Having tucked The Pilgrims’ Tale away in the airing cupboard, under a damp tea-towel to prove, I’m in between big novel projects at the moment. This is a dangerous position to be in. It means I may suddenly be seized by a desire to write yet another story about Loki, and none of us wants that.
This was the result of a prompt I saw somewhere I can no longer remember, which called for a story uniting these three elements: A campfire, a scream, and a lie that wouldn’t stop growing. Come on, how could I not write a story about Loki and a giant chicken after a prompt like that? I had so much fun, I’m not even ashamed.
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I recently had a lovely email from Gert Alenhall, who is the person in charge of making and keeping the 18th century clothes of the mariners on the Swedish ship Götheborg. He also runs a business of his own, designing and making all kinds of costumes. Check out his website here www.ateljealenhall.se )
He said (I paraphrase) “I was very surprised to see the cover of your book, False Colors, because that’s my ship on there, and I keep the archives of photos and don’t remember that one.”
I had no idea where the photo came from, as the cover was made by Larry Rostant and I had nothing to do with it, but I was simply amazed that it’s a real ship at all. How lovely!
I’m not making myself clear, am I? But breaking news is that the ship at the bottom of this cover:
is this ship:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6theborg_%28ship%29
Here she is exchanging gun salutes with HMS Belfast on her way back home to Sweden after visiting London:
How cool is that? I would say “very” but I am biased 🙂
Well, the gist of this post is in the title. My lovely editor at Samhain, Anne Scott, emailed me this morning to say “Did you know Bomber’s Moon has a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly?” To which I had to sit down abruptly with the smelling salts (porridge actually) and calm myself before replying.
Publisher’s Weekly, how about that? And under “Fiction” – not “m/m romance” or even “romance”. Talk about mainstream 😀
They say
Beecroft’s writing dazzles, brimming with lush descriptions of worldly and otherworldly landscapes, taut conflict, and two finely drawn romantic leads… readers will delight in every moment of their adventure.
Full review here: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-60928-724-5
Coolness! *Doing the interpretive dance of speechless glee.*
Huzzah, and other, more period-appropriate, exclamations. The first draft of The Pilgrims’ Tale is complete at 87,890 words. It opens with a scene a little bit like this:
only without the anachronisms and arrows, and carries on being less about war and more about music and gender-role confusion than is usual with me. It’s probably the gentlest thing I’ve done so far (if you don’t count the way my heroes meet up the second and third time, or the fate of the best friend, or the inability of Leofgar’s lord to understand the word ‘no.’) That’s either because I’m feeling old and tired at the moment, or it’s because I wanted to show Saxon society when it was working, not when it was either falling apart under threat of invasion or gearing itself up to fight.
This is probably all wrong from a tension and drama POV, but my heroes are a professional musician/entertainer and a reluctant berserker. The gleeman would be in trouble in the middle of a war zone, and the berserker would have more pressing matters to attend to than to fall in love. Hence, peace.
I should really celebrate by going out somewhere nice – except that the car has broken down. Or by having a nice relaxing bath – except that a water main burst nearby last night and we still have no water in the house. Tomorrow then 🙂
I wrote 52,296 words of this since the girls went back to school on the 6th of January by making sure that I wrote at least 1000 words every week day. In practice I think I averaged about 1800 a day, with some sick days. Which is not quite as impressive as NaNoWriMo, (where I also only write on weekdays, and therefore need to write about 2,400 words a day) but is a lot more sustainable.
Now I think I will write that story about Loki versus the giant chicken, then do the first draft of a short novella, and thus give myself the time and space I need apart from this to come back to the second draft fresh.
I occasionally also froth at the mouth about this subject, and have crossed one publisher off my list of ‘people I will ever work with again’ because they tried to take my wases away. But I have been too lazy/ill informed to ever write a proper post about why using the verb ‘to be’ does not constitute passive voice, why you can’t just take it away without deforming the language – and why passive voice isn’t always such a terrible thing anyway.
