So, my son has now got his change-of-name documents back from the deed poll people. Which was very easy and efficient and provides you with a document with some glorious language on it, in caps, no less. Listen to this:
“I ABSOLUTELY renounce and abandon the use of my former name… I AUTHORISE AND REQUIRE all persons at all times to designate, describe and address me by my adopted name…”
Isn’t that stirring? I love it.
After getting that done and signed and witnessed, yesterday we took it to his bank to get his name and title changed there. I was frankly imagining some sort of Brazil-like bureaucratic horror that would grind on for days and days of exchanging ever more obscure documents. Being politely judged by impenetrable layers of flunkies…
But what actually happened was that the guy checked out the change of name form, then filled in the new details on my son’s bank account, hit the ‘reason for change’ box and hit ‘gender reassignment’ from the drop-down menu, requested a new bank card with the new name and title, and we were done. In and out in quarter of an hour, without receiving so much as a single strange look.
So there you go. If there are any trans*people out there having trouble with your banks, I can definitely recommend Santander in Cambridge for prompt and friendly service.
Today I’m handing over to Julian Griffith, my fellow age of sail fan, so that she can talk about her new novel Love Continuance and Increasing, which I have just downloaded onto my ereader because it sounds fabulous. And isn’t that cover amazing?
We have a giveaway to give away 🙂 If you comment on this post (wherever it appears) you’ll be entered into the hat to win a digital copy of Love Continuance and Increasing in their preferred format (Mobi, ePub, PDF, or LIT). That will run through the 11th, so it’ll end 11:59 pm US Eastern Time on Sunday, August 11th. That way, everyone has the entire weekend to enter. Comment with your email address so we can get back to you if you win! Anyway, enough from me and over to Julian.
Hi, Alex, and thanks for having me on your blog! It’s so exciting for me to be here, since I’ve been a fan of yours for quite a while, and you encouraged me when I was still unpublished. And now I’m here with my first novel, Love Continuance and Increasing, which is a historical M/M/F ménage romance set in England during the Napoleonic Wars. And it’s that M/M/F aspect, and especially the role that my heroine, Caroline, plays in the story, that I want to talk about today.
There are a lot of M/M romances set in the Age of Sail, but not very many M/M/F ones that I’ve seen. It’s all too common for female characters in M/M romance to serve the purpose of being an obstacle to the men’s happiness together, rather than having a story of their own.
I could have written that plot easily enough. Caroline is an obstacle for Lieutenant Thorne and Lord Rockingham’s relationship, or at least the idea of her is. Rockingham, who’s an army major as well as a viscount, isn’t married when he and Thorne meet. But just days after the start of their affair, Thorne gets to hear Rockingham’s grandmother badger him to find a girl to marry, as he’s not getting any younger and the cousin next in line for the estate is a ne’er-do-well. Once they’re alone, they talk about it frankly—one of the things I can’t stand in romance is the sort of problem that would be cleared up if the characters would only talk to each other for five minutes—and Rockingham makes it clear that it’s not a dislike of women that’s kept him unmarried, but the hope that someday he’ll find a woman who likes him at least as much as she likes his title. He even asks if Thorne would still be his lover if he found himself in a loveless marriage, but Thorne’s a man of strict principles, and he tells Rockingham no. So it’s right there from the start: Rockingham has to marry, and when he does, their love affair will have to end.
Naturally, Rockingham does marry, and this is where, if the story were like so many others, the woman would turn out to be a harpy so that Thorne would take pity on Rockingham. Perhaps she would cheat on her marriage so that turnabout would seem “fair” or possibly so that Rockingham would divorce her. Another typical outcome would have her die in childbirth (delivering a healthy son, of course, so that Rockingham wouldn’t have to marry again). One way or another, she would somehow get shuffled out of the plot so that the men could be together.
I didn’t want to write that story. I wanted to write one where Rockingham’s wife was just as deserving of love and loyalty as Thorne was, and find a way where the men’s happiness didn’t come at the woman’s expense. That’s how Caroline came to be.
Caroline has the advantage of being exactly the sort of girl that Rockingham ought to marry. She’s the granddaughter of a baronet, so her birth is sufficiently respectable; she’s no great heiress, but she’s not penniless, either. She’s been brought up all her life to run a household well and to have the proper ladylike accomplishments and graceful manners to be a good hostess. And, of course, Caroline’s young enough to have plenty of years to provide Rockingham with a son—she’s just out in society, only eighteen to Rockingham’s thirty-five.
