The Myers-Briggs classification of this Blog, and A greeting to readers!

My books sell very slowly; I'm lucky I don't depend on my books for a living!

Of my best-selling books, the most popular one is Prisoner! which has occupied the number 1 spot for more than a decade.  (I think.)  I understand; it is very readable, and the characters are simple, and the story is romantic.

Alexandra  and  Music of the Stars are the two most serious efforts, the most substantial books, in terms of number of words, each more than 250,000 words.

Apart from Prisoner!, the books that sell these days are Helen at Ballet Camp, and Helen and the Flower Shop Girl, both of which are essentially short stories (Flower Shop Girl is a short story, and Ballet Camp is a sort of Teen novelle).

I am reading Alexandra for fun at the moment, and it is interesting how the character Ninel arrives in the middle of the story, and sort of takes over!  I do love that character, (as well as little Katie,) and it must reveal something about me, probably that I long for a child, which is a little embarrassing.

In Music of the Stars, too, there is a young person who is very important, namely Lena, who is about 20 years younger than Helen at the beginning of the story, and actually the same age as Helen at the end of the story.

On a completely different tack, I submitted this blog to a website that gives you the Myers-Briggs 4-letter analysis of the author of a blog, and it came up ISFJ.  Here's the full report:

The author of http://k-helen.blogspot.com/ is of the type ISFJ.

The quiet, devoted and sympathetic type. They are especially attuned to the present moment, the details of the task at hand and the people involved. ISFJs usually have an extremely good memory of details of people and situations. They are modest caretakers who do not demand credit or thanks for their efforts.

They tend to be suspicious of future possibilities and trust history more than the future. Their shyness with strangers can lead others to misread them as standoffish. Because they are so such nice and generous people they have to look out not to be taken advantage of. It might be important for them to learn to speak up for themselves.

The Nurturers enjoy safe and harmonic work places with few surprises and clear goals. ISFJs are serious people with a strong work ethic, not inclined to self-indulgence. They believe in being meticulous and thrifty. They work well alone. While they may enjoy taking care of others, they do not enjoy giving orders.

Common satisfying careers: Interior Decorators, Designers, Nurses, Administrators, Dentists, Veterinarian, Social Worker, Biologist, Medical Researcher and Librarian.

Notable ISFJs: Mother Teresa, Jimmy Carter, Prince Charles, Tiger Woods, Halle Berry, Naomi Watts, Kirsten Dunst and C3P0.

Well!  The analysis took less than a second, so I must conclude that they just sampled the most recent blog post.  Still, I confess that I just loved their conclusion, and I only wish it were accurate.  In several of my stories, someone tells a character: you are so good and sweet, your mother must be truly blessed to have a child like you!  And the person replies: why, are (other people you know) particularly mean or cruel?  Unlike my characters, I do know that I have fewer mean tendencies, and I tend to withdraw from a conflict rather than confront it.  The only disconcerting things is that I'm described as serious.  I never realized this; I had always thought of myself as a fun person.

I hope I quickly forget this description of the bucket I have been placed in; as I grow older, I'm becoming less helpful and caring, though I'm even more aware of feelings, especially pain, in others.  If I respond to pain, it should be spontaneously, and not because I wound up as the same Myers-Briggs type as Mother Theresa!

The Blog analysis can cheat in any number of ways; for instance, by counting the number of links, or certain categories of words, they can quickly arrive at conclusions that are mechanically driven, which methods are not available when administering the Multiple Choice test that the real Myers-Briggs analysis uses.  Come to think of it, any multiple-choice test has a mechanical element to it, but some tests are more carefully constructed than others.  For instance, such tests as Which Disney Princess Are You?  or What Salad-Dressing Are You? are just for entertainment, and do not serve any useful purpose, and often aren't even funny.

Kay

Excavation2! Helen Archeology

To continue the previous post about Helen manuscripts I have unearthed:  I have to say that finding them is one thing, but going through them is quite another!

