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
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