A Review of Malinda Lo's: Last Night at the Telegraph Club

I seldom read stories that are what I would call heavy---after all, what does heavy even mean?  If you know, then you don't need a definition.  But if you want to use the term precisely, you need a definition.

Yesterday, I finished reading Malinda Lo's celebrated novel: Last Night at the Telegraph Club, a complex story about a teenage Chinese girl growing up in San Francisco.  I didn't call it a coming-of-age story, because on one hand, it tells you a lot about the story, but it also cues in lots of prejudices on the part of the reader, that might not help my review, because the idea of prejudice, and even racism, is so central to this story.  Even those who are sick and tired of prejudice and racism will take something good away from this story, because viewed from where we are today (the spring of 2022), it is so wonderful to take stock of how far we have come, and to brace ourselves to ponder how far we have yet to go.

The main protagonist is a child of Chinese immigrants, a father from Shanghai, and a mother from somewhere else in China, Christians both, who have met in San Francisco, married, and had three children, the eldest of whom is Lily (Li-Li, in Chinese).  Unlike her stereotypical fellow Chinese girl classmates, Lily is fascinated by space travel, and to this end, she is avidly reading up on Arthur C. Clarke's The Exploration of Space, one of his earliest non-fiction works.

When Lily meets an American classmate, Kathleen, who isn't scornful of Lily's fascination with space, and who herself is eager to become a pilot, the two girls form a bond based on their common interests.  Very soon, the girls discover that their mutual attraction goes beyond mere platonic interests, and they realize---separately---that they are sexually attracted to each other.

Very realistically---remember, this is the 1950's, when homosexual activity was still illegal---the girls do not express their feelings to each other.  They even sneak into a lesbian bar (The Telegraph Club) together, under the benign eye of a friendly doorkeeper, to listen to a sexy male impersonator (a woman who dresses like a man, and sings torch songs to the other women in the audience).  Male impersonators were all the rage back in that era.

The first person story reveals a great deal about the thoughts of Lily, whereas we have to see Kathleen's feelings only through the mind of Lily, and so we aren't aware that Kathleen has been attracted to Lily for two years.

I can only say that my own heart was wracked with sympathy for the young couple; who knows how anyone else would respond to the same story?  There are a couple of friendly adults, who help the girls---or at least, Lily---deal with the dramatic upheaval of the last few months in the story, among them Aunt Judy, Lily's father's sister; and a progressive teacher at their school.  Malinda L. draws a pretty detailed picture of what Lily's life is like, and her family, which---though not typical of Chinese life at that time, is at least generally representative---and Ms. Lo is at pains, throughout, to give historical background, in the guise of establishing the chronology of Lily's family's life events.  There is a little skipping backwards and forwards in time, exploring the events surrounding the meeting of Lily's parents, which explains their ambitions, and the degree to which they feel betrayed when various horrific things happen to the family, through US government retribution for not cooperating with espionage against their fellow immigrants, who are suspected of being communist sympathizers.

The mix of sexual repression, anti-communist paranoia, gender conformity, distaste for hard science, the intense American patriotism of immigrants, police brutality, and similar forces make this story difficult to palate, but not impossible.  In contrast to what we expect in intelligent and strong-minded protagonists, in our times, Lily is painfully submissive to her family's unreasonable demands, especially those of her mother.  The use of alcohol and cigarettes to handle apprehension and fear is a constant motif.

Malinda Lo has delivered a complex (did I mention that already?) multi-faceted story, which is almost more than a sensitive soul can handle.  The book has won several awards, and one can appreciate why.  Highly recommended.

Kay

One of my Earliest Stories: Jane

Jane was one of my earliest stories.  At that time, I had hardly any idea about how to set up a story to make it easier on a reader.  (I still don't, ha ha.)

The original manuscript started with Jane meeting her first model, or models, and then I found that the story began to write itself, based on the personalities I had given Jane and her models.  (That was the first inkling I had that stories would essentially write themselves in a way that I found satisfying; whether readers would find it equally satisfying is still open to doubt.)

For some reason, I found (or found myself writing the story in such a way) that two major characters died in the attack on the Twin Towers of 2001, and in the HIV epidemic that was affecting the US at that time.  I suppose the facts had just gotten registered in my brain, and I couldn't ignore them any longer.  That event had implications for Jane; not just one of her lovers, but three of them were affected.  Two actually died, and one broke up with Jane.

Suddenly, without my consciously planning it, the story I had initially conceived to pander to my own craving for (imaginary) sex, became a tragedy.  I had to come up with a way to make Jane emerge from this situation.  I just couldn't make Jane simply bounce back from it; it had to happen naturally, and that took a little longer than a year.

