuous document, you tell Scrivener to compile.  You also tell it into what form you want it compiled: pdf, text, docx, ebook, html, etc.
This is a total winner, for most cases.  However, in my case, I need to rewrite each lump of the story, to make it fit into the time-frame!
Anyway, it is both less fun, and more fun, to do this than it might seem from my description!  Mostly because this part of the story is about some of the most beloved of my characters: Sophie, Nadia (an elderly Belgian professor), the kids: Gena, Erin, Alison and James; the kids at the college (who are a lot less annoying than some undergraduates I have met), and not least, Rain--Lady Evelyn Woodford--and her parents; and Lorna Shapiro.
Well!  Now to get started!
Kay

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

What's Love Got To Do With It, Anyway?

I recently got to read an article on Marianne Williamson, written by an author with the unlikely name of Taffy, who had been assigned to cover the candidate by the NYTimes.

At the debates, Ms. Williamson seemed quite plausible and attractive, but I could not get my head around her chosen profession of being, essentially, a motivational speaker.  Having read the article (please read; it is a slight possibility that I might have misunderstood some of the content there, and because I'm writing this more than a couple of weeks after reading it, I might have forgotten some things, too) I understand Ms. Williamson a lot better.  At the close of the first debate, Ms. Williamson said that she wanted to counter Donald Trump's basis for his political strategy, namely the harnessing of hate, with the power of love.  That statement no longer seems to come out of left field.

The Left-Field-ness of the statement was not really anything to do with its reasonability, in terms of the bare meanings of the words.  Trump certainly has capitalized on unharnessed feelings of hate and frustration in a large number of people, and the frustration of many conservatives among the Republicans at being unable to push forward their agenda, namely to make the USA a little more like it must have been in the Fifties.  All right, a lot more.  This is the subtext of the MAGA caps.  It is not about whether America was great in any objective sense; it merely meant that many conservatives remember it as being great.  They long for their youth, the things that made life in the USA so wonderful.  Of course, different people remember different things as being what made life wonderful!  There was a lot of money; taxes were (sometimes) lower; there wasn't this much pressure to do well in school; movies were better; you get the idea.  (No doubt, some folks think that the uptight schoolmarms among the Democrats were responsible for raining on their parades.  No making fun of minorities and women . . . Women took a sexist joke with a smile, in the old days, didn't they?)

But Love?  What is this?  Flower power all over again?

Whether or not Marianne Williamson finds a place in the Administration of 2021, we should take her basic idea seriously.  Without something like love, the future is very bleak.

A rose by any other name
What Sister Marianne calls love has been with us all along, by other names.

The chief among these is respect.  This word has many uses, some of them very different from each other.  I'm using it in the sense of treating everyone as though they're human; as though they have the same rights as we ourselves.  Technically, of course, an illegal immigrant has very few legal rights; but they do have some rights by law, no matter how much certain people hate that fact, and even some of us may hate that fact.  In many countries, foreigners are viewed with distaste and dislike, and sometimes with hostility.  Marianne advocates a return to respect.  And I do, too.  (As an author, and perhaps too unrealistically, I write stories in which everyone is respectful.)

There are other words: kindness, hospitality, generosity, patience.  They all mean love.  They're all sadly lacking in the way this administration, and Republicans in the government, have been conducting themselves.

And there are Republicans outside the government who are deeply unhappy about this.  It is difficult to identify with a party that wants to advance its goals by abandoning all these characteristics of loving and decent people.

Marianne Thinks The Left is Mean
If you Google an article in the New Yorker about Marianne's feelings about her candidacy, you will read that Marianne is shocked and frustrated with others in the left wing of the Democratic Party.

The younger folk among the Democrats, who tend to identify strongly with the Left Wing of the party, are impatient.  The older Left Wingers are also impatient, because they feel that its going to take hard steps to push back on the Alt Right, and warm fuzzy approaches are going to distract and delay the party.  Many factors are pushing them towards cynicism: the feeling of urgency in those who are fearful of Climate Change; the steady drift of economic (and political) power to be concentrated among the richest Americans; the gradual erosion of the power of Congress, and the gradual increase in the power of the Presidency and the Senate.  The escalating chaos among foreign governments that were formerly allies of the US.  The breakdown of international economic agreements.  The confusion within the Department of Justice, and the other security agencies.  The Republicans are truly bent on dismantling the government, and the Left wants to put a stop to it quickly.  We can imagine that, in their hurry, they act viciously against anyone, even other Democrats, who appear to stand in their way.

This is the sort of thing that the Democratic leadership mistakenly did during the 2016 elections, and that did not end well.  Unfortunately, whether we have time for it or whether we do not, these hasty Left-Wingers must learn through experience just how much decency they can sacrifice in order to further their progressive agenda.  In my considered opinion, they cannot sacrifice decency--or Love, if you prefer--at all.   You could sacrifice religion; in fact, the government must be run without reference to any particular religious system.  But you can't sacrifice love.  Trump sacrificed love, but nominally embraced Christianity.  The Church--perhaps I should say churches--responded very enthusiastically, hoping that in the long term, conditions favorable to organized religion will emerge.  That may well happen; as many of us suspect, organized religion is almost the opposite of what most religious leaders have taught.

Kay

Monday, July 29, 2019

Authors, Writing, George R.R. Martin, and Sarah J. Maas

I recently read that George R. R. Martin (who wrote Game of Thrones) described himself as a writer of the Gardener Type.  He considers that there are two sorts of writers, the Architects, and the Gardeners, and that he belongs to the latter category.
All right!   I was struggling to describe how I wrote, and this is the perfect description!
I wrote that what I do is create a character, and then other characters, and follow them around, seeing what they do, and reporting on the action!  Read the article at the link above, to see why he calls J. K. Rowling an architect.
Gardeners, in contrast,
". . . dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it," [Martin] told the Guardian. "They kind of know what seed it is, they know if [they] planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows."
Gosh.  I have to agree that his is a more poetic description of a procedure that is ultimately essentially the one I follow.  And this is given as the reason why it takes so long for stories to get completed.  When Martin says that he has to wait to see how the tree grows, because of the way his "seed" has been constructed, there are some characteristics that are built-in.  The circumstances of course cannot be built-in.
In the interests of complete disclosure, I have to reveal that I have not read a single book of Mr. Martin's; nor have I watched any of the TV episodes (or movies, or whatever).