So far I have found several threads (I'll put the number here when I finish counting them):

1. The story of 'Helen's' Early Music Festival, a TV event that Helen was responsible for at the end of her Freshman Year.
2. Helen's involvement with the world-famous tennis coach, Gary.  This story, too, is interwoven with a story of a woman called Inez, from Argentina, who invites Helen to her home, and some tense adventures there; stories of Helen's work as a photographer for a men's magazine; Stories of Helen's appearance as a nude dancer at a unusual nightclub in remote Florida, and her long affair with the star of that troupe, Leila.
3. The details of Helen's meeting with Lisa Wallace.  Lisa is a high-school student, the daughter of the President of Helen's undergraduate college, and of Pat Wallace, who gave Helen her first violin, a priceless 17th-century unconverted violin with a Baroque bow.  This story, too, is interwoven with how Helen met Cindy O'Shaughnessy, and how Helen became a singer of Lyric Opera, through singing in The Magic Flute, and The Marriage of Figaro.  This is also the story of how Helen discovered her mother's family, the Johnsons, including her cousins Ingrid, Marika, and Heikki, who appear off and on in numerous stories, most importantly in Helen On the Run.
4. The story of Janet's brief second marriage to Scott Forrester, a pastor in North Carolina.
5. Helen's encounter with a teenager called Michelle Smith, who appears in Helen On the Run as a grown-up woman.  The two Michelles have rather different personalities, and if I publish the story of the youthful Michelle, (which isn't very interesting), I'll have to rewrite it quite heavily.
6. The story of Helen's Christmas Special a few years later.
7. The details of the account contained in Helen at Ballet Camp.  This story is mixed in with the story of Helen's Tennis Camp in the Canada wilds, in a reserve owned by Sylvia Tedesco (also known as "Nurse", since she is the nurse for the tennis camp, in addition to being the owner),  Helen's year-long stay with Sylvia, Helen's pregnancy with twins, who were subsequently stillborn, and Helen's affair with Marsha Moore, the Hollywood movie star.  (BTW, if you find the name Sylvia familiar, it is also the name of Helen's mother, now dead for about 4 years.)  This is also where Helen meets Dr. Nadia Van Der Wert, who ends up being Helen's academic advisor for a number of years, and is hired together with Helen at her job as a professor, before she gives that up.

I enjoyed re-reading the Lisa Wallace / Cindy O'Shaughnessy story so much, I'm getting it ready to publish it independently.  I decided at one time to number the stories in sequence, but at that time everything before Ballet Camp seemed so giddy and un-salvageable that I numbered Ballet Camp 0, in the Helen sequence.  Helen and Lalitha--The Lost Years comes in at 1, and Helen On the Run--The Lost Years at 2, and so on.  So this "prequel" will have to be given a negative number, or just a name, and the tag Helen BackStory.  So this one would be Helen BackStory--Lisa, Cindy, and the Violin.

Excavation! Helen Archeology

Recently I was forced to go through my stuff and get rid of anything I didn't need desperately.  (It had to do with emptying out a closet, so that some complicated rewiring could be done inside it.  It appears that a lot of wiring in older apartments goes through closets.  Who knew?)

Well, imagine my surprise and delight to discover that one of the boxes contained nothing but the lost Helen manuscripts.  Close to 20 pounds of the stuff; some stapled, others simply loose . . . some written on both sides, and some only on one side; some in two columns!  I have devoted an inordinate amount of time to that piece of fantasy.  You are about to discover some of the seamier aspects of that project.  Some of the sections were carefully numbered, others had been numbered at a later time, as I tried to sequence the thing, so that I could type it into my earliest computer.

I had started writing the story when I was in my teens.  Everything I wanted to do, I made Helen do, for me.  Now, a dozen years later, I am hammered by emotions that come to me as I read various parts of these sheets.  And when I take a packet out to read, it could be from a dozen different places (but all --or most-- chronologically before Helen goes to Ballet Camp).

When I give the back-story to any of the episodes I have put up on Smashwords, I try to remember how Helen met some of the characters that figure in the stories.  One of them, who plays an important role in Helen and Lalitha--The Lost Years, is a former nun called Cindy.

I did remember that (I had created her this way:) she was, in fact, a former nun, that she had been kidnapped and drugged, and suffered total amnesia.  But now I'm reading that she had a rather different personality than I remember today.  Today, I describe Cindy as a long-suffering, quiet, earnest person, who loves Helen, and would do anything for her.  I did remember that she was an excellent figure skater, and a string player (a musician), who actually gets Helen started in violin playing.  But in the manuscripts, she is an eager, vital woman whom they initially think is about 25, but who ends up being significantly older.  And I had written samples of the poetry she had written!  She and Helen had met online, in an old-time Chat Room, and she spoke essentially in poetry, always fearing that she would be interrupted by the fellow who abducted her, and was forcing her to be a prostitute.  The manner in which she gets rescued by Helen is described in detail, and is quite different from how I remembered it, until just a couple of days ago.  I think I must have intended for Helen to someday return to Cindy, because I had given Cindy the characteristics that would enable the little nun and Helen to be suitable foils for each other, according to my teenage wisdom.

