Smashwords had been telling me, for a little over a year, that Helen and Lalitha had problems. Now, a lot of my stories have problems, but what Smashwords considers to be a problem, and what I consider to be a problem are completely different things, so I tend to ignore it when SW raises these red flags.
But, as you are aware is one of my failings, I tend to read my own stories repeatedly (because, of course, I think they're so amazingly awesome). Pretty soon I learned that, well, there was indeed something that needed to be fixed in, of all things, the Table of Contents of Lalitha. If the TOC were good, at the bottom of my e-reader there would be a white line, with irregularly spaced tickmarks across it, the chapters. But the tickmarks of Lalitha were a cluster at the beginning, and then just one in the middle. So I got into the manuscript, and painstakingly chopped out the TOC, and re-constructed it carefully. (Having done similar things to a couple of other books, I have got it down to a fine art.)
The book was uploaded, and it is "on sale" for free. (I know; that doesn't make any sense.) But, honestly, Lalitha is one of the best-written of the Helen stories. By which I mean, when I sucked a chunk of the story out of the Helen monster manuscript, and cleaned it up, and removed all the irrelevant paragraphs, it was one of the most successful results of the process. On the Run was a little less successful, but I love it, like a mother loves an idiot child. The order of the series is:
1: Helen, Cindy, Pat, Lisa, and the Violin
2: Helen at Ballet Camp
3: Helen and Lalitha---The Lost Years
4: Helen on the Run---The Lost Years
4.5: Helen at Westfield
5: Helen and Sharon
6: Helen at the Beach
7: Helen and the Flower Shop Girl
8: Helen and Handel's Messiah
9: Helen's Concerto
I should really re-number these. For instance, Flower-Shop Girl is rather an independent episode, whereas Westfield describes Helen's relationship with Rain, who was an important influence on Helen. There is another episode that sort of takes place at Westfield, before filming for the "Pelican Movies" takes place.
OK, happy reading!
Kay
