Kay's Stories on Smashwords

As you know, I have made all the stories free on Smashwords, as part of a COVID epidemic lockdown-related promotion.  SW hopes that people are quietly reading at home; perhaps they are, perhaps they aren't!!

I love to go on the Smashwords dashboard, as they call it, where a SW author goes to manage his or her book sales, and select 'Daily Sales', and then 'Books', which tells me which books are selling.  Actually, which books are being given away fastest!!  As you might know, I don't really care about making money from these books (though, honestly, some people do make an awful lot of money from their books, and I shouldn't sneer at the prospect of earning from the books).

The titles
Prisoner!
Helen at Ballet Camp,
Helen and the Flowershop Girl,
Jane on Holiday
are the most popular ones, because (I think) they have the most explicit, and implicit, sex in them.  Again, I should not disparage those who look for sexy stories to read, and pick my ones, because there are quite a number of sexy stories on Smashwords to buy (and get for free), and wanting to read something that is a bit titillating is nothing to be ashamed of; in fact, I wrote these very stories to keep myself from going crazy at a rather dry time.  (Gosh, I can't believe I wrote that.)

This is strange, but for a sort-of reclusive person, I do feel very much for those who are going stir crazy in the US, because of the lock-downs imposed by the more intelligent governors.  There are some governors who are trying to play a game, I suppose trying to make their states compete unfairly against the locked-down states and areas, and get ahead economically at this time when we should not be doing that.

Talking about being locked down: I thought about writing a story concerning Helen and her family during these times, and how they cope, but I write so slowly that by the time it gets written, it could be of no more interest to anyone!  As it is, while I labor over Helen at Westfield, I get the strong feeling that it could not possibly hold anyone's interest for very long.  In trying to telescope Helen's adventures over many many months into a single semester, Helen comes across sounding like a superhero.  Her 'special powers' all flow from her being, in addition to a great violinist, also an athlete, and actor, and a persuasive speaker.  I gave her a pretty face, but that was about all; she is strong, but lanky and stringy, and only her personality makes her attractive, really.  But I could not bear to create a heroine with a plain face.

On facebook, there are dozens of amateur musicians playing guitar and singing, on the Covid Concert page, and giving links, where people could leave tips!  Some of these are just hoping to make a dollar or two; others are probably desperate to make up the money they lose from staying home.  This has been a horrible two years; I gave lots of money for my favorite candidates last fall, and now I'm faced with having to give tips to singers whose songs I really don't like.  But at least they're trying!

I'm starved for the company of the pets of my friend!  If you have cats and dogs, count yourself lucky; just watching them is very entertaining, and if you have the imagination to tease them with something they would interact with, it is worth all the effort!  I could tell you so many stories about pets I have observed!  And, of course, there are pets on YouTube.  There is even a sequence of videos about someone who made an obstacle course for a squirrel in his yard, which was constantly raiding his bird-feeder.  So he made it difficult for the squirrel, and took videos of what the squirrel did.  It was amazing!

Out here, the spring flowers are slowly coming up.  I have not been a flower person so far, though I do appreciate the flowers other people plant and care for.  There are reports that rivers are running clearer, air is less polluted, though I understand many of you must long to go out there and pollute a litte air!  (It is a little quieter, too; the fellows who race around in little motobikes, just to make a racket, can't do it anymore.  I wish they would tape it, and listen to themselves over headphones; I suspect they're more excited about being a nuisance to us than anything else.)  The canals of Venice are smelling less!  Isn't that amazing?

I am so wanting to get up and sing into a camera, and put it up on facebook!!  I can play several instruments, and I can sing a little, but I can't put the whole thing together!  I wish there were an easy way to put my phone up on a tripod stand; I bet Helen and the kids would figure out a way pretty easily.  My characters, unfortunately, are a lot cleverer and more motivated than I am.

Anyway, I sincerely hope that all of you who read my blog posts have the resources to eat nutritious food, and keep yourselves from being bored; those are the main things to worry about.  If you focus on the others in the house with you, it helps to keep you occupied.  Always thinking about how bored you are just leads to boredom.  I, unfortunately, have nobody to entertain, but I have records, and books, and, of course, the Internet.  Even if the Internet dies, I think I could manage for about a month . . .

