Welcome to Deviant Art Members :)

Using a complicated chain of reasoning, I have concluded that some friends from DeviantArt—the website from where I get artist support for the e-book covers—occasionally read my posts!

There are a handful of writers on DA—our internal abbreviation for DeviantArt—who are more likely to actually read the occasional text posts that appear on that site.  

Unfortunately for me, while the majority of folks our age—or maybe some years younger than me; of course, I know you guys don't have a clue exactly how old I am, and that's the way I like it—like to read stories with large amounts of graphic sex in them, I just don't like graphic sex; and by that I mean typical graphic sex.  I find that when an author puts in almost any graphic sex, it clashes so much with my own preferences for how sex between lovers should proceed; or the style of the sex clashes with my perception of how gentle or affectionate a particular character is (or how clumsy, inconsiderate, or rough) that I become unhappy and frustrated.  So I expect that readers, too, will be badly served by being confronted with typical graphic sex.  Now, don't misunderstand me: graphical sex with a certain degree of vagueness can be effective.  That's what I try to do, (and maybe I fail, but that's my objective) and I must confess that I have absolutely no training in creative writing, and maybe that's where both my strengths and my weaknesses stem from!

Many of my DA friends are writing erotica; that is, descriptions of scenarios and sex scenes, with a view to exciting the reader sexually, and not furthering any sort of romantic relationship (in the story).  I don't seek that sort of writing out, but I have stumbled on stories of that sort, and in a couple of instances, I have been really moved by them.  More often, though, I'm thinking: wait, wait, that's not a good move now!  Oh, no!  (In my mind, you know, I'm God's Gift to Women, and if you think I'm delusional on that score, you're absolutely right.  I have very little experience with sex, for various reasons, and I ought not to be trying to write descriptions of sex scenes at all.  On the other hand, how much fun is it going to be for you, to read sex scenes written by a semi-professional lover?)

[Added later:]  I just checked my Smashwords author page, and there have been about a half-dozen downloads of my stories since I looked this morning!  My belief is that whenever I post something on my Blog, here, I get some downloads.  So maybe this post has already borne fruit!!  I had fifteen downloads from a couple of days ago, and fourteen for today.  Keep it up, friends!

I have just repaired Christine's ... Christmas, and uploaded it, with a new cover image.  (The previous cover image simply had my name as Kay Brown, without the 'Hemlock'.)

Kay.

Why I Write

The reason I'm writing this blogpost is because I was becoming more aware of why other authors---mostly on Amazon---were writing their stories.

Some of them, certainly, were writing in order to earn.  Sometimes writing is what someone feels he or she can do the best.  Sometimes they can only write.  Often they're inspired by other writers whose works they have read, and so on.

Others are fired by a need to support emerging lesbian, and more generally, LGBTQ young people, and give them models and instances of other teens and YA women struggling with the need to choose that lifestyle, or deal with the social problems accompanying their preferences.  Yet others want to recount their own stories, or stories of their close friends, which they think are going to be interesting or inspiring to readers.

Still others are still smarting under the hostility they felt from convention-bound parents, or other older adults who simply could not reconcile what they were seeing with how life used to be for them.  These older adults still see the new freedom to choose a respectful lifestyle as an affront to their religious views, or what they consider, for some reason, as right and proper.  Many citizens see the new laws as atrocious, shameful parodies of what legislation should be, and authors feel the need to respond to these feelings, or to support young people who struggle against members of society who harbor these feelings.  Of course, I feel the urge to do this as well, but I don't have the evangelical feelings to do this that some women have.  If challenged, I suppose, I might be provoked into lashing out, but that isn't me.

[To be continued...]

Ebooks vs. Snail Books

Now that I've got to reading tons of ebooks from Kindle and Smashwords, I have quite a different perspective on pricing!

An actual paper book, costs about $6, and I take about 3-4 days to read it.

An e-book, on the other hand, I sometimes finish two a day.  I think the authors are not focused on filling e-books with a lot of substance; they're more into hooking a reader into reading the first of a long series of books.  Some of the books I have read lately seem to be just an installment in a serial novel.  ('A Tale of Two Cities' by Charles Dickens was first published this way.)  So if one of my e-books were to be priced at $ 6, readers would (1) expect quite a substantial book, and (2) have to be committed to all of the odd variety of topics that the book contains: college life, young children, music, television, a young drama queen, a daughter of a British Earl (even if a minor one), and so on, in the case of Westfield.

None of my books---except Yraid, and Flower shop Girl, are quick reads, as it happens, but I'm glad I priced them at 99c, now having a feel for the issues.

A Wonderful Book: "Without Words"

I have been reading a number of books on Kindle, as I said, and I have come across a dozen great authors, about whose existence I had not been aware.  Unfortunately, in the literary environment in which we find ourselves, you can't depend on an author who has written a fantastic book to keep repeating the same feat with subsequent books.  (I mean, you never could, really; the best indication of how good a book is, is to read the first quarter or so of it.)

The book, a fantasy, was Without Words, the author is Cameron Darrow, and I'm close to being without words to sing the praises of this particular book!  The title refers to a really unique character in the book, who has difficulty with language.  All through the book, this character struggles to communicate with her tribe.  She is not unintelligent; the conceit of the book is that, due to an extreme effort needed to save her life when she was an infant, the required magic damaged her language ability.  There are a handful of wonderful other characters, but this central, linguistically challenged character, Zifa, carries the entire story, and the entire book.  With careful skill, the author succeeds in describing Zifa's---often complex---thought processes, which she struggles to convey purely at the vocabulary level, being unable to use sentences at all, except ones that she has memorized.

Many of the stories that I have read have the theme of prejudice running through them, sometimes even racism.  On the other hand, a lot of the stories are close to being potboilers: stories that are close to being formulaic, focusing on comfortable themes, of coming out, or 'friends to lovers,' or 'age-gap romances,' or any number of such frames.  This is not to say that the authors do not take time to invent an interesting plot, and interesting circumstances, and insert interesting details, and set these stories in interesting locations, or create glamor by making one or both protagonists fabulously wealthy, or powerful, or a movie star.  It is interesting, but natural, though, that authors of lesbian romance novels are sensitive to the existence of prejudice.

