General Griping About Anything But Politics

Greetings, readers!

As you know, I'm a reclusive sort of person, with few friends (and few acquaintances, too, for that matter, outside those I used to know at work).  As a result, I have no outlet for my griping, so you're it!  This is admittedly dangerous, because a little bit of my griping has to do with the writing, Helen, etc., and the last thing I want to do is to alienate you folks, who I assume are the ones who most of all appreciate my writing!

The first, and most interesting, problem I have is with my nom de plume.  Kay Hemlock Brown is not my real name, since I do not want it known that I am an author, even if my writing is really quite sterilized, compared to the raw form in which it sat in my computer.  Secondly, I began writing a few years ago--actually a couple of decades ago--when alternate preferences were not as widely accepted as they are now, and some of the hangups I had with being identified with those alternate preferences are now stuck in my mind well and truly.  Lastly, I think I have a tiny bit of name recognition, and there's no way I can get anyone to pick up a book of mine under any name except Kay Hemlock Brown.  Remember: it used to be just Kay Brown, but I could never find my stuff, on Barnes and Noble, or anywhere else, because of all the other Kay Browns who cluttered up my search results.

Anyway, because Smashwords got a nasty letter from the Internal Revenue Service, saying that they could not find a decent Social Security Number associated with my pen-name, and that Smashwords is forbidden to send me any money without a good SSN.  I had not given them my actual SSN, because of my desperation to remain anonymous, even to Smashwords, who could turn into blabbermouths any minute.  So, from the time my paycheck was frozen at the level of $23.26 (Tee hee!  I don't earn very much at this racket!) I have been offering the books for FREE.  Those of you who have gone to the Smashwords website already know this, of course.

There is a way around this problem, I believe.  I have to create a formal business, and the Federal Government will assign a SSN to that business, which I can then give the IRS, who will gather taxes on my $23.26 with great delight, to which they are perfectly welcome.  I do not write these books for the income, though pretty soon I might find the additional income very useful indeed.

One reason I want to charge a nominal amount for the books is to find how many of the books are actually being read.  I suspect that people obtain free books, and never read more than a couple of pages!

I went through and figured out how many books had been actually sold, and it is a grand total of 631.  If you're among those who actually shelled out cash for my books, I am sincerely grateful.  I'm even more grateful if you read the book, or books!  I wish there were some way to allow you to tell me your thoughts.  I mean, there is; you can write to me privately, via this Blog, I'm pretty sure.

There were far more downloads of samples : a total of 8363.  I have been having stories published for seven years (I counted), and even that statistic is not impressive for such a long stretch of time.

I know the reason, and I have blogged about it before.  The net I cast is too narrow.  You have to be interested in classical music, and within classical music, early and Baroque music;  you have to be interested in violin; you have to be interested in soprano vocalist, and out-of-control lesbian ones; you have to be interested in kids; you get the idea.  If you're interested in all these things, I would probably really like to meet you!  Just kidding; I'm a people person only in my mind; I purge myself of all my people fascination by all this writing, and then avoid people as hard as I can.

Helen at Westfield

My latest project is a story called Helen at Westfield, which describes the first year or so after Helen starts teaching at Westfield, a fictitious college in the imaginary wilds of northwestern Pennsylvania.

So many things happen to Helen during this period that it is impossible to fit all of them into the periods I have allotted to them.  This happens because the school year is a quite rigid time-frame; various things have to happen: tests, Homecoming, Thanksgiving, and so on, and all Helen's excitement has to happen around these landmark events.  (I think I'm succeeding, but I'm not sure.)  What I have to do is--I thought--just shuffle the material I already had, maybe re-sequencing it a little, and there you go!

For this purpose, I think I have the ideal tool: a piece of software about which I have written before--Scrivener.  This is a program like a cross between PowerPoint and Word, in that you have a window on the left that looks like the PPt outline pane.  (Or even the Index Pane of Acrobat Reader.)  Then, you write your story in little packets, and each packet becomes an independent file.  It is given a name, and the Outline is a list of all these little files, which are actually called Texts.

When you're finished, and you want to combine the whole lot into a single continuous document, you tell Scrivener to compile.  You also tell it into what form you want it compiled: pdf, text, docx, ebook, html, etc.

This is a total winner, for most cases.  However, in my case, I need to rewrite each lump of the story, to make it fit into the time-frame!

