Helen Nordstrom, An Interview?

These days, a regret of mine is that Helen Nordstrom has little or nothing to contribute to the politics of 2019.

Most of the Helen story was written in the mid 1900s, when the major topics were gay marriage, and other issues of alternate lifestyles.  Today, we grapple with mainstream economic and social justice issues, and Helen is handicapped by her loss of memory and experience.  I must have wanted to make her purely a musician, and I succeeded too well.

I wonder whether it would be interesting to have Helen give an interview for a magazine that explored political views?

Magazine: Miss Nordstrom, you're a millionaire. What do you feel about your financial resources, at a time when poverty is rampant, and income disparity is so extreme?

Helen: I think I'm probably the poorest millionaire in the millionaire club! As you know,--and I was told!--that I announced my retirement some years ago . . .

Magazine: Yes, when you were going through a particularly difficult time.

Helen: Exactly. But I kept working with Galaxy Studios, at that time, and . . . I think the bookshop . . .

Magazine: BNB Inc.

Helen: Yes, they have made steady money, and of course that brings in some revenue. But I support several charities, as well as, you know, extended family, so the money is put to good use! But when I hear about wealth inequity, I understand, and I support steps to reduce it, generally!

Magazine: For the record, are you still a millionaire? There's a possibility that you might not be, anymore!

Helen: I might not, actually. I could find out from Becky Singer, who knows all about that! Oh, and also, we have a subsidiary, that is LMN Records, which makes steady money, and there's also an instrument workshop, that is losing money, so it's hard to keep track of. At tax time we find out!

Magazine: And you're also performing again, now, so that must bring money. And royalties, and stuff.

Helen:  Oh, yes, I forgot.

Magazine: Let's change the direction of our conversation. What are your thoughts about the administration, and the upcoming elections!

Helen: Well, until about the beginning of this year, I took the point of view that . . . our president is the one the people wanted, and it was a good lesson for all of us to be careful whom we select. We just could not be backtracking every decision; we have to suffer through this . . .

Magazine: . . . Term . . .

Helen: . . . Right, and do better next time. I was very unhappy with the public humiliation that the President was being put through.

Magazine: But now?

Helen: Now, I still feel the same. But I have been cringing increasingly more frequently, at seeing mean and unreasonable actions being taken in the name of the US, and thinking that the World thinks of these actions as American actions, and not just the actions of the President.

Magazine: But you still stand by the President?

Helen: Stand by is too strong a phrase of support. I'm unhappily tolerating what he does, and we will have a lot of work to build back the goodwill and the--I don't know what the word is; I don't think it is appropriate to seek approval, but the confidence, I guess, is the word I want. We need to earn the confidence of the world out there.

Magazine: What do you think of Twitter?

Helen: You know, we can't treat the population as though they were children. There are naive adults who are easily manipulated by, you know, Facebook, and Twitter, and other social media, but I think it is inappropriate to pass laws that say: people are foolish; we have to save them from themselves! We just can't do that. At least, that's my point of view.

Magazine: This has been very interesting! You know that your views are very much more conservative than those of the mainstream Democrats of today!

Helen: I think that's how elections work. I think we should make sure that elections are fair, but once the results are in, we're stuck with them.

Kay

Names in the Helen Story: A Startling Insight

I realized, just a few days ago, that there was an interesting coincidence in the names of characters in the Helen story.

Most of the names are just names I like, such as Janet, and Sylvia, and Eleanor, and Evelyn, all of which are names I have liked for years.  (I also like Kay, which is not my real name, but a Nom de Plume, which is to say, a pen-name, literally.)  I also like biblical names, such as David, Rachael, Naomi, and so on, though there aren't too many of those.  John and James are probably the exceptions.

Now, I'm not too much of an expert in this area, but the story of Rama and Sita is parallel to that of Helen of Troy;  in each case, a young queen is abducted by an enemy king.  In the case of the Greek legend, as recounted in Homer's Iliad, Helen is abducted by Paris, prince of Troy, because the goddess Venus promised him that he would have the most beautiful woman in the world as his lover.  Paris takes her away to Troy, and this sets off a decades-long seige of the city of Troy by a Greek coalition, which ultimately ends with the sacking of the city, and massive bloodshed.

