Galactic Voyager

I had never noticed before how pompous that title sounded!  Most scifi titles do tend to be a little on the grandiose side.  Not really grandiose; impressive, really.  SciFi aficionados wouldn't notice anything that wasn't on an impressive scale!

I still remember writing this story—again, in chunks—but I specifically remember introducing the character of Lena!  I love kids, and Lena is one of the children whom I adored the most.  (Lena and Summer were created together, and they're both wonderful characters.  If I were a good artist, I'd try to draw Summer; Lena is a little too much of a perfect child, but Summer, I should be able to manage.  She was a thin-ish, shapeless kid, always dressed in a TShirt, and jeans and a jeans jacket, grey eyes, dirty blonde, blonde eyebrows that disappeared into her bangs, a short bob hairstyle.)

Helen started a choir on the ship.  Over the winter break (they created winter on the ship, by reducing the number of hours the heating and lighting was on) they were rehearsing choral numbers in the early morning.  Here's a paragraph describing it:

Summer was in the chorus, though Lena had been deemed a little too young to take the grueling schedule of rehearsals. She didn’t care; she sang along softly as she waited for her friend, all arms and legs and hair. Her hair was long now, a chestnut mane of straight, silky stuff that everyone loved to play with. Little girls often braided it and re-braided it, while Lena blissfully sang.

The words blissfully sang just puts me back into a special place in my mind, where I was when I was writing this chapter; I think I had just realized what a marvelous creation Lena was.  I could not have imagined how her character would develop; Helen and Lena are both major strands in the story.

So is Summer; so is Lena's mother, Daisy, and so are Sheila Connors, and her family!

If any of you had tried to read the story, but been discouraged by the introduction, go find the place where Helen is revived, and start reading there; I give you full permission!

Kay Kay, Kay.

Flowershop Girl

She's once again running away with the statistics (which means 'stats').  I'm going to put on a nominal charge for it. 

Kay

Serious Aspects of the Helen Story Sequence

Of course, the musical parts of the Helen stories are serious; in fact the whole story is serious.  In each story, though—and I didn't set out to have it turn out this way, trust me—Helen slowly matures.  I had noticed that Helen was a big baby, in the earlier stories, and tried to get her to be more responsible, and somehow it turned out that in each story, Helen was painfully learning to join the dots, and to take pleasure in the happiness of the people around her. 

I recently wrote a blog post over on the other blog ('Don't wait for the Movie') on the subject of adulting, and there were lots of references to the Helen stories, so I thought I may as well sort of cross-post that post over here.

Its title is Adulting.

K H B

Just Keeping in Touch

Actually, a lot happened today, most importantly, I watched the Barbie movie!  I have to let that sink in some, so I'll give you my take on it tomorrow. 

I was at my friend's just at meal time again, so I got to feed the pets!  The dogs were cute, as always, but the kitten was just so perfect!!!  There's nothing fancy, you know; you serve the food out, and the dogs just inhale it.  But the cat just slowly and deliberately eats it, but it's super cute!  Oh man; whoever invented cats needs to get some sort of reward!

Well, that's the other thing; the only pets that I noticed in 'Barbieland' were horses!  How stupid is that?  I suppose Mattel never made Barbie kittens, then?

See you tomorrow!

K

Sheila

Just read Flowershop Girl.  Somehow, I had deleted my own copy, so I had to (1) set the price to 0, (2) go back on the Smashwords website, (3) actually buy the story—which should have been free to me, as the author— (4) download it, and read it.  There's one more step: (5) set the price to what it was.  I'll do it tomorrow!

Sheila, the Flowershop Girl, is just such a 💓!  (What's that emoji?  I should read all the available emoji research ...)  In addition to Sheila and Helen, the story also colors in Lorna's personality a lot!

Kay.

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