Anyway, it is both less fun, and more fun, to do this than it might seem from my description!  Mostly because this part of the story is about some of the most beloved of my characters: Sophie, Nadia (an elderly Belgian professor), the kids: Gena, Erin, Alison and James; the kids at the college (who are a lot less annoying than some undergraduates I have met), and not least, Rain--Lady Evelyn Woodford--and her parents; and Lorna Shapiro.

Well!  Now to get started!

Kay

What's Love Got To Do With It, Anyway?

I recently got to read an article on Marianne Williamson, written by an author with the unlikely name of Taffy, who had been assigned to cover the candidate by the NYTimes.

At the debates, Ms. Williamson seemed quite plausible and attractive, but I could not get my head around her chosen profession of being, essentially, a motivational speaker.  Having read the article (please read; it is a slight possibility that I might have misunderstood some of the content there, and because I'm writing this more than a couple of weeks after reading it, I might have forgotten some things, too) I understand Ms. Williamson a lot better.  At the close of the first debate, Ms. Williamson said that she wanted to counter Donald Trump's basis for his political strategy, namely the harnessing of hate, with the power of love.  That statement no longer seems to come out of left field.

The Left-Field-ness of the statement was not really anything to do with its reasonability, in terms of the bare meanings of the words.  Trump certainly has capitalized on unharnessed feelings of hate and frustration in a large number of people, and the frustration of many conservatives among the Republicans at being unable to push forward their agenda, namely to make the USA a little more like it must have been in the Fifties.  All right, a lot more.  This is the subtext of the MAGA caps.  It is not about whether America was great in any objective sense; it merely meant that many conservatives remember it as being great.  They long for their youth, the things that made life in the USA so wonderful.  Of course, different people remember different things as being what made life wonderful!  There was a lot of money; taxes were (sometimes) lower; there wasn't this much pressure to do well in school; movies were better; you get the idea.  (No doubt, some folks think that the uptight schoolmarms among the Democrats were responsible for raining on their parades.  No making fun of minorities and women . . . Women took a sexist joke with a smile, in the old days, didn't they?)

But Love?  What is this?  Flower power all over again?

Whether or not Marianne Williamson finds a place in the Administration of 2021, we should take her basic idea seriously.  Without something like love, the future is very bleak.

A rose by any other name
What Sister Marianne calls love has been with us all along, by other names.

The chief among these is respect.  This word has many uses, some of them very different from each other.  I'm using it in the sense of treating everyone as though they're human; as though they have the same rights as we ourselves.  Technically, of course, an illegal immigrant has very few legal rights; but they do have some rights by law, no matter how much certain people hate that fact, and even some of us may hate that fact.  In many countries, foreigners are viewed with distaste and dislike, and sometimes with hostility.  Marianne advocates a return to respect.  And I do, too.  (As an author, and perhaps too unrealistically, I write stories in which everyone is respectful.)

There are other words: kindness, hospitality, generosity, patience.  They all mean love.  They're all sadly lacking in the way this administration, and Republicans in the government, have been conducting themselves.

And there are Republicans outside the government who are deeply unhappy about this.  It is difficult to identify with a party that wants to advance its goals by abandoning all these characteristics of loving and decent people.

Marianne Thinks The Left is Mean
If you Google an article in the New Yorker about Marianne's feelings about her candidacy, you will read that Marianne is shocked and frustrated with others in the left wing of the Democratic Party.

The younger folk among the Democrats, who tend to identify strongly with the Left Wing of the party, are impatient.  The older Left Wingers are also impatient, because they feel that its going to take hard steps to push back on the Alt Right, and warm fuzzy approaches are going to distract and delay the party.  Many factors are pushing them towards cynicism: the feeling of urgency in those who are fearful of Climate Change; the steady drift of economic (and political) power to be concentrated among the richest Americans; the gradual erosion of the power of Congress, and the gradual increase in the power of the Presidency and the Senate.  The escalating chaos among foreign governments that were formerly allies of the US.  The breakdown of international economic agreements.  The confusion within the Department of Justice, and the other security agencies.  The Republicans are truly bent on dismantling the government, and the Left wants to put a stop to it quickly.  We can imagine that, in their hurry, they act viciously against anyone, even other Democrats, who appear to stand in their way.