The legend of Rama and Sita, attributed to the bard Valmiki, tells of Prince Rama, who marries the lovely princess Sita, and makes her his queen.  On their honeymoon, or at any rate, while they are holidaying in the countryside attended by only a small entourage, Rama leaves Sita alone briefly, when the enemy king Ravana, who is also a sorceror, comes upon her disguised as a handsome young stag, and carries her away to his mysterious magical island kingdom. 

Sita spends many months in a magical garden of king Ravana.  Somehow she succeeds in withstanding his amorous overtures--or does she?  The pivotal point of the story is whether Sita's virtue survived the imprisonment.

Once Sita is rescued and returned to Rama's court, there is great public curiosity about her ordeal, and when Sita's twin sons are born, their paternity is at issue.  Either Sita requests to be given a test, or Rama insists on a test, which amounts to a paternity test.  But Sita passes all the tests of purity, but is so traumatized by the doubts cast on her virtue that she leaves Rama.  (Actually, she calls on the Earth to open up, and receive her into its bosom.)

Did you notice that--entirely by coincidence, of course--the names of our lovers are Helen and Sita?  The plot of the present story (the story of Helen Nordstrom) has nothing to do with conventional concepts of virtue, so the names Helen and Sita have no symbolic significance whatsoever.

[Spoiler alert!  But don't panic; the Helen story is hardly a whodunnit of any sort.]  Helen is a young girl of great musical talent, whose sleeping libido is released by a chance encounter with a beautiful woman.  As a teenager, she is incorrigibly promiscuous, and has passionate--and often concurrent--affairs with numerous girls, and a few men as well.  But in her senior year in college, she encounters a foreign girl, Lalitha, who has a profound impact on Helen.  Helen, who at that time was the companion of Hollywood A-List actress Marsha Moore, finds herself irresistibly attracted to Lalitha, and Lalitha finds herself returning the attraction.  When Lalitha is ordered back home by a tyrannical father, Helen follows, but finds herself powerless to prevent Lalitha from being married off to a man the latter does not love or respect.

The visit to India is extremely costly to Helen; it stretches out for ten years; she is diagnosed with a brain tumor (which, of course, could happen anywhere, and cannot be blamed on India per se); loses her memory, and is repatriated without identification.  Luckily, a friend recognizes her, and a little more than a year later, Lalitha (who has returned to the US independently, neither Helen nor Lalitha knowing that the other has returned) finds Helen, and triggers the return of memory.  The two lovers pledge to each other in an unofficial ceremony, and the future looks promising.

But Helen has a wandering eye.  A lovely babysitter enters their lives, and presently Helen and Lalitha break up, and after many misadventures, Lalitha and Helen each find themselves with different partners, and though they mend their differences and become close friends, their romance cannot be rekindled.

Sita is Lalitha's kid sister, a decade younger than her.  By a great fluke, Helen and Sita are thrown together during the making of a movie, and frequently thereafter.  Helen is in disguise for the movie; she pretends to be a undiscovered actress.  Sita falls in love with this actress, and after she learns that it had been Helen, falls in love with Helen.  When Helen suffers amnesia a second time, Sita prepares to abandon her admiration for Helen as a hopeless cause,  but somehow the two women recognize their feelings for each other. 

I imagined Sita as a girl of a serious disposition, extremely loyal to her older sister, to whom she clings tenaciously, and whose opinion she values highly, and whom she admires as being the musician of the family--indeed the only family she has (apart from Suresh, Trish, and their daughter), since they have no ties to family in India.  Sita's fascination with Helen is sort of  initially derived from Lalitha's gratitude to Helen.  (Helen, after Lalitha had left her, pursues her to Baltimore, where Lalitha and Trish, and Lalitha's son, Suresh are in dire straits.  Helen persuades them to return with her to Philadelphia, and settles them with an apartment, and employment.  Lalitha never forgets that Helen came to rescue her twice: once to India, and once to the slums of Baltimore.)

