Why I Write

The reason I'm writing this blogpost is because I was becoming more aware of why other authors---mostly on Amazon---were writing their stories.

Some of them, certainly, were writing in order to earn.  Sometimes writing is what someone feels he or she can do the best.  Sometimes they can only write.  Often they're inspired by other writers whose works they have read, and so on.

Others are fired by a need to support emerging lesbian, and more generally, LGBTQ young people, and give them models and instances of other teens and YA women struggling with the need to choose that lifestyle, or deal with the social problems accompanying their preferences.  Yet others want to recount their own stories, or stories of their close friends, which they think are going to be interesting or inspiring to readers.

Still others are still smarting under the hostility they felt from convention-bound parents, or other older adults who simply could not reconcile what they were seeing with how life used to be for them.  These older adults still see the new freedom to choose a respectful lifestyle as an affront to their religious views, or what they consider, for some reason, as right and proper.  Many citizens see the new laws as atrocious, shameful parodies of what legislation should be, and authors feel the need to respond to these feelings, or to support young people who struggle against members of society who harbor these feelings.  Of course, I feel the urge to do this as well, but I don't have the evangelical feelings to do this that some women have.  If challenged, I suppose, I might be provoked into lashing out, but that isn't me.

[To be continued...]

Ebooks vs. Snail Books

Now that I've got to reading tons of ebooks from Kindle and Smashwords, I have quite a different perspective on pricing!

An actual paper book, costs about $6, and I take about 3-4 days to read it.

An e-book, on the other hand, I sometimes finish two a day.  I think the authors are not focused on filling e-books with a lot of substance; they're more into hooking a reader into reading the first of a long series of books.  Some of the books I have read lately seem to be just an installment in a serial novel.  ('A Tale of Two Cities' by Charles Dickens was first published this way.)  So if one of my e-books were to be priced at $ 6, readers would (1) expect quite a substantial book, and (2) have to be committed to all of the odd variety of topics that the book contains: college life, young children, music, television, a young drama queen, a daughter of a British Earl (even if a minor one), and so on, in the case of Westfield.

None of my books---except Yraid, and Flower shop Girl, are quick reads, as it happens, but I'm glad I priced them at 99c, now having a feel for the issues.

A Wonderful Book: "Without Words"

I have been reading a number of books on Kindle, as I said, and I have come across a dozen great authors, about whose existence I had not been aware.  Unfortunately, in the literary environment in which we find ourselves, you can't depend on an author who has written a fantastic book to keep repeating the same feat with subsequent books.  (I mean, you never could, really; the best indication of how good a book is, is to read the first quarter or so of it.)

The book, a fantasy, was Without Words, the author is Cameron Darrow, and I'm close to being without words to sing the praises of this particular book!  The title refers to a really unique character in the book, who has difficulty with language.  All through the book, this character struggles to communicate with her tribe.  She is not unintelligent; the conceit of the book is that, due to an extreme effort needed to save her life when she was an infant, the required magic damaged her language ability.  There are a handful of wonderful other characters, but this central, linguistically challenged character, Zifa, carries the entire story, and the entire book.  With careful skill, the author succeeds in describing Zifa's---often complex---thought processes, which she struggles to convey purely at the vocabulary level, being unable to use sentences at all, except ones that she has memorized.

Many of the stories that I have read have the theme of prejudice running through them, sometimes even racism.  On the other hand, a lot of the stories are close to being potboilers: stories that are close to being formulaic, focusing on comfortable themes, of coming out, or 'friends to lovers,' or 'age-gap romances,' or any number of such frames.  This is not to say that the authors do not take time to invent an interesting plot, and interesting circumstances, and insert interesting details, and set these stories in interesting locations, or create glamor by making one or both protagonists fabulously wealthy, or powerful, or a movie star.  It is interesting, but natural, though, that authors of lesbian romance novels are sensitive to the existence of prejudice.

