Just an Update

Well, I took a peek at the downloading statistics, and I was struck by the fact that two copies of Helen at the Beach was downloaded on three consecutive days, which has never happened before!  The word is getting out, at least about that story.  It's a story about a love pentagon, not even a love triangle; all these people continue to be important characters (they would have been even importanter, if I hadn't purged some references to some of them.)  I think I can guess what the attraction is, in this book, but let it pass. 

I do not condone Helen-like morals or behavior; I think, at that time, I just couldn't resist.  Writing about Merit had got my libido fired up!  If ever you find yourself wanting to do something libidinous, just go into retreat, and write a story about it. 

K.

What's Helen Like?

I think I might have given a pencil sketch of Helen once before, but here, I'm doing it again. 

When I first conceived of Helen, she was an eccentric, neurotic, thin, fairy-like teenager, around 14, who could sing like an angel, and play the guitar.  She was academically strong, impulsive, stubborn and pig-headed (though always polite), and moderately skilled at tennis and swimming. 

When she met a couple, Janet and Jason, her latent preference for girls emerged, and she soon approached Janet sexually.  With Janet's encouragement, she began to put on weight and grow stronger, and in my imagination she had grown several inches by the following summer.  She had also become much better at tennis and swimming, and begun to run as well.  She had also started to learn to play the Renaissance viol family of instruments, and begun the violin.  [She's around 15.]

By the summer of the following year, she had taken to dance in a big way; both ballroom dancing, and ballet, and was almost professional level at dancing, as well at music, singing, and playing the violin. [17.]

She is invited to sing in two operas, and incidentally becomes romantically attached to (in addition to Janet and a girl she met in Florida, Leila) a fellow-performer in the operas, Kurt, whom she marries.  By this time she is quite tall, around 5' 9", but the marriage with Kurt is coming apart. [18]

She takes a year off from college, and lives in rural Canada with a former nurse, off the grid, in a large wilderness preserve.  Gradually it emerges that she's pregnant with twins.  They are stillborn.  [19]

Persuaded to return to school, Helen meets a freshman from India, and they fall passionately in love.  But the Indian girl's father makes her return home, and sets up a marriage for her with one of her father's friends.  Helen follows her to India, is unable to prevent the marriage, and retreats to a Catholic farming community of nuns, and loses her memory.  [25.]  A large brain tumor is detected, and Helen is sent back to the US, is operated on, and returned to her family, minus, of course, her memory.  [30.]

Helen agrees to live at a convent in California, where they have a small farming operation.  But the nuns think it would be beneficial for Helen to join a real estate developer, and she becomes a capable carpenter.  I imagined that by the time she leaves California [34,] she's partly regained her memory, and grown physically, to about her adult weight of around 165 pounds, which holds steady for the rest of the story, except for when she delivers James, when she's close to 195 lbs.  [36.]

Okay, I'm going back through what I've written above, to insert approximate ages, to provide a time-line.  (I'm not going to do a calendar timeline, because it's too much work to collate with contemporary international events.)

Helen's personality keeps developing throughout the story, and she's the most mature person, as much as I could arrange, when she was at Westfield (despite running off to star in movies).  She owned a plane, and learns to fly it, but the stock market crash of around 2005 made it necessary for her to sell off the plane. 

When she loses her memory the second time, there is a distinct shrinking of her personality; she becomes a lot more fearful and tentative.  Gradually, though, she regains a degree of the old confidence, but she's not quite the same. 

The Helen of Galactic Voyager is significantly different.  The Helen described above is a mother of four; the Helen in the Voyager becomes quite a different sort of mother!  I can't explain it; in my mind they started out being the same person, but they grew apart. 

Anyhow, let's leave it there. 

Kay

Eventful Summer

The last couple of days, I've been reading two Helen stories that were left out of the Helen list of stories: Helen vs. Handel's Messiah, and Helen's Eventful Summer.  There is a simple reason. 

When I started writing the Helen story—it was essentially one long story, to which I added a little each day—it was for my own amusement.  Sometimes I pretended that Helen was me, and other times I pretended that I was in love with Helen!  Anyhow, there were little interesting episodes, which generally didn't lead anywhere; they just added to the Helen unbelievable story.  Then came the idea to have Helen make a movie!  She had to be in disguise, and that was the birth of the Sharon Veuhl episodes.  Once those were done, the succeeding stories were essentially follow-up of the events set in motion by the Sharon movies.

When I was prodded into the fatal mindset of publishing some—or all—of the Helen stories on Smashwords, I had to take a critical look at the Helen file, with a view to publishability, and I was a serious college professor at this time, and I had to brutally trim the material.  Consequently, 'vs. Messiah', and 'Eventful' didn't make the cut. 

Not that they weren't interesting; they were chock full of interesting stuff.  But they didn't support the main romance of the whole thing.  So, I did publish them, on Smashwords, but I never mentioned them.  I'm beginning to notice that it's the stories I mention here, in the blog, that people run out and download!  You're busted!!

