Woohoo! Coolness 🙂 I have a new cover for Blessed Isle, and Riptide already have a coming soon page for it. And we have a blurb. It’s so efficient!
And I really, really love this cover. Obviously you can rarely go wrong with a tall ship, but look, they have uniforms and period shirts and everything.
Blurb
For Captain Harry Thompson, the command of the prison transport ship HMS Banshee is his opportunity to prove his worth, working-class origins be damned. But his criminal attraction to his upper-crust First Lieutenant, Garnet Littleton, threatens to overturn all he’s ever worked for. Lust quickly proves to be the least of his problems, however. The deadly combination of typhus, rioting convicts, and a monstrous storm destroys his prospects . . . and shipwrecks him and Garnet on their own private island. After months of solitary paradise, the journey back to civilization—surviving mutineers, exposure, and desertion—is the ultimate test of their feelings for each other.
These two very different men each record their story for an unfathomable future in which the tale of their love—a love punishable by death in their own time—can finally be told. Today, dear reader, it is at last safe for you to hear it all.
~
They would normally do something this long (100 pages) for $4.99, but this is going to be going at the bargain price of $3.99 because it’s a reprint.
(The story used to be available in the Hidden Conflict anthology, which is no more. So if you have one of those, you now have a collectors item!)
It’s due on the last day of the year, which will be a great way for 2012 to go out for me 🙂 I’m looking forward to it.
Speaker Rebecca Kadaga said that this was a ‘Christmas gift’ to the populace, the majority of who, it seems welcome the passing of the bill.
There’s an air of finality about it, but I say it’s not finally decided until the ink is on the paper, so it’s possible that petitions may help. jessie_lansdel has found this one:
But as a lot of the pressure for this bill seems to be coming from the Ugandan church, which is a member of the Anglican Communion – part of the same organisation as the Church of England – charliecochrane and I thought it would be a good idea to ask the Archbishop of Canterbury to give them a stern talking to about what ‘God is love’ means in this context. It is surely about time non-fundamentalist Christians started standing up and saying no to our brethren who are busy trying to kill people in the name of God.
So there is now a petition to ask the Archbishop to step in and do something to make sure this bill doesn’t see the light of day:
Six Sentence Sunday; I am doing it wrong. I ought to be linking back to the website and list here, but I have failed to be organized enough to get myself included on it. So I’m just going to post it for myself and own my own fail 😉
This is from The Glass Floor, in which our scientifically minded heroine Ecatarina notices her brother in the garden.
~
His eyes had sunk, the tips of his fingers had turned dark, he had smelled, sweet, offensive, as his cheeks began to puff up, and she had had to wave the flies away from settling on him. He had been dead, unbreathing, for days before going into the earth. No doubt about that. No tragic possibility of being buried alive such as she had read of happening in other countries, who disposed of their loved ones indecently fast.
He was dead. And he was looking up at her window with puzzled eyes.
~
At 76K, I’m approximately half way through and everything is about to take a turn to the left, as we find out what on earth Zayd and the mad Sultan has to do with any of this.
Glad to hear that there’s good news from America both in virtue of elections and another couple of states allowing gay people to get married. American politics is not really my business, but with American publishers I feel I have a stake even if I don’t have a say in what goes on.
The purple waistcoat is finished and looks very smart. I must post a photo here when I wear it, which is likely to be for Mill Road Winter Fair. Now I just hope everyone else doesn’t go for purple too.
I have decided that 2,500 words is a good count in a day. Writing more per day definitely keeps up the enthusiasm – I’m still enjoying The Glass Floor, which is unheard of for me. 1,000 was easier, but it made the whole process so slow that it felt more laborious. I can do 3-4,000 if I really try, but that leaves no time for making lunch or…well, anything else at all. 2,500 during week days with weekends off = NaNoWriMo all year round, which should definitely up my productivity.
Speaking of The Glass Floor, I cannot believe it took until now for me to put ‘Lautari’ – the name of a Romany clan famous for musicians – and ‘Musica Lautareasca’ together and work out that Musica Lautareasca means ‘music of the Lautari.’ Eep! I know I don’t speak Romanian, but am I tone deaf for languages or what?
And speaking of productivity, I broke my 200,000 word target for the year yesterday. I know I’ve largely stopped blogging and tweeting and all that stuff, but this is why – major reassignment of my time and effort into the writing.
And wondering why the first week of NaNoWriMo has to coincide with half term, so I will start out at 500 words a day if I’m lucky. Why, people? Why are there so many damned holidays during which I’m all but forced to stop work?
Well, it really is. Here I am, reading up on Romanian folk music, after having been informed that it wasn’t at all the same thing as the muzica lautareasca I posted about earlier – shame on me for propagating bad information – when I come across this:
and it turns out that here is another possible relative of the morris, going back into a dim and distant past in which we all lived in the forests together.
I don’t actually see much similarity, (other than the bells, sticks, crossed sashes, association with hobby horses, and possibly the pole… actually that’s quite a lot.) But the stepping and the figures are very different, and morris – as far as I know – never was a ritual dance, despite what the Victorians might have you believe. Still, I embrace the possibility if only for the sake of the warm fuzzies of meeting a distant family member you never knew existed before.
I’ve had Ely Apple Day on my mind for a week. I blogged about it last week, full of enthusiasm with the memory of good dancing and good music on a day when it didn’t rain, even though it looked like it wanted to. I’d been looking forward to seeing the photos, but when we did, several members of the side noticed that everyone was wearing blue. The idea of our kit is that our white shirts represent the white skies of the Fens, our black skirts represent the rich black Fenland soil, our red handkerchiefs represent the blood spilled in the Ely and Littleport Riots after which we’re named, and the many different colours of our waistcoats represent the individuality of each dancer.