Another fascinating fact is how these stories deal with sex.  (I had to resist trivializing the word 'sex' by placing an exclamation point after it.)  Sex is dealt with in various ways; some authors are at pains to describe exactly how each partner pleasures the other; some authors do not focus on sex at all; some authors describe the opening moments of an intimate encounter---especially if the level of intimacy escalates throughout the story, and then 'fade to black' a very clever phrase that describes, rather graphically, a literary device where the description of the sex is gradually faded out.  The number of acronyms used with lesbian romance is vast; it is clear that lesbians have no patience with long phrases that could be abbreviated into a few initials.  A few are HEA ('Happily Ever After'), a description of an ending, which allows the option for a reader to not choose a book that ends in too trite a fashion, HFN ('Happily For Now'), and I suppose there is some acronym for a story that ends tragically.  Without Words is a HEA book.

Insight into Being an Author

I was recently reading some (lesbian) literature from (Amazon) Kindle, and I was amazed at how good some of the books were.  (Of course, some of the books were really below par, but it evidently suits Amazon to keep them on their site.)  The book I read most recently---actually, I've read a couple of books since I read that one---was so well plotted out, and the characters were so beautifully created, and some of the incidental, and not so incidental events so perfectly described, that I felt embarrassed at how far my own writing fell short, I guess, from what that author was delivering.  And that author wasn't alone; at least 10 of the authors, or close to that number, anyway, were amazingly good writers.  Writing lesbian fiction, it seems to me, requires a couple of different skills, and not all authors have these abilities developed to the same degree:

(1) Getting inside the head of their characters.  [Almost all authors had this skill.]

(2) Being able to explain what their characters were thinking.

(3) Creating a scene in the minds of the readers.

(4) Inventing a story that captures the interest of the audience.

(5) Introducing just the right number of subsidiary characters, who have enough charm to lend depth to the story.  [I think this is an important skill.  Some of the characters introduced were pets, who were super cute.  I could have done this, but I think I've missed some opportunities!]

(6) Guiding a reader through a dialogue, where the reasoning of each participant isn't self-evident.

That last item is the one I'm trying to focus on.  But before we go into it, I want to mention one of the vices of an author that one of my early mentors pointed out to me: editorializing.

What does editorializing mean?  As I understood it when it was first used with me, it means making judgements on the words or actions of a character.  Most writers of fiction hold the view that moral judgements of the actions of a character are not needed, or even appropriate, in a work of fiction.  Whether some action is good, or bad, or horrifying, or despicable, or admirable: it should be left to the reader to make that call.  But some stories hinge on a particular call being made, and so the author steers the thinking of the audience, by using a loaded word or phrase.

Item (6), above, is different.  We're all, in some ways, amateur psychologists.  When someone is telling us something important, what we make of the statement depends on (a) both our backgrounds and our circumstances, (b) any previous events that would color the meaning or our response to the statements; possibly very specific incidents the reader simply does not know; or perhaps a thinking pattern that was habitually a part of one of the characters.  (For instance, perhaps it was the habit of a character to assume that another character was always trying to put him down, in which case even an innocent remark would be regarded as a criticism.  Or perhaps a certain person wouldn't ever consider a woman to be anything but innocent, and a man to be anything but guilty!)  So the author has to run interference for us, and make it clear how the psychological reasoning of one of the participants in the dialogue is going, based on all these background thoughts and habits.  It's unavoidable for this to happen, otherwise the reader would jump to the wrong conclusion.  Sometimes this guidance has to be put in right in the middle of the dialogue, to stop us going even an inch down the wrong road, because that would be ... I don't know, objectionable somehow.

I'm going to try and find an example of this, to show you.  I'm too embarrassed to use something from my own writing, so it would have to be from a story by someone else!  I'll add to this post when I find a good enough example.

Kay

Magic, or No Magic?

This is going to be a complicated post.

First off, my new story, about the romance between an African American girl and an Elf (tentatively titled the girl with the pretty eyebrows): a chunk of it is available for reading on one of the pages of this blog.  It was easy to get started with, but not to continue with, I'm afraid.

Secondly, I have a bit of a political idea to air, though I will try not to offend any of the political folders into which people have grouped themselves.  Here goes.

We all learn a little biology, a little botany, a little physics, a little chemistry, and so on, in school.  But, since the time of Aristotle, you can guess that the volume of science that mankind knows, and the volume of science that ordinary people are expected to know, has absolutely exploded.  Aristotle would be amazed at how much we know.  But I'm willing to take a guess that, long before the stage at which our teachers expect us to top out, we've already experienced a combination of emotional overload, as well as information overload, and we let the information come in through one ear, and out through the other.  It's mostly because we're kids (this all happens around the age of about 14) and we also buy into the idea that we can't afford to remember all this, especially because we're unlikely to ever use it.  Then, BOOM!  We're in the middle of a pandemic, and people are expecting for us to use all this 9th-grade knowledge that we have so carefully prevented ourselves from absorbing.  What we do is think of all the stuff that happens inside gadgets we use as being slightly magical.  We think of microwave ovens as being slightly magical; we think of air fryers as being slightly magical (actually, it's just a low-powered blowtorch), we think of our smart phones as being magical, etc.  Some phone companies encourage this belief.  But we are accustomed to thinking about vaccines sort of as though they're magic.

And worse, this new vaccine works in a more hi-tech way, using genetics.

Now, genetics does not have to mean tinkering with our own DNA.  A few years ago, I went on a reading spree about genes and DNA, and I found that the vast majority of things that our DNA does, is to manufacture proteins.  The proteins go along our bloodstream, and do all the things that need to be done, like get a baby started, or repair a tear somewhere, etc.  But one family of tasks can't be done with a single protein.  This task is fight infections!  To fight infections, popping out a single protein won't do, because all mammals are really designed to fight diseases---which means bacteriums---that they haven't seen before.  Of course.  There's no point in fighting only familiar diseases, because an unfamiliar one is sure to come along any day.

