Update On an Update!

Dear readers, and fans and stuff like that:

The other day, I happened to get myself Adobe Digital Editions, which is (as far as I know) just another ebook reader.  To my horror, the book I had chosen to read—Helen and Lalitha—had random paragraphs in boldface!!!  This was beyond horrible; I hate when that sort of unexpected thing happens.

I hurried to check the original Word file, and there was nothing that could have caused this peculiar effect.  Either I had noticed this problem and proceeded to fix it, and then forgotten about it, or ... I don’t even know what else it could be.  Now that I'm charging 99 whole cents for this book, it behooves me (word of the month) to give readers as error-free a book as possible.

Not just that book, but all  of the books need to be repaired in one way or another.  But, for some reason, maybe from staying indoors too long, my energy level is way way down, and I only sit at my computer about once a week, so at this rate, it will take the whole year, or a big chunk of it, to get all the books fixed up.

OK, here I go, to link to this post on Don’t Wait For The Movie!

Stay safe, and try to stay home,

Kay.

My First Experience of Helene Grimaud

I was idly cruising around on YouTube (having been fed an enormous lunch by some friends who were visiting me sort of illegally.  These are the people with whom I visit whenever I visit, so we're all going to get sick together, or we're not going to get sick.)

Anyway, a link attracted my attention, it was a Brahms piano sonata, played by Helene Grimaud.  (There are some accents I must add to her name; I don't know enough French to do it on my own, I must go check the spelling somewhere.)  So I clicked, and---I was listening through headphones, because at least one other person was also on their phones, listening to something or other---and my socks were completely knocked off!

I have never been much of a pianist; I can play just enough to entertain myself.  And I had seen Brahms music lying around the house of my music teacher, and---can you believe it?---it is written in three lines!  I'm going to find an image of Brahms piano music and put it on the side here.  Playing piano music on three staves is just insane.  But, oh my goodness, not only was it amazing, she was just beautiful.  She had cut her hair short, for this video, and ... well, if I were a pianist, I would want to look exactly like her.

Unfortunately, I have bought into the long-hair philosophy; sooner or later I shall have to get rid of it, and begin to look hip, even if I'm not actually hip.

Then, I stumbled on this cover of a song by David Byrne, by a young musician whose name is Joshua Turner: https://youtu.be/ROOmeQHf6dA

He says that it's all live, but you can't overlay tracks like this unless some of them are recordings.

Now I like David Byrne, and Brahms piano sonatas!  I think the secret to living fully is knowing what to click on!!!

Kay Hemlock Brown

News and Updates

Well, the new cover for Helen On the Run, is now well known.  (I don't think the cover has enhanced sales very much!)  I think the demographic that these books are aimed at is somewhat economically disadvantaged, which would explain that the vast majority of those readers tend to download them only when they're free.  (jk; sarcasm alert: I've made no secret of the fact that I do not hold my breath waiting for sales.  But nor do I want my stories to be the lowest-hanging fruit on Smashwords, pricewise.)

Now that the dynasty of president #45 is drawing to a close, I can take up completing---or at least, continuing to write---the story of Helen's and Sita's life after the events of Concerto.

It isn't going to be quick, because each time I re-read what I've written, I'm seeing purple prose that really does not belong there, and doesn't move the story along!  Of course, what happens after a couple gets established is---well, purple prose, and all that.  But that doesn't mean that I have to put it down in black and white.  (I'm regretting the little that sneaked its way into Yraid, but if I took that out, there would be very little left.  In fact, I think I failed to describe exactly what attracted the two together, except minor details of physical appearance.  But sometimes, you know, Chemistry just can't be explained.)

Here is the image I used for my own copy of the ongoing Helen+Sita project.

Kay

Exciting News: 'On The Run' Will Get (has got) a New Cover Illustration!

Out of the several major episodes of Helen's story, only a few have the original Frankenstein covers left; our artist HALCHROMA has been steadily painting covers for them, one every couple of months.  (She puts all her requests in a queue, and now its my turn again.)

At the time I first uploaded these stories to Smashwords, I did not have any way to obtain satisfactory quality original art, and I had a really flexible piece of software that could do easily what Photoshop does, slowly and painfully.  So, I collected bits of images from everywhere, but mainly from old photographs, and sometimes advertisements, and often fragments of features of images, many of them from royalty-free sources, and so on.

