Frustrated!!

Gosh, it's hardly been a month since I sort of said that I would never go on DA again, but ...

First of all, I switched from Facebook Lite to mainstream Facebook.  I was getting a little tired of the Lite app, and decided to try the real thing.  Well, the real thing was pretty bad.  It was, on the surface, easier to navigate the so- called Reels.  But the number of commercials it hit me with were hard to tolerate. 

I had no place to go, when I was so bored that I needed to see something familiar, and I had read all my mail.  So all I could think of doing was to take a peek at DA.

It was just as bad, just as male-oriented as ever, but at least the commercials stemmed from other members.  (All this could easily change overnight.)

Kay, feeling glum

Year-End Summaries

This is the time of year when the news sources—TV, radio—do their Best of the Year lists.  I used to pay more attention to these in my younger days, mainly because I listened to the radio a lot more.   Recently I've begun to think that these comparisons (you have to compare, just to sort the items in order, from best to worst) are all so subjective!

My favorite movies are not anyone else's favorites, just to give an example.  But there's one sense in which comparisons and lists make sense: popular votes.  By having the public send in their yeas and nays, the newspaper can tally up which item gets the most positive votes, and so on.  It's amazing how many people wait until these media gurus make their choices for them!  For books, though, I guess some people figure that it makes more sense to wait until the New York Times publishes a best seller list than to go out and buy a ton of books, read them all, and then make up their own minds.  I hardly watch TV at all, so I don't know what's on there.  There, too, I tend to watch a show only when I've been invited over to visit someone, occasionally because one of my friends wants to make me watch something. 

I was really taken off guard when there was a huge roar of approval for the Barbie movie.  I never cared for the Barbie products; I was much more into international dolls (they're described in detail in Christine's Miraculous Christmas but I only had a very few, because of the expense, and how picky I was).  Still, it must have been good; I shall wait until it gains universal approval at the end of the year, and then watch it.  I'm not going to watch the Oppenheimer movie; it sounds way too harrowing.  I watched Maestro, and sort of hated it.  It was, like, everybody was gay in that movie.  And where were the lesbians?  And this was in the fifties!  But I digress.

If they come up with a top 10 list for blogs, I'm not going to read it.  Not that I'm sensitive about my place in the constellation of fantastic blogs, but that this is not a general-interest blog in the first place; it was about my stories, so it should be impossible to compare it to a blog about, say, zoos, or something. 

Well, happy weekend!

Kay

A Horror Story

I have just been reading a story that's sort of a cross between thriller, and a sort of stealth love story.  It's called So Happy For You; I don't want to outright recommend it, but it has tons of features to recommend it.

This story is based on the concept of The Bridezilla (and the Momzilla), made readable with just the right amount of humor.  The narrator, who is the Maid of Honor, is a type of person many of us know (and I could easily imagine myself being), who by the end of the story is fearful for her very life!  Seriously, it's funny, but not that funny.  Not funny enough that I wasn't ready to give up on the book every so often!

I had borrowed it from the Libby app; you might want to buy it. 

Kay

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Christmas Oratorio

I'm listening to the Christmas Oratorio, one of Bach's long choral works.  My story Christine's Miraculous Christmas is all about this work, from a kid point of view.  As you can expect, I love my characters in that story!  Kelly is an adorable kid, as are most Altos!  Just kidding.  A lot of my best friends happened to be Altos. 

Oops, time to change the CD ...

I have learned that Bach wrote a Cantata for each Sunday of the year, and trained and conducted the boys' choir to perform the Cantata during the church service.  At some times of the year—certainly on Christmas Day, for instance—they had a Cantata for non-Sundays as well.  And the cantatas were on the subject appropriate for the season. 

Well, Bach decided to compile six of the Christmas-time cantatas, and make an Oratorio of it, and that's how the Christmas Oratorio, known as XO to its friends, was born.  He left the work packaged into 6 portions.  Each  of the six sections—well, they're called cantatas, actually—opens and closes with a full choir chorus.  In between, there are brief choral portions, such as when the shepherds talk among themselves, and say "Let's go into Bethlehem!" or something like that.  But twelve major choruses there are, as Yoda would say.  What there is a lot of, is solos, duets, and one lovely trio!  Read all about in Christine.

It's difficult to fully describe the XO.  The solos and duets and such items not only describe the action, but also reflect on it (unlike in Handel's Messiah, where all the text is directly from the Bible, and there are no passages that say things like: O how wonderful is our God, or anything like that.)  So XO is almost an entire church service, sermon and all.  But so beautifully set to music!

