How Helen continues to torture me

Many years ago, I started writing Helen.  It was simply a diary of my fantasies about an amazing, impossibly talented woman.

Initially, those fantasies were so impossible that I never even thought that Helen, or even parts of it, could be allowed to see the light of day; they revealed far too much about myself.  So I wrote and wrote and wrote, with nothing to hinder my amazing and disgusting creativity.  When I stopped, Helen was in love with five women at the same time, all of them wonderful people, and I could not see how the story could continue, because, well, how would Helen keep them all happy?

Then, of course, a friend of mine, a guy, and his daughter read little bits of Helen, and were delighted with it.  They laughed at my problem with the plot, but they loved the little bits that they had found lying around so much, they urged me to do something with it; change the story around; whatever.  Obviously, that was a lot easier to say than to do.

I decided to abandon Helen, and began to write other stories; some less salacious, others even more salacious.  But now, I knew that there were at least two people who would pester me to show them what I was writing.  Even worse, they had a cousin who was an award-winning writer, and they had told this person about me, and this author very gently, and very charmingly, offered to read something that I had written.

Soon I was corresponding with her (it was a woman; I suppose it would do no harm to confess that) and she wrote back that the large unfinished story I had written was excellent in some ways, but she pointed out some problems that I was going to encounter very soon.  But what struck me was that at least three very insightful people were endorsing my writing style, and genuinely liked a lot of the stuff I was showing them.

About this time, I was getting comfortable with computers, and I summoned up the courage to type large chunks of these stories into my very first computer, and, in the dark of night, I printed out Alexandra, which I had painfully sterilized, so that the little sex there was in it wasn't obviously gratuitous.  I looked at the printed pages, and I was hooked.  I loved how it looked in print!

Then the real world intruded, and I had to get busy, I was teaching more challenging courses, and I had to write whenever I had time, and my friends gave me constructive criticism, and I was beginning to actually see myself as an author, even if unpublished.  Meanwhile, I had started this blog, and I began to trickle bits of stories into serialized form, and put them here.  Jana  was the first one, but I kept losing the manuscript.  (I haven't thought about Jana in a long time; I should make a serious attempt to finish it.)

Then e-books and tablets and Smashwords came along, and finally, I decided to publish a really important chunk of Helen on Smashwords.  (This was Sweet Hurricane, a rather desperately saccharine title.  It should be called Helen at the Beach, or something more serious, because it is where she meets Marissa, the woman who supports Helen in the later, sorrowful years.  I love Marissa, because she sticks by Helen even when it appears that Helen has very little to give her.)

Then I went back to Helen, and began to write some more, which I finally set aside for the Jane project.  A quick aside: almost the only reader who wrote to me about Jane asked me whether I had written the next part yet!  Unfortunately, I have written several hundred pages more, but not enough to finish the story, and some of those pages are lost!  I had better publish what I have pretty quick, or I may lose the only documented fan I have.

After Jane, which I made into a publishable packet and put on Smashwords about a year ago, I went back and continued writing a science fiction story that featured Helen, who is on a spaceship that is looking for a colonizable planet.  But when I got writing a few thousand pages of that, I went back to look at the latter part of the original Helen story, only to find that Helen had progressed to the point where she could not have possibly been put on a spaceship: she had lost her memory completely.  So the Helen on the Spaceship and the Helen of the Helen story are two different people, who share a history up until about the age of thirty, at which point they diverge.  If you're a stickler for logic, simply assume that they are completely different people.

But now, since I invested in Scrivener, a text organizing program for writers, I am finding that the last several hundred pages of the main Helen saga rotate among several different threads so rapidly that it is difficult to even break the narrative into chapters.

At first, I thought of publishing each thread separately; I have gone ahead and done this in Little John finds a Friend.  But the Smashwords managers do not like material to appear in multiple documents.  If you've ever read the Darkover series of stories by Marion Zimmer Bradley, you would have seen just this situation taking place, with multiple stories relating different aspects of the same action in the same period.  Zimmer Bradley, of course, writes incredible stories, and she can do what most ordinary mortals cannot dream of doing.

