I had begun writing Music of the Stars after I had shelved Helen fairly permanently. Helen had grown into an emonster piece of writing, with amazingly creative plot elements, but as it stood at that point it seemed impossible to salvage it, because of the utterly self-indulgent frame of mind in which I had written it. (Much later, of course, I "sanitized" it, and found, to my amazement, that it contained a story that stood perfectly well without the purple prose. So that's what I have been putting up on Smashwords piecemeal.) I had not read Helen in a long while, so I had completely lost track of what happened to our hero, and didn't know that that original character Helen could not possibly be the Helen of Music. (For one thing, she was a lot older, and for another, she had three adopted children, and her own little boy, James. Obviously a mother of four is not going to allow herself to be frozen and put aboard a spacecraft, leaving her children behind.)
I uploaded in the summer of 2014, an incomplete version of Music of the Stars to Smashwords, and set it up to be released in August 2015 (they let you do that, to increase anticipation). I proceeded merrily with my various little projects, until early in the summer of 2015, when I remembered that Music had to be completed and gotten ready for release. I began some of the most intense writing spells I have ever undertaken, and to my amazement, as I read it now, the writing is really awesome, if I say so myself: the character development, the details in some of the plot elements, the descriptions, the dialog. But the plot conclusion is disappointing to me. It isn't hopeless, and anyone interested in space science will have things to enjoy, but ... I'm afraid that people who like big, grand endings will be dissatisfied. Well, that's the price I paid for leaving it to the last moment.
Anyway, I have just reduced the retail price to $1.99 briefly, just in case that encourages someone to actually read the book!
Kay
