Little Women (2019)

Just a warning: This post has little or nothing to do with my books on Smashwords.

L-R: Beth March [Scanlen], Jo March [Ronan],
Meg March [Watson], Amy March [Pugh]

A few nights ago, I watched Little Women starring Laura Dern, Saoirse Ronan, Meryl Streep, and numerous others.

First of all, I have read Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men, the main books that form part of a single connected story, and read them often, and so I know my way around the narrative extremely well.  Bear that in mind, when I wax critical about this latest movie.

First and formost, I see numerous matters that concern the author, Louisa May Alcott.  Anyone, with any sort of observation and sensitivity who lived at that time--even without the history of the world since that time to illuminate their thinking--could have had similar concerns:

* The status of women, who were under the control of their menfolk.  Many women--if not all women--could see the unfairness of this state of affairs.  But especially in times of war, it was more glaringly obvious that men, and male politicians and legislators made matters worse than they already were, though there may have been a few wonderful leaders of the masculine gender.

* The fact that women were consigned to certain tasks and responsibilities, which kept them out of the running in tasks and responsibilities that were far more important, which were jealously controlled by inept men.

* The fact that no matter how brilliant, a typical woman had no access to higher learning, no matter how well fitted she may have been to have the world of knowledge opened to her.  Women needed access to knowledge both in order to make a difference in the social and political sphere, and also in order to follow their instincts and their thirst for knowledge in any area.

* The fact that women had to subject themselves to often quite unreasonable demands of their husbands to bear large numbers of children.

* Alcott was painfully aware of the sorry plight of poor immigrants.  Whether or not this was a central concern of hers I do not know--reading her personal papers could tell us the answer to that--but she certainly brought up the matter in Little Women, and presented the death of Beth March as a direct consequence of the lack of medical care available to the Hummel family.  Another factor was:

* The poor state of public health practices at the time, and sanitation standards.  It is hard to tell whether Alcott was sufficiently far seeing to imagine what would be possible in the future.

* The limitations of poverty.  The March family, while certainly better off than the Hummels, still looked upon the Lawrences next door, and their Aunt March, with envy.

A unifying theme in the context of all these concerns, is the powerlessness of women, even if it does not have a direct bearing on every single one of these items.  Certainly being a woman made everything so much worse, if you had to have a connection between, say, the Hummels and female powerlessness.  It seemed that the Hummels were a family headed by a woman, and such a family would usually be worse off in every respect than a family led by a man.

However, I think that, to make Little Women a monothematic piece of work would be to do it an enormous disservice.  Directors with a vision often think that, in making a movie out of a book, it is impossible to convey more than a single important point.  I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the main driving force behind the Little Women (2019) project, Greta Gerwig, subscribed rather too enthusiastically to the belief that Louisa M. Alcott's governing concern was feminism, which seems to have resulted in a very heavy-handed use of the flashback technique.  Never before in the history of mankind has so much flashback been resorted to, with such confusing effect.  To follow what was going on, you had to have known the story intimately already, and you had to keep track of what the lighting was, how long someone's hair was, and so on.  Ms. Gerwig may have succeeded in elucidating the motivations for various actions by backing them up with flashbacks, so, OK, motivations in this movie might have been a trifle easier to understand than in earlier Little Women movies.  But the thread of the story really suffers.

There were brilliant moments.  Beautiful visuals, gorgeous costumes, scenes improved by realistic acting.  But it was difficult to follow the thread of the story; and I fear that only those who knew the story, and were desperately trying to salvage something from the temporal confusion, would have made the effort to thread their way through the spaghetti.

An interesting turn of events is that Professor Bhaer, the gentleman who eventually wins the heart of Jo March, has only a few minutes on screen.  This is explained by presenting the happy ending to the story (the consummation of the love affair of Jo and Bhaer) as being an unwelcome result of undue pressure being brought to bear by the publisher.

I suppose I'm too much of a lover of the original stories, and the author, L. M. Alcott, in my own superficial way, I suppose, to appreciate the deconstruction, and the painful reconstruction of the story by Greta Gerwig.  If there had only been two time periods between which the camera switches, it might have worked.  But sometimes Gerwig switches between three, or more.  I have a horrible suspicion that the actual flashback she wanted was between the scene at the publisher's office, and Jo's scramble to intercept Bhaer before he leaves for New York; all the other flashbacks were (I believe) merely a means to convey legitimacy on that final one.