[To be continued.]

The Music of The Stars

Readers will remember that my story I anticipated that would generate the greatest amount of interest and attention would be The Music of the Stars, about an alternate Helen, who is frozen—voluntarily—and put aboard a space vessel, called the Galactic Voyager.  In other words, I decided that what was going on in the TV show in which Helen starred, would really happen to Helen.

Well, I got impatient.  The book is barely completed —actually it is incomplete— but I decided to pre-publish it.  This means that it goes up on Smashwords, and customers can read the first so much percent of it (20%), but the book can’t be downloaded in its entirety until the Publication Date, which is August 15, 2015, right after the holocaust that is to come!!!

When I wrote Music of the Stars, some of the things that happened to Helen in the regular Helen story had not happened yet.  So, in Stars, Helen has not suffered the last really horrible amnesia with which the regular Helen story climaxes.  Also, James was not born, so the Helen in Stars is childless.

Don’t think of this as a disaster; think of them as two mostly different Helens.  I could have called the Helen in Stars “Patricia”, or anything I wanted.  But I wanted her to be a charismatic celebrity, so it made more sense to call her Helen Nordstrom.

So if any of you are interested, go ahead and read the first 20% of the new book, and I hope you enjoy it!

Kay

What I'm Going to Do With This Blog

Thus far, of course, I have used this blog to do pretty much what I want, which is (1) post about women and girls whom I find attractive, and (2) post episodes from stories I have written.

Posts about women and girls whom I find attractive was not the original purpose of this blog, but a time comes when you feel so strongly about some person or other than it simply has to be put out there!  I do more of that sort of thing in the companion blog to this, Helen, to which there is a link at the top of the website.  I haven't been doing this for a while because of all the work that I put into getting the three stories I first published on Smashwords ready.  But I often watch a movie, or see something in the news or on the Internet, and for a brief while I have an unbearable crush on someone, and I have to post something desperately worshipful in the worst possible way.  Only having work to do, and classes to teach distracts me from this imperative.

Posting my stories here is more frustration than anyone should have to endure, both setting it out, and reading it.  I look at these stories, all in frustrating reverse chronological order, and I think to myself, this last episode looks like crap to anyone reading it without having seen the earlier chapters.  Context is everything, as far as any story goes, and a story has to be written very carefully if it is to be read in reverse chronological order.  (It has been done, and brilliantly, but that was not the intention with these stories.)  So I'm going to put the stories in Smashwords, for a nominal cost, all of them assembled into a few self-contained novels, which I plan to publish at around a dollar or two each.

But this blog could be more a place where I write about the stories, and my attitudes towards the characters and the stories, which really have no place in the books themselves.  (Piers Anthony has written a fascinating book, Bearing an Hourglass, about a person who becomes, briefly, Fate (or possibly, Time).  It is one of the books in the series Incarnations of Immortality (or something on those lines), and Fate sees time in reverse chronological order, so as to facilitate the coming into being of events that have been established already in the distant future.

At any rate, this is probably the best place to give an inventory of the stories that I have begun, and most of them, never finished!  (I understand that there are individuals out there who find it difficult to get started with a plot, and have no compunction about stealing a story from another writer.  if you're one of those, feel free to steal the plots, but I would be grateful if you credit me with the idea for the story!)

Helen.  This is a story (episodes of which have been serialized in Helen, another blog) about a girl who is adept at singing, the violin, art, dancing, and, well, Tennis.  While this story was started, semi-consciously, for the sake of company --for many months, Helen was my only companion-- subconsciously I made it all about a girl who could do everything.  In that sense, Helen is an extension of myself, though I want to make it clear that I can't do many of the things Helen does, and none of them as well as she can!  But I'm frustrated to be surrounded with people who keep saying: Oh, I can't do that sort of thing.  Jeeze; why not?  I can't stand it when I sit at a piano and doodle on it a little, and someone looks at me with sheer envy!  It didn't cost much to rent a piano; it was, like $30 a month, which I could afford with even my grad school stipend of, like $900 a month.  So get a grip, all you young parents out there.  Give up the frikking Cable Service, and rent a piano for your kids.

