A Visitation!

All through my childhood, growing up in various parts of the country, there were always cats and dogs in the house, and in the houses of my friends and relatives.  But it's only recently that I have been noticing these critters.  I don't feel comfortable looking after a pet all by myself, so there isn't one at home.  But I visit a few friends every now and then, especially one, and she has a dog, and also a cat.

It just so happened that I slept over last night, and early this morning, I felt the delicate touch on my leg, and then on my arm, and then on my chest, and when I moved the sheet that was covering my face aside, I was greeted by two enormous eyes peering in at me!

I have read numerous paragraphs of this very experience on the Web, but this is the first time it has happened to me as an adult, and it is exactly as delicious as it is described.  The little cat is a standard-sized one, almost pure white, with a very thick winter coat.  After peering at me for a while, she came close, and gave my nose a lick!  Ohh!  Then she began kneading my chest, which was a little alarming, and I talked to her, and she marched up and down my body.  I am totally in love.

I asked her whether she had been accidentally locked up upstairs, and when I started moving aside the covers to get out of bed, she scampered to the unoccupied side of the bed, and watched me with what appeared to be a degree of interest.  When I had got a robe on and headed towards the door, she ran ahead of me, and down the narrow stairs, and waited at the door at the bottom.  She had indeed been locked out of the first floor.  (The idea must be to keep her locked out of the upper floor, but she had crept upstairs unobserved, evidently.)

We opened the door and stepped into the dining room, and were greeted with a happy cry of "Now everybody's here!"  I could get used to this!  They do make the most fantastic coffee; it is just grocery store brand coffee, but it tastes delicious.

Some days I feel so happy I could cry.

K.

In love again!

I'm falling desperately in love with a dog!

It's a female, and she belongs to a friend.  She has declared that the dog belongs to me, too, but ... Anyway, I just have to blog about this sweetheart.

She is very old, and various estimates put her age at between fourteen and sixteen years.  But she has the loveliest eyes, and beautiful coloring, and a lot of gracefulness in her moves.  Of course, she's rickety, and her sight is weak, and her hearing is gone, and she's mostly interested in begging for food all the daylight hours, but, oh!  I just want to hug her all the time!

So whenever I visit, this dog is hanging out in the kitchen, getting underfoot.  (When I visit, most of the time we're fixing something to eat, so the dog follows her nose straight to the action.  Now, by a process of association, she just comes over on spec.)  My friend goes nuts, and yells at the dog, and when that doesn't work (the dog pretends not to hear, but it's clear to anyone that she's getting yelled at, and she's not that blind) my friend puts some furniture across the entrance to the kitchen area, to fence the dog out.

She just loves to go on a walk.  When my friend puts on her sneakers, the dog comes and stands close, watching her intently.  When her leash is finally pulled out, she prances around, impatient to get going!  There is another dog, about a quarter of her age, a mere pup, but he's enormous, close to eighty pounds of pure muscle.  He's rather a lunk, really, even if he is lovable and good natured.  When an excursion is about to happen, the bigger dog gets so rambunctious that he often knocks the older one down, and gets a surly snarl from her.  That was about a year ago; now she just staggers back, and keeps out of his way with a frown.

Once we set out, the older dog has the greatest grin on her face, and continues to grin until she's exhausted, or until she's back home.  Meanwhile the big male dog is straining at the leash, his nose to the ground, trying to extract every bit of olfactory information from the route we're traversing.  I don't know whether he's bright enough to make sense of all that information, but he's certainly sniffing it all up.  And, of course, he has to pee on every significant post and shrub we come across.

The household also has two cats, who are very interesting.  One is a middle-aged male stripey cat, with most amazingly beautiful eyes you ever saw.  The other is a dainty little white princess, about half his age.  A college friend was of the opinion that cats were barely about a tenth as intelligent as dogs, and I have to agree; cats are not aware of the moods of people at all.  When they hop up and want to be affectionate, it is nothing to do with you; it is something that she decides to do all by herself.  If you're upset with her, and not ready to play, they're surprised, and scurry off to get out of your way.  In contrast, dogs have made a study of you, and know your mental state intimately.

