Thank you so much to everyone who sent me birthday wishes yesterday. I’ve never felt so loved in my life! I was positively overwhelmed. My sister invited me round for lunch and bought me perfume, and my husband brought home Thai food for dinner and gave me a necklace that looks like a stylish pendant but is actually a stick-drive. I shall put all my stories on it and wear my backup around my neck 🙂
The tattoo was my main present, but I was also lucky enough to get Lush bath stuff from one daughter, and a glasses stand and a tea-infuser shaped like a teapot from the other. They even wrapped them up in the middle of the night and sneaked them down to my desk in the morning. (Until which point I had no idea they had remembered at all.)
Thank you so much to Wulfila for the lovely notebook, which is just the right size for my bag, so I will be able to carry it around and write down ideas when they come to me, instead of losing them. Thank you to Clare London, Canadian Jay and lovely anon for the virtual gifts, about which I am very chuffed, and yes it was one of my best birthdays ever. Considering I’ve had so many of them, that’s saying something 🙂
June 24th,2011
Life | tags:
birthday,
thanks |
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Chapter Two.
The sun came up on Sessrumnir, and when the servants had thrown open the glistening doors it glanced through all the rooms and glittered in Freyja’s mirror. She sat before her glass admiring her beautiful face, rouging her lips with a paste of blood and honey. The yellow light shocked glints of red and gold from her auburn hair, and stroked a gentle hand along the twisted amber and gold of the Brisingamen like a lover departing in the morning.
An elvish maidservant came hurrying in silently bearing scented water in a golden dish. The steam rose like a grey blossom as she walked between the silvered pillars and filled the air with the fragrance of forest flowers. Her dark green oblate eyes were wide with anticipation,her face unreadable. As Freyja washed her red-stained fingers she said;
"My Lady, Loki is at the door."
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So, yesterday I hit my target weight on my diet, which means that I now have to figure out how to eat in order to neither lose nor gain any weight. That will be interesting. I may stay on the diet but start exercising, in an attempt to replace fat with (heavier) muscle.
In a total coincidence, but a nice one as it makes this a reward for achievement, yesterday was also the day when I got my long-planned vine-scroll tattoo done. This was a much bigger job than the cross and took two solid hours of work. (By which I mean the tattoo artist worked solidly for two hours, while I read “On Stranger Tides.”)
Again, it was not terribly painful – at times I was so absorbed in the book that I forgot it was happening at all. The last half an hour, where he was going over lines he’d already made in order to widen them and do a bit of shading, did begin to shade into “I wonder how much longer I’m going to be able to stand this without needing to ask him to stop” territory, though. It had got to the stage where the skin already felt badly sunburnt, so the hot scratchy feeling of the needles was magnified by everything already being inflamed and oversensitive.
I did ask him why I – with my low pain threshold – was finding this easy, while people I know with much higher ones have found it terrible, and he said, darkly, that “there are a lot of butchers out there.” Which I take to mean that a lot of it is down to the skill of the tattoo artist rather than my innate toughness.
This was a different artist this time – Barry himself, the boss of the place. I was very impressed by the way he took the line drawing he’d made and improved on it with a bit of freehand shading. He seemed surprised that I didn’t want any more doing with it. He said “I could do so much with this! Fill it in with colour or greywork to make it look like a piece of jewellery.” But I don’t know that I want any more than this. I’m fairly certain I don’t, in fact. I like the bold, black tribal tattoos, and I wanted it to be a bit like that, only with iconography from my own culture (assuming there’s some Angle or Saxon blood in me somewhere.) It’s pretty much exactly what I wanted as it is:
What a great year it’s been so far for films I wanted to see! I can’t remember another year like it. But perhaps I’m getting jaded as a result, because I went into X-Men: First Class with high hopes and found it very … meh.
Part of this may be that I’m still obsessing over my newly kindled Thor fannishness. It’s funny, I could see that First Class was a better film than Thor – it had character arcs and important issues and slicker special effects and better fight scenes. But, deary me, it was so very worthy with its earnest examination of social and self-acceptance issues that it seemed to forget to have any fun.
In that, I’m sure it’s quite realistic for a super-hero film, and maybe the realism is why I didn’t like it very much.
It was nice to see some new mutants, and Banshee’s appearance caused me to lose a 5p bet I’d had with my daughter a couple of years ago. (I maintained that you will never see any red-headed heroes, red hair usually being reserved for villains.) Banshee wasn’t exactly the hero of the film, and his hair was more auburn than ginger, but it was close enough. It still doesn’t count as a great step forward for inclusivity, though, when set beside the fact that the one black character was there to be canon-fodder, and all the female mutants were on the ‘wrong’ side. (You can see why they would be, mind you. That’s the side I’d have chosen too in the circumstances.)
The scene with Magneto pulling the submarine out of the water would have been awesome if it had come before the scenes of Magneto doing even more awesome things in the last two pictures. I did enjoy the final showdown, and thought it was cool that Xavier got to share in that death (nice to see his telepathy has its downsides too.) I also thought “you killed my mother!” made a nice change – so many heroes are fixated on their fathers to the point where you wonder if they had a second parent at all.
But setting it in the 60s and being faithful to a certain amount of the skeevy sexism of the period meant that quite a lot of it left a bad taste in my mouth. I remember what that was like, and it was no fun the first time.