Another fascinating fact is how these stories deal with sex.  (I had to resist trivializing the word 'sex' by placing an exclamation point after it.)  Sex is dealt with in various ways; some authors are at pains to describe exactly how each partner pleasures the other; some authors do not focus on sex at all; some authors describe the opening moments of an intimate encounter---especially if the level of intimacy escalates throughout the story, and then 'fade to black' a very clever phrase that describes, rather graphically, a literary device where the description of the sex is gradually faded out.  The number of acronyms used with lesbian romance is vast; it is clear that lesbians have no patience with long phrases that could be abbreviated into a few initials.  A few are HEA ('Happily Ever After'), a description of an ending, which allows the option for a reader to not choose a book that ends in too trite a fashion, HFN ('Happily For Now'), and I suppose there is some acronym for a story that ends tragically.  Without Words is a HEA book.

Insight into Being an Author

I was recently reading some (lesbian) literature from (Amazon) Kindle, and I was amazed at how good some of the books were.  (Of course, some of the books were really below par, but it evidently suits Amazon to keep them on their site.)  The book I read most recently---actually, I've read a couple of books since I read that one---was so well plotted out, and the characters were so beautifully created, and some of the incidental, and not so incidental events so perfectly described, that I felt embarrassed at how far my own writing fell short, I guess, from what that author was delivering.  And that author wasn't alone; at least 10 of the authors, or close to that number, anyway, were amazingly good writers.  Writing lesbian fiction, it seems to me, requires a couple of different skills, and not all authors have these abilities developed to the same degree:

(1) Getting inside the head of their characters.  [Almost all authors had this skill.]

(2) Being able to explain what their characters were thinking.

(3) Creating a scene in the minds of the readers.

(4) Inventing a story that captures the interest of the audience.

(5) Introducing just the right number of subsidiary characters, who have enough charm to lend depth to the story.  [I think this is an important skill.  Some of the characters introduced were pets, who were super cute.  I could have done this, but I think I've missed some opportunities!]

(6) Guiding a reader through a dialogue, where the reasoning of each participant isn't self-evident.

That last item is the one I'm trying to focus on.  But before we go into it, I want to mention one of the vices of an author that one of my early mentors pointed out to me: editorializing.

What does editorializing mean?  As I understood it when it was first used with me, it means making judgements on the words or actions of a character.  Most writers of fiction hold the view that moral judgements of the actions of a character are not needed, or even appropriate, in a work of fiction.  Whether some action is good, or bad, or horrifying, or despicable, or admirable: it should be left to the reader to make that call.  But some stories hinge on a particular call being made, and so the author steers the thinking of the audience, by using a loaded word or phrase.

Item (6), above, is different.  We're all, in some ways, amateur psychologists.  When someone is telling us something important, what we make of the statement depends on (a) both our backgrounds and our circumstances, (b) any previous events that would color the meaning or our response to the statements; possibly very specific incidents the reader simply does not know; or perhaps a thinking pattern that was habitually a part of one of the characters.  (For instance, perhaps it was the habit of a character to assume that another character was always trying to put him down, in which case even an innocent remark would be regarded as a criticism.  Or perhaps a certain person wouldn't ever consider a woman to be anything but innocent, and a man to be anything but guilty!)  So the author has to run interference for us, and make it clear how the psychological reasoning of one of the participants in the dialogue is going, based on all these background thoughts and habits.  It's unavoidable for this to happen, otherwise the reader would jump to the wrong conclusion.  Sometimes this guidance has to be put in right in the middle of the dialogue, to stop us going even an inch down the wrong road, because that would be ... I don't know, objectionable somehow.

I'm going to try and find an example of this, to show you.  I'm too embarrassed to use something from my own writing, so it would have to be from a story by someone else!  I'll add to this post when I find a good enough example.

Kay

Magic, or No Magic?

This is going to be a complicated post.

First off, my new story, about the romance between an African American girl and an Elf (tentatively titled the girl with the pretty eyebrows): a chunk of it is available for reading on one of the pages of this blog.  It was easy to get started with, but not to continue with, I'm afraid.

Secondly, I have a bit of a political idea to air, though I will try not to offend any of the political folders into which people have grouped themselves.  Here goes.