I've already talked about the first story.  Eventful is sort of an omnibus that contains a number of stories from that time, and it rotates from one thread to another.

There's the account of how Thomasina, Helen's half-sister, makes a porn video.  Also, how Helen meets Melanie and Jana.  (If you have a high opinion of Helen, this book is going to embarrass you.)  There's also a lot of the story of how Crystal gets Janet, which I think is a lovely story, and I can't think how I invented it.  Oo, and also the story of Elly and Morgan. 

Well, anyway ... I'm running out of informative stuff about this book; I'll keep reading, and if I discover anything you ought to be told, I'll rush back and supplement this post.  (Prolly won't happen.)

Kay

Helen, and Messiah

Helen, Handel's Messiah, etc. was an episode from the Helen story that, for some reason, I shunted into a little packet of its own, and published separately.  I hadn't actually realized that it was available on Smashwords; I'd put it up, and forgotten about it. 

This morning, as I do every once in a while, I snuck a peek at the downloading statistics (I can't call them the sales figures, for obvious reasons), and was startled to see that Helen and Messiah etc, was the story that had 'sold' the most copies!

As some of you would remember, during the filming of Merit, Helen (disguised as Sharon Veuhl) became attracted to Sita, her co-star; and after the filming it was a wrench for Helen to leave Sita in Vancouver and depart for home. 

After Helga was released, and Helen came under vicious criticism from religious conservatives, Helen retired from the concert stage, and spiraled into depression.  At her low point, Helen could not sing a single note.  This story describes how the various women in Helen's circle, with difficulty, ease her back into equilibrium.  It is also an account of how Sita begins to fall in love with Helen, after having pined over 'Sharon'.

I hadn't read the story in a long time, maybe several years.  My e-reader at home didn't have a link to it.  I was pleasantly surprised at how well I had done, and then realized that it was really two stories.  The first one was about the Messiah compilation.  The second one was about how Elly and Maryssa buy a new piano for Helen.  If any of you readers have gone out to buy pianos, the second story will be very familiar!

Kay

Errors in 'Westfield'

The main plot of Helen On the Run was written around 2000, when I was still in College.  I was steeped in the ideas—of valveless horns and trumpets, and the manufacture of these instruments—but I knew nothing about them; I hadn't even looked at one of them up close!

Helen, as you know, was roped in early on, into helping with a workshop that manufactured authentic instruments of the 17th Century, especially string instruments, which I knew something about.  This is how Helen gets sucked into instrumental music, whereas she had been a singer to start with.

Recently, though, I got to see a brass instrument up close, on several occasions, and the reality about the manufacturing process struck me.  First, I think that a long,  triangular strip of metal—bronze, I imagine—has to be cut out.  Then this strip has to be bent into a conical shape, by hammering it around a wooden, conical form.  Then the two long edges must be sort of folded over like an enclosed seam, and hammered flat, and heated until it's seamless.  That will form the main tube of the instrument. 

Next, the tube must be very carefully bent into a coil-—for a horn—or the coiled trumpet shape that you would have seen, except that there are no pistons or valves.

This entire description has been surmised by just what I saw; I don't know whether the instruments were made in sections, and then joined by heating; that process would be unavoidable if either section had very tight coils.  Today, the mouthpiece is made separately; that was probably how they did it in the 1600s as well.  (This is all fabulously interesting, but all my conjecture is just based on guesswork.  Come to think of it, that's what conjecture is.)

My ignorance overflows into others of my stories, too.  Alexandra helps a blacksmith, and a lot of what she does is very similar to what I've described above.  In Galaxy, Helen gets her friends to help with instrument manufacture, but by this time I was quite a bit older, so I finessed some of the details that could have caused errors.  But there was no horsehair* on the ship, so I blithely wrote that they looked for a synthetic substitute.  Yay for Science Fiction.

None of these stories have been carefully researched, so please forgive me!

With love, 

Kay

*Horsehair: if you're wondering what horsehair has to do with anything, violin bows are made with horsehair.  In fact that's how bows for all bowed stringed instruments are made. 

A Passage from 'Helen and Sharon'

Helen & Sharon is, at once, the central love story of my Helen books, and the most awkward of the installments.  All the others are concluded with a degree of flair, but this one is flawed from beginning to end.  Not because of the story, but because of how I handled it.

There is a lot of the romance blossoming awkwardly between Helen and Sita.  At first, Sita doesn't know that Helen had been masquerading as an actress, in fact Sita's co-star in the movie, and after whom Sita had been yearning for months.

Later, Sita begins to have feelings for Helen as Helen, independently.  At this point, Helen gives a concert in Florida, which Sita attends, and I thought this passage was just lovely, a lot more emotional than my usual style. 

