Emily

I recently lost a very beloved friend.  She was the youngest of a family of three.  She was talented, musically and academically, but without the financial resources to take on a college education, like so many others in that position, she decided to pursue professional training as a nurse.  But her true love was music: she played guitar, and was constantly experimenting for new sounds she could make on her awesome Washburn.  But she was a chronic asthmatic, and a smoker, and I believe the smoking aggravated the asthma, and a few days ago, she had a massive attack, and died before the ambulance could reach the hospital.

Everyone who knew her was stunned; especially because she was so young; not very much past the age of twenty.  She had a mischievous sense of humor, and loved animals, and had several pets.  She loved to travel, but could not really afford to get out of her hometown very much, but greatly enjoyed every sortie outside the confines of her usual round.  When someone elderly passes away, we're not so stunned as relieved; their time has come.  But for this child, her death seems very much as if she was stolen from us, a mean theft.

In the story about Emily, which I began to describe some months ago, I had a death early in the story.  Emily's divorced husband takes ill, and comes back to her, and she takes him in.  He dies, and I describe my feelings about death there.  It is a bit of writing that is dear to me; I'm sure greater writers have conveyed those same feelings a lot more successfully, but this piece is mine, and I want to present it here, in memory of my little songbird, whom I miss very much, and it has hardly been a few days.  To everyone who feels cheated of enjoying a reasonable amount of time with someone we love: I hope this piece helps.

I will put it up as a document, and link to it once it is ready,

Kay

Getting Clever About Readers: Coupons!

To summarize, I have published stories in Smashwords, one of which —Jane— is free.  I have sold a total of 8 books in my lifetime, all on Smashwords, and, let’s see: 866 copies of Jane have been downloaded, and a total of 6 books from all the other titles.  In other words, Jane is “selling” like crazy, and the others are not selling like crazy.

I don’t really worry about this, except that I’m not sure that all those millions who download Jane are actually reading it.  So I have decided to put a coupon at the end of Jane, offering 33% off Helen at Ballet Camp.  If I see a surge in Ballet sales, I can reasonably conclude that people are actually reading the free book Jane.

The next thing to do is to offer another coupon for another book, perhaps offering 90% off, to see whether there are those who will actually read a free book, in contrast to those who will download a free book, but not actually read it!  That seems like a mean trick, but I have to know!!  Are people just downloading the book, or are they also reading it?

While I’m at it, here’s a coupon for anyone who’s reading this!  It is for half off Sweet Hurricane, an important episode in the Helen saga in which I have succeeded in introducing some wonderful characters, and in which I might have made some horrible mistakes.  Still, Matt and Marissa are favorite characters of mine, even if they’re awkward.  You enter this code at checkout time.  I hope it works, or you’re stuck with a $2:00 purchase:  ZY24R

Kay

Kay's World: A peek into my life

Students
You probably know that I teach, but I haven't revealed much more than that.  Let's just say that I teach writing (you might not approve of my own writing, but compared with some of the writing I have to grade, you should be informed that my students have a long way to go before they're at the point where I can't help them), and one has to have an amazingly optimistic disposition to avoid falling into deep despair in the teaching world!

I have begun a story about an English teacher, but it has foundered on the threshold of the middle section of the story.  Anyway, once I get that published, you'll know a lot more about how I feel in regard to teaching.

Animals
I don't have pets of my own, but I have made the acquaintance of several animals that belong to friends.  I have few friends, but I sneak up and make friends with animals though I'm not supposed to!

One of these is a lovely dog, advanced in age, and with a grave disposition, but somehow I love her dearly.  She isn't very demonstrative, but she has a wag of the tail and a welcoming look every time we meet.  There are a couple of other dogs --wildly different in personality from the first one-- an all of them great characters.  Of late, I haven't met a single dog I don't like.  Oh, maybe one; it's more a matter of not understanding him than disliking him.

Another pet is a cat.  For some reasons, growing up we never had cats, but I had thought I knew all there was to know about them.  I was wrong; being around this cat, in the last year or so, I'm beginning to appreciate how entertaining they are!