We all learn a little biology, a little botany, a little physics, a little chemistry, and so on, in school.  But, since the time of Aristotle, you can guess that the volume of science that mankind knows, and the volume of science that ordinary people are expected to know, has absolutely exploded.  Aristotle would be amazed at how much we know.  But I'm willing to take a guess that, long before the stage at which our teachers expect us to top out, we've already experienced a combination of emotional overload, as well as information overload, and we let the information come in through one ear, and out through the other.  It's mostly because we're kids (this all happens around the age of about 14) and we also buy into the idea that we can't afford to remember all this, especially because we're unlikely to ever use it.  Then, BOOM!  We're in the middle of a pandemic, and people are expecting for us to use all this 9th-grade knowledge that we have so carefully prevented ourselves from absorbing.  What we do is think of all the stuff that happens inside gadgets we use as being slightly magical.  We think of microwave ovens as being slightly magical; we think of air fryers as being slightly magical (actually, it's just a low-powered blowtorch), we think of our smart phones as being magical, etc.  Some phone companies encourage this belief.  But we are accustomed to thinking about vaccines sort of as though they're magic.

And worse, this new vaccine works in a more hi-tech way, using genetics.

Now, genetics does not have to mean tinkering with our own DNA.  A few years ago, I went on a reading spree about genes and DNA, and I found that the vast majority of things that our DNA does, is to manufacture proteins.  The proteins go along our bloodstream, and do all the things that need to be done, like get a baby started, or repair a tear somewhere, etc.  But one family of tasks can't be done with a single protein.  This task is fight infections!  To fight infections, popping out a single protein won't do, because all mammals are really designed to fight diseases---which means bacteriums---that they haven't seen before.  Of course.  There's no point in fighting only familiar diseases, because an unfamiliar one is sure to come along any day.

So what the DNA does is generate disease-fighting "machines", that modify themselves to fight new germs.  One of them meets a new germ, and learns how to fight it, and spreads the word to the other "machines",  and the war is on.  Be assured that these "machines" are not part of our DNA; they are one step removed.

The new vaccines capitalize on this process, to make these machines more efficient.  They teach those machines to defeat one of those spikes that the COVID virus has.  But the spike has enough information in it for the "machines" that get hold of it to destroy the entire virus, so, yes: there's a little bit of spike in the vaccine, as I understand it.  But the spike itself is harmless; it's the rest of the virus that hijacks our lung cells, and forces them to generate more viruses.

It's a sneaky, mean little virus, but the best weapon against it are our own virus-fighting machines, and the vaccine is a sort of Coach, that helps them learn to fight the virus.  Now, because I am not sure how much microbiology you have picked up, and sadly, the science teachers in different schools teach their students wildly different amounts of science, some folks are going to be able to understand what I'm saying (behind the strange anthropomorphizations that I have described).   Some of you might be affronted at having to pull out all that dusty information that you hoped never to have to use again.  But this vaccine is such an effective piece of chemistry, despite the tiny number of people who get the infection even after being vaccinated, that it is sad that there are so many who reject the vaccine.

A lot of people reject much of the science behind other things as well, such as Climate Change, and Election Security.  They have long ago relegated science to the same box as Miracles, and Magic, and they feel that rejecting science is a cousin of rejecting magic.  Rejecting magic is good, right?

But rejecting the vaccine is not a partisan choice, except that Pres. Biden promised to end the pandemic in so many days.  GOP leaders are waiting to mark down this failure to end the pandemic as a win for them.  But a win for the GOP leaders would seem to be a huge loss for the GOP rank-and-file, because their seniors, and their kids are going to suffer.  There were even some politicians who, in a weak moment, said that their seniors were tough enough to take a little hardship on behalf of The Cause.  That's just plain foolish, and I'm not going to write any more about that sort of testosterone-speak.

A Great Epiphany

Hello, dear readers of this Blog!

