Baffled In Pennsylvania

I'm not sure what I did on August 29^th, but I sold 44 books that day.  I'm not overjoyed only because most of the books were being offered for free, but it is certainly nice to see that there is some sort of interest in the books!

Here is a capture of the graph that shows how many of each title was downloaded each day; it is a little bit tricky trying to figure out which date goes with a particular point on the graph.

This is a 'stacked' line graph, which means that the number of books sold for a given title is color-coded, and stacked on top of the graph point for the book below it.  For instance, the graph (dark blue) that lies under the whole lot corresponds to Helen at the Beach, presumably because it has the most 'sales' overall.  Above it is the graph for Helen's Concerto, and so on, all the way to Helen Versus Handels's Messiah. 

Forgive me for trying to explain a graph, to explain which I have no special training, but which everyone really ought to know how to read!  For example, on the right, we see a blown-up detail of the graph shown above, of which one 'peak' is shown, marked with an 'X'.  That corresponds to October 17th.  Only 7 different titles were downloaded that day: one each of Helen at the Beach, Helen's Concerto, Jane, Jane the Early Years, Helen Backstory: Lisa, Cindy, etc.; Helen and the Flowershop Girl, and Alexandra.  On other dates, multiple copies of certain titles were downloaded, e.g. 9 copies of Beach on August 27^th.

I know you folks are not too concerned about these 'sales', but I like to see these books 'flying off the shelves,' or rather, burning up the Internet!

When I'm not careful, I feel a certain pride in having written so many titles back when I was still teaching a full load!  It isn't easy to write fiction while preparing for classes at the same time; obviously, I wasn't doing either the writing or the preparing very well!  (Neither one, actually.)  Also, I remember that most of the stories are extracted from a single story: Helen, and published some ten years later, so now you know that your blogger is not such a furious writer as it might have appeared at first.

Kay

P.S.: Actually, using this form of graph to represent sales is somewhat misleading.  They should use a stacked bar graph, which uses rectangular bars.  Then the total area of, for example, the dark blue rectangles would represent the total sales for the period.  With these zig-zag graphs, this does not happen, though the graph looks attractive.  (This is the problem with putting a graphic designer in charge of a data project.)

[Added Later:]
I found out that on June 27^th, I had sold a total of 49 books!  The most number of copies was of Helen at the Beach.  The second-most-downloaded title was Helen's Concerto.  Now, of these two, the popularity of the latter is easy to explain; I had been talking about it for weeks before that date, and I suppose some readers had been waiting for the book to come out.  But for Beach, I have no explanation, certainly nothing that I did.  Must go through the blog and see.  I suspect that there is some word-of-mouth advertising going on.

Touching Base: News About Galactic Voyager, Plus Miscellaneous Thoughts

I find it difficult to edit my stories, which is something I really need to do.  I decided to try a new method, namely to read the story as I usually do: on a e-reader, and note down the points that need editing with bookmarks.  I'm sure I have thought about doing this often, but I'm really doing it for the first time.

I just fixed about a dozen minor details, and uploaded the new manuscript to Smashwords.   If any one of my readers is reading this, and has not finished reading, please feel free to hop over to the publisher's website, and get yourself a new improved version, with fabric softener and added Vitamin C.

There are only a couple of full-length stories (novels—I still feel bashful to describe them as novels, though they just can't be anything else) of which I'm really proud.  I'm fairly proud of the whole lot, but these are serious contributions to these genres of literature:

Alexandra, a long story with characters I think are truly admirable and attractive, and with human failings that are entirely forgivable;

Music On The Galactic Voyager, a truly awesome (stop me!) science fiction story.  The science in this one is not close to being magic, as many sci-fi stories become; it is just 20th-century science.  (Ultra-futuristic sci-fi is boring.  And you may quote me.  I mean, anything can happen, and the author can shrug and say: it's future science, kiddos.  Yeah, right.  This is my quarrel with Japanese sci-fi fantasies.)

A couple more are waiting in the wings: Jane, for instance, which really needs to be re-written to have a satisfactory ending; Prisoner, which had a huge following at one time, and Helen, of course.  But these are all projects that are still under construction, though I have recklessly thrown them into publication.  Helen's Concerto only needs polishing up; I'm writing a front-end to Helen & Sharon, after which I will tidy up and slim down Helen & Sharon.  At that point, the trilogy: Helen at Westfield, Helen & Sharon, and Helen's Concerto will be a good piece of writing.  At the moment, there are too many flaws in the Helen saga, though in its large plan, it is already complete.

Kay Hemlock Brown

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