One of my Earliest Stories: Jane

Jane was one of my earliest stories.  At that time, I had hardly any idea about how to set up a story to make it easier on a reader.  (I still don't, ha ha.)

The original manuscript started with Jane meeting her first model, or models, and then I found that the story began to write itself, based on the personalities I had given Jane and her models.  (That was the first inkling I had that stories would essentially write themselves in a way that I found satisfying; whether readers would find it equally satisfying is still open to doubt.)

For some reason, I found (or found myself writing the story in such a way) that two major characters died in the attack on the Twin Towers of 2001, and in the HIV epidemic that was affecting the US at that time.  I suppose the facts had just gotten registered in my brain, and I couldn't ignore them any longer.  That event had implications for Jane; not just one of her lovers, but three of them were affected.  Two actually died, and one broke up with Jane.

Suddenly, without my consciously planning it, the story I had initially conceived to pander to my own craving for (imaginary) sex, became a tragedy.  I had to come up with a way to make Jane emerge from this situation.  I just couldn't make Jane simply bounce back from it; it had to happen naturally, and that took a little longer than a year.

Besides being a photographer, Jane is also a painter, an artist.  This was an avenue for me to arrange for Jane to meet with a woman who could 'save' Jane.  From this point, the story trundled on, occasionally getting a bit fantastic, until I sort of didn't know what to do with it.  So, working from the end, I backed up to a point at which I could sort of close the story out, and ended it.  From the beginning, too, I looked for a point at which I could begin the story, and decided to start shortly after 2001, with one girl dead, along with two other supporting characters; and one estranged girlfriend.

It seemed to me, at that time, that everyone reading the story needed to know all the characters in the story so far.  This was a mistake, but I painfully inserted little stories that introduced all the characters, and then jumped to the point where the third person dies of AIDS, and picked up the story from there.  So that's how Jane rests.  I think it's a poignant story---or at least, poignant in spots---as Jane meets the girl who becomes her lover, and then meets her sister, and so on and so forth.  There's an episode which features Jane's niece, Heidi, who is about fifteen.  If you don't like kids, well, what can I say?  Most of my stories feature kids, because I like kids!

As it happened, I eventually thought that all that omited material from the beginning was pretty interesting, so I packaged that into the story Jane, the Early Years, that has one of my favorite home-made covers.  (The cover depicts Scorpia, which is Jane in disguise.  There is actually a part of a story with Scorpia and Lisa Love, which hasn't been published yet.)

Most of the Helen story, if you've read any of it, is concerned with (classical) music, and many of you might find that either distracting, or actually annoying.  Worse, Helen is a soprano, and a violinist, and a conductor, so Helen's achievements are unavoidably front and center!  In Jane, however, there are very few hifaluting elements; Jane is very much a girl-next-door type---and so are the Twins, even if the modeling brings Gillian a lot of money.

I just wanted to make you guys aware of the Jane story, because though it is essentially incomplete and is sort of a bleeding chunk, many of you might relate to it a lot better than to the Helen story.  I'm beginning to realize that Helen the Genius probably sickens a lot of readers!

Kay

Doing Something About My Pet Peeve

Hey, I'm back, to continue with one of my rants that leads nowhere.  Well, usually nowhere, but hopefully somewhere, this time.

Have you heard me carrying on about how, in most lesfic (OMG, I'm beginning to adopt Millennial Lesbian terminology.  Kids, man) stories---I don't want to call it literature---it is always a butch (or a top) with a femme (or a bottom).  Always.  Why?  Why can't lesfic be more satisfyingly symmetric, and equal?  I am convinced that this Butch/Femme dichotomy was created by and for men.  I have little against men, as such (though I hate testosterone-infused guys, who further the stereotype that the inarticulate guys who communicate mostly with grunts and loud pickup trucks are attractive to women).  So I have always dreamed of writing a story of a romance between two femmes.  But a lot of my stories are, in fact, stories between femmes.

Guess what!  I decided to write a story of a romance between two Butches!  But not the stereotypical butches riding motobikes or driving pickups, but sweet, sensitive girls, who nevertheless give off femme vibes (there I go, adopting Millennial lingo!  Kids, man), but stop short of being actually girly.