I suppose there are extraordinary cats who know when you're down, and try to cheer you up.  But I think that's more the exception than the rule.

A couple of times, as we were setting out, one of the cats wanted to come along, too!  My friend was not confident about their ability to come home again, so we have to go back in the house, and shut the cats up, to prevent them from following!  It was funny to watch them marching along behind us as we first set out!  It seems almost certain that they can sniff their way back, but we didn't want to take the risk.

So I'm visiting fairly often, just to see the "critters," as she calls them.  This could go somewhere.

Kay

My Fiction

When I first started writing, I was doing it for entertainment, and out of boredom.  It might sound silly, but I was creating companions for myself.  (I've explained most of that elsewhere, so I need not go into it again.)  But, as I have said, some friends discovered my secret, and soon I was confronted with my stuff being read by, well, other people.  At first it was just my friends, and only two or three of them.  But a few years later, when I discovered e-books, the potential for a larger audience was suddenly very real.

Being a teacher, and not just of necessity, but because I just need to teach, I couldn't just tell a story, and leave it there.  I'm ashamed to say that I wasn't just interested in entertaining my readers.

What did I want to do, other than tell a good story?  Firstly --and don't take this the wrong way-- I'm not really good at dreaming up stories.  What I think I'm good at, is imagining people.  (They're mostly like me; that can't be avoided.  Any writer who thinks any of her characters have not an atom of her own personality in them is just delusional.  Some authors are just better at hiding the fact that their characters are an aspect of themselves.)  And I'm good at imagining things happening to my characters.  But I'm not good at the architecture required to make an overarching plot.  That's just -- well, I can't do it.

Pretty soon, though, I found myself wanting to portray lesbian love, specifically, the satisfaction of lesbian love.  Even more specifically, the pleasure of love between women apart from sexual satisfaction.  To be honest, I have so little sexual experience that I have to use my imagination to the point of my brain getting overheated to depict even the least satisfactory physical love.

You have to bear in mind that, at the time I was beginning to write (and the time at which most of the writing was completed, really; all this was written back in 2001, 2002; I just polished the stuff up to get it published) love between women was still a threatening subject to most women.  Finding out that one of their close friends was a lesbian, or bisexual, was almost a frightening thing--no, it was a frightening thing-- to most women.  Certainly, straight women were thoroughly unhappy with finding out that a lifelong friend was lesbian; but more surprisingly, lesbian women were put completely off balance.  It was not uncommon (and still isn't, in some circles) for a lifelong closet lesbian to rail against same-sex marriages, and the stupidity of the Supreme Court, and so on.

The reason for this was that the dynamics of interpersonal relationships back a decade or so ago, and certainly in the last century, and even more in the previous century, the dynamics were distorted by the need to keep secret.  Older people probably have a vague understanding that the need to show the world a false heterosexual (or non-sexual, in the case of Catholic Priests) face drove even very moral individuals to behave in terrible ways.  So when a typical person learned that someone was gay or lesbian, in the old days, it was under the most horrific circumstances: the person had usually been caught molesting a child, or the person had been discovered to have entertained a series of people of the wrong sex in their homes.

I set out to portray female lovers as affectionate, responsible, moral (for the most part; not entirely so in the case of Helen) people.  They were loving to everyone around them, not just to their partners; they were affectionate in the usual way to young people; they were not predators (again, for the most part), they were embarrassed by the usual things: being discovered in a deception, being verbally abused just for who they were, feeling an inappropriate attraction to a married person, being the target of a crush by a student.