Besides being a photographer, Jane is also a painter, an artist.  This was an avenue for me to arrange for Jane to meet with a woman who could 'save' Jane.  From this point, the story trundled on, occasionally getting a bit fantastic, until I sort of didn't know what to do with it.  So, working from the end, I backed up to a point at which I could sort of close the story out, and ended it.  From the beginning, too, I looked for a point at which I could begin the story, and decided to start shortly after 2001, with one girl dead, along with two other supporting characters; and one estranged girlfriend.

It seemed to me, at that time, that everyone reading the story needed to know all the characters in the story so far.  This was a mistake, but I painfully inserted little stories that introduced all the characters, and then jumped to the point where the third person dies of AIDS, and picked up the story from there.  So that's how Jane rests.  I think it's a poignant story---or at least, poignant in spots---as Jane meets the girl who becomes her lover, and then meets her sister, and so on and so forth.  There's an episode which features Jane's niece, Heidi, who is about fifteen.  If you don't like kids, well, what can I say?  Most of my stories feature kids, because I like kids!

As it happened, I eventually thought that all that omited material from the beginning was pretty interesting, so I packaged that into the story Jane, the Early Years, that has one of my favorite home-made covers.  (The cover depicts Scorpia, which is Jane in disguise.  There is actually a part of a story with Scorpia and Lisa Love, which hasn't been published yet.)

Most of the Helen story, if you've read any of it, is concerned with (classical) music, and many of you might find that either distracting, or actually annoying.  Worse, Helen is a soprano, and a violinist, and a conductor, so Helen's achievements are unavoidably front and center!  In Jane, however, there are very few hifaluting elements; Jane is very much a girl-next-door type---and so are the Twins, even if the modeling brings Gillian a lot of money.

I just wanted to make you guys aware of the Jane story, because though it is essentially incomplete and is sort of a bleeding chunk, many of you might relate to it a lot better than to the Helen story.  I'm beginning to realize that Helen the Genius probably sickens a lot of readers!

Kay

Doing Something About My Pet Peeve

Hey, I'm back, to continue with one of my rants that leads nowhere.  Well, usually nowhere, but hopefully somewhere, this time.

Have you heard me carrying on about how, in most lesfic (OMG, I'm beginning to adopt Millennial Lesbian terminology.  Kids, man) stories---I don't want to call it literature---it is always a butch (or a top) with a femme (or a bottom).  Always.  Why?  Why can't lesfic be more satisfyingly symmetric, and equal?  I am convinced that this Butch/Femme dichotomy was created by and for men.  I have little against men, as such (though I hate testosterone-infused guys, who further the stereotype that the inarticulate guys who communicate mostly with grunts and loud pickup trucks are attractive to women).  So I have always dreamed of writing a story of a romance between two femmes.  But a lot of my stories are, in fact, stories between femmes.

Guess what!  I decided to write a story of a romance between two Butches!  But not the stereotypical butches riding motobikes or driving pickups, but sweet, sensitive girls, who nevertheless give off femme vibes (there I go, adopting Millennial lingo!  Kids, man), but stop short of being actually girly.

I recently read a lovely story by, er, Kallie Mont (not her real name), about a woman who---having broken up with her career-obsessed girlfriend---moves to a somewhat rural New England seaside location, and meets a lovely local.  The somewhat Butch newcomer to the village is a lovely, protective person, and it made me realize that I have written about Butch characters often; it's only that I have rarely been conscious of it.

Kay

Things I Want to Do Better!

It's been a long time since I posted here---more than a month, possibly---and I want to touch base with my readers, about what has been happening to me.  (I will not remark about World politics, except to say that the Russians seem to be acting in their own interest, which is not new.  This only makes sense if all that they need can be supplied from within their sphere of influence.)

OK, let's get back to my reading.  I have been reading up a storm; these books are not difficult to read, because they're seldom more than 20,000 words long; often a lot shorter.  I do get the impression that the authors---most of them women---seem to depend on their book sales in order to make a living, so they have to strike a balance between satisfying their needs to tell a certain story, or a story in which certain things happen, and a story that grabs the reader.  To make it worse, I never buy an ebook that costs more than $4, so it is possible that I'm not getting the best books.   (On the other hand, I seem to see that there is no connection between the quality of a book and the price the author sets; and maybe we shouldn't expect there to be one.  After all, like L'Oreal, it all depends on how much each author think she's worth!  Haha.)

I have been making some of the points below for several posts, so some of them may come across as Old News.

