For the longest time, I felt a little embarrassed about revealing too much about these things, because I felt that my anonymity was sort of fragile; would people recognize me from what I said?  Now it is clear that few if any readers have identified me, and the few who have aren't confronting me with it.  Anyway, as time goes on, I don't really care; I'd love to be able to be out and proud of my achievements (even if my fiction isn't as great how as some other stories I have read).

Just last night I was reading something from Concerto*, and I was thinking how much I loved Helen Nordstrom.  Actually, it was the love for Helen that drove me to make the manuscript publishable in the first place.  Once it was published, I began to believe that Helen was not an easy person to love.  She was so focused on music, that ordinary readers--that is, those who were not as crazy about music as I was--would find Helen boring.  Well, I have done as much as I'm going to do to make her approachable; and now it's up to her. 

In the earliest (Helen) story, she was an innocent, naive kid of 15 (a little too young to be attending College, I know, now that I've taught college for a couple of years), who had fallen head over heels for Janet.  Once she got to college, she gradually began to notice other girls.  At first, she related better to kids younger than herself, as she was an assistant to Janet on the weekends, for when Janet conducted a summer tennis clinic. 

After a while, she made friends with Leila, a young dancer in Florida, and their Relationship became physical; the first physical relationship outside Janet.  

The following year, Helen began to form physical relationships with several girls, which Leila could not tolerate, and I thought that this wasn't a good thing.  Then came Lalitha, a freshman from India, and that relationship became very serious, and lasted over twelve years, through amnesia, and adopting Gena and Alison.

Once Helen was in graduate school, her sexual adventures became a little embarrassing to me. I was torn between writing a permissive, promiscuous lifestyle for Helen, and a more restrained one that I could really get behind.  This brings us to Westfield, where Helen battles her instinct to give physical comfort to girls whom she likes, or loves, and a more responsible conduct, suitable to a sedate college professor.  Still,  Helen winds up setting up a menage a trois, which I thought the plot needed, but I was embarrassed more than before.  This promiscuous behavior comes to a head in the summer of Helen's second year at Westfield, and then the Press turns on her, Helen has a terrible accident, and announces her retirement.  At this time, I felt more sorrowful about Helen than admiring.  The outrage in the story was over trivial things; Helen was behaving moderately well.