What Helen Looks Like!

From the time I first began writing the Helen story, and Helen was a very young college freshman, I had a mental image of her.  She looked a little defensive, very vulnerable, reserved, determined, frightened.  Of course she had all that incredible curly hair, like spun gold, as I wrote in the first few paragraphs of the story.  She was a fantastical character, an almost elfin child; and—similarly with many of the characters that teenagers create—she had piercings and fetishistic details (I just read that that word means something different than what I intended, but there just isn't a better word) such as little details of her underwear—which are hardly worth going into now!

As time goes on, and Helen absorbs and acquires amazing things from her friends and the people around her, the defensiveness disappears; the vulnerability is greatly reduced, the reserve goes away to some degree.  The slight build rapidly gives way to a tall, willowy girl, who puts on muscle with her athletic activities.  As she begins to practice martial arts with her teen lover, Leila (the child of a nightclub owner in Florida, who had become an adept in the martial arts at the tender age of twelve, and killed a man already at that age, while defending her mother from a rapist), and the two girls go on reckless adventures that involve fighting, I imagined Helen becoming stronger and more confident.

After a year away from College, living in the Wilds of Canada (I don't really know whether there even are wilds in Canada; to me Canada is a place where anything could happen, and does!) hunting and farming for food, Helen returns to complete her B.A., after which she follows the lovely Indian girl, Lalitha, to India; is kept away from Lalitha by the latter's father, and later her husband; spends a few months as a custodian in a rural school; begins to have trouble with her memory, and lives for a decade in a poor Indian Roman Catholic commune, where she gradually forgets her identity, and begins to be called Sister Mary.

She has medical problems—a brain tumor—to treat which she is sent back to the US, where by a coincidence she is identified, and returned to her family.  By this time, she is physically an adult, and the years in India finish the work of making her body type essentially inherited from her Norwegian father, John Nordstrom.  She is tall and rangy, and the curly blonde hair is all from Daddy Nordstrom.  But her face has a certain sweetness, which is inherited from her one Finnish grandmother, Grandma Kuikkonen, on whom I did not bestow a first name!  Finns Helen meets seem to see a fellow-Finn in Helen, and she also has a quarter Swedish ancestry, but Helen is physically mostly Norwegian.

Covers
All this has a bearing, of course, when it comes to creating covers for the Helen stories.  On one hand, it is a mistake to represent characters too closely on book covers, because ultimately the most dedicated readers have their own mental image of a character, and a cover representation that conflicts with their mental image becomes a stumbling-block—to some readers.  On the other hand, it is good to have what is called a reference on which to base different covers, so that they plausibly look like the same person, doing different things, or at different times and ages.

Helen Nordstrom, by Halchroma
Copyright (c) 2019

On DeviantArt, the website that I joined with the main objective of acquiring artwork for these covers, they have the concept of the original character, OC, which is precisely what I have been trying to describe.  For the younger members, it means some fantastic superhero, where they describe the powers and the characteristics of their original character, the fights that he or she is likely to win, the personality traits, the costumes, etc!  [Added later: this is all used when these characters are used for computer / video games.  The character becomes a game piece and the player is given a list of the properties of the so-called playable character, and it interacts with other playable characters, with randomized outside objects thrown in.]

So I selected an artist who seemed promising, and asked her whether she would consider collaborating in creating the original character of Helen Nordstrom.  And just yesterday, she delivered (of course there was a certain amount of going back and forth) something that was stunningly convincing!  Except for the fact that Helen has much more curly hair than this image has, still, within the errors permissible in hand-painted art, this piece is wonderful!  I just had to share.  (I have asked the lady to try to modify the piece to depict even curlier hair.  Nevertheless, if you think about it, a true blond with straight hair usually seems to have thin hair.  The curlier it is, the more body it appears to have, and the body of the hair in this picture is certainly appropriate to curly hair.

This is Helen about the time at which she was teaching at Westfield College (Helen & Sharon), and occasionally conducting.  At this time, she was about 35, but according to the story, her mental age was about 25.  That is something that I would have had to do a lot of fast talking to convince an artist about, because a typical artist isn't very concerned with subtleties of personality, or the detailed medical history of a character, which might result in a trait that is largely invisible.  [Or perceived to be invisible.  In Helen's case, her friends believe---with me--that Helen's facial expression shows that in her mind she's about a decade younger than she actually is.]