Janet is depicted as too much of a rug on which Helen walks heedlessly.  As I was writing about Helen after her College Professor days, her new beloved is Marissa Brooks, who first appears in Helen at the Beach, and---spoiler alert---Marissa has inherited some of Cindy's personality.  Marissa meets Cindy in Helen Versus Handel's Messiah (or maybe she doesn't; I might have cleaned up that story to reduce the number of stray characters for the reader.  There are literally hundreds of characters, mainly because I was writing just to entertain myself, and it was not intended for anyone else's eyes), and the account of that meeting---as seen in the imagination of my adult self---somehow seems really plausible.  But now Cindy is just part of the furniture, a very background character, and she deserves better.

A character called Michelle, a model, is reintroduced in Helen on the Run, an important and long innings in the Helen saga.  I'm still trying to get this one ready to publish; if I take too much longer, nobody will ever read it, I suspect.

I have remembered that I always hated writing verse.  I would supply it when it was necessary, but never voluntarily.  But here, as Cindy and Helen corresponded, both of them did it in verse!  I can't even imagine my mental state that could have led to such a thing.  It isn't very good verse, but it . . . maybe I'll include a little of it, as I get more comfortable about revealing details about myself.

K.

It’s Impossible to Edit My Own Writing!

I’m in the process of editing one of the three most complete books I’ve published: The Music of the Stars, and I’m seeing terrible, embarrassing mistakes of all sorts!

I have read this book at least five times, since it was published in August 2015; I love the story, despite its flaws (about which you can read elsewhere), but in spite of intermittent corrections and repairs, there are still errors; sometimes entire words missing.  I read a paragraph, and I’m at the next paragraph before I feel an odd sense that something is wrong, and backtrack.  Evidently my mind puts in the missing words, and I ‘see’ what I want to see, rather than what’s actually on the page.

A few weeks ago, I had a sudden recurrence of a craving to have one of these stories actually printed out, on paper, and in my hands.  I contacted a friend who works at a printing company, and she said, sure, send it over; she would print it in paperback form, or at least send me a cost estimate.  It’s going to be some 600 pages (mostly because I have not had it professionally edited; most editors would slice out massive chunks of it), and I would have to think long and hard whether I could afford to print out a single copy.  It’s expensive to print out a single proof copy; only the fact that a few hundred are printed out makes them affordable at paperback prices.  Also, my friend is very likely to print the book out on fairly good paper, rather than the typical crap on which mass-market paperbacks are printed.  Also, I have to get ready a nice cover image at high resolution, because this girl is a perfectionist, and she will pester me until she gets a cover image up to her standards!

Oh well.  Stars is full of impossibly nice people; one reason that I love to read and re-read it.  Interestingly, it seems very much as though the typical reader is not happy reading books full of nice characters!

Kay

Philosophical Problems in Writing Fiction

When I'm zooming along, writing a story, unexpectedly a spiritual issue raises its head.

I'm not at all a religious person; in fact, I am probably closest to being a complete agnostic, or more accurately a don't-care-ist.  It's not that I want to actually declare that there is no god, but it seems very much a non-issue.  But sometimes it becomes important for one of my characters to at least think about what drove him or her to do something.  Of course, this makes me have to think about it, and I have to temporarily suspend not caring.  For instance, I think of Helen as being someone with strong moral values that flows from her religious upbringing.  But her mother is dead, and her father is probably an agnostic, though he never gets asked the question.  But Helen has strong feelings about things that seem to amount to a de-facto religiousness, and I have to write appropriately.

Most of my other protagonists are essentially non-religious.

Jane, who starts out being a reluctant rebel, quickly reveals herself to be an extremely empathetic woman, who simply can't turn away from a person who needs help.  She likes to attend church with her girl friends, but simply to enjoy their company in yet another way.  I think she connects church attendance with domesticity, which she craves.

