Bel Blackwood, for the third time.

I've written about this wonderful author before, and I was just reading this story: Sugar and Smoke for the third time, and I have a couple more thoughts about it.  I guess I'm getting older, and the angle I see things at are getting different!  Also, I need to give a lot of context to my remarks, and I certainly can't depend on you people to go out and get the book, and read it,  all on your own.  So here's a pretty complete plot digest for you.  It's set in New Zealand, but there's very little Kiwi-specific material in the story.  Except, of course, that the tone of the writing isn't either as racist as in the US, or as anti-racist as in the US.

The MC (main character—one of two) Tessa, has been pressured into taking a 6-month leave of absence from her law practice.  She's going to house-sit for this gay artist guy, who's setting out to spend a month touring Italy.

She arrives, and discovers that there is (1) a cat,  Thomas—?—who is very aloof; and (2, 3, 4) three llamas.  They could be alpacas, but to most people, the critters are sort of interchangeable.  Tessa finds some wine, but she's getting hungry. 

There's a knock on the door, and there's a cute, cuddly woman with dimples, with yet another llama on a halter.  It turns out that this one is called Stephanie.  She, Stephanie, tends to sneak out of their corral, and go exploring.  (Why not the other three?  I don't know.)

The new woman is Kaia, and she lives next door.  Tessa gets her to show how to get hot water for a shower (Tessa doesn't know anything about living anywhere except in a big city).  She asks what's a good place to eat out, and Kaia reveals that it's too late for that—6:00 p.m.-ish—and too late for take out ("Yeah, we don't have that in these parts!  Sorry!") and offers to bring something over.  Tessa absolutely refuses, reluctant to be beholden to Kaia too much; after all: llama return, and hot water. 

Kaia heads for home, highly taken with the house-sitter, who is super glam.  She quickly puts together a rescue plate of homemade bread and stew, and some jam and some cream, and creeps up and leaves it on Tessa's doorstep, all excited.

Starving Tessa finds it after her shower, and waves thanks to Kaia through her open Kitchen window, and gets a dimple in return!  (Man, the dimples alone were getting me going.)

The guy (Kiwi: 'fella') for whom Tessa is house-sitting is a bachelor, and predictably his refrigerator is filled only with beer.  So, next morning, Tessa moseys over to Kaia's to find where coffee is available, and is given a mug of coffee.  She also learns where to get supplies.

Meawhile, there's a guitar leaning against the wall, in her living room: acoustic.  She picks it up, and strums a chord, but it hurts her fingers, so she puts the guitar down.  Later on, she's out in the garden, and hears a loud jangling, coming from a ramshackle hut in the corner of the property.  She picks up a shovel, and pulls the door open. 

There's a teenager reclining on an old couch in the shed.  "Nice shovel," she says. 

"What're you doing here?" Tessa asks the teenager. 

"This belongs to Leo," the teen replies.  "Who're you?"

Tessa explains that she's house-sitting, and asks the kid what her name is, and how old she is.  She lies 3 times, but the third time she says her name is Ruby, and she's sixteen and a half. 

Ruby is interesting.  She's got an attitude that's a mile high, but miraculously Tessa and Ruby get close.  Ruby is distrustful of her family, but begins to trust Tessa, to the point where Ruby calls Tessa when she's in a spot of trouble.  Everybody in the little town seems to hate Ruby, because she puts graffiti on everything: store fronts, fences, schools, signboards, 'Rubez,' etc.

Meanwhile, Kaia enlists Tessa to help her with a jam competition.  Kaia's grandmother, Grandma Kingsley, used to be the jam champion of those parts, and Kaia is good, but not as inspired as Grandma was.  As you can imagine, the interaction between Tessa, and all the weirdos of the town gives us a lot of insight into Tessa's character; and the farmer's markets at which Kaia and Tessa sell their jams gives us insight into Kaia's character, and Tessa quietly eases out of her super-sharp city lawyer image into something softer. 

I wish I had written this story!

Kay.

Purple Passages

I am a (former) author, as some of you know!  If you've read any of my stories, you know that there were few—or actually no—purple passages in them.  Actually, I can remember a few; but they weren't that purple, really.

But I have mostly stopped writing, but I'm reading.  But when I see the word 'steamy' in the description of a story, I'm beginning to cringe.  Honestly, I've been turned off sex for more than a year, and as much as my active sex life has evaporated,  (which can be explained by a medical treatment I'm getting) my interest in reading sexy passages in fiction has also gone away. 

This is not a disaster, except that most writers feel obliged to have some degree of physical sex in the writing, which I mostly skip over.  I get the very strong impression that authors write this stuff reluctantly.  Furthermore, I think they crib these 'juicy bits' from each other, so much so that they all seem to look the same.  But don't worry; I'm not going to indulge in forensic reading.  As far as I'm concerned, the sex in WLW fiction is most definitely not the core of these stories, it is the emotional aspect of the sexual encounters when they happen. 