Meanwhile, I was introduced to a writer called Sarah J. Maas, who has an enormous following.  She says she started writing in high school, and kept writing all through college, until her first novel: Throne of Glass, was published, and became a blockbuster.  (My antivirus says this is not a safe link; I'm not sure what the problem is.)
The title reveals how much George RR Martin has been an influence on Sarah J. Maas's generation.  But generally speaking, the feudal world is attractive to romantic souls, because of the mystique of the nobles and royals.  To authors, the powers of discretion, the ability to act without being hindered, those are also attractive, because otherwise the hero gets stymied by rules and regulations and lack of funds at every turn.
There is a crazy series of books about a young hero named Artemis Fowl, whose author goes in a different direction: the books are set in the present day, but the hero is impossibly rich, and his mother is impossibly easy to trick into letting him having his way!  (My problem with the hero's first name is that it is the name of a female, and the last name is sort of bird-like.)

Alexandra
One of the few stories I wrote about a queen is Alexandra.  It is sort of very unimaginative steam-punk; in fact, when I started writing the story, I did not even know of the existence of the genre.  (Apparently I was writing in a genre called Victorian—which might need an extra word in front, to distinguish it from actual Victorian.)
Spoiler alert: I must have been so unhappy with the fact that I had selected a queen as my protagonist that I made circumstances make her almost powerless.  As a result, the plot becomes almost bafflingly interesting; I could not have consciously dreamed up that plot if I had written in the architectural style, as GRR Martin describes.  That's just the first half of Alexandra.  The second half is pure self-gratification, on my part.  Well, read it; it's completely free, as of date of writing.

Prisoner!
This one is set in an alternate universe, in a late Bronze Age.  (Steel had not been discovered yet.  Many great romances are set just at the period when steel weapons are first discovered, and magical properties are attributed to steel swords, for instance.)  Anyway, the main protagonist, Maia, is a young girl taken prisoner in a war, and brought back (with hundreds of other slaves) with the conquering army.  She is taken to be the personal slave of one of the two royal princesses, and a tortured romance develops between Maia and her mistress.  There are some particularly fantastic elements to this story, which I will not disclose at this point.

The other stories are set in the present, or at least the late Eighties, before cellphones were common.  (Cellphones change the conditions of the stories in confusing ways.
An interesting feature of fantasy novels is the fact that many successful novels of this kind end up being seriesSome authors, perhaps, hope that their story will be adapted into a television series, or perhaps into movies.  I think, rather, that because these fantasy stories require a certain amount of work in creating the Worlds in which they take place; once that World is constructed, it seems a terrible waste to set only a single story in it.  This is true of J. K. Rowling's World of Harry Potter;  Tolkien's World of Middle Earth; the World of Star Wars; the World of Game of Thrones—it probably has some name; the World of Star Trek, and so on.  Even Sarah J. Maas's World has given rise to close to a score of books.  Philip Pullman's World of His Dark Materials is particularly interesting, because it is a many-worlds parallel worlds world, where you can cut an opening from one world into another.  So is S.J.Maas's World, and many other fantasy Worlds, but unlike in these other Worlds, a lot of the action (of Golden Compass / Dark Materials) takes place in several of the alternative worlds in Pullman's fantasy, which begins with The Golden Compass.  I did not mean to leave out Discworld, in which the stories of Terry Pratchett take place.  And how could I forget?: PERN, the World of the Dragon stories of Anne mcCaffrey, and Darkover, the World of the Darkover novels of Marion Zimmer Bradley.
Though GRR Martin describes the seed he plants in very general terms, I have confessed that the seed I plant is a set of interesting characters.  I'm not sure how much detail goes into the characters who are parts of Martin's seed, but the character of Helen, for instance, in Helen stories, is based on a fantasy character whom I imagined long ago, when I was day-dreaming, as a sort of imaginary friend, or an imaginary person I wanted to be.  All the things Helen could do were all the things I wanted to do.  I could actually do some of those things, and most of them pretty poorly, but Helen could do them beautifully.  I can flop around in the water, but Helen can swim for miles without tiring.  I can't dance at all, but Helen can dance like an angel.   So that sort of shows you why Helen is the way she is.  I find it difficult to resist temptation; Helen finds it impossible!  (At the outset.)
Unlike me, Helen is an awesome teacher!

