2024 - July - 14
Firstly, a few words about yesterday's attempt to injure—or assassinate—Donald Trump. We must bear in mind that the whole point of elections, and our complicated procedure for self-government is to simply avoid violence. This may not be everyone's understanding, it is my understanding, and I'm sure the understanding of the majority of American citizens. People often wonder how civilized the USA really is. Well, a measure of that would be: what proportion of the people were unhappy with this attempt to do violence to Trump, and in such a cowardly way? Ideally it would be everyone; 100%.
Sadly, it's quite possible that people would think: Just this once, I'm OK being considered uncivilized; I wish never to have to think about Trump anymore. To some degree, Trump has been the reason for many re-assessing how civilized they are, and this is something he should not be proud of.
Helen Nordstrom
Helen Nordstrom, Ph.D., is the very first character I created, and in many ways the beginning of my fiction writing. I did not think this through at the time I created her (It's so funny to think that way! It seems to me that she was always there!) I wanted her to be perfect, a perfect version of myself! But as the story developed, I needed Helen to be flawed. In fact, I built in little flaws into her, but most of those were lost when I edited the story to make it more terse and readable, and less prurient! (The flaws were on the lines of being sexual.)
As I got on with the chapters of the story, and as I grew older and more mature myself, the characteristics of Helen became baked into a real personality—significantly different from me in many ways—and it became easier to write the adventures of Helen.
What I wanted to explore today is whether—and how much—Helen varied from story to story. In theory, it's the same woman, and it's a single story. But in reality, there are slight differences in personality.
Lisa, Cindy, Violin.
This story was actually titled Helen backstory: Lisa, Cindy, and the violin. This is the youngest that Helen is in any of the published stories, and really she's just a kid, a sophomore in college, but a very childlike one. As the story begins, a high-school girl is pursuing Helen romantically, and I had made Helen okay with deciding to have sex with this girl, and sending her on her way, which is not at all typical of Helen as the story moves on.
Helen and Janet have a sort of relationship. Helen, flirts a lot with various girls, and Janet is very tired of it. She decides to go on an extended vacation, and Helen gets involved with a woman who has been kidnapped, whom she meets on the Internet. The story is really about how Helen manages to free the kidnapped woman who subsequently helps her in many ways.
Ballet Camp.
This story takes place in France and Belgium. At this point, Helen has some experience handling young people. She had helped Janet run a tennis camp; been a leader of a tennis camp in Canada, and without coming out and saying it, we are made aware that Helen recognizes that she has a certain degree of charisma. This story is a lot about ballet, a lot about music, and about girl-girl romance and intimacy. Helen is incognito, calling herself Tiffany, and the younger girls adore her.
Helen and Lalitha.
This is where the story starts to get serious. So far, Helen has had relationships with older women. In this story, though,you get the feeling that this is the real thing.
This is a complex story, and Helen grows as a character throughout the story. For one thing, Helen spends 10 years in India, and there's very little action during that time. After she returns to the US, though, with amnesia, all sorts of things happen. Helen is very unsure of herself while she has amnesia, except that she's very confident about carpentry. Once her memory returns, she becomes, once again, the hypersexual diva she used to be. (I don't know why I did that; maybe I was living vicariously, but Helen was wrangling two orphans she had adopted, Gena and Allie, and she should have shown more restraint. She has to confront the issue, because Gena is unhappy with her!
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