It's the Weekend Before Christmas!

Christmas plays a large role in my stories.  I ought not to, but I feel that I should apologize to my Jewish readers and friends, for not investing an equal amount of excitement in Jewish festival days!  I must admit that I know very little about the Jewish religion, except for what little we see through the lens of Protestant Christianity, from which the anti-Jewish hysteria (and there's a whole lot of that, I'm sad to report) has been carefully removed.

Honestly, Christmas is, to my mind, the only Christian festival worth celebrating.  It stands for everything I believe in: eradication of poverty; generosity; shelter for the homeless; survival under a hostile regime, even if it is our own.

There are things to deplore, as well: principally the commercialism, and every sort of excess that businesses are eager to encourage.  And this year, it is somewhat amusing that businesses are greatly frustrated at being unable to encourage the usual foolishness of the season.  I am going to support the local soup kitchens as much as I can, though I'm living on savings right now.  One hopes that they plan for the future, and spread their revenues over the whole year.

There are several stories in which Christmas figures prominently.  (You need not read these if you're not so inclined!)

Christine's Amazing etc. Christmas

Jane

Helen and Lalitha

Helen on the Run

Helen vs. Handel's Messiah

Helen at Westfield

I must admit, every story whose timeline goes through December has some Christmas references, including Alexandra, in which I thought the Christmas chapter was particularly poignant.   Jane features two Christmasses; Westfield has an attempted suicide shortly after Christmas, which was tasteless of me, but my stories that year were rather drama laden.  I did not mention Christmas on the Voyager, though it was a particularly romantic one; the same goes for the holiday season in Helen and Lalitha.  In On the Run, Helen is hugely pregnant at Christmas, and there's a lot of excitement for various reasons.

Kay

"On The Run" has a new cover, by Halchroma!

I'm gradually getting our artist Halchroma to replace all the goofy covers for my books published through Smashwords, as most of you know.  When I say goofy, I meant that many of Halchroma's covers are better than mine, and many are a lot better.  (Yraid 's cover was by Chayna-Gina, and was really based on a self-portrait of her.)  You can read the detail in the post "On The Run is getting a new cover!" on the Helen blog; it comes after the so-called jump break at the bottom.

Kay H. B.

[About the] Smashwords Price List

Dear Readers and Friends,

A few days ago, I went on Smashwords and assigned prices of mostly 99c to almost all the my books.  As usual, I anticipate that the downloads of these books will plummet, but I believe that most readers who follow me (using the phrase in the most liberal sense!) have already acquired almost all the books they really want, which means that only Smashwords members who are new to my stories will have to shell out 99 cents for books!  Some of you get the books from Apple Books, and I have no idea how that works.

In the scheme of things, that's not an exorbitant price; most readers can afford a dollar for even something they might not want to keep.

As I blogged on Helen a few days ago, I'm anticipating a new cover for Helen On The Run, which would be lovely.  The cover I had put for it was somewhat offputting!  Our artist, who has just begun to attend college last year, is working like mad over the summer, and trying to keep up with schoolwork.  I sincerely hope she does not get infected with the Coronavirus, that dastardly enemy of good artwork.  A pox on it.

Well, keep healthy, all of you, even if it means not attending large Thanksgiving dinners.  Especially those of you who are diabetic (like Helen), or older (like Olive), or who carry a few extra pounds (like Olive, again), stay home, and give them any excuse, and plead for your portion to be dropped off!  (That would be a lot of packing, but they may oblige!)  Trump survived the virus, so how bad can it be?  As some of you might be able to guess, I personally don't like turkey, so I will probably have a little roast chicken, which is easy to make, and easy to eat.

Hey, I might write a recipe book one day.  That gives me a lot of satisfaction!  Shall I call it Helen's Favorite Recipes?

A happy Thanksgiving to all you!  I think we all deserve a good Thanksgiving, even if great doubt has been cast on the motivations of the participants of the original feast.

Kay

A Broken Society Someone Has To Repair

We won!  Or, at least, the Democrats won, and I was solidly behind the Democrats.

I should explain why I was behind the Democrats.