[By the way, I have started a story about a middle-aged English college professor approaching burnout, confused by a couple of relationships with other women which are becoming alarmingly intimate.  So far, it's gotlet me go look—32,000 words, and it is all about relationships and feelings.  This is about the point at which a plot will have to rear its ugly head… ]
This was not intended to be very insightful or very long; I just wanted to mention Sarah J. Maas, in case I had more insights about her in the future.  I have finished the story Throne of Glass, and I have several more books by her from the local library, which I must either read, or give back promptly.  The main protagonist, Celaena, is very young: 18 or so, and there are two heroes that she is drawn to, and who are attracted to her.  The author is, even at the end of the story, keeping her options open, which annoyed me!  Also, the dialog is snappy in the style of present-day speech—which is what we got in Star Wars, if you think about it; "I've got a bad feeling about this..." etc—which doesn't work for a story in a feudal environment.  But I get the feeling that the non-snappy dialog in my stories probably turns away a lot of young readers.  Well, that's all for now, folks.
Addendum: I am at about the quarter point of another story titled Heir of Fire in Sarah J. Maas's Throne of Glass cycle.  I must say that the writing in this story is many steps superior to that in Throne of Glass.  [I apologize for the critical tone of that remark, but this is my blog, and I can venture opinions about other authors, even those who have plotting skills greatly superior to mine!!]
This is where J.R.R. Tolkien, and Richard Wagner, and even J.K.Rowling have been such a great influence on us.  The names of the characters simply must be convincing, and they must be cleverly chosen to convey implications about rank, and origin, and role.  In the case of Rowling and the Wizarding World, Rowling simply gives her characters funny names, like Mundungus Fletcher, which are quite unjustified, but she gets away with it because—who knows the meaning of Wizarding traditions, anyway?  But Ms. Maas has cleverly latched on to the cultural peculiarity of Elves and their ilk, that they often have many names.  So a poorly chosen name can be quickly replaced by something more appropriate, when the character is revealed to be, well, something unusual or special.  In principle, the name of the character could be changed numerous times, as a sequence of stunning revelations about him or her are made!  (We have George Lucas doing the same thing with Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader.)
I think I can trace at least one idea that seems current in present-day teen mythology back to Golden Compass.  In that story, Pullman has Witches, a hidden race of women, who have certain magical powers.  Then, I began to see artwork on DeviantArt of sweet-faced, shapely-limbed women with ugly, jagged metal teeth!  Now I'm reading about just such a race of witches—jagged metal teeth and all—in S.J.Maas's book.  So either the artwork I'm seeing was inspired by Ms. Maas's stories—which is quite possible; her publishers and agents have worked furiously to make her a major phenomenon—and the Manga folk have pounced on the idea of witches, and somewhere along the line, the jagged metal teeth have popped into the soup; or perhaps the path of the idea is some variation of that one.  I am amazed at the alacrity with which Japanese fantasy writers and artists grab the ideas in any fantasy fiction, reduce the ideas in it into small idea atoms, and cannibalize them immediately!  It is a sort of reverse-engineering approach to literary invention.
Kay

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

A Manga Story

I recently began reading an adult manga story.  It was fascinating, and now it's got me thinking about writing something similar.  But of course, I'm not going to make it a graphic novel; that would be weird.

The story is a simple encounter of a young girl, still in school, and a female grad student.  They meet on the commuter train, and the younger one finds herself being drawn to the older, basically wanting to see her every day at the same time, and trying to attract her attention.

In our culture, this would be described crudely as 'stalking', a very derogatory word for something that is perfectly natural, and in my opinion, harmless.

After a couple of weeks, the older girl drops a book, which the younger one hurries to pick up, and they get to talking, and the older girl invites the younger one to her apartment, and very gradually they indicate to each other that they are attracted to each other.  It is the very gradual pace of the story that I find most romantic!

After they have done this for a couple of days, they kiss.  Both of them are thrown off balance by the kiss, and they part, planning to meet the next day.  The next day, they kiss again, and then their clothes come off, and it gets very heated.  At this point, the artwork goes off the rails; in his (or her) eagerness to depict the intense intimacy of the two girls, the artist resorts to various cliches, which lead me to believe that it is a boy (or a guy, anyway; hopefully even an adult male will be a little less ignorant about sexual procedures!) and both girls have an intense emotional response to what they're doing.

Over the next few days, there are other issues that come up: jealousy, curiosity from classmates, embarrassment due to various events, all sorts of interesting episodes.

It has been a great experience, but I wish I had some creative input to it.

KHB

Sunday, July 7, 2019

More About Helen's Concerto

Since this is about Helen, the series, I should post this update on my companion blog, Helen.  I'm going to do it there, and when I'm done, I'll make a link to it.  As soon as I can, I'll take the "Rated R" filter off; I don't know how to do it yet!

More about Helen's Concerto.

KHB

Wednesday, June 26, 2019

The Fantasy Universe, and DeviantArt

For those who actually like to read my books: they're completely free for a month, as far as I can tell.  Smashwords is having a promotional period, where they are giving the books away (books from cooperating authors, anyway).  Disclaimer: just a very few books are still not free, I observed just a moment ago.

