Lovely review for Shining in the Sun

Google Alerts are not an unmixed blessing, because they make you aware of how much you are being pirated.  On the other hand, it’s wonderful to stumble across a review that you had no idea was there.  This one is from the Isn’t It Romance blog:

you know what I really really loved? The way the stakes were set up; the beautifully set up believeable conflict. I felt the truth of the characters’ dilemmas. I believed. They were real to me.

Thank you so much to Tumperkin 🙂  (Great name, btw.)

We’ve been having a conversation on Twitter and she delighted me by mentioning that Darren had a sort of purity about him.  This made me squee, because I thought so too, but I wasn’t sure whether it came across.  Both of my boys in this book start out as born victims, allowing themselves to be sacrificed for the needs of others, and that should come with a little inner purity, I think.

Wonderful review of False Colors

Ooh, Google Alerts has just alerted me to this wonderful review of False Colors from John Kompa at Flying Off the Shelves:

Her main characters, John Cavendish and Alfie Donwell, are more alive, more human than most people I know. She breathed life into these characters and they took what they got, ran away together to make the best of their existence. I was so engrossed by the characterization that I forgot I was reading a fictional piece

Five stars, and I get a personal thumbs up too.  Hee!  Thanks John!

Tattoo musings

I’ve always wanted a tattoo – and when I say ‘always’ I mean “since long before it became acceptable for women to have tattoos.”  It’s that history thing again.  Being English, with a mother from Yorkshire and a father from the Welsh borders, it’s highly unlikely that I don’t have a mix of Saxon, Viking and Celtic blood – and all of those peoples traditionally wore tattoos.  I don’t know why other people want them, but for me it’s a way of connecting to my roots, honouring my ancestors, that kind of thing.

My dad got tattooed when he was in the Army and regretted it ever after.  (I always thought that his tattoos were cool, myself.)  On the hottest of days he wouldn’t wear shorts or short sleeved tops because he wanted to keep them covered up.  That cautionary tale has kept me from taking the plunge myself.   What if I did get one and then regret it?

But I’m getting older now, so the question is turning into What if I don’t get one and then regret that for the rest of my life? If I get one and then wish I hadn’t, I really don’t have as long to live with it as I used to.  I want to be the kind of person who has tattoos, not the kind of person who always wanted tattoos but never summoned up the nerve to get them done.

So, I’ve promised myself that when I hit my target weight on this diet, I will get a tattoo as a reward.  Judging from the way the diet’s going, that will be some time in April, which doesn’t give me very long to choose something I can live with as part of my own body until I die.

I started off by browsing tattoo flash sites, which was depressing.  All the tattoos for men are too big for me, and all the tattoos for women are, for want of a better word, too girly.  I’m really not the kind of person who wants to decorate themselves with stars and flowers.  I like tribal tattoos, but which tribe are we talking about?  Probably not mine.  I had thought I wanted a compass-rose, but I couldn’t find a good one, and surely there were symbols that meant more to me than that?

Eventually I looked up the history of tattooing and discovered that:

The Council of Northumberland in 787 makes it clear that the Fathers of the Church distinguished between profane tattoos and Christian tattoos. They wrote: “When an individual undergoes the ordeal of tattooing for the sake of God, he is greatly praised. But one who submits himself to be tattooed for superstitious reasons in the manner of the heathens will derive no benefit there from.”

Which confirmed to me that my ancestors made a practice of tattooing themselves, and made me think.  I was converted to Christianity by reading the Anglo-Saxon version of the scriptures, and particularly by a poem about the last judgment, written by a man called Cynewulf.  It would be nice to honour him by getting a tattoo that the fathers of the English church would have approved of.

That sent me off looking for Saxon religious symbols, and I immediately thought of vine-scroll.  An intertwining grape vine inhabited by small animals and birds was used a lot in Saxon art to represent Jesus (because of the bit in the Bible where it says “I am the vine and you are the branches.”)  Great, I thought.  Now I know what to look for, it’ll be easy.