(1)  I felt that only the Democrats were concerned about the poorest citizens among us.  I just can't believe that the rest of the country seems to be unconcerned about the poorest of the poor; those who are hurt most by being required to work during the COVID crisis.  I'm sure there are some among the Republicans whose hearts are moved by the plight of these workers, but perhaps they have some reason why they feel that helping them is bad for somebody.  The facts will come out over the next year.  Maybe it is that they do not believe that the Democrats will actually help these people, and it is all a lie.  Maybe it's racial prejudice; a belief that only minorities are in this group of poor citizens, and need not be a concern for us.  This is sad, and need not be a permanent state of affairs.

(2)  I felt that only the Democrats were concerned with the Environment, and with the COVID pandemic.  I know why Republicans did not believe in these issues; they do not think that they are important.  They also do not believe in Clean Energy, because they feel that Clean Energy will not be enough energy, and will not be cheap.

(3)  I felt that the Democrats' promise about helping pay back student loans was a huge idea; I hope that if this is made into law, that those Republicans who benefit from it give the Democrats a second chance, and consider helping the Democrat plans for the nation.  At the very least, the interest rates for college loans should be fixed as low as home mortgage interest rates.  I don't think a college degree helps everyone to be a better citizen.  But I firmly believe that the young person with an inquiring mind can get an enormous amount of information from a college education.  On the other hand, a young person who has to be handed everything on a plate could easily not acquire an education, because the last thing a college professor wants to do is to stuff an education into the head of an unwilling student.

(4)  I firmly believe in consumer protection.  Businesses, with the best will in the world, will not voluntarily be honest about the problems with their products.  This is why there are so many rules about what they have to do.  Don't we all depend on the ingredients list in food?  I don't know exactly what regulations the Trump Administration threw out; when I find out, I will be better able to defend why they should be reinstated.

Above all, I think we have to engage young Republicans in talking about government, and in making reasonable decisions about what regulations should be kept, and which ones should be thrown out.  Handicapped individuals are now part of our society, and any rules about  handicapped accessibility should remain.  But it is important that, as individuals, we do not make the divisions wider between ourselves and Republicans; we must learn to agree to disagree more politely, or with a willingness to try a second time to understand their point or view, or the third time, or as many times as needed.

Kay

Unexpected News about Trump Supporters

Well, what do you know.

I had subconsciously assumed that Trump supporters only tolerated him because they had somehow gotten to believe that his policies would ultimately help them; or, if not, because they had bought into the glamour of his personality, such as it is!  But just yesterday I got a call from a friend who lives in a rather liberal city, and she says that, watching the progress of the vote-count, Trump fans—who are a minority there, of course—are practically in tears!  This is completely unexpected.  I had assumed that people were only interested in Trump from a political point of view.  Instead, they appear to be very hurt by the fact that Trump isn't sweeping the election.  (And Trump appears to be confounded, too.)

In my own view, I thought the attraction of Trump was that he was not a Washington insider, but had spent ages deploring the actions of Congress and former presidents, and had ridden to power as the glamorous outsider, who said what he thought, and made remarks off-the-cuff, which his fans loved.  His unscripted speech was welcome to those who felt put-off by the gramatically 'correct' sentences of ordinary political leaders.  But the fans seem to actually identify with him far more than the rest of us imagined.

Now, carefully crafted sentences might be offputting to many, especially those to whom conventional, grammatical language does not come easy.  But to the typical lawyer—most congressmen and senators, and even presidents, start out being lawyers—writing a sentence whose meaning is unambiguous is second nature.  If you're writing up an international agreement, for instance, you can't shoot from the hip.  So Trump's sloppy language might be refreshing, but its refreshing-ness should have worn off after four years.

If we're to have all these people who have strong emotional ties to Trump, life is going to be very difficult.  I can just imagine an unending string of Trump Tweets about every little action of Congress or the Senate or the White House, which will start off being annoying, and end up being highly disruptive.  This looks like the future that's facing us.