Anyway, it has been an education being on the DeviantArt website.  (I did not insert an exclamation point, in case it was interpreted as a wink and a nod; the Deviants —as they call themselves—above all, take themselves very seriously indeed.  Those who become disillusioned with the site and the system seem to leave quite promptly, and then, as often as not, rejoin, because they miss the site!)
To really understand what is going on, you only need to visit it.  The flavor of the site is different if you use your phone than if you use a desktop; in either case, you can look at thousands of images of artwork, almost all original art, though a few—a very small minority—are reprocessed images from the Web.  You will find a few poems, a few short stories, but the vast majority of images are original art.
The genres of the graphic art on the site form an interesting study.  They flow from any of (1):Anime-Manga type images, or from the video game universe; (2) Fan-Art; this means art produced by young artists (most of them are in their teens and twenties) as homage to movies and movie heroes; for instance there are images of Captain Marvel, and Wonder Woman, and even some art showing them together, and interacting in various ways; (3) Fantasy art based on fantasy literature, which is, in turn, based loosely on Anime legends, or great modifications of Irish, Norse, German, and French (and sometimes Chinese, Korean and Japanese, and even African) Gothic stories and legends.
The techniques, or the media used, are also an interesting study.  There is (A) Anime-style art.  This is a sub-genre of ordinary animation art, but it has a lot of convention, borrowed from Japanese animation.  Instead of a continuous spectrum of emotions that are depicted on the faces of the characters, there appears to be (and I could be quite wrong here) standard emotions that are depicted in codified ways.  Of course, there's nothing to prevent an artist from departing from the standard codified palette; but a skillful artist can depict any one of the standard emotions with just a few strokes of the brush, or pen.  In the manga genre (Comics derived from Japanese illustrated stories), this is especially true.  In the anime genre, in addition to the expressions, there are certain motions that indicate particular situations or interactions.  Furthermore, the voice-actors can, using a not-very-wide range of vocal expressions, convey a surprisingly wide range of emotions, by appealing to convention.  Of course, animation with full sound is not present in any significant volume on the DeviantArt site; you are sent off-site, to YouTube, or other sites to watch and listen to full video and sound examples.  Then, there is an interesting technique based on software, which results in (3D) animation!  In this method, an artist acquires one of several programs, which generate, using computer graphics, a a surprisingly realistic-looking character, equipped with any one of a set of costumes (usually bought separately, or built with difficulty from scratch), with hair of one of several possible colors (bought separately, usually), with any desired eye color, in any desired background, etc.  The software itself is essentially free; the characters, the things they carry—weapons, wands, books, etc—need to be obtained separately, as well as the clothing and other accoutrements.   (The character is actually an object of the software, using the term object in the technical sense.  In fact, all the gadgets are objects, even including such things as shoes and eyeglasses.)
Then, there is conventional painting, (P), which is photographed and uploaded.  There is also digital painting, (D), where the drawing is done using a mouse, on a computer, or other mouse-like devices, called pens or brushes.  Often a brush is understood to be a program setting that is connected to a mouse or pen inside the software.  There is, in my mind, no big difference between painting and digital painting; less difference than there is between oils and acrylic paints, as far as a non-painter is concerned.  Of course, there are all sorts of other media, and all sorts of papers and canvases, the differences between which are totally sacred to artists.
There is an interesting discipline called Cosplay, for which I have not thought of an acronym.  In this, people dress up in costumes, like Superman, or Zelda—a mythical character from a video game from the eighties, or even earlier—and enact scenes, or still tableaux, from the movies or games concerned.  Sometimes they pose in scenes that were never parts of the original movies or stories, such as Superman beheading Batman, just to give an example.  (One hopes that this is never enacted anywhere!)
There is a genre called digital photo-manipulation, where software similar to Photoshop (an Adobe product) is used to modify an ordinary photograph.  Above and beyond the usual sorts of things we're accustomed to calling photoshopped, there are amazing different modifications that are possible, and virtually impossible to detect as a modification.
Women
Have I written about this already?  I am so annoyed with this problem—which I am about to describe to you shortly—that I complain about it in my head to my imaginary friends all the time!
Most of the women depicted in the artwork are heavy-breasted, and most of them narrow-waisted, almost all wide-hipped, and many of them semi-nude.  Now, I would expect that women drawn by young guys: teens and twenties, would be that way.  Women of that sort probably populate the wet dreams of pubescent guys, (and possibly men all the way up to their eighties).  But even female artists have bought into these aesthetic values, at least on DeviantArt.  
Now, let's think about this.  If you're depicting a goddess of fertility, for instance, you would—or, at least I would—represent her with full breasts, to convey fertility and motherhood.  She would be gentle-eyed, and her pose would be somehow accepting, ready to embrace.  If I'm depicting a warrior goddess, on the other hand, she would be sharp-eyed, ready to fight, well-muscled, equipped with effective weapons, her hair tied back, all business.  But no; the battle-goddesses on DeviantArt are shown practically nude, wielding fantastic, totally ineffective swords, or ornamental lances; their breasts hanging out, their hair whipping about, likely to get the goddess killed merely by getting entangled in something.  I'll just stop here.  The artists on DeviantArt either know little or nothing about fighting, or would rather sacrifice martial realism for the sake of a sexy piece of art.  To me, a realistic fighting figure is sexy; the look of cool concentration, the focus in the eyes; that's sexy.  But . . . oh, it is so frustrating.  The culture on the site, moreover, is to not offend with any sort of cutting criticism.  Any criticisms must be prefaced with long and abject apologies.

Information accompanying artwork
Each piece of art is accompanied with optional information, and its title.  The titles are sometimes self-explanatory, and that is all one needs.  But also, often, without a detailed explanation, it is impossible to figure out what the artwork represents.  For instance, a piece of art showing a girl kissing a boy, could represent the girl from such-and-such a comic series (a manga series, for instance) kissing one of the boys from such-and-such a videogame, in such-and-such a scenario, imagined by such-and-such a member of DeviantArt.  Often it is possible for a member of DeviantArt to actually request someone to draw such an encounter, and the requester will pay for the artwork.  This is called a commission.  I knew that it was possible to commission a book cover, and I did.  The young lady whom I commissioned to create a cover for Little John Finds a Friend, one of the last couple of stories in the Helen saga, delivered a simple but effective cover, with which I was completely satisfied.  My original cover, and the new commissioned cover are shown below.
I think, within the parameters of the commission, the young artist gave me something that is eminently reasonable.  The story was not highly dramatic, and the cover is appropriate.
Going back to the Information accompanying a piece of art, sometimes these information fields are completely empty.  Sometimes they are filled with a sort of alphabet soup of references, which refer to various anime videos, or computer games, or movies, and even modifications of these sorts of things.  For instance the Mortal Kombat series of games are referred to as MKI, MK2, and so on; the Final Fantasy series of games are FF, FFII, FFVII, FF10, or something like that.  The Final Fantasy games are associated with movies.
Of course, we are aware now, that it is possible to make actual videos using this technology as a basis.  We know that it is possible to make an object that can be animated, such as Gollum, from The Lord of the Rings, where the motion is borrowed from a physical actor.  (This is how they make video games these days.)  People have been angry at how the Speaker of the House of Representatives was depicted in a video as if she was drunk.  Whoever did that did not realize that it would be altogether too easy to create a video of a drunken President; or perhaps they thought that actual videos of the President behaving in a silly way were digitally manipulated.  (And maybe they were.  I sincerely hope that did not happen.)
Generally speaking, the artists on the site are actually incredibly good: both the photographic artists, and those who create images from scratch.  The artists who use 3D software are also excellent; they must use a wide range of techniques that manipulate the basic objects that they have procured, to deliver some image, which they must subsequently tinker with in Photoshop or other secondary program, to get the result they want.  Some of them can deliver miraculous results, and the others are still learning how to do that.  There are, obviously, elements of both programming, and digital image-crafting involved; it is an entirely new field of art.
For the intensely dramatic story of Helen and Sharon—which even I am at a loss as to how to characterize accurately—I commissioned a cover from a different artist, who has promised me a cover in early July.  I intend to use the cover regardless of how appropriate it is, but I get the feeling that it is going to be a challenge for the artist.  To begin with, my mental image of Helen is in flux; I imagine the violinist / conductor / singer in different ways at different times; and I asked the artist to represent her in two panels: one showing Helen, the Conductor, and one showing Merit, the fighter.  I said, they are the same person; the one on the right is heavily disguised.  She made it clear that she was not going to be able to depict a woman who weighed exactly 165 pounds, and I confessed, yes, that does seem to be beyond the realm of the possible!