The foregoing summary, apropos of nothing, prepares the way for a sort of follow-on book, not really a sequel, but simply written for fun, because I so enjoy writing about Helen and Sita, and thus far their interaction has only been a little bit here, and a little bit there.  (Sharon-Sita episodes can't be counted among them, because Helen acts so differently when she's disguised as Sharon.)

Well, that's basically all.

I was looking around for images of Helen of Troy, and Sita of  the Ramayana, but I was dissatisfied with those available.  Each of these women was considered a paragon of female beauty, but historical artistic depictions tended to go overboard with whatever features the artists considered to be appropriately superlative.  So some images of Helen of Troy are adorned with enormous breasts (because breasts were "in" for centuries in the West, unfortunately), and images of Sita showed her invariably with a bland expression; evidently bland expressions have been "in" for millennia as well.  A couple of pieces of art depict Sita--only a couple--with a grave face.  After all, on one hand she expected her husband to give her the benefit of the doubt, but on the other hand, as the consort of the King, there were public relations expectations.  The image shown here depicts Sita in a mood that could be either grieving, injured, or frustrated; or perhaps just preoccupied.  I was unable to identify the artist.

This representation of Helen of Troy is by Evelyn De Morgan, evidently someone on the fringe of--the Pre-Raphaelites.  I'm pleased to note that the Pre-Raphaelites did not value the ponderous breasts that other romantics were wont to endow their female figures with.  Let's face it: women do have breasts, but more is not always better.

Evelyn De Morgan seems to consider that vanity is a characteristic of Helen of Troy, though I am not certain that Homer indicated so.  The mirror is a hint.  (It is a work of fiction, anyway, so it doesn't matter, I suppose.  But being a pivotal character in the legend, I dislike the fact that vanity should be her central property of Helen, rather than, say, being crazy about footwear.)

Anyway, these illustrations of two of the most celebrated human beauties of mythology are frankly disappointing.  One reason that commentators give is that these women were considered ideals, and therefore not appropriate to represent in artwork.  That excuse doesn't really work, because there are so many depictions of the goddess Venus.  If she wasn't an ideal, who was?

Except for the ultra-curly hair--which is definitely a coincidence--I would not take this piece of art to be a model for Helen Nordstrom.

As a visual model for Sita Maunder, though (Maunder is not the family name of Lalitha and Sita; it is the name of the missionary family that brought Sita to the UK), the Sita picture is not bad.  I imagine Sita with an expression that is relaxed, but serious.  I also imagined her with rather straight brown hair, even black hair; and I imagine her without any jewelry, except maybe ear studs.  But more on that in another post.

Kay

Attention KMart Shoppers! Update to _Helen_On_the_Run

(That was terrible; it was so Eighties . . .)

I was looking through Helen On the Run, and noticed that the Table of Contents was not working.  (It might still not be working; it could work for me at home, and then not work once Smashwords gets its hands on it.)

Furthermore, I realized that there were little episodes that I could not squeeze in anywhere else, namely: Helen meeting Sophie, and Helen meeting Olive Gibson.  There was a quickie visit I had shoehorned into On the Run, but I added another visit, which takes place at the same time as the Sophie meeting.

When I have the time, I should make a slightly better cover for On the Run, but it feels like a lot of work for something I'm giving away for free!

Kay

What Helen Looks Like!

From the time I first began writing the Helen story, and Helen was a very young college freshman, I had a mental image of her.  She looked a little defensive, very vulnerable, reserved, determined, frightened.  Of course she had all that incredible curly hair, like spun gold, as I wrote in the first few paragraphs of the story.  She was a fantastical character, an almost elfin child; and—similarly with many of the characters that teenagers create—she had piercings and fetishistic details (I just read that that word means something different than what I intended, but there just isn't a better word) such as little details of her underwear—which are hardly worth going into now!

