A Passage from 'Helen and Sharon'

Helen & Sharon is, at once, the central love story of my Helen books, and the most awkward of the installments.  All the others are concluded with a degree of flair, but this one is flawed from beginning to end.  Not because of the story, but because of how I handled it.

There is a lot of the romance blossoming awkwardly between Helen and Sita.  At first, Sita doesn't know that Helen had been masquerading as an actress, in fact Sita's co-star in the movie, and after whom Sita had been yearning for months.

Later, Sita begins to have feelings for Helen as Helen, independently.  At this point, Helen gives a concert in Florida, which Sita attends, and I thought this passage was just lovely, a lot more emotional than my usual style. 

Helen’s entry (as solo violinist) was incredibly sweet, almost apologetic. But the tone built, gradually, and soon she was dominating the orchestra, not just with the volume of the sound, but with some subtle cleverness of the music itself, … or was it the performer? It was as though the violin was gaining courage, and growing in confidence, and ever so charmingly subverted the entire orchestra, arguing, laughing, singing, stealing its song, and doing clever, wonderful things to it.

Sita watched Helen’s face as she played, the joy, the concentration, the exaltation, and sometimes some watchfulness. What did it feel like to both conduct and play? Did she just play and hope for the best? Was she giving mysterious, invisible indications to the orchestra?

I'm hoping this passage accurately portrays the feelings of someone not quite an insider into the live classical music scene!

Kay H. B.

How DA Manages Displaying Images

In case you just joined us, I'm a member of the website DeviantArt, which is a little like Instagram, in that most members are artists, and they upload their artwork, and usually <indecipherable> be some time browsing the artwork of other artists.  (I don't create art, so I just browse.)  Originally, the idea was that members would negotiate to buy images, and the site got a percentage of the sale.  I have no idea whether DA gets any money from my membership, which is interesting ...

Anyhoo... since there are so many images on the site, from time immemorial and from countless artistists, the site sort of takes over your browsing for you.  It keeps track of the images you've 'liked', and tries to show you similar images.  In my case, seem to have told the algorithm that I mostly—or only—want to see pictures of girls.  (There was all sorts of silly stuff, mostly having to do with artifacts related to Anime, and computer or videogames, about which I knew nothing. So it boiled down to: this member only likes pics of girls.

But here's the thing.  The combination of the DA algorithm and the design of AI software results in a peculiar situation: every picture looks like the same girl.  The actual same girl!  This is very weird. 

[Note: I have exaggerated.  Since I wrote these words, I'm noticing a—slightly—greater variety of facial types.  I was alarmed, on that day, with seeing so many images with what seemed to be the identical facial features, but it was a fluke ...]

I got into a conversation with one of the artists about why all the girls have big boobs, and he swore it wasn't him.  He said the AI seemed only familiar with heavy-breasted chicks!  And now, it looks as though that's the only girl I have been noticed as likeing!  So every day, I have to scroll through about 20 portraits of the same girl, by which time I get bored and do something else. 

Kay

Slang and Abbreviation

Writing about music so much, and classical music, in particular, it wasn't hard to spell words out.  For one thing, I didn't actually know the abbreviations, and I'm not one for using abbreviations anyway.  Once Millennials got into classical music, I get the impression that the music abbreviation industry flourished, because—as we well know—this generation is abbreviation crazy.  (Just last evening I blogged about hyphens versus dashes, and discovered how to generate an m-dash on a phone.  I'm going to put m-dashes anywhere it makes sense!)

The bad thing about slang and abbreviations, in my mind, is that they often create the feeling of being an outsider in anyone who doesn't know the term (abbreviation or slang, as the case may be).  That's the effect it has on me, anyway.  I look up the terms on the internet ASAP*, but I still feel slightly miffed.  Just to think of someone referring to a treble clef as a 'trebbie' gives me hives.  Also, having spent absolute years weeding out, and minimizing the amount of music terminology in Helen, to make it palatable to a general audience, I'm inordinately sensitive to inserting technical music terminology into any of the stories. 

Furthermore, for years early music was considered a fringe area.  Famous classical musicians were often actually hostile towards anyone espousing historically accurate ('authentic') performance practices, until it seemed like suddenly one day, it was standard.  Using viole da gamba was fine, and so was valveless horns.  So, not taking any chances, I spelled everything out. 

But now, I worry whether that actually dates the writing, making it sound like it was being written by some Victorian scholar.  I have to gradually get used to the idea that, given that the Helen stories (or story; it's just mostly a single story) are/is about a musician, the more I fiddle with it to make it less strange to some groups, the more I ruin it for some other  group. 

Two wonderful things that happened, in my battle to introduce non-musicians into the story are Lalitha and Sita!  Lalitha was a musician, introduced to diversify Helen's circle of friends, and Sita was a non-musician.  As I wrote the story, the two sisters became gradually so important that they defined the direction of the story, and in a wonderful way. 

Off to fix myself some brekky, as we say in Australia.  (Or do we?)

Kay

*As Soon As Possible.