The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics

I have been reading one of the most astounding books I have read in a while.

This work, by Olivia Waite, an author who has written a romance by the above name, between two women, somehow landed in my hands, and pretty soon, I could not put it down.  The story is set in 19th Century England.  The chief protagonist is a young woman who had worked with her late father, who was an astronomer, by making hand-calculations to support his astronomical observations.  (In that time, theories of the motions of planetary objects had to produce predictions, based on hand calculations, and these calculations were often carried out by women!  At any rate, this service of our heroine is presented here as a novelty.  But a story of a lesbian protagonist who is a mathematician, and an astronomer!  How wonderful!)

One of the most wonderful things about Olivia Waite's writing is: the language; by which I mean, the tone, the speech, the voice of the narrative.  I often deplore the stories about bygone times, where the idiom is modern.  It does not work.  The language of those times very closely reflected the inequality between men and women; there were a thousand ways in which women were subtly shamed or patronised for their words or their actions, and it cannot be done in modern speech without missing the proper tone.  This is a weakness in numerous movies, as well.  The caution with which our heroine, Lucy---who was of humble background---or rather, the woman who loves her, who is a countess, tries to find out whether Lucy is open to being the object of the countess's love, is very refreshing indeed.  It would not have been appropriate for the countess to drag Lucy into her bedroom, and make her move there.  It had to be all approached much more circumspectly.  Circumspection is rather an alien concept to so many authors, especially lesbian authors, because so few lesbian authors are in the closet, and forced to behave circumspectly.

Olivia Waite's writing is beautiful, because of how poetical it is.  She writes about nature, about flowers, about music, about embroidery: things that I could never write about intelligently, because I hardly notice them!  I am such a failure in that department...

I just had to write a review of the book at a point when I have only gone halfway through the book.  (I keep doing this.)  Amazon did not permit me to write a review under my pseudonym, since I had not racked up a sufficient dollar amount of purchases with them, so the review must be done here.  I have read two more books that are truly wonderful, but I will not review them here, because I feel that Olivia W's book needs to be presented independently.  Hurry out and get a copy!

Kay

Istanbul, not Constantinople / Fascinated, not Obsessed

I'm pleased with Lalitha having been repaired, and with many of the stories being downloaded from Smashwords!  Of course, this pops me back (thinking of this situation as a stack) to the state of being unsure whether the stories are really being read.

Of course, they're being sort of read; perhaps not from beginning to end, or as we would have said back in the days of Agatha Christie: from cover to cover.  I have to be content with readers reading just a paragraph or two; or just using the stories as masturbation aids.  I understand the need, but it still makes me queasy.

To turn to something completely different, I went on DeviantArt, the Art website---where I initially went to find artists who might help me create covers for the books---and wrote that my libido, and with it my creativity, have sort of faded out completely.  I'm not sure whether it makes better sense to make that sort of confession here (in the Blog), or there (in DeviantArt).  I was getting treated for a certain medical condition, for which reason they had to tinker with my hormones, and I found myself abruptly losing all interest in sex.  Of course, that is a blessing, in some ways, for someone who has been terrified, all their life long, with beginning relationships.  (Once a relationship begins, it is a lot less terrifying.)  But, you might have heard that it is our sex drives that make all sorts of creativity possible.  In my case, it apparently is; and now I can't write fiction.  I can't write romantic fiction, which is almost all that I wrote, though I can still write these hypochondria-laced blog posts.  I had been casually informed by the KHB Repair Agency that my natural hormones will return, all by themselves.

Now to turn to something even more completely different: I have recently become aware of the popular singer and YouTube personality Billie Eilish.  I don't know much about her; there are sites that contain Billie information, but one has to dig rather deeply to get anything.  She seems to be at the point in the arc of her fame where she doesn't want to release a statement about herself for fear of alienating somebody.