On top of all of this, Trump fans are fed an endless stream of untruths and misinformation.  This is possible, because these fans do not like the Media, either.  They only watch Fox News, I suppose, and listen to Rush Limbaugh, but claim to not entirely trust those sources either, but only trust Trump himself.  This makes it difficult or impossible to reason with them about reality, because their own reality, roughly thrown together by Trump, has such a strong hold on their imaginations.  In their minds, vote counting centers are filled with suspicious people, ready to slide in fake ballots at any opportunity.  In actual fact, they are filled with very serious people, half Republican, half Democrat, who labor for hours, trying to be as careful as possible about recording the ballots.  I know at least one of these people personally, and she was in physical pain, after crouching over a table from six in the morning to ten at night, working with mailed-in ballots.

The voting in every state is different, but in Pennsylvania they take elections very seriously.

Mailed ballots come in an envelope with the details of the voter written on it.  All that information is recorded carefully by hand, checked against the voter rolls, in case the voter is trying to vote twice.  Then the envelope is opened up, and inside is another envelope, which contains the ballot.  That one is anonymous, and is put in another pile.  A second pair of workers opens that envelope up, and runs it through the vote-recording maching.  This machine reads the votes—scans both sides of the sheet—and stores the result.  (Sometimes it rejects the ballot, which must then be re-scanned in all possible ways, backwards and forwards, etc.  Very much like feeding a dollar bill into a machine in a rest area on a highway.)  This proceeds as efficiently as possible, but cannot be sped up very much more.

Because of the mail-in ballots—which are being used widely for the first time, because of convenience, and the virus—the procedure is necessarily complicated.

The scanners are not connected to the election center.  This is for fear of hacking.  The results are called in every hour or so, which is then reported to the news services.  The total ballot counts are known already, at the times the ballots are closed, by simply counting the people coming through, and the total mail ballots sent out.  Only the actual votes are counted slowly.  So the news services know the percentages of how many votes were counted, e.g. 86%, or whatever.

Now, there are calculations the news services can make.  They set how much error they can stand, and figure out what percentage of the votes must be counted to keep the error in their estimate of the total vote below that percentage they have settled on.  This part of the process cannot be easily explained to laymen; in fact, I only understand the mathematics in the broadest outline.  So the news services have to wait until the probability of error in their prediction (of any particular state result) is less than, say one-tenth of 1%.  Until then, all they can say is that it looks like Trump is ahead, or whatever.

Finally, the Electoral College adds another wrinkle to the mess.  Trump is careful not to criticize the Electoral College, because he was convinced that it is the E.C. that allowed him to win in 2016.  This year, the Electoral College seems to be giving the win to Biden, and the popular vote seems to be going to him too.  There are a long list of things that Trump will love or hate, depending on the outcome of the election.  His lawyers have entered lawsuits against three states.  We don't know how far these lawsuits will go.

Kay

My Sales Over the Last Few Weeks

I think that I have cracked the code.

I used to puzzle over the seemingly random distribution of book sales reported by Smashwords.  Now, I believe that I have figured out an explanation, and it is something that makes me thoughtful.  I believe there is just a small number of readers who are interested in these books, really.  I think they wait until the books are offered for free, and snap them up.  The total number of copies of each book sold is more or less the same.  I suspect that some readers download multiplie copies of some of the books, perhaps to read them on the various devices that they own.  (I do the same, but once you buy one, you're usually allowed to load them on each of your mobile devices at no extra charge!  But downloading fresh copies gives the illusion that I'm attracting new readers.  I don't mind; I don't do it for the money; I do it for the FAME!  Just kidding!

I have said before that I wanted to base a book that was intended to follow Concerto on our present day existence, but because the political news so dominates the attention, there seems nothing interesting going on except political activity.  That would kill interest in any book, so I'll wait on things to settle down, or I'll just give up the whole thing.

Things are sure to turn out all right.  Some people are terribly worried that the ultra-left people will take over, and change the US beyond recognition.  That will probably not happen.  There are urget needs that have to be taken care of: support for those who have been reduced to abject poverty by the Virus (some of the relief money has been soaked up by employers to benefit themselves, and not shared with their employees); schools must be gradually made effective again; some investment must be made in preparedness for epidemics; and we must seriously put the brakes on fossil fuels, which make life easy and fun for those whose lives depend on big gas-guzzling vehicles, or whose lives are made much more fun  by them.  Well, we have to move over to other ways of having fun.