As you know, I have two blogs; this one, and one focused on the Helen story.  I don't really need to maintain them separately now; that's just a relic of the times when the "Fiction from Kay Hemlock Brown" blog was more about my writing, and the "Helen" blog was more about slightly more R-rated stuff.  If you're using the standard interface, there are links to the other blog on each of them.  If you're using the mobile interface, you have to cross over using some other method.  (My own method is too lengthy to have to describe to you ...)

Well, as I wrote a few days ago, the book I last read, at that writing, was "The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics", a wonderful book.  I was disturbed by the little explicit sex there was in that---very little, really, compared to some other stories---but there was another notable aspect.  One of the women involved was a powerful and rich member of the nobility.  The book I have just finished reading is a simple story set in modern times, but one of the women is a super-rich divorcee.

This seems to be almost an inevitable feature in many stories, and perhaps more in lesbian fiction.  As I wote in the last post, even in my own writing, one of the characters was invariably someone powerful for some reason, and more often than not, someone who was wealthy.  Now, I have a reputation, at least among my friends on DeviantArt, that my politics lean a little to the left.  (Or a whole lot to the left, which is somewhat alarming.)  Should I feel obliged to write stories about rich, and/or powerful people?

Thinking about this a little more deeply, the essential ingredient in these sorts of stories is more subtle than wealth or power: it is glamour.  People do not read stories unless there is glamour involved.  One of these days I'm going to write a story about two women lovers, neither of whom is glamorous at all.  And we can watch its popularity plummet.

It's probably too late to de-glamorize my Elf story; having an elf in it already means magic, and magic means glamour.

If any of you readers find a story that is worth reading, but does not have any glamour in it, just let me know!

Kay 

Elves

Well, I hate to be so capricious (inconstant, mercurial, unstable--Google) so that you readers are unable to rely on what I say, but ... though I said that I'm unlikely to do any more writing at all, I have started a---quite unambitious---writing project!

I have recently embarked on a completely new story, unrelated to almost anything I have written before, about an African-American girl and---get this---an Elf!

Now, I have noticed that many stories, especially fantasy stories, have something in common, that is, that their chief protagonists are celebrities, or nobility, or rulers, or people otherwise with a certain degree of financial power.  Let me confess this situation in my own stories first:

Alexandra ---the queen of her country.

Helen stories ---a particularly wealthy woman, who has her own corporation, etc, and at one time was  a college professor, a movie/TV star, and a conductor.

Jane ---a somewhat wealthy girl, because of her artwork.

I have excuses.  The reason, at least in my case, for choosing occupations, or circumstances, that give these protagonists so much (financial) power is to enable them to do things that they otherwise could not do.  I myself cannot fly anywhere I want to go, or get a room in a hotel anytime I want; but I wanted my heroines to be able to do that.  But now, I'm beginning to want different things.

All my life, though, I had to be clever about how I traveled, how I saved up money to stay in a hotel, etc.  I wasn't broke, but I had to be careful about what I spent.  I used to have a car, and drove carefully, to use up the least amount of gasoline, and calculated the shortest paths between where I was, and where I wanted to go.  It was strange to write about a person who could pick up and do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted.

Lately I have been reading a lot of popular literature---I couldn't possibly read enough of it to be able to say that I'm familiar with the genre; there is so much of it!  But quite a lot of it deals with ordinary people, with no particular claim to power, and I found that strangely attractive.  It is important, from an educational point of view, not to represent (in fiction) that being wealthy is a normal condition, just because it isn't.  The wealthy have appropriated most of the wealth of this country, (and the world), and if we pick a person at random---and surely my readers ought to be typical citizens; I would hate to think that my audience consists of people who come from the wealthy classes exclusively---we must assume that that person must be of limited means.  And I must assume that it is annoying, or at least disconcerting, to read of a protagonist who was inexplicably wealthy.  (But this is America, and most ordinary people love to read about people who are many orders of magnitude richer than they are; for instance, that's all what Reality TV is about.  One of the stars of Reality TV even ran for president, and won.)

So my two protagonists are going to be very ordinary people, including the one who was an elf.  I must create a world where the elves have poor people among them, too.

Kay