But there’s more than that to her. For one thing, Caroline’s aware of the world around her beyond fashion and gossip—she knows that the 43rd is at Shorncliffe to do more than provide a supply of officers to dance with the local girls, and she asks intelligent questions about military matters. For another, she has courage—she loves to ride, and she really does throw her heart over the fences, even in a sidesaddle. What’s more, she’s lighthearted and merry. She laughs easily, and she makes Rockingham laugh. And she genuinely seems to like him. In short, Caroline’s exactly the girl Rockingham was looking for. I worked hard to make her appealing enough that readers would believe that Rockingham cared for her, even though it meant the end of his romantic relationship with Thorne, and that they would care for her, and about her, as well.
Then there was the challenge of showing how Thorne fell in love with Caroline over the space of only a couple of days. It actually helped that he started out expecting to resent her because then, when she was kind and gracious to him, he was thrown off balance. Caroline’s looks didn’t hurt, either; Thorne’s first sight of her was as she came into the drawing room before dinner, in an elegant gown and with pearls threaded through her hair. Thorne spent most of his life at sea, and he just wasn’t used to women like that; she was so far out of his experience that she seemed like a creature out of Fairyland, not part of the real world. And, at dinner, when Thorne describes his part in the action at Trafalgar, Caroline’s grandfather, Sir Ralph, makes a comment that shows so little understanding of the principles of war that it borders on offensive. Caroline immediately jumps in to correct him, and from that moment, Thorne is smitten.
It was easier to show how Caroline fell in love with Thorne. She was still just shy of twenty, and even though she was married and a mother, that wasn’t enough for most men, who subscribed to the common notion of women as lacking in intellect, to treat her seriously. Thorne did. That, combined with the intensity of his attention to her, was enough.
This is the point where a story would usually play the situation as a love triangle, with Caroline faced with an impossible choice between two good men, and the prospect of betrayal and misery until one or the other of the men showed himself unworthy, and the final couple then goes off into what we’re told will be a happily-ever-after.
I didn’t want to write that story either. Frankly, I’ve never been able to believe in the happy ending in a situation like that; it’s always seemed more likely that it will end up like Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot, with nobody happy. And yet, that story always bothered me, too. Why should Guinevere have to choose? Why should two men, the closest and dearest of friends, let that bond be broken because they both love the same woman? Why shouldn’t they all be able to love each other, happily ever after?
Since this was my story, I decided that they could. And so Caroline, instead of being an obstacle, became the character who linked the men back together in a way that would have been impossible for the two of them alone.
The excerpt below is from that fateful dinner party. As I’ve already described its importance, I thought you might enjoy seeing how it played out. Thanks for having me here, Alex! I hope everyone will take a look at Love Continuance and Increasing, which is now available from Storm Moon Press in ebook and print!
***
Thorne could not have said, later, what had been served at dinner, though he knew it had been lavish; for all the attention he paid it, it might just as well have been ship’s biscuit and dried peas. He found himself sitting directly across the table from Marcus, with Rockingham’s mother at his right and Mrs.-Filmer-the-aunt at his left, and only Lord Brackley between her and Lady Rockingham, who sat at the head of the table as hostess. She was so poised as to make the conversation seem effortless. At first, she engaged her sister-in-law on a discussion of her children, and brought her aunt and mother-in-law in to contribute their wisdom, all in such a way that Mrs. Pennington never once took offence; but it was later, when she was encouraging Lord Brackley and her grandfather to attend to what details he and Marcus could give of the recent battle, that she earned his undying admiration. She asked such questions as to give shape to what, in truth, had been hours of sheer chaos, and Marcus was describing how the Percy had come to the assistance of the Prince, to rescue the French seamen who had leapt from the burning Achille, and he was contributing a word or two on how the boats had barely avoided destruction when the Achille‘s still-loaded guns had exploded in the heat, when Sir Ralph said something that silenced them both.
“Nearly destroyed, you say? You’d have done better to leave the Frogs in the water, and let ’em boil or drown.”
Lord Brackley raised his glass to him. “Well said, sir.”
Marcus just sat there, plainly shocked. Thorne could never understand how such a bold commander could be such an innocent by land, but there it was; he was amazed that anyone could suggest such a thing. He’d long since given up himself on expecting landsmen, especially civilians, to have any sense of conduct in battle, but he couldn’t think of how to answer without giving offence to a marquess and a baronet, both his seniors in age as well as rank. Lady Rockingham, though, had no such fear.