Being Christmastime, I listen to a lot of Christmas music, and read a lot of my Christmas stories, and get almost insane pleasure at how satisfyingly I wrote many of those stories.  I'm not a believer; I thought I ought to say that to avoid deceiving my more religious readers.  I never have been, even as a child.  I loved to imagine the events of the First Christmas, but even as a child, I realized that it was a myth.  (A myth, in my mind, is a sort of averaging of significant experiences, and responses to events, distilled into a story, to create a specific attitude in the listener.  In the case of Jesus--who I'm convinced was an historical figure, even without sufficient evidence--it probably was to communicate the bewilderment of his family by his life path and his actions.  He acted so contrarily to conventional wisdom that they were impelled to say that he was not really their child, and it was a short step from there to ascribe a divine origin for him.  Self-sacrifice was an idea that was very slow in coming to the Western World, or to any civilized people.  Women knew it well, but it was considered inappropriate behavior for a man.

Just last night, I was reading the episode from the Helen saga, in which she watches a collage of "Best Of" Messiah performances, and I was practically swooning over a paragraph here and there.  Helen's last sweetheart, Marissa, a woman about ten years younger than Helen, home-schooled and sheltered to an unbelievable degree, is frustrated by Helen's chronic depression, ever since Marissa's mother died, and Helen announces her retirement in a fit of anger.  Meanwhile, Helen had, a couple of years before, disguised herself as an actress and dancer, a completely fictional person, with a fake passport and everything, and acted in three movies.  In the third, she had starred alongside a lovely Indian girl in a lesbian action-adventure, only to find that the girl was the sister of an old friend, Lalitha.  But being in disguise, Helen could not reveal herself to the girl, so the young Indian falls in love with this person that Helen was pretending to be.

Shortly afterwards, the young Indian girl meets Helen as Helen, and to Helen's relief, does not connect Helen with her actress crush at all.  Somehow, knowing that she had been "someone else" when they had met and sort of fallen in love, enables Helen to be cool.

Of course, the girl eventually, over a year or so, finds out.  She is initially bitter, but now she knows Marissa, and she realizes that Helen just cannot be her lover; the homes of too many of her friends would be jeopardized.  But she comforts Helen when the latter tries to get through the Christmas season somehow, despite being reminded at every turn that she has fallen out of favor with the Christmas choral music establishment.  Comfort in an emotional sense entirely; it seems to me tenderness and kindness is infinitely more romantic than "getting it on."  Perhaps I should have been a writer for soap operas.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Well, I saw this on December 17^th, in a moderately full theater.  It was a lot of fun (even if the masked Darth Vader like figure seemed a little silly to me).  Daisy Riddle (Rey) was delightful, though I can't for the life of me think why so many new actors need to be New Zealanders or Australians.  I think the US public has an insane fascination for foreign accents, in particular, Australian / New Zealander accents.

Minor Spoiler Alert: the movie also presents a Storm Trooper as a human being; about time, too.  In wartime, people try to discourage any attempt to humanize the enemy, but to endure more than six movies without a look behind the mask of a Storm Trooper can only trivialize the military aspects of the saga.  Even Tolkien resorts to portraying his enemy forces as subhuman orcs, to make it easier for readers to accept the idea of massacring them.  Jane Rowling has her Dementors.  But at this stage of the game, perhaps it is time that the soldiers had a face.

Kay

My best selling story: Prisoner!

It normally does not make sense for an author to review his or her own writing, but I have an especially warm place in my heart for Prisoner!  

Sometimes I have an embarrassingly teen sensibility; I often catch myself thinking like a fifteen-year-old, even if an unusually precocious one.  This makes it easier to write stories for young people, in the age range of 15-to-18.

I can't remember writing Prisoner! --or rather, I can't remember beginning to write it, though I suspect it was in the early Spring, when I was just beginning to have free time to write.  It is one of my favorite stories, though I must say I like all my stories, and read them often, just for kicks.

Made a whole new cover.
This is the old one.

This particular story is about a young girl of a royal family who disguises herself as a commoner during an invasion, and is hauled off as a slave with the conquering army.  I most definitely was influenced by G. A. Henty's The Cat of Bubastes, which I read as a teenager, a rare book that my parents happened to have left lying around.  In that story, a young man is hauled off to Egypt, with a whole lot of slaves from his fellow-countrymen, after they had fallen to the Egyptian conquering army.  He subsequently falls in love with the young daughter of the family to whom he is given as a domestic slave.  Prisoner! runs parallel; in fact a very close parallel, if you ignore that the love affair is between the girl and her princess owner.  I have sold thirteen copies of this story, in contrast to single digits of all the others (except for Jane, of course, which has been downloaded some 1300 times, for free).