As time goes on, and Helen absorbs and acquires amazing things from her friends and the people around her, the defensiveness disappears; the vulnerability is greatly reduced, the reserve goes away to some degree.  The slight build rapidly gives way to a tall, willowy girl, who puts on muscle with her athletic activities.  As she begins to practice martial arts with her teen lover, Leila (the child of a nightclub owner in Florida, who had become an adept in the martial arts at the tender age of twelve, and killed a man already at that age, while defending her mother from a rapist), and the two girls go on reckless adventures that involve fighting, I imagined Helen becoming stronger and more confident.

After a year away from College, living in the Wilds of Canada (I don't really know whether there even are wilds in Canada; to me Canada is a place where anything could happen, and does!) hunting and farming for food, Helen returns to complete her B.A., after which she follows the lovely Indian girl, Lalitha, to India; is kept away from Lalitha by the latter's father, and later her husband; spends a few months as a custodian in a rural school; begins to have trouble with her memory, and lives for a decade in a poor Indian Roman Catholic commune, where she gradually forgets her identity, and begins to be called Sister Mary.

She has medical problems—a brain tumor—to treat which she is sent back to the US, where by a coincidence she is identified, and returned to her family.  By this time, she is physically an adult, and the years in India finish the work of making her body type essentially inherited from her Norwegian father, John Nordstrom.  She is tall and rangy, and the curly blonde hair is all from Daddy Nordstrom.  But her face has a certain sweetness, which is inherited from her one Finnish grandmother, Grandma Kuikkonen, on whom I did not bestow a first name!  Finns Helen meets seem to see a fellow-Finn in Helen, and she also has a quarter Swedish ancestry, but Helen is physically mostly Norwegian.

Covers
All this has a bearing, of course, when it comes to creating covers for the Helen stories.  On one hand, it is a mistake to represent characters too closely on book covers, because ultimately the most dedicated readers have their own mental image of a character, and a cover representation that conflicts with their mental image becomes a stumbling-block—to some readers.  On the other hand, it is good to have what is called a reference on which to base different covers, so that they plausibly look like the same person, doing different things, or at different times and ages.

Helen Nordstrom, by Halchroma
Copyright (c) 2019

On DeviantArt, the website that I joined with the main objective of acquiring artwork for these covers, they have the concept of the original character, OC, which is precisely what I have been trying to describe.  For the younger members, it means some fantastic superhero, where they describe the powers and the characteristics of their original character, the fights that he or she is likely to win, the personality traits, the costumes, etc!  [Added later: this is all used when these characters are used for computer / video games.  The character becomes a game piece and the player is given a list of the properties of the so-called playable character, and it interacts with other playable characters, with randomized outside objects thrown in.]

So I selected an artist who seemed promising, and asked her whether she would consider collaborating in creating the original character of Helen Nordstrom.  And just yesterday, she delivered (of course there was a certain amount of going back and forth) something that was stunningly convincing!  Except for the fact that Helen has much more curly hair than this image has, still, within the errors permissible in hand-painted art, this piece is wonderful!  I just had to share.  (I have asked the lady to try to modify the piece to depict even curlier hair.  Nevertheless, if you think about it, a true blond with straight hair usually seems to have thin hair.  The curlier it is, the more body it appears to have, and the body of the hair in this picture is certainly appropriate to curly hair.

This is Helen about the time at which she was teaching at Westfield College (Helen & Sharon), and occasionally conducting.  At this time, she was about 35, but according to the story, her mental age was about 25.  That is something that I would have had to do a lot of fast talking to convince an artist about, because a typical artist isn't very concerned with subtleties of personality, or the detailed medical history of a character, which might result in a trait that is largely invisible.  [Or perceived to be invisible.  In Helen's case, her friends believe---with me--that Helen's facial expression shows that in her mind she's about a decade younger than she actually is.]

But isn't it wonderful?!  If this artist were to achieve the success and fame that is promised by this piece of work, I would be inordinately proud to be able to show this early work!

Kay

Helen's Concerto Is Being Downloaded!

I shouldn't get so excited about this, but according to the Smashwords records, 109 copies of Concerto have been downloaded already, and probably at least partially read!