“Grandpapa, for shame!” she said. “Captain Birtwhistle told us of how the Achille caught fire, and how her men were abandoning ship. That is very nearly a surrender, is it not, Captain?”
Marcus swallowed. “Yes, my lady, you might put it that way.” Thorne wasn’t so sure, but after the Defiance and the Dreadnought had shot away most of the Achille‘s rigging, though they had a flag, they might not have possessed the means to lower it, and by the time she caught fire, their quarterdeck had been so pounded that she probably hadn’t an officer left who could surrender, so it was a moot point.
“And it is dishonourable in the extreme to continue fighting after a surrender. Any men left alive then are properly prisoners. Why should it matter whether they are on their deck or in the sea?”
“Well, when you put it that way, my dear…” her grandfather said.
Lord Brackley coughed. “I had not understood it entirely, my lady. I beg your pardon for my earlier remark.”
“I am not offended, my lord,” Lady Rockingham said. “I am sure you had no intention of suggesting that Captain Birtwhistle or Lieutenant Thorne would ever conduct themselves in a dishonourable fashion. A misapprehension, that is all.” She gave him a disarming smile. “May I offer you some more of this orange cream?”
Lieutenant William Thorne, of His Majesty’s Navy, is a man of humble origins. He knows that his affair with Major Anthony Rockingham of the 43rd Infantry can’t last forever, not only because the war against Napoleon has sent him on blockade duty in the English Channel while the major’s regiment trained ashore, but because Rockingham is a viscount, and viscounts must marry. When Rockingham’s letter reaches him, saying that he’d chosen Miss Caroline Filmer as his bride, it is no more than Thorne had expected.
What he does not expect, when he returns home after the Battle of Trafalgar, is to find an invitation to the christening of Rockingham’s son. He does not expect, when he meets the young viscountess, that he would fall instantly and passionately in love with her. And he certainly does not expect that Caroline would fall just as desperately in love with him. Thorne is sure that their feelings for each other can only lead to disaster, even more so as his love for Rockingham has never gone away. While the war with France continues, Thorne finds himself fighting a war within his own heart.
Love Continuance and Increasing by Julian Griffith – Now Available from Storm Moon Press for $6.99 (ebook) or $13.99 (paperback)
That sounds cool, doesn’t it? Here The Crimson Outlaw is, heading up an article in USA Today about new releases in Romance novels for August 2012. How did that happen? Particularly in a list so heavily dominated by Highlanders. I hope nobody buys it hoping for kilts, because I’m fairly sure that’s never going to happen in a novel of mine.
I am slightly ashamed that I only seem to blog when I’ve got something to sell. That’s going to change. But I’d be even more ashamed if I didn’t support my publishers when they’re doing something which is good for them, and for me, and for anyone who wants to buy bargain books.
And is available for 60% off normal retail price. Which is well worth while starting blogging again for 🙂
Seriously – I think my slump is finally coming to an end, and I hope to pick up the Write On posts and more normal blogging habits soon. I’ll probably wind up to it this month and do it properly from September.
Woohoo! It feels like a long time since I’ve had a new release, due to my unfortunate habit of bunching things up and leaving big gaps between the bunches. And typically I’m going on holiday tomorrow so I won’t be around to promote it for a week, but never mind, I can do that a bit when I get back.
This is my first book with a cover drawn by an artist. I asked for something with a fairy-tale theme because Romania was such a fairy-tale country (full of witches and wolves) during the time when this was set, and I think the artist has done beautifully. Despite that slightly fairy tale feel, this is a historical not a fantasy.
So with no more ado, I announce the arrival of
Love is the greatest outlaw of all.
Vali, heir to a powerful local boyar, flees his father’s cruelty to seek his fortune in the untamed Carpathian forests. There he expects to fight ferocious bandits and woo fair maidens to prove himself worthy of returning to depose his tyrannical father. But when he is ambushed by Mihai Roscat, the fearsome Crimson Outlaw, he discovers that he’s surprisingly happy to be captured and debauched instead.
Mihai, once an honoured knight, has long sought revenge against Vali’s father, Wadim, who killed his lord and forced him into a life of banditry. Expecting his hostage to be a resentful, spoiled brat, Mihai is unprepared for the boy to switch loyalties, saving the lives of villagers and of Mihai himself during one of Wadim’s raids. Mihai is equally unprepared for the attraction between them to deepen into love.