Kay

Mozart!

Writing about music for the Helen stories, I may have given the impression that I know a lot more about music than I really do.  But one thing I can say truthfully: I love the music of Mozart a great deal. 

I was just listening to the Mozart clarinet quintet in A, and it was filling me with an insane amount of jealousy.  Why? Because I couldn't join the musical group—two violins, a viola, a 'cello, and of course, a clarinet—in the performance!  I can't play anything apart from the piano, and being envious of musicians is something I'm beginning to come to terms with. 

Mozart, as some of you probably know, wrote really heavenly music for the clarinet.  The second movement of both the clarinet quintet and the clarinet concerto are slow, lyrical movements, imbued with tranquility and loveliness, and peace.  The slow movement of the quintet might be one of the loveliest pieces of music that Mozart ever wrote.  But then, when I listen to the slow movement of the clarinet concerto, I'm inclined to take the crown away from the quintet, and give it to the concerto instead!

Well, my instinct is to fill up the next few paragraphs with a lot of trivia about quintets and clarinets, but I'll spare you the trouble of reading them, and gracefully fade out ...

Kay.

What I Did Today!

Well!  This post is going to tell you a lot more about me, as a person, than most other posts!

As you know I visit with my best friend on weekends, a lot.  This weekend, she invited me over for lunch.   It was great!  We first went shopping, for a few very specific things, then came back to her place for lunch. 

And then, her pets (about whom I've written before, at length) gave me tons of love, and finally we settled down to watch Brave.

It was awesome!  You know, from the previous time I watched that movie, I had missed so many details!  I think the Scottish accent had been a little too difficult for me to penetrate.  But this time, I asked for the subtitles, and it was lovely.

Kelly MacDonald, who voices Merida, and Emma Thompson, who voices her mother, were just wonderful.  (I've seen them work together in Nanny McPhee, which was great.)  The comedy was over the top, definitely, but this time it made much more sense.  I loved the sly digs at automated phone systems, and the millennial suitors who came forward for Merida!  For anyone who regarded the scene with the suitors as just a long comedy skit, I guess it would have been perfectly fine, but I was going cross-eyed trying to read the captions and watch the action at the same time. 

Merida was sort of a tomboy, but she was my kind of tomboy: feminine to some degree, and soft-voiced.  Maybe I need to be deprogrammed, or something, because so many feminists insist that women should learn to be loud and insistent.  OK, I'll shut up now. 

Kay

Christmas Dinner

This year, I'm going to fix something festive for myself for Christmas.  I'm usually invited over somewhere for the meal, but then I have to go along with someone else's traditions, etc, which I don't mind too much, but ... you know, I have my own traditions, if ya don't mind.  I'm going to say I have plans, and I'm gonna stay right here. 

I don't like turkey, but I do like chicken.  I'll get a small one, rub it over with something as spicy as I can stand, and roast the thing.  Then gravy, mashed potatoes—lots of variations on those—and I'm set for life.  Also maybe a tiny bit of stuffing (yum), and I'll make a little pumpkin pie, and lots of whipped cream, and that would be perfect. 

At one time I was crazy about Christmas music, but somehow I've lost my favorite Christmas CD's, so I'll have to make do with "Grandma got run over" type songs.  And of course, there's TV, for emergencies!

So, that's my plan for Christmas this year!  It all goes down next week!

Kay

Will, and Shall

I was just re-reading a cute story, about two women, slowly falling in love with each other, when I read: "Will I  top up your glass?"

Normally, this sentence only makes sense if the speaker doubts whether she would do it.  The way I would say it is "shall I top up your glass?"

It might be clearer if you look at a plain sentence [declarative], rather than a question [interrogative]; we can later check out whether changing a statement to a question makes a difference. 

"I shall top up your glass."  This person has decided to top up somebody's glass.

"I will top up your glass."  Here, the speaker will top up the glass, unless there's a problem. 

"You shall top up my glass."  That's an order. 

"You will top up my glass."  That's a prediction.  If the "will" is emphasized, like with italics, it's a threat.  You will top up my glass.  You have resisted me too often! 

Gosh, that took too much out of me... no wonder I was such a mediocre teacher ...

Okay, now ze questions. 

"Shall I top up your glass?"  This is a simple request for information.

"May I top up your glass?"  This is a polite request for permission.

"Will I top up your glass?"  Hmm, I wonder.  This is complicated; it suggests that glass-topping-up has had overtones of power play. 