Love to all,

Kay

Update and Personal News

Hello friends—all 13 of you!!!—and other readers! (Don't feel slighted by that dubious salutation! As you can imagine, I long for a following of a few hundreds, but it appears that a very small core of readers read all my stories...)

As I blogged in Helen (the companion blog to this one), I'm staying mostly at home, though at the moment, our Governor, Tom Wolf, has not mandated a lockdown.  This (staying home in voluntary isolation) is no hardship, since I'm a semi-recluse, anyway!  Unlike in the story Helen and Sharon, where Sharon thinks that she could be a pretty sociable recluse, if she felt like it, I'm not really a recluse in the first place; it's just that it doesn't bother me to stay home, reading, writing, or thinking about drawing something!

I just realized that this could be a great opportunity for those of you who have kids to interest them in reading for pleasure.  The main principle is: Don't force them!  Every hour or so, give them an opportunity to let off steam.  Sneaking off to some remote place to do something interesting is good.  Pretty soon, you might find your little people begging to be left alone with their book!  Sitting on them and insisting that they read will almost certainly not work.

One of my favorite authors of children's books is Tamora Pierce.  (Her facebook page seems to suggest that she was recently in bad health, as implied by the bulletin that she had been released from hospital.)  I stated in my own facebook page that my favorite series—a sub-series of the Tortall Series—is the one named Protector of the Small.  The principal character of this line of stories is a girl called Keladry of Mindelan (all these stories are set in a feudal universe), who is prone to taking the side of the underdog in almost any conflict.  This is only natural, for anyone with any sort of moral sense; Keladry is just more unswerving in her determination than most others.

As to my personal news, so far I'm keeping well; I would imagine that if I were to succumb to this virus  (Covid-19, if you're reading this in the distant future, and don't know what's going on), I suspect that I would not have the energy to keep up these posts.  I will also have to call in to my friends, to stop by with supplies.  Luckily I don't have a problem doing that; but I'm careful—have been careful, so far—not to be too much of a nuisance.  I have about a week’s worth of supplies, including a packet of breathing masks, which I had bought for a DIY project, and never used.

Thank heaven for cell-phones, don’t you think?  Can you imagine this same situation back in the 90's, when you had to use paper, or at least a land-line?  Well, land-lines were not so bad, I guess.  (Land-lines, for you younger people, were wired phones.)

Finally, all the projects I had floated last year have never been worked on, for the most part.  I did start a story called Helen in Westfield, but I just can't get motivated to continue with it, because it involves so much work, straightening out the sequence of events, to fit into a brief 14-week time frame.  It would be easier to write a completely new story to fit in with the Pandemic, which might be interesting.

Just remember that doing all these recommended things  only guarantees that we won't all get the virus at the same time.  The chances are good that we will get infected sooner or later, but at a time when the hospitals are able to provide us with beds and equipment.  (If we all get sick at once, how are they to accommodate us?)

Several months from now, some of the most healthy among us will have already gotten the virus, and kicked it off, and would be free to move around, and make life a little more normal for the rest of us—provided, of course, that they knew they had been infected by the virus.  Without tests, nobody knows anything.  In particular, young, vigorous hospital workers will be safe from contracting the virus.  These are some of the factors that slowing down the rate of infection delivers to us.

But, chances are, we're all going to get it, but it involves —hopefully—only a brief period of painful chest congestion, which might have to be alleviated by breathing assistance.  I'm almost certain that they'll have to use tubes into my lungs to remove accumulated moisture.  At least, I've never smoked; if you have smoked in the past, this treatment might remove all sorts of smoking debris from your overwhelmed alvioli!!

Anyway, be brave, and keep a positive outlook.  Try to be one of that lucky few who doesn't get the virus at all.  Don't be mean to people who come too close, etc.  If you go out, there's a sort of viral audio clip that advises taking a shower, and changing into clean clothes when you come back inside.  Washing your hands and wiping down flat surfaces (counters and desks) is a good plan for this time; apparently the virus can survive on a cold metal surface for several days.  (I had heard that it was 9 hours, but this audio clip says days;  I think that needs to be checked.)  But exposure to soap (and any detergent, I assume) kills them.