Is it heck!  Trying to find designs using “vine-scroll” brings up all the feminine designs I didn’t like.  Trying to find designs using “Saxon tattoos” brings up a few designs based on early metalwork, none of which are remotely Christian.  Eventually I realized that to find Saxon designs I had to search under “Celtic” which grieves my geeky historical accuracy side no end.  But even then, I didn’t turn up any inhabited vine scroll.

In a way this is a good thing – it means if I can get a nice armband of inhabited vine scroll, not many other people will have anything like it.  But it makes getting it a lot harder.

Eventually I found a drawing of the Bewcastle cross, which has some spectacular vine scroll up the sides:

and then attempted with my less than adequate Gimp skills to turn that into an armband design.  I’m hampered somewhat by not knowing what size my arm is going to be in April, and even more by not knowing how much is possible in terms of complexity v size.  Still, I think this gives an idea, and perhaps I’ll be able to discuss it with the tattoo artist once I find one, and ask them to adapt it into something that would work.

Of course, that looks like a major undertaking, and I have the lowest pain threshold in the world.  So I’m now thinking that perhaps I should get something small and simple first, to test myself out, like a very basic black cross.  Heh, I’d heard that, once you started, you tended to get more than one, but I seem to have persuaded myself into two from the word go 🙂

I’ve been looking up the local tattoo parlours on the internet, and the one that seemed to have the most consistent good word of mouth is Tattoo Crazy in March.  So on Friday I drove up there to look it over.  It certainly seems very clean, and the lady on the desk was friendly and happy to show off her full sleeve tattoo which she’d had done there (and which was lovely.)  So all I need now is to lose the 1stone 5lbs I’ve still got to go before I hit my target weight.  I wish I could do that faster, dammit!  I want to get this done now!

Colour or black and white on the vine-scroll, incidentally?  I was thinking black only, but having seen her coloured one, I’m now thinking colour would be nicer.  What do you think?

What to do tomorrow?

I have finished the first draft of Forced today.  Hurrah!  It came in at 20,367 words out of an estimated length of 20,000, which I feel quite smug about.  (Let’s not mention the fact that I already know it will need an entire new opening scene.  Possibly I can reduce Conroy’s interminable dithering to make up for that.)

It wasn’t until today, about four paragraphs from the end, that I realized what the story was about (theme-wise.)  It’s about the damage that the self-righteous can do in the world.  Up to that point I thought it was about giving up everything – including one’s self respect – for love.  Perhaps I thought that theme couldn’t ever yield a happy ending.  At any rate, at least I know now, and that will give me something to aim at once I start the edits.

But speaking of edits, I now have Under the Hill and Forced both waiting for the second draft stage.  I know I should rest Forced for a while before starting edits on that, but I don’t want to start edits on Under the Hill and then have to interrupt them in a week’s time to work on something else.  If I let Forced rest for the rest of this week and over the weekend, I can start editing it on the 17th.  But what to do with Thursday and Friday?  Should I:

a) Work on the plot plan for Whirlwind Boys,

b) Write a short story set in Anglo-Saxon times,

c) Drive to March and check out the tattoo shop there, or

d) Take all my size 18 clothes to the charity shop?

Other exciting news – it is the Straw Bear Festival on Saturday, and this time I really am dancing in it.  Further huzzahs! 🙂

Plough Monday

It is Plough Monday today, the traditional time when ploughboys and other agricultural types were expected to go back to work after Christmas.  Naturally this couldn’t happen without a ritual attached (a ritual that took all day and therefore meant one more day of not working 😉 )

Here in the Fens the tradition was that the ploughboys would go round the houses of the village, molly dancing and cadging money from the richer inhabitants.  If anyone failed to pay up, they might find their front lawns mysteriously ploughed up.  Because the dancers meant business, they blacked their faces with soot so that they could not be recognized later if the householder – in a fit of Scrooge-like meanness – reacted by calling the police.

Like lots of traditions that could be construed as begging, this died out under the Victorians.  According to Mollydancing.com Much of the molly dance performed today was adapted from the teachings of Cyril Papworth who ran a workshop in 1980 to teach local East Anglian dance groups the molly dances that his grandmother had taught him.

