Big thanks to Penelope Friday for this article in the T5m Collective magazine:
in which she interviews Lee Rowan, Kris Jacen and I about the I Do anthologies.
On other news, eagle eyed LJ readers may notice that I’ve changed my LJ style. I envied Erastes her sidebar with the pictures of her book covers on it. So I went looking for a three column style and then tweaked it so that it (a) fits with my website and (b) doesn’t look too much like hers, I hope. It would look less like hers if there wasn’t only a single three column layout to choose from. Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but being unexpectedly cloned can offend.
A bonus feature is that I’ve discovered the list of links on the right hand side, and how to add more of them. So if you have a website you would like me to list there, just comment here with the name and URL and I will add it.
This weekend I have done three different text layouts on one book cover, received two different sets of suggestions for improvement, applied both and sent the resulting two different layouts to the publisher for a final decision on which one to go with. I’ve done three different concept mock-ups for another book cover. I’ve read and made notes on one book, and read the book for which I did the 3 mockups. That just leaves me with two books to read and review, and a blog post to write during the week. I’m almost looking forward to the week because it’ll be more restful!
Since posting on Thursday that my day was strangely hectic, I’ve decided that there was nothing strange about it. I’ve been taking on stuff here and there, and not doing it. So now I’ve suddenly realized that I have four books to read: two to review, one to read in order to get ideas for making the cover, one to read to give feedback on next Saturday at my writer’s club. I also have four, possibly five, book-covers to make. And I’ve promised to do a post on the Macaronis blog next week.
And, of course, I’m trying to get my daily minimum of 1050 words written, plus answering emails, and trying to extricate myself from conversations on topics which could be interesting, could get nasty, certainly require lots of thought, and for which I just don’t have the time or energy.
And there’s real life too. The girls went back to school yesterday after A was ill on Tuesday and R was ill on Thursday, but DH and I spent Friday at the reenactor’s market (a post on that anon). From which we returned with enough material for me to make a frock coat and waistcoat. That joins the “make higher class clothes for the family” to do list, which I haven’t started yet. I did finally get 18th Century shoes, though, which is a relief, as my clogs were quite uncomfortable. However, it adds “find appropriate buckles” to my list.
And there’s the whole feed, clothe, clean up after and taxi your family to their various activities. Exercise has once more been abandoned as an unrealistic ideal, and bodhran practice cut back to twice a week. I really don’t know how some writers manage all of this and a full time job too! *Am awed*.
I guess I’d better stop blathering here and go and do some of the things I ought to do instead.
Today has been strangely hectic, and yet I don’t seem to have achieved anything. Largely because Rose was at home ill again. She spent the morning asleep in bed, so I managed to get my daily 1050 words done (just), but this afternoon I feel absolutely exhausted from running about, but nothing seems to have got done. (Other than making a pint of custard because she wanted comfort food. Half of which is now going solid in the pan.)
However, two very good things have also happened today 🙂
A lovely review for The Wages of Sin
One is that I got this lovely review from Val Kovalin at Obsidian Bookshelf, who really enjoyed The Wages of Sin and voted it a recommended read. She says “I enjoyed reading The Wages of Sin and I’m a reader who usually finds ghost stories to be tedious. However, this one held my undivided attention, starting with the title, …. I liked the flashes of humor expressed by the admiral when he describes the neighbor feud, and I found Jasper and Charles to be appealing characters that I’d love to see in a sequel, practicing their unique investigative abilities.”
The full review is available here: The Wages of Sin by Alex Beecroft
and *fanfare* 😉
Captain’s Surrender comes in joint second place in Love Romances Cafe’s Best Historical Romance of 2009 category.
I have got a button 
which I will put on my website to celebrate 🙂 Thank you so much to anyone who voted for me! You are very cool and it’s entirely appreciated.
One of the nicest things about this is that the m/m historical romance was judged in with the m/f historical romance, rather than being confined to its own little ghetto. Congratulations too to Charlie Cochrane, whose “Lessons in Temptation” won an Honourable Mention. Given that m/f romance is a very much bigger field than m/m, I think we did pretty well 🙂
After I posted that “Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief” contained gratuitous scenes of Daniel Craig in a Greek mini-skirt, the astute Sarah F pointed out that whoever was playing Poseidon, it wasn’t Daniel Craig.
Daniel Craig playing Sir Not-appearing-in-this-film
This threw me into a three day ferment of “so who was it then? I’m sure I know his face from somewhere.” And I’m happy to announce that I’ve tracked him down and it was in fact Kevin McKidd, who I knew from the Rome TV series, where he played the centurion Lucius Vorenus.
Kevin McKidd, in Roman mini-skirt (sadly not visible in this picture.)
I’m not at all ashamed at getting them mixed up, since I had them both filed in my mental category of “hard looking blond bastards.”