This is the sort of thing that the Democratic leadership mistakenly did during the 2016 elections, and that did not end well.  Unfortunately, whether we have time for it or whether we do not, these hasty Left-Wingers must learn through experience just how much decency they can sacrifice in order to further their progressive agenda.  In my considered opinion, they cannot sacrifice decency--or Love, if you prefer--at all.   You could sacrifice religion; in fact, the government must be run without reference to any particular religious system.  But you can't sacrifice love.  Trump sacrificed love, but nominally embraced Christianity.  The Church--perhaps I should say churches--responded very enthusiastically, hoping that in the long term, conditions favorable to organized religion will emerge.  That may well happen; as many of us suspect, organized religion is almost the opposite of what most religious leaders have taught.

Kay

Authors, Writing, George R.R. Martin, and Sarah J. Maas

I recently read that George R. R. Martin (who wrote Game of Thrones) described himself as a writer of the Gardener Type.  He considers that there are two sorts of writers, the Architects, and the Gardeners, and that he belongs to the latter category.

All right!   I was struggling to describe how I wrote, and this is the perfect description!

I wrote that what I do is create a character, and then other characters, and follow them around, seeing what they do, and reporting on the action!  Read the article at the link above, to see why he calls J. K. Rowling an architect.

Gardeners, in contrast,

". . . dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it," [Martin] told the Guardian. "They kind of know what seed it is, they know if [they] planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows."

Gosh.  I have to agree that his is a more poetic description of a procedure that is ultimately essentially the one I follow.  And this is given as the reason why it takes so long for stories to get completed.  When Martin says that he has to wait to see how the tree grows, because of the way his "seed" has been constructed, there are some characteristics that are built-in.  The circumstances of course cannot be built-in.

In the interests of complete disclosure, I have to reveal that I have not read a single book of Mr. Martin's; nor have I watched any of the TV episodes (or movies, or whatever).

Meanwhile, I was introduced to a writer called Sarah J. Maas, who has an enormous following.  She says she started writing in high school, and kept writing all through college, until her first novel: Throne of Glass, was published, and became a blockbuster.  (My antivirus says this is not a safe link; I'm not sure what the problem is.)

The title reveals how much George RR Martin has been an influence on Sarah J. Maas's generation.  But generally speaking, the feudal world is attractive to romantic souls, because of the mystique of the nobles and royals.  To authors, the powers of discretion, the ability to act without being hindered, those are also attractive, because otherwise the hero gets stymied by rules and regulations and lack of funds at every turn.

There is a crazy series of books about a young hero named Artemis Fowl, whose author goes in a different direction: the books are set in the present day, but the hero is impossibly rich, and his mother is impossibly easy to trick into letting him having his way!  (My problem with the hero's first name is that it is the name of a female, and the last name is sort of bird-like.)

Alexandra

One of the few stories I wrote about a queen is Alexandra.  It is sort of very unimaginative steam-punk; in fact, when I started writing the story, I did not even know of the existence of the genre.  (Apparently I was writing in a genre called Victorian—which might need an extra word in front, to distinguish it from actual Victorian.)

Spoiler alert: I must have been so unhappy with the fact that I had selected a queen as my protagonist that I made circumstances make her almost powerless.  As a result, the plot becomes almost bafflingly interesting; I could not have consciously dreamed up that plot if I had written in the architectural style, as GRR Martin describes.  That's just the first half of Alexandra.  The second half is pure self-gratification, on my part.  Well, read it; it's completely free, as of date of writing.

Prisoner!

This one is set in an alternate universe, in a late Bronze Age.  (Steel had not been discovered yet.  Many great romances are set just at the period when steel weapons are first discovered, and magical properties are attributed to steel swords, for instance.)  Anyway, the main protagonist, Maia, is a young girl taken prisoner in a war, and brought back (with hundreds of other slaves) with the conquering army.  She is taken to be the personal slave of one of the two royal princesses, and a tortured romance develops between Maia and her mistress.  There are some particularly fantastic elements to this story, which I will not disclose at this point.

The other stories are set in the present, or at least the late Eighties, before cellphones were common.  (Cellphones change the conditions of the stories in confusing ways.

