Does She Look Like Lena?!?

I just saw an image on DA, which I thought is how I imagined Lena to look like!!

Lena is a character in Music on the Galactic Voyager, one of my longest stories.  When Helen meets Lena, she’s just about 9 or 10.  By the time the story is brought to a close, Helen is still about the same age as she was, about 30, but Lena is about 35!  (They had put Helen in a hibernation state, because she had medical problems.)

Kay

Vocabulary: 'Conflating'

I was just reading  Helen and Sharon this morning—I know, I'm weird that way—and came to a paragraph where Helen tells James that Megan is his 'sister', (in this story, he's only three) but he contradicts his mother, and says no, Allie is his sister.  Helen thinks: man, I screwed that one up; clearly James was conflating sister and girl.

Conflation is an interesting and useful idea.  When someone conflates two words—like 'sister' and 'girl', as James might be doing—it's a lot like confusing the two words: sometimes the two words do mean the same thing, but the two words usually are intended to mean different things.  

Fiction with a Moral

I was recently reading the biographies of numerous authors; some of them wrote about the lives of farmers, especially women.   Some of them wrote about women who fought for the vote for women.  Some of them wrote about the lives of slaves.  Some of them wrote about exceptional women who educated themselves, and then taught children.

In all the books I've written, the hero is just a woman, who tries to make life more fun and interesting for the people around her, and for herself.  There is very little service aspect in what she tries to do; so it's never going to be great literature!

Oh well; them's the breaks.

Kay

Julie

I don't remember exactly when; it was before Galactic Voyager, but after Jane—I was feeling very emotional, for some reason, and I began to write a story about a pair if women, former ballet dancers, who found themselves on the run from a vengeful guy, who had dynamited one of their homes, just for taking in his pregnant wife, whom he had violently abused. 

I must have watched too many soap operas.  But I wanted to write a love story between two female ballet dancers; you can see the obvious implied eroticism.  I just stumbled on the file this afternoon!

As you know, I'm terrible at filling out an erotic story about two women.  But I think I could make something readable out of this; at least a short story. 

Kay.

This Blog

This blog is where I go when I want to comment on any of my stories.  Political commentary and current events go on the 'other side,' Don't Wait for The Movie.  I have two solutions I can think of. 

Move all writing-related blogposts to 'Helen' Blog.  Some of my readers are primarily interested in lesfic, and my comments about my own stories; they could simply head over here, and only visit the other one if there has been some really startling political development.  Language issues, such as punctuation, vocabulary, etc, could all be left on here.  Actually, I'll have to rethink that; it would be sad if only the president's foolishness ever got discussed on that side.  On the this side, I would put any posts about matters such as references to pets, for instance, in any of the stories. 

Compartmentalize the Blog.  I mean, leave the blogs as they are, but have departments in each one; a Current Events department, and LGBTQ department, a Fine Arts department, and Language department, and so on.  Most of that would really happen on the other side, which is sort of a 'Dear Diary' thing, anyway. 

I really don't need to fuss so much about it; but adopting one plan or the other would make it easier to do the actual blogging.  The readership of the Blog is about 25 readers per post, and it isn't clear that every visitor reads the whole post!

I'm going to try a sort of hybrid approach for a while.

Kay Hemlock Bonaventura Brown

Diabetes

I don't know whether Helen being diagnosed as diabetic (in Helen and Sharon) was a putoff, but I had been diagnosed as a mild diabetic just then, and I just couldn't help going that route in the story. 

The Galactic Voyager story features diabetes more centrally.  But, since my own diabetes was being managed just medically (which means with only pills, in this case), that's how I had Helen's condition also managed, because I didn't know any better.  After a few years, though, any diabetic (as far as I know now) has to go on to Insulin injections.  This didn't happen for Helen, so Helen's further diabetic adventures are a little implausible for anyone who is a diabetic, or who knows one!  Voyager is worth rewriting for that reason, but I'm not going to do it. 

Sheila

At one time, the story Helen and the Flowershop Girl was 'disappearing off the shelves!'  Earlier today, I just took a look at it; it really was charmingly written.  It seemed as if it was written by someone else!  (I seem to say that often.  I think I'm having a personality change; for some reason there's a discontinuity between the writing of my earlier self, and my writing now.  I don't want to guess why.  I'm just getting older, and that's my simplest assumption.)

Sheila—that's the name of the Flowershop girl—is real in a way none of the other characters in my books are real.  She's an old-fashioned dyke; that was a role that lesbians of that time took on.  They were very polite, but not warm, and not encouraging.  But Sheila was attracted to Helen, though she realized it was not possible.  It was too good to be true. 

Kay