Jiggety jig.
We are safely returned from Cornwall, bringing home with us patchy tans, several pounds of extra weight due to ice-creams and cream-teas, soaked and salty wetsuits, and a sheaf of photos that need sorting through before I post any on here.
(Not one of our photos of the Minack Theatre. Ours include the stage hands setting up backdrops for The Book of Mirrors, a steampunk musical. But as I say, they’re still in the camera.)
I just about managed to keep up with my more urgent emails while I was there, but it’s hard typing a cogent message on a mobile phone, so I’m catching up with my blog posts now I’m home.
Speaking of which, here I am guesting on Elin Gregory’s blog, being put through the ordeal of the Comfy Chair:
http://elingregory.wordpress.com/2012/08/11/today-in-the-comfy-chair-alex-beecroft/
where I’m talking about the problem I have with villains. (They will keep blocking the chimney when they try to break into the place. Why can’t they just come to the front door like the salesmen?)
Mrs Giggles reviews Bomber’s Moon and gives it a mark of 83 (out of 100.) I don’t think I really do it for her, but many thanks to her for reviewing it 🙂
Clare London sent me an interesting link to a Guardian article on fan fiction
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/13/fan-fiction-fifty-shades-grey
in which, apparently, the mainstreaming of fanfiction spells the end of literature as we know it. IMO, this doesn’t sound like a bad thing. My only real interest in 50 Shades of Grey comes from noting that it at least proves definitively that there’s nothing illegal about filing the serial numbers off your fanfic and publishing it. If this isn’t a legal precedent, I don’t know what is.
with a rant called Holding the Left Hand of Darkness, in which I talk somewhat angrily and incoherently about the subject of gender in this, one of my favourite books ever.
From me, anyway. I have finished editing and polishing The Pilgrims’ Tale. Woohoo! Now I can launch it into the wide world (or at least I can give it to my agent so that she can find a home for it) and start work on the edits of EPQ.
I’m having second thoughts on EPQ, to be honest. I wanted it to be lighthearted and fairytale in a similar mode to the lighthearted fairytale episodes of new Dr. Who, now Moffat’s in charge. But now I’m worried that it’s just far too silly. I’ll have to hope that when I open it for the first time in months, tomorrow, it turns out to have enough good in it to be worth salvaging.
That’s a worry for tomorrow, though. I have 30 minutes of today left to savour the fact that I’ve finished writing a new book. The whole nailbiting “will any publisher want it? Is it any good?” thing can have an evening off while I celebrate the mere fact that Pilgrims’ Tale exists at all.
Guess what I’ve just finished reading? I suspect it’s a classic that I ought to have read earlier. Certainly if I’d read it when it first came out in the nineties many of the things in it that reminded me of stuff I’d seen elsewhere, or mundane every day realities, would have seemed like dazzlingly weird imaginings. Some of the gloss is taken off, now that we’re living with things like 2nd Life and Google Earth, which would have been intact when yahoo groups were the most complicated thing on the internet.
Anyway, ten things. Five good, five bad:
Good:
1. This is the very definition of high concept. It bursts at the seams with new ideas, and even though reality has caught up with some of those new ideas now, you can still hear them sizzle.
2. Sumerian neuro-linguistic programming. Seriously, I luuurve almost all stories that hinge on forgotten technologies of ancient civilisations that look like magic to us now. I was going “oh, stop with the swordfighting and get back to talking about Babel and Asherah and the nam-shrub of Enki.” I need to find excuses to get the phrase ‘the nam-shrub of Enki’ into every day conversation.
This is the high concept thing again, but the nam-shrub of Enki gets its own entry, because the idea of there once existing a language that bypassed all the higher functions of the brain and moved people to act the way computer programming causes computers to act, is a delightfully new one to me. I knew of the idea of a primal language, of course, but the idea that it would work like programming on people was fascinating.
3. Good doggies. I loved the rat things, even if they reminded me of the metal dog in The Ballad of Halo Jones. I don’t know which came first, but I loved both – so it’s all good.
4. Everyone is a character of colour – and this was first published in 1992.
5. Gated communities turned into independent countries, and run as franchises by enterprising individuals like Uncle Enzo of the Mafia and Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong. It’s a fun idea and doesn’t actually sound too impossible.
Bad:
1. (But appropriate) The characters are as flat as video game characters – they don’t have personalities other than their skills and appearances. These are designed to be cool, but they give off a ‘so desperate to look cool they just look like sad posers’ vibe to me.
2. Far too much ‘Look at all the hard edged urban crime-war grittiness! Isn’t it exciting?” for me. Possibly I’m just over-exposed to American urban crime-war grittiness as a genre, which would not have been such a problem when it first came out.
3. So YT’s mum gets interrogated by the Feds and reveals that she knows of the existence of a drug that can scramble the brains of programmers just by looking at a bit map. There’s lots of heavy angst and foreshadowing around this. And then nothing happens, and when YT gets home from being kidnapped, her mum’s there, apparently unharmed and unaware that her daughter has been missing for months, and everything’s back to normal? Does not compute.
