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

My Readers

I recently read Alexandra, and Voyager, and the parts that I read were so satisfying that I feel I could never write that well again, and I am so frustrated at feeling that such a few have read these books.  Actually, Smashwords kept statistics of how many readers downloaded the books.   But now they (the company) has been acquired by Draft 2 Digital, and I don't know where to look for statistics, and I don't even know whether any statistics they keep would include the older downloads. 

I can hardly believe I had been capable of such great concentration at one time, as to put myself into the heads of these interesting characters, male and female, and put such convincing words into their mouths.  As much as they are real to me now, because of how authentic their voices are, they must have been more real when I was writing, a decade ago. 

Now to a different topic entirely. 

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 was.  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

Youths in My Stories

There are several young people who appear in my stories.  One is, of course, Gena, and later, Erin, in Helen's story.  An important one is Lena, who appears in the Galactic Voyager story, together with Summer.  Alexandra (the story) contains the lovable Ninel.  The Jane stories feature the teen nude model Zsuszana, who is persuaded to take up conventional modeling instead.  (And later, the irrepressible Heidi, Joanne's child.)

I often think that, in my mind, these characters are blurred together, and it's difficult for me not to think of them as a real person.  In fact, I often think, late at night, that I'll ask one of them, Ninel, or Erin, to solve some problem for me!  When I wake up in the morning, I realize that my 'solution' involves enlisting the aid of an imaginary character, and it leaves me more bereft than you can know.

This compound character is much more completely fleshed-out in my mind than she is in any of the stories; it is my fear—and regret— that my readers will only have a sort of half- formed picture of her.  I don't have any idea how to remedy the situation.  Gena/Erin/Ninel/Lena is a superhero in my mind, much more than Helen, or Alexandra, or Jane, or Aggie, or Maia!

Well, that's my life; once you have created, or given birth, to a character, she never dies. 

Kay

Music that Helen Didn't Play

I was recently listening to some music—on YouTube, of course—in fact, some of my favorite pieces, and got to thinking that I never wrote that Helen, in her conductor days, ever featured some of these!  (I could be wrong; it's been a couple of years since I went into the Helen story, but I remember mostly choral music being conducted by Helen.  There was a set of symphonic variations by Brahms (the St. Anthony Chorale Variations), and the Overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.  Then of course, there were a number of violin pieces: concertos, mostly, and other pieces featuring solo violin.  The problem was that my musical experience was pretty small, Back in the early 2000s when I wrote Helen at Westfield, which was the story in which she did most of the conducting. 

So the music that I put in the stories would have been too little for those who were interested in music, and too much for those who weren't interested in the music!!!

Kay

Exile's Song

This title would only appeal to a reader who already had a strong idea what the story was about.  It was one of Marion Zimmer Bradley's last few Darkover novels.  And one of her best.

The central character of the two-part story (the second part is titled Shadow Matrix) is a girl called Margaret Alton, one of my all time favorite characters.  She's a girl who was born on the planet Darkover, which is very strange; its sun is blood-red, their culture is medieval, the people are pre-literate, and there's a sizable minority of people who are psychic, who are the nobility of that society.   Lewis, Margaret's father, and his wife Diotima, Margaret's step-mother, are taken off-planet, and Margaret with them.  But both Lewis and the child have psychic ability, and for years the little kid is tortured by the mental turbulence of her father. 

Once she gets into her teens, Margaret escapes to University, which is a whole planet that functions as an academic center, and is finally taken into the home of a music professor.  She settles into a career in music (specifically ethnomusicology,) and never goes home.   She and her advisor travel to various planets, studying the primitive music of backward societies, until, unplanned, they're sent to Darkover, which certainly has what would be considered a typical backward society. 

Well, the personality MZB gives Margaret is interesting.  Margaret gradually discovers that she can read minds, and worse: she can mind-speak—very loudly—to others!  She learns to moderate and control her voice.   She's about 26, BTW.

The point is, the personality I have given Helen, is distressing similar to that of Margaret Alton!  I had read the book when I was a teenager, and evidently was so impressed by the character of Margaret, that I borrowed it for my own story!

The MZB Darkover stories are—necessarily—on the border between SciFi and fantasy, because of the theme of psychic talent.   In the earlier stories, set in the Darkover of thousands of years in the past, people with psychic talents could even fly; MZB gradually moved away from that idea, and towards more moderate abilities for the psychics.  Margaret and her father, and her beloved, are able to 'talk' silently, but not a lot more than that.  Well, actually, the story gets pretty wild in the second part, but to find out exactly in what way, you'll have to read the books yourself!

The Many Moods of Helen

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!

My Least Romantic Ŝtory

Maybe that's a dangerous title to use for a blogpost!  Many of my readers here are looking for clues about what books to download, and romance is a major heading for many of them. 

The story I'm talking about is Music on the Galactic Voyager, a story about a space ark, containing a thousand human colonists, that set out in the 21^st Century—just a few years before the present time!—and the problems they faced, and their experiences.  Helen Nordstrom is among them, but in a hibernation state, but the leaders of the project resuscitate her, because they are convinced that she could help them with some serious social problems. 

In the story, it was necessary to describe Helen's character from scratch, since this story doesn't follow along from any of the other Helen stories.

Helen is attracted to several women on the ship, and eventually settles down in a long-term relationship.  But somehow, at least in my mind, her romances were not front and center.  (In fact, there was an ongoing love affair between Helen and a little kid, entirely sexless, that is a lot more central to the story than Helen's romances.)

For reasons having to do with Helen's deteriorating health, she is put in hibernation once more, while they plan how to attack her medical issues.  She is re-thawed 20 years later, by which time Helen's little students, including that little kid whom she loves so much, are mature adults. 

In this story, too, Helen is a musician, and a music teacher.  The reason she is initially 'awoken' is that the shipboard youth are bored, and getting involved with vandalism, and other destructive pastimes.  But the musical references are not at all technical. 

There's a sale on Smashwords, and you can get almost all my stories for free, for the month of July!

Kay