I should talk.  I have wielded flashback ruthlessly in my stories.  But I freely confess that it was due to my ineptness as an author.  Well, perhaps one day, a Director's Cut will be made available to us, where the flashbacks are handled more delicately, or hopefully, eliminated.

Kay

Updates On "Prisoner!", and "Lalitha".

Well, first of all, I made The Lost Years:  Helen & Lalitha  a free download, and then I made Prisoner no longer free, but priced at 99 cents.  (I think it is one of my best stories, and easily worth more than the price I've set.  But stories that sell on Smashwords are, I believe, priced very low, and that's what readers are looking for.)

Immediately, of course, Prisoner stopped selling; in fact nothing has sold for the last few days!  The message is clear: I may give away my stories, but I may not try to sell them.  (On the other hand, there are a few steady sales on Apple Books, and Barnes and Noble, for which I'm grateful.)

Lalitha, meanwhile, priced to move as a free download, has not sold a single copy, which is frustrating for me.  I think that story, which is not an essential part of the Sharon story, except for establishing essential background for the character Sita, is nevertheless a lovely, romantic story on its own, with several fascinating characters, even though they're essentially adults.

Prisoner, which was downloaded enthusiastically, is certainly a great story, but it is set in a fantasy universe, and the characters are in their late teens.  I wonder whether that's the secret of the popularity of Prisoner?

Meanwhile, I commissioned an artist to supply for me a cover for Lalitha, and she delivered a few hours ago.  The main illustration for the cover is shown here.  It depicts the unofficial 'wedding' where Helen and Lalitha are informally married according to a Hindu rite.  I'm pleased with how Lalitha has been drawn, but in the story Helen has been a worker in housing construction, something which I did not make clear to the artist.  Still, I do see Helen and Lalitha in the artwork, and I think it is just perfect.  Whether it will help to make the book more attractive, I cannot say!

Kay

"Prisoner!", and Other Stories

My story Prisoner! is now being given away for free on Smashwords, and all the other books are being sold for 99c or a little more; as a result, only Prisoner is selling!  I'm a little annoyed, and I'm also not annoyed; it's complicated.

Prisoner! is an interesting story, because of the voice of the narration.  In a nod to the historical flavor of the story--not that it is historical, or even fictionalized history--it has a sort of dispassionate, matter-of-fact tone to the narration; perhaps this works really well.  The emotional relationships emerge well into the story, and there is a sort of objective flavor to most of the sex that is there.  (There is very little graphic sex.)  The main character is essentially a female security guard of the bronze age, who develops feelings for the princess whom she is assigned to guard.

If any of my blog readers have read it already, you will know the story, those of you who have not read it, well, what can I say?  It is as well written as any of the other stories, and better-written than most, really.  And, of course, it is being given away at the moment: 2019.  In fact, it has been given away for most of this year.  Unfortunately, none of the other books are like it; the story whose tone comes closest is Alexandra, which is set at a time when the civilization is like the late 19^th century / early 20^th century.  It is in the distant future, but technology has regressed, and so scientific knowledge is somewhat primitive.  However, Alexandra was an early effort, and I was not as experienced when I was writing it.

There is another story set in a bronze-age universe: Jana.  It isn't ready for publication, but I had put up episodes from it on this very blog; the last few episodes were mere summaries of the story.

Well, it seems common sense to change my strategy, and do two things: (1) charge for Prisoner, since if its sales take a dive, it will have no implications for the sales of any of the other books; (2) select another loss-leader, e.g. Helen at Ballet Camp, or Helen and Lalitha.  Ballet Camp is a sort of goofy piece of writing!  It is unlikely to lead anyone to follow it up with reading any of the other Helen stories.  Helen and Lalitha, in contrast, is a very strong story, with characters who are very real to me, and three-dimensional.

You know, literary coaches are always telling inexperienced writers to cut the fat in their writing.  Take out anything that isn't absolutely necessary.  Kill any inessential characters, and so on.  Well, I did this for Lalitha, and you know what happened?  I killed the vitality from the thing.  The interaction between Helen and Lalitha, which was one of the greatest events in Helen's life, and in Lalitha's life as well, which cast an immensely long shadow on their histories, just stands there, like a ruined castle.

