OMG Shoes! 18th Century shoes!

I have finally installed my buckles on my 18th Century shoes.  Or rather, I’ve finally chased my husband down long enough to get him to do it.  It’s all but impossible to do yourself, since you need the shoes to be on your feet while you do it, to get the fit right.

Here is a picture of the buckle and the shoe: Read the rest of this entry »

Guest blogger: Dawn Roberto of Love Romances Cafe

Confessions from a book addict

By Dawn Roberto

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Lovely review of SitS from Three Dollar Bill Reviews

They say:

Money and class are important themes in the story. It’s very British in that regard. The details of the setting, the dialogue, the general atmosphere, are all very British; but the tension between classes is what truly marks it out as a story about British people. Class differences put barriers between Alec and Darren, and though of course their love eventually breaks down these barriers, it’s not easy and there’s a feeling at the end that it’s always going to be something they’ll have to deal with, even if mostly as assumptions and prejudices from other people.

Although there are plenty of outside events intruding on their lives, the relationship still drives the story. When they are pulled apart by events they keep on finding each other again, always drawn back together. There’s a real feeling that this relationship is the one that will change their lives.

And many other interesting and insightful things which you can read if you click here.

But I was particularly happy with that paragraph because it’s good to know that the relationship comes across as I hoped it would – as the thing that is already beginning to help both of them grow and mature into the more assured men that I know they can be.

Thank you to Junkfoodmonkey!  and to Three Dollar Bill reviews.

Thank you too to everyone who sent me a birthday present, card, vgift or note.  It’s been one of the best birthdays I can remember for a long time, despite or possibly because of the fact that it was very busy with phone calls and children at home and Autoglass Repair coming out to do the windscreen of the car and… 🙂

I got 18th Century shoes with cut brass buckles, a book full of glossy photos of the Avro Lancaster, some Lush bath stuff from one daughter and pens of my very own (which come with a promise that they won’t be borrowed and mislaid) from the other.  Also I got my own fire-breathing dragon, who sat on the glass table with flames coming out of his nose for about an hour.

And a review!  Altogether a very nice day indeed.  Thank you again!

Can anyone recommend

any really good books on plotting?  I’m thinking that it was time I was plotting another historical novel, so that I can finally send Running Press the option book that it calls for in my False Colors contract.  Not wanting to do anything the easy way, I made up the plot for False Colors by doing one of those “100 drabbles from random prompts” things, and it took me the better part of a year just to do the plot plan as a result.  This time I was hoping to do something a bit speedier!

TV meme:

Day 5 – A show you hate.

Steptoe and Son

The old man was disgusting, the young man was cruel, they were needlessly horrible to each other all the time, and it was supposed to be funny.  Why is it supposed to be funny to watch people make each other’s lives a misery?  Are we being invited to enjoy their suffering or something?  That’s a bit sick, isn’t it?

It was very popular when I was young, and it was one of those things that made me feel like I was some kind of stranded alien on the earth who would never understand human beings.  I still don’t understand it, and just watching that Youtube clip makes me sad.

Amazon Store?

I was putting a nifty little ‘RSS feed’ compass icon in my website sidebar today when I noticed that my Amazon Store icon only took me to a page that said “Server Not Found.”  At first I thought that there was probably just some broken code on my website, but when I went to Out in Print’s blog to find their Amazon Store, I discovered that theirs’ wasn’t there any more either.  Has Amazon stopped doing this for ages, and I’ve only just noticed?  Or is it working for everyone else and my site is just wrong?

Edited much later to say that I have found the problem, which turned out to be a broken link on my site, and after Andrew spent much of the evening figuring out how to get at it, because it was deeply hidden in the template of the blog, we fixed it.  Huzzah for us!  And now it’s way past time to go to bed.

All downhill from here

Phew!  I have turned the corner and passed the middle of Under the Hill.  At 77,555 words I am now officially into the second half of this 150,000 word whopper.  It’s slightly frustrating because 77K is long enough for a book on its own, and I’ve still got half to go, but on the other hand, the hump is over and it’s downhill for Under the Hill from now on.

I’m not even thinking about how much editing this thing is going to need!  (A clue – it’s lots and lots.  But I’ll think about that after the first draft is finished.)