I recently read a lovely story by, er, Kallie Mont (not her real name), about a woman who---having broken up with her career-obsessed girlfriend---moves to a somewhat rural New England seaside location, and meets a lovely local.  The somewhat Butch newcomer to the village is a lovely, protective person, and it made me realize that I have written about Butch characters often; it's only that I have rarely been conscious of it.

Kay

Things I Want to Do Better!

It's been a long time since I posted here---more than a month, possibly---and I want to touch base with my readers, about what has been happening to me.  (I will not remark about World politics, except to say that the Russians seem to be acting in their own interest, which is not new.  This only makes sense if all that they need can be supplied from within their sphere of influence.)

OK, let's get back to my reading.  I have been reading up a storm; these books are not difficult to read, because they're seldom more than 20,000 words long; often a lot shorter.  I do get the impression that the authors---most of them women---seem to depend on their book sales in order to make a living, so they have to strike a balance between satisfying their needs to tell a certain story, or a story in which certain things happen, and a story that grabs the reader.  To make it worse, I never buy an ebook that costs more than $4, so it is possible that I'm not getting the best books.   (On the other hand, I seem to see that there is no connection between the quality of a book and the price the author sets; and maybe we shouldn't expect there to be one.  After all, like L'Oreal, it all depends on how much each author think she's worth!  Haha.)

I have been making some of the points below for several posts, so some of them may come across as Old News.

First of all, many of my own books were excerpts of a single story; a lengthy biography of a fictitious person.  But that biography was not conceived to be readable, or have any of the properties that an author of commercial fiction would be ruled by.  I made Helen have lots of girlfriends, lots of sex, lots of talent, travel a lot, be athletic, be beautiful; in short all the things I wanted, and could not have!  But all these desires did not make for a good story.  When I started chopping the Big Helen Story down to little chunks, I began to see how a few chapters here, and a few chapters there, made a story on their own; especially the early adventures of Helen and Lalitha, which form a beautiful story, for which I really cannot take any credit, and reveal a lot about Lalitha, and Helen, and the children, and Lorna.  The other chunks just barely qualified as stories; and many of them suffered, without the earlier episodes to round out Helen's character and personality.  In contrast, the professional authors who write for Kindle/Amazon, really try hard to make a story with a happy ending, and for the most part, succeed.

The adventures that summer at the beach were also important, but that doesn't mean that it was interesting to read.  But I wept at the foolishness of Helen, which resulted in so much heartbreak for Amy, and Hattie, and the lawyer Miss Pearson, just as anyone who might have read the book would have. 

The Kindle stories  varied widely in the mechanical quality of the writing; some authors wrote beautiful, expressive, fluent prose, that really nailed what they wanted to say.  I could tell what they wanted to say, just from the context, and being just a step or two ahead of the typical reader, knew what they wanted to say, and I could tell whether they got it across.  However, some authors really struggled to do it.  Some of them got tripped on homonyms.  For instance, the words bear and bare sound the same, but there were instances where an author would write something like "the unbareable agony of having to wait".  There were occasional difficulties with plurals: flys, instead of flies; and with tenses: swum, instead of swam. (Actually, either word: swum or swam could be wrong;  "I had swum so fast, I was all out of breath!"  And: "It was the very same route I swam before!")  As I said before, in a previous post, some of these problems---especially with the homonyms---can be explained by the authors using Dragon Speaking software, or something like it, which takes dictation, and converts it into text.  And if this software is now created by non-native English speakers (or had been, all along), that fact would explain why there might not be routines to eliminate those sorts of problems.

Obviously, from the point of view of these sorts of mechanical aspects of writing, I would find it easy to pick faults with any writers who were less inclined to absorb mechanical aspects of writing than I was.  Someone who was being trained to teach English would be more likely to submit to being drilled on mechanics, than someone who was not.  (That's sort of a moot point as far as my own training was concerned, because I was not trained to teach English!  Oops; the embarrassment.)

In every story I have written, the romantic thread of the story was always an add-on at the end, except, maybe, in Alexandra, where the lovers meet right at the beginning of the story, and are ripped apart halfway through, and struggle to reunite over close to a 100,000 words.  Any literary masochists ought to read that one.  I should take that one apart, and rewrite the whole damn thing.

Well, I totally haven't (or "totes" haven't, as the millennials say) set down specific things I want to do better; I think the only thing I can do is to write a decent love story from scratch!

Kay