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 plume.  Kay 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

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