In India, Helen fails to do anything consequential to prevent Lalitha's marriage to someone she does not love; in fact the ten years Helen spends in India (which is a little implausible, because certainly someone in Helen's family would have tried to find out where she was) is totally wasted; it accomplishes absolutely nothing.  Well, life is like that; some years only succeed in making you older!  (That's certainly true for the past three years of my life.)  On the other hand, Helen does become fluent in one Indian dialect, but that fact never has any bearing on what happens to Helen.

I'm not very motivated at the moment, so I'll get around to changing the pricing on Prisoner!  and Lalitha sometime, possible next week.  Because of the prices I have chosen: 99 cents or less, I cannot put these books into the promotional plans that Smashwords sets up for the Holiday Season.

Well, happy holidays anyway!  I strongly believe in enjoying holidays to the fullest, even if you don't believe in any of the mythology!  Don't let the bastards grind you down!  Broadcast love to everyone, even those rotten conservatives!  Nobody is at their best when they've got their backs to the wall.

Love,

Kay

What Does Sharon Vuehl Look Like? New Artwork

One of the things I now enjoy the most about publishing an e-book on the Internet, is creating cover art for the books, with the help of young artists on DeviantArt, a website and an organization that supports artists.

Helen & Sharon is a book that recounts the story of how Helen starred in several hit movies masquerading as a new young talent, Sharon Vuehl.

When I first published H & S, I just threw together a cover picture depicting an Amazon (from a sculpture), as well as a picture of the goddess Saraswati (also from a sculpture), since Sharon Vuehl's co-star, Sita Maunder, was a devout believer in the goddess.

It was well past time to replace this placeholder with an appropriate piece of cover art, and when the artist whose work I prefer announced that she had some free time, I described what I wanted.  She had it ready within a couple of weeks (which is very fast indeed), and here it is:

What's going on here?

On the left we have Helen, perhaps a few months after her little boy James was born, dressed for a concert, holding a baton.  Presumably she is about to conduct the performance of an orchestral work.

On the right, we have a depiction of Sharon Vuehl in her role of Merit, the principal character in the most high-grossing movie in which Sharon starred, namely Merit and the Princess.  Merit is a high-born young woman in a society in which the coming-of-age ritual has the girl going on an adventure, leading a team of women warriors.  Merit and her band are skilled fighters, and in the picture, Merit is in a fighting crouch, ready to take on some antagonist that is not visible to us.

According to the story, Helen secretly trains and exercises, to build muscle, and her disguise involves straightening her curly blonde hair, and having it colored red.  Sharon Vuehl, when she goes into the studio, looks both more muscular, and younger than Helen, and has blue eyes and red hair.

The artist was instructed to make the two figures plausibly the same woman, except for the blue eyes and the musculature.  We would expect that Helen's disguise made it impossible to recognize Sharon as being Helen, whereas in the artwork, Helen and Sharon had to look convincingly the same person.

Kay Hemlock Brown

A Drastic Change: Charging for All Books

Just decided to charge (more or less) a flat rate for each of my stories on Smashwords: $0.99.

The reason for this is to ensure that only one title is available for free; this way I have a better idea whether people actually read the books, and if so, which ones.  My basic assumption is that people who pay for a title are more likely to actually read it, in contrast to those who download a title at no cost!

I'm not sure whether this decision affects people unduly; I doubt whether there is anyone at all who has read all the titles --18 of them--that I have put up on Smashwords, or who was planning to obtain and read all of them.  Well, until now, most of them would have been free, except for maybe two or three.  From now on, they would cost around a dollar each, and if you think about it, it isn't too outrageous to get 18 books for a little over $20!

If there is anyone who was planning to buy a number of my stories (wow; that would really knock my socks off) and has been put in the position of actually having to shell out big money for them, please contact me with a good sob story, and I'll work on arranging for you to have the books you desire for free!

By the way, Prisoner! is still available for free, for no good reason.  I just want to see all the sales statistics flatline, except for Prisoner!, which would perversely cheer me up.

Kay

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