So what the DNA does is generate disease-fighting "machines", that modify themselves to fight new germs.  One of them meets a new germ, and learns how to fight it, and spreads the word to the other "machines",  and the war is on.  Be assured that these "machines" are not part of our DNA; they are one step removed.

The new vaccines capitalize on this process, to make these machines more efficient.  They teach those machines to defeat one of those spikes that the COVID virus has.  But the spike has enough information in it for the "machines" that get hold of it to destroy the entire virus, so, yes: there's a little bit of spike in the vaccine, as I understand it.  But the spike itself is harmless; it's the rest of the virus that hijacks our lung cells, and forces them to generate more viruses.

It's a sneaky, mean little virus, but the best weapon against it are our own virus-fighting machines, and the vaccine is a sort of Coach, that helps them learn to fight the virus.  Now, because I am not sure how much microbiology you have picked up, and sadly, the science teachers in different schools teach their students wildly different amounts of science, some folks are going to be able to understand what I'm saying (behind the strange anthropomorphizations that I have described).   Some of you might be affronted at having to pull out all that dusty information that you hoped never to have to use again.  But this vaccine is such an effective piece of chemistry, despite the tiny number of people who get the infection even after being vaccinated, that it is sad that there are so many who reject the vaccine.

A lot of people reject much of the science behind other things as well, such as Climate Change, and Election Security.  They have long ago relegated science to the same box as Miracles, and Magic, and they feel that rejecting science is a cousin of rejecting magic.  Rejecting magic is good, right?

But rejecting the vaccine is not a partisan choice, except that Pres. Biden promised to end the pandemic in so many days.  GOP leaders are waiting to mark down this failure to end the pandemic as a win for them.  But a win for the GOP leaders would seem to be a huge loss for the GOP rank-and-file, because their seniors, and their kids are going to suffer.  There were even some politicians who, in a weak moment, said that their seniors were tough enough to take a little hardship on behalf of The Cause.  That's just plain foolish, and I'm not going to write any more about that sort of testosterone-speak.

A Great Epiphany

Hello, dear readers of this Blog!

As you know, I have two blogs; this one, and one focused on the Helen story.  I don't really need to maintain them separately now; that's just a relic of the times when the "Fiction from Kay Hemlock Brown" blog was more about my writing, and the "Helen" blog was more about slightly more R-rated stuff.  If you're using the standard interface, there are links to the other blog on each of them.  If you're using the mobile interface, you have to cross over using some other method.  (My own method is too lengthy to have to describe to you ...)

Well, as I wrote a few days ago, the book I last read, at that writing, was "The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics", a wonderful book.  I was disturbed by the little explicit sex there was in that---very little, really, compared to some other stories---but there was another notable aspect.  One of the women involved was a powerful and rich member of the nobility.  The book I have just finished reading is a simple story set in modern times, but one of the women is a super-rich divorcee.

This seems to be almost an inevitable feature in many stories, and perhaps more in lesbian fiction.  As I wote in the last post, even in my own writing, one of the characters was invariably someone powerful for some reason, and more often than not, someone who was wealthy.  Now, I have a reputation, at least among my friends on DeviantArt, that my politics lean a little to the left.  (Or a whole lot to the left, which is somewhat alarming.)  Should I feel obliged to write stories about rich, and/or powerful people?

Thinking about this a little more deeply, the essential ingredient in these sorts of stories is more subtle than wealth or power: it is glamour.  People do not read stories unless there is glamour involved.  One of these days I'm going to write a story about two women lovers, neither of whom is glamorous at all.  And we can watch its popularity plummet.

It's probably too late to de-glamorize my Elf story; having an elf in it already means magic, and magic means glamour.

If any of you readers find a story that is worth reading, but does not have any glamour in it, just let me know!

Kay 

Elves

Well, I hate to be so capricious (inconstant, mercurial, unstable--Google) so that you readers are unable to rely on what I say, but ... though I said that I'm unlikely to do any more writing at all, I have started a---quite unambitious---writing project!

I have recently embarked on a completely new story, unrelated to almost anything I have written before, about an African-American girl and---get this---an Elf!

Now, I have noticed that many stories, especially fantasy stories, have something in common, that is, that their chief protagonists are celebrities, or nobility, or rulers, or people otherwise with a certain degree of financial power.  Let me confess this situation in my own stories first:

Alexandra ---the queen of her country.

Helen stories ---a particularly wealthy woman, who has her own corporation, etc, and at one time was  a college professor, a movie/TV star, and a conductor.

Jane ---a somewhat wealthy girl, because of her artwork.

I have excuses.  The reason, at least in my case, for choosing occupations, or circumstances, that give these protagonists so much (financial) power is to enable them to do things that they otherwise could not do.  I myself cannot fly anywhere I want to go, or get a room in a hotel anytime I want; but I wanted my heroines to be able to do that.  But now, I'm beginning to want different things.

All my life, though, I had to be clever about how I traveled, how I saved up money to stay in a hotel, etc.  I wasn't broke, but I had to be careful about what I spent.  I used to have a car, and drove carefully, to use up the least amount of gasoline, and calculated the shortest paths between where I was, and where I wanted to go.  It was strange to write about a person who could pick up and do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted.

Lately I have been reading a lot of popular literature---I couldn't possibly read enough of it to be able to say that I'm familiar with the genre; there is so much of it!  But quite a lot of it deals with ordinary people, with no particular claim to power, and I found that strangely attractive.  It is important, from an educational point of view, not to represent (in fiction) that being wealthy is a normal condition, just because it isn't.  The wealthy have appropriated most of the wealth of this country, (and the world), and if we pick a person at random---and surely my readers ought to be typical citizens; I would hate to think that my audience consists of people who come from the wealthy classes exclusively---we must assume that that person must be of limited means.  And I must assume that it is annoying, or at least disconcerting, to read of a protagonist who was inexplicably wealthy.  (But this is America, and most ordinary people love to read about people who are many orders of magnitude richer than they are; for instance, that's all what Reality TV is about.  One of the stars of Reality TV even ran for president, and won.)

