Introducing my tumblr

One thing a blog is not really great at is as a format for really short posts and a locus for community… Two things a blog is not great for are as a format for really short posts, a locus for community and a place to…

Among the things a blog is not really great for are (a) a format for really short posts, (b) a locus for interaction with a community, and (c) a place to chat.

I used to love Livejournal for all those things, but LJ is deserted these days. This blog on its own just doesn’t cut it. I find Twitter intensely tedious and Facebook intensely annoying and hard to use. I have therefore relocated on a day to day basis to Tumblr.

I would love to see and follow anyone with a tumblr over there. Let’s actually talk for a change, rather than me just lecturing (which is what it feels like, shouting into the void on this blog.)

I am at http://itsthebeecroft.tumblr.com/ I would love to see you there!

Blogging Labyrinth

It occurs to me that I have nothing pressing I need to blog about at the very same time as I am about to embark on writing a new thingy. Why not blog about a project while it is in progress? Well, if there is a reason, I imagine we’ll soon find out!

I’m in the acquisitive phase of writing at the moment. You can imagine me wandering around with a scoop on my head, shovelling the universe into me in hopes of sifting out inspiration. (Where ‘the universe’ = any book or post on the internet that takes my fancy, plus anything else.) A few weeks ago I started random Google searches on the Minoans and have ended up with a Pinterest full of appropriate pictures.

On a related note, let me complain at you over the lack of pictures of potential face-cast people with interesting faces. I don’t want my every character to look like a model. I want to be able to find pictures of people who make me go ‘ooh, look, I wonder what he’s thinking?’ or ‘ha! There’s a bloke who’s seen some interesting things in his time.’ Pretty is all very well, handsome is absolutely fine. I’m not knocking beauty, but I wish there was a bit more variety out there.

Which reminds me to find face casts for Maja and Jadikira before I start writing. At the moment I have no idea what they look like, and that doesn’t seem right.

Back to my main point, which is the acquisitive stage. At this point, I am taking in everything, finding ideas with puzzling edges and trying to fit them together in such a way as to make a picture, though there is no guiding box-lid to follow. I’m avoiding reading J.A Rock’s Minotaur because I am probably going to have a minotaur and I want it to be my own, but I’m thinking about werewolves and how a society deals with male violence – and how one deals with ones own rage – and that’s all getting knotted up together in a way I’m finding quite exciting.

At any rate, not a lot is talked about the acquisitive stage of writing. I don’t know – maybe not everyone has this stage? I always do, though. The first stage of writing anything, for me, is the insatiable need to find out more.

So if you have any obcure bits of minoan lore or books to recommend please toss them my way now, while I can’t get enough of the stuff! Thank you 🙂

Re-reading the Iliad

So my antagonists for the Cretan thing are early Homeric-era Greeks. It seemed sensible to re-read the Iliad for background. I remember loving the Odyssey in childhood, but being a little meh about the Iliad. However, a lifetime of gender studies, feminism, anthropology and introspection has left me practically unable to read it at all. My God what a bunch of entitled jerks the characters are! Why am I supposed to care? Let Zeus fucking raze the beaches and the city of Troy alike with lightning storms and let them all burn. (You can save Patroclus and Odysseus first though.)

Sheesh. These are our heroes?

I wonder if I dare re-read the Odyssey. I liked it at the time because it had monsters, and both Odysseus and Penelope were clever. That surely can’t have changed.

A conversation with KJ Charles and Joanna Chambers

As part of Queer Romance Month the three of us had an interesting chat about queer historical romance, and whether it must inevitably be depressing. Can there be a happy ending? With my usual forthrightness, I say ‘who’s talking about an ending? I want a happy continuance.’

http://www.likesbooks.com/blog/?p=17721

Punches the air

Yes! So, my father is in hospital awaiting a heart operation and I’m rushing up there every day to try to help him to understand what’s going on (he has dementia and doesn’t remember these things – which makes being in hospital a terrifying experience). Despite this, I have just finished Heart of Cygnus 5. Yes! 102,080 words of space-opera-y goodness in which the entire galaxy is about to find out that it was a bad idea to try to keep my middle-aged female space captain down.