Don't panic, and don't feel negative.  A positive outlook is likely to keep your resistance stronger than almost anything else, but of course, it cannot trump simple hygiene, which is, washing.  Also don't cough on people, and avoid getting coughed on (I know, I know) and shower at least once a day.  And keep reading!

Kay

From Behind My Window Curtains

Ohh, I can hardly stand it!

I wonder how my fellow-citizens can endure the brawling that goes on in these endless Democrat candidate debates!  I understand that the candidates feel a need to come before the public more or less steadily, until the voting takes place.  Exposure is important.  But how can they avoid repeating the same old points over and over in every debate?  Where do the moderators find some of the most inane questions to ask the candidates?  (It really has gotten a little better these last few debates.)  I was so relieved that the candidates did not sharpen their claws against each other in the first few debates, and actually, they have been much more civil with each other than, say, the GOP candidates were in 2016.

I'm beginning to think that only Elizabeth Warren could be the Democrat nominee who would make me happy.  She has the style, the personality, the values, the plans, the attitude that I have.  I love Bernie Sanders, I can handle any of the others, except Joe Biden, and honestly, I can handle even him being the President.  I dislike his 'crazy Uncle Joe' rhetoric, and all that goes with it.  But except for being reactionary, and conservative enough to make the Alt-Right extremely happy, even Joe B. would make a better president to follow Trump, but, after Biden leaves office, we're not likely to be very much better off.

None of the male candidates, as far as I can tell, look like they would be serious champions of women.  Clinton surprised everyone by signing legislation that was fairly progressive for its time.  But I would be very surprised if any of the guys would be as progressive as even Clinton.

If Bernie Sanders becomes president, and manages to put through even a fraction of the changes he suggests, all our lives will be better, and the women's lives together with those of everyone else.  (Of course, the GOP will insist that the entire thing is a fiasco, and present false information to support it.)

In all other respects, nothing has really changed, except, of course, for Michael Bloomberg.  He made a fair Mayor for New York City, though I wasn't close enough to his mayoralty to have an opinion about it.  He ditched the Republican Party to become a Democrat, but he isn't either one.  He is basically a very rich guy, who likes to throw money around like Andy Warhol threw paint.  (I don't know very much about Warhol's paint-throwing!  He may not have done it, actually.)  Bloomberg has supported many good people, especially those who were fighting the gun lobby.  Well, if any of the other candidates had that much money, they might have done the same.  (They might not have, too.)

What do you think about this new flu that is going around?  I'm going to eat my vegetables, stock up on dry goods and canned foods, and keep an eye on whether it comes to my locality.  I have a very reclusive lifestyle, and I don't often go out if I can stay home and write!  Keep your spirits up, because a depressed person is more likely to have a bad case of the flu than someone who has a cheerful disposition.  As time goes on, they're sure to come up with how to fight the flu if you get it.  This is why it pays to give up smoking, and working in places with bad air; these things weaken your lungs.  If you have kids, I suppose you really have to work hard to keep them from being bored and cranky if their schools close down for the flu.  Note that only people who are sick, or are prone to flu, or have Asthma, are expected to have a bad time with this disease.

Kay, spitting into the wind.

Just Keeping in Touch

I'm going to put up a new post in our companion blog: Helen, which sort of does not belong here.  This blog I'm going to keep for matters concerned with my activities as an author; the other blog is for matters that are Helen-specific, which is why it was originally created.

At first, having started with this blog, as a means of publishing a story called Jana, I began to post episodes from that story.  After a while, I took seriously the thought that I should keep the story fairly innocent, and devioid of graphic sex.  (I'm not sure why; perhaps it was the belief that kids would be reading it.)

At that time, the story of Helen was full of wildly sexy passages.  I had been writing it in a much more self-indulgent phase, and I used Helen as an outlet for all my frustration!  In the end, though, very little of that made its way through into the blog.  (I must go look; I can't remember!)