So my two protagonists are going to be very ordinary people, including the one who was an elf.  I must create a world where the elves have poor people among them, too.

Kay

The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics

I have been reading one of the most astounding books I have read in a while.

This work, by Olivia Waite, an author who has written a romance by the above name, between two women, somehow landed in my hands, and pretty soon, I could not put it down.  The story is set in 19th Century England.  The chief protagonist is a young woman who had worked with her late father, who was an astronomer, by making hand-calculations to support his astronomical observations.  (In that time, theories of the motions of planetary objects had to produce predictions, based on hand calculations, and these calculations were often carried out by women!  At any rate, this service of our heroine is presented here as a novelty.  But a story of a lesbian protagonist who is a mathematician, and an astronomer!  How wonderful!)

One of the most wonderful things about Olivia Waite's writing is: the language; by which I mean, the tone, the speech, the voice of the narrative.  I often deplore the stories about bygone times, where the idiom is modern.  It does not work.  The language of those times very closely reflected the inequality between men and women; there were a thousand ways in which women were subtly shamed or patronised for their words or their actions, and it cannot be done in modern speech without missing the proper tone.  This is a weakness in numerous movies, as well.  The caution with which our heroine, Lucy---who was of humble background---or rather, the woman who loves her, who is a countess, tries to find out whether Lucy is open to being the object of the countess's love, is very refreshing indeed.  It would not have been appropriate for the countess to drag Lucy into her bedroom, and make her move there.  It had to be all approached much more circumspectly.  Circumspection is rather an alien concept to so many authors, especially lesbian authors, because so few lesbian authors are in the closet, and forced to behave circumspectly.

Olivia Waite's writing is beautiful, because of how poetical it is.  She writes about nature, about flowers, about music, about embroidery: things that I could never write about intelligently, because I hardly notice them!  I am such a failure in that department...

I just had to write a review of the book at a point when I have only gone halfway through the book.  (I keep doing this.)  Amazon did not permit me to write a review under my pseudonym, since I had not racked up a sufficient dollar amount of purchases with them, so the review must be done here.  I have read two more books that are truly wonderful, but I will not review them here, because I feel that Olivia W's book needs to be presented independently.  Hurry out and get a copy!

Kay

Istanbul, not Constantinople / Fascinated, not Obsessed

I'm pleased with Lalitha having been repaired, and with many of the stories being downloaded from Smashwords!  Of course, this pops me back (thinking of this situation as a stack) to the state of being unsure whether the stories are really being read.

Of course, they're being sort of read; perhaps not from beginning to end, or as we would have said back in the days of Agatha Christie: from cover to cover.  I have to be content with readers reading just a paragraph or two; or just using the stories as masturbation aids.  I understand the need, but it still makes me queasy.

To turn to something completely different, I went on DeviantArt, the Art website---where I initially went to find artists who might help me create covers for the books---and wrote that my libido, and with it my creativity, have sort of faded out completely.  I'm not sure whether it makes better sense to make that sort of confession here (in the Blog), or there (in DeviantArt).  I was getting treated for a certain medical condition, for which reason they had to tinker with my hormones, and I found myself abruptly losing all interest in sex.  Of course, that is a blessing, in some ways, for someone who has been terrified, all their life long, with beginning relationships.  (Once a relationship begins, it is a lot less terrifying.)  But, you might have heard that it is our sex drives that make all sorts of creativity possible.  In my case, it apparently is; and now I can't write fiction.  I can't write romantic fiction, which is almost all that I wrote, though I can still write these hypochondria-laced blog posts.  I had been casually informed by the KHB Repair Agency that my natural hormones will return, all by themselves.

Now to turn to something even more completely different: I have recently become aware of the popular singer and YouTube personality Billie Eilish.  I don't know much about her; there are sites that contain Billie information, but one has to dig rather deeply to get anything.  She seems to be at the point in the arc of her fame where she doesn't want to release a statement about herself for fear of alienating somebody.

One of the things I like about her is that she's such a flawed androgyne!  She's an androgyine---I mean, just look at her!---and she's just beautifully imperfect, which makes her so easy to relate to.  A few months ago I saw Stephen Colbert interviewing her, and she came through beautifully (on Zoom, even) though I thought Colbert just couldn't quite get what she was trying to convey.  Colbert always seemed, to me, to present a very masculine affect; and in response, Billie was greeting him very warmly and politely, but in a definitely feminine manner.  So, though at certain levels, Billie presents herself as androgynous, I think her persona reponds to whomever she is responding to, with a complementary gender identity.  Warning: I'm not an expert in this sort of thing, and I have stopped believing in that sort of expertise anyway.  I think psychology is more of a religion than a science!

Though I deplore having lost my libido, however temporarily, I have to confess that I still have a craving to hand out hugs to anyone who seems to be sad, or in pain, or just unhappy.  Not guys; only girls or women.  What does that say?

Flying Off the Shelves Once More

Heh heh.  I had hardly got finished blogging that I had reduced prices on several of my books, than I 'sold' a couple of dozen of them!  This confirms that the stories are technically worthless, or at least worth less than 99 cents, which is the minimum that Smashwords will allow!  No, I'm not upset or insulted; I know that a reader has to have a peculiar mix of interests (classical music, girl-girl relationships, children, etc) for the Helen stories to grab them.  (The non-Helen stories are a lot of fun, and don't have anything to do with music, except for Music on the Galactic Voyager, which is sort of vaguely a Helen story.)

Listen, you guys: come on, now; spread the word!  I don't need the cash, honestly; but I do like to see people buying the books!!!

(I get the sneaking suspicion that a single person has bought all the books that were downloaded yesterday.  Well, thanks, whoever you are!)

Kay Hemlock DarkBrown

What's Going On?