Is she a late-blooming Mary Sue? Quite possibly. Do I care? I do not. It’s taken me this long to realize that I have a feminine side at all (because it’s a feminine side that wants to PUNCH DRAGONS.) And there are not that many of those kinds of female characters around, so why not?

Basically: Yes! I have finished a book! Now I can start planning the Minoan m/m thing I’ve got to do by March. I’m looking forward to that 🙂 Huzzah!

All my asexual agender people

I have a book recommendation for you!

I read this recently when I was not very well, and it made me cry in several places. On a basic level, it’s the story of the clan composer of a conquered people whose music has been taken without his permission by the court composer of the conquerors. He comes to court to protest the theft and ends up falling in love with the thief (and slowly coming to terms with the dominant culture.)

Recently, thanks to many reviews of my own stuff that went “cut down with the flowery language for crying out loud!” I’ve been pruning my own language back as far as it will go and learning to rely a bit more on a surprising metaphor or two. So it took me a while to get back into the sheer gorgeousness of the language of this. But the gorgeousness is in place and apt for a story that deals with the intricacies of a court setting whose intricacy and studied beauty reminds me of Imperial Japan.

Once you get into the flow of it again, you find you’ve been slowed down enough to start appreciating all the questions of culture and colonialism the book takes on in the middle of a love story.

I’m not doing this justice! I’m trying to be all intellectual about it and I shouldn’t, because what I really loved about it was that it’s a story set in a culture of people with men, women, hermaphrodites and neuters, and although the love story is between a man (Amet) and a Third (Dancer) – a hermaphrodite – it’s a poly relationship, because the Third is already in a sexless relationship of intimacy and love with a Fourth (Always Falling) – a neuter. And throughout the book, the relationship with Always Falling is acknowledged as equally important to Dancer, if not more so, than the love story, and it’s clear that Always Falling is not going to be usurped, squashed out or forgotten. It’s clear that unless they are fully involved with the relationship, there will not be a happy ending.

The last time I read a book where I felt that there was a character who I could latch onto as being like me was The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin. And that was Therem Harth rem ir Estraven – a person who was fully gender neutral and sexless about 90% of the time. I feel very fortunate that I’ve now met Always Falling, and that they are written by an author who can handle language with as much beauty as LeGuin and who simply *gets* them – gets their integrity and importance as a human being in a way even LeGuin didn’t.

I’m so delighted to hear that the next book is the love story between Amet and Always Falling! I’ll be getting that one on the day it’s out.

Basically, this is not a well put together review. What I’m trying to say is that if you are agender and asexual, and you’re thirsty for representation, and you’ve never (or rarely) seen anything like yourself in any form of media, this book not only gives you representation but also does it in a work of great beauty. It could not be better!

(Though as a niggling little point, I don’t personally like ‘it’ as a pronoun. I’d have rather had ‘them’ or ‘ze’ or something. I find it hard to reclaim ‘it’ from non-personhood. But I’m not going to quibble about that when everything else is so damn good 🙂 )

Forty Seven Years

Or: A guest post on The Novel Approach (with giveaway) celebrating the release of Blue Steel Chain–

When False Colors came out in 2009, I still thought I was straight. I remember the furor that was kicked up by the marketing campaign for that book, which was released as part of a four book attempt to take m/m romance to the mainstream under the ill advised marketing slogan “m/m romance by straight women for straight women.” The four authors involved were somewhat startled by this because they were Erastes, Lee Rowan, Donald Hardy and me. That’s two bisexual women, a gay man, and an asexual person who really still isn’t quite sure about this whole gender business.

I’ve digressed. My point was that at the time I didn’t know that asexuality existed. I thought I was the token straight in that group. I’d always been aware that I’d never been very good at being straight. I’d always felt that there were vast areas in our culture that I just wasn’t getting. The whole business with sex, for example. What was the attraction? What was the point? I could see that it seemed to be a huge driving force in human interaction, and yet for me it was a blank space. Did that mean I wasn’t human? I sometimes felt that way.