I had been a little dissatisfied with the cover of Prisoner!, and I just uploaded a new cover.  I might have just killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, because it is just possible that it was the old cover that sold so many copies of this book.

Halloween
I had a lovely Halloween, which I spent with friends.  I sat in the back, reading, only coming out to observe the occasional Trick-Or-Treater, who was invariably simply adorable.  My friends handed out candy to an incredibly diverse cross-section of the population: black, white, Asian, Latino, girls, boys, kids from about a few months old, and still at the "goo gaa" stage, and older kids of around 13, who made wisecracks at the costumes of my friends, who had dressed pretty well, I thought.  I myself did not dress up, though I did carve a pumpkin, a little one.  (I might post a photo of it sometime.)

P.S. I made a completely new cover for Prisoner, shown at right.  This one has a rather plain girl, with strong, muscular legs.  I needed the face to be that of a girl who held her feelings tightly reined in, and I finally found such a face.  The fact that I liked her legs was a bonus.  The reason I texture the photographs so much is that I want the image to be sort of mythic, and not too much like the girl next door.  I would prefer if the features were completely unrecognizable, even generic, but without a tiny bit of character, the cover image wouldn't work.  This is a small file; the cover at full resolution is here.  Double-click to see a larger image; it is 1600 pixels wide, so keep going until you see the thing at full resolution.

Kay

Covers from Smashwords

As you know, making interesting covers for the books I have published on Smashwords is one of my pastimes.  I get just about as much fun out of making these covers as I got from writing the books!

The first one, and one of the least successful, was the cover for Sweet Hurricane, which was a rather pitiful attempt.  It was a complicated story, so I had to have a cover that was relevant.  If I get a better idea for one, this one will be dropped like a hot potato.

The cover features too many elements, from the general store motif (because our heroine Helen works at a sort of general store at the beach), to the dance motif (Helen meets and falls in love with a brother and sister pair, and they're dancers.  But the pair shown here doesn't represent what they look like in my imagination, or even in their description), to the kids on bikes motif, and the hurricane motif.  Worst of all is the title; if I had to do it all over again, I'd pick a different title.  Probably less adventuresome: "Helen and co. at the Shore: Hattie".

OK, well, I did go ahead and changed this cover.  Here's the new one.

The very next book I published was the amazingly successful Jane, with one of the best covers I managed to make, sultry and simple and sexy and colorful.

Jane is free, and has been downloaded more than 1,300 times, but I don't know whether it is because of the cover, or whether because it is free.  It contains some very attractive characters, but I'm not sure whether they connected with anybody.

The lesbian theme is front and center, both on the cover and in the introduction, and I wonder whether readers who like lesbian fiction are the only ones who download the books.  (I suppose that's an obvious "yes", because all the books are on lesbian themes...)

This is the book most heavily procured on the Smashwords site, written by me, but it is offered free.  There is a prequel: Jane, the Early Years, see below.

[I changed the cover a little.  You will recognize the image that is on the sidebar of this blog.]

The next book --I'm trying to list these in chronological order, but it is just a little too difficult--was Little John Finds a Friend.  This is a story about the kid brother of Helen, a character about whom I wrote an enormous book, which I'm publishing in parts.  (Sweet Hurricane is a --rather important, actually-- episode from the Helen saga.)

Little John is an interesting character, and in Finds a Friend, his relationship with his college friend Taylor becomes more intense.  The story is lighthearted, and actually not a lesbian themed one, despite what I wrote a few paragraphs above.  I like Little John a lot, and I like Taylor even more, and this story is a lot of fun.

In keeping with the tone of the story, the cover was a doodle with stick figures.  John is a tall, lanky fellow, and Taylor is a goth chick.  I did the best I could.