The original cover for Helen On The Run: The Lost Years is at right.  At first, it was just an image of Helen in a hard hat, and looking ready to bang some nails into a stud or two.  Later, I added a background of a pregnant girl lying on a grassy meadow (something that never occurs in the story; pregnant Helen is teaching at a boarding school).  As you can see, Helen is wearing a reflective vest, something only highway workers wear, and HALCHROMA has agreed to take it off.

She showed me an image of Helen wearing a plain vest, with no reflector strips, but I requested for that to be removed, and a tool belt put in instead, and I'm waiting for her reply.  There are tool vests, which she may like better . . .

More later,

Kay

Helen, the Character

 After I had written the beginnings of the Helen story, until Lalitha happened along, I did not like the way Helen's character was developing.  I can't remember, but Lalitha had been introduced, I think, as a means whereby I could reform Helen's character, and present her as someone with at least a few saving graces.

But many of you know that I don't maintain close control over the stories; I allow them to have some sort of autonomous control over themselves, and it turned out that Helen had had amnesia and so on, and at this point, I actually left the story for a while.

I turned to Alexandra, and Jane.  Those two stories went in opposite directions; Alexandra in a serious direction (though it was superficially silly and childish, to begin with), and Jane in the direction of erotica.  But no sooner than I begin a project with the intention of making it, you know, sexy, I have second thoughts, and go in and strip out all the gratuitious sex.  (Obviously, a hyperactive superego, as they say.)

When these non-Helen stories began to work out really well, I looked at the Helen files, with great regret, because it seemed that I had lost a wonderful opportunity to write about a musician, and strayed into writing about a spoiled brat instead.  So, a year or so after the Helen story had been abandoned, and I had mostly forgotten how it went (or more accurately,  how it was supposed to go), I got this idea of writing a serious hard science fiction story.

In Science Fiction, hard science fiction is a genre in which only plausible extrapolations of known science takes place.  Soft science fiction is, in contrast, a genre where almost anything can happen, and the science is about mysterious things in the very distant future, that approach magical effects.  So, Music on the Galactic Voyager was a story--about Helen, just in case you were wondering--where I grab Helen out from around the time of Helen at Westfield, except that Erin and James have not yet come into the story.  (You should think about Voyager Helen as a different person altogether.)  This story gave me the opportunity of introducing a completely reformed, normal, well-behaved Helen, without all her over-the-top characteristics.  So, there are similarities between the two Helens, and differences.

Similarities:  Both Helens are musical geniuses; both can sing, both play the violin and the piano.  Both have well-developed libidos, and both are lesbians.  Both like to teach, and both are familiar with folk song, and both play the guitar.  Both have some skill in unarmed combat.

Both have diabetes; I think that must have been one of the last things that Helen discovered about herself, before she was abandoned by me (while I wrote Voyager).

Differences: The Helen of the Voyager has never had children.  She has never had amnesia.  She has had an unhappy affair with Lalitha, and with some other woman, I probably meant Anne, the ballerina with great allergies, or perhaps Lorna.

I have been reading Voyager, and I was struck with how serious the story was.  (Hard Sci Fi ends up being rather serious, because of the subject-matter, and because of the mindset of the authors, I believe.  Alexandra is also sci fi, but more as an alternate Earth, rather than a futuristic setting.  It is in the distant future, but not a dystopian one.)

Writing these stories enables me to be several different Kays; it is almost as if I have different personalities in each story.  Yraid is yet another new, crazy Kay.

Well, I have to go.

Kay

A Remarkable Aria

[This was originally posted to the Fiction From Kay Hemlock Brown blog, where it certainly makes sense to post it.  But it is all about Helen, so I'm also posting it here.]

A song—a classical aria, really—which is, in my mind, one of the pinnacles of Helen’s vocal performances, was a number from Handel’s Messiah, and unfortunately one that is not very well known outside the circles of die-hard Messiah fans.  It is featured in an episode in which Helen, who was deeply depressed at the time at her rejection from the circles of Baroque vocal music, and Baroque sacred vocal music, began to re-assess her own capabilities, and begin to believe in herself.  At the same time, Helen was beginning to realize how much Sita had come to love her.

The aria is: I know that my Redeemer liveth, a lovely aria, very long, very lightly accompanied, and to my mind, difficult for typical listeners to appreciate precisely because of its length, and the light accompaniment.  It has to be carried entirely by the soprano, because the accompaniment is so light.  