I’ve had a slight revelation and realized that if I shut myself in the bedroom for two twenty minute periods of intensive writing, I can do 1000k a day even when Rose is at home, and this is making me lots happier about her study leave.  If I can keep it up while they are both at home, I might even be able to reclaim the summer holidays, and that will be a major source of frustration eliminated from my year.

Dear Author reviews “Shining in the Sun”

and says:

Much of what I enjoyed about Shining in the Sun is the balance between issues of sexual and personal identity and strong genre storytelling conventions. While I had a number of issues with the book, I was engaged enough to want to dig through my digital TBR pile for False Colors before another review book claims my time.

(Read the whole review here)

It’s a very interesting review, I thought, because I think it’s true that I was playing with a lot of Romance tropes while writing it – trying to feel my way into what made a Contemporary click.  Hee!  I’m very glad she had the reaction she had over Max.  That was what I was hoping for 🙂

Judging from the comments, I’m putting a lot of people off my books by my over-descriptive style.  But I think I’ll have to shrug and call that a difference of taste.  I find a lot of modern books too spare and pared down – too thin and without juice or colour – as the characters rush from one action scene to the next in a flat, grey world that rarely has any reality or glamour of its own.  I like to stop and smell the roses.  And I like to know whether they are yellow roses or red, and whether they’re trained up a trellis or a hedge.

Funnily enough, it is scenery that I seem to retain most from the books I love, the hurrying river and cold wind, the miles of brown land and the melancholy peep of small water fowl amongst the reeds, when the Fellowship of the Ring are travelling down Anduin.  The sunshine and the fountain, and the black inquisitive eye of Archmage Nemmerle’s raven when Ged first arrives on Roke in A Wizard of Earthsea.

I worry a little that these things are no longer fashionable.  But perhaps it’s not as necessary to describe the world as thoroughly in a contemporary as you would in a historical, because people think they already know it?

In which my booksigning dreams are crushed.

Ah well, I thought it was too easy.  I’ve just had a reply from Waterstones’ event organizer, who I emailed in an attempt to arrange a book signing.  She says “Unfortunately this is not something that would for us here in Piccadilly” and encourages me to try my local branch.  However, given that my local branch doesn’t even have the book on its database at all, let alone have it in the shop, I feel it’s much less likely that my local branch would be interested.

I will try the local branch, but I’m sorry that I raised anyone’s hopes about a do in London.  It seems it’s not going to happen after all.  This is more the kind of level of enthusiasm I’m used to receiving from bookshops, but I’ve got to admit it’s a bit of a disappointment after the lovely reception I got when I visited personally.  Back to business as usual, it seems 🙂

False Colors = “a very good naval fiction novel”

Says this review from Astrodene’s Historical Naval Fiction website:

False Colors was a pleasant surprise. I expected the M/M Romance aspect to dominate but it did not. The naval story was well researched and the ship handling, action, and crew interactions were woven into a very believable naval narrative. It is primarily a love story but it is also a very good naval fiction novel.

This makes me squee, because I badly wanted it to be both a good romance and a good AoS novel.  I don’t see why you would have to choose one or the other.

It’s amusing, though, that I see a trend in the reviews, with the Romance readers getting frustrated about the iceberg incident (presumably because they think that Alfie’s period of mourning for Farrant goes on too long?  Or perhaps that he ought not to mourn at all?) while the reviews from a naval novel POV seem to think that was the best bit.  Perhaps you can’t please all the people all the time, but you can clearly please some people some of the time, and some other people at other times 🙂

This week has been a great week for reviews, but a poor week for health.  Here’s hoping that next week I feel well enough to write, and if that has to be paid for in no more reviews, I will just cherish the ones I’ve already got and be thankful.

It’s like a theme

Something nice happens and then I get ill, as if I have to karmically pay for it 🙂  I’m so exhausted today that I haven’t been able to write at all, or even summon up the energy to comment on my FL.  Another day of no progress on UtH (though I’m that ¦¦ far away from Ben’s dramatic kidnapping and everything starting to speed up towards an all-action finale.)

So instead I’ve been researching the Age of Piracy and Captain Hook wigs.  I think that – when UtH is done – I’ll do that pirate story I always said I would never write.  Maybe for NaNoWriMo.  With all these camper vans and elvish palaces behind me, I’m starting to miss the feeling of being on the deck of a tall ship.