U-Haul Lesbians

Have you ever heard this phrase?  What does it mean?

I thought I had some insight into the phenomenon crudely alluded to with this phrase, but maybe I should think some more.

Because of the evolution of public opinion about homosexuality (not by any measure uniformly positive, in case you were wondering), it's a lot easier for a woman to discover that she prefers to associate with women than with men in this century, than it was 20 years ago.

It is quite a step from there for a girl to arrive at the conclusion that she would prefer to pursue a romantic relationship with another woman than with a man.  (This isn't made any easier by the fact that the culture of young men and boys still leads them to behave in crude ways.  Girls wonder---I certainly did---whether the fact that boys behaved like assholes was what was putting me off, or the fact that I'd rather be Touched by another woman than by A man.  As I grew older, my tolerance increased; I could give a boorish young man a second chance, and a third chance, but I began to feel that it was a waste of time.  I was the bigger problem, and not they.

All this takes time.  And when that blessed day comes when you realize that you can relate to most girls a lot better than to most guys, it is soon followed by an even more blessed day on which you encounter a girl who looks at you in a special way.

I can easily imagine the sort of desperation that takes hold off a queer woman when she meets someone who could be special.  I have, but I've never had the courage to take the first step, though I have wanted to do so very, very much.  I can't provide more details without endangering my anonymity, but it is a sort of desperate relief, like a drowning woman, I can imagine that the instinct to capture that welcome prospect, and bind to her with bands of steel is irresistible.

But I could be confusing my own feelings for universal lesbian instincts, and we must be careful.  But what's to be done?  Maybe life is too short to be waffling about whether you've found your soulmate.

What I Would Like in an Editor Program, as an Author of Ebooks

As you can see, today's post is a little unusual; I want to gripe--or rant--about editing / word-processing software with which I have to work, to create the disasters (or miracles) that my stories are.  The software I use is MSWord, which is perfectly fine, if I were printing out the stories.  But I'm converting them into ebooks, which Word does not directly support (as far as I know), and in any case, ebooks do not usually support everything that a typical author wants to use.  The e-readers I use do not even support an embedded font, which is frustrating.  My phone shows some of the stories in a font that I like, but my tablet does not--sometimes--and other times, it's the other way round.  I do not have the patience to investigate what the software companies--both Microsoft, and the e-reader manufacturers--imagine authors and writers want or need.  I'm going to tell them, right here.

What A Basic E-book Word-Processor Should Provide

Fonts:  There should be a minimum of 2: Firstly a serif font, such as Cambria, or Garamond, or Droid Serif, or Palatino, which are the fonts I principally use.  If they want to, they could give the user a once-and-for-all-times choice, at least for each document, for which font is going to be their serif font.  Secondly, they should also supply a fixed-width, or a sans-serif font.  They are not the same, but they do provide an alternate regular font face, if one is needed, e.g. for displaying a letter.

Font Effects:  By these I mean such (essential) things as Italics, bold, subscript, superscript.  Less important (not quite as essential) are strikeout, underline, and colors.  I could use a gray of a medium level.

Line and Paragraph Spacing:  There are two main ways to indicate paragraph separation: by indenting, and by extra paragraph spacing.  I like to do the latter; this post, for instance, has paragraphs indicated by a little vertical space.  I think both options should be provided, but I don't think it makes sense to give the writer control over how much spacing, or how much indentation is provided.  Every additional thing the software sets out to provide is (A) one more thing that could go wrong, and which the writer could inadvertently use to get into trouble, and (B) one more reason the software will become larger, and more unwieldy, and slower.

Special Characters: I would like an m-dash, a cedilla (for spelling words such as façade, or soupçon).  If the software provided the option for ligatures, such as ffl which would be used in words such as shuffle, that would be a plus, but I can see where most authors would look at such a thing cross-eyed, and feel that it is unnecessary.  There are a whole set of those, all of which I would like, and most other authors would never miss.  Also ñ, which comes in useful in words such as mañana and señorita.  The tilde is readily available, but not to attach it to an 'n' easily.

Hyphenation: this is really a function of the e-reader; it ought to split words on the fly, so that when the text is not justified (i.e., when spaces are not expanded to make the right margin even), the presence of extra-long words doesn't make the right margin look totally stupid and ragged.  Slight raggedness is, of course, inevitable in un-justified text.  In justified text, the presence of un-split long words results in entire rivers of white flowing down the text body, which is almost worse than ragged right margins.  So writers of editing software (or word-processing software, whichever is the current term preferred by you folks): disregard the issue of hyphenation.