Vali soon learns that life outside the castle is not the fairy tale he thought, and happy endings must be earned. To free themselves and their people from Wadim’s oppression, Vali and Mihai must forge their love into the spear-point of a revolution and fight for a better world for all.
Writers hate writing synopses, am I right? I think I am. So now imagine my plight – I have four of the damn things to write at once.
I suppose, technically, that only one of them is a synopsis and the others are plot plans, but that’s not making things better.
The situation is that The Glass Floor is finished and ready to be sent out to publishers, but Fantasy publishers are notoriously not fond of stand alone novels. They typically want trilogies. Therefore I need to write a synopsis for The Glass Floor (done) and also a synopsis for two other novels after it, (tentatively called The Gate of Ice and The Lightning Isle) which I have not yet actually written.
Then – because there will inevitably be a long delay while The Glass Floor and its planned sequels are shopped around – I need to start writing something completely different. (Currently being called Storm Seed.) So I need to think up a plot plan for that too.
On the one hand this will be great – I’ll have ready made plot plans for those novels for when I start writing them. On the other hand, argh, thinking up the entire plot of a book before I start writing it is the hardest bit. To have to do it three times in a row with no actual writing in between is frying my brain.
This was a great do! I’m still not quite up to dancing, but I can now breathe well enough to play the whistle. As my ladies’ side, Ely and Littleport Riot, had decided to come even though they did not have any of their musicians, that wasn’t a problem – I just turned up as a musician for both Coton and the Riot. Two full days from 9 am-5pm of dancing in various picturesque Yorkshire villages along with almost 150 other morris dancers of the full spread of traditions. Longsword, North West Clog, rapper, border and Cotswold, plus the 400 Roses who are a unique combination of morris with tribal belly dance.
I Christened the new top hat which I got for my birthday, and by the time the weekend was closing, and I was standing on a cobbled street at the brow of a hill, looking down on a stone town straight out of a Hovis advert, playing as the lone musician left for Coton, I felt I had earned it. The past few years I have felt a little bit like an impostor among the musicians, but this time around I had a moment of feeling sure I belonged. In celebration I’ve gone out today and bought some white feathers to put in my hat brim, so in future photos the hat will look even more splendid.
I was one of only three musicians who stayed to the very end, for the traditional massed dance-off that closes the do. If you listen very hard you can just about hear me, but tbh I am rather drowned out by the melodeon and accordion next to me. I know I was there, though!
The ladies in coloured waistcoats with red hankies are my side, Ely and Littleport Riot, the gents in black and white are my other side, Coton, and the ladies in the extravagant skirts are the belly-dancing morris side 400 Roses:
In other news, I apologise for the fading out of everything, blogging, writing, everything. I am gradually getting better after the whole “is it a heart attack? Is it a duodenal ulcer? How many blood tests can one person give without needing a transfusion?” thing, but it’s still a slow process, and they still don’t know exactly what it is.
I will, however, finally do the draw for the hop against homophobia and transphobia winner this week, sorry about the delay!
So, I have finished the first draft of Blue Eyed Stranger. Which only convinces me that I was right to think that I can’t write contemporaries. That is, I clearly can write contemporaries because now I’ve written two of them – Shining in the Sun and Blue Eyed Stranger. But in both cases the struggle was epic. I don’t know how long it’s taken me to get these 37K words, but the mental wear and tear was considerable.
However, that might be health related. Last Monday I had the interesting experience of being carried off to hospital in an ambulance with suspected heart failure. (Pain in my chest under my breastbone, which got worse when I walked and stopped me from breathing.) I’d been feeling dodgy for a week before this and it had got to the stage where I was sincerely worried that something serious was going on. So when I phoned NHS Direct and they sent an ambulance, I wasn’t really surprised.
After an evening spent in hospital, however, it turns out that my EEG is very healthy, my blood tests rule out heart failure and gall bladder problems and an embolism on the lung. (“I’ve got swollen ankles,” I say, because they ballooned unexpectedly that very evening. “What’s that about?” “Normally that’s a sign of heart failure, but in your case we can rule that out.” “Why?” I want to say, “why can we rule it out when I’ve got all the symptoms?” but I don’t ask, because they seem so certain about it. The swollen ankles worry me, but I let it go.)
They confessed themselves baffled. Said it might be ‘a muscular problem’ and told me to go home, rest and take ibuprofen. Which is pretty much all I’ve been doing since, other than a little light Stargate fannishness.
