A Helen Story that isn't: 'Music on the Galactic Voyager' (was Music of the Stars)

Last night, having finished whatever I had been reading, I picked up Music of the Stars, my own science fiction novel based on the fictitious Galaxy Show in which Helen (the principal protagonist of the Helen saga) had acted for close on five years.  Music is basically the same plot premise as that of the Galaxy Show, except that instead of the fictitious character Cecilia Yorke, we have Helen Nordstrom being put aboard the space vessel.

I had begun writing Music of the Stars after I had shelved Helen fairly permanently.  Helen had grown into an emonster piece of writing, with amazingly creative plot elements, but as it stood at that point it seemed impossible to salvage it, because of the utterly self-indulgent frame of mind in which I had written it.  (Much later, of course, I "sanitized" it, and found, to my amazement, that it contained a story that stood perfectly well without the purple prose.  So that's what I have been putting up on Smashwords piecemeal.)  I had not read Helen in a long while, so I had completely lost track of what happened to our hero, and didn't know that that original character Helen could not possibly be the Helen of Music.  (For one thing, she was a lot older, and for another, she had three adopted children, and her own little boy, James.  Obviously a mother of four is not going to allow herself to be frozen and put aboard a spacecraft, leaving her children behind.)

I uploaded in the summer of 2014, an incomplete version of Music of the Stars to Smashwords, and set it up to be released in August 2015 (they let you do that, to increase anticipation).  I proceeded merrily with my various little projects, until early in the summer of 2015, when I remembered that Music had to be completed and gotten ready for release.  I began some of the most intense writing spells I have ever undertaken, and to my amazement, as I read it now, the writing is really awesome, if I say so myself: the character development, the details in some of the plot elements, the descriptions, the dialog.  But the plot conclusion is disappointing to me.  It isn't hopeless, and anyone interested in space science will have things to enjoy, but ... I'm afraid that people who like big, grand endings will be dissatisfied.  Well, that's the price I paid for leaving it to the last moment.

Anyway, I have just reduced the retail price to $1.99 briefly, just in case that encourages someone to actually read the book!

Kay

My most viewed post

You probably know that Google provides statistics of how many page views my blog posts have received.  The post that received the most views was Elly, Episode 10.

Elly is an important character in the Helen story.  (To save you from having to look it up: the Helen story starts off with Helen trying to hitch-hike her way to her freshman year in college, and a young couple picking her up.  The young couple is Janet and Jason Kolb, newlyweds, on their way back from their honeymoon.

Somehow, Helen and Janet begin a passionate secret affair.  When their Cherokee loses a muffler coming into Illinois, Jason takes the car out to be repaired, and the two girls go crazy, and engage in mind-blowing sex.  Janet had been straight all her life, and Helen, of course, being just about sixteen, would have had her mind blown with any sex at all, having been a total virgin.

As it happens, they're on their way back for Jason to teach at a school right in the town in which Helen's college is situated, in Eastern Ohio.  Helen gets permission to stay with Janet and Jason, to save on room and board, and Helen has an eventful freshman year, with Janet mostly off balance.

Janet's mother, we learn, had been Helen's mother's lover when they had been in college, twentyfive years before.  Janet's mother is overjoyed, not surprisingly, when she learns that Janet and Helen have become close.  But back in Kansas, Helen's father is still in a deep depression after the death of his wife some years before.  Janet's mother, Elly, takes a deep breath, and calls the widower, John Nordstrom (Helen's dad), and invites herself over, to try and comfort the man, and help him put away Helen's late mother's things, and put the house to order, after some four years.  Elly had never met John, since the two women had kept up an affair for all that time, continuing to meet in secret once a year.  Janet's mother, once she has seen young Helen, is half in love with the teenager, and is eager to meet the husband of her lover, Sylvia.