Alexandra is an amazing story; it is set in a planet far far away, in the distant future.  Ships from Earth have colonized this Earth-like planet, and now it is thousands of years in the future of the landing.  (Countless Science Fiction stories have bases very much on these lines.)  But, from here on, the setting may as well be Earth, set in the late 1700s.  There is a twist: in one continent, there is a larger-than-usual proportion of citizens who are homosexual, and, get this: two women can use a certain type of gadget to get one of them pregnant.  So female-female couples can have kids, with no additional expense.

Alexandra is a young girl, of about 18, who finds herself Queen of one country, Norsland, but is immediately faced with invasion.  She has just been married to a princess from a neighboring nation, but the young couple gets separated during the war that follows, and half the story is about how the young princess helps the war effort, while Alexandra is in hiding in exile.  When the war comes to an end, the young couple find that they have become different people from when they were first married, and they cannot continue the sham that their marriage has become, but neither can they face the thought of a formal divorce.

Jane.  This is a story of a girl who finds herself a porn photographer.  She has been "straight" all her life, but now she begins to be attracted to her models, until she completely falls in love with one of her models, and then finds herself established in a semi-permanent menage-a-trois with her lover and yet another girl.  At about this point, I had a change of heart, and instead of pursuing the entirely erotic possibilities inherent in the setup, I found myself examining some of the psychological relationships between Jane and some of her more interesting models.  Disaster strikes, in the form of the AIDS epidemic, and 9-11, which were the backdrops against which the story was begun, and soon Jane finds herself all alone, with both the other girls dead.  But Jane is an artist, and before things go to hell completely, Jane manages to paint and sell prints of an erotic painting that becomes wildly popular on Ebay.

In the second part of the story, Jane meets a fashion model called Gillian, who wants her portrait painted.  Gradually Jane puts her life back together, finding work, in addition to being a portrait painter, as a makeup artist for fashion modeling, and later for movies.  She also creates a fictitious character called Scorpia, which is a role she plays at Metal Fetish gatherings.  Pretty Wild.

Jana  (I'm obviously partial to these two names: Jane, and Jana.)  Jana is a girl who grows up in a nomadic nation in a sort of desert belt in an alternate Earth.  She is put in a troop of militia, who function like a cross between bronze age Texas Rangers and border guards.  Jana's troop take into protective custody a young man and his older companion, who are later revealed to be a prince of a neighboring nation, and his tutor.  She is assigned to return them to their home, in the process of which, the young fellow falls in love with her.

Jana finds herself asked to remain in the country of the young prince, and finds herself emotionally involved with not only the prince, but his sister, as well.  After many adventures, Jana returns home, and accepts a post as the leader of another squadron, just in time to have to deal with a massive invasion of robber hordes across the border.

Prisoner  Maia, a princess of a city state in an alternate Earth, is taken captive, and into slavery in a barbarian land ruled by a king and his twin daughters.  Maia earns the trust of the two princesses, and finds herself being trained as an elite guard.  She is also the focus of the sexual attentions of one princess, but falls in love with the other twin.

Maia's beloved is sent to marry a neighboring prince, and Maia is part of the honor guard that conducts the Princess to her new home, after which she returns.  Graduating from training, she is just in time to witness the sacking of their capital city by a strange tribe of giant warriors.  The King is killed, and Maia and the (unmarried) Princess escape into hiding, accompanied by two other slaves, a couple.  The princess tells Maia that she is no longer a princess, but is Maia's servant, and over the next few days, as they continue their flight from the invaders, she begs forgiveness for sexually harassing Maia.  After many adventures, they come to Maia's homeland, now overrun by yet other unsavory elements, and now the princess must help Maia restore something like stability to her homeland.