The unfortunate part---as those of you who have read at least a few pages of Concerto would know already---is that that early part isn't very exciting, and readers are not likely to keep reading, unless they already know enough about the Helen story to do so.  And there is no surprise ending; there is no sex worth speaking of, and---there; I've probably knocked a hole in my own boat right there---this story is not chick lit at its best.  I do get the impression that this is exactly what chick-lit is supposed to be, but that it is really terrible chick-lit, because there are so few guys featured in the story.

OK; just to make this post informative, let's mention all the males that I can remember who appear in the Helen stories:

John Nordstrom, Helen's father.  He's an ultra-quiet father figure, not based on anyone I know!
Tom Krebs, Janet's father, and Old Elly's husband.  He is a sweet guy, and (in contrast to John Nordstrom) is based on practically all the older gentlemen in my family.
Jason Kolb, Janet's husband.  I tried to make him a believable character, but for reasons of brevity, all the Jason material has been ripped out (sad face); and there really isn't any reason to put them back in.  Jason is a sweetheart.
Richard Wallace, Ph.D., Pat's husband, and Lisa's dad.  He's the President of Helen's college, but dies in the year she takes off from college.
William Knowlden (Geppetto), the instrument-maker, who is instrumental in Helen's career taking off.
John Nordstrom Jr, Helen's half-brother, generally referred to as Little John.  A goofy guy, who committed some indiscretion that really, really pissed off Helen.  The fact that she was upset is recorded in the files, but what caused it is completely forgotten.  I really should remove all traces of the supposed animosity between the half-siblings.  John ends up being quite a charming guy, and Gena has a small crush on him.
Suresh, Lalitha's son.  All I have said about him was that he was quite bright, clever in the way of engineers, generally; very shy, devoted to his crazy wife, Trish, and the father of little Megan Grace, who has some cognitive disability that is not spelled out.  (Megan Grace loves everybody, if that is a disability.)
Jeffrey Gibson.  He has a Master's degree in music, and is a capable keyboard musician, and a music educator.  He is the father of James Nordstrom Gibson, Helen's baby boy, and the son of Olive and Walter Gibson.
Bert Frederickson, D.Ed, how could I forget?  Principal of Ferguson School, who gives Helen a job when she is horribly pregnant, and on the run.
Lord George Woodford.  He's Rain's dad.  Most of the material having to do with him is gone; I wish it wasn't!  He's a sweet old boy.
Matt Brooks, the brother of Maryssa, and the son of Diane Elman Brooks, the famous  portrait photographer.
Marcus Gustavson, a guy Gena meets at the beach.  He likes Gena and Kristen so much, he transfers to their school.
David Powers, DVM, the veterinary surgeon, and father of little Ruth Powers, and husband of Dr. Amy Salvatori.
Joe, driver and security man for Galaxy Studios, and ultra-loyal Helen fan.
James John Jeffrey Nordstrom Gibson.  This long name was intended entirely in fun; the little guy isn't pompous in the least!  This is the price Helen pays for not taking the Gibson name, and marrying Jeffrey!  But Jeffrey and Barbara are a good pair, even though I don't give Barb a lot of time in the stories.  She basically lives entirely in On The Run.

Hmm.  Well, that's a lot of guys, I must admit, but compared to the women in the story, they're fewer, and unimportant.

I wish there was some way you readers could write to me!  (There has to be; at least one reader wrote to me, but I have no clue how they managed it!  It was done so that I did not receive their e-mail, so there must be some mechanism in Blogger than permits people to write privately to the blog owner.)

Kay

More About 'Helen's Concerto'

Hello readers of my Blog Fiction from Kay Hemlock Brown!   I started these two Blogs at a time when I had gotten heartily sick of the Helen story, and wanted to spend most of my time with the stories that I began to write later: Jane,  Alexandra, Prisoner!, Jana, and so on.  It just so happened that, once they were all done, I went back to my (enormous) Helen file, and started up writing more, and the story began to take on a lot more shape, and the material was a lot less embarrassing, and frankly, worth publishing.

