Just to clarify: most of you know that I'm incognito; this means many of the pieces of information that I give, that you would normally expect to be able to use to identify me, really presents a person who is different than me. Kay Hemlock Brown is just a nom de plume, or a pen name. There are many good reasons for this; the best one is that I do not want to be "outed" as a writer of fiction, including lesbian fiction. (This is a holdover from when I first started writing, when alternative preference was not as well accepted as it is now. A lot has happened in twenty-five years.)
The time has come, though, for me to decide what the details of the Kay Hemlock Brown persona are. This is not absolutely necessary, but I'm just in the mood to give it a good try, especially since I have stumbled on this method of creating a profile picture that is so interesting!
Kay is a female; that hasn't changed since I started writing, or since this Blog was created. These days, in more progressive forums, or places where ideas are exchanged (such as this Blog site, or Deviant Art, or Facebook or Instagram, for instance,) people are allowed to have fluid gender, that is they're allowed to declare that, well, they're female, but would prefer to be regarded as gender-fluid, that is that in some situations, they would not respond to certain things as a female. In addition, the concept of transsexual is gaining ground. Exactly what people mean by that term is not clear, and different people can mean different things by it. For instance, it could mean a person who intends to change their gender, possibly through surgery; and have begun taking hormone treatment to enhance the outcome of the surgery, or prepare for the surgery; they could even decide to take the hormone treatment, and go no further; they could choose to wear male clothing, which means that they are transvestites as well, or cross-dressers, and so on. I am none of these things. In fact, a woman wearing male clothing is not even remarked upon today; we have successfully hijacked most items of male clothing and made it our own! (That reminds me of a book I was reading: Escort, by Emily Hayes. I would cautiously recommend this story, but the story is very carelessly edited, which is rather a turn off. In any case, one of the main characters in the book, Ashley, likes to dress in masculine style.) It would help if I were hip to all the terminology that lesbian women use to describe themselves, but being a recluse has its disadvantages!
Kay is young, but not as young as she used to be! When I read lesbian fiction (why would I read any other kind?), I'm beginning to see dialog that is most definitely not part of my own idiom, or my dialect. I'm just barely within the age-group where you greet your friends with "Hey." I used to say Hi almost all the time, but now, Hey is creeping in. I started writing in the late 90's, if that helps you to date me. I couldn't possibly be less than 20 years old, because I would have written those books before I was born!
Kay is very plain. In fact, I ought to be honest and say: Kay is a dog! But when I started this Blog, the first thing that struck me was that here is an opportunity to be attractive! I put up, as my profile picture, a well-known piece of art of the 19th century. As I got bored with that, I kept changing my profile picture to other, less well-known portraits of really pretty women, until this software came along, and I could put up an image that looks a lot more like me than those early pictures!
Kay hates to read badly edited text, despite the fact that her own writing has spots where the editing has major lapses. Unfortunately, the process of uploading a story to Smashwords is so clumsy that, even after I finish editing some errors out of a story, I drag my feet in uploading it. The first few weeks after uploading a story, I work quite busily, replacing the early, error-filled editions with cleaned-up versions. Then the process slows down, and comes to a halt. (I wish there were a means where readers could--politely--alert an author to any remaining errors; I would love that.)
Kay would love to use more exclamation points (!), but when you use too many of them, their value gets diluted. In Yraid, for instance, I started off using hardly any exclamations, but then it seemed as though Aggie was a sort of morose person. (She starts off being pretty morose, actually.) I also like to use semicolons; these things are supposed to be used when you have two sentences next to each other, and they make better sense if they were combined into one sentence, without using a conjuction, such as 'and' or 'but' or something like that. But I also use them when I'm making a list, and there are commas within the list items. For instance, if you were giving a list of your favorite songs. You could do this most of the time, separating them with commas. But what if one of the songs had commas right in the title? I would then separate the titles with semicolons, and the comma could go right in the title, where it belongs.
Kay likes to use italics. I use them everywhere I can; I think it makes the text appear more sprightly, it makes the dialog look more lively, it gives a better approximation of the vivacity of the speech of a young person. Young people often emphasize particular words to get their meaning across, instead of using cue words. For instance, look at these two sentences.
I liked the costumes better this time.
It was the costumes I liked better this time.
I think I'll stop here; it's better to put in additional information as I think of it, rather than strain to think up other trivia that isn't important! I hope everyone is keeping safe, and avoiding big indoor gatherings that have the potential for becoming major spreading events. That gives me an idea; I think I will create an avatar wearing a mask, and put it up temporarily, if that is possible.
Kay
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