But isn't it wonderful?!  If this artist were to achieve the success and fame that is promised by this piece of work, I would be inordinately proud to be able to show this early work!

Kay

Helen's Concerto Is Being Downloaded!

I shouldn't get so excited about this, but according to the Smashwords records, 109 copies of Concerto have been downloaded already, and probably at least partially read!

The unfortunate part---as those of you who have read at least a few pages of Concerto would know already---is that that early part isn't very exciting, and readers are not likely to keep reading, unless they already know enough about the Helen story to do so.  And there is no surprise ending; there is no sex worth speaking of, and---there; I've probably knocked a hole in my own boat right there---this story is not chick lit at its best.  I do get the impression that this is exactly what chick-lit is supposed to be, but that it is really terrible chick-lit, because there are so few guys featured in the story.

OK; just to make this post informative, let's mention all the males that I can remember who appear in the Helen stories:

John Nordstrom, Helen's father.  He's an ultra-quiet father figure, not based on anyone I know!
Tom Krebs, Janet's father, and Old Elly's husband.  He is a sweet guy, and (in contrast to John Nordstrom) is based on practically all the older gentlemen in my family.
Jason Kolb, Janet's husband.  I tried to make him a believable character, but for reasons of brevity, all the Jason material has been ripped out (sad face); and there really isn't any reason to put them back in.  Jason is a sweetheart.
Richard Wallace, Ph.D., Pat's husband, and Lisa's dad.  He's the President of Helen's college, but dies in the year she takes off from college.
William Knowlden (Geppetto), the instrument-maker, who is instrumental in Helen's career taking off.
John Nordstrom Jr, Helen's half-brother, generally referred to as Little John.  A goofy guy, who committed some indiscretion that really, really pissed off Helen.  The fact that she was upset is recorded in the files, but what caused it is completely forgotten.  I really should remove all traces of the supposed animosity between the half-siblings.  John ends up being quite a charming guy, and Gena has a small crush on him.
Suresh, Lalitha's son.  All I have said about him was that he was quite bright, clever in the way of engineers, generally; very shy, devoted to his crazy wife, Trish, and the father of little Megan Grace, who has some cognitive disability that is not spelled out.  (Megan Grace loves everybody, if that is a disability.)
Jeffrey Gibson.  He has a Master's degree in music, and is a capable keyboard musician, and a music educator.  He is the father of James Nordstrom Gibson, Helen's baby boy, and the son of Olive and Walter Gibson.
Bert Frederickson, D.Ed, how could I forget?  Principal of Ferguson School, who gives Helen a job when she is horribly pregnant, and on the run.
Lord George Woodford.  He's Rain's dad.  Most of the material having to do with him is gone; I wish it wasn't!  He's a sweet old boy.
Matt Brooks, the brother of Maryssa, and the son of Diane Elman Brooks, the famous  portrait photographer.
Marcus Gustavson, a guy Gena meets at the beach.  He likes Gena and Kristen so much, he transfers to their school.
David Powers, DVM, the veterinary surgeon, and father of little Ruth Powers, and husband of Dr. Amy Salvatori.
Joe, driver and security man for Galaxy Studios, and ultra-loyal Helen fan.
James John Jeffrey Nordstrom Gibson.  This long name was intended entirely in fun; the little guy isn't pompous in the least!  This is the price Helen pays for not taking the Gibson name, and marrying Jeffrey!  But Jeffrey and Barbara are a good pair, even though I don't give Barb a lot of time in the stories.  She basically lives entirely in On The Run.

Hmm.  Well, that's a lot of guys, I must admit, but compared to the women in the story, they're fewer, and unimportant.

I wish there was some way you readers could write to me!  (There has to be; at least one reader wrote to me, but I have no clue how they managed it!  It was done so that I did not receive their e-mail, so there must be some mechanism in Blogger than permits people to write privately to the blog owner.)

Kay

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