Commuting to work is not fun for those who work in large cities, like New York and Los Angeles.  I have spent time in those places, and getting to work is miserable.  It can be changed so that commuting is a lot less miserable, and the pollution is highly reduced.

Finally, it is time to urge those heads of businesses who have been accustomed to enormous profits towards helping to pay for government services; in other words, we have to raise their taxes.  (Some quite middle-class people have gotten alarmed, thinking that their incomes are going to disappear into government coffers.  I don't know for certain, but I do not think this is going to happen.  But it is nice to imagine that you are a lot richer than you are; you know who you are.)

So, happy reading, all of you!

Kay

A Look At Politics

I hate to look at politics, generally, but these days all my friends are a little anxious.  It did not help that the last presidential debate was far from presidential!  And to top everything, the White House is now floating the story that the president and the first lady have tested positive for the covid virus, which could very well be true.

At the best of times I am fairly inactive; in these days of sheltering in place, I stay home except for a walk around the block each day.  My figure was never svelte, but now I am getting alarmingly fleshy all over, which makes me worry.

Meanwhile, I'm getting a little concerned that I have never written a story involving a black protagonist.  (Actually, I sort of have; if you've read Music on the Galactic Voyager, you might recall Megan Barrows, who was the EVA specialist, whom Helen fell almost in love with.  I loved writing that part of the story, which gave a beautiful texture to the period of time right after Helen has the Twins.  But Megan is not a typical black woman, though I think I have invested her story with a little of the concerns that Blacks have, or at least what outsiders imagine that they have.)

Lalitha, Sita and Suresh are Indians, and in a foolish moment I described them as being fair of complexion; they need not have been described that way.  In terms of their thinking and behavior, though, I think they are fairly typical, judging from the several Indian friends I knew in college and in graduate school.

In my paper-and-pen scribblings that form the origins of the Helen story, there are a few more accounts of Helen's friendships with men and women from Spanish-speaking countries, but they never made it into the Helen story that has got published.  There was even a hermaphrodite among them, an extraordinarily loving woman, who belongs to a very conservative family, and for whom the unusual physical feature prevented her from marrying, though she longed to marry.  (Bear in mind that this story came out of my fevered brain, and was not inspired by an actual person.)

As far as the outcome of the election is concerned, since the only part of my civic responsibility that I will undertake is to vote, I will not talk about all the upsetting things that Democrats are being threatened with.  I am not a member of the Democrat Party, but when it comes to being threatened with violence, I count myself as one of them.  Unlike Donald Trump, my college and university education makes it impossible to do otherwise than think rationally, even if I unwittingly betray that training occasionally, in my fiction.  Many of Trump's most ardent followers, I feel, have difficulty following the logic that leads to legislation that the Democrats have supported.  Many of them believe the conspiracy theories manufactured for their consumption by the leadership of the GOP, and some members of the News Media, just to make things interesting for themselves.

I might watch the Vice-Presidential debate for a few minutes--or seconds--just because I'm curious as to how Kamala Harris would deal with the twisted logic that Mike Pence uses!

We don't have long to wait; there will be Halloween with few of the usual amusements (except for scofflaws in counties such as ours, where it is common to see tubby little kids grabbing candy like there's no tomorrow during Halloween, between extremely polite young people, carefully taking two pieces of candy and no more!  I wish there were an alternative to candy, but it's too much part of our culture.  I often dress up, out of respect for the Trick-Or-Treaters, and this time, I hear on the grapevine, that there are costume exchanges for those who can't afford a new one.  (That will unfortunately deal a blow to those who make costumes as a living.  Still, I support recycling anything, rather than consuming fresh materials, for something as trivial as Halloween costumes, though it admittedly gives a lot of joy to a lot of people.  What can I say.

For all the young people, bored to tears by having to stay at home: try writing a little fiction!  Write a two-page story on one of these themes:

• Stealing out after dark with a friend, and having a good fright!
• Visiting a friend in a foreign country, and unexpectedly being caught in a temporary lockdown.
• Two or three friends sign up to compete to sing at a fair.  Two of them can play guitar, or ukulele, and they practice, and get selected to sing at the finals!

Writing of any kind is good, especially if you examine your writing for mistakes, and then fix them.

Kay.