Helen is Depicted as an All-Rounder

Something I'm proud of is that I was into numerous things growing up—but I was never a violinist!—and when I invented Helen Nordstrom, I wanted her to have just as diverse talents and interests as I did, and a few more.  I had three years of Calculus, so Helen had the same, in college.  She also had physics and computer science and art.  (But I had chemistry!)

There is a story I wrote, in which there is a murder, and Helen is asked, by her Dean, to take over the Calculus class of the dead teacher.  I have no memory of what drove me to write this story, none whatever; but I read it over the weekend, and again I'm stunned at how well I had written it.  This is frustrating; I'm in the process of unpublishing all my stories from D2D (the successor to Smashwords), so when I wax poetic about any of my stories, there will be nowhere you can get them from!  Well, I'm working on the problem. 

To continue: Helen does take over the calculus 2 class.  Unlike in many schools, in Helen's school (Westfield College, an entirely fictitious institution), the curriculum of calculus 2 includes a variety of topics, including convergence of series.  (Wait; you know, those topics are never mentioned in the story.)

In the story, three of the students are caught, trying to burn the wallet of the dead teacher, but there is no evidence that those kids are responsible for the actual murder.  (Robbing  a corpse is still a crime.)

The other students turn on the three who were caught (who are allowed to finish out the semester), except for one girl student, Angie, from New Jersey, who helps Helen deal with the class.

Kay

Violin Pieces

This is a fragment of a blogpost I put in the sister blog (Don't Wait For the Movie) recently. 

When I wrote the Helen stories, I had her playing my favorite pieces, naturally.  I had listened to recordings of these pieces for years and years, but I hadn't seen them being played!  I recently watched a famous violinist play one of these pieces, and I was startled at how different her playing style actuall was, from how I had imagined it.  And now that I think of it, many of the violinists play that way; that is, they sway to the music, as though they were dancing.

I'm not sure whether this is a modern thing; pop singers, of course, use their entire bodies to make their performance more exciting, so it could be that classical musicians follow suit.  Come to think of it, the musicians I used to watch on YouTube were usually foreign: German, or Japanese, and they kept their bodies relatively still. 

When I described Helen playing, I described her as being relatively still.  I don't think I really like this dancing about, though it is the expected thing these days. 

Well, I'm no violinist, I want to make that perfectly clear, so my descriptions of musical performances are from the point of view of an outsider!

I wish you all a wonderful new year!

Kay Hemlock Brown