Maia, the slave in Prisoner, is a sort of religious cynic.  Her approach to religion is to consider it a cultural thing, and a soothing ritual.  She urges the princess to allow her and her fellow slaves to observe the midwinter Festival of the Sun, simply as a comforting ritual.  Remember, this is the Bronze Age, and most people were not accustomed to thinking about religious philosophy.  Of course, she was in exile, and I considered that she could easily believe that both her gods and the gods of the local people were in charge, each in their own way.  Complicated.

Alexandra, the young queen in the story of that name, is a passive Roman Catholic.  (Catholicism has evidently survived into our distant future, and is the state religion in this story set on a colonized planet several centuries in our future.)  Being young, and her responsibilities occupying most of her thought processes, with just a little mental energy left over for her to worry about her personal relationships, she has absolutely nothing to spare for religious conjectures.

Helen in The Music of the Stars is essentially the same Helen as in the Helen stories; she is just technically a different person, because the facts are not consistent.  The future of Stars is much more front and center than the future of Alexandra, for obvious reasons.  In Alexandra, the fact that the story takes place on another planet only serves to support the fact that it isn't Earth.  In Stars, the environment of Space, the fact that they're traveling between the stars, is central to the background of the story: we need new thoughts to handle these circumstances!  So Stars-Helen's philosophical base is probably very much like my own: the moral principles that religion supplies —especially Christianity, since that is the most familiar— are crucially important, because shipboard society is so fragile, but the superstitions that accompany religious beliefs are a mere nuisance.

Lalitha, in the Helen stories, and her sister Sita, are a pair of Indian girls, sisters, who are closely involved with Helen and her activities.  Lalitha believed in a very personal god, or rather goddess.  Without consciously meaning to, I emphasized the fact that Lalitha saw, in Helen, the goddess Saraswati.  This is not too far-fetched; becoming a vehicle for one of the gods is something that many Hindus perceive in people they feel are good, or being good for a particular purpose that they themselves might not be aware of.  Because Helen was so good and kind to Lalitha, and because she seemed to glow with unearthly beauty, (and I always imagined Helen as being larger than life,) she immediately concluded that the goddess was residing in Helen.  It was always temporary.  Sita was an outsider to this whole Goddess business, except that she was horrified when Helen cursed the goddess on one occasion.  (Helen disguised herself as a fictitious actress, Sharon, in order to act in a movie that might have compromised her reputation.  In the end, her reputation bites the dust anyway, for a mostly unrelated reason.)

Christine and Kelly, in Christine's Amazing Christmas.  These are two young girls, around 15, who are chosen to sing in a Christmas choral festival.  They would consider themselves mainline Christians, but ones who are just beginning to look closely at what that means, and how they feel about it.

Of course, each book contains numerous characters, for instance the Czech model, Sofia, with whom Helen's sister Tomasina makes friends over the Internet.  Sofia turns out to be an utterly affectionate young woman, a total doll, as they used to say in the fifties.  I get the impression that they don't take religion quite as seriously as we do, out there in Eastern Europe; again, it is mostly comforting ritual.

Kay

The Dark Materials Trilogy (Golden Compass, etc.)

I was reading The Subtle Knife a couple of days ago, and was once again caught up in the story.  The one thing I regret is that my mental image of the central characters of Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel, as well as Lee Scoresby, are all dominated by those of Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and Sam Elliott, but honestly, there isn't that much regret on that score.

If you haven't read the books, you should; Philip Pullman is an excellent writer.  The characters are wonderful, and likable for the most part.  But that's not saying much; I think my own characters are just as great, but this next component is what I struggle with: the story.  Pullman's story line is brilliant.

I picked up the last book in the trilogy: The Amber Spyglass, and to my disappointment, the narrative gets a little confused, especially in the parts with a lot of action.  Despite everything, including the highly ambitious philosophical background, the trilogy seems to be a success.  I'm still not through the last book, and I must confess that a complete endorsement of the trilogy must wait, because the end of a large work of fiction must be reasonably satisfying, to receive a star.  In a short story, the ending is almost everything, but not so in a novel.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, here are the word counts of some of the more interesting fantasy series as reported by https://griffinpauljackson.com/ :

• His Dark Materials (trilogy) by Philip Pullman – 329,000
• Lord of the Rings (trilogy) by J.R.R. Tolkien – 455,000
• Harry Potter (seven-book series) by J.K. Rowling – 1,002,000

Writing merely a long book is not a praiseworthy achievement, but I found it difficult to write Music of the Stars, 236,000 words, and Alexandra, 329,000 words.  Helen, the piece of writing with which I began is reported by Word as 1.3 million words, not including some enormous gaps in the middle, for which my careless editing is to blame; I ripped out vast chunks of text before replacing it with something decent, and now I can't remember what's supposed to go in there.