An interesting feature of fantasy novels is the fact that many successful novels of this kind end up being series.  Some authors, perhaps, hope that their story will be adapted into a television series, or perhaps into movies.  I think, rather, that because these fantasy stories require a certain amount of work in creating the Worlds in which they take place; once that World is constructed, it seems a terrible waste to set only a single story in it.  This is true of J. K. Rowling's World of Harry Potter;  Tolkien's World of Middle Earth; the World of Star Wars; the World of Game of Thrones—it probably has some name; the World of Star Trek, and so on.  Even Sarah J. Maas's World has given rise to close to a score of books.  Philip Pullman's World of His Dark Materials is particularly interesting, because it is a many-worlds parallel worlds world, where you can cut an opening from one world into another.  So is S.J.Maas's World, and many other fantasy Worlds, but unlike in these other Worlds, a lot of the action (of Golden Compass / Dark Materials) takes place in several of the alternative worlds in Pullman's fantasy, which begins with The Golden Compass.  I did not mean to leave out Discworld, in which the stories of Terry Pratchett take place.  And how could I forget?: PERN, the World of the Dragon stories of Anne mcCaffrey, and Darkover, the World of the Darkover novels of Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Though GRR Martin describes the seed he plants in very general terms, I have confessed that the seed I plant is a set of interesting characters.  I'm not sure how much detail goes into the characters who are parts of Martin's seed, but the character of Helen, for instance, in Helen stories, is based on a fantasy character whom I imagined long ago, when I was day-dreaming, as a sort of imaginary friend, or an imaginary person I wanted to be.  All the things Helen could do were all the things I wanted to do.  I could actually do some of those things, and most of them pretty poorly, but Helen could do them beautifully.  I can flop around in the water, but Helen can swim for miles without tiring.  I can't dance at all, but Helen can dance like an angel.   So that sort of shows you why Helen is the way she is.  I find it difficult to resist temptation; Helen finds it impossible!  (At the outset.)

Unlike me, Helen is an awesome teacher!

[By the way, I have started a story about a middle-aged English college professor approaching burnout, confused by a couple of relationships with other women which are becoming alarmingly intimate.  So far, it's got—let me go look—32,000 words, and it is all about relationships and feelings.  This is about the point at which a plot will have to rear its ugly head… ]

This was not intended to be very insightful or very long; I just wanted to mention Sarah J. Maas, in case I had more insights about her in the future.  I have finished the story Throne of Glass, and I have several more books by her from the local library, which I must either read, or give back promptly.  The main protagonist, Celaena, is very young: 18 or so, and there are two heroes that she is drawn to, and who are attracted to her.  The author is, even at the end of the story, keeping her options open, which annoyed me!  Also, the dialog is snappy in the style of present-day speech—which is what we got in Star Wars, if you think about it; "I've got a bad feeling about this..." etc—which doesn't work for a story in a feudal environment.  But I get the feeling that the non-snappy dialog in my stories probably turns away a lot of young readers.  Well, that's all for now, folks.

Addendum: I am at about the quarter point of another story titled Heir of Fire in Sarah J. Maas's Throne of Glass cycle.  I must say that the writing in this story is many steps superior to that in Throne of Glass.  [I apologize for the critical tone of that remark, but this is my blog, and I can venture opinions about other authors, even those who have plotting skills greatly superior to mine!!]

This is where J.R.R. Tolkien, and Richard Wagner, and even J.K.Rowling have been such a great influence on us.  The names of the characters simply must be convincing, and they must be cleverly chosen to convey implications about rank, and origin, and role.  In the case of Rowling and the Wizarding World, Rowling simply gives her characters funny names, like Mundungus Fletcher, which are quite unjustified, but she gets away with it because—who knows the meaning of Wizarding traditions, anyway?  But Ms. Maas has cleverly latched on to the cultural peculiarity of Elves and their ilk, that they often have many names.  So a poorly chosen name can be quickly replaced by something more appropriate, when the character is revealed to be, well, something unusual or special.  In principle, the name of the character could be changed numerous times, as a sequence of stunning revelations about him or her are made!  (We have George Lucas doing the same thing with Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader.)