Fortunately for my laziness, Patricia C Wrede has written her own post about it, and it is wonderful. Have a look at this:
~ Read the rest of this entry »
With the self publishing boom showing no sign of going away, I thought it might be a useful thing to do a tutorial on the making of simple book cover art. Like everything, making cover art can be as easy or as hard as you choose to make it, and while getting a professional cover artist in may be the ideal, paying for professional cover art may not be possible. If that’s the case, you can still do a pretty good job yourself with some free programmes and a tenner or so spent at the stock photo sites.
First of all, go to http://www.gimp.org/ and download The GIMP. (This stands for “GNU Image Manipulation Program” and has nothing to do with leatherwear unless you want it to.) The Gimp is almost as powerful as Photoshop, more than capable of allowing you to make highly professional book covers, yet totally free.
It’s also offputtingly complicated and has no user manual, but who cares about that, right? 🙂
So, today let’s make a cover for a book which you are going to upload to Smashwords. Smashwords likes its book covers to be 800 pixels tall by 500 pixels wide. If you want to make a cover for Amazon, you’ll need to check what dimensions they recommend and use those instead.
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Wow, the Under the Hill books have just had their first review and they’re not even out yet. What’s even more exciting is that it’s a good one, and it’s by Library Journal Reviews, so I guess I can keep my fingers crossed for the books to be available in a few libraries once they’re out. After all the furore about RWA recently, it’s also nice to see them listed with two m/f romances and no attempts at segregation at all.
The review is by Kristi Chadwick and concludes “From World War II to Faerie, ghosts to dragons, war to romance, there is a little bit of everything in these books. Beecroft (By Honor Betrayed) weaves together a wonderful pair of books with interesting characters and more than enough twists to keep the reader surprised until the end. …. Those who enjoy complex fantasy stories with nontraditional pairings will enjoy this ebook duo.”
Full review here.
Huzzah! Thank you Kristi. It’s always scary waiting for the first review and wondering whether it’s going to be good or bad. I’m really relieved to have it so successfully behind me before I’d even started to worry 🙂
Hold these dates!
September 14th – 16th 2012
will see the third annual UK Meet for readers/writers/reviewers/fans of GLBTQ fiction.
There will be a full day of programmed events on Saturday 15th, plus social events on Friday evening and Sunday morning.
Full press release, with details of where, what and how to book, goes live Friday 24th Feb.
Call for submissions for linked anthology "Lashings of Sauce" goes live Friday 2nd March.
UK Meet team (Jo, Jamie, Clare, Alex and Charlie)
UK GLBTQ Fiction – Read it, Write it, Love it
February 10th,2012
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I share many of my own characteristics with my characters – if they have my paranoia or my faith it gives me a sort of trap door into their minds through which I can get in there and rummage around to see what else there is.
I may have mentioned before that the particular aspect I gave poor Conrad from By Honor Betrayed was my decision making process. Like him, I can’t help revisiting every thought, decision and action endlessly, trying to make sure I’ve seen all the possible angles, been as fair as I can be, guessed as many of the reasons behind [whatever] and attempted to predict any and all consequences from any and all possible actions.
This makes it hard to say anything with certainty, and means I often end up coming back and semi-contradicting what I said earlier. And ever since I posted that post about finding your author’s voice, I’ve been plagued by the thought that I might not have covered the full complexity of things.
Firstly, I stand by my opinion that you don’t need to go looking for your ‘authorial voice’. I still think your over-all style, the thing that makes your writing yours and when distilled smells of “essence of Beecroft” (not honestly a thing that sounds terribly attractive) is something you don’t have to go looking for. It will turn up on its own as you write and continue to write.
However (there’s always a ‘however’) I do think it’s important to point out that each individual book has a voice, and that does need to be found.
If I’m writing a book set in the 18th Century, I write in a different way to how I write contemporary. Because I’m a very instinctive writer – I do stuff without knowing why I do it – I didn’t really notice this fact until I started writing A Pilgrims’ Tale. When I wrote Shining in the Sun, I knew that something in me rejoiced in the ability to run wild and free with characters who were suddenly allowed to utter elegant sentences such as “Oh fuck you, you fucking wanker!” And to be able to use words like “psychiatrist” and “aspirin” and “Volkswagen.” That was terribly exciting, but I didn’t really give it a second thought until I had to shift gears again and start something Saxon.