First of all, many of my own books were excerpts of a single story; a lengthy biography of a fictitious person.  But that biography was not conceived to be readable, or have any of the properties that an author of commercial fiction would be ruled by.  I made Helen have lots of girlfriends, lots of sex, lots of talent, travel a lot, be athletic, be beautiful; in short all the things I wanted, and could not have!  But all these desires did not make for a good story.  When I started chopping the Big Helen Story down to little chunks, I began to see how a few chapters here, and a few chapters there, made a story on their own; especially the early adventures of Helen and Lalitha, which form a beautiful story, for which I really cannot take any credit, and reveal a lot about Lalitha, and Helen, and the children, and Lorna.  The other chunks just barely qualified as stories; and many of them suffered, without the earlier episodes to round out Helen's character and personality.  In contrast, the professional authors who write for Kindle/Amazon, really try hard to make a story with a happy ending, and for the most part, succeed.

The adventures that summer at the beach were also important, but that doesn't mean that it was interesting to read.  But I wept at the foolishness of Helen, which resulted in so much heartbreak for Amy, and Hattie, and the lawyer Miss Pearson, just as anyone who might have read the book would have. 

The Kindle stories  varied widely in the mechanical quality of the writing; some authors wrote beautiful, expressive, fluent prose, that really nailed what they wanted to say.  I could tell what they wanted to say, just from the context, and being just a step or two ahead of the typical reader, knew what they wanted to say, and I could tell whether they got it across.  However, some authors really struggled to do it.  Some of them got tripped on homonyms.  For instance, the words bear and bare sound the same, but there were instances where an author would write something like "the unbareable agony of having to wait".  There were occasional difficulties with plurals: flys, instead of flies; and with tenses: swum, instead of swam. (Actually, either word: swum or swam could be wrong;  "I had swum so fast, I was all out of breath!"  And: "It was the very same route I swam before!")  As I said before, in a previous post, some of these problems---especially with the homonyms---can be explained by the authors using Dragon Speaking software, or something like it, which takes dictation, and converts it into text.  And if this software is now created by non-native English speakers (or had been, all along), that fact would explain why there might not be routines to eliminate those sorts of problems.

Obviously, from the point of view of these sorts of mechanical aspects of writing, I would find it easy to pick faults with any writers who were less inclined to absorb mechanical aspects of writing than I was.  Someone who was being trained to teach English would be more likely to submit to being drilled on mechanics, than someone who was not.  (That's sort of a moot point as far as my own training was concerned, because I was not trained to teach English!  Oops; the embarrassment.)

In every story I have written, the romantic thread of the story was always an add-on at the end, except, maybe, in Alexandra, where the lovers meet right at the beginning of the story, and are ripped apart halfway through, and struggle to reunite over close to a 100,000 words.  Any literary masochists ought to read that one.  I should take that one apart, and rewrite the whole damn thing.

Well, I totally haven't (or "totes" haven't, as the millennials say) set down specific things I want to do better; I think the only thing I can do is to write a decent love story from scratch!

Kay

Kristen Zimmer, Natasha West, and others

As many of you guys know, I have been furiously reading the less expensive Girl-Girl stories on Amazon, and thoroughly enjoying myself, for the most part.  Some of the outstanding authors I have encountered there are:  Kristen Zimmer; Olivia Waite, Siera Maley, Natasha West, (I'm going to add to this list as I remember the other names).

Here is a review on Kristen Zimmer's story When Sparks Fly. When Sparks Fly by Kristen Zimmer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a wonderful book, nicely written, and certainly was a lot of fun to read, though it was suspenseful at times.

I'm comparing it to a number of other stories that take place in the senior year in high school, and what sets this one apart is that the two girls are thoughtful adults. There's a lot about (1) photography, which caught my attention, a lot about (2) high school education, a lot about (3) finances and economics, and about (4) the foster care system. All, or most, of these topics were handled seriously by Kristen Zimmer.

What I did not know much about, at all, was the geography of the greater Boston area, the restaurants, the parks, the tourist attractions, etc, and at times Kristen seemed to think of these as background information that anyone ought to know! Of course it was quite possible to follow the story along very closely without this added information, but that doesn't make it any less annoying!

But the personalities of the three main protagonists, and the parents, were brilliantly delineated, and it was they who kept me riveted. I have read other books by K.Z, but none came close to the quality of this one; and I conclude that this story was based on girls that Kristen knew well—fortunate woman!—and how fortunate the author who has led a life rich enough to have it as a source for delighting her readers.

Let me add that the title of the story: "When Sparks Fly" reveals less than nothing about the theme of the story.  70% of the books on Amazon have nondescript, or actually misleading titles.  Amazon must have a policy of requiring crappy titles from its authors.