A few days ago, I made several of the stories on Smashwords either free, or priced very low.  Yet, the sales have not exploded like I expected!  Perhaps it takes time for the news to percolate to the people who want to buy my stories and haven't got them yet!

Maybe I didn't reduce the prices on very many stories; I need to go and check.

Meanwhile, as I said, I have hit a roadblock in my writing, and not a whole lot of new material is forthcoming.  I will get around to it eventually, but it won't be soon.

Kay

Two Days, When the Stories Flew Off the Shelves!

Smashwords sent me an email some time ago, saying they're having a Summer Sale.  They wanted me to "sign up," which meant that they would sell my stories at a reduced price (which I had to approve,) an then, on August 1, the prices revert to normal.

Well, since nothing was moving, and since I suspected that a few dozen Kay Hemlock Brown fans have been hoping something like this would happen, I signed up.  Since they were already at the minimum price of 99c, this meant that they were now free, which means Smashwords would not make any money from them!  It was already July 29th when I signed up, so for two days, 25 copies of my stories were sucked up by various people.  What they did with those stories I can only imagine; they're probably putrefying in various hard drives across the USA (and other parts of the world, but I suspect that in other lands, people actually read the stories).

And Now For Something Completely Different.  I have hit a block in finishing up the various things I had wanted to do with the existing stories and story lines.  Having said that, I have various issues on my mind:

1. What with the recent interest in racism across the country, I feel that there are too few people in my stories who are non-white.  There certainly are a few; in Jane, there are Italians, Hungarians, and Jews, who must certainly be considered as contributing to racial diversity in our society, but not many others.  In the Helen stories, there are Indians, for certain, and French, and Germans, too.  But the stories are too white.
2. The changing weather patterns--climate change--are really in our faces; it might be appropriate for fiction to reflect this.
3. I wanted to incorporate COVID into a story.

I forget what I wanted to say.  More later.

Kay

Why is Kay so Mysterious?

As you know, Kay Hemlock Brown is merely a pseudonym I dreamed up, to protect my privacy, back when I was a seriously closet writer!  So I have to make up enough detail about my life to satisfy the curiosity of my readers, as well as to provide a foundation for my fiction.  (Fiction written by someone about whom you know nothing at all is strangely unsatisfying, and somehow distressing.)  As for my age, if I was a teenager when I started writing the Helen story around the year 2000, I must be at least in my thirties now.  (I'm much older.  But, judging from what I say and write, you have to agree that I am distressingly youthful, or even child-like.)

But I cannot turn my back on the fact that, ever since COVID, my life has been very unsatisfactory, and meanwhile, I have been unable to write at all.  I have begun a number of projects, and not gotten anywhere with any of them.  When I go back and read them, I actually forget my plans for them, because, of course, I don't plot them out, like Jane Rowling; I let the stories steer themselves.  But now, maybe I'm going to either have to plot the stories out, or give up writing.

To make things worse, I have been unable to get rid of the feeling that our world is in the charge of some very unimaginative and heartless people.  There are some decent folk who are trying their best, but I'm beginning to fear for their ability to advance their agendas, and worse, I'm beginning to fear for their lives.  For those who believe in God, it is easy to leave things to him (or her), and trust to his (or her) goodness.  But for me, I need to do something about it.  (I don't want to get too political about it, but I firmly believe that, this mid-term elections, if we leave matters to go, as usual, to the party in the opposition, it is going to go very badly for us; the Democrats have to get out the vote like never before.)  I do not believe in gun ownership.  Unfortunately, though, some of the people who are arraigned against us do believe in armed opposition, and the Constitution permits the ownership of guns.  What will happen, if they are convinced that they can never get the votes to get what they want through legitimate means?

To turn to something completely different, I have occasionally been reading about what is happening at the Olympics in Japan, and I stumbled upon a video clip of our gymnasts in action.  Of course, there was Simone Biles, doing unbelievable things while in the air.  But more interestingly, there were several seconds of Sunisa Lee, whose forte is the uneven bars, and I was stunned.  I wrote some time ago that I had started a story that was inspired by the legend of Sleeping Beauty, where instead of a princess and a prince, there were two princesses.  This is not a novel idea; I myself have read stories that go that way.  But, as I watched Sunisa Lee in action, I felt as if one of these characters had been actually brought to life!

Well, I can't elaborate further without embarrassing myself; a person in my situation can easily be thrown off-balance by the slightest thing, but I'm sure I'm stable enough to return to equilibrium.  (This is one of the weaknesses of Yraid, where you would expect that the main character, Aggie, could have been shown to be extremely vulnerable, and you would have wondered why I did not take the opportunity to explore the psychological aspects of a girl who essentially has hardly anyone in whom to confide, and no one off whom she could bounce her feelings of being torn about her loneliness, and her broken family.  Initially, I wanted her to have these bad moments, but not to confess them in the story; after all, once I created her character, I had to be consistent about her, and she was essentially not someone who would bare her soul.)  I had conceived of both the characters---in the Sleeping Beauty story---as being serious girls, only occasionally laughing when one or the other noticed something as funny, and shared it with the other.  Sex and desire are serious things, especially when you're young, and I just couldn't approach their relationship in a lighthearted way.

In the bit of the story I have written so far, the girls have just met, in a meadow some distance from the hut in which Beauty (not her name in the story) lives with her three fairy godmothers, and where the other princess has run away from home, and is enjoying her freedom, running about, and practicing the sword.  Some problems that I have yet to solve are: how much sex is there going to be?  Is there going to be any magic?  (There has to be, since the fundamental problem the story tries to solve is magical in its very nature.)  The newcomer princess is a warlike person: a swordswoman, an archer, and a rider.  One of the first things she does is to kill a doe, and skin it, roast it, and eat it.  Is Beauty going to be able to persuade the newcomer to not kill animals for food?  Meanwhile, all the forest creatures who are Beauty's friends are appaled and aggrieved.  Though Beauty talks to them incessantly, and they mostly understand what she is saying, she cannot understand them.

