Louisa May Alcott

Just came across a post about this woman, the author Louisa May Alcott, and realized that I haven't posted about her in a long while!

I was given a book by Alcott when I was in grade school, soon after I had seen Little Women, the movie.  I'm not seeing (in IMDb) the exact version of the story I remember seeing, so I'm wondering whether I imagined the movie completely.   I imagine Jo March as a little like Helen Nordstrom, though the two characters are so different from each other. 

In the mini biography of LMA that was posted, it was emphasized that she was quite uninterested in writing a moralistic story aimed at women.  (Nevertheless, she was persuaded to write a story about girls, and she did.)

Then I was given the sequels Good Wives and Little Men, and what attracted me to them—and repulsed me at the same time—was how moralistic in tone they both were, the last one most of all.  It was so—moralistic, that is— to the point of being emotionally manipulative.  And now, not so many years later, I find that I have been influenced by these three stories so much, that sometimes I read a passage I've written, and think: jeeze, this reads just like Alcott on a really bad day.  And many passages have that dreadful earnestness that makes one cringe, but really, I don't mind that.  Earnest: OK.  Moralistic: Yuck.

Aside: One thing I really miss in our current federal government, is earnestness.  There are just a few people worth listening to: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  This is a huge contrast with Obama and his administration.  And of course, the queen of earnestness: Michelle Obama.  By leaving anybody out, I don't mean to imply that they're cynical, e.g. Kamala Harris, or Hilary Clinton.

To get back to influences, another big influence on me is L. M. Montgomery, the author of the Anne of Green Gables stories, which I hadn't read until I had finished most of the Helen stories.  Those (Anne of Green Gables) stories are significantly more whimsical than the Jo March stories, so their influence is a little less—what's the word?  Strong?  Brutal?  Obvious?  Direct?—than that of the Alcott stories.  Contrasting the two authors would be an interesting exercise, but I'm not sure it would get one anywhere, except for being an exercise in delicacy of characterization.  Montgomery was Canadian, while Alcott was a Yankee, but I'm reluctant to base their contrasts on their nationalities.  In any case, the folks of the Canadian maritime provinces of those times can't have been very different from their American cousins, though they would have no doubt insisted that they were (quite different).

In my own writing, the interesting characters really made their appearance later on in the story: Nadia Vander Wert, Lalitha, Sita, Marsha, Sophie, Marissa, Olive Gibson, Polly and Evelyn Woodford, and Isolde Wells.

Anyway, if anyone accuses me of having copied the style of Alcott, or even Montgomery, I would humbly accept that there could be quite a lot of truth to the accusation. 

Kay Hemlock Brown

Telomerase Discovered on Christmas of 1984

I'm so excited!

I had remembered reading somewhere that there were lots of non-functioning nucleotides (is that the correct term?) at the ends of DNA strands, and wrote a sort of minor story line in The Galactic Voyager based on that observation.  Today, what should I see but that a graduate student, Carol Greider, discovered these 'caps' at the ends of DNA strands.  In addition, she discovered the enzyme that causes these caps to be attached: Telomerase!  I know very little biology, but the little I know has found its way into one of my stories!

Apparently these caps are instrumental in delaying aging, the natural process where a person's DNA frays at the edges, and causes imperfections in new cells.  The DNA caps try to keep the DNA intact.  But now, it's reported that these caps seem to keep certain cancer cells protected, too, which we definitely do not want.

Kay

Diversity in Helen

I tried to make the characters in the Helen stories as diverse a group as possible.  Not initially; at first I was subconsciously trying hard to make them diverse in appearance.  That was probably a youthful desire; I was thinking very visually.  I was very much into physical beauty, so Helen's Scandinavian appearance was offset by Janet's German heritage.

Much later, I chose to make Dr. Martha Singer a Jewish person, even if a non-religious one.  Then I made Lorna a Jewish girl as well.  The name Esposito—Lorna's family name—I had believed was Jewish.  (It isn't.)

One missed opportunity was to make either Elly Krebs or her husband (Janet's parents, and therefore Janet) Jewish.  I had made Janet's brother and sister David and Rachel already.  Elly's maiden name was Murray, and that's Scots, I believe.