I think I can trace at least one idea that seems current in present-day teen mythology back to Golden Compass.  In that story, Pullman has Witches, a hidden race of women, who have certain magical powers.  Then, I began to see artwork on DeviantArt of sweet-faced, shapely-limbed women with ugly, jagged metal teeth!  Now I'm reading about just such a race of witches—jagged metal teeth and all—in S.J.Maas's book.  So either the artwork I'm seeing was inspired by Ms. Maas's stories—which is quite possible; her publishers and agents have worked furiously to make her a major phenomenon—and the Manga folk have pounced on the idea of witches, and somewhere along the line, the jagged metal teeth have popped into the soup; or perhaps the path of the idea is some variation of that one.  I am amazed at the alacrity with which Japanese fantasy writers and artists grab the ideas in any fantasy fiction, reduce the ideas in it into small idea atoms, and cannibalize them immediately!  It is a sort of reverse-engineering approach to literary invention.

Kay

A Manga Story

I recently began reading an adult manga story.  It was fascinating, and now it's got me thinking about writing something similar.  But of course, I'm not going to make it a graphic novel; that would be weird.

The story is a simple encounter of a young girl, still in school, and a female grad student.  They meet on the commuter train, and the younger one finds herself being drawn to the older, basically wanting to see her every day at the same time, and trying to attract her attention.

In our culture, this would be described crudely as 'stalking', a very derogatory word for something that is perfectly natural, and in my opinion, harmless.

After a couple of weeks, the older girl drops a book, which the younger one hurries to pick up, and they get to talking, and the older girl invites the younger one to her apartment, and very gradually they indicate to each other that they are attracted to each other.  It is the very gradual pace of the story that I find most romantic!

After they have done this for a couple of days, they kiss.  Both of them are thrown off balance by the kiss, and they part, planning to meet the next day.  The next day, they kiss again, and then their clothes come off, and it gets very heated.  At this point, the artwork goes off the rails; in his (or her) eagerness to depict the intense intimacy of the two girls, the artist resorts to various cliches, which lead me to believe that it is a boy (or a guy, anyway; hopefully even an adult male will be a little less ignorant about sexual procedures!) and both girls have an intense emotional response to what they're doing.

Over the next few days, there are other issues that come up: jealousy, curiosity from classmates, embarrassment due to various events, all sorts of interesting episodes.

It has been a great experience, but I wish I had some creative input to it.

KHB

More About Helen's Concerto

Since this is about Helen, the series, I should post this update on my companion blog, Helen.  I'm going to do it there, and when I'm done, I'll make a link to it.  As soon as I can, I'll take the "Rated R" filter off; I don't know how to do it yet!

More about Helen's Concerto.

KHB

The Fantasy Universe, and DeviantArt

For those who actually like to read my books: they're completely free for a month, as far as I can tell.  Smashwords is having a promotional period, where they are giving the books away (books from cooperating authors, anyway).  Disclaimer: just a very few books are still not free, I observed just a moment ago.

Anyway, it has been an education being on the DeviantArt website.  (I did not insert an exclamation point, in case it was interpreted as a wink and a nod; the Deviants —as they call themselves—above all, take themselves very seriously indeed.  Those who become disillusioned with the site and the system seem to leave quite promptly, and then, as often as not, rejoin, because they miss the site!)

To really understand what is going on, you only need to visit it.  The flavor of the site is different if you use your phone than if you use a desktop; in either case, you can look at thousands of images of artwork, almost all original art, though a few—a very small minority—are reprocessed images from the Web.  You will find a few poems, a few short stories, but the vast majority of images are original art.

The genres of the graphic art on the site form an interesting study.  They flow from any of (1):Anime-Manga type images, or from the video game universe; (2) Fan-Art; this means art produced by young artists (most of them are in their teens and twenties) as homage to movies and movie heroes; for instance there are images of Captain Marvel, and Wonder Woman, and even some art showing them together, and interacting in various ways; (3) Fantasy art based on fantasy literature, which is, in turn, based loosely on Anime legends, or great modifications of Irish, Norse, German, and French (and sometimes Chinese, Korean and Japanese, and even African) Gothic stories and legends.