(This post is getting me interested in this project again!)

Kay

New Post in 'Helen' Blog

A new plan for a Helen-related piece has occurred to me; it's described in detail in our sister blog: Helen.

Vaccination Hesitancy

Dear friends:

Apparently a large number of people are not trying to get the vaccinations for various reasons:

(1) they believe that COVID is not as dangerous as the Democrats say it is;

(2) they're waiting to see whether those who have got the vaccination have any bad side-effects;

(3) they dislike being told what to do, that is "Get the vaccine right now!" is something they immediately push back against;

(4) they believe a number of conspiracy theories having to do with the vaccine---and all vaccines---that certain people have been spreading.

Well, if you're in group 4, then until you are finally convinced that there is no ulterior motive behind the vaccine, you're not going to get it.  Those who tend to believe these sorts of conspiracies are very difficult to persuade, until (and unless) someone they know well catches the virus, and they see first-hand how painful the disease is.  (If this happens, ask for a vaccine right away.)

If you're in group 3, don't do it for yourself, do it for your friends.  If you're a recluse, then it probably doesn't matter.  But if you're sociable, you could carry the infection even if you appear perfectly healthy.  Because hundreds of people have been shown to be asymptomatic; that is, a test shows that they have the virus, and can infect others, but do not appear to have the disease.  This is why a person whom you meet, who looks quite well, just might infect you.  And if you're asymptomatic, you could infect people you meet, especially older people who are very susceptible.

Groups 1 and 2: Firstly, the disease is very painful indeed.  I haven't got it, but we have people who have recovered telling us how painful it is, not to be able to breathe easily.  Also, those who recover from the disease are said to be permanently affected.  Secondly, it seems quite clear that nothing bad happens to those who get vaccinated, except a fever after the second shot, which lasts less than a day.  I have got one shot, and will get the second shot as soon as I'm eligible.

In other news: I have not been writing very much---not writing at all, really.  I think I will go through all the existing Kay Hemlock Brown stories, and repair any broken grammar or spelling, or mislocated people (for instance, there are references to Helen in a Jane story, which is embarrassing; Helen should not appear anywhere in Jane stories).

OK!  Happy masking!

Kay

A new page

 An excerpt from Jane is here.

What's Happening!, and How to Choose a Guy

So, this family with whom I'm friends just all got their vaccinations.  Both the shots.  Of course, the first thing they think of is to go visiting their kids!  But they're driving, so---I suppose it's less dangerous than taking a plane, as long as they don't go into restaurants.  And guess what?  I'm house-sitting for them!

They gave me the password for their wireless router, and everything.  (Actually, I've had it for some time, because I've spent weekends here in past years.)  The biggest responsibility I have is to look after their dog and two cats.  I love these furbies, so that is not a huge deal.  Already, these little guys are actually asking me where the regular inmates have gone!  At least, that's what I think they're asking me.  I must write a story with a lot more pets than any I have written.  There's Lita, in the Helen story, but she doesn't really do much.

Before they left, my friends were all, oh, you're going to be bored out of your mind!  I said no, what do you think I do at home?  It's no different, really!  And anyway, I said, I'm going to get on my computer and blog.  The problem is, even at home I don't blog too frequently.  I've been here two days already, and this is the first time I'm blogging!

Guys
By now, most of the readers of this Blog would have suspected that I was either an out-and-out lesbian, or bisexual.  I never obsess over guys; it's only women and girls that catch my attention.  Even in my stories, the male characters are usually older, and sort of formulaic.  I think that, with a little effort, I could write in a male character who was a lot more three-dimensional, but it would not be any fun for me, and being so terribly spoilt that I only write stories that are fun to write, I would not probably write a story with a guy in it, and certainly not centered on a guy.  (To my horror, I recall that I have started a story where the first character who appears is an older gentleman!  Well.  We must wait and see what happens to that one.)

Do I hate men / guys beyond salvageability?

I haven't written much about my parents, and that is because I'm incognito, and the more I say about my parents, the easier it would be for someone to recognize who I am, which would lead to furious and undisciplined second-guessing of the motives behind various of my stories, which is not a happy prospect.  (But interest in my stories has seriously declined, so I'm going to relax my self-imposed discipline somewhat.)

Both my parents were awesome!  They were literally awesome.  Each of them was a teacher at various times of their lives, and their students venerated them.  (I wish my students would even try to get back in touch with me, and at least say Hi!  I guess it's difficult to get back in touch with part-time faculty, unless you really wanted to.)  My mother was a lovely woman, but very reserved.  But then, a teacher has to suppress her tendencies to being reserved, and be outgoing with her students, so that's what she did.  She could do everything (except knitting), and she used to be a Girl Scout, and in her day, Girl Scouts seem to have done a lot more than they do now.

My father was a jolly gentleman, very outgoing, very generous.  He had a great sense of humor.  He could not sing as well as my mother could, but he was good at leading community singing, though he did not have as wide a selection of songs to present as my mother did: she had all her Scout songs, as well as church choruses, and a lot of songbooks for schools, from which she could pick out interesting and uncommon songs to present to any group.  But it was always my Dad who was asked to lead the singing!  So there you have the tragedy of our culture; a woman has to be beyond merely exceptional to be invited to lead any activity.  I am far from being bitter about the limitations of our society; actually, women have been ingenious for centuries, to contribute to their local culture, despite the preference to have men do it.  For instance, my Dad would come to my Mom for ideas for his sing-alongs, and she would help him.  The sing-songs were always brilliant, and everyone was amazed at the songs that they learned, songs they might have heard long ago, and forgotten!  But they were all from my Mom's song collection.