The ride in the ambulance struck me as good research, though. I’d never been in the back of one of those things before, and I’m sure it will come in handy for a murder mystery or something further down the line.
If I’m late in answering an email, or haven’t been around as much as you might expect, I apologise. I’m still feeling dodgy, just with much less dramatic reason to, and I’ve only just started to pick up writing again. Other things may take a little longer to get back up to normal, and I wish I knew what it was, so that I would know how long it was likely to continue. But a general lack of heart failure is a thing I am not complaining about, though the possibility was quite a scare.
Anyway, to get back to my point, I really don’t think I’m going to write contemporary again. It’s just not me.
So, following the ‘just plough on until you reach the end’ advice – advice which is much easier to follow if you have a plot plan, btw, because at least you’re never left not knowing what happens next – you’ve finished your first draft. What to do now?
Well
1. Celebrate. Reward yourself. We train dogs and children to do good things by rewarding them when they achieve them and not rewarding them when they don’t. Train yourself to finish your first drafts by rewarding yourself when you finish, whether that’s with a new book to read or a trip out, or a packet of smarties, or whatever your imagination most wants and your pocket can reasonably afford. I recommend getting something you wouldn’t have allowed yourself otherwise. Something that will last quite a while and will continually remind you of the benefits of finishing your stuff.
2. Take the rest of the day, if not the week off. Writing a novel is a long sustained mental effort, and just as you would rest at the end of a physical marathon, if you didn’t want to end up like Pheidippides – glorious but dead – you should also rest after a mental marathon.
Of course, taking the rest of the week off must not be allowed to turn into taking the rest of the month off. It’s very easy, once you get off the writing bandwagon, not to get back on again. As with physical training, a few days off won’t harm you, but leave it too long and you’ll find you’ve lost all your muscle and you’re more unfit than you were when you started. Then you’ll have to go through all that slow, tedious, painful warming up again before you can get back on track.
(Which in writerly terms translates to whining, making coffee, doing the ironing, spending longer at work, doing your tax return, watching another episode of [box set of choice] discovering an obscure relation you really have to visit and then finally eking out 250 words in the last 5 minutes of the day before bedtime, before falling into bed hating yourself for being such a loser.)
3. Now (mentally) put a tea towel over the first draft and set it on a mental airing cupboard shelf to give it some time to prove.
Or to be less metaphorical, commit the first draft to the care of your subconscious and turn your mind to something else for a while. This is a good time to do the plot plan of the next book, or write a couple of short stories, to edit the book you finished before this one, or to do some other kind of writerly job which has no connection to this one.
4. Once you’ve done that, and you’ve got to the point where you’ve mostly forgotten your first draft, you’re ready to give it another go. I like to print it out for this stage, which I think of as either the ‘second draft’ or the ‘first edit’. Somehow it’s easier to see things on the printed page than it is on the screen.
Now it’s time for a slow read through, with a notebook to hand.
Don’t even start fixing things at this stage. The read through is to figure out what needs to be done, so you can do it in the most efficient fashion. So you do read through and notes first, then you fix things.
There’s a good reason for this. As you read, you’ll notice lots of typos and awkward sentences, and it’s worthwhile noting them with a number on your list of things to fix. But you’ll also notice that there are plot holes, there are places where you filled in the flow with [research this later] notes, there are timeline problems and big, structural elements that are wonky. There’s no point polishing sentences that are only going to end up on the cutting room floor when you have to fix the big plot hole associated with them.
Once you’ve identified all the things that are wrong with the book, fix the big things first. First close the holes and fix the time line. Then you can go through and do all the research you left for later, incorporating that where it’s needed. This will often involve getting rid of some scenes altogether and doing large chunks of re-writing. That’s why it’s still no place to worry about the commas.
With the major problems sorted and the manuscript now making sense as one coherent story with all the appropriate research incorporated, then you can do another pass, concentrating on making those sentences beautiful. But for the moment, the first editing pass is a structural job. Here’s where you decide whether your characters are acting in character, where you decide if a boring bit of exposition ought to be re-written as an exciting scene, or an interminable scene can be shortened into an off the cuff exposition while a character does something else. Here’s where you identify the boring bits and either re-write them to be interesting or delete them and write something new to replace them.
Which leads me into the exciting world of editing, of which, more anon.
The Boat of Small Mysteries - A cozy mystery aboard a narrowboat, in which a murder and a disappearance keep our aroace detective from fully relaxing into the idyll of country life.