Heels
I myself seldom wear very high heels, except perhaps at Halloween, and I detest the modern trend of women wearing enormously high heels all the time.  It's even worse to see almost every woman on TV and in the movies wear higher than moderate heels.  But most inexplicable is the every woman in DeviantArt images is shown wearing unbelievably high heels.  I shall not speculate about the causes of this phenomenon.
Politics
When the artists give a glimpse of their political leanings, they tend to be left-leaning.  Many of them—very delicately—deplore the rising sea levels, the rising temperatures, the dying species, the increasing poverty, and the wars dragging on, and the rising numbers of refugees.  Occasionally, there is an outburst from the opposite side, with someone complaining essentially about either immigration, or about liberals and their speech.  The worst that can be said about artists and their philosophies of life is that they're more concerned with whatever art they're involved with than with the state of the world around them.  You seldom see artists anxious about bequeathing billions of their ill-gotten gains to their children!

One Last Thing
One of the silliest things I have noticed in hand-drawn artwork on DeviantArt is: garters.  If you think about it, with most modern hosiery, you don't need to wear garters.  Garters are used, more in the glamour photography industry than anywhere else, simply as an accessory.  So, when you see a fighter-goddess wearing garters, you have to think: something is wrong here.
An interesting cultural phenomenon is taking place, and may have a bearing on the use of garters, among many other things: Japanese, Korean, and Chinese young people are insatiable in their search for thematic inspiration: stories, art, theater, and music.  There are numerous references to classical Greek gods and goddesses, and the bare outlines of disemboweled classical myths are joyfully refilled with modern imaginings in the spirit of Godzilla.  Olympus has been moved into galaxies far, far away, and slightly (or considerably) different battles are being fought in this new arena, with the gods and goddesses using lasers and lightning bolts, and powerful bolts of psychic energy.  The conventional propensities of the gods of Olympus are often replaced with modern motivations.  Giants and ghouls and evils spirits are replaced with robots, cyborgs, and other fearsome antagonists.  (We don't have to go very far to see examples of this that have been already seen and accepted by everyone: Tolkien's orks are, to my mind, modern substitutes for Hades's armies.)
Everyone indulges in this sort of borrowing.  Meanwhile, in search of any sort of inspiration, the folks on DeviantArt are not held back by the actual plotlines of the existing stories in which various characters appear.  If they feel like it, they interpret a character from one story in the style of another story, and have him or her interact in the style of a third story, to produce a scene of their liking!  This is certainly creativity at work; nobody complains about a drawing that contains anything at all (unless, of course, it is shown to children).  But sometimes, I feel, these 'Deviants' would be well served to know the original stories of the classics a lot better; they're missing a lot, in stuffing those characters into their own little stories.  The old myths were epic not so much in the sense of the wide swath of destruction that their fights caused; they were epic in the sense of the far-reaching consequences that those ancients attributed to those conflicts.  The epic battles of modern youth fiction too often resembles a huge storm in an enormous teacup.


Thursday, May 9, 2019

Helen & Sharon, and the Concerto, and Music

I have done my homework---most of it---and gone through "Concerto" for the third time, and taken out yet more redundancy, and thrown in a few images, just for fun.

My fiction contains lesbianism, which was one of the original focuses when I started writing; it contains dance, it contains some athletics: mainly tennis, swimming, skating and running, and martial arts; and it contains a lot of classical music.

On one hand, if someone loves all these topics, then there will be something to interest her; on the other hand, if someone does not like more than one of these topics, they're likely to be bored a lot of the time!!  This is one reason that I am not too upset at the low sales rate I'm getting.  The total number of downloads and sales are around 6000 books, which is low for most authors who have been in the game for 5 years, more or less.

Honestly, the music component needs to be taken seriously by me.  I refer to so many pieces in the stories which a typical reader will not be motivated to look up---and might not like, even if they do look one up---that I thought of putting links here to as many of the pieces mentioned in Helen & Sharon, and Helen's Concerto as I can remember.

  1. Right at the beginning of Helen & Sharon, we mention The St. Matthew Passion.  This is a major, 2-hour long work, and has four kinds of pieces (numbers) in it.
    1. Chorales: these are just hymns,
    2. Arias: these are solos, and there are occasionally duets as well,
    3. Recitatives: a sort of sung explanation, in essentially free rhythm,
    4. Choruses: these are major choir numbers; there are only about 4.  Here is one of them: O Mensch, bewein dein' Sundre gross(When you finish listening, use the [back] button to return here.)
  2. Helen practices the Partitas, and Nadia is appreciative!  These are nice, short, keyboard pieces by Bach in 3 parts.  Let me find one for you: Partita No 1.
  3. The second Sharon Vuehl movie was a remake of a famous Charlie Chaplin movie, which you're sure to have heard.  Chaplin composed this theme himself: Limelight 
  4. Helen first meets Sita when she is invited to Philadelphia to conduct Die Meistersinger, an opera that is around 3 hours long.  Here is just the Overture, which is 9 minutes long!  You don't have to listen to the whole thing, but I love it so much I can't resist!
  5. There is a brief mention of Helen singing in Messiah, which also comes up later in Helen, Handel's Messiah, and the Piano, and in Concerto as well.  Let's listen to this lovely double-aria, a contralto first, followed by a soprano: He shall feed his flock.
  6. Helen's father dies while she is partying in California, and she is flown out to Helen's father's little farm, where they might have sung this common funeral hymn: Abide With Me.  I would have preferred to link to "For all the Saints," but I couldn't find a video that I really liked...
  7. One of the works mentioned on the Georgia trip is the Brahms Violin Concerto in D.  This is Hilary Hahn.  It's a lot of fun.
  8. In Florida, Helen conducts one of Bach's orchestral suites, so let's play this one.  There are several movements; just the Courant (the second movement) is enough to listen to.
  9. Next is a solo violin concerto that Helen plays: the Bach A minor.  Let's cut you a break, and listen to the last movement, Allegro Assai, "very fast."