That's enough for the moment, but I can see myself adding to this list after I have had a little think, as she said in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Kay

Louisa Alcott: Little Women, Little Men

I was given Little Men by Louisa Alcott when I was about 13, and somehow it was the perfect book to get me started on reading.  Of course, thirteen is a little late for learning to read, but I was reading "children's books" until then, and Little Men was a sort of transitional book.

It was transitional in a way that Little Women never was.  To this day, I don't know what it is about Little Women that sets it a little apart from other books of that time; even the Laura Ingalls Wilder books were---different---from the Louisa May Alcott books.  I could try to put my finger on some differences, but they may not be the crucial ones.  Little W. had a large palette canvas; as far as I am concerned, it tells me almost all that I need to know about Louisa M. Alcott and her times, and her concerns, and her values!  It taught me about people, and about how life is so unfair.

In contrast, Little Men seemed to speak about simple things: decency, generosity, honesty, responsibility, and industry, and also greed and indolence!  Little W. was also about heartbreak, and patience, and rebelling against societal norms; both books are about that, I must concede.  I ought to go back and read Little Women, but I seem to remember a lot less editorializing in that one, whereas Little Men, I'm sorry to say, has lots of embedded sermons, as though LMA didn't trust her audience to draw the right morals from the story.  But that was the state of the art at that time; authors were obliged to underscore the morals in their work.  Some authors, such as Jane Austen, would point out obvious and superficial morals, while there were deeper implications hidden between the lines, which she left alone.  Maybe I'm imagining it, but I thought I saw numerous values that Jane Austen didn't care to, or dare to, draw attention to.

Today we know---have known for years---that Louisa's father, Bronson Alcott, was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and is considered a transcendentalist.  Many of the values that Louisa embeds in Little M. are ahead of their time, and flow from the ideas of the transcendentalists.  For whatever reason, I have to confess that though I am not a practising Christian, in the sense of being subscribed to an accepted denomination, I broadly accept the moral teachings of Jesus.  But from a practical point of view, I recognize that my morals are derived largely from Little Men by Louisa May Alcott.  ('May' is actually Louisa's mother's family name.)

There are a few clichetic features in both stories; they both propagate the principle that it is good and innocent people who die young.  In Little Women, Beth, the pianist, the sister whom everybody loves, dies of scarlet fever; in Little Men, John Brooke, who is initially introduced in Little Women as the long-suffering tutor of young Teddy Laurence, who eventually marries Meg March, Jo's oldest sister, dies.

Jo (Josephine) Bhaer (nee March) is, without doubt, Louisa Alcott's most brilliant invention.  There are some amusing surveys in Good Reads for readers to vote for their favorite character in each of the Little books, and I shake my head at any choice but Jo.  Of course, all the characters are painfully wonderful, and eminently worthy of being 'favorited'.  But the transformation of Jo's character is just too beautifully carried out to leave me the option of choosing anyone else, though Meg, Beth, and Laurie, and Amy, and even their mother, 'Marmee', are all perfectly reasonable choices.  (Apropos of nothing, Christian Bale, who plays Laurie in the Winona Ryder version of Little Women does such a good job, that no other version could possibly work for me!  Apologies to Saiorse Ronan.)

Though I have criticised aspects of these two books, and it is tempting to speculate whether they can be edited to conform with 20^th-21^st century literary norms, I am certain that modifying the stories in any way would be to their detriment.  But I could be wrong; someone might do it, and we might marvel at the success of the experiment!  These are amazing books, and if you anticipate that there might be moralizing to be found, you could safely skip the offending paragraphs if you're reading the books for the first time.  Warning: some of the moralizing is essential, but I can't think of how to identify those portions.

Kay

Thanks to My Readers

I just checked my "sales" for the last 360 days, and all my stories have sold well.   (Which means people have been downloading them enthusiastically, cost being essentially no hindrance.)  Many authors would probably be despondent not to be making money with their books, but I don't depend on my writing for a living--- at least not at the present time.

Once again, let me urge those of you who haven't read Helen and Lalitha yet to read it.  I would like to be judged as a storyteller based on that book.  I just know that there is great scope for improvement in that book, but I'm afraid that if I touch it, I'll ruin it. 

Helen at Westfield,  and Helen on the Run are both important from the point of view of the larger Helen story, but not as stand- alone stories in their own right (though both have interesting episodes).

I'm going to stop here, else I'll go on forever. 

Kay