A word about British author Natasha West.  This woman is insanely funny!  Of course, those who live in Britain will find the stories even funnier, because of her extensive use of colloquialisms, in particular, catchy net words and expressions, used by young people, which doubtless convey associations and meanings we can't even hope to catch.  (On the other hand, Brits might well be jaded enough to simply read right through these expressions, since they might be so familiar.)  But the humor is only interjected to keep our attention; there are fraught situations that the more emotional reader might need a tissue to handle.  One thing I love about Natasha West is that she writes about couples both women of which are definitely femmes.  The story of hers I read most recently is about two girls—women, really; they're about 28—who are girls through and through. One is a little more combustible, but you could never imagine her as a guy; you simply couldn't.

Another of these authors that I love, is Siera Maley.  I have read a half-dozen of her books, but the one I love the most is: Dating Sarah Cooper.  This one is funny, just thinking about the story, and the characters, especially the aforementioned Sarah Cooper, a crazy BFF who launches herself headfirst into almost any project, however risky.  You're wincing throughought the story, in anticipation of what Sarah might do, but you have to love her.  I had friends like that, and I loved them to pieces!  Luckily, none of them were as heedless as the fabulous Sarah.

Kay

My Christmas Story

This story, of which spake the prophets of old (just kidding; nobody spake of it), is---and I blush to say it---just half of a story.  I have a rough idea how to fill it out, but being the coward that I am, I don't want to get started on it.  But there is a lot of story in this first part already.

Another feature of it is: it is about a group of high-school kids from a variety of schools, who have been brought together to sing the Bach Christmas Oratorio, or the Weihnachtsoratorium, as Germans call it.  There is a lot of authorial gushing about the Oratorio, but you might be able to ignore all that.  I just love music, and I find it hard to hide that.

There are two girls, 11th-graders, who are, in my mind, approaching a sort of romantic relationship with each other, but in the story so far, there is very little explicit mention of a relationship.  It is full of Christmas Spirit, because I wrote it about 10 years ago, before I was standing in the corner, losing my religion!  Don't get me wrong; I love Jesus, most of all, and all of those who enter into his story, but I hate the way the modern church is controlled by people with no imagination, and no real understanding of what Jesus would do if he were alive today.

Kay 

Welcome to Deviant Art Members :)

Using a complicated chain of reasoning, I have concluded that some friends from DeviantArt—the website from where I get artist support for the e-book covers—occasionally read my posts!

There are a handful of writers on DA—our internal abbreviation for DeviantArt—who are more likely to actually read the occasional text posts that appear on that site.  

Unfortunately for me, while the majority of folks our age—or maybe some years younger than me; of course, I know you guys don't have a clue exactly how old I am, and that's the way I like it—like to read stories with large amounts of graphic sex in them, I just don't like graphic sex; and by that I mean typical graphic sex.  I find that when an author puts in almost any graphic sex, it clashes so much with my own preferences for how sex between lovers should proceed; or the style of the sex clashes with my perception of how gentle or affectionate a particular character is (or how clumsy, inconsiderate, or rough) that I become unhappy and frustrated.  So I expect that readers, too, will be badly served by being confronted with typical graphic sex.  Now, don't misunderstand me: graphical sex with a certain degree of vagueness can be effective.  That's what I try to do, (and maybe I fail, but that's my objective) and I must confess that I have absolutely no training in creative writing, and maybe that's where both my strengths and my weaknesses stem from!

Many of my DA friends are writing erotica; that is, descriptions of scenarios and sex scenes, with a view to exciting the reader sexually, and not furthering any sort of romantic relationship (in the story).  I don't seek that sort of writing out, but I have stumbled on stories of that sort, and in a couple of instances, I have been really moved by them.  More often, though, I'm thinking: wait, wait, that's not a good move now!  Oh, no!  (In my mind, you know, I'm God's Gift to Women, and if you think I'm delusional on that score, you're absolutely right.  I have very little experience with sex, for various reasons, and I ought not to be trying to write descriptions of sex scenes at all.  On the other hand, how much fun is it going to be for you, to read sex scenes written by a semi-professional lover?)

[Added later:]  I just checked my Smashwords author page, and there have been about a half-dozen downloads of my stories since I looked this morning!  My belief is that whenever I post something on my Blog, here, I get some downloads.  So maybe this post has already borne fruit!!  I had fifteen downloads from a couple of days ago, and fourteen for today.  Keep it up, friends!

I have just repaired Christine's ... Christmas, and uploaded it, with a new cover image.  (The previous cover image simply had my name as Kay Brown, without the 'Hemlock'.)

Kay.