The techniques, or the media used, are also an interesting study.  There is (A) Anime-style art.  This is a sub-genre of ordinary animation art, but it has a lot of convention, borrowed from Japanese animation.  Instead of a continuous spectrum of emotions that are depicted on the faces of the characters, there appears to be (and I could be quite wrong here) standard emotions that are depicted in codified ways.  Of course, there's nothing to prevent an artist from departing from the standard codified palette; but a skillful artist can depict any one of the standard emotions with just a few strokes of the brush, or pen.  In the manga genre (Comics derived from Japanese illustrated stories), this is especially true.  In the anime genre, in addition to the expressions, there are certain motions that indicate particular situations or interactions.  Furthermore, the voice-actors can, using a not-very-wide range of vocal expressions, convey a surprisingly wide range of emotions, by appealing to convention.  Of course, animation with full sound is not present in any significant volume on the DeviantArt site; you are sent off-site, to YouTube, or other sites to watch and listen to full video and sound examples.  Then, there is an interesting technique based on software, which results in (3D) animation!  In this method, an artist acquires one of several programs, which generate, using computer graphics, a a surprisingly realistic-looking character, equipped with any one of a set of costumes (usually bought separately, or built with difficulty from scratch), with hair of one of several possible colors (bought separately, usually), with any desired eye color, in any desired background, etc.  The software itself is essentially free; the characters, the things they carry—weapons, wands, books, etc—need to be obtained separately, as well as the clothing and other accoutrements.   (The character is actually an object of the software, using the term object in the technical sense.  In fact, all the gadgets are objects, even including such things as shoes and eyeglasses.)

Then, there is conventional painting, (P), which is photographed and uploaded.  There is also digital painting, (D), where the drawing is done using a mouse, on a computer, or other mouse-like devices, called pens or brushes.  Often a brush is understood to be a program setting that is connected to a mouse or pen inside the software.  There is, in my mind, no big difference between painting and digital painting; less difference than there is between oils and acrylic paints, as far as a non-painter is concerned.  Of course, there are all sorts of other media, and all sorts of papers and canvases, the differences between which are totally sacred to artists.

There is an interesting discipline called Cosplay, for which I have not thought of an acronym.  In this, people dress up in costumes, like Superman, or Zelda—a mythical character from a video game from the eighties, or even earlier—and enact scenes, or still tableaux, from the movies or games concerned.  Sometimes they pose in scenes that were never parts of the original movies or stories, such as Superman beheading Batman, just to give an example.  (One hopes that this is never enacted anywhere!)

There is a genre called digital photo-manipulation, where software similar to Photoshop (an Adobe product) is used to modify an ordinary photograph.  Above and beyond the usual sorts of things we're accustomed to calling photoshopped, there are amazing different modifications that are possible, and virtually impossible to detect as a modification.

Women
Have I written about this already?  I am so annoyed with this problem—which I am about to describe to you shortly—that I complain about it in my head to my imaginary friends all the time!

Most of the women depicted in the artwork are heavy-breasted, and most of them narrow-waisted, almost all wide-hipped, and many of them semi-nude.  Now, I would expect that women drawn by young guys: teens and twenties, would be that way.  Women of that sort probably populate the wet dreams of pubescent guys, (and possibly men all the way up to their eighties).  But even female artists have bought into these aesthetic values, at least on DeviantArt.  

Now, let's think about this.  If you're depicting a goddess of fertility, for instance, you would—or, at least I would—represent her with full breasts, to convey fertility and motherhood.  She would be gentle-eyed, and her pose would be somehow accepting, ready to embrace.  If I'm depicting a warrior goddess, on the other hand, she would be sharp-eyed, ready to fight, well-muscled, equipped with effective weapons, her hair tied back, all business.  But no; the battle-goddesses on DeviantArt are shown practically nude, wielding fantastic, totally ineffective swords, or ornamental lances; their breasts hanging out, their hair whipping about, likely to get the goddess killed merely by getting entangled in something.  I'll just stop here.  The artists on DeviantArt either know little or nothing about fighting, or would rather sacrifice martial realism for the sake of a sexy piece of art.  To me, a realistic fighting figure is sexy; the look of cool concentration, the focus in the eyes; that's sexy.  But . . . oh, it is so frustrating.  The culture on the site, moreover, is to not offend with any sort of cutting criticism.  Any criticisms must be prefaced with long and abject apologies.

Information accompanying artwork

Each piece of art is accompanied with optional information, and its title.  The titles are sometimes self-explanatory, and that is all one needs.  But also, often, without a detailed explanation, it is impossible to figure out what the artwork represents.  For instance, a piece of art showing a girl kissing a boy, could represent the girl from such-and-such a comic series (a manga series, for instance) kissing one of the boys from such-and-such a videogame, in such-and-such a scenario, imagined by such-and-such a member of DeviantArt.  Often it is possible for a member of DeviantArt to actually request someone to draw such an encounter, and the requester will pay for the artwork.  This is called a commission.  I knew that it was possible to commission a book cover, and I did.  The young lady whom I commissioned to create a cover for Little John Finds a Friend, one of the last couple of stories in the Helen saga, delivered a simple but effective cover, with which I was completely satisfied.  My original cover, and the new commissioned cover are shown below.