A Facebook friend of a friend (most of the posts I see are from other people's friends) expressed the opinion that cats are very intelligent.  I don't know from where that opinion could possibly come.  Cats do the few cat things they have to do extremely well, but it is all instinct, not true intelligence.  Since they do not waste any energy on thinking about their environment, they can spend it all in pure play, which looks like intelligence, but is just practicing skills.

Human attitudes toward intelligence are naive and contradictory, and I suppose I'm as open to the accusation about jumping to conclusions about animal intelligence as anyone else.  But I'm convinced that cats are not as intelligent as dogs, for whatever that's worth, and whatever that might mean.

Books
Just this morning, I went to a book sale by a library supplier.  This company specializes in servicing libraries: supplying books, materials, processing, cataloging, everything.  Among other things, they help with cleaning out books that aren't seeing a lot of circulation, and selling them off, essentially wholesale.

I'm getting the distinct impression that there are consultants who think up titles for books.  We know for a fact that an attractive sexy cover gets people to pick up a book that would otherwise be ignored.  But the same must go for titles.  A clever title like The Bourne Identity could attract attention to a piece of workmanlike fiction.  (I'm sure there are those who would call my writing workmanlike, and who am I to contradict that?)  Since The Bourne Whatever has received so much critical attention, and has been made into a movie, titles of that sort are fashionable: The Hipster Proclamation, or The Terrified Turtle.

Anyway, there is such intense competition for display space in any bookstore that it is amazing that people want to write books at all!  I just don't understand the phenomenon, especially that people who can't put two words together to make a sentence are driven to write!  I don't feel bad about my own writing, since it is only published as e-Books, and do not contribute to the landfills in any way.

This same company which supplies libraries also sells off their wholesale library de-accessioned books to actual bookstores.  Even if the bookstore sells the books for $2 each, to make a profit of $0.50, I still feel that I ought to have a greater obligation to support the bookstore than to support the wholesaler.

Meanwhile, Barnes and Noble and Amazon have edged out almost all other book retailers, which is something that makes me very sad.  But I am annoyed when Barnes and Noble flood my e-mail with advertising.  But once Barnes and Noble are driven to bankruptcy, that leaves Amazon as almost the only source of books, which is a very dangerous situation.  So now, where should our allegiance be: to Barnes and Noble and Nook, or Amazon and Kindle?  Amazon already gets far more of my discretionary income than they should.

Fund-raising and Cookies
In a strange twist of fate, I was approached by a student club at our school to be their faculty advisor.  A lot of what they do is raise money for one project or another.  One project is to make T-Shirts for their volleyball team.  It seems crazy that the club should have to raise money to create a T-Shirt for a volleyball team, which will probably be worn only once, for the Homecoming Volleyball Tournament.  But that's what the kids do, and I don't have the energy to argue with them, so I'm playing along.  But I have to buy the cookies and the other junk that they want to sell to make their fund-raising target!

But if you've ever taught a crazy bunch of freshmen, or advised a College club, you realize that the sheer energy and intensity of the kids is like a drug.  I just sit there and listen to their carrying on, and it is annoying, and it is also insanely pleasurable.  I wonder how long I can stand it!

K.

Emily

Greetings to any regular readers of my blog!  I don't keep up with this blog very regularly, and I apologize.  I'm under no illusions that I actually have fans, but I sometimes imagine that people drop by just to see what I've been up to :)

I have shown some of my writing to people who are professional authors, who have actually sold books, and so forth.  At least one of them teaches writing, and I believe another of them has just started a blog intended for authors just setting out to write.

None of these professional writers are very close friends, so of course they're obliged to be polite to me, and not disparage my writing by being brutally honest.  When they're encouraging, I know better than to take the encouragement as high praise.  On the other hand, when they're critical, I'm not immediately crushed, either.  I'm beginning to really believe that writing is a very personal thing, and I'm going to be cautious with how I respond positively to negative feedback, if you know what I mean.