I defined myself in negatives. I wasn’t a woman but I wasn’t a man. So I probably wasn’t trans. I wasn’t gay or bi or poly, but I really wasn’t very straight either.

How could a person who was so nothing ever actually exist at all?

That may not sound like an important question, if you’re the kind of concrete realist who can then go on to say “and yet I do, and my existence is valid.” But as an artist and an INTP, I’m a pattern maker by nature, and when I didn’t fit into any of the available patterns it did tend to lead me down the road of “then you must be a mistake. If there’s no space for you in this world, perhaps the world would be better off without you.”

An interesting thing that happened to me recently was that I began to go to a therapist (for non-writing related reasons). On one occasion I said to her “My depression hasn’t been so bad the last three years.” Another time I said “I found out about asexuality about three years ago, and that cleared up a lot of questions I’d had.” She was the one who said “You don’t think the timing of those two things is significant?”

I think it probably is.

I’m supposed to be talking about Blue Steel Chain, aren’t I? But this backstory is relevant to that book. By the time I discovered that asexuality was an actual thing, I had already lived for forty seven years. I had lived for 47 years not knowing that I wasn’t simply a failure at being a human being.

Asexuality is known as one of the ‘invisible orientations,’ because there is so little awareness in society that it exists at all. Asexual people can go their whole lives asking “what’s wrong with me?!” and never get an answer.

Naturally once I’d found this out, I knew I had to do something about it. I had to spread the news and let other people know that they too were not as broken as they might have thought. So I wrote Blue Steel Chain, a romance in which one of my main characters is asexual.

I thought I was writing it mainly for me – mainly for the thrill of thumbing my nose at all those people who assumed that I was writing romance for the sex. “I’ll show them what I really think about sex!” I thought. “That’ll teach them.”

(Because I’m clearly a very mature person these days.)

What I didn’t anticipate was that the moment I said I was writing a book with an ace main character, so many people would start saying “Yes! I feel represented. I can’t wait!”

I really hope I don’t let you down. There are as many different ways to be ace as there are people, and Aidan can’t be all of them. But I hope those of you who are ace can recognize something in him and go “Ha! Yes! It’s just like that.” And I hope those who aren’t will find it fun anyway, and useful for knowing how to deal with the Aces you meet in your life.

Judging from the latest surveys of slash writers/readers I think there are a disproportionate number of us amongst m/m fans. So the chances are you will meet one of us sooner or later. Be prepared!

Book Bub

As part of the promotion of Blue Steel Chain, Riptide have scheduled a Book Bub for Trowchester Blues.

What the heck is a Book Bub? You may ask yourself. I know I did.

Well, it seems to be this cool thing here:

https://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals/recommended

Where you sign up with your email address, and pick what categories of books you enjoy – and yes, there is an LGBT section – and then all kinds of books are available for you either free or with their prices slashed to the bone.

It’s a little worrying. I only found out about the site yesterday and already I’ve bought four books. OTOH, I’ve bought four books for $3.98 in total, so… win. I think 🙂

So if anyone wants to start trying (a) my books in general, or (b) the Trowchester series in particular, this is a great place to pick up the first Trowchester book, Trowchester Blues for $0.99

The ‘bub’ will start on the 31st of July and go for five days. Happy shopping 😉

And speaking of Blue Steel Chain! It’s due out on the 27th of July. I haven’t written any of my blog spots for the tour yet. So if anyone has any questions they’d like me to answer, or anything in particular they’d like me to talk about during the tour, do say! I would love to have a chance to talk about something you actually want me to talk about, rather than my usual random nonsense.

Write On – Show, Don’t Tell

So, we’ve done our first pass edit. We’ve plugged the plot holes and the story is hanging together as a marvellous creation that has a beginning, middle and end. Everything’s tied together in a chronology that could work, and no character has accidentally been forgotten half way through. Surely that’s our job done, right?