John manages to greet Elly graciously, and they mourn Sylvia together.  Elly is able to get John out of his funk, and leaves for home, thoroughly satisfied with her mission of mercy.  But John is now totally in love with Elly, who, even in late middle age, is a lovely woman.

When the New Year rolls round, and Easter Break, John is invited to join everyone at the home of Elly and Tom, Janet's parents, where Helen and Janet and Jason are also visiting, so that everyone can be together.  When the kids return to school, not only have Jason and Janet gotten pregnant, old Elly is also pregnant, by John Nordstrom.  This is the fact that makes everything so complicated.

Jason Kolb is called up, being in the Army Reserve, and sent to the Balkans.  Before he can see any action, he dies in a plane crash.  Janet is devastated, but she is on the brink of delivery, and keeps herself together for the sake of the child.  Meanwhile, her mother Elly, too, is pregnant, to her great embarrassment, and Elly travels to Janet's home, so that they could help each other.  On Christmas Eve, both women give birth.  Janet names her child Elly, after her mother, and Elly names her child Tomasina, after Tom Krebs, hoping that her husband will forgive her infidelity.  The two little girls grow up together, and call themselves The Twins.

Helen loves little Elly very much, and after Elly's sophomore year in College, she has a falling out with both her Twin Tomasina, and her mother, Janet, and comes to live with Helen.  She's been suspended from her university, so she has registered for courses at a local community college, and has had a good junior year.  The story opens as Elly begins to work part-time at a suburban supermarket.

Kay

Models

This is an Australian Model whom I have featured before on this blog.  I'm not sure what it is about this woman that is beginning to make me change my mind about models.

The big problem with models (and with most of us, including me) is that our vision dominates our sensory input, at least most of the time.  (At certain times, I hear that smell creates a stronger impression than vision, but that happens rarely.)  Models are obsessed with visual perfection, and with apparel.  Many interviews of models bring out their fascination with clothes, and with bodies.  I don't want to assert that their interests stop there; many models, or former models, once they give up modeling and begin to take an interest in matters that have to do with other things than physical beauty and clothing, become interesting, even fascinating.  No longer willing to rely on their physical beauty, they become beautiful, even more beautiful than before, as they become less 2-dimensional.  They may take the view that they were always this interesting and this beautiful, but I would go out on a limb and claim that in their working years, their beauty is limited to the beauty of a photograph.

When I see a photograph of this woman, however, I just turn into an adoring puddle of mush.  This is not the sort of woman I usually go for.  I like girls who are strong and athletic.  I'm rarely attracted to girls who are well-endowed, generally (though there are exceptions).  I don't go for very narrow waists.  I admire clear skin.  What is going on here?

I don't know!  I don't like all the clothes she models, either, though they do suit her.  I guess I'll get over this lady eventually, but until then, I enjoy seeing her anywhere.

Kay

Dear Diary

I find myself in a quandary.

As an author of sorts, I realize that it is counterproductive to reveal too much about myself; a healthy amount of mystique is all to the good.  When a reader gets to know an author so well that there's really nothing left to discover, that author is more or less finished.  You know exactly what she's going to say.

But I'm going to put this out here, hoping that no one, or very few, will discover this, though I almost want it to be known!

I have discovered someone on whom I have a sort of crush!  She is a model, and just a few minutes ago I discovered that she has a website, and lives a semi-public life as a sort of free spirit.

What attracted my attention first was her smile, which was nothing short of gleeful, though I have to admit it is serene, in its own way.  Right there you have the enigma that this person is: gleeful, serene, mischievous, serious.  She seems to be both sensitive and tolerant, a woman for this worrisome age.  She seems outgoing, but private.

The least I can do is not stalk her too assiduously!

But there you have it: sometimes you see someone, and you have to tell the world!

Unfortunately, I get crushes like this about once a month, so it isn't going anywhere.  But ... what can I say?  Having a small crush is a lovely thing.

K.