4. Raven is the coolest badass ever to badass, and I suspect we’re supposed to think it’s glamorous and/or attractive, but actually it’s just the most extreme case of ‘my author thinks I’m hot, so you should too,’ I’ve seen in quite a while. Actually this goes for the hero, Hiro, too. I can’t take seriously anyone who calls himself ‘Hiro Protagonist.’
5. How convenient it is that YT discovers she has the hots for Raven, given that it’s pretty clear that she doesn’t actually have the choice to say no to him. It struck me as a nasty case of ‘how to rape your 15 year old heroine and pretend you didn’t,’ and it spoiled any pleasure I might have had in YT’s cleverness. Although the fact that she was passed from hand to hand between all the powerful men in the story for them to patronise and admire for her cute spunkiness didn’t help either.
On balance:
Still seriously worth reading. My life would be so much poorer without the nam-shrub of Enki in it. And having said all the bad stuff, it was still gripping and entertaining throughout. Even the bad bits were not that bad, when weighed against the good.
Forgive the slightly cynical title there. I don’t actually know whether it’s still the case that RT will include adverts for m/m romance if paid, but won’t give m/m books the free review a paid advert entitles a m/f romance. I hope that the fact that they’ve published an article about m/m romance indicates they’re starting to soften towards the genre.
Apparently m/m romance is a torrent, flooding the defenceless market of romance.
http://www.rtbookreviews.com/magazine-article/its-raining-men-tackling-torrents-malemale-romantic-fiction-flooding-market?page=1
Given that m/m romance – from a m/m writer’s POV – hasn’t even made it into the mainstream yet, I suspect this is something of an exaggeration. Possibly of the same sort that says women are taking over SF if there are two female characters on a show with a six man team. IE, anything more than tokenism starts to look like a lot.
Having said that, the article is nowhere near as sneering as some of the early ones on the subject, and though it treads old ground it does so without scattering caltrops as it goes. Pretty damn positive, I think, on the whole.
Cynical I might be towards RT, but I’m absolutely not cynical about seeing two of my books featured as readers’ top picks in the historical section. Wow! I do the unalloyed happy dance over that 🙂 Thank you so much to those readers! You are stars!
This is not a review of the new Spiderman film because I don’t have an awful lot to say about it. I went to see it yesterday with the kids, and we all enjoyed it (verging on ‘enjoyed it very much’.)
I certainly enjoyed it more on the whole than The Avengers. That is, while I loved The Avengers immoderately for the first three quarters, I came out of it bitterly disappointed in the end. Partly I think this was because there had been enough time spent on the characterisation in Spiderman for me to really care about what happened to the characters. And a 17 year old can get away with being emotionally constipated and unable to express himself far better than the more grown up heroes. Also because the end of the film made sense in the context of the rest of it. The build up was good, the climax fitted it, and the whole thing reinforced the film’s theme of there being something noble in everyone, which is a theme that I like to see.
What I like about Spidey (as opposed to Batman) is that he’s light on the angst and the manpain. Batman, frankly, takes itself far too seriously. I don’t want my superhero films to be ‘realistic’ – where ‘realistic’ means ‘believes that everything is shit.’ I want my superhero films to defy that, to dare to have hope. This version of Spiderman’s origin story didn’t quite escape the canon angst, but at least there were some moments early on that made me laugh, and a genuinely heartwarming moment later (with the cranes) that made me think ‘yes, humanity is worth saving, so there!’
I didn’t come out with a buzz and an urge to write fanfic, which is my test for a top quality film, but I did enjoy it more than most things I’ve watched recently. Hm, I think for me that makes it good but not great.
Do I want to go and see The Dark Knight Rises? I’m not sure. Because of the ‘realism,’ Batman is often too nasty for me. I like Nolan, I like Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon Levitt, but I don’t like the nihilism. I don’t think it’s really realistic at all, though like all ideas it forms human reality around it. I may pass and watch it on DVD later.
So, I’m really enjoying writing The Glass Floor, despite the fact that my agent tells me vampires are passe and difficult to find a home for. And despite the fact that I said I would never write vampires, ever ever.
I should know better by now than to say things like that. It’s like a challenge to my muse. The beloved pesky creature pricks up its ears and goes “What’s that you say? You’ll never write vampires because you can’t see what’s so attractive about snogging a corpse? You strange person! I can see a dozen ways of writing a vampire story that don’t involve necrophilia, and now I’m going to suggest all of them to you, just to show you I can.”
If nothing else, the urge to write proper, traditional vampires has lead me to learn all sorts of things about Romania that I never knew before. I do like the armchair travel aspect of being a writer. There is nothing like researching a book to make you realise how wide and whacky this world of ours is, and how ignorant I am about most of it.
It also makes me appreciate Bram Stoker’s artistry in creating atmosphere in Dracula – the things he left out, and the things he infodumped. When I read his book, it does not come with Ottoman, Austrian and Russian politics. You’d never guess the Romanian princes were Greek servants of the Turkish empire imposed on them from outside, or that the country had been an Ottoman protectorate for centuries. All of which I find in equal parts fascinating and a bit too complex to easily get my head around.