This is totally scuppered if we all go for the same colour, and somehow, despite differences of shade, we all seem to have gone for variants of blue. This could mean only one thing – time to make another waistcoat. I wanted lime green, but they didn’t have enough of that on the roll, so – in an unexpected move which surprised even myself – I’ve bought some royal purple material instead
with some tacky yet sparkly buttons to match. This should clash in a most satisfactory way with my orange hair and lime green shawl. Good taste being yet another of those things which the true zen masters of folk have ascended beyond.
Speaking of Ely Apple Day, I had a lovely exchange with a member of the crowd who had drawn up to watch us.
“Where are these dances from?” she asked me.
As I’m sure you know, the same question can have several appropriate answers depending on the context, because the context helps clarify what is actually being asked. I’m not much good at picking up the subtle clues which show what the context is, so I started off by trying to explain that these were dances from the Welsh Borders, but there were other styles of morris dancing from other areas, such as Cotswold and North West Clog, and that the local style – Molly – was similar to what we were doing, but slightly different.
But by that point I could tell from her continued look of bemusement that I was not really answering the question she’d intended to ask. Then I put together her Mediterranean looks and slight lisp of an accent and struck out with what I thought might be a lucky guess. “The prevailing theory is that the Morris dance is originally from Spain,” I said.
Her face cleared – this was obviously what she’d really been asking about all along. “I’m from Catalonia,” she said, “and our dances are just like this. I wondered if there had been some sort of cultural exchange programme.”
I laughed. “There was indeed. It was in the 15th Century.”
And this is why history, and Folk, are neither boring nor irrelevant – because the cultural ties our two countries had five hundred years ago still help make sense of our behaviour, and allow us to feel like part of a family, even today. It’s a small world and dancing makes it a better one.
Music does too. On a different subject, we were walking around Cambridge today, and in three different places we were surrounded by music played live on the painted pianos that have been scattered around the town
proper music, mind you. People had obviously discovered they were there, gone home for their sheet music and come back prepared. There was some wonderful concert standard stuff going on al fresco, in the balcony of the shopping centre and outside in the park.
Ow, ow. What possessed me to think I could research 18th Century Romania and the Ottoman Empire at the same time? A hopeless naivety towards the available source material, I suspect. There’s too much on Istanbul and not enough on Bucharest, and I’m never going to get a handle on just enough of it to fit in a book.
But the Romanians have the prettiest names in the world – Constantin Brancoveanu? Lovely.
I feel I ought to blog, but only because you’re supposed to blog once a week on a regular basis. It doesn’t mean I’ve actually got anything to say.
I had a very nice day on Saturday, dancing at Ely Apple Day with the Riot. We were unusually together and danced with both vigour and accuracy. Usually we manage one or the other, but this time we were on top form and achieved both.
I’ve reached the stage with The Glass Floor (now 50-odd thousand words long and looking to be about 120k when it’s done) where my inner editor has kicked in and is nagging me to go back to the start and correct everything. I am instead making a list of notes for revision on the second draft, and pressing on. It haunts me to think that a lot of what I’ve done so far will need to be changed, but that’s better than my old process. (Which involved making dozens of revisions on the first five chapters and then abandoning the book unfinished.)
I read a book recently that claims you have to enjoy every part of your writing process, or it’s a sign that you’re writing something boring. This naturally has made me feel very anxious. (Everything makes me anxious.) But, given that I suffer from regular depression and don’t enjoy being myself, it would be very out of character for me to enjoy anything all the time. I don’t think I have the kind of wiring capable of such a thing. Given this fact, I take the knowledge that I don’t hate my writing to be the equivalent of the positive person’s ‘OMG, I love it!’
And speaking of writing advice and other people’s processes, I’ve decided to have a go with the whole right-brain mind map thing and do one for each of my main characters, as well as my own sweet spot map. I’m such a left brain person, I normally even do things like this in lists, and can’t help a mental sneer at the untidiness of the whole brainstorming squiggle thing. But that disdain probably just means that it would do me good if I tried.
Anyway, that reaches my limits of stuff I have to say today. If you’re looking for a rather more interesting blog post, you could try this one by Kay Berrisford on the subject of the forest in folklore:
What is the title of the book you’re currently working on? The Glass Floor (temporary title as the actual glass floor got left behind in an older idea for the plot.)
Where did the idea come from for the book?
I have absolutely no idea. You can’t expect me to remember stuff like that.
What genre does your book fall under?
Historical Fantasy.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Frank – Alex Pettyfer, Radu – Julian McMahon, Zayd – Burak Özçivit, Mirela – Neha Sharma, Ecaterina – Alexis Raben
What is a one-sentence synopsis of the book?
A Romanian lord fights for his country’s freedom from the Ottoman Empire, using an army of vampires.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
It’ll be represented by the L.Perkins Agency (providing my agent doesn’t wash her hands of it because she told me vampires were a bad idea and I went and wrote them anyway.)
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
I haven’t finished it yet.
What other books would you compare this story to in your genre?
I… wouldn’t. Maybe Barbara Hambley’s first ‘Travelling with the Dead’ book, but not really. Of course I would compare it to Dracula, though. That’s inevitable since both feature Wallachian noblemen with vampiric associations.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Julian McMahon – saw him in the Fantastic Four films and thought that, while he made a terrible DOOM, he might make quite a good sinister hero of some other sort.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Atlantis. The vril accumulator. A total lack of flying carpets. All the best parties include tortoises.
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.