I'll add in a couple of pieces from "Concerto" after I have lunch!

Sunday, April 21, 2019

Easter in Pennsylvania / The World of DeviantArt

Greetings to everyone, regardless of whether you celebrate Easter or not.  (My apologies to believers, but Easter seems rather a shaky thing to celebrate.)  But it is a wonderfully bright and sunny day out where I live, and everyone is smiling, and calling out greetings--which I hate, because I don't feel comfortable calling out greetings back at them!
I have been working on Concerto, and I took a break, and went out for a walk.
I have joined DeviantArt, a peculiar site for artists: that is, graphic artists.  I'm actually looking for cover art for these books of mine, but they seem to be charging more than I can afford.  Bear in mind that I have earned just about sixty dollars, lifetime, perhaps partly because my covers are not that wonderful!!
But these guys and gals at DeviantArt are just amazing!  They produce beautiful work, but many of them are totally immersed in some specific fantasy sub-culture; sometimes it is a game, sometimes a particular manga series; sometimes it is an anime series, sometimes it is a specific character from a movie.  Many of them are faithful to some character from the Marvel Universe, for instance; others focus on drawing millions of cute teens with pussycat ears!  I mean, that's fine, but . . . it doesn't seem sane to draw so many of them.  Some of them put pussycat ears on every girl they draw.
Thinking about that, I haven't seen this feature on their pictures of guys.  So they live in a world in which the sexes may be equal, but they're certainly different.  (I can hardly complain; almost all the couples in my stories are girl-girl couples.)
Another strange feature is that many of the members of the website do nothing but artwork.  If they haven't posted some artwork for a few weeks, they feel terrible, and apologize to their colleagues, and their Fans.
Some of them have personal problems, such as being transsexuals, and having unique problems related to that situation.  (I don't mind transsexuals, but I strongly disapprove of parents of really young children, who encourage their infants with their obsession of identifying with the other sex, such as little boys who insist on wearing dresses, and being called girls, and vice versa.  Let them wear whatever they want, but I do not think encouraging them to plan to have surgery or hormone treatment makes sense until they're at least sixteen.  That is somewhat arbitrary, I know, but without an arbitrary age of consent, judges will find it difficult to rule, if a legal challenge comes up, such as if the child were to sue its parents.)
Going on to more interesting things, I have noticed that the artists in DeviantArt often draw superheroes, or goddesses, or female fighters; and often these are drawn with heavy chests, and extremely narrow waists.  This is depressing to me, since I prefer waists that are not too narrow, and slim breasts!  If one of these superheroines had nursed twins for several years, I suppose it would make sense to draw them amply endowed.  But for these young fighters, wouldn't it be better if they were slim?  Why do these artists pander to the taste of guys who like big breasts?  Even the female artists seem to have adopted this ideal.
And another thing.  Many of the female heroes depicted wear armor.  But the armor has holes that would help an enemy to pierce them in numerous awkward places.  It is almost as if the artists have not understood the point of metal armor.  (It could be magic armor, which protects even if it does not cover.  That is possible, with good magic!)
There is a particular artist several, of whose pieces I really like.  Unfortunately, her characters seem to always wear the same expression.  If it were a neutral expression, such as a friendly smile, that would be fine.  But often her character wears a bewildered look, that makes her appear to be permanently off-balance.
There are cosplayers, who dress up as interesting characters from movies or videos, and take pictures of themselves, or have friends take their pictures for them.  Some of them are brilliant, and most of them are beautiful women, and good actresses, who can portray emotions really well, emotions appropriate to their chosen character, in her chosen pose.
I would encourage my readers to visit the site, and see the millions of pieces of art you can look at for free.  There is a small risk that you may never make it out again!
Kay H. B.

Thursday, April 18, 2019

Maundy Thursday in Pennsylvania

Readers of the Helen stories might remember the enormous effort that Helen and her students put into the Matthäuspassion (just before Helen runs off to audition for Goodbye Mr. Chips!, the shameless hussy).

I'm watching this very passion on YouTube just this minute, and it is a particularly nice performance.  There are many good performances on YouTube, of course, and they are all more interesting to watch, than to simply listen to the music on a CD.

There are three choruses that I always look forward to; the great opening chorus, Come ye daughters,  the great chorus that closes the first half of the passion: O Man, bewail thy grievous sin, and the closing chorus, We lay ourselves, with weeping prostrate  (the English translation doesn't quite convey the meaning of the original German, I very much suspect).  Each of these is a masterpiece in itself, including, in my opinion, the last chorus, which is generally neglected by critics.

The opening chorus sets the scene for the religious drama that is presented in the Passion: exhorting the Daughters of Zion (a symbolic group representing the audience in the manner of Greek Drama) to weep.  The piece does not further the action, but it successfully sets the foreboding mood of the drama, which relates how Jesus is captured--away from his staunch supporters--and brought before the religious authorities, and eventually tried by a sort of kangaroo court, convicted, and executed.  From the outset, it manages to create a mood of confusion and fear, proceeds to work itself up to a feeling of terror, and then stops, saying, behold a lamb; implying that it will be slaughtered.