Reading the current rash of feminist journalists, writing about the psychological shortcomings of men, and the weaknesses of women who admire men, one could get the impression that the only right-thinking women are lesbians!  This suspicion is confirmed when we look at some of the really amazingly feeble-minded men who are making the news out there.  And not just one or two; entire states.  For instance, there is a woman in Texas, who was released from prison early for committing a felony: falsifying tax records for a client.  She was still under probation for that felony, so by Texas law, she was not permitted to vote.  Nevertheless, she cast a provisional ballot, which was not counted, but discarded.  She had signed an affidavit to the effect that she believed she was a legal voter.  Now, the affidavit was clearly false.  But she is being threatened with five years of jail, because she attempted to cast an illegal vote.  To my mind, attempting to cast an illegal vote should be a lesser crime than that of casting an illegal vote.  In any case, sending her to jail would be a punishment out of all proportion to the offense.  It is all guys who carried out this agenda of punishing this black woman, while a number of white citizens of Texas have been given lesser punishments for the same offense (as I understand it).

Yet, all around us there are guys acting compassionately, justly, kindly, generously, thoughtfully.  I never liked Joseph Biden very much, but we have to go beyond the surface.  There were multiple killing sprees since Biden took office---I think about five---but he does not issue an executive order to confiscate weapons, or anything on those lines.  I think this is admirable.  I hope he is waiting for legislation.  I think a law ought to be passed in congress that guns ought to be licensed.  That alone might keep guns out of the hands of people of less than robust mental capacity.  It might keep guns out of the hands of half the Republicans in Congress.

To get back to what sort of man a militant feminist might approve of: perhaps the days of "strong men" are gone.  There is often a dark side to men who are forceful.  Sometimes they are bullies; they are often stubborn, and they often disregard the thinking of women.  I do not have statistics; perhaps lots of forceful, strong guys are reasonable, and willing to listen to logic from women.  Once we eliminate the bullies from our set of candidates, and eliminate the guys who listen only to other guys, and eliminate the guys who are willing to take shady short-cuts, what's left are the guys with whom we can work, and of whom we can be proud.  And hopefully they're good at leading singing, and their humor is not offensive!  And it couldn't hurt if they look decent.

No, I do not hate men; don't put me down as a man-hater.  I don't want to give examples of guys whom I can stand, lest it give me away.  As I said, Biden is doing very well, and I think his not dealing with firearms with executive actions is a smart thing to do; that has to be done through legislation.  Ideally bipartisan legislation, but, whatever.

It is sad that all progressive ideas have come to be labelled 'Democrat'.  Once this sort of thing happens, the people must replace the opposition party with one more likely to keep the train of Congress on the rails with more reasonable brakes.

Kay

A Peculiar Movie: "Across the Universe"

I really must get out more.

This weekend, I discovered a movie that I’m sure most people have cheerfully forgotten about, namely Across the Universe.  Now, I’m definitely a Beatles fan, and there are a score of Beatles songs in this movie.

But then, I discovered Evan Rachel Wood!  I have seen glimpses of her, acting in various movies and TV series, and though she came across as a singularly sweet and simple person, I did not watch these things for long enough for the actress to make an impression on me.

When I finished watching this movie, I was head-over-heels in love with Evan Rachel Wood.  And more: she can sing!  (Yes, I just discovered that she sings in Frozen 2, where she voices the mother of Anna and Elsa.)  I don't know whether it’s brilliant acting, or whether this is just Evan Rachel Wood being herself, but that simplicity, sweetness and earnestness is the essence of the character she plays: Lucy Carrigan.

The story is, essentially, that a Liverpool child of a single mother signs up for the British Army, and then skips out when the boat docks in New York.  He meets a mischievous undergraduate at a certain college, makes friends, and is invited to his home for Thanksgiving.  There he falls in love with the sister of his friend, played by Evan.  In my opinion, Matt and Lucy Carrigan are the most believable characters in the movie, and Lucy [Evan] far more convincing than Matt.  In a sense, this movie, though it isn’t very convincing as a movie on its own terms, does a good job of representing various archetypes of the young people of that time.  Evan does a fantastic job of playing the young woman who feels impelled to protest police brutality of that time, and the war in Vietnam, which was emerging as unjustified, and unwinnable.

The peculiar thing about the movie is that the characters were required to sing a series of Beatles songs that seemed to superficially express the needs of the characters at particular times.  So the film moves along, quite realistically, until a situation comes along where one or more characters bursts into a Beatles song, such as, say, Strawberry Fields.  At that point, the movie becomes unrealistic, but perhaps convincing in a sort of off-Broadway sense.  For me, these moments spoil the movie.  I could endure Evan singing her songs, though they were pitched often very high indeed.  Evan hit every note square, and we learn that she has always been a singer.

She has been quoted as saying that she considers the director of Across the Universe, Julie Taymor, as being ‘amazing.’  Though there may be good reasons for this opinion, I feel that Evan is a particularly innocent person, for reasons that I cannot put into words!

In retrospect, I feel that Evan Rachel Wood might have been almost a perfect model for Helen, the central character in the majority of the stories I have written!  Her features are very much in line with how I imagined Helen, but more importantly, I imagined Helen as being simple and innocent in some ways, which is how I perceive Evan to be, though of course we cannot make that conclusion without knowing her more intimately.  The character of Helen undergoes surgery twice, each time losing her memory; temporarily the first time, and more permanently the second time.  At the end of the saga (of ten odd stories), I depicted Helen as more Evan-like than ever.  In addition, the artist, Halchroma, who illustrated many of the covers of the Helen series for Smashwords, depicted Helen’s face uncannily on the lines of the face of Evan Rachel Wood.  I don’t know whether this is true, but she may have taken Ms. Wood’s face as a model!  I’m not going to ask her about it.

The Beatles, and the Vietname War, the drug culture of that era, and the cultural upheaval, is an important part of the history of the century.  Perhaps Julie Taymor set out to use the music (and lyrics) of the Beatles as a means for making that era accessible for younger people, but for me, the songs only made the story far more fantastic, and therefore not powerful from an historical point of view.  Anyway, there are some good points to this movie, and you have to decide for yourself whether you want to watch it.  It even features Joe Cocker in three roles, Bono (of U2 fame), and a couple more familiar faces I could not place.

