Helen has Come Out of the Closet!

Thanks to the encouragement that you readers have unwittingly provided, I have decided to publish stories from Helen on Smashwords!  Smashwords, some of you might not know, is a site that permits anyone to publish e-books.  It is well worth paying it a visit, because some of the e-books on Smashwords are available for absolutely free, while some of them cost as little as 99 cents.  (You have to register with them, to get any of this stuff, which--at present--means only that you will get the occasional promotional e-mail from them.  I get almost no junk mail from them, even being an author.)

So far, I have published two episodes on the site, namely (1) Sweet Hurricane, which is the story of Helen and kids at the beach, when --and where-- Helen meets Harriet, and shortly afterwards, in Philadelphia, Maryssa and Matthew Brooks, children of the elderly photographer Diane Elman.  (Note: this book was subsequently renamed Helen At the Beach.)  Both Harriet and Maryssa (and of course Helen, which goes without saying) are among my favorite creations, and though the greater part of Helen has been just thrown together, and only intended as --informal-- therapy for myself, and will require an enormous amount of editing to make it publishable, this episode begins the portion of the "book" where I write for an audience other than myself.  Secondly, (2) Little John Finds a Friend is the story of Little John, Helen's young half-brother, now in college, and Taylor Brown, the goth chick who takes charge of him over one Christmas break.  Taylor Brown is also one of my favorite characters, and I love her to pieces.  She is more of a real person than most of the people in Helen, who are really myself in disguise!

Both those stories have been priced very low (under $3), and are not selling at all!  This is not surprising; I'm told that it is rare for a typical writer to make it big on Smashwords, and even rarer to do so with their earliest offerings.

An image I featured on this site, and how
it was modified to be a cover for Jane.

One of my most recent stories (well, begun around 2002) is Jane.  I haven't serialized Jane for the simple reason that it contains an enormous amount of sex, and I essentially wrote it for very prurient reasons.  But, as I wrote, Jane evolved into a story far more accessible than the Helen stories.  Being an amateur musician, I made Helen a total musical phenom, and as a result I suspect that the typical reader will find it hard to relate to someone who comes across as impossibly gifted musically, and impossibly screwed-up psychologically. While Helen is considerate (for the most part) of her colleagues and her students, she is inept in dealing with her significant others--not because she doesn't care for them, but because she finds it so hard to resist temptation.  So, anyway, I did a serious amount of sanitizing Jane, and published it completely for free.  Obviously, this doesn't bring me any money at all, but, on the other hand, it has been downloaded some 80 times, which is great!  You can find Jane here, at Smashwords.  I'm in the process of cleaning up spelling and grammar errors, and I hope to have it exactly the way I want it by Thanksgiving.

Synopsis of Jane.  Unlike Helen, Jane is a college dropout, has broken up with her husband (or boyfriend; it isn't clear, and I don't care enough to clarify it), and lives in a big house in New York City, taking so-called glamour photographs which her ex helps her put on the Web.  He pays her a fraction of the money his website makes, but gradually Jane gets into painting, which is her main avocation.  She paints an erotic painting of two of her models blended into a single girl, nude, kneeling in front of an ornate mirror, looking at her crotch.  What an awesome picture that would make!  I'm sure someone somewhere has done it, but I certainly don't know where to find such an image.  Anyway, she sells limited edition prints of this, and makes a lot of money.  By this time, she discovers that several people she knows has contracted AIDS, including her lover Deanna, who gradually gets sick and dies.

Jane is devastated.  She barely survives for close to a year, occasionally checked on by some of her models, who are very fond of her.  Then she meets a pair of twins, who gradually bring her out of her depression.  A lot of the story is about other characters who are incidental to the main story, but whose little adventures make Jane a more real person.  (I just can't write a story with a straight-line "plot"; sorry.  Life isn't like that.  However fantastic my stories end up being, and however impossibly brilliant my characters, they live in a sort of real-ish world, where lots of things interfere with what might be considered The Plot.)  End of Synopsis.  Well, read it and check it out; after all, it is free!

I started writing because (A) I had these awesome fantasies that I got while driving long distances all by myself.  I just had to do something while driving for, like 6 or 7 hours at a stretch, which I had to do frequently.  Then, (B) I had some unhappy experiences with my partner at one time, and decided to move into separate apartments.  When I found myself spending hours and hours by myself with only my coursework assignments to do, I decided to actually put some of my stories down on paper, beginning with Helen.

As I gradually got accustomed to thinking of myself as a sexual animal, and less fearful about appearing so to the outside world, I began to think of a story where the sex was a little more objectivized, and Jane was born.  9-11 plays a role in Jane, but the excerpt I published is taken from well after that event, and is not concerned centrally with it.  Jane could end up being the only true book I write.

There is another book, called The Music of the Stars © 2012 , which is very promising.  In Helen, it so happens that our heroine is invited to star in a weekly prime time series called The Galactic Voyager.  It is set in the not-so-distant future, where an enormous space vessel, called the Galactic Voyager is launched from Earth, with several hundred volunteers on board, including a famous musician and artist called Cecilia.  Helen is to play Cecilia, who is put on board in a state of hibernation, which is to say in a deep freeze, to be resuscitated as needed.  But a couple of dozen years into the mission, the young people who were born in space are becoming disoriented, because they really don't have a context for living on board a space vessel.  I mean, imagine growing up in deep space, and being told that your parents had lived on an actual planet at one time, but now all you have is this cramped spaceship?  So Cecilia is revived, to provide them with some meaning in their lives.

Anyhow, I began to think that this story line might actually be better as the basis of a novel than almost anything I have written up to now, though of course, it is squarely in the area of science fiction.  So I began to write a new story, and in this one, it is actually Helen who is put in stasis, on board a vessel bound for deep space.  She is revived, and then they find themselves in the vicinity of a star system that has a planet that promises to be inhabitable.  Meanwhile, Helen's diabetes has taken a turn for the worse, and furthermore, she is the only diabetic on board.  In order to ensure that Helen's genes are preserved, they clone her, unbeknownst to her.  So, to make a long story short, this has been written at some length: some 225,000 words.

Most interestingly, one of the greatest difficulties I'm having with publishing on Smashwords is --you'll never guess-- creating attractive covers for the books!  I am pleased with the cover of Jane.  The cover of Little John is a goofy little thing I put together in PowerPoint, which captures the mood of the story amazingly well.  (The difficult part is to represent the characters not too closely, because that would spoil it for readers with a strong imagination, whose conception of a particular character might be at odds with the depiction on the cover.) The cover I created for Hurricane is probably the most awful cover ever created by man or woman.  Here they are!

Kay