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

Music Education

In the heat of the recent events, I lost sight of one of my most important hobby-horses: music education.  My main heroine, Helen Nordstrom, is a professor of music at a (fictitious) Pennsylvania college.  She discovered a wonderful contralto (a mezzo-soprano, actually) on CD, and one Christmas, had been surprised to find herself on the same stage as this woman, Natalia Zemanova, a Czech settled in Paris.  Helen and Natasha become firm friends.  It just so happens that Natasha agrees to sing in a major musical event that Helen has mounted at her school: the Saint Matthew Passion, in which Natasha is singing contralto, and Helen is conducting (to the disappointment of Natasha, who wants Helen to give up this silly conducting, and sing.)

Anyway, during the days preceding the big performance, Natasha finds time to sit in on the classes of Helen and her friends.  Here are a few paragraphs from this episode.

Helen’s class was a revelation.  What Natasha had learned with diligence and hard work at the conservatory in Prague, Helen made simple for these youths.  They took it for granted that the material would be easy, and occasionally complained when it wasn’t obviously so.  In each instance, with infinite patience Helen questioned the student until the idea was clear.  She used the piano, recordings, the chalkboard, everything at her disposal, and by the end of the hour, had convinced the class of the easiness of what she was trying to convey.

Afterwards she confessed that it had been a harder day than usual.
“You work so hard!” said Natasha sympathetically.  “In my conservatory, they would discourage the less talented ones.”  She smiled.  “If you had to teach my classmates and me, it would have been easy for you!”
Helen laughed.  “But out of these unresponsive, complaining lumps of rock will come musicians, parents of musicians, congressmen, senators, voters . . . I need every one of them!  In this country, Tasha, Music can afford no enemies.”

And so it is with everything we teach.  This is why some teachers seem to think that their lives depend on the work they do.  The teacher is the invisible part of the larger picture, the part that everyone loves to vilify.

Kay

Wrapping Up This Election

I'm sure the chapter of the election of 2016 is not closed, but I do need to bring some sort of closure to my blogging about it.

There were many dimensions to the candidacy of Donald Trump: economic issues--people, it seems, were more eager to have lower taxes than to support a liberal economy, with support for the poor, and concern for the environment; cultural and social issues--a large majority of voters, including women, were less anxious about the empowerment of women, and rights for minorities than the rest of us thought.  Educational issues--it appears that Trump supporters were more angry about the leadership of the educated elite than the supporters of Hillary Clinton were anxious that the White House should get into the hands of the most ignorant among the conservatives.

As could have been expected, my friends on social media have struggled to deal with the outcome of the election, and are working out their anger in vicious posts that predict awful things in the days to come.  I, for one, am done with prediction.  What we haven't seen is the Elephant Bubble in the room.  It isn't a bubble, really; it is an enormous sound-proof blanket, separating those who have internalized the lessons of a decade, what we think of as altruism: coming to the aid of the poor and the powerless, trying to look at the world through the eyes of those who live outside the US, and even the eyes of Nature, if that makes any sense.  We thought of the Planet as a dumb being, grinding away according to the laws of physics and chemistry, but how can it be an uncaring, mechanical thing, if it is, as we suspect, the only astronomical object that is home to life?  It seems to me that the Earth watches in horror, as it sees life slipping away.

On the other side of our blanket, we see ignorant businessmen, who are more focused on such immediate things as cheap energy and gasoline, rather than the long-term goods such as renewable energy, cutting back on global warming, and slowing or reversing the pollution of the water and the oceans.  They probably do recognize that the environment is being destroyed, but dismiss the alarms raised by scientists as exaggeration, stemming from the greed for publicity that they have come to think of scientists as being addicted to.  Since that's more convenient for them to believe, that's what they believe.

But the social, cultural divide is the most heartbreaking.  For whatever reason (and probably not a calculated one) the Trump camp has settled on xenophobia and racism as their philosophical basis.  That has all been a secondary issue for Republicans for many years; something quietly trotted out in private at election time, as we saw in that Romney video of 2012.  But it has become a signature plank in the Trump platform, and as such, conservatives, especially the very young, dragged along with their elders, feel obliged to subscribe to that poisonous attitude.  I see it even in my students; they're practicing glaring at their foreign classmates, their minority friends and former friends.  Their looks seem to say: I have nothing against you personally, but it looks very much as though you had better keep a low profile in the future.  The conservatives probably have no inkling that this formal racial hostility is tearing white youth apart.  Or perhaps they do, and believe that it is a lesson young whites have to learn: to keep non-white, non-straight, non-American human beings at arm's length.  There are many who do not buy into it, but soon their stand is going to seem heroic.

There is a small chance that Trump was only play-acting about his xenophobia, or perhaps he was so troubled by the turbulence and violence in the Levant that he snapped, and decided to become hostile to everyone who was not just as White as he was.

Across the US, institutions of higher education are announcing their manifestos, informing their students that these colleges and universities shall be safe havens for minorities of all sorts: ethnic, sexual, political, and economic.  It used to be that American institutions had to spearhead sanctions against foreign nations whose policies were discriminatory against minorities and women.  But now, foreign banks and organizations are pulling out support for companies that are riding rough-shod over Native Americans.  Good for them.

So, dear readers, if you can bear to do it, I suppose this is the time for us to show how much decency and goodness we have in us, if we have any left!  The young people around us must see that all goodness is not gone forever.  In Alexandra, I portrayed an invasion of a country by a neighbor.  The invasion runs into trouble, and the enemy military leadership changes hands many times as they encounter obstacles, until finally an ambitious young woman accepts the reins of power (of the invading nation).  She takes into her service a woman who she discovers is a spy.  Out of fear, but still reluctant to give up the beautiful servant, she cripples her, and continues to use her sexually.  But the time comes when the general confesses to her crippled lover that she must give up the war, before all beauty is gone from her land forever.  Any fool can fight for wealth, for natural resources, for access to seaports, trade routes, the sorts of things that invasions sought to obtain for the invaders in centuries gone by.  But to fight for the health of the planet, for a good life for all people, for beauty: these are things that are new.  But they are good things.  And it is a different kind of fighting.

Kay

The Lost Years

As you might remember, I have an embarrassing habit of reading and re-reading the stuff I have written--the stories, I mean--and I just started reading Helen and Lalitha: The Lost Years.  For anyone not familiar with this: some episodes of the Helen story got mislaid in various computers, and I reconstructed them from memory; hence the "Lost Years" description.  Lalitha is an Indian girl who was a freshman at Helen's college in Helen's senior year.

I'm going to edit and correct this episode, so if any of you own it, you can download the the edited version for free once I'm done with the cleaning up.  I would like to mention that there is a significant chunk of the story set in rural India, for those of you who're interested in travel abroad!  And the story describes how Helen came to adopt Gena and Alison.

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