Helen's Eventful Summer

Just to make sure that those who only read this blog get the news as well:  I have just published a major chunk of the Helen story in Helen's Eventful Summer, which goes online at Smashwords tomorrow sometime.

The story starts with Helen out in Seattle for a longer-than-usual filming of a feature movie based on several episodes of the Galaxy Show (her regular TV series), in which the space ship The Galactic Voyager discovers a barely habitable planet, and decides to leave a colonizing team on it.  Helen has been cloned, and the infant's growth has been artificially accelerated so that she is a teenager within a few months.  (This will never be possible; that part is just bad science fiction.  If you like a more realistic version of this sort of thing, please read The Music Of the Stars, which is a story about another person called Helen, who has some of the same background as the Helen in this story, but is intended to be someone different.)

Anyway, Helen goes off the rails, and decides to hire a call girl.  But being Helen, she manages to get into a complicated relationship with this woman, and worse, shortly after gets into an affair with a girl in a restaurant, called Jana.

Unlike the other Helen stories where I managed to purge most of the explicit sex, this story has enough graphic sex to actually get in the way of the other action.  But I just couldn't see how to remove it, because of the plotline.  If you're Eastern European, I apologize in advance for the representation of Jana's English.  I wanted her to be very foreign, and so I had to tinker with her dialect.  She is a wonderful character, so I hope you forgive me for the liberties I have taken with the dialog.

Two other characters emerge in a very three-dimensional way:  Elly Kolb, the daughter of Helen's oldest Ex, Janet, and Tomasina Krebs, the daughter of Janet's mother, Old Elly.  While Elly has turned over a new leaf and become a good student, Tommy has decided to get into the porn industry as soon as she graduates.  In fact, she makes an adult video featurette over the summer break, in which she is a motorcycle babe who abducts a young bride from the altar, and gives her a night she will never forget.

Finally, there is an innocent college freshman, Crystal Baxter, whom Janet meets during a visit to Philadelphia.  Crystal is so obsessed with Janet that she walks to Minnesota from her home in Wisconsin, and takes a room close to where Janet teaches.  I don't think I have succeeded in making Crystal a believable love interest for Janet, but that's just too bad: Crystal and Janet will be a couple for the long term.

I've had a pretty eventful summer as well.

It started with Google and Facebook flooding me with ads for dresses, just because I happened to see a dress being modeled by a girl that looked attractive.  This model was everywhere I looked, sometimes with her eyes cropped out, often with only her mouth and below showing.  I started collecting pictures of the dresses she modeled, even though I could never dream of pulling off wearing one of them.  She was a classic summer model type: deep tan, bright red lipstick, big curves, lovely classic legs, narrow waist, long bleached blonde hair, beautiful hazel eyes (I managed to find a photo or two with her eyes in them).

I want to say that I stopped short of actually obsessing about her, especially because that wasp-waisted, heavy-breasted girl is not the type I go for.  (I prefer girls who look like serious competition swimmers, for instance.)  But this woman's face continued to haunt me.

Finally discovered that her name was Renee Somerfield, so I can relax now.  Somehow the magic is gone, but she seems interesting, at least in the few interviews I have seen on YouTube since I learned her name.  Australian models are interesting at least because of their accents; I love to watch Miranda Kerr on YouTube, with her sly humor.

So that was pretty exciting while I was still looking for a name to go with the face of Renee Somerfield.  She looks fabulous in dresses, but a little too 'Swimsuit Model' stereotypical in a swimsuit.  Stick to dresses, Renee, and who knows: I might buy one of those!!

Kay

A Brief Update

I forgot to report that the episode "Helen vs. Handel's Messiah" was re-published for the Holiday Season (or, more specifically, the Christmas season, since it's about Messiah, after all).  Please take a look at it.  For those who are queasy about too much physical sex, there's very little of that in the story!

The background to the episode is in another episode [yet unpublished], in which Helen sings at a performance in London.

