Outed! Hide, hide, hide

I'm not out, dear friends.  I write as though I'm fearless, and don't give a damn.  But that's because I write under a pen-name; people who actually know me only know me as a weird recluse, and not as a lesbian, let alone a lesbian author of lesbian romance.

Well, this changed over the weekend!

I have a lady friend, of whom I'm very fond, and she had visitors over the weekend.  One of them was a man, whom I knew from previous visits.  He sat me down, and wanted to know what I did all day long (as I'm sure many of you would like to know too).  I hedged for as long as I could, and then revealed that I read.  What do you read, he asked.  In a moment of foolishness, I said I'm a writer, and I love to read my own books.

He was now very interested, thinking he has just discovered an author--well, I suppose he had, really--and he wondered whether I had written anything he would like to read.

The answer, of course, was no; not unless he was into lesfic.  I mean, I don't write porn; but just like I cringe at the thought of two guys cuddling in bed (though I probably shouldn't, at this point), I assumed this guy would be uncomfortable reading about lesbian intimacy.

So I thought furiously, and happened to mention that I had written a 255-thousand word piece of science fiction (Galactic Voyager), and presently he was looking at my Smashwords page, with all the titles, most of them offered for free.  He was amused that I wrote under a pen name, but then lunch was announced, and the conversation moved on.

Man, save me from inquisitive men.  I should have said something like: I'm sorry, but I'm unable to satisfy your curiosity on that point; or I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.  I would not have so much trouble with a woman whom I didn't know.  It just struck me that I didn't have to reveal that I had written Galaxy, but only that I was reading it!!  I had got flustered.

Anyway, as soon as the visit was over and I was back home, I opened up Galaxy, and examined it from the point of view of what a guy who knew me slightly would think of it, and now I'm in the thick of reading it yet again.

Kay.

Another Look at Galaxy, and Other Stories

Hi, readers!

(Edited to insert 'so'.)

So I've often discussed some of the true novels within my opus, but this is from a slightly different point of view.

To explain it, I have to start by saying that I watched Lightyear, the movie about Buzz Lightyear, who first appeared in Toy Story.  Contrary to some of the harsh evaluations of the movie by fans of Disney, I found the movie quite watchable.  The character of Buzz had the usual types of shortcomings that a cartoon hero would have been expected to have.  But the story was given a surprising degree of depth from a surprising source, namely Izzy, the grandchild of Buzz's fellow astronaut.

Às you might have expected, the overall story has plenty of masculinity from Buzz.  From Izzy came, more than femininity, a lot of enthusiasm, warmth, optimism, spirit, and a little hero-worship.

One interesting fact is that Izzy's grandma was a lesbian.  Quite apart from the problem of conceiving a child that has the genes of the two women (all finessed in the movie), we have to admire how Pixar approached the challenge of relating to this diverse, and, er, woke generation.

So I began to think about my own fiction: are the characters representative of the genders that readers might want to find in the story?

The situation in Galaxy is a little troubling.  The main characters, at the outset, are Cass Hutchinson-Holt, and Alison McCormick-Warren.  In earlier drafts of this story, these two were far more intimate, but I felt that all that intimacy did not move the story along very much, and the first version I published had all that stripped out.

Once Helen is revived, she has several encounters with women, which are a little more intimate than a completely platonic relationship would be: with Daisy, and with Lucy, the Dropout girl, and later with Sissy, Cass's granddaughter.  All these women are bisexual (or at least we would call them so).  The story is, interestingly, set in a culture in which strict gender roles are beginning to break down; subconsciously my own attitudes were beginning to loosen up.

I was also reading Helen's Concerto, and two things struck me: firstly the small number of men in the story; it's wall-to-wall women.  Secondly, most of the females are lesbians.  The exceptions are Gena, who is in a trio with a girl (Kristen) and a man (Marcus); Trish was in a lesbian relationship, and is now married to Lalitha's son Suresh; Marissa, Helen's long time partner, leaves Helen to marry Larry, the oatmeal man.

In both these books, I have to accept that the first third or so is, in the case of Galaxy, very slow moving, and in the case of Concerto, boring and redundant.  I shudder to think how many readers might have gotten bogged down in this earlier part, and never make it through to the more exciting, and better-written latter part. 

[To be continued. ]

Weird Aspects of Cosplay

I was just getting used to cosplay.  Cosplay isn't just dressing up; it isn't just putting on makeup, and trying to look like a favourite character from a book, a game, a movie, or a comic.  Cosplayers take their avocation very seriously.

I was startled by how some cosplays stretched the character, and sometimes the actual scene they were trying to represent.  Can you imagine a female Superman?  A female Flash?  A mellow Harley Quinn?  All of these seemed to be reasonable at some level.