I think, within the parameters of the commission, the young artist gave me something that is eminently reasonable.  The story was not highly dramatic, and the cover is appropriate.

Going back to the Information accompanying a piece of art, sometimes these information fields are completely empty.  Sometimes they are filled with a sort of alphabet soup of references, which refer to various anime videos, or computer games, or movies, and even modifications of these sorts of things.  For instance the Mortal Kombat series of games are referred to as MKI, MK2, and so on; the Final Fantasy series of games are FF, FFII, FFVII, FF10, or something like that.  The Final Fantasy games are associated with movies.

Of course, we are aware now, that it is possible to make actual videos using this technology as a basis.  We know that it is possible to make an object that can be animated, such as Gollum, from The Lord of the Rings, where the motion is borrowed from a physical actor.  (This is how they make video games these days.)  People have been angry at how the Speaker of the House of Representatives was depicted in a video as if she was drunk.  Whoever did that did not realize that it would be altogether too easy to create a video of a drunken President; or perhaps they thought that actual videos of the President behaving in a silly way were digitally manipulated.  (And maybe they were.  I sincerely hope that did not happen.)

Generally speaking, the artists on the site are actually incredibly good: both the photographic artists, and those who create images from scratch.  The artists who use 3D software are also excellent; they must use a wide range of techniques that manipulate the basic objects that they have procured, to deliver some image, which they must subsequently tinker with in Photoshop or other secondary program, to get the result they want.  Some of them can deliver miraculous results, and the others are still learning how to do that.  There are, obviously, elements of both programming, and digital image-crafting involved; it is an entirely new field of art.

For the intensely dramatic story of Helen and Sharon—which even I am at a loss as to how to characterize accurately—I commissioned a cover from a different artist, who has promised me a cover in early July.  I intend to use the cover regardless of how appropriate it is, but I get the feeling that it is going to be a challenge for the artist.  To begin with, my mental image of Helen is in flux; I imagine the violinist / conductor / singer in different ways at different times; and I asked the artist to represent her in two panels: one showing Helen, the Conductor, and one showing Merit, the fighter.  I said, they are the same person; the one on the right is heavily disguised.  She made it clear that she was not going to be able to depict a woman who weighed exactly 165 pounds, and I confessed, yes, that does seem to be beyond the realm of the possible!

Heels

I myself seldom wear very high heels, except perhaps at Halloween, and I detest the modern trend of women wearing enormously high heels all the time.  It's even worse to see almost every woman on TV and in the movies wear higher than moderate heels.  But most inexplicable is the every woman in DeviantArt images is shown wearing unbelievably high heels.  I shall not speculate about the causes of this phenomenon.

Politics

When the artists give a glimpse of their political leanings, they tend to be left-leaning.  Many of them—very delicately—deplore the rising sea levels, the rising temperatures, the dying species, the increasing poverty, and the wars dragging on, and the rising numbers of refugees.  Occasionally, there is an outburst from the opposite side, with someone complaining essentially about either immigration, or about liberals and their speech.  The worst that can be said about artists and their philosophies of life is that they're more concerned with whatever art they're involved with than with the state of the world around them.  You seldom see artists anxious about bequeathing billions of their ill-gotten gains to their children!

One Last Thing

One of the silliest things I have noticed in hand-drawn artwork on DeviantArt is: garters.  If you think about it, with most modern hosiery, you don't need to wear garters.  Garters are used, more in the glamour photography industry than anywhere else, simply as an accessory.  So, when you see a fighter-goddess wearing garters, you have to think: something is wrong here.