A Pilgrims’ Tale is set in early Anglo-Saxon England, in the days when the English Language looked like this:
þær ic ne gehyrde
butan hlimman sæ,
iscaldne wæg.
(There I heard naught but the roaring sea, the ice-cold wave.)
And to me it seemed obvious that I couldn’t possibly use the same ‘voice’ for a story set in the 8th Century as the voice I used for the 18th or the 21st. The way people use language says so much about their attitudes and their beliefs that to use modern language for the past, or historical language for the present sounds ridiculous and falsifies the way people think.
When I read the journals of an 18th Century writer, I’m always struck by the careful but confident elegance of the way they express themselves. You can feel the spirit of the age in them – in the way that they make such an effort to be civilized, urbane and delicate – and yet keep slipping into roaring, lively vulgarity. They’re a noisy, self-confident people with lots of animal vitality who are trying to tame themselves for the sake of civilization. And if you can get all of that from the way they express themselves, then the writer can get all of that across to the reader simply by allowing the book to speak in the same way. (Or at least, as close as you can get without losing your modern reader altogether.)
But when I read Anglo-Saxon poetry I get something very different. Although the undercurrent of lively vulgarity is still there, the overcurrent (so to speak) is in a much more minor key – it’s melancholy but strong. It laments the hardships of the world and finds consolation in reputation and shield-brothers, in a good lord and the possibility of doing the right thing. It’s fatalistic and – if not despairing – it is resigned to the futility of everything in this world and the inevitability of death.
Somehow, using a language that has changed so much from its Old English roots that you need dictionaries and grammars to translate it, I have to find a voice for this book which captures something of the proud, grim, beautiful act of endurance that was life in Saxon days. I have to find a voice for this book which is different from my 18th Century voice, and different again from my contemporary one.
How to do that?
For me the first step is always reading what the people of the time have written. You really can’t get into their heads in any other way. No amount of looking at grave goods or reading text books can substitute for reading the actual people’s actual words. How else would we know that the Saxons were plagued with thoughts that the days of glory were gone, the ancient works of giants were destroyed and they were living in a mean little post-apocalyptic world where nothing would ever be as good again?
Dagas sind gewitene,
ealle onmedlan
eorþan rices;
The days are gone of all the glory of the kingdoms of the earth;
How else, too, would I know how they expressed themselves, and be able to take elements of that to use for myself?
Once I’ve read a lot of original source documents (even if it has to be in translation) the way they express themselves will begin to sink in. With the Saxons I notice that the words are simple, but the phrases alliterate, and the whole thing has a beat like a drum. I notice the tendency for certain sentences to sound a bit like proverbs – and I remember that outside the monasteries this is an oral culture, so people need mnemonics to help them remember things. There’s a heaviness, a portentousness there. These are serious-minded people.
And all of that is stuff I can do myself. So when I started writing A Pilgrims’ Tale, I deliberately chose simple words with English roots over complex words with French roots. (My characters ‘turn thoughts over’ rather than ‘consider’ or ‘cogitate’ or even ‘reflect’.) My scop (bard) character has a tendency to speak in alliterative verse – because he’s been so highly trained and memorised so much of it that that’s how he thinks. And everyone has a tendency to offer each other gnomic pieces of advice, and faintly regret that they weren’t born in a more splendid time.
The result of which is that A Pilgrim’s Tale will have a very different ‘voice’ to anything I’ve done before. It’ll still be my authorial voice, but it’ll be what my voice sounds like when speaking about the Saxons. The book voice will be different, whatever makes me me (and therefore my author voice) will be the same.
Here endeth my needless complication on the idea of ‘voice’ 🙂
So uncomfortable in fact that one of their chapters have banned authors of same-sex romances from entering their books into competition altogether.
This kind of discrimination makes me uncomfortable too. I’m sure you’ve heard of this already, but if you haven’t, check out Heidi Cullinan’s post about it:
http://heidicullinan.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/rwa-shouldnt-be-in-the-business-of-discrimination/#comment-9126
And in keeping with my apparent new mission in life – spreading links to petitions – here is the link to the petition you can sign to tell the RWA that this is unacceptable.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/rwa-shouldnt-be-in-the-business-of-discrimination/
Please pass the link along to anyone who you think might be interested.
