Swimsuits and Pretty Girls!

Okay.  This situation is totally getting out of hand.  The price I'm paying for clicking on that ad on facebook is that I see nothing but swimsuit ads everywhere I go.  If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.  Here are some of the cutest outfits I have encountered.

This is one of my favorites, though I probably don't have the legs for it.  And I love this model; she has a lovely smile!

Another pretty dress, but an even prettier model.  Can you tell I like long hair?  Streaky, medium-brown, sunbleached is my favorite, I think.

It's the same model, looking like a teenager, which is probably what she is.  I love the sandals, but she seems just a little too thin for my tastes.

I think this young lady looks lovely, but I don't know whether I approve of the style of the bodice.  I know it's now a mainstream design, but ...

Our model doesn't look quite as startlingly thin here.  I love the rear view very much, especially her grave expression when seen from the rear.

I think this is the same person, modelling a really pretty swimsuit.

Another really pretty swimsuit, with a rather cylindrical model.

This young lady looks spectacular from in front, and I also love her face.  Again, a little too thin for my unqualified approval.

And finally, a lovely model, pretty from both angles, and a fabulous suit.

Two more; these dresses really looks like something I would wear.  It appears to be a really light fabric, but I wonder whether you could wear it more than once, just because they dressy enough for an afternoon out, and you know how that goes.

This model is sweet, though those platforms are scary.  Another lovely dress from that island beauty I love so much.  I might wear a dress like that, if I could afford it ...

That's quite enough of that.

K.

New Distractions

Our school is winding down our school year, and my work is mostly over.  I need to work furiously over the summer to get a manuscript ready for Smashwords (Music of the Stars, which I have written about before).

On Facebook I happened to click on an advertisement for a dress, and pretty soon I was sent to the Nordstrom website, and I started looking at various clothes.  I have no hope of ever wearing any of those, because I just don't have the figure for them.  (I used to pretend that I did, but if I ever did, that time has gone!!)  But the models were cute, and so I couldn't resist looking at one dress after another.

From that day on, my Facebook page always has something from some clothing manufacturer.  The models look pretty much the same, and some views of them look so uncannily similar that I suspected that they simply photoshopped their clothes on them.

I just have to tell someone that this model, from this angle, is completely irresistible.  Most of all I love her hair, which is the color I wish my own hair was!

These days, they get young kids of about 17 to model, some of them as young as 15 or 16.  I'm not sure how I feel about that; it seems just a little too exploitative to me.  It encourages them to think of modeling as a career long before they have an opportunity to think of other possibilities.  It is such a temptation to micromanage other people's lives for them, but I suppose it is a parent's right to ruin his or her children's lives, until the kids are adults, at which point, the kids have the right to ruin their own lives, or submit to the ruining plans of their parents.

In conclusion, I would like to place on record that, if I were seventeen again, I would totally wear that swimsuit.  It is called the Mia crocheted one-piece swimsuit by Robin Picone.  Do not tell Robin Picone that I endorsed her blasted swimsuit, or Google will not leave me in peace, for urging me to "monetise" my blog.

Kay

Time for a Little Rant

You probably know that I teach part time.  I want to make it quite clear that I do not consider myself a lot more intelligent than my students.  In fact, not a semester goes by that I don't remark to myself that more than a dozen of my students are clearly brighter than I am, and I secretly wonder whether I come up to their expectations of a professor.  I go into a vague diatribe sometimes about how a professor often sees students pass through her hands who seem to be destined for greatness, based on their insight into language, their ability to see through past the surface of a question to its crux.  They look gratified, but unable to quite see the point of the remarks.

The reason I say this at the outset is that I find it necessary, despite my points above, to point out to my students the most obvious things.  They're great at getting at difficult ideas.  But they totally suck at obvious things.

What is it?  Is it poor observation of the people around them?  Is it a lack of reading?  Is it poor listening skills?  Is it their closeted upbringing?  I don't know.  It could be a little of all of these.

One thing I do know is that all of them, most of the time, do not interact with the ideas and the information they're being given while it's being dispensed to them.  There is the occasional question (with its obvious answer), but for the most part, they sit there passively.  When I ask them, out of class, one-on-one, why they don't seem to be really absorbing the material, they quickly protest that, yes, they are!  But a little probing reveals that they'd rather wait until they're home, and have had a chance to look over their notes.  So in class, they're preoccupied with getting the notes down.

Now, I do not hand out class notes.  So they do have to write down a lot.  My suspicion is that they will not read copious duplicated class notes--I certainly didn't, when I was in college.  So, some of them might be reading their notes at home.  But I suspect that the majority of them do not interact with the material in class, and do not interact with the material at home, except perhaps just before an examination.

The exception are the foreign students.  They do listen attentively in class, even if some of them struggle with the language.  And they usually read all their notes at home, and approach me with questions privately, which is unfortunate, because they always ask the good, meaningful questions.  So, if there is one thing I want to pass along to college students: listen to your teachers.  They should know their stuff, and they love it.  How better to learn it?

K.

A Milestone Approaches: Jane

I just learned that I'm a book away from the 1,200^th copy of Jane being downloaded.  Since more copies of Jane are being downloaded than anything else I have written, I assume that most of you have read it.  (For the rest of you: it is the story of a girl who drops out of college with her boyfriend, only to find him discovering that he is gay.  She moves into an apartment in NYC, and takes up glamour photography, with the help of her former boyfriend.  After a while, she, too, realizes that she is attracted to women.)

At this time, I merely want to thank my readers for downloading Jane in such numbers.  If only those 1200 readers would go on to read my other stories!

Anyway, I wish you all a happy spring!  Keep reading, and treat you neighbors and your world with kindness.

Love,

Kay.

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.