I’ve enjoyed reading the 10 rules of famous writers in the Guardian’s Ten rules for writing fiction article. I’ve just picked the ones that resonate most with me. Some of them make a worthy list which puts me off ever reading any of their work, and some – Anne Enright in particular – sound so sensible and pithy that I feel sure I would like their books. Some of my particular favourites are:
From Margaret Atwood
You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
From Anne Enright
(I don’t know who Anne Enright is, or what she writes, but I like so many of her rules so much that I may have to check out her work.) Read the rest of this entry »
I followed a link from c_smith_author today and ended up on the Amazon.com page for False Colors, where I don’t go very often any more. It was nice to see I’d had three new reviews since I visited last. Amusingly enough one review essentially said “didn’t like the romance much but enjoyed the naval historical details”, and one review said “enjoyed the romance but there was too much blah, blah, blah about ships.” Which boils down to “you can’t win them all,” in my book 🙂
The first one really made me squee, because I’ve been waiting on tenterhooks for a reaction from someone who was reading it from an Age of Sail perspective. Was my ship-handling at all convincing? Could it be read by the same sort of people who read Patrick O’Brian and not let the side down? So hearing this was music to my ears:
“Alex Beecroft did her homework and treats the reader to compellingly written passages of ship and sail evolutions, gunnery, medicine and boat handling. There are plenty of well handled actions — single ship, cutting out, shore bombardments and fighting ashore. In particular, Beecroft showed a fine mastery of how to fight a bomb ketch. I was very impressed with her narration of ship handling and repair during a harrowing, and near-disastrous, encounter with an iceberg in the arctic.”
Huzzah!
I also got a very peculiar review which claimed that I had a shaky grasp on gay male psychology (because of course all gay men have the same psychology.) This reviewer felt sure that I had had the pirates throw a bucket of piss over John when they were torturing him because I’d heard about water-sports and wanted to… I don’t know… make the torture scene more sexy, or something.
I’m a little sad that people can’t tell the difference between when I’m trying to write sexy and when I’m trying to write horrific. But if he’d asked me, I could have told him that I added the bucket of piss to the scene because I was concerned that it would seem unlikely that John would survive his injuries. I wanted to give him something that would increase his chances of pulling through. In an era when medical knowledge had no conception of the need for sterilizing anything, dousing him in urine was the only way I could think of of getting something antiseptic on his wounds.
I went to see Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief today, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Much glee over the opening sequence with Poseidon turning up in modern day New York wearing something that looked very much like a sailor suit. I’ve never quite shared the tendency to swoon over Sean Bean that I know affects a lot of my friends’ list, but the same can’t be said of whats-his-name who plays James Bond and was Poseidon in this film. I am thinking that more men should wear miniskirts these days, if that’s what they look like in them.
Having said that I enjoyed it, I think I may have liked the beginning and end much more than the middle. I’m getting tired of the “youth discovers he’s special, gains lots of cool powers, goes through a time of testing and comes out a hero” theme. Admittedly, it’s my fault for watching so many children’s films! But I think on reflection that I was more interested in the doings of the gods than in what Percy and pals were up to. All these “gods play games with the fates of men” stories seem to concentrate on the men they use as playing pieces – just once I’d like to see the story from the gods’ point of view.
The special effects were great. I’ve never seen a better centaur in a film. He looked positively real. I also loved the lightning bolt. I really enjoyed the set-up with the explanation of who Percy was. It all began to go down hill when he got to the training camp and within minutes was taking down experienced sword-fighters by the sheer power of his bloodline. I’m kind of fed up with this meme that all you need to do is find the thing that you’re good at. No amount of practice, training, dedication or hard slog is required. There are no years and years of working at your skill and perfecting it by slow degrees. No, Harry gets on the broomstick and instantly he’s the best quidditch player ever. Percy sticks a hand in the water and heals, and instantly he can take down the best fighter in the school.
If only it worked like that. But it doesn’t, and the constant repetition of the idea that it does probably damages children’s ability to buckle down and actually practice hard enough to get genuinely good at things. Grr!
Also grr to the fact that the black guy on the team was a satyr. Is it me, or is that kind of a demeaning choice? Initially when I saw he was on crutches, I thought “ooh, he’ll really be the god Hephaestus in disguise. How cool !” But no, he doesn’t even get to be a demi-god. He gets to be a semi-bestial creature who is obsessed with sex. That’s… not a casting decision I would have made, given the choice.
I did enjoy the first of the three questy-type things. The overgrown garden centre was genuinely creepy. And I liked the lotus eaters as well. Charon was very good – he had definite grim reaper style. But I was a little disappointed with the Hades = Hell thing. They’re not the same at all, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a depiction of Hades. That would have been something different – so I felt that was a bit of a wasted opportunity.
I don’t know that I would watch it again, but I was only a little tiny bit bored by the over-abundance of action at the end, which is a lot more than I could say for the latest Harry Potter. And it is nice to have the Greek gods back on film. I think I missed them, over the last 10 years.
Just making it in time for Valentine’s day yesterday, I Do Two is now available in pdf here!
Other formats are in the pipeline and should be coming along very soon, and it has gone to the printers. So it should be available in print in about a fortnight.
All profits from this anthology will be donated to the Lambda Legal Defense to support their fight for marriage equality for all. So if you buy this anthology, you won’t only get a great read, you’ll also be doing a good deed 🙂 (I should make that a tag line – “do a good deed, buy a great read!”)
It’s a good hefty volume. Nearly 100K long, containing 22 stories from authors ranging from the well known – like James Buchanan – to newly discovered rising stars – like D.C Juris. And as part of the team who chose the stories, I can vouch that every single one of them is good 🙂
My contribution is called Inner Truth, which is a glimpse at the happy ending of John and Alfie from False Colors, but told through the eyes of one Joe Malley who has his own