The big chorus halfway through the passion, O Mensch, bewein dein' Sundre gross,  'O Man, repent your enormous sin,' expresses great remorse, grief, shame and mourning.  The children's choir, usually placed in the center, sings the hymn, while the two other choirs, usually placed on either side, comment on the hymn, emphasizing it and elaborating on it.  It's hard to describe; the old German tune that it is sung to is just perfect for it, as if it were an epic poem, describing the shameful death of a hero.

The final chorus is simply a farewell.  In this case, it is the sad farewell of a choir that is wiped out, emotionally, left without hope, keeping exhausted watch over the grave of Jesus.  Some of this is explicit in the words, much of it is conveyed in the homophonic wail that we hear in the music.

Kay.

Monday, April 15, 2019

Well, Its Coming Along!

Greetings again, to all six of you readers!

It's rather amusing, when writing this Blog, to realize that only six people read it!  Obviously I can't encourage any more readers to come check it out by writing anything here!

Luckily, I get a lot of satisfaction in just writing the books; so it doesn't matter a huge amount how many people read them!   (I guess I just conflated the readership of the books with that of the blog, for which there is no good reason, really.)

I'm doing two sorts of things when editing the books, apart from checking the grammar and the syntax, and the spelling, that is:  Firstly, I try to unwind a lot of the flashback there was.  There still is some, which would be difficult to rip out without making a mess.  For instance, there is this episode where Helen goes camping with a couple.  It is mentioned in about three, or even four places, and I decided to just leave it there; it is too hard to make things perfect.

Secondly, I actually introduced an episode or two that had not been in the manuscript at all.  This would make the story a tad longer, but at the moment, we have it down to 136,000 words, give or take a few, and about 300 pages in Word.  (I set up a page size that would be nice to read on a tablet, if I converted the book to Pdf, which of course I'm not planning to do for Smashwords.)

I have to take breaks from the editing, because the last thing I want to do is to get Helen Fatigue, which is a weird phrase that comes up in the story, incidentally.

Well, that's all for now; I might be done with this work much sooner than I expected, but you don't get to see it before June 21, 2019.

Thank you all for your support; I really appreciate it!


Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Isolde Wells

Whoa, I just learned that the Welsh form of Isolde is Esyllt!

That is lovely; I wish I had known it before I started writing the episodes of the Helen story in which Isolde appears (none of which have been published, unless I'm mistaken).

I do believe that a young musician named Esyllt, in modern Britain, would probably have changed it to Isolde just for the sake of ease of pronunciation, and to minimize the exotic nature of the name.  Isolde does not come across to me as--or at least, I did not conceive the character to be--someone who considered that how different and unique she was, as her main characteristic.  She knew she was extremely good at what she did: play several instruments; and the other things that made her different: her clothes, her hair, her voice, etc, were just incidental.

Kay

Friday, April 5, 2019

My Books on Smashwords!

I had just announced a couple of days ago that Concerto was finished!  Just this morning (or was it last night?) I uploaded the thing to Smashwords, and pre-published it, to be published on Midsummer's Day, June 21.  There's nothing special about this day, except that it is the longest day of the year, in terms of the number of daylight hours, and is--not quite incidentally--the anniversary of D-Day of World War II.  Helen's Concerto has less than nothing to do with that fact; I just picked the date out of a figurative hat!
Of course, this gives me a couple of months to tinker with and edit Concerto, and I'm taking the opportunity to clean it up, but also to add in some background, without which would be a bit obscure.  At the moment, the story keeps backing up, because there's a big difference between a love story and just a history: the things people say, and the reasons they say them, are important.  Part of this love story is buried inside Helen & Sharon, and I really hate to have to duplicate any of that.
The way I'm rewriting it, I may not have to back up at all, or maybe back up just once, after having outlined most of the story until we get to the point at which Helen & Sharon ends.

I just looked at the author area in Smashwords, and thought it might be as amusing to you as it was for me, to see which books are selling, and which are not!  (Most of them are selling at present, because most of them are being given away free!  Hey, don't download them unless you read them, people!  I want to know how many are actually reading them!)

This represents a (somewhat misleading) stacked chart of the sales of the books every six days or so.  Actually, each day; only every sixth day is labeled.  One day a total of 31 books sold!  It was March 28th.  Around 5 copies of Helen at the Beach were downloaded (judging from the thickness of the dark blue band at the bottom),  about four copies of Jane and Jane the Early Years, three copies of Prisoner!, one copy of Helen at Ballet Camp (which was slightly embarrassing, because it was written in a sort of a teen style; but I love that little story, especially the characters of Hunter, Cara and Dena).  Then come four copies of Alexandra, a copy of Helen & Sharon--hey, come on, guys; that's an important book in the Helen sequence.  And it's free (I think?).  One copy of Helen & the Flower Girl, three copies of Galactic Voyager, one of Helen on the Run,--a pity; I think that's a book that's a cut above; anyway, three copies of Backstory: Lisa, Cindy, Pat & the Violin, a copy of Little John Finds a Friend, and two of Helen vs. Handel's Messiah.
Is there a trend?  The Jane books are selling better than the Helen books; stories with more sex are selling better than those without!  And free books are selling better than book that are not free!  I think I set the price of Concerto at $1.99, which might be too rich for your blood, but if you wait long enough, the paying customers will buy all they want, but there's sure to be a shop-soiled copy or two for free for you later in the year!  No, I'm not upset with those who wait to get a story at no cost, because I would do the same.  The difference is that I would actually read the book, while you folks might not!
I would dearly love it if those who actually read the stories would write to me care of Smashwords, if you're too bashful to write to me here, in the comments, and say how you liked the story.  You can say that it sucked, or it was OK, or you liked it, or anything you like.  Authors love those who read their books, not necessarily those who say nice things.  (Of course, we love those who say nice things, but speaking for myself, I know that the way I write, some people will not enjoy the writing.)