One recurring complaint was that my characters were all improbably beautiful.  I just come right out and say that so-and-so was stunningly beautiful.  I know this is a flaw in my writing, and I can jolly well describe the character as quite ordinary-looking, while I imagine to myself that the character is simply gorgeous!  What's going on here is that I started writing just to have an imaginary world full of my friends, and if I'm going to do that, why not be surrounded by real stunners, however imaginary, instead of the sort of people I do find myself surrounded with?

The big drawback is that women don't like to read about gorgeous women, at least the women whom I want to cultivate as readers.  I certainly like to read about beauties, but apparently I'm kind of alone in that regard.  I think, even if the character is physically beautiful, it's more important that the person's motivations should be plausible.  Or, in complete contrast, the person's motivations could be completely opaque, in which case there has to be something that the reader can relate to.  It's nice to have an enigmatic character, but too much of an enigma is a little hard to believe.

So, anyway, I started writing a story about a middle-aged woman who was a rather unsuccessful professor at a minor college, a situation about which, on the face of it, I knew a fair amount.  "Write what you know," they always say, completely forgetting that Jane Rowling could not have know very much about being a gifted young boy magician, nor could Tolkien have known much about being a Hobbit.  So, to be a mediocre writer: write what you know.  If you're going to be a fabulous writer, write about anything you please!  Isn't that silly?

Anyway, the story I'm talking about is called Emily, after the central character.  She is given a semester off by the Dean, just because her most recent classes were terrible failures.  Her ex-husband has just died, and left her a nice little car, but she gets a call saying that there is a claim on her car, and she has to surrender it.

That's the last straw.  Emily gets in her car, and heads out west, completely incommunicado with the Law, the College, and most of her friends back home.  The story is essentially about what she does on her spree.

[To be continued.]

Kay

The Music of The Stars

Readers will remember that my story I anticipated that would generate the greatest amount of interest and attention would be The Music of the Stars, about an alternate Helen, who is frozen—voluntarily—and put aboard a space vessel, called the Galactic Voyager.  In other words, I decided that what was going on in the TV show in which Helen starred, would really happen to Helen.

Well, I got impatient.  The book is barely completed —actually it is incomplete— but I decided to pre-publish it.  This means that it goes up on Smashwords, and customers can read the first so much percent of it (20%), but the book can’t be downloaded in its entirety until the Publication Date, which is August 15, 2015, right after the holocaust that is to come!!!

When I wrote Music of the Stars, some of the things that happened to Helen in the regular Helen story had not happened yet.  So, in Stars, Helen has not suffered the last really horrible amnesia with which the regular Helen story climaxes.  Also, James was not born, so the Helen in Stars is childless.

Don’t think of this as a disaster; think of them as two mostly different Helens.  I could have called the Helen in Stars “Patricia”, or anything I wanted.  But I wanted her to be a charismatic celebrity, so it made more sense to call her Helen Nordstrom.

So if any of you are interested, go ahead and read the first 20% of the new book, and I hope you enjoy it!

Kay

The Popularity of Jane

I just read on my Smashwords "dashboard" that I've sold a total of seven books, in my entire career.  [Added later: we're now up to 9 sales!]  My greatest success has been with the book I have given away free, Jane.  Six hundred and twenty-odd copies of Jane have been downloaded, and I suppose that if readers actually read and enjoyed Jane, they would come back to actually buy some of the other books!

Jane is a light-hearted story, though it starts out with tragedy and death.  Since the only feedback I get is the raw numbers of downloads and sales, I have no way of telling how readers are reacting to the stories.  (There's little I would do about the stories; it is difficult for me to write to order, but I am interested in comments about other aspects of the writing.)

I suppose I do feel something of a success, because people do download so many copies of Jane.  Two copies of Alexandra were sold, the most expensive book I put up for sale, and that's heartening.

My creation with which I'm most concerned is Helen, and the only Helen story I have sold is Little John Finds a Friend, in which Helen does not appear at all!  I wonder what that says about the personality of Helen, if anything.  But one thing is certain: Jane has the most attractive cover of any of the books, and I'm beginning to believe that nothing is more important for a book than its cover.  People do judge books by their covers.

Kay

Can anyone identify this model?

I would appreciate any information on these models:

She appeared in an advertisement for e-readers, but I forget where I found it.

I love her skirt!

Kay