I think I might have given a pencil sketch of Helen once before, but here, I'm doing it again.
When I first conceived of Helen, she was an eccentric, neurotic, thin, fairy-like teenager, around 14, who could sing like an angel, and play the guitar. She was academically strong, impulsive, stubborn and pig-headed (though always polite), and moderately skilled at tennis and swimming.
When she met a couple, Janet and Jason, her latent preference for girls emerged, and she soon approached Janet sexually. With Janet's encouragement, she began to put on weight and grow stronger, and in my imagination she had grown several inches by the following summer. She had also become much better at tennis and swimming, and begun to run as well. She had also started to learn to play the Renaissance viol family of instruments, and begun the violin. [She's around 15.]
By the summer of the following year, she had taken to dance in a big way; both ballroom dancing, and ballet, and was almost professional level at dancing, as well at music, singing, and playing the violin. [17.]
She is invited to sing in two operas, and incidentally becomes romantically attached to (in addition to Janet and a girl she met in Florida, Leila) a fellow-performer in the operas, Kurt, whom she marries. By this time she is quite tall, around 5' 9", but the marriage with Kurt is coming apart. [18]
She takes a year off from college, and lives in rural Canada with a former nurse, off the grid, in a large wilderness preserve. Gradually it emerges that she's pregnant with twins. They are stillborn. [19]
Persuaded to return to school, Helen meets a freshman from India, and they fall passionately in love. But the Indian girl's father makes her return home, and sets up a marriage for her with one of her father's friends. Helen follows her to India, is unable to prevent the marriage, and retreats to a Catholic farming community of nuns, and loses her memory. [25.] A large brain tumor is detected, and Helen is sent back to the US, is operated on, and returned to her family, minus, of course, her memory. [30.]
Helen agrees to live at a convent in California, where they have a small farming operation. But the nuns think it would be beneficial for Helen to join a real estate developer, and she becomes a capable carpenter. I imagined that by the time she leaves California [34,] she's partly regained her memory, and grown physically, to about her adult weight of around 165 pounds, which holds steady for the rest of the story, except for when she delivers James, when she's close to 195 lbs. [36.]
Okay, I'm going back through what I've written above, to insert approximate ages, to provide a time-line. (I'm not going to do a calendar timeline, because it's too much work to collate with contemporary international events.)
Helen's personality keeps developing throughout the story, and she's the most mature person, as much as I could arrange, when she was at Westfield (despite running off to star in movies). She owned a plane, and learns to fly it, but the stock market crash of around 2005 made it necessary for her to sell off the plane.
When she loses her memory the second time, there is a distinct shrinking of her personality; she becomes a lot more fearful and tentative. Gradually, though, she regains a degree of the old confidence, but she's not quite the same.
The Helen of Galactic Voyager is significantly different. The Helen described above is a mother of four; the Helen in the Voyager becomes quite a different sort of mother! I can't explain it; in my mind they started out being the same person, but they grew apart.
Anyhow, let's leave it there.
Kay
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