Queenie

Hi, I'm Kimberly Steele. Queenie is an alter-ego I invented for myself. She's an outcast geisha. Like me, she is half-Japanese and half-Caucasian. I imagine Queenie to have the decadent existence of a belle epoque courtesan. She enjoys the freedoms that I, had I come of age in the Victorian era, never would have permitted myself. She is not attached to any one man--instead she inhabits a half-world of display and extravagance. Queenie could never be a real geisha in old or even modern Japan, she would be seen as a mongrel and an impersonator.
I don't consider myself a musician as I don't perform live. I do write a lot of tunes. I have been obsessed with melody and harmony though; obsessed enough to obtain my degree in Music Theory. I have become a recording artist by default. In 2001, I produced a self-recorded album (in a closet!) called QUEENIE. There was some label interest in QUEENIE but it was MP3.com and other digital music broadcasters that helped the songs from QUEENIE become about as popular as they could be for a badly recorded amateur album. Luckily, people were awesome enough to listen to the songwriting and not the recording per se.
2004-2006 was a very dark chapter in my life that I do not look back upon fondly. For reasons that I'll explain only if you ask me directly, I was holed up in a century old house without a computer. I'll be dead before I'm ever bored, so I literally took pen to paper and scribbled my first novel, Forever Fifteen, in a series of notebooks by hand in the span of about a year. I released my novel as a free audiobook around the year 2006: it was the first free vampire novel on the internet. It did very well, winning recognition, awards, and best and most important of all, readers. It is these readers who have given me the confidence to pursue writing more novels and to express my inner darkness.
Wanting to keep in touch with music led me to release UNTOUCHED, a live album of songs that was my last live performance. UNTOUCHED was recorded on a small stage in 2006.
The Dream of Flight was completed in the year 2010. It is my first foray into more complex, electronic orchestra sounds. Much of the Dream of Flight was inspired by my dreams. I have mostly bad dreams ranging from mildly unpleasant chase scene to horrific diabolical nightmare, I would say 75 percent are bad. The good ones are very memorable, probably because they are rare! The good dreams are usually flying dreams. All of my dreams reoccur: it's been that way since I was a baby. The Dream of Flight is what I would consider a concept album. There's a story behind it: a young girl is abandoned by her social-climbing mother and forced to go to a school in remote northern Japan. The girl, Quin, dreams herself into an alternate reality where she is tortured by ghosts but also seduced by an ancient tale of epic Japan that probably originates from her own mind's desire to escape. Queenie the courtesan lives in a little corner of Quin's dream world. Meanwhile, Quin's mother's obsession with perfection turns her into a monster: she was already ruthless but she loses her soul somewhere along the way too, and there are some things, once sold, that can never be bought back.
I'd love to hear from any and all listeners out there. I delight in hearing from you whether it is feedback about my fiction or music or just to chat. This is probably sad to some but I enjoy a nice Friday night at home in flannel pajamas sitting in front of a computer far more than any other Friday night activity. The computer is where all you fun people live; I'd rather live vicariously anyhow, it seems to suit my appetite for mild-mannered non-adventure. Please write or join me through my various social tentacles, I look forward to hearing from you.
http://queeniemusic.com
http://foreverfifteen.com
http://facebook.com/kimberlysteele
http://facebook.com/queeniemusic
http://twitter.com/queeniemusic
queenie@queeniemusic.com
ksteelestudio@gmail.com