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 as 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

'Little John Finds a Friend' Gets a New Cover

Well, that's it, in a nutshell!

I'm still tinkering with it, but here it is:

I still need to insert the copyright notice, but it will be done soon.

'Lalitha' (_Helen and Lalitha: The Lost Years_) is Repaired

Smashwords had been telling me, for a little over a year, that Helen and Lalitha had problems.  Now, a lot of my stories have problems, but what Smashwords considers to be a problem, and what I consider to be a problem are completely different things, so I tend to ignore it when SW raises these red flags.

But, as you are aware is one of my failings, I tend to read my own stories repeatedly (because, of course, I think they're so amazingly awesome).  Pretty soon I learned that, well, there was indeed something that needed to be fixed in, of all things, the Table of Contents of Lalitha. If the TOC were good, at the bottom of my e-reader there would be a white line, with irregularly spaced tickmarks across it, the chapters.  But the tickmarks of Lalitha were a cluster at the beginning, and then just one in the middle.  So I got into the manuscript, and painstakingly chopped out the TOC, and re-constructed it carefully.  (Having done similar things to a couple of other books, I have got it down to a fine art.)

The book was uploaded, and it is "on sale" for free.  (I know; that doesn't make any sense.)  But, honestly, Lalitha is one of the best-written of the Helen stories.  By which I mean, when I sucked a chunk of the story out of the Helen monster manuscript, and cleaned it up, and removed all the irrelevant paragraphs, it was one of the most successful results of the process.  On the Run was a little less successful, but I love it, like a mother loves an idiot child.  The order of the series is:

1: Helen, Cindy, Pat, Lisa, and the Violin

2: Helen at Ballet Camp

3: Helen and Lalitha---The Lost Years

4: Helen on the Run---The Lost Years

4.5: Helen at Westfield

5: Helen and Sharon

6: Helen at the Beach

7: Helen and the Flower Shop Girl

8: Helen and Handel's Messiah

9: Helen's Concerto

I should really re-number these.  For instance, Flower-Shop Girl is rather an independent episode, whereas Westfield describes Helen's relationship with Rain, who was an important influence on Helen.  There is another episode that sort of takes place at Westfield, before filming for the "Pelican Movies" takes place.

OK, happy reading!

Kay

New 'Helen' Story Under Construction

Dear Readers,

I was reading out of the enormous file, called Helen, from which all the Helen stories have been extracted, and I realized just how much I had stripped out of it, before re-forming the episodes into Helen at Westfield, and so on.

By now, people have read as much as they can stand from those books.  A very few determined readers have sprung for the nominal cost for those books; most new readers just download Yraid, which I have to admit has a lot of charm.  But some of the incidents and accidents that make the characters in the Helen story three-dimensional have been ripped out.  This is partly because some of those stories are sort of irrelevant to the main thrust of the overall plot.  But they are also partly because they reveal these characters to be somewhat less high-minded than I wanted them to be, as occupying the world in which Helen, the person, has been placed.  So my plan is to write a collection of vignettes, called Helen Out-takes, or something on those lines, and put it up on Smashwords. If I do, I will either make it free, or price it at 99 cents, like most of the other books.  Remember: I'm not a professional author, and don't depend on your payment for my livelihood.  If you manage to steal copies of these books from your buddies, I really don't mind; except, of course, I would never know the actual number of people who have bought the books (and hopefully read them).

Chronologically, these stories will take place after Helen returns from Hollywood, and go on from there.

For those of my readers who are wondering whether I'm still babysitting the house with all the animals: no; I'm back home, where I live.  The people for whom I was house-sitting have been back for close to a month; and I said my fond farewells to the fur-babies, giving them as much loving as they could stand, and left before my friends arrived back.  I did not want to deal with any viruses they were bringing back from parts unknown, though I believe they're as careful---or more careful---than almost anybody else I know.

OK, back to work.

Kay