A Brief Update

I forgot to report that the episode "Helen vs. Handel's Messiah" was re-published for the Holiday Season (or, more specifically, the Christmas season, since it's about Messiah, after all).  Please take a look at it.  For those who are queasy about too much physical sex, there's very little of that in the story!

The background to the episode is in another episode [yet unpublished], in which Helen sings at a performance in London.

Helen met an unusual and interesting girl at Westfield College, where Helen had taken up an Associate Professorship in music.  The other girl (a woman in her middle twenties, actually) was a language instructor, and  had introduced herself as Rain.  At this time Helen was single, because she and Michelle (her partner while she had been on the run [Helen On the Run--unpublished]) had split up, and her faithful friend Penny (Erin's mother) had died of cancer, and Helen was in fear of violating the Judge's exhortation to conduct herself in a manner suitable to a mother of two young children, on pain of being sent to serve her suspended sentence for kidnapping.  (The kids, of course, were her own, but that's another story.)

Rain and Helen were soon desperately in love.  Helen had a firm friendship with Sophie Cocteau, a tennis player, and of course Lorna Shapiro, who was Becky's girl, also had a serious crush on Helen, but Helen needed someone who could be a true partner, for the long term, and it looked very much as though Rain was the one.  In addition, Rain just adored the two youngest kids, Alison and James, and that settled it for Helen.

Some time later, Rain disclosed to Helen that her name was actually Evelyn Woodford, and that her father was a British earl.  Rain had not written or called home for more than a year, being in rather a rebellious phase.  But this new relationship seemed important enough that she wanted her parents to meet Helen.  As luck would have it, Helen was also invited to sing in a performance of Messiah in London, which was attended by Queen Elizabeth, who spoke to Helen briefly after the recital, in the Royal Box.  The following year, too, Helen spent in England in Rain's family home.

Another wonderful Christmas episode centered around Helen visiting Olive Gibson, the mother of Jeffrey Gibson (little James's father), on which occasion she was also invited to conduct the massed bands of the Armed Services on the Mall in Washington DC.  This was also an occasion in which she played tennis with Sophie Cocteau, and there was a brief romance between the two, which they decided, by mutual agreement, not to let get out of hand, simply because every major romance Helen had had up until then had ended badly.  Sophie wanted to be a constant presence in Helen's life, for Helen's own sake, and her theory was that it would be impossible if Helen and she became lovers.  By the time Helen and Rain (Lady Evelyn) had found each other, Sophie and Helen were merely good friends.  (But Helen was harder on Rain than on any of her other lovers, and the end of that relationship reflects more poorly on Helen than anything that happened before or since.)

Kay

Making A Cover for “On The Run”

I'm not sure who reads this blog (in contrast to the sister blog: Don't Wait for the Movie!), but I feel guilty about putting all the latest information about the Helen project on Smashwords over there.  In short, I'm publishing the entire Helen story in installments on Smashwords, which is essentially a self-publishing website.

Helen and Lalitha: The Lost Years was put up a couple of weeks ago.  It takes up the story after Helen gets back from ballet camp, (Helen at Ballet Camp), and describes how she meets Lalitha, an important, recurring character.  The book I'm working on now is Helen On the Run: The Lost Years 2, which describes how Erin joins the family, and little James is born.  In the first half of this story, Helen masquerades as a man, a construction worker.  In the second half, Helen is pregnant (well, she's pregnant pretty much the whole time).

When I made the cover, I first had a picture of a guy in a hard hat, and put it in a sort of Southwestern landscape.  But it looked rather dismal; I had put a lot of texture on it, because it looked so plain with just the picture of the gal in the hard hat.  Here is what it looked like at that point:

It is the head of a girl, and the body of a man, but I widened the hips, so that it looked more plausibly a pregnant woman.  But by the time I had finished with the texturing, it looked really gloomy.  People would have thought: she should jolly well be on the run, and she can stay on the run, for all we care!

But I thought we needed a softer image of a pregnant girl, so I added, behind the construction girl, a pregnant woman, lying on the ground.  It now looks like this:

I'm kind of proud of the lettering, which looks like a Wanted poster from the Old West.  Unfortunately, the pregnant woman looks like she's been amputated at the hips, which is really peculiar.  I guess more work is needed...

[To be continued ...]

Kay

What has been selling on Smashwords

I began publishing books on Smashwords last year, and so far I have published a total of 10 stories there (two of which were seasonal, and which I "unpublished".  They get put in the deep freeze, and I can thaw them out again as appropriate).

Out of these books, one is a complete, independent novel, Alexandra (328,000 words), three are short stories, Helen at Ballet Camp (48,000 words), Helen and the Flowershop Girl (less than 10,000 words), and Little John Finds a Friend (11,000 words).

Jane, 125,000 is a major part of another long story, which I put up for free, for no good reason, and it has been downloaded in its entirety almost 600 times (which I'm very pleased about, but of course, I have no idea whether anyone has actually read through it; that's the problem!), while Alexandra, which is the longest book I have published at Smashwords, has sold just 2 copies, at $5.99, which is on the high side.  At about 500 words a penny, it is probably not such a huge ripoff, and some of the words are pretty long!  Just kidding.

A stand-alone novella, to which I hope to write a sequel, is Prisoner (46,000 words).  I love this story very much, and I lavished a lot of care on it, and two copies have sold.  It isn't erotica, by any meaning of the word; the little sex there is in it is, I think, important to the plot.  I could probably take it out, but it would not be quite as powerful.