A little political commentary.
I am a liberal, and I vote Democrat.  I'm not registered as one, but that's how I vote.  Because I don't make a huge amount of money, I don't pay taxes, but I'm comfortable knowing that the government tries to provide services to the poor and destitute that I would like to provide, if I had the money and the time.
People are horrified at the things Donald Trump does and says.  (What he says is sort of an act; to please those who hate the Democrats.  A lot of Trump supporters do not support any policies except to frustrate and anger Democrats, and support Trump, the man.)*  As I see it, I think reacting to these taunts will only encourage him and his followers.  If we could rein in all our indignant liberal friends into completely ignoring Trump for two weeks, it would be the worst two weeks of his life.
On a related note, I wish the legitimate news programs would just report the news, and not try to explain it.  When they do, it sounds like spin.  (Hopefully you know what 'spin' is.)
Love (whether you read the books or not),
Kay
* Added very much later:  In hindsight, I guess I was wrong about Trump.  I said that his hate of Democrats was a pose.  At this point, it's clear that he really does hate Democrats.  He's identified all the attorneys general, who're bringing cases against him, as democrats, at least to his own satisfaction—and at this point, most lawyers who have observed him for the last seven years are certain that he's as crooked as—you fill in the blank.  At the very least, the sneaky tricks of Trump's lawyers make getting judicial rulings against Trump very difficult iindeed, which makes him a sort of Public Enemy No. 1.

Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Finally! "Helen's Concerto" is finished!

Just a few minutes ago, I finished writing the final episode of the Helen Saga: Helen's Concerto!
I'm going to take all the time I need to edit this carefully, but be assured, there will be errors, and things that need to be changed, that will be fixed for the next few years, or never fixed at all.  I am a terrible  editor of my own work, but a passable editor of stuff I did not write.
I have placed an image of the cover in my last post--unless I'm much mistaken--and you can take a peek at that.
I'm very tempted to tell you a summary of the story right here, so that those who read these stories for the stories themselves will be frustrated!  Well, no, I won't; but you will be able to guess the final outcome about a quarter of the way in.
I have a very Soap Opera mentality in the way I write.  I just wallow in the dialogue (or dialog), I develop the personalities, I obsess over their motivations . . . all the things that the writers of Soaps are preoccupied with.  Of course, they're also preoccupied with such mundane things as cliffhangers, etc, etc, which I don't give two hoots about!  You probably think I should give at least half a hoot about those things, which would make the stories more interesting.  I, in contrast, simply like to present everyday life, and the interactions of the characters!  I'm incorrigibly pathetic.
In spite of all that, I think many readers--not most, I'm afraid; just many--will find the story satisfying, especially those who have found some understanding of the personality of Helen Nordstrom.  I think this last story makes the character more plausible, and her final state more acceptable.
The story has something like 126,000 words, more or less, for those of you who like statistics.  I can even give you the character count: oops, no I can't . . . I looked everywhere.  It's 300 pages, but I'm seriously considering lengthening it slightly, especially the early part, where I summarize a lot of the pertinent adventures of Helen that will probably never appear elsewhere.
Note: One of the things I have done is to show to what extent, and how, Helen's musical skills return after the amnesia.  A lot of that those who are not crazy about classical music will find boring.  Sucks to be you.    Similarly for Helen's other skills.
I also try to introduce many of Helen's friends.  I did not bring in Leila, nor Juliana, nor Gretchen; Melanie, Little John and Taylor only appear in passing.\
(Those are placeholders, in case I want to add a small paragraph or two later.  That's how I do this fancy paragraph spacing; it's a nuisance to do from scratch.
Thanks to my readers who have supported me so far!  Love,

Kay H. B.

Monday, March 25, 2019

Back to Writing the Ending of the Helen Saga

I'm not sure whether I blogged about this, but the last episode of the Helen story has been named Helen's Concerto, because a concerto that Helen wrote for Isolde Wells is a pivotal object in the story.  I also have a cover illustration.  It isn't as elaborate as those for earlier books; it is a simple photograph, intended to represent Isolde Wells.  Please don't jump to any conclusions about Isolde; she is one of my most beloved characters in these stories, but not that beloved!  The story also features Olive Gibson, little James's grandmother, and a brief appearance of Polly Woodford, Rain Woodford's mother.
I'm also puzzling about the problem of delineating the character of Lalitha, who being foreign, is difficult to describe.  But perhaps the things she does in this final book are enough to provide a useful description of her various little characteristics, and the details that make Lalitha's little family a unique resource for Helen.  I took time out yesterday to read through a few pages of Helen and Lalitha, and I was a little overwhelmed with how I had managed to make the characters there so persuasive and three dimensional.  The Helen in the first few chapters of Helen and Lalitha is quite close to the Helen of the stories before the episodes published in Smashwords begin; a smooth carry over of the girl depicted in Ballet Camp.  The Helen in India is new; I don't know why, but I had abbreviated her Indian adventures; I think I have lost the extended version, so I can't restore it.  Then, the Helen of the early California days was yet another distinct evolution, and finally the Helen after the return to Philadelphia was a pretty distinctive grad-school version of Helen that is sort of obnoxious.  That is where Helen becomes a professional violinist, but I keep looking for passages where Helen is away from home giving concerts, but there are very few.  But it's too late for a complete rewrite of Lalitha, so it'll have to remain as it is.
I have given up making Concerto have a dramatic story, and having any heavy sex in it.  At this point, it is just an ending, and it's going to be moderately believable, and it's going to gather together a few threads, but that's about all it can accomplish.  I mean, it could accomplish a lot more, but I don't think I'm capable of doing it at this point!!
Another handicap for me is being confused about which little stories-within-other-stories I have actually published.  I decided I would barrel along, and if it so happens that there are references to stories that never got published, I will just do another book, a collection of the missing stories, after Concerto has been successfully published.
Much love, Kay Hemlock Brown