But m more I'm seeing a totally nude cosplay.  Wait a minute; what is left of the character if you take away the entire costume??  Suppose you take the character Tifa Lockhart, and submit a photograph of her completely nude?  Without even her characteristic suspenders?  The very universe should howl in protest.

There's a lot of nudity on DeviantArt; the site tolerates a lot of weirdness, and nudity is one of the least objectionable of those.  I'm just saying that if someone is playing the role of some character from the popular media, one is

Centered Paragraphs?

I'm just reading a story with a weird characteristic: every paragraph is centered!

What kind of weirdo would do that?  I suppose I should not impute peculiar motives to new authors, but hey, they ought to take the trouble to set out their stories in a professional way.  Sometimes I get the feeling that kids write stories for their high school magazines in a certain way that passes for 'creative' when they're in school, and continue to write the same way professionally.

Quite honestly, I have to stop thinking that LGBTQRSV++ authors writing e-books are professionals, exactly.  I can honestly say this because when I wrote my first story for Smashwords, I was far from being a professional, except in the sense that my grammar and syntax might have been fairly good.  I had to fix up almost every story at least once, and re-upload it.  And I did not feel comfortable letting any of my friends look at my writing, precisely because I was on the queer spectrum myself.

Pets: What are they thinking?

I'm babysitting the pets of a friend.  When I was growing up, we had a dog, and a cat, too.  But I never was really close with them.  But I find my friend's pets utterly fascinating!

From time to time, they need to be sent outside, to take care of calls of nature.  Usually I do it by the clock, but sometimes they want to go out a little earlier, and I find the process where they let me know "Out, quickly!" amazing, and amusing.  Then, of course, I want them to come back in.  (If they stay outside, they feel that they have to bark at all sorts of imaginary enemies, which is considered bad form.). So I call out to them, and they stand all the way at the back fence, and stare at me, as though I'm out of my mind!

It's an interesting adventure, me trying to get them to understand what I'm thinking, and them trying to get me to understand what they're thinking.

I often think that it would awesome if they and I could actually converse.  In fact, I once read a book called 'The magnificent Wilf,' in which there was a dog who could speak to its owners telepathically.  I have thought about this a long time, and I have changed my mind; what's neat about this particular set of pets is precisely the communication problem!  If they could talk, after a while it would get boring.  Struggling to be understood is interesting to me (maybe not to them).  When they can't make me understand, it's just business as usual, because their whole lives have been spent with humans who only have the merest inkling of what is needed.

Clueless Woman

A couple of days ago, I was reading a story about a clueless grad student, who is set up with a beautiful highschool teacher.  Most of the reviews on Amazon were negative; I believe mostly because grad students are an unfamiliar type for readers of lesfic.  It's hard for a typical person to understand how much tunnel vision is lurking in the confused brain of a PhD student.  I found the story really believable,  so I rated it high, and gave it a polite review. 

It turned out that the book I had read was actually a prequel.  The next book had been written first, and after it had been written, the author seems to have smoothed out the harshness of the MC.  In the book I'm reading now, the MC is an asshole.  She's a two-timing wretch with no conscience, and the sanitized prequel manages to downplay this.  So now I must get on  GoodReads  and humble myself, and explain how it was that I was fooled, and to make it clear that not all graduate students are two-timing bitches.

Kay the Gullible

Stories With Fighting

In my distant youth, I attended a class in self-defence for a few months.  It might be said that fighting is like riding a bicycle, but I can't remember a thing from that class!  But I have written a few stories that involve the heroine engaging in combat, of one sort or another.

Helen and Sharon, for instance, involves both unarmed fighting—Helen showing the director what she could do—as well as sword fighting.  In Alexandra, Jane has an encounter on the beach with troops from 'Bernia'.  In Prisoner(!) Maia fights with the sword on several occasions; also in Jana, which I have not published yet, but which has been serialized right in this Blog.  How did I do all this?  Pretending.  I have read a good many books about hand-to-hand combat, enough to have a few (theoretical) ideas about how it should go!  You might not know, but Alexandra is set in the distant future, in a colonized planet.  This does not enter the story directly, except that there are vague references to Earth culture, and artifacts that are clearly ancient, and with Earth technology, now lost.  The culture on that planet has reverted to early 19^th century science, and they fight with rifles, crossbows, and swords.

In Jane, or at least Jane - The Early Years, Jane and Heather learn Karate, to make a Scorpia video.

Well, I just wanted to make clear that I was writing about violence under false pretences, and not with any personal knowledge.

Kay