Now, however, I have different roles for the two blogs, and they may as well be one blog, really.  Each blog has a link to the other one.

The last post I put up in Helen is an interview of Helen, from a political perspective.  I have decided to make that blog have a political voice, though Helen, as she is now, does not have the perspective that a convincing commentator on politics should have.

Well, if you're interested in my take on all the events that are taking place these days, go over to that site, and read what I have to say, via the character of Helen!

Kay Hemlock Brown

Grrr! Lost Knowledge Behind Fashion Artifacts

Sometimes I get so mad!

As I have reported, I spend a lot of time on the website DeviantArt.com, which is a website for artists to show their work to each other, and to fans.  It attracts lots of youthful artists who contribute what is called Fan-Art, which is essentially artwork paying homage to Japanese popular art (from Anime, Manga, computer games, TV, movies, etc).  Often, of course, this artwork depicts superheroes, gods, goddesses, aliens, mutations and so forth, so that the characters in these derived works look weird and sensational, and are shown doing things with their enhanced powers and physical attributes.

So far, so good; the fantasies of young people these days are inevitably fueled by the entertainment that is available to them, so many of the characters they like to draw are goddesses, ghosts, magicians (like Harry Potter and co.) and even vampires and zombies.

Vampires and zombies are laughably hokey to the greater part of the population, but there are enormous hordes of people who are able to suspend belief to the extent that the doings of vampires and zombies are of urgency and concern to them.  Oh, how cruel of X to do that to Y!  And he (or she) had been so patient and so loving, etc, etc.

There are some things, however—things I have mentioned often in the past, I believe (I'm too impatient with the subject to go look whether I have mentioned these things often)—which make absolutely no sense.

I must have mentioned stilletto heels.  Platform shoes.  But let's not forget banana clips, barrettes, and nipple piercings, and similar things that only make sense for ordinary ladies, 9-5 folks, or perhaps denizens of the night to sport.  Why would a goddess, who normally lives in the Astral Plane, have such low self-esteem as to adopt platform shoes and stilletto heels, and so on, which are usually associated with human mating rituals?

Then there are stockings, and garters (or garter tabs; I'm not too sure of the latter).  Some younger girls may not know, and guys may know even less: garters are intended to help keep up the stockings girls wear, especially if they wear shorter than ankle-length skirts or dresses.  Stockings, meanwhile, are intended to smooth out the appearance of the lower legs, and to provide a little warmth in cool weather.  A goddess, who can smooth out the appearance of her legs with sheer effort of will, does not need stockings, and certainly not garters to hold them up!  And, in any case, for whose benefit is this supernatural being wearing these appearance-enhancing equipment?  Imagine you're a goddess.  Would you go to the trouble of obtaining garters and stocking to impress your secret sweetheart, or would you simply influence her mentally with your god-like powers? 

Most recently, I have noticed the details of the lip color that the immortals who are depicted in Anime-style artwork wear. 

A few decades ago, it became common for professional makeup artistes to slightly enlarge the lips of their clients, by applying lip color slightly outside the line of the lips.  This was very effective in enhancing the lips of women in show-business who might have needed the enhancement.  Then, of course, women began to use collagen injections to enhance their lips, sometimes with disastrous effect.  But can you imagine a goddess enhancing her lips by painting on color outside the lip line?

Push-up bras, open-crotch panties—you name it, these goddesses do it.  Well, of course they might have a sense of humor, and do it just to make us laugh.  But that sort of defies reason. [When the artist comments on his or her creation, it is usually something on the lines of: "I just felt like doing that!  Haha!  Sometimes I think Xxyzzy needs a little something extra, you know?"  Of course, Art needs to make no excuses!

What we have here is a crisis in imagination.  There are a few authors who are true innovators in how they conceive their immortals to appear, and what characteristics (read: super powers) those immortals have.  Then, the fans love those protagonists so dearly, that they are unable to conceive of any new super characters (gods, goddesses, fairies, aliens, you name it) that are entirely different from those.  Even their names are derived from classical names of heroes, sometimes declined or inflected in painful ways. 