Not quite. Writing a book is a little like carving a sculpture. First you quarry the basic story stone out of your subconscious, and crudely hew it into the right rough shape. That was your first draft and first revision pass. Now you’re going to put down the saw and pick up the chisel – it’s time for the fine work.

For this pass, we’re going to go through the story we have already, and see where we can make it better. Start again right at the beginning and consider how you have told the reader what you have told them.

This is where most writing books pull out the most well known piece of writing advice that ever existed – Show, don’t tell. Which is all very well, but what the hell does ‘show don’t tell’ actually mean?

Well, for example, suppose you want to open your book with a quick precis of your character’s backstory. My first reaction would be ‘don’t’. Why do we need to know that he was brought up in Northampton and had a pet dog called Spot? Is that relevant? If it’s not relevant, can we perhaps not put it in at all, and just start with the story?

But if you insisted – if you said ‘No, my character’s backstory is the most interesting thing ever, and will be essential to understanding why he chooses to ignore the evidence that his wife is an alien until it’s too late’ – I would have to say Okay then, your funeral.

Let’s consider how to show, rather than tell, your character’s backstory.

When you ‘show’ something, you think up a scene in which that thing becomes obvious to the reader. So if you want to show that your character was afraid of bats ever since he fell down the well in the grounds of his mansion (I wonder where I got that example from), you write a scene in which you allow the reader to feel what it was like for a boy at play to feel the ground crumble around him. You evoke the terror of falling by making the reader feel like they are falling, letting them feel the punch of rocks against their back as they crash into the ground, drawing in vivid detail the stench of ammonia and the crawling, flapping blackness of a bat colony as it swirls past his face.

We’ll call him ‘Bruce’ shall we? So if you were doing this, you would end up with something that read a little like this:

Bruce’s foot plunged into the earth, dislodging stones, wrenching his knee. He tried to scramble away but the long grass was sappy and slick beneath his weight. A burst of green smell and he slid sideways, arms flung out, gripping for the boulders that fell away beside him. Rushing noise and rushing darkness, something whipping past his face. His back slapped into something sharp edged that punched the wind out of him. Stones smacked into his face, lights bursting behind his eyes, and then he hit the ground.

The stench awoke him, acrid and brilliant as a desert sun – the only brightness in the endless dark. He felt the darkness like a plastic bag taped around his face, stopping him from breathing, thinking, had to force himself to wobble to his feet. That was when he heard them, above him. Something rustling. A single huge rustling, and a drip, drip, drip of what he thought at first was rain. But it was urine, concentrated and toxic, like acid on his skin.

“No!” he choked, wanting to crawl out of his own body at the touch. “No!”

…..

And so on. We haven’t even seen the bats yet. At some point he’s got to find his way out of the cave into a place where there is enough light to see them, and then he’s going to have an epiphany about using the power of that image to turn his fear into other people’s fear. But hopefully you see what I mean about ‘showing’. In this example, I’m not telling you that Bruce got his bat idea after being frightened by bats, I’m showing you what it was like for him to be frightened by bats and come up with his familiar idea.

There are things to notice about this. One is that ‘showing’ produces a more viscerally engaging and entertaining thing to read. Another is that ‘showing’ takes up an awful lot of words and space. And what that means is that the pundits who say ‘Always show, don’t tell,’ are wrong.

Show any time you want your reader to really live through the information. Any time you want them to remember it as something dramatic that happened to them. Any time you want them to feel an emotional connection to the information.

But telling is useful and legitimate too. Suppose you just want to get information to the reader with as little fuss as possible? Suppose you’re already in the middle of an exciting scene and you don’t want to interrupt it to have another nested one to explain something you could tell them in a paragraph? Then I say do that instead. A whole load of unnecessary waffle can be cut by a conversation between two characters that goes a bit like this:

“Why the bat motif?”