There is plenty to write about on this subject, namely the interplay between sex and emotion, and to what extent graphic sex interplays with it.  I don't think I'm the one to write about it.  But I ļike to write stories set in the nineties, where the US was just beginning to emerge from the old closeted world, and women and girls were being more courageous about expressing 'forbidden' love.  It certainly was a lot more romantic than it is today!

But the climax in many lesbian relationships was often punctuated with a physical encounter, a big emotional event, and often one or both of the girls were new to it, and that was part of what propelled them through into a different stage of their relationship.  Those are the stories I like best, and they're difficult to dig up. 

Well, regards to all of you, and here's hoping our semi quincentennial celebrations are satisfying, despite a green reflecting pool. 

Kay

A Memory I Can't Place

I have a memory of a dying person, writing to a friend, or a lover, saying that soon they would be together, and then they would have a good time.  But it never happens.

Where did I read this?  When did I read this?  It seems like a well- known situation that everyone knew ...

I give up. 

Kay

P.S.  I suddenly recalled where I heard those words!

It is from James Taylor's  'You can close your eyes.'  The second verse goes:

Won't be long before it's another day

We're gonna have a good time, 

No one's gonna take that time away from you

You can stay as long as you like

 

I think I confused the order of the words. 

An Episode of the Helen story that had been forgotten by me!

Here is the link, and I'll explain below:

Chopsticks

This is a 'page' on the Blog.  It is set at the time Helen had had her most recent, and most invasive, brain surgery, and had returned home with Maryssa, to the Primrose house (Maryssa's family home, from where they would move to the new, rented home near where Lalitha's family, and the instrument factory were situated).

I was just reading this page this morning, and I was startled at how well I had been writing at that time.  Many of the characters are illuminated beautifully by this episode, but I'm a little nervous about slicing it into one of the other stories, for fear of having to do some lengthy inspections, to avoid duplication, etc.  The painfully slow steps Helen took to become a functional adult again have been glossed over in Concerto.  This episode also highlights how Erin struggled with Helen's nemory loss.

A Scene from "On the Run!"

This weekend I ran out of stuff to read, so I re-read Helen On the Run, and I concluded that it must be awfully confusing, because there were so many plot lines being interwoven!

Firstly, Helen is trying to avoid being caught by the FBI, because she had picked up her two adopted daughters, and made a run for it. 

Secondly, she met up with a mother and daughter couple, soon after she had left home to go into hiding, and they wanted to come along with Helen and the little girls!  The daughter is Erin, who figures in all future stories. 

Thirdly, Helen is pregnant with a baby.  The baby's father is Geoffrey Gibson, a musician, and a recurring character.  Geoffrey keeps pestering Helen to marry him, but of course she,  being a lesbian, isn't going to. 

Fourthly, while in hiding, Helen disguises herself as a man, and takes up a job as a construction worker.  One of her co-workers—a woman—has a daughter in high school.  Helen is invited to their home, and the daughter falls in love with Helen.

Fifthly, Helen and company have to go underground again, because one of their party,  Michelle, is caught by the FBI.  They wind up in the vicinity of St. Paul, and Helen and Erin's mother get jobs at a private boarding school. 

Finally, Helen begins to show, and she's taken to an obstetrician, where Helen is declared to be high-risk.

There are at least four more threads, having to do with Helen's work at the school, and the teachers, and the principal, and the music in the school chapel on the weekends.  I must have been mad when I wrote the story, but it seemed very plausible to me at the time!

Well.  I had to get that off my chest. 

Kay.

Lied?

People find it challenging to use the verb 'To lie' correctly.  It's super useful.  But if you make mistakes using it, your reader would know something was wrong, but would probably at a loss as to how to fix it.  (A little smile here, just to show that my heart lies in the right place!)

I want to lie down.

I lay down, or even I laid down.

I will have lain down.

I would have laid down, if not for ...

You know, looking back on these, I'm not sure they're all grammatically correct!  But saying "Lied down" is wrong. 

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

P.S.:  I forgot to mention that, in later stories, a number of ethnically diverse characters are introduced. 

Elly & Tommy:  Grandma Elly was intended to have Scottish ancestry, and some Native American; Jason Kolb is described as having Mediterranean heritage, so Elly is a mutt.  Tom, the child of Grandma Elly and John Nordstrom, would be half Scottish, and half Norwegian.

Amy Salvatori: is definitely Italian.  I don't know whether the character, as I have written her, is sufficiently Italian to satisfy those who have an opinion about it!