One of the things I like about her is that she's such a flawed androgyne!  She's an androgyine---I mean, just look at her!---and she's just beautifully imperfect, which makes her so easy to relate to.  A few months ago I saw Stephen Colbert interviewing her, and she came through beautifully (on Zoom, even) though I thought Colbert just couldn't quite get what she was trying to convey.  Colbert always seemed, to me, to present a very masculine affect; and in response, Billie was greeting him very warmly and politely, but in a definitely feminine manner.  So, though at certain levels, Billie presents herself as androgynous, I think her persona reponds to whomever she is responding to, with a complementary gender identity.  Warning: I'm not an expert in this sort of thing, and I have stopped believing in that sort of expertise anyway.  I think psychology is more of a religion than a science!

Though I deplore having lost my libido, however temporarily, I have to confess that I still have a craving to hand out hugs to anyone who seems to be sad, or in pain, or just unhappy.  Not guys; only girls or women.  What does that say?

Flying Off the Shelves Once More

Heh heh.  I had hardly got finished blogging that I had reduced prices on several of my books, than I 'sold' a couple of dozen of them!  This confirms that the stories are technically worthless, or at least worth less than 99 cents, which is the minimum that Smashwords will allow!  No, I'm not upset or insulted; I know that a reader has to have a peculiar mix of interests (classical music, girl-girl relationships, children, etc) for the Helen stories to grab them.  (The non-Helen stories are a lot of fun, and don't have anything to do with music, except for Music on the Galactic Voyager, which is sort of vaguely a Helen story.)

Listen, you guys: come on, now; spread the word!  I don't need the cash, honestly; but I do like to see people buying the books!!!

(I get the sneaking suspicion that a single person has bought all the books that were downloaded yesterday.  Well, thanks, whoever you are!)

Kay Hemlock DarkBrown

What's Going On?

A few days ago, I made several of the stories on Smashwords either free, or priced very low.  Yet, the sales have not exploded like I expected!  Perhaps it takes time for the news to percolate to the people who want to buy my stories and haven't got them yet!

Maybe I didn't reduce the prices on very many stories; I need to go and check.

Meanwhile, as I said, I have hit a roadblock in my writing, and not a whole lot of new material is forthcoming.  I will get around to it eventually, but it won't be soon.

Kay

Two Days, When the Stories Flew Off the Shelves!

Smashwords sent me an email some time ago, saying they're having a Summer Sale.  They wanted me to "sign up," which meant that they would sell my stories at a reduced price (which I had to approve,) an then, on August 1, the prices revert to normal.

Well, since nothing was moving, and since I suspected that a few dozen Kay Hemlock Brown fans have been hoping something like this would happen, I signed up.  Since they were already at the minimum price of 99c, this meant that they were now free, which means Smashwords would not make any money from them!  It was already July 29th when I signed up, so for two days, 25 copies of my stories were sucked up by various people.  What they did with those stories I can only imagine; they're probably putrefying in various hard drives across the USA (and other parts of the world, but I suspect that in other lands, people actually read the stories).

And Now For Something Completely Different.  I have hit a block in finishing up the various things I had wanted to do with the existing stories and story lines.  Having said that, I have various issues on my mind:

1. What with the recent interest in racism across the country, I feel that there are too few people in my stories who are non-white.  There certainly are a few; in Jane, there are Italians, Hungarians, and Jews, who must certainly be considered as contributing to racial diversity in our society, but not many others.  In the Helen stories, there are Indians, for certain, and French, and Germans, too.  But the stories are too white.
2. The changing weather patterns--climate change--are really in our faces; it might be appropriate for fiction to reflect this.
3. I wanted to incorporate COVID into a story.

I forget what I wanted to say.  More later.

Kay

Why is Kay so Mysterious?

As you know, Kay Hemlock Brown is merely a pseudonym I dreamed up, to protect my privacy, back when I was a seriously closet writer!  So I have to make up enough detail about my life to satisfy the curiosity of my readers, as well as to provide a foundation for my fiction.  (Fiction written by someone about whom you know nothing at all is strangely unsatisfying, and somehow distressing.)  As for my age, if I was a teenager when I started writing the Helen story around the year 2000, I must be at least in my thirties now.  (I'm much older.  But, judging from what I say and write, you have to agree that I am distressingly youthful, or even child-like.)

