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 21st 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.