I suppose Western mythology has been tremendously influential on the youth culture for more than a century.  Many of the stories that young Japanese and Chinese and Korean and Vietnamese people love best are derived from Greek and Roman myths and legends, and Norse and Irish folk tales, and when a young person of today wants to invent a monster, for instance, nothing is more natural than that she or he should create a name from a Norse root, juxtaposed with an Indonesian suffix.  (Forgive my murderous way with linguistic objects, but I hope the essential ideas are coming across.)

Take away the—to my mind—embarrassing missteps with clothing and accessories, and even the outsized swords and guns that Manga protagonists choose as their weapons, and you're left with some really innovative artwork.  I did not mean to demean the quality of the art; it is just that some of these young artists take what I'm going to call anachronistic styles and accessories completely for granted; they don't hesitate for a moment in drawing a character wearing leather armor, sporting both a knife and a laser weapon.  My word anachronistic is a hold-all for all pairs of accoutrements that combine any sorts of objects whose use together makes no logical sense, whether or not it has to do with temporal issues.

I also have a problem with females with super-large breasts.  This is a cultural issue; both young boys and young girls imagine their heroines with ponderous breasts, it seems.  Meanwhile, since a large number of users of the DeviantArt website are models and cosplay artists, it is clear that about half the girls who put up nude photographs on the site are well-endowed, while the other half is very slim.  I'm not sure whether it takes a great deal of courage for a girl to show herself in the nude, if she has AA-cup breasts; at any rate it must be the braver ones who put up their self-portraits, and nine times out of ten, they are lovely.  I suppose that betrays my personal taste.

The heavily-endowed girls are also quite attractive (though I don't particularly admire them), but I get the impression that they're not automatically favored over the slimmer girls.  So there are subtleties with how audiences like their breasts.  It is difficult to understand this trend towards super-large mammaries (a word that I dislike intensely, but which I'm using to avoid saying 'breast' too many times).

I suppose I must just get into the habit of skipping over the artwork that annoys me.

Kay

Little Women (2019)

Just a warning: This post has little or nothing to do with my books on Smashwords.

L-R: Beth March [Scanlen], Jo March [Ronan],
Meg March [Watson], Amy March [Pugh]

A few nights ago, I watched Little Women starring Laura Dern, Saoirse Ronan, Meryl Streep, and numerous others.

First of all, I have read Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men, the main books that form part of a single connected story, and read them often, and so I know my way around the narrative extremely well.  Bear that in mind, when I wax critical about this latest movie.

First and formost, I see numerous matters that concern the author, Louisa May Alcott.  Anyone, with any sort of observation and sensitivity who lived at that time--even without the history of the world since that time to illuminate their thinking--could have had similar concerns:

* The status of women, who were under the control of their menfolk.  Many women--if not all women--could see the unfairness of this state of affairs.  But especially in times of war, it was more glaringly obvious that men, and male politicians and legislators made matters worse than they already were, though there may have been a few wonderful leaders of the masculine gender.

* The fact that women were consigned to certain tasks and responsibilities, which kept them out of the running in tasks and responsibilities that were far more important, which were jealously controlled by inept men.

* The fact that no matter how brilliant, a typical woman had no access to higher learning, no matter how well fitted she may have been to have the world of knowledge opened to her.  Women needed access to knowledge both in order to make a difference in the social and political sphere, and also in order to follow their instincts and their thirst for knowledge in any area.

* The fact that women had to subject themselves to often quite unreasonable demands of their husbands to bear large numbers of children.

* Alcott was painfully aware of the sorry plight of poor immigrants.  Whether or not this was a central concern of hers I do not know--reading her personal papers could tell us the answer to that--but she certainly brought up the matter in Little Women, and presented the death of Beth March as a direct consequence of the lack of medical care available to the Hummel family.  Another factor was:

* The poor state of public health practices at the time, and sanitation standards.  It is hard to tell whether Alcott was sufficiently far seeing to imagine what would be possible in the future.

* The limitations of poverty.  The March family, while certainly better off than the Hummels, still looked upon the Lawrences next door, and their Aunt March, with envy.