However, the oldest of the modern molly sides is Mepal Molly, and one of their members told me this morning that he danced with the original Mepal Molly side – then very old gentlemen of 90 years or so – when they were still around.  The modern side modeled its clothes and dances on the original side, so they can claim an unbroken lineage.

Mepal Molly dance only twice a year, on Plough Monday and at the Wittlesea Straw Bear Festival (which is itself a Plough-Monday thing.)  Because they only dance two days in a year they are awesomely terrible.  They are so bad, in fact, that I can’t believe they didn’t have to practice hard to get that bad.

They’re also an invitation only side.  You don’t get to just join, you have to be asked.  Last year I loaned my 18th Century peasant outfit to their Molly (the bloke who dresses as a woman).  And this year, although a different man is playing the part and has decided to go more 1950s-ish with it, he’s got my brown wig.  Bigger news than that, though, is that this year my husband was asked to dance with them.

I think this is a brilliant thing and quite an honour.  So we spent all day on Saturday raiding the local charity shops for an outfit that might have been worn by a turn-of-the-century ploughman, then sewing tatters on the jacket.  This morning he was picked up at the outrageous time of 8.15 to dance in various local schools.  This afternoon’s schedule looks like this:

12.00 noon Aldreth “world’s end” crossroads
12.30pm Sutton High Street dance by SPAR shop.
1.00pm The Red Lion at Stretham
2.10pm Wilburton Church
2.15pm The Three Kings at Haddenham
2.45pm Witcham – by the bus shelter
3.00pm Wardy Hill Green
3.15pm Coveney – by the old school
3.30pm Way Head
3.45pm Little Downham by the School
4.15pm Ely market place
The times are somewhat approximate.

7.15pm The Prince Albert, Silver Street , Ely.
8.30pm The Honest John, Chatteris
Finale 9.45pm The Three Pickerels, Mepal.

So I think if they do get paid for any of that, they will have certainly deserved it!  I’m going to try and catch them at at least one spot and take a video, which I will add to this post when I can.  They really are so bad that they have to be seen in action to be believed.

One of the things I find quite interesting about all of this is that the Molly was very anxious and ashamed about dressing in women’s clothes before he started, but when I met him today he said “I see what you mean about it not being anything special.  They’re only clothes.”  I can’t help but feel that a small blow has been dealt there against gender absolutism 🙂

Video as promised.

Possibly one of those resolutions that doesn’t last

I’m Posting every week in 2011.

I’ve decided I ought to get myself organized in order to do more, so I’m signing up for this WordPress post-a-week thing, and will try to post something every Monday.

I know it won’t be easy, but it might be fun, inspiring, awesome and wonderful. (Can you tell that this is a form letter?  I would never say something so perky.) Therefore I’m promising to make use of The DailyPost, and the community of other bloggers with similiar goals, to help me along the way, including asking for help when I need it and encouraging others when I can.

If you already read my blog, I hope you’ll encourage me with comments and likes, and good will along the way.

Signed,

Alex

(I wonder if this post counts as my post for this week? 😉

Reading for pleasure and profit

(The profit being that you end up better read than you were when you started.)

One of the good things about limited internet over the holidays was that this gave me oodles of time to read.  I re-read The Letter of Marque by Patrick O’Brian and fell in love with his style and storytelling all over again, but Jack didn’t quite get reinstated, so I’ve got to dig out The Thirteen Gun Salute now, because I can’t leave him stranded in the misery and disgrace of being a hugely successful and wealthy privateer, poor man.

I also read Bomber County: The Lost Airmen of World War Two by Daniel Swift, which is a very thought provoking and fascinating book about World War Two war poetry, focusing particularly on the imaginative experience of the airmen in Bomber Command.  He tracked down the story of his grandfather, who was shot down on the coast of Holland, but I had the feeling that his grandfather was a convenient bit of pathos for him, and that his real interest lay in the poetry.  I had something of the experience, reading this, that I had at university studying English and Philosophy.  Philosophy demanded that you try to be clear and specific about what you said and meant, while English was all about getting as much resonance out of a piece of text as was humanly possible, whether or not the text actually supported that reading.  My sympathies were all with the philosophers, and judging from my reaction to Swift’s musings, they still are.  I thought he got more resonance out of his stories than they really justified, (Icarus?  Seriously?!  Are you missing the whole point of the Icarus story, or what?) but it was interesting watching him do it, nevertheless.