Helen’s entry (as solo violinist) was incredibly sweet, almost apologetic. But the tone built, gradually, and soon she was dominating the orchestra, not just with the volume of the sound, but with some subtle cleverness of the music itself, … or was it the performer? It was as though the violin was gaining courage, and growing in confidence, and ever so charmingly subverted the entire orchestra, arguing, laughing, singing, stealing its song, and doing clever, wonderful things to it.

Sita watched Helen’s face as she played, the joy, the concentration, the exaltation, and sometimes some watchfulness. What did it feel like to both conduct and play? Did she just play and hope for the best? Was she giving mysterious, invisible indications to the orchestra?

I'm hoping this passage accurately portrays the feelings of someone not quite an insider into the live classical music scene!

Kay H. B.

How DA Manages Displaying Images

In case you just joined us, I'm a member of the website DeviantArt, which is a little like Instagram, in that most members are artists, and they upload their artwork, and usually <indecipherable> be some time browsing the artwork of other artists.  (I don't create art, so I just browse.)  Originally, the idea was that members would negotiate to buy images, and the site got a percentage of the sale.  I have no idea whether DA gets any money from my membership, which is interesting ...

Anyhoo... since there are so many images on the site, from time immemorial and from countless artistists, the site sort of takes over your browsing for you.  It keeps track of the images you've 'liked', and tries to show you similar images.  In my case, seem to have told the algorithm that I mostly—or only—want to see pictures of girls.  (There was all sorts of silly stuff, mostly having to do with artifacts related to Anime, and computer or videogames, about which I knew nothing. So it boiled down to: this member only likes pics of girls.

But here's the thing.  The combination of the DA algorithm and the design of AI software results in a peculiar situation: every picture looks like the same girl.  The actual same girl!  This is very weird. 

[Note: I have exaggerated.  Since I wrote these words, I'm noticing a—slightly—greater variety of facial types.  I was alarmed, on that day, with seeing so many images with what seemed to be the identical facial features, but it was a fluke ...]

I got into a conversation with one of the artists about why all the girls have big boobs, and he swore it wasn't him.  He said the AI seemed only familiar with heavy-breasted chicks!  And now, it looks as though that's the only girl I have been noticed as likeing!  So every day, I have to scroll through about 20 portraits of the same girl, by which time I get bored and do something else. 

Kay

Slang and Abbreviation

Writing about music so much, and classical music, in particular, it wasn't hard to spell words out.  For one thing, I didn't actually know the abbreviations, and I'm not one for using abbreviations anyway.  Once Millennials got into classical music, I get the impression that the music abbreviation industry flourished, because—as we well know—this generation is abbreviation crazy.  (Just last evening I blogged about hyphens versus dashes, and discovered how to generate an m-dash on a phone.  I'm going to put m-dashes anywhere it makes sense!)

The bad thing about slang and abbreviations, in my mind, is that they often create the feeling of being an outsider in anyone who doesn't know the term (abbreviation or slang, as the case may be).  That's the effect it has on me, anyway.  I look up the terms on the internet ASAP*, but I still feel slightly miffed.  Just to think of someone referring to a treble clef as a 'trebbie' gives me hives.  Also, having spent absolute years weeding out, and minimizing the amount of music terminology in Helen, to make it palatable to a general audience, I'm inordinately sensitive to inserting technical music terminology into any of the stories. 

Furthermore, for years early music was considered a fringe area.  Famous classical musicians were often actually hostile towards anyone espousing historically accurate ('authentic') performance practices, until it seemed like suddenly one day, it was standard.  Using viole da gamba was fine, and so was valveless horns.  So, not taking any chances, I spelled everything out. 

But now, I worry whether that actually dates the writing, making it sound like it was being written by some Victorian scholar.  I have to gradually get used to the idea that, given that the Helen stories (or story; it's just mostly a single story) are/is about a musician, the more I fiddle with it to make it less strange to some groups, the more I ruin it for some other  group. 

Two wonderful things that happened, in my battle to introduce non-musicians into the story are Lalitha and Sita!  Lalitha was a musician, introduced to diversify Helen's circle of friends, and Sita was a non-musician.  As I wrote the story, the two sisters became gradually so important that they defined the direction of the story, and in a wonderful way. 

Off to fix myself some brekky, as we say in Australia.  (Or do we?)

Kay

*As Soon As Possible.

A New Home for my Gripes

I'm going do my complaining here (K-Helen) rather than over in Don't Wait For The Movie---I bet some of you didn't even know that that was the title of the blog!  After all, what I mostly complain about is the artwork on DeviantArt, and I first joined DA to get covers for books in the Helen saga. 

I'm beginning to learn that DA is showing me mostly pictures of the same type of woman, probably one of the most successful AI models, in each of the several different AI systems that people on DA use.  Somehow, one day, DA mislaid my 'user profile', and showed me a huge variety of images.  So I wish it would lose my user profile permanently ... 

It's not that I dislike the images DA shows me.  They're lovely girls.  But they're all the same girl!!

Kay