Helen met an unusual and interesting girl at Westfield College, where Helen had taken up an Associate Professorship in music.  The other girl (a woman in her middle twenties, actually) was a language instructor, and  had introduced herself as Rain.  At this time Helen was single, because she and Michelle (her partner while she had been on the run [Helen On the Run--unpublished]) had split up, and her faithful friend Penny (Erin's mother) had died of cancer, and Helen was in fear of violating the Judge's exhortation to conduct herself in a manner suitable to a mother of two young children, on pain of being sent to serve her suspended sentence for kidnapping.  (The kids, of course, were her own, but that's another story.)

Rain and Helen were soon desperately in love.  Helen had a firm friendship with Sophie Cocteau, a tennis player, and of course Lorna Shapiro, who was Becky's girl, also had a serious crush on Helen, but Helen needed someone who could be a true partner, for the long term, and it looked very much as though Rain was the one.  In addition, Rain just adored the two youngest kids, Alison and James, and that settled it for Helen.

Some time later, Rain disclosed to Helen that her name was actually Evelyn Woodford, and that her father was a British earl.  Rain had not written or called home for more than a year, being in rather a rebellious phase.  But this new relationship seemed important enough that she wanted her parents to meet Helen.  As luck would have it, Helen was also invited to sing in a performance of Messiah in London, which was attended by Queen Elizabeth, who spoke to Helen briefly after the recital, in the Royal Box.  The following year, too, Helen spent in England in Rain's family home.

Another wonderful Christmas episode centered around Helen visiting Olive Gibson, the mother of Jeffrey Gibson (little James's father), on which occasion she was also invited to conduct the massed bands of the Armed Services on the Mall in Washington DC.  This was also an occasion in which she played tennis with Sophie Cocteau, and there was a brief romance between the two, which they decided, by mutual agreement, not to let get out of hand, simply because every major romance Helen had had up until then had ended badly.  Sophie wanted to be a constant presence in Helen's life, for Helen's own sake, and her theory was that it would be impossible if Helen and she became lovers.  By the time Helen and Rain (Lady Evelyn) had found each other, Sophie and Helen were merely good friends.  (But Helen was harder on Rain than on any of her other lovers, and the end of that relationship reflects more poorly on Helen than anything that happened before or since.)

Kay

Making A Cover for “On The Run”

I'm not sure who reads this blog (in contrast to the sister blog: Don't Wait for the Movie!), but I feel guilty about putting all the latest information about the Helen project on Smashwords over there.  In short, I'm publishing the entire Helen story in installments on Smashwords, which is essentially a self-publishing website.

Helen and Lalitha: The Lost Years was put up a couple of weeks ago.  It takes up the story after Helen gets back from ballet camp, (Helen at Ballet Camp), and describes how she meets Lalitha, an important, recurring character.  The book I'm working on now is Helen On the Run: The Lost Years 2, which describes how Erin joins the family, and little James is born.  In the first half of this story, Helen masquerades as a man, a construction worker.  In the second half, Helen is pregnant (well, she's pregnant pretty much the whole time).

When I made the cover, I first had a picture of a guy in a hard hat, and put it in a sort of Southwestern landscape.  But it looked rather dismal; I had put a lot of texture on it, because it looked so plain with just the picture of the gal in the hard hat.  Here is what it looked like at that point:

It is the head of a girl, and the body of a man, but I widened the hips, so that it looked more plausibly a pregnant woman.  But by the time I had finished with the texturing, it looked really gloomy.  People would have thought: she should jolly well be on the run, and she can stay on the run, for all we care!

But I thought we needed a softer image of a pregnant girl, so I added, behind the construction girl, a pregnant woman, lying on the ground.  It now looks like this:

I'm kind of proud of the lettering, which looks like a Wanted poster from the Old West.  Unfortunately, the pregnant woman looks like she's been amputated at the hips, which is really peculiar.  I guess more work is needed...

[To be continued ...]

Kay