I started picking out self-contained sections from the Helen story, and started steadily publishing them on Smashwords, and to my confusion, these Helen excerpts began to take over my life.  At one time, I had sliced up the saga into something like 30 'books', and I started numbering the books from 1 (for Helen Goes To Ballet Camp) to 19 for Helen's Eventful Summer, and 21 for Helen vs. Handel's Messiah, and so on.

By now you know that I'm pretty dense in some ways!  It took a while for me to see that, though I had not intended this, the Merit & the Princess movie, and the deception surrounding it, was really a love story that was struggling to be recognized.  Despite all the other events that crowded themselves into the saga, which kept on writing itself, that earnest little romance got more assertive as time went on, and nothing I had written really detracted from that thread.

I wanted Helen and Lorna to be the big romance of the saga.  I also wanted Helen and Rain to be the big romance.  Helen and Lalitha!  Helen and Maryssa!  Helen and Amy!  Helen and Cindy!  Helen and Anne Lambert!  Helen and Stephanie Robbins!  Helen and Angie Connors!  Helen and David Powers!  Even Helen and Janet.  But my fingers, without my telling them, quietly paired most of these alternative romantic possibilities among themselves, almost as if they were thinning the field for something to happen.

Pretty soon I threw in the towel, and decided that it was time to finish the series--remember it had never been conceived as a series; I had simply fallen back on that idea because of wanting to get the stories out there on Smashwords--with a conclusion.

And I did.  Helen's Concerto does this, and very satisfactorily (from my point of view, despite how burdened it was by my lack of professionalism).

Because of the enormous detail that went into all the material that is being digested into Concerto  (It should really be titled Helen, The End, not that Helen dies, or anything), and because all this detail is in my mind, and when I see a passage somewhere, I'm automatically linking in my memory of 'earlier' passages that are the background for it.

For instance, the second cancer surgery, in Seattle, is written up in some detail, in Helen and Sharon, and again in Concerto.  But I've just expanded the manuscript of Concerto to include more of what goes on in the hospital, as well as more of what happens when Helen is brought back home, and when Helen tries to settle back into life in Philly.

There's a cute scene where Helen spots the new piano in the Brooks house, and Maryssa shows Helen how to play Chopsticks.  Helen learns it fast, and plays it every now and then.  Months later, Helen forgets her vow to never touch a violin again, and joins the beginners in the violin class.  Erin, waiting impatiently for Helen to progress faster, laughs that "It's Chopsticks all over again!"

Well, I didn't include either episode; but I might, someday.  There is a poignant conversation between Erin and Maryssa, where they discuss Helen's lack of progress.  I will slip in all three episodes someday.

The Helen Saga now consists of just 10 stories, and a few other episodes that aren't in the canonical ten:

Helen BackStory: Lisa, Cindy, and the Violin (Book 1)

This was titled "backstory" because Ballet Camp, in the original numbering, had been numbered 1, and this was a sort of prequel.

Helen at Ballet Camp (Book 2)

Helen and Lalitha: The Lost Years (Book 3)

"Lost Years" because the original manuscript had been lost.  But it turned up, in handwritten form.  This is an important chunk, in my mind, and I'm pleased that it has gotten some downloads!

Helen On the Run -- The Lost Years (Book 4)

The previous comment applies to this one, too; in fact, even more so.  But it is condensed in Concerto, so readers of that final book don't need to get this one if they would rather not.  This is the only book in which you read about Erin's wonderful mother, Penny O'Brien.

Helen and Sharon (Book 5)

This story actually stretches out over the next few books, and all the way to the end; actually Concerto forms a conclusion for this book.

Helen and The Flowershop Girl (Book 6)

Helen at the Beach (Book 7)  

A sort of independent episode, except that it introduces Matt and Maryssa, and Kristen Robinson, and Marcus Gustavson!

Helen Versus Handel's Messiah (Book 8)

Little John Finds a Friend! (Book 9)

Not an important book at all, but a light and funny story about the love story of Little John and Taylor Brown, two lovely characters!

Helen's Concerto (Book 10).

KHB