Kay

Aeonica

I have just finished reading the first book of an epic trilogy by David Musk.

The trilogy is named Aeonica, and this first volume is called The Lost Redeemer.

There are lots of aspects of this story that I like; the main protagonist is a girl, Nahlia.  She is a library assistant.  She is a child of mixed parentage: half human (from her father's side) and half aeon (from her aeon mother).  The Aeon are sort of analogous to Elves, in conventional fantasy; they are indistinguishable from humans, for the most part, except for their eye-color.  They have some extra abilities; mostly invisible abilities.  Our girl, Nahlia discovers that firstly, she heals very fast indeed, and secondly, that she has the ability to heal others as well, merely by touching them.  She can purge poisons from their systems—and her own—by sheer effort.

She can fight; she can even turn her hands into something like flamethrowers; you have to read the story to get the details.  The details are everything!  But she isn't a born fighter; she has to force herself to fight. 

I love everything about Nahlia; all her attributes; her relationship with her mother—long dead—and her love of reading and digging into lore, are all traits that I relate to fiercely. 

But there are aspects of the story that I do not like very much.  There is war, and war, and more war; preparation for war, chases, prisoners, secrets, blackmail, racism, prejudice, tunnels, caverns; the list of fantasy elements is endless.  This sort of thing is called World-building, and Mr. Musk (no relation, I assume) builds his world with a will.  There is a high degree of consistency; it all fits together nicely.  But another thing that's endless is the list of characters.  All the people in Nahlia's home village, the people she meets on the run, the people she meets once she gets to relative safety, the numerous students and teachers in the academy to which she's sent, to train.

I just looked back at the story, to remind myself about an interesting female character, and saw again a strange phrase, which had amused me when I first saw it.  The author describes a garden as a massive garden.  Massive?  There are lots of alternatives for describing large gardens: extensive, overwhelming, vast, enormous, staggeringly incredible, and so on.  But massive doesn't work, because of how it alludes to weight, or literally mass.  A good writer often writes fast, to jump on the momentum that a new idea brings, and that speed also brings forgivable mistakes with it, especially those like the present one where 'massive' signifies just 'large', in common teen parlance.

Now, because of how long a period over which I wrote some of the longer stories of my own, I often invented characters on the fly, to move a part of the story forward.  But then, much later, I would refer to this same character, because his or her character traits fit the need of that future passage nicely, or not recycling the character would imply inventing yet another character for the same job.  So I'm guilty of the sin of character proliferation myself.  Lots of characters make for a realistic story, because most people know hundreds of people, even if they interact with just a handful of them on a regular basis.

Well, a thumb up; but I don't think I want to commit to reading the next volumes!

Kay.

Does She Look Like Lena?!?

I just saw an image on DA, which I thought is how I imagined Lena to look like!!

Lena is a character in Music on the Galactic Voyager, one of my longest stories.  When Helen meets Lena, she’s just about 9 or 10.  By the time the story is brought to a close, Helen is still about the same age as she was, about 30, but Lena is about 35!  (They had put Helen in a hibernation state, because she had medical problems.)

Kay

Vocabulary: 'Conflating'

I was just reading  Helen and Sharon this morning—I know, I'm weird that way—and came to a paragraph where Helen tells James that Megan is his 'sister', (in this story, he's only three) but he contradicts his mother, and says no, Allie is his sister.  Helen thinks: man, I screwed that one up; clearly James was conflating sister and girl.

Conflation is an interesting and useful idea.  When someone conflates two words—like 'sister' and 'girl', as James might be doing—it's a lot like confusing the two words: sometimes the two words do mean the same thing, but the two words usually are intended to mean different things.  

Fiction with a Moral

I was recently reading the biographies of numerous authors; some of them wrote about the lives of farmers, especially women.   Some of them wrote about women who fought for the vote for women.  Some of them wrote about the lives of slaves.  Some of them wrote about exceptional women who educated themselves, and then taught children.

In all the books I've written, the hero is just a woman, who tries to make life more fun and interesting for the people around her, and for herself.  There is very little service aspect in what she tries to do; so it's never going to be great literature!

Oh well; them's the breaks.

Kay