Lalitha & Sita: these are definitely Indian.  I don't know what sort of Indians they are, because there is a huge variety of ethnicities within India itself.  They're definitely Hindus, so not from the Kashmir region, and not from the far Eastern region either!

Juliana Hoffman: is described as from the part of Germany closest to France.  Leila, an early lover of Helen's, was intended to be of an interesting European heritage, but I've forgotten!

Sophie (Cocteau?): is French.

Nadia: is Belgian.

Sirikul: is Thai.  Most of the segments including her have been cut out. 

Cindy, or Mary-Catherine O'Shaunessy: Irish.

I have no idea why I invented such a specific background for a character in my story!  It probably had to do with things I was reading at the time. 

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

Julie

I don't remember exactly when; it was before Galactic Voyager, but after Jane—I was feeling very emotional, for some reason, and I began to write a story about a pair of women, former ballet dancers, who found themselves on the run from a vengeful guy, who had dynamited one of their homes, just for taking in his pregnant wife, whom he had violently abused. 

I must have watched too many soap operas.  But I wanted to write a love story between two female ballet dancers; you can see the obvious implied eroticism.  I just stumbled on the file this afternoon!

As you know, I'm terrible at filling out an erotic story about two women.  But I think I could make something readable out of this; at least a short story. 

Kay.

This Blog

This blog is where I go when I want to comment on any of my stories.  Political commentary and current events go on the 'other side,' Don't Wait for The Movie.  I have two solutions I can think of. 

Move all writing-related blogposts to 'Helen' Blog.  Some of my readers are primarily interested in lesfic, and my comments about my own stories; they could simply head over here, and only visit the other one if there has been some really startling political development.  Language issues, such as punctuation, vocabulary, etc, could all be left on here.  Actually, I'll have to rethink that; it would be sad if only the president's foolishness ever got discussed on that side.  On this side, I would put any posts about matters such as references to pets, for instance, in any of the stories. 

Compartmentalize the Blog.  I mean, leave the blogs as they are, but have departments in each one; a Current Events department, and LGBTQ department, a Fine Arts department, and Language department, and so on.  Most of that would really happen on the other side, which is sort of a 'Dear Diary' thing, anyway. 

I really don't need to fuss so much about it; but adopting one plan or the other would make it easier to do the actual blogging.  The readership of the Blog is about 25 readers per post, and it isn't clear that every visitor reads the whole post!

I'm going to try a sort of hybrid approach for a while.

Kay Hemlock Bonaventura Brown

Diabetes

I don't know whether Helen being diagnosed as diabetic (in Helen and Sharon) was a putoff, but I had been diagnosed as a mild diabetic just then, and I just couldn't help going that route in the story. 

The Galactic Voyager story features diabetes more centrally.  But, since my own diabetes was being managed just medically (which means with only pills, in this case), that's how I had Helen's condition also managed, because I didn't know any better.  After a few years, though, any diabetic (as far as I know now) has to go on to Insulin injections.  This didn't happen for Helen, so Helen's further diabetic adventures are a little implausible for anyone who is a diabetic, or who knows one!  Voyager is worth rewriting for that reason, but I'm not going to do it. 

Sheila

At one time, the story Helen and the Flowershop Girl was 'disappearing off the shelves!'  Earlier today, I just took a look at it; it really was charmingly written.  It seemed as if it was written by someone else!  (I seem to say that often.  I think I'm having a personality change; for some reason there's a discontinuity between the writing of my earlier self, and my writing now.  I don't want to guess why.  I'm just getting older, and that's my simplest assumption.)

Sheila—that's the name of the Flowershop girl—is real in a way none of the other characters in my books are real.  She's an old-fashioned dyke; that was a role that lesbians of that time took on.  They were very polite, but not warm, and not encouraging.  But Sheila was attracted to Helen, though she realized it was not possible.  It was too good to be true. 

Kay

'Deviant Art': an Online Gallery

Why do I torture myself?  Once again, I headed out to DA out of sheer boredom, and the ultra-feminine models there left me frustrated!

I've written before that ultra-feminine women / girls are what I go for.  But, realistically, an ultra-feminine girl could be a lot of fun if you go out to a meal, but once that's over—I'm not   talking about sex; I'm talking about a story, an adventure, being chased by the bad guys—I can't imagine the girl holding up her end in a dangerous situation. 

You know, though, I think I could imagine that.  Unfortunately, it would be no different from a story with a tough guy—that would be me, now, unfortunately—and a swooning female.  But I can even imagine her not being the swoony type. 

Most of the women on DA are feminine, but sort of frilly and fussy.  (Presumably the guys on DA like the frilly, fussy type of girl.)  You can't imagine them grabbing the gun and saying, "I'll look after this side; you keep an eye on the street."