There's always the chance that the—increasingly common—use of "will" instead of "shall" is a sort of regional, or generational, dialect element, that was thrown in to emphasize the age difference between the two women.  If so, I'm too much of an outsider to catch it. 

Well, so far this is getting to be a fun Christmas.   Hope you readers are enjoying yourselves!

Kay Kringle

Hair

I've implied this lots of times, but perhaps I never came right out and said this: I don't like the untidy, fly-away hairdos that young people are wearing.  I much prefer the tidy, close to the head hairdos that I associate with formal occasions much better.  My tastes are probably dated; maybe that sort of hairdo is completely out of fashion, and maybe it puts girls with one sort of head shape, or one sort of hair type at a severe disadvantage.  Too bad; I have said what I said. 

We'll talk more about this another time. 

Kay.

Television For Cats?

I have heard about, and seen, TV programs for people's pet kittens, and cats!  I don't know what to think of that!

The programs have videos of birds, and squirrels, and other stuff that, presumably, cats like to look at.  I don't really own a cat (though I have had a huge crush on my friend's little cat) and occasionally, when I'm off my guard, I too catch my mind drifting towards looking for YouTube videos that might amuse the little ball of fluff!  She is an affectionate little person, and loves to lie on my breast and purr!  But I'm often checking out Facebook, and she never gives the impression that she's paying any attention to the screen.  I know that, with dogs, if there is no animal scent with the object, dogs completely ignore the object.  It just might be the same with kittens, but it might not.  Presumably, a cat or kitten might be figuring whether the thing can be knocked off a high shelf to good effect ...

Audio files are more interesting to a cat.  (I'm calling my friend's cat a kitten, though she's an adult fully grown cat.  But she so often behaves like a juvenile, that I feel that, in some ways, she may as well be a kitten.  She's a 10 year old kitten!  I recently wore a beanie with a pom-pom to my friend's house, and the cat was mad to play with the cap—and the pom-pom, of course. 

Well, hope the holiday season is going well for you!

Kay

Promotional

Well, it's the end of the year—inevitably—and Smashwords,  or more politically correctly, Smashpeople, are having their end of the year sale.  I'm giving away all my books for free, starting on the 15^th of December.  Hey, I should also re-publish my Christmas time story about the Christmas Oratorio: Christine's Amazing Christmas. 

Go out and buy!  Oh, wait; it's free, so, er, go download it.  If you feel the burden of gratitude, you could put in a happy comment to this post!  Also, if you're a fair- to- good artist, I would love to use your artwork for the cover art of Christine, and even for one of the other books, except those that already have a commissioned cover!

Kay

P.S. : Whoa, guess what: Christine was never unpublished; I had forgotten to do that!  I generally unpublish it at the end of the Christmas season; I think it's sort of rude to keep carrying on about Christmas all year round. 

Musings About 'Alexandra'

I was recently thinking about this book (story) Alexandra, and giving it a critical appraisal: if it had been someone else's work, how would I assess it?

What would not be widely known (or known at all, come to think of it) is that it was written in chunks, because I was very busy teaching, for the first time, and I rotated from book to book—I vaguely remember working on at least three books at that time—and working out, in my head, the stories of the books I was not writing at the time!  That makes me sound like a genius, but I'm sure that that's what most authors do. 

Early in the story, Queen Alexandra and Princess Genevieve set out on a tour of the nation, and their first stop on their way is at a estate in Westholm.  This is the point at which, in my opinion, the story settled down to be serious. 

It was still a little silly, I was still portraying the three girls as silly teenagers, but important subsidiary characters appeared, and seemed to tamp down the foolishness quite effectively, especially Lena, the warden of the Lodge and the farm complex. 

Shortly afterward, there are preliminaries to an invasion, and the tone gets a lot more serious. Then there actually is an invasion, and the two principal characters get separated for almost half of the book.  I'm reluctant to get into more detail, but let's just say that Alexandra and Genevieve are out of communication for about a year.

Meanwhile, Genny was conscripted into addressing the nation each day, in a war of propaganda, to keep up morale.   I enjoyed writing Genny's political speeches; there were at least three of them. 

Lena (Magdalena) was a character whose creation gave me lots of satisfaction.  There are two more characters who were great inventions: Nevenka, and Katya.  The first is a spy; the second was, in fact, the woman who becomes the president / head of state of the enemy country.  I wrote a couple of speeches for Katya as well!

Don't worry; it was not all about speeches; there was tons of romance too.  Most interestingly, there were characters aged from 8 years old, all the way to 80 years old, and even older.  I was in love with each and every one of them by the time I was done writing!  I'm a little sentimental. 

K