But I cannot turn my back on the fact that, ever since COVID, my life has been very unsatisfactory, and meanwhile, I have been unable to write at all.  I have begun a number of projects, and not gotten anywhere with any of them.  When I go back and read them, I actually forget my plans for them, because, of course, I don't plot them out, like Jane Rowling; I let the stories steer themselves.  But now, maybe I'm going to either have to plot the stories out, or give up writing.

To make things worse, I have been unable to get rid of the feeling that our world is in the charge of some very unimaginative and heartless people.  There are some decent folk who are trying their best, but I'm beginning to fear for their ability to advance their agendas, and worse, I'm beginning to fear for their lives.  For those who believe in God, it is easy to leave things to him (or her), and trust to his (or her) goodness.  But for me, I need to do something about it.  (I don't want to get too political about it, but I firmly believe that, this mid-term elections, if we leave matters to go, as usual, to the party in the opposition, it is going to go very badly for us; the Democrats have to get out the vote like never before.)  I do not believe in gun ownership.  Unfortunately, though, some of the people who are arraigned against us do believe in armed opposition, and the Constitution permits the ownership of guns.  What will happen, if they are convinced that they can never get the votes to get what they want through legitimate means?

To turn to something completely different, I have occasionally been reading about what is happening at the Olympics in Japan, and I stumbled upon a video clip of our gymnasts in action.  Of course, there was Simone Biles, doing unbelievable things while in the air.  But more interestingly, there were several seconds of Sunisa Lee, whose forte is the uneven bars, and I was stunned.  I wrote some time ago that I had started a story that was inspired by the legend of Sleeping Beauty, where instead of a princess and a prince, there were two princesses.  This is not a novel idea; I myself have read stories that go that way.  But, as I watched Sunisa Lee in action, I felt as if one of these characters had been actually brought to life!

Well, I can't elaborate further without embarrassing myself; a person in my situation can easily be thrown off-balance by the slightest thing, but I'm sure I'm stable enough to return to equilibrium.  (This is one of the weaknesses of Yraid, where you would expect that the main character, Aggie, could have been shown to be extremely vulnerable, and you would have wondered why I did not take the opportunity to explore the psychological aspects of a girl who essentially has hardly anyone in whom to confide, and no one off whom she could bounce her feelings of being torn about her loneliness, and her broken family.  Initially, I wanted her to have these bad moments, but not to confess them in the story; after all, once I created her character, I had to be consistent about her, and she was essentially not someone who would bare her soul.)  I had conceived of both the characters---in the Sleeping Beauty story---as being serious girls, only occasionally laughing when one or the other noticed something as funny, and shared it with the other.  Sex and desire are serious things, especially when you're young, and I just couldn't approach their relationship in a lighthearted way.

In the bit of the story I have written so far, the girls have just met, in a meadow some distance from the hut in which Beauty (not her name in the story) lives with her three fairy godmothers, and where the other princess has run away from home, and is enjoying her freedom, running about, and practicing the sword.  Some problems that I have yet to solve are: how much sex is there going to be?  Is there going to be any magic?  (There has to be, since the fundamental problem the story tries to solve is magical in its very nature.)  The newcomer princess is a warlike person: a swordswoman, an archer, and a rider.  One of the first things she does is to kill a doe, and skin it, roast it, and eat it.  Is Beauty going to be able to persuade the newcomer to not kill animals for food?  Meanwhile, all the forest creatures who are Beauty's friends are appaled and aggrieved.  Though Beauty talks to them incessantly, and they mostly understand what she is saying, she cannot understand them.

(This post is getting me interested in this project again!)

Kay

New Post in 'Helen' Blog

A new plan for a Helen-related piece has occurred to me; it's described in detail in our sister blog: Helen.