Kay

A Cleaning-Up Project on the Helen Books

 I just uploaded a cleaned-up version of Helen and Lalitha.  Read all about it here.

Happy St. Valentine's day —Kay.

More Current Events--Week of February 8, 2021

This is a lot of stuff that is all unrelated, but I'm writing it anyway, to support the impression that I am a real person, and not a robot.

What many people are preoccupied with---including a few of my readers, I'm sure---is the trial of Mr. Trump in the Senate.  I'm not anxious for it to turn out one way or the other; if he is convicted, with support from the GOP senators, it would mean that, as a party, they do not condone his conduct, and the disapproval comes entirely from the Democrats, and is all political, and not just outrage that goes beyond mere anger against the Republican party.  The fact is that there are dozens of categories of people who have supported Trump despite his actions, because he acted and spoke for a lot of them, in some ways that go beyond the proper way to speak and act.  But these are the objectives that the GOP and the other conservatives wanted; they told themselves that they would address the legality of the actions and the words when it becomes absolutely necessary.  But now, many of them are thinking: if we disregard the irregularity and the dishonesty, we might get a Republican president in 2024!  By then, the pandemic would have been fought vigorously by the Democrats, (and the anger of any young fellows and gals who hate to wear masks will be all directed towards Biden, not Trump, which is fine, right?) and the Dems will drag the economy back, using methods that are risky, and which the Republicans do not have the guts to do, and if there is bad inflation, it will be the Democrats' fault.  The GOP does not want to be blamed for anything; their coalition of quite unrelated philosophies is very fragile, and only anger against the Democrats holds them together; at least that what it looks like to my eyes!

It looks as though I will only get my vaccination by June, unless the stocks of vaccination doses pile up, and Biden and his team get impatient with the restrictions about who gets the virus first, and say: after 75% of the doses get administered on any day, anybody waiting behind the barriers, suitably distanced, and wearing masks, can get a vaccine, up to as many as are available.  The main thing is that (1) the elderly in nursing homes, (2) service workers, e.g. police, firefighters, cafeteria workers, even teachers, (3) medical personnel,  must get vaccinated first.  After that, it pretty much does not matter in what order they get their shots.  There will be plenty of those who do not want vaccinations; what are we to do when they get sick?

Tax returns are due now.  I mean, we have until April, but we've got to work on them.  Some years I get them done in a single day; other years, it takes weeks.

I did not watch the Superbowl; I never do.  I don't mind football; I would watch it if my school was playing, and it was live.  The game is really made for non-experts to watch.  But watching on TV is sort of depraved, I think.  I don't know what to think of this girl reciting poetry at the game!  I think she's wonderful, but . . .

Also, the Australian Open began yesterday, I think (?), and I had forgotten!  I used to play, but I'm terrible!!  We have to pray that it will not be a virus-spreading event.  (It probably will be.)

I wear my mask everywhere.  I think I look actually a little better in a mask, in contrast to most people who probably think masks make them look terrible.  Dear friends: if my request makes a difference to you, please wear a mask, and keep your distance from everyone who doesn't live with you.

Kay

Current Events

This is not intended to be a political post.  But I have been both amused, and bewildered, at the professed beliefs of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green.  Some questions come up: 1.  Does she really believe what she says she does?  Or are these statements intended to confuse and bewilder her opponents, just to throw them off balance?

One of her declarations was that 9/11 did not happen.  It certainly did, as far as I know; this one is pretty easy to refute.  But what a foolish claim for her to make; what if those she sides with---the far Right, Trump supporting Republicans---happen to have actually seen the events of 9/11 first hand?  It is pretty hard to hide a plane ramming into one of the tallest buildings in NYC; there were witnesses across the river in Hoboken, for instance, who saw the collisions take place.  But there must be some really interesting conservatives whom she can persuade into believing Large Marge against the evidence of their own eyes.  She sees Trump telling preposterous lies, and must wonder whether she herself has the talent to tell equally stunning lies!  Are we doomed to be listening to lies the lest of our lives?

Another of her claims is that the Democrats---or at least some of them---are involved in child trafficking, and even Satanism.  Then she supports the theory that voting machines have been subverted by the Democrats.  Some of these are so wild, I have trouble giving them credence, but then I only know what I read in the papers, as Will Rogers (or someone) famously said.

The way to deal with these incredible claims is to (A) tentatively accept them, (B) verify the truth of the matter as quickly as possible, and (C) if what you thought you knew was in error, make your friends know the truth.  If you had been right, make that known, too.

Kay Hemlock Brown

Did I Really See That Happen?

For a while, I was most upset about the theft of the lecturn, until I realized how materialistic I had become.  What a sad loss of life, in these sad times.

Of course, like many of my readers, I'm angry.  I guess I was in denial; I did not see this coming.  Some friends and acquaintances---with whom I should have kept in closer touch---had seen people talking about invading the Capitol on Facebook, and assumed that I would have known.  Well, I did not have to know; I do not regret missing that horrible party; I would have ended up thinking of pulling people back by their shirts, but of course, I'm not brave enough to do that sort of nonsense.  It went on for so long!  And we waited in vain for security forces to intervene.

Meanwhile, as you know, I am trying to work on a story that is set in the present.  It is about Helen's and Sita's first few years together.  Initially it was supposed to be a romantic, lyrical story.  Since Trump was in the White House, I assumed that things would be a little less than rosy, especially since Sita was still an Immigrant (in contrast to Lalitha, who had received Citizenship).  But I never expected this dystopia.  A better writer than myself would have woven the events we have just seen into the story, but the politics would have become more important than Helen and Sita and the children.

People love to hate poor Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.  The people who do are either ignorant of the sheer corruption that the poor workers---many of whom are out of a job---who live in AOC's area see; or they are willing to tolerate it, for the sake of the system of oppression that they support.  They should not fear; Biden will probably make only small adjustments to the system.  All this makes me so disheartened.

This protest was in fact the Haves protesting against the incoming Have Nots, though the latter are not as penurious as to be called by that name.

Kay