Dracula comes equipped with a mental spooky soundtrack, including wolves howling and creaking doors, and possibly a lone, wailing violin in a minor key.
Mine will come with Romanian folk music, for the lulz (and the contrast.) I bet you never associated vampires with this
And yet from now on I always will. Oh Radu, no wonder you are angry all the time. You have a lot to put up with!
So, I may fail at posting one item a day on the happiness meme, but I now have some news which works to fill all the other days at once.
I’m delighted to announce that I’ve signed on with Louise Fury of the L. Perkins Literary Agency. We had a chat on Monday and agreed that we were both interested in all kinds of different genres. I was a gen writer long before I started writing slash, and I wanted the opportunity to expand out of just doing m/m romance – to have the chance to try my hand at all the many types of Fantasy and mystery and other non-romantic things.
Louise had just sold a comic book, despite never having represented graphic novels before, because she saw it and loved it and therefore saw no reason not to represent it. I find that kind of enthusiasm very liberating. So as soon as I’ve finished A Pilgrim’s Tale, EPQ and The Glass Floor, I’m going to have a go at some of the other things I’ve been constantly putting off because I knew how to sell m/m romance, but didn’t know where to start with anything else.
This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop doing m/m romance, because I love that. It just means I’m going to start doing other things too. I’m really looking forward to it. This writerly life proceeds in such slow motion that sometimes it seems like nothing ever changes. But this, this is really something 🙂
To recap:
1. Post about something that made you happy today, even if it’s just a small thing.
2. Do this everyday for eight days without fail.
3. Tag eight of your friends to do the same (Feel free to do it, but don’t feel obliged.)
Three things today too, all morris related, as I’ve spent the day playing whistle for Coton Morris Men for the first day of Ely Folk Festival, and tomorrow I’m going to spend the day dancing with the Riot for the second day.
1. Dancing with the Riot in Coton kit.
My muso’s outfit with Coton tends towards ‘The Matrix’ – tight black trousers, tight black waistcoat, long flappy black leather coat. The Riot’s kit is all colourful hankies and bright, rainbow waistcoats and costume jewellery. I very much enjoyed being drafted in to dance the Riot’s signature dance at the end of the show and looking like the spectre at the feast in the process.
2. A hatchet job on my Riot kit.
Remember that waistcoat I keep blogging about – the teal one which I made to a size 18 pattern when I joined, not realising that a size 18 pattern makes a size 14 garment? The one I had to make a stomacher for to make it big enough to fit my size 18 person? About a year ago I took the stomacher out because it fitted as it was. Now it’s too big, so today I’ve taken it in, to fit my now size 12 person. I’m happy with the weight loss and I’m happy that finally my waistcoat fits properly again.
3. Spending birthday money.
In June, my Dad gave me some money for a birthday present. Today I bought a low D whistle, so that instead of Coton’s band consisting of two high Ds, we could have the more interesting sound of one high, one low. It should sound like this:
because it is indeed a Dixon low D. But unfortunately I do not have such long and spidery fingers as the man in the video, so I need to learn to play with parts of my hand I did not think were designed for such frivolity, and – despite all the fingering for all the tunes being exactly the same – it will take me some time to adapt to it. It’s still a gorgeous monster of a thing, though, and will help me if I ever want to move on to the Uillean pipes.
1. Post about something that made you happy today, even if it’s just a small thing.
2. Do this everyday for eight days without fail.
3. Tag eight of your friends to do the same (Feel free to do it, but don’t feel obliged.)
Eight days? Can I find something that makes me happy every day for eight days? Well, I can find three today, so that’s a good start.
1. Tuskan Bean Soup. (In the style of Darth Vader.)
I tried making a Slimming World recipe soup for lunch – Tuscan Bean soup. Either the recipe meant 1.2 pints of water rather than the 1.2 litres it actually said, or some people really like their soups to taste of Dickensian gruel. This did not make me happy.
But the Beecroft is not so easily beaten by watery food products! So I stuck in a carton of passata, twice the amount of macaroni, a splash of Worcester sauce and a dollop of Peri-Peri sauce, changed the name – because it was now hot as a Tatooine desert – and presto! It was suddenly one of the best soups I’ve ever had, while still being fully Slimming World compliant. This did 🙂
Pah! You people who think slimming food has to be thin and tasteless, I defy you all!
2. Live daughter.
Eldest phoned to say she was safely on Kos and not dead in a plane crash/dead in a coach crash/dead in a boat sinking, as I had feared since she left (yesterday) for her first ever holiday away from the family/country, with nary a responsible adult on hand. She’s 18 now, and is supposed to be a responsible adult herself. Learning that she was not dead made me very happy.
3. Scrivener is silly.
When you plot with scrivener’s plotting cards, they make you give each card a title. They don’t give you much space for it, so if you want to see the whole thing, you have to keep it short. If you then click on the chapter heading, all of the titles of your cards come up, in a brief, laconic summary of the plot. This week’s chapter made me laugh:
- Radu makes a bad first impression
- Enter the vampires
- Radu has embarrassing parents
- Everything gets a bit dub-con
- Frank blames himself.
Possibly I have been reading too much fanfiction recently 😉