Back when I was a kid, and more Romantic adaptations of Messiah were still not in disrepute (as they were just a few years later), all these arias were accompanied by the full orchestra: flutes, clarinets, oboes, horns.  Wagner had shown how this could be done pianissimo—very softly—so that the vocal line was like an exquisite string of pearls on a velvet cushion.  But, to those who demanded authenticity, that was not the point; the original was only accompanied by the violins, and the lute or harpsichord, and the bass line (probably just a cello, or a couple of cellos).  That was all!  So we have the soprano singing for all she’s worth, supported only by violins and bass, and keyboard or lute.  (The Lute is basically just a guitar.)

There is yet another problem, namely the text.  The song is about physical resurrection, something that hardly anyone believes in.  Of all the things Christians believe in, and those of us who are CINOs—Christians In Name Only—this is the principle that is among the first to be rejected, together with the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection.  We may love Jesus, and we may follow his teachings as far as we can, because they are not easy; but we cannot bring ourselves to subscribe to the mythology.   I, for one, have never believed in those magical things that we were supposed to believe.  It is a tragedy that so many jettison the teachings of Jesus along with the mythology.

So when the soprano sings that she knows that Jesus is alive, I can imagine scores of listeners shutting off their ears to the words of the delusional librettist—the Apostle Paul, in this case—and trying to obtain satisfaction in the music alone, which is so difficult, given that the entire piece is so vehement in its message.  (Here is a performance  by Eileen Farrell that is more fully accompanied.  Do not try to imagine that, when Helen sings this tune, that it sounds like this; I imagine it quite differently.  Here is another performance.  Lynn Dawson can look beautiful while she sings, something that many sopranos cannot pull off!)

Helen, the character, was not created to be a philosopher.  The only instance where she tries to think about abstract things is this one, where she struggles with the text of this song.  All the rest of the time, she was thinking of the children, about music, about her teaching, and mostly about the people around her, especially if they were struggling with something or another.  I wanted Helen to be, above all, a compassionate woman, and to some extent, that was Helen’s only, or at least her principal, saving grace.

As I have written about before, there is an interesting episode that I have left out of all of the published Helen stories, because it is difficult to squeeze into them, timewise.  At first, I had her teaching at Westfield only for two years.  But now it appears that she would have to have taught there for at least three years, to have done all that I had written about; in which case, if I were to include another Westfield story, this episode could find a place there.

The story is briefly as follows.

Helen visits friends in Philadelphia, and returns to Westfield, to hear that one of her colleagues in the Math Department has been the victim of a hit-and-run incident.  There is some suspicion that one of his students was responsible, because evidently there was severe animosity between the victim, and the students in one of his classes.  The students are suspicious of each other, and the administration is at a loss as to how to complete the semester for them.

Someone happens to have told the President that Helen had a strong background in mathematics, and it ends up that they have Helen taking over the course.  (There are several reasons for this; one being that Helen had a very light teaching load, because she was being kept free to keep up a concert schedule.  Secondly, the Dean wanted someone special to take the course, because of the extraordinary circumstances, and he felt that Helen might succeed where most of the faculty might fail.)

Helen struggles as never before, and the students struggle, and bits and pieces of information emerge from the Police murder investigation, and the course is slipping downhill, but Helen, and a couple of students manage to salvage it, and it ends much better than anyone had any right to expect.  Eventually, Helen has to teach most of the students one-on-one.  One of the students is Angie Connors, who emerges as an important character in Helen’s Concerto.

As you can see, I was preoccupied with this aria, and I think I must go listen to it sung in a version from the sixties, when the authentic performance movement did not yet have a lock on Baroque performance as it had from the Seventies onward!  If I have interested a reader to listen to that aria, I would be delighted!

Kay Hemlock Brown

A New Cover for "Helen at Westfield"

Helen at Westfield was a story that had a lot of simple living packed into it.  Helen had got her first real full-time teaching job at a small four-year college, and I found myself presenting it as a lot of fun.

As anyone who has read any of the Helen books knows already, pretty girls just naturally gravitate towards Helen!  In this story, all the women who are prospective partners for Helen are people whom she meets legitimately; not one of them is a student.

Our artist HALCHROMA has done a bang-up job with the artwork, and is responsible for representing these characters fairly accurately.  I was torn between having her paint four generic women for the cover, versus representations closer to my mental image of them.  The problem is that, as most people agree, the images readers create for themselves are just as valid, if not more valid, and the more detailed the depiction of the characters in the illustrations, the more they could clash with those in the reader's imagination.