I’m now reading One of the Boys: Homosexuality in the Military During World War II by Paul Jackson which is also proving to be very interesting. It’s about the Canadian military, but I don’t know of an equivalent book about the British military, so beggars can’t be choosers. He strikes me as being much less biased about his subject than the bloke who wrote Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition and Boys at Sea: Sodomy, Indecency, and Courts Martial in Nelson’s Navy, both of which were spoiled, for me, by the author never admitting that his data might support other conclusions than the ones he draws, depending on how you interpret it.  Jackson strikes me as being much more thorough and more decently reticent about his ability to discern the absolute truth of something that was complicated and contradictory even to the participants and has to be even more so to us after 70 odd years of distance.

Review for SitS

I just got back from up North, and am absolutely shattered, but couldn’t leave today without mentioning the lovely review of Shining in the Sun which Elisa Rolle posted on her site today.

She says Of course Alec is naïve, of course he knows that if not for his money he would have not met Darren; and of course Darren is far from being innocent, and he is interested, and weak, right until the last chapter. Does this make them less perfect characters? I think that indead this makes them the most interesting thing of the novel.

which makes me happy because I love those boys, and I love them because they are both, in their different ways, complete disaster areas.  I don’t think love should be just for the heroes.  Screw-ups with personality problems should get a happy ending too 😉

Obligatory end of year post

2010 has been a frustrating year for me.  It’s been the year when my frozen shoulders went from annoying to “I’ve been in debilitating agony for months” and then back again to merely annoying (thank God!)  It’s been a year where I’ve felt as if I was in transition, but I haven’t known from what or to what.  Writing time has been sporadic and constantly interrupted, and as a result I lost quite a lot of my enthusiasm.

Nevertheless, despite that, I’ve written the first draft of a 140K novel, and most of the first draft of a novella (give me three uninterrupted days and I’ll finish that too.)  So it can’t be counted as a complete fail.  I’ve also learned to play the pennywhistle, thus fulfilling a lifetime’s ambition to play something that could carry a tune.  But that’s another story.

There’s nothing any resolution of mine can do to ensure that this year my family are all in better health and thus go about their own lives, leaving me to have some regularity in mine which will allow me to plan for this year.  So any plans will have to be more like guidelines.  However, starting off with a lack of crippling pain already makes it a better year than 2010.

The easy bit is this:

In 2011 I intend (God willing)

To edit and submit “Under the Hill.”

To finish, edit and submit “Forced.”

To write a good chunk of the first draft of “Whirlwind Lads.”

And anything other than that will be a bonus.  Hopefully by the time I’ve finished “Whirlwind Lads” I’ll have a better idea of where I’m going and what to do next.

I also resolve not to pressurize myself to turn out writing as if I was on a factory production line.  I don’t want to write production line books.  I am a naturally slow writer who needs lots of pondering time, so this year I give myself the time to make sure I do things well.

And on that note it’s about time I figured out a better way of doing research than just “reading lots of stuff and hoping to remember it for long enough to get the book written.”  I need some way of keeping it organized and available in case I need it again.  My memory is definitely not the thing for that!

Happy New Year to everyone!  And I hope that 2011 is better for us all than 2010.

A good Christmas

Despite  Christmas being a bit of a last minute emergency affair for us this year, it turned out to be a very good one.  It was a last minute affair because we had been intending to go to my MIL’s  this year, but she lives up North, and when the roads were bad with the snow it seemed a good idea to cancel rather than risk the journey.  Our central heating and hot water boiler had also chosen the week before Christmas to pack up and we were afraid of the house freezing and the pipes bursting while we were away.  So on 23rd I had to dash out and get ingredients for a Christmas dinner here.  Read the rest of this entry »