Helen versus Handel's Messiah was a sort of Christmas Special, but I keep it up all the time, because it is too much trouble to archive and unarchive.

Despite it's flippant title, it is a serious, slightly sentimental meditation on the reversals in Helen's life, especially the several years since she began to teach at Westfield College, a fictitious institution in Pennsylvania.  The model featured on the cover doesn't really reflect my image of Helen, but her expression was sort of interesting.  The score on the cover is an actual page from the manuscript score.

Alexandra was a major project, not in the sense of how serious the material is (the tone is pretty serious, for the most part), but because of how long it was, and how much effort it took.  I plan to rewrite the first fifty or so pages one of these days, but it stands at more than a thousand pages long at the moment.  The cover was a depiction of Alexandra and Genevieve, the royal couple who are the central love story of the book.  It isn't really a gothic romance, as the cover and the summary might lead you to believe.  It is a romance, an anti-war novel, a science-fiction fantasy (but no dragons), and in a perverse way a sort of social commentary.  I don't think it succeeds at every level, but do want people to buy it and read it, but I don't want to give it away.  I guess the thing to do is to give away coupons for it, and one of these days I'll put them here, below.

A Smashwords staffer was unhappy with the depiction of nudity on the cover.  I'm crazy about nudity, and I think we should have nudity everywhere we could possibly have it, but I am unhappy with the suggestion that there is a lot of sex in the story.  There is a little, but sex is by no means a central theme.  Well, not very central.

Helen and the Flowershop Girl was a short episode from the Helen saga that I packaged and published last Spring.  I had a different cover for the first publication, until I came up with this one.  Helen is a tall, long-haired blonde, and the Flowershop Girl is a short, chunky girl, who wears shorts.  As you can see, I had trouble getting images that were appropriate, so the girl in shorts is a rather svelte young woman, while the girl in the dress is a brunette, and not particularly tall.  So what to do?

Neither girl is at all how I imagine the characters to be, except that the girl in the dress has that innocent look that seems part of Helen's personality, and her hair is very much as I imagine Helen's hair, except for being the wrong color.  I do imagine Helen wearing a dress on those lines, and the dress was definitely added from a fashion catalog, and I hope I don't get into trouble for it.

Prisoner! is a story set in the Bronze Age in an alternate Earth.  The original cover was based on a classical painting of a slave market, with clothes overlaid on (very clumsily).

The main character, Maia, is a war captive, so the image does not really fit the story.  Still, I imagine Maia's build and features to be roughly the same as those of this poor girl.  I love the colors, and they fit the mood of the story very well.

There are twin princesses in the story, and I wish I could feature a cover with them in it somewhere; maybe a summer project for next year.

There is also a character of a dark-skinned girl, with every inch of her body tattooed; that would be a fun search.

I grew dissatisfied with this cover (though the book had done very well with it), and eventually settled on this one.  The build of this girl is rather 20th Century; bronze age women, even the tallest ones, were not as firm-fleshed as she!  I struggle with trying to be authentic in terms of dress and other details, with trying to convey the essence of the character in terms of how she might look if she were to be a modern girl.  This is obviously a quest that can never be satisfied.

Helen at Ballet Camp  is the first book in the Helen series.  (There will probably be a prequel, which summarizes what went on before Ballet Camp, during Helen's freshman, sophomore and Junior years.)  Ballet Camp is a rather innocent teen novel, but that's how I had written Helen's character at that stage of her development, and the writing is as immature as Helen's character.  But it relates a part of Helen's story, as it happens, an inessential part.

If it isn't obvious, Helen had ballet training under a (fictitious) famous choreographer and dancer, Andrew White, no relation.  This establishes the background for a couple of stories in which Helen dances, later on.

Music of the Stars.  This work was a major project, which I doubted I could finish.  However, I recklessly published it in advance in August of 2014, and promised to have a completion in one year.