“Oh, he fell down a well when he was young. Figured that the things that terrified him then would terrify others now. And maybe when he became what he feared, he thought it wouldn’t fear it any more.”

“Crazy.”

“Yeah, but it seems to work.”

So, that was a long-winded sidetrack to my point about editing. We’re going to have many many editing passes, but the purpose of this one is to decide which things you want to show and which things can be passed over quickly by telling them. Obviously that’s very much up to you, but I would sum it up this way:

If you just want to quickly get across information with no emotional impact – tell.

If you want to make an emotional and visceral impact with the scene – show.

It’s up to you as the author to decide what should be minimized by telling or maximized by showing, but I would also say if you always do one, try to do the other one occasionally, just for variety. Variety will help stop your reader from either being burnt out by all this excitement, or bored by all this exposition.

Next time, adding more interest. Coolness! 🙂

Practically perfect pilfering

One of the joys of writing contemporaries is the ability to pilfer parts of real life to stick into your own personal world. I freely admit that I grabbed churches and bookshops and names of villages with wild abandon to put into Trowchester and its environs.

To start with the top down, the twisted spire of Trowchester’s cathedral owes its existence to the Church of St. Mary and All Saints in Chesterfield.

I don’t think I’ve ever been inside. To the best of my memory, I just saw it in passing as we drove past on the way to somewhere else. I couldn’t believe how eerie and wrong it looked, as if God had reached down and twisted it like barley sugar. I don’t know yet why Trowchester’s cathedral spire suffered the same fate, but I’m sure it will reveal itself to me in time.

Finn’s book shop is much closer to home. That’s based on Toppings book shop in Ely.

This is one of those tardis-like bookshops that are far larger on the inside. Outside, a tiny little front, inside it goes back forever, and down, and up and out on both sides. More than that, though, if you go up to the first floor there is a help desk, where you can say ‘What have you got on the Ottoman Empire?’ or ‘I’m looking for something about vampires’, and they will say ‘fiction or non-fiction?’ After which they will guide you to a window seat and place a pile of books in front of you, a pot of coffee and a cup, and they will let you read as much or as little of those books as you please, and to stay as long as you like.

Needless to say, I buy a lot of books there.

Finn’s shop, of course, has slightly more eccentric décor, and a collection of display pieces that he has acquired from up and coming local artists. Also a gay book club that meets on a Friday night. It’s a case of gilding the lily, but who’s going to complain about a golden lily? Not me.

Ely is also home to a tea shop that might feel very familiar to readers of Trowchester Blues – largely because I nicked it and put it on the page mostly unchanged. This is Peacocks Tea Rooms

Home of the widest variety of teas you will ever see served in one place, and cheese scones to die for, Peacocks is one of the most quintessentially English places I’ve ever seen in my life. It definitely deserves to be immortalised in fiction. Possibly in better fiction than mine – but one does what one can!

I’m not sure whether you can thieve the atmosphere of a whole city and put it into your book, but that didn’t stop me from trying. I personally love the bohemian, hippy, flower-child, alternative lifestyle atmosphere of Glastonbury in midsummer.

Because of the Tor and the Abbey, and the fact that King Arthur and Queen Guinevere are (allegedly) buried there, Glastonbury attracts people interested in spirituality, Christianity, paganism and folklore – and all of those things are like nectar to me. I didn’t think I could get away with stealing King Arthur, and besides, I’m not all that fond of the man, so Trowchester has a bronze age hill fort and a sacred spring instead. But I made off with the spirit of the place and crammed that into my book too.

I think that’s about it. Harcombe House, the country home of the Harcombe family is too much of a generic stately home to pin it down to any one influence. I’ve seen many houses on the banks of canals, and many marinas, but Michael’s house and boat-builder’s yard are not really any of them in particular.

Oh, one more. Khan’s Restaurant in London is a real place and appears as itself, though sadly Tahir and his father are entirely imaginary.

The Trowchester Series

I have fond memories of Khan’s as it was the place my (now) husband took me for our first date. I was, as you can imagine, very impressed, and I remain so to this day.