News and Commentary

Hello everyone!

The Eclipse
I ventured forth to try and get a glimpse of this thing, but my eyesight is poor, and everywhere I tried, I could only see a blurry image, so I gave up.  As soon as I got home, it began to become overcast, and that was the end of that.  I must place on record that I have seen an eclipse some years ago, and it was very impressive.  I had some sort of equipment then, like a darkened glass, which really worked well.

A local support rally
The progressives in our town got together in a quiet town park, and I quietly attended, trying not to be very visible.  I have a retiring nature, and the last thing I need is to be identified as one of these "libtards" who are supposedly destroying American society for everybody.  I'm not sure what to make of such claims, but more on that later.

I was deeply moved at what happened at the rally.  It was not called a rally, simply because that is almost an invitation for anyone opposed to tolerance and racial harmony to come out and disrupt it.  There was no march, no slogans; only appeals for reaching out, forgiving, and patience, and (brace yourself) love.  I never thought of myself as a very loving person, but I began to remember the mood of love and peace from the seventies, just as it was beginning to be shut down in the eighties.  But warmhearted people are still out there, trying to spread peace and love, but some of this seed falls on barren ground, as they say.

What conservative ideologists have to say
I discovered a paperback for sale in our local supermarket, outlining what one conservative writer thinks is happening in the US.  He says that
(1) Liberals have gone overboard about animal rights.  Obviously (he says) pets and animals do have some rights, as they would in any decent society.  But it looks as if some people want animals to have the same rights as people!  This is true, and perhaps it is this sort of thinking that is not yet widely accepted that bolsters the notion that liberals are running away with everything.
(2) Liberals (he says) have some arbitrary principles about how things should be done, and they are forcing everyone to fall in line with these.  I suppose he means things like marriage for same-sex couples, and bathroom privileges for trans individuals, and so on.  Well, we were on a roll, but some people are frustrated to be on the losing side.  It is no longer the losing side; it seems that the present government is comfortable with repealing many of the most progressive laws that were put into place in the last few years.  This is the danger of going far and fast; everything can be undone.  If you thought Obama was moving too slow, you realize now that consensus building is a very important thing.

Finally, it is clear that conservative businessmen are convinced that the Liberals are taking all their wealth.  No, it is not the liberals, it is their fellow-conservatives.  When the government takes money in the form of taxes, it is spent, as wages, social services, infrastructure-building (construction), education, libraries, etc.  That money is spent in turn by people to buy various goods and services, which of course enrich other businessmen.  In contrast, when businessmen and other fat cats are allowed to keep their money without paying taxes, it sits in their bank accounts, making them happy, but out of the reach of their fellow-conservatives, who are anxious to increase their wealth.  Big money, is of course, at pains to convince the people that the money simply disappears into Government coffers.  If it did, we would not have such a deficit.

Work
I had taken on fewer and fewer teaching jobs over the last few years; I was getting increasingly frustrated with the abilities of incoming students.  A few of them are very good, but the vast majority of undergraduates are difficult to teach.  I must leave it to more capable people than myself to push through the material that they need to be given; I certainly can't do it.

Personal News
I don't like to reveal too much about myself, nor do I like to burden my readers with things that they would probably not be concerned about.  Suffice it to say that I had some minor health problems, but I am bouncing back pretty well.  I have not lost my sense of humor, yet, and I will start writing again in the near future.

Reading
You probably realize by now that what I love to read is books I have already read, and the latest are the books of the Anne of Green Gables series.  The first book was crafted brilliantly, but the remaining books are also amazingly fresh and rewarding to read.  Lucy Maud Montgomery had a delightful sense of humor, and I have to admit that she was able to create a variety of characters that really are three-dimensional, by which I mean that they were distinctive, recognizable types, with consistent characteristics and dialect that she carefully used to keep them alive all through a book, and all through a series.  And, of course, the younger characters aged very plausibly.  I know how hard that is to do: to make the descriptions of a character, their nature, their personality, their spoken idiom, all age continuously through a story in a plausible way!  Of course, the books were originally intended for young people.  But there is plenty in them for a mature reader to admire and appreciate.

Kay