If I hadn't done that, I never would have completed it, so I'm happy.  Unfortunately, the completion shows signs of being written very fast, and I'm determined to rewrite it.  I won't change the story substantially, but I suppose it's inevitable that it's going to be a little different.  Mostly, because I'm so involved with so many of the characters in that story (talk about killing off your darlings) I can't bear to commit to particular endings.  Most of all, I'm depressed at being unable to fill out the character of Athene, Helen's daughter (in this story).

While we're on the topic, when I first started writing this work, some half a dozen years ago (I can't remember), I had almost decided to scrap the original Helen saga.  That was so dripping with sex and depravity that I thought it would have to remain just an indulgence of mine.  Since then, I have seen far more depraved things with no saving features whatsoever in print and online, and Helen came off looking practically like a nun.  So I'm cleaning up the Helen saga in little bits.  But Music of the Stars was an attempt to salvage the interesting character of Helen, and make something out of her.  To my horror, when I looked back at the original Helen story, it was obvious that the two characters could not be the same, because their histories diverge at about the age of 30.  So anyone who reads this book has to think: Oh, this is the Voyager Helen, and not the Saga Helen.

It is a very long work, close to 650 pages, and serious in tone.  As with all my writing, despite the mature themes, there are lots of juvenile characters, some of whom grow into roles that have sexual themes interwoven in them.  The cover is very generic, and I want to create a different one when I can.

[Added later: This is a new cover; I have gammaed it up (don't bother to find out what that is: it just makes it less dark) for the blog post.  It shows a girl swimming up through the center of the Andromeda Galaxy, which is, of course, impossible.]

Helen, The Lost Years: Lalitha.  This is a reference to an Indian girl (she starts out being about 17 in beginning of this story, and by its end, about 35.  Helen actually marries this girl in a civil ceremony; she is crazy about her.  But, while they're living together, Helen begins having affairs with a couple of other people, and Lalitha can't take it anymore, and they split up.  But Lalitha continues to be a significant presence in the Helen stories, and I subconsciously wanted them to get together eventually.  But they never do.

The Indian girl in my imagination is very close to the model in this photograph, but I did not have a good photograph of her in the collection.  And, to my amazement, the Western girl in the picture does come very close indeed to my mental image of Helen.  (Of course, what's important is that it doesn't clash with the mental image the reader has.)  But the cover is kinda crappy, and I have to work on it.

Jane, the Early Years.  This story was written shortly before 9/11, and was intended to be both very erotic, and very serious.  After some years, I felt the eroticism was a little too much, and I had to work hard to partially sterilize it.  It has some serious themes, such as HIV and terrorism, not to mention Xenophobia.  Those themes are explored in Jane, but they're also present in this book, of which Jane is a continuation.

I think this cover might be, along with the cover of Jane, one of my best, and I'm certainly not going to touch it!  I hope you love it as much as I do.

Volumes in Preparation:  Jana
This one was written completely, but not typed into the computer, so now I have to look for the sheets of manuscript, and my filing habits are worse than useless.  Don't tell Smashwords, but this story was partly serialized on this very blog: see the archives.  The graphic of a girl wearing a chiton that is on the sidebar was an illustration for Jana.  It's a modification of that graphic that I'm presently using as a cover.

Kay

New Ways of Showing Breast

There’s nothing less rewarding than making a general appeal for more tastefulness.  Good taste, or specifically tastefulness is considered to be in the eye of the beholder, so anyone can avoid taking the appeal seriously by invoking this fact.

A case in point is the recent interest in showing a (part of) the breast that has really been around since the seventies, when girls began wearing larger armholes, to show off a particularly erogenous part of the breast, namely the little of it closest to the armpit.  In this article, a blogger called Alexandra explains why she believes this style is ‘Not Cool.’  I have to say I agree with most of her points.

It is overdone.  This is where taste comes in.  Because young women have nowhere to turn to get an assessment of tastefulness, we have an escalation of breast-baring styles.  Evidently most modern women have never studied fashions of the past, to see how this style can be adapted to be perfectly satisfying.  Revealing a little of the outermost part of the breast has been around for centuries, certainly since Greek times, and there has been lots of opportunity for discovering styles that make the little that is shown flattering, rather than overwhelming.

