As you know, Kay Hemlock Brown is merely a pseudonym I dreamed up, to protect my privacy, back when I was a seriously closet writer!  So I have to make up enough detail about my life to satisfy the curiosity of my readers, as well as to provide a foundation for my fiction.  (Fiction written by someone about whom you know nothing at all is strangely unsatisfying, and somehow distressing.)  As for my age, if I was a teenager when I started writing the Helen Story around the year 2000, I must be at least in my thirties now.  (I'm much older.  But, judging from what I say and write, you have to agree that I am distressingly youthful, or even child-like.)

But I cannot turn my back on the fact that, ever since COVID, my life has been very unsatisfactory, and meanwhile, I have been unable to write at all.  I have begun a number of projects, and not gotten anywhere with any of them.  When I go back and read them, I actually forget my plans for them, because, of course, I don't plot them out, like Jane Rowling; I let the stories steer themselves.  But now, maybe I'm going to either have to plot the stories out, or give up writing.

To make things worse, I have been unable to get rid of the feeling that our world is in the charge of some very unimaginative and heartless people.  There are some decent folk who are trying their best, but I'm beginning to fear for their ability to advance their agendas, and worse, I'm beginning to fear for their lives.  For those who believe in God, it is easy to leave things to him (or her), and trust to his (or her) goodness.  But for me, I need to do something about it.  (I don't want to get too political about it, but I firmly believe that, this mid-term elections, if we leave matters to go, as usual, to the party in the opposition, it is going to go very badly for us; the Democrats have to get out the vote like never before.)  I do not believe in gun ownership.  Unfortunately, though, some of the people who are arraigned against us do believe in armed opposition, and the Constitution permits the ownership of guns.  What will happen, if they are convinced that they can never get the votes to get what they want through legitimate means?

To turn to something completely different, I have occasionally been reading about what is happening at the Olympics in Japan, and I stumbled upon a video clip of our gymnasts in action.  Of course, there was Simone Biles, doing unbelievable things while in the air.  But more interestingly, there were several seconds of Sunisa Lee, whose forte is the uneven bars, and I was stunned.  I wrote some time ago that I had started a story that was inspired by the legend of Sleeping Beauty, where instead of a princess and a prince, there were two princesses.  This is not a novel idea; I myself have read stories that go that way.  But, as I watched Sunisa Lee in action, I felt as if one of these characters had been actually brought to life!

Well, I can't elaborate further without embarrassing myself; a person in my situation can easily be thrown off-balance by the slightest thing, butd I'm sure I'm stable enough to return to equilibrium.  (This is one of the weaknesses of Yraid, where you would expect that the main character, Aggie, could have been shown to be extremely vulnerable, and you would have wondered why I did not take the opportunity to explore the psychological aspects of a girl who essentially has hardly anyone in whom to confide, and no one off whom she could bounce her feelings of being torn about her loneliness, and her broken family.  Initially, I wanted her to have these bad moments, but not to confess them in the story; after all, once I created her character, I had to be consistent about her, and she was essentially not someone who would bare her soul.)  I had conceived of both the characters---in the Sleeping Beauty story---as being serious girls, only occasionally laughing when one or the other noticed something as funny, and shared it with the other.  Sex and desire are serious things, especially when you're young, and I just couldn't approach their relationship in a lighthearted way.

In the bit of the story I have written so far, the girls have just met, in a meadow some distance from the hut in which Beauty (not her name in the story) lives with her three fairy godmothers, and where the other princess has run away from home, and is enjoying her freedom, running about, and practicing the sword.  Some problems that I have yet to solve are: how much sex is there going to be?  Is there going to be any magic?  (There has to be, since the fundamental problem the story tries to solve is magical in its very nature.)  The newcomer princess is a warlike person: a swordswoman, an archer, and a rider.  One of the first things she does is to kill a doe, and skin it, roast it, and eat it.  Is Beauty going to be able to persuade the newcomer to not kill animals for food?  Meanwhile, all the forest creatures who are Beauty's friends are appaled and aggrieved.  Though Beauty talks to them incessantly, and they mostly understand what she is saying, she cannot understand them.

(This post is getting me interested in this project again!)

Kay