Magneto pretty much stole the show, and Xavier came across as such a self-centred dimbo that I wasn’t really able to feel the central ethical tug of the story at all. Someone more eloquent and likeable should have been on the “humans are not necessarily our enemies” side, particularly if all the evidence of the film was going to be weighed against them. Perhaps the film makers thought that was obvious, but it wasn’t obvious enough for me, given that every character on the other side had perfectly good reasons to be there. Someone who was slightly less oblivious of society’s dark side than Charles would have been a better choice for the mouthpiece of the ‘right’ side. As it was, he failed to convince me to cheer for him – which meant I didn’t enjoy his victory as much as I should have.
So yeah, this is not much of a review because I can’t find much enthusiasm for the film. I don’t really want realistic politics from my gosh-wow, “isn’t it fun to blow things up in awesome ways” escapist super-hero films. At least, not this much of it.
I guess I also feel that there are things too terrible to be used – or at least used like this – as melodramatic backstory to the wish-fulfilment fantasy of being gifted with cool powers that set you outside the normal run of humanity, and the holocaust is one of them. I don’t know why I feel like that with this film, and didn’t with Magneto’s backstory in the previous ones, but perhaps it’s because those terrible things are that much closer in this one and cast a denser shadow as a result. Or perhaps it’s because the social outcast/super-hero metaphor breaks down for me when it’s looked at as closely as this – none of these super-powers leave you exactly powerless in the face of human evil, after all.
Cheyenne Publications owner Mark Probst has launched a great new project, begun after the rash of gay youth suicides a few months back. The problem may not be in the headlines at the moment, but it’s no less serious. The Trevor Project, founded in memory of one such young man, is dedicated to preventing glbt teen suicide and helping kids survive adolescence.
And there are some GREAT stories:
Reviews
“Four top authors take on GLBT teen issues—and the proceeds go to the Trevor Project? I’m so there!”
Brent Hartinger, author of Geography Club and Shadow Walkers
Awake is now available for sale. Four acclaimed authors have provided YA stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender teens. All net proceeds go to The Trevor Project. Retail 12.99.
It’s available in print and various ebook forms, and you can find it here:
Amazon (print)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982826761
Barnes & Noble (print & Nookbook)
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Awake/Tracey-Pennington/e/9780982826768
Amazon Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0055KUFSM
TLA Video:
http://www.tlavideo.com/gay-awake/p-324060-2
The Book Depository (free shipping worldwide)
http://www.bookdepository.com/Awake-Tracey-Pennington/9780982826768?selectCurrency=USD
Amazon UK:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0982826761
Comprising the rest of Chapter One
Previously – Sceldwulf, having lived his three score years and ten, decided to stir up trouble with a story of the old gods, and then commit suicide. Now that everyone is feeling properly on edge, there comes a knocking at the door…
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and free to anyone who wants it 🙂
Blurb
Enjoy this entertaining collection of flash fiction stories, each one a short but sweet expression of what it means to be queer in Britain, past and present. All these stories reflect the iconic sights and national character of the British Isles: a taste of our idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, but also an unashamed representation of the love, loyalty and laughter of our people.
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So, I’m at the stage with Under the Hill in which I should imminently be getting a contract to sign – at which point I will officially announce as much as I know about who the publishers are and when it’s likely to appear. But in the mean time my editor and I have decided that as it’s so long, the best thing is to publish it in two parts. This is fine, as there happens to be a natural cliffhanger right in the middle, which will make a great place to end one book and start another.
However, that means that Under the Hill becomes the title of the whole series (if you can call two books a series), and I have to think of separate individual titles for each volume. I was thinking Knight’s Gambit and Queen’s Pawn. The trouble starts in the first book when a knight of Faerie meets Ben and recognizes him, and it ends in the second book with two Queens of Faerie having a smackdown, aided by our heroes, so that seemed appropriate. But I can’t help thinking that chess references may be as common as muck. What do you think?
Otherwise I was thinking about something to do with take-off and landing (to tie into the fact that two of the heroes are WW2 airmen.) Or something to do with being kidnapped and rescued (though that might be a bit spoilery)? The first book mainly takes place in Bakewell in Derbyshire (a small, picturesque village in the UK), with diversions into Elfland, whereas the second takes place mainly in Faerie, with diversions into our world. But Under the Hill: Village People and The Queens of Faerie, while appropriate, might be a bit misleading.
Can anyone help me? I’m really useless at this!
What to do when stuck at home with two ill children – try and catch up on all the comic reading you missed for the last 20 years. Also brush up on your mythology.
I have been consistently hating on (comic and movie) Loki’s horned helmet for decades, but now, thanks to the evidence of the Loki Stone from Kirby Steven church in Cumbria UK, it’s become clear to me that the ram’s horns are as authentic as you can get. The Snaptun stone in Denmark, where you can tell it’s him by the scarred lips, also has cute little horns. So, since horns appear to be obligatory, I shall resign myself to them on the grounds of "love me, love my silly hat."
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1st part available here: http://alexbeecroft.com/2011/05/since-there-is-no-lokaday/ in which the elderly Sceldwulf is telling his disapproving kinsfolk about how he once met two gods, when they were being hunted out of England by the new faith.
Chapter 1, Part Two – in which Sceldwulf fulfils an old oath.
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