Then, there are two major episodes taken from Helen: Helen and Lalitha (74,000 words) and Sweet Hurricane (65,000 words), both of which are important chapters in the Helen story, but neither of them have sold a single copy!  So the story that is closest to my heart simply does not resonate with the readers.  Hurricane was the first story to get published, so there has been ample time for people to read the 40% sample.  Lalitha was published two weeks ago, and I suppose some of you are still laboring through the (enormous) 50% sample you can download for free.  I was tempted to just give it away, but in the end I priced it at $2.99, to find out whether anyone is actually reading it.  There have been eight downloads of samples, and we shall see how it goes!  No pressure, you all; please only buy it if you want to read it :)  I have a day job, and I'm comfortably off!!

My greatest loves are music, art and dance, which is why Helen is a musician, an artist, and a dancer.  A close runner-up is education, and Helen is a teacher as well, and a good one, unlike me!  I'm too impatient with kids who aren't interested; I understand that they're being forced to learn stuff they don't care about, but, well, you know, if you don't care, it is only a truly remarkable teacher who will go more than halfway with you.  But, the point is that the Helen story doesn't make sense to anyone uninterested in the world of classical music, so that is probably the biggest brake on the Helen series.

Well, thanks for enduring my rant, if you've read this far!  Happy reading!

Kay Hemlock Brown

Helen Among the Stars

Dear Friends,

I have written a number of stories, only one of which is complete, namely Alexandra, which I'm trying to edit quickly to be ready for release by Monday after next!  It is completely written, but since writing it sometime in 2004 or so, I have learned a lot about what to write, and to what degree I want sentimentality to intrude into my writing, and how to express ideas that are just a little trickier than popular authors want to write about!  So I have to go back and clean it up, because there are passages in Alexandra that are so utterly extraneous that nobody would enjoy reading them.  Well, anyway, I need to clear out at least half of the remaining pages; the rest is pretty well written.

Alexandra is a story about war, about cultural diversity, about idealism and society, in a minor way, and about love and lust, and the different ways people love each other.  I love that story, and despite the clumsiness of the writing early on, there are a few characters in that story that are types that I love dearly.  Some of them reappear as other characters in other stories, but they were first invented in Alexandra, so I feel that these are, in some ways, the originals.

Another story I wrote —the very first— is the story of Helen; a long, rambling saga of a couple million words, which begins when Helen is a teenager, trying to hitch-hike her way to college, and continues her tortured progress through cancer, amnesia, heartbreak, a secret existence as an underage adult entertainer, until she achieves fame as a singer and violinist, and musical genius.  Obviously this is a completely implausible story on the face of it.  But once Helen was out of graduate school, I got tired of making her so fantastically amazing in everything she undertook, and the story settled down into an account of someone who just barely could exist.

Well, quite incidentally, —and I don't have a clue what made me invent this subplot; it was around 2000— a new TV company, in the story, creates a TV series called Galactic Voyager, in which a spaceship is built in Moon orbit, in the early 21^st century, and sent into space with a large number of volunteers on board, including a dozen people, experts, who were in hibernation, frozen alive, like the crew on 2001: A Space Odyssey.  One of these is a brilliant musician and dancer called Cecilia.

I made this company invite Helen to play Cecilia on this TV series.  (There are excellent reasons why Helen was the ideal choice for the role, in the plot.)  As Helen's life goes on, on one weekend a month, she heads out to Seattle, to tape the segments in which she is to appear on the show on Saturday nights.  She isn't the star of the show, and lots of stuff goes on in the show, Cecilia's storyline being just one of many.  Of course I don't have to describe them all; I only bother to describe the storyline as it impinges on what Cecilia is asked to do.

A year or two later, it struck me that I might just be able to write a Science Fiction novel based on this sub-plot in the Helen story, but this time, it would actually be Helen herself.  (The Helen in this SF story is not exactly the same Helen as in her earlier story; in that, towards the end, she has another bout with cancer, which leaves her almost a total amnesiac, regressed to her late teens, totally unable to be a musician, barely a mother to her adopted children.  In the new story, Helen is a violinist and conductor who, after a traumatic breakup with her lover, impulsively offers to join the expedition as the first volunteer in hibernation.)

I feel, at this point, that this story: The Music of the Stars is the one most likely of anything I have written, to attract any significant attention from critics or readers.  Unfortunately, it is incomplete.  But I have several dramatic choices I can make; there is almost too much potential in the story.  If anyone reading this is familiar with Science Fiction at all, you must know that absolutely anything can happen.  So far, nothing in the story is at all fantastic; it is all boringly plausible from the scientific point of view, so as hard science fiction I suppose it rates fairly low.  All my energy has gone into exploring the psychological dynamics of shipboard society, and how some of the personalities respond to the conditions with a lot of grace, while others do not.

So, while I work at Alexandra because I want it published with the least embarrassment to me and to Smashwords, and because I have my pride, and I hate to find weaknesses in my writing which I could have fixed before it went into print, in a sense Alexandra is already finished.  But Stars could be more important, and I want to make sure I do right by it, to make the ending truly worthy of the setup!  I wish I could tell you more, but it is the sort of story where a spoiler could actually make the story not worth reading.

I guess I just had to get that off my chest!!  I should be working on Alexandra, but it's Stars  that I read just before I fall asleep at night!

Kay.