A unifying theme in the context of all these concerns, is the powerlessness of women, even if it does not have a direct bearing on every single one of these items.  Certainly being a woman made everything so much worse, if you had to have a connection between, say, the Hummels and female powerlessness.  It seemed that the Hummels were a family headed by a woman, and such a family would usually be worse off in every respect than a family led by a man.

However, I think that, to make Little Women a monothematic piece of work would be to do it an enormous disservice.  Directors with a vision often think that, in making a movie out of a book, it is impossible to convey more than a single important point.  I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the main driving force behind the Little Women (2019) project, Greta Gerwig, subscribed rather too enthusiastically to the belief that Louisa M. Alcott's governing concern was feminism, which seems to have resulted in a very heavy-handed use of the flashback technique.  Never before in the history of mankind has so much flashback been resorted to, with such confusing effect.  To follow what was going on, you had to have known the story intimately already, and you had to keep track of what the lighting was, how long someone's hair was, and so on.  Ms. Gerwig may have succeeded in elucidating the motivations for various actions by backing them up with flashbacks, so, OK, motivations in this movie might have been a trifle easier to understand than in earlier Little Women movies.  But the thread of the story really suffers.

There were brilliant moments.  Beautiful visuals, gorgeous costumes, scenes improved by realistic acting.  But it was difficult to follow the thread of the story; and I fear that only those who knew the story, and were desperately trying to salvage something from the temporal confusion, would have made the effort to thread their way through the spaghetti.

An interesting turn of events is that Professor Bhaer, the gentleman who eventually wins the heart of Jo March, has only a few minutes on screen.  This is explained by presenting the happy ending to the story (the consummation of the love affair of Jo and Bhaer) as being an unwelcome result of undue pressure being brought to bear by the publisher.

I suppose I'm too much of a lover of the original stories, and the author, L. M. Alcott, in my own superficial way, I suppose, to appreciate the deconstruction, and the painful reconstruction of the story by Greta Gerwig.  If there had only been two time periods between which the camera switches, it might have worked.  But sometimes Gerwig switches between three, or more.  I have a horrible suspicion that the actual flashback she wanted was between the scene at the publisher's office, and Jo's scramble to intercept Bhaer before he leaves for New York; all the other flashbacks were (I believe) merely a means to convey legitimacy on that final one.

I should talk.  I have wielded flashback ruthlessly in my stories.  But I freely confess that it was due to my ineptness as an author.  Well, perhaps one day, a Director's Cut will be made available to us, where the flashbacks are handled more delicately, or hopefully, eliminated.

Kay

Updates On "Prisoner!", and "Lalitha".

Well, first of all, I made The Lost Years:  Helen & Lalitha  a free download, and then I made Prisoner no longer free, but priced at 99 cents.  (I think it is one of my best stories, and easily worth more than the price I've set.  But stories that sell on Smashwords are, I believe, priced very low, and that's what readers are looking for.)

Immediately, of course, Prisoner stopped selling; in fact nothing has sold for the last few days!  The message is clear: I may give away my stories, but I may not try to sell them.  (On the other hand, there are a few steady sales on Apple Books, and Barnes and Noble, for which I'm grateful.)

Lalitha, meanwhile, priced to move as a free download, has not sold a single copy, which is frustrating for me.  I think that story, which is not an essential part of the Sharon story, except for establishing essential background for the character Sita, is nevertheless a lovely, romantic story on its own, with several fascinating characters, even though they're essentially adults.

Prisoner, which was downloaded enthusiastically, is certainly a great story, but it is set in a fantasy universe, and the characters are in their late teens.  I wonder whether that's the secret of the popularity of Prisoner?

Meanwhile, I commissioned an artist to supply for me a cover for Lalitha, and she delivered a few hours ago.  The main illustration for the cover is shown here.  It depicts the unofficial 'wedding' where Helen and Lalitha are informally married according to a Hindu rite.  I'm pleased with how Lalitha has been drawn, but in the story Helen has been a worker in housing construction, something which I did not make clear to the artist.  Still, I do see Helen and Lalitha in the artwork, and I think it is just perfect.  Whether it will help to make the book more attractive, I cannot say!

Kay