A young person's style
There’s absolutely no doubt that typically it is a style that flatters women with firm breasts, which usually means young women who have never given birth, or women who have had surgery to insert implants or otherwise firm up the breast.  I don’t like the idea of elective surgery generally, and I dislike that so many women feel obliged to undergo it for the sake of their lovers, male or female.  But I think this particular style works well for girls who have had breast augmentation, provided it is done well.  (Breast augmentation does not always work out nicely; I don’t want to mention names, but some of the former Bruce Jenner’s in-laws have had unfortunate experiences with their body modification.  I feel that it is so unfair that a good boob job is probably beyond the means of the typical citizen; it outrages my sense of fairness.  On the other hand, I don’t think the Taxpayer can be expected to subsidize elective surgery unless [a] all other essential needs of every citizen are met first, and [b] elective surgery stops costing such a fortune.)

I’m dying to post some examples of what I consider tasteful exposure of the breast, but I’m reluctant to offend anyone on this front (or this side), because I feel that it is so unfair to rub its potency in the faces of women, who are subjected to an onslaught of these sorts of pressures already.  But I would hate to see the style die out, just because some women overdo it.  I have noticed that some men bloggers are appealing for restraint, which I think is fantastic.  Quite apart from the fact that I’m rather a prude (and not proud of it), I think dressing tastefully is just incredibly sexy, but I’m afraid that my opinion won’t carry much weight, just because of who I am.  Okay, well, I guess one little picture won’t hurt:

Down to the Skin is not needed
The style to which I refer (okay, let’s just come out and call it what they call it on the Web: side-boob) works beautifully if a translucent undergarment is worn.  Girls have worn sheer underblouses for a decade, when they set out to show off their midriffs.  (Some of them drew attention to their bellies by constantly tugging at the bloody things with fake coyness.  Fakeness is endemic among teenagers.)  Many of the more charming fashions do have a sheer panel that obscures the breast, while at the same time drawing tasteful attention to it, without the need for fake tugging.

A bra for the style?
The article suggests that the style does not work with a bra.  Well, with conventional bras, probably not.  It won’t be long before someone invents a sheer bra that supports the breast, but shows off the side of it.  How hard can it be?  There is mesh fabric available today that is pretty strong.  The panel can go fairly high, if it is made of mesh.

In conclusion, let it be known that Kay Hemlock Brown endorses side-of-the-breast-baring styles, as long as it is done with some taste.

Jane—The Early Years

I recently decided to publish the prequel to Jane that I had written about earlier, under the name Jane—The Early Years.  This should make my one (documented) fan happy!  It is not a sequel, as desired, but still, it tells you a lot about Jane, and how matters came to be.

I had a great old time putting a good cover together; in the end, I used a representation of Scorpia, Jane's alter ego, a personality invented by Jane and Co. who appears at Metal Fetish gatherings, in a mask, and goes about being a wise guy.  (Scorpia reappears in the continuation of Jane, after she meets Lisa Love, who persuades her to make a feature film.  This part has not been written yet; I suspect that it will be two parts, actually.  The first will be a protracted holiday in Canada, and the second part will be Jane acting her part as Scorpia, until Lisa finds out who's behind the mask.)

The cover is at right.  I imagined that the mask would be much more opaque, and cover up most of Jane's face, but that would have looked horrible on the cover of a book, so I used this sort of "wrought iron" filigree mask instead.

Unlike Jane, The Early Years is not free; but it is priced at about $2, and I'm hoping it will sell well.  I have only sold a total of 19 books, which makes me hardly an author at all.  Please go out and buy the book you all; it goes on sale on Saturday.

Kay.

[Added later:  I don't think I will ever succeed in designing a cover more attractive and more appropriate than this one on the right, for Early Years.  It is colorful --perhaps painfully so, to the taste of some-- and unfortunately it depicts one of two possible scenes that would be perfect covers.  I wish there were similar scenes in the other books!  I mean, there are, but I just can't pull them off with the resources I have.]