Man, I'm getting ideas for an action story!

Well, anyway—

See you later ...

Kay

A New Purpose

It's strange.  Most of the time, I shrink from revealing too much of my thoughts.  But sometimes I need very much to share; but to only a small audience.  It struck me that, now that the Helen saga was decently concluded, the number of readers checking out this blog will be reduced, so I can tell things to this blog—you know what I mean—and reach a smaller audience just like I would prefer!  So the topics of these posts are not going to be exclusively about Helen in the future. 

This is actually the 'younger' blog; the earliest post dates from almost a year after the earliest post on the Don't Wait For the Movie blog.  I created it for the purpose of writing about Helen, which had a lot of sex in it, initially.  I also wanted to discuss how to tone it down.  Actually, the relationship between Helen—who was less than 16 years old at the time—and Janet, who was in her mid 20s, and a college graduate, was highly inappropriate, but even more, writing fiction about it would have been in very poor taste, so I ripped out huge chunks of the story to sanitize it.  It must seem as though Helen's feelings for Janet is/was mere infatuation, but they had a full on sexual relationship for close to a year.  But then Helen had sexual relationship with practically anyone who asked her in her first two years of college, until she fell seriously in love with Lalitha.

Well, anyway ...

What brings on this strange desire for sharing, you might ask?

It's actually quite (innocent).  I was pondering on what sort of girl/woman I would model my ideal woman—a subject that is very personal indeed.  In earlier years, my image of a perfect girl was—let's face it—a somewhat sexual one!  This is why, I think, Helen was created.  Helen was the image of the girl I wanted, as well as of the girl I wanted to be.  I wanted to be all those things: a blonde, with long, curly hair; thin and delicate (which I already was); a good guitarist—I'm fair; she was to have a beautiful 'white' soprano voice, which is not how I'd describe my voice, but I have a good choir alto; athletic, and a good tennis player, I'm barely athletic, and a hopeless tennis player.

She was to like little kids, and to be good at minding them; I'm sort of okay there.  She was to learn specialized woodworking very fast; I don't know, I've never tried it.  She can dance ballet; I just know the basics. 

As I described Helen in her twenties and thirties, our differences took over, and I will never resemble her.  She has already stopped being the sort of woman I could go for; her second amnesia put the last nail in her coffin, though I was still able to write about her sympathetically.  A lot of her character and personality had been passed on to the children, principally Erin and James.  Not intentionally, but unplanned. 

Just this morning, I saw a sort of PSA about caring for dogs by Katherine Heigl.  She seems genuine in her interest in the welfare of dogs 🐕, though I'm more a cat person myself. 

When I first encountered her, she seemed very German.  At that time, I had a close affinity to the people, the language and the culture of Germany.  It turns out, Katie Heigl is thoroughly American, though these days that is not a complete unqualified endorsement of her.  I must be getting old, because I thought she gave out a no-nonsense, but motherly vibe, which I found very attractive!  In the past, 'my type' has been women like Olivia Newton-John, Emma Watson, Naomi Watts, and various other ultra- feminine women, but perhaps more athletically built.  Keira Knightley?  Too thin.  Actually, I was crazy about Elizabeth Hurley, and still am!

There now.  I had promised myself I wouldn't gush about my crushes, and here I am ...

As far as guys go: I admire Obama, and that's about it. 

Kay 

Just Keeping in Touch!

Well, it's getting warmer in our part of the world; crocuses are popping up, grass is greening, there are buds on the trees!  We used to have a real winter, but now we're inflicted with this fake winter, with just a little snow, making a nuisance of itself!

Just as it is hard to remember the beautiful winters of years gone by, it's hard to remember a time when people celebrated diversity, and were generous towards people who were poor, and soup kitchens and food pantries were supported with enthusiasm!  Elon Musk has said that empathy is a weakness of civilization.  From where does he get this nonsense?  That sort of sentiment will probably not resonate with a lot of people; we've progressed too far for people to feel right about dumping on the unfortunates.  [Musk himself must feel constrained by social expectations from the 'richest man in the world'!  When he does what he wants, like an overgrown kid, he feels the disapproval of the community, and he's unhappy!  He longs for a society that will cheer him on, when he grinds the poor and helpless under his heel.  In Trump, he must have thought he has found such a person.  Trump would consider the poor and helpless 'Losers' and worthy of destroying.]

I'm reading Concerto, and I described Sita, Trish, and Maryssa as generous and kindhearted.  Back then I found it difficult to write about crude, cynical, cruel characters.  I guess that's a weakness.  I'm a Loser, according to the Trump classification!  All LGBTQ are 'Losers.'  I guess I'm saying that I write about soft-hearted, generous people. 

Kay