An interesting cultural phenomenon is taking place, and may have a bearing on the use of garters, among many other things: Japanese, Korean, and Chinese young people are insatiable in their search for thematic inspiration: stories, art, theater, and music.  There are numerous references to classical Greek gods and goddesses, and the bare outlines of disemboweled classical myths are joyfully refilled with modern imaginings in the spirit of Godzilla.  Olympus has been moved into galaxies far, far away, and slightly (or considerably) different battles are being fought in this new arena, with the gods and goddesses using lasers and lightning bolts, and powerful bolts of psychic energy.  The conventional propensities of the gods of Olympus are often replaced with modern motivations.  Giants and ghouls and evils spirits are replaced with robots, cyborgs, and other fearsome antagonists.  (We don't have to go very far to see examples of this that have been already seen and accepted by everyone: Tolkien's orks are, to my mind, modern substitutes for Hades's armies.)

Everyone indulges in this sort of borrowing.  Meanwhile, in search of any sort of inspiration, the folks on DeviantArt are not held back by the actual plotlines of the existing stories in which various characters appear.  If they feel like it, they interpret a character from one story in the style of another story, and have him or her interact in the style of a third story, to produce a scene of their liking!  This is certainly creativity at work; nobody complains about a drawing that contains anything at all (unless, of course, it is shown to children).  But sometimes, I feel, these 'Deviants' would be well served to know the original stories of the classics a lot better; they're missing a lot, in stuffing those characters into their own little stories.  The old myths were epic not so much in the sense of the wide swath of destruction that their fights caused; they were epic in the sense of the far-reaching consequences that those ancients attributed to those conflicts.  The epic battles of modern youth fiction too often resembles a huge storm in an enormous teacup.

Helen & Sharon, and the Concerto, and Music

I have done my homework---most of it---and gone through "Concerto" for the third time, and taken out yet more redundancy, and thrown in a few images, just for fun.

My fiction contains lesbianism, which was one of the original focuses when I started writing; it contains dance, it contains some athletics: mainly tennis, swimming, skating and running, and martial arts; and it contains a lot of classical music.

On one hand, if someone loves all these topics, then there will be something to interest her; on the other hand, if someone does not like more than one of these topics, they're likely to be bored a lot of the time!!  This is one reason that I am not too upset at the low sales rate I'm getting.  The total number of downloads and sales are around 6000 books, which is low for most authors who have been in the game for 5 years, more or less.

Honestly, the music component needs to be taken seriously by me.  I refer to so many pieces in the stories which a typical reader will not be motivated to look up---and might not like, even if they do look one up---that I thought of putting links here to as many of the pieces mentioned in Helen & Sharon, and Helen's Concerto as I can remember.

1. Right at the beginning of Helen & Sharon, we mention The St. Matthew Passion.  This is a major, 2-hour long work, and has four kinds of pieces (numbers) in it.
1. Chorales: these are just hymns,
2. Arias: these are solos, and there are occasionally duets as well,
3. Recitatives: a sort of sung explanation, in essentially free rhythm,
4. Choruses: these are major choir numbers; there are only about 4.  Here is one of them: O Mensch, bewein dein' Sundre gross.  (When you finish listening, use the [back] button to return here.)
2. Helen practices the Partitas, and Nadia is appreciative!  These are nice, short, keyboard pieces by Bach in 3 parts.  Let me find one for you: Partita No 1.
3. The second Sharon Vuehl movie was a remake of a famous Charlie Chaplin movie, which you're sure to have heard.  Chaplin composed this theme himself: Limelight 
4. Helen first meets Sita when she is invited to Philadelphia to conduct Die Meistersinger, an opera that is around 3 hours long.  Here is just the Overture, which is 9 minutes long!  You don't have to listen to the whole thing, but I love it so much I can't resist!
5. There is a brief mention of Helen singing in Messiah, which also comes up later in Helen, Handel's Messiah, and the Piano, and in Concerto as well.  Let's listen to this lovely double-aria, a contralto first, followed by a soprano: He shall feed his flock.
6. Helen's father dies while she is partying in California, and she is flown out to Helen's father's little farm, where they might have sung this common funeral hymn: Abide With Me.  I would have preferred to link to "For all the Saints," but I couldn't find a video that I really liked...
7. One of the works mentioned on the Georgia trip is the Brahms Violin Concerto in D.  This is Hilary Hahn.  It's a lot of fun.
8. In Florida, Helen conducts one of Bach's orchestral suites, so let's play this one.  There are several movements; just the Courant (the second movement) is enough to listen to.
9. Next is a solo violin concerto that Helen plays: the Bach A minor.  Let's cut you a break, and listen to the last movement, Allegro Assai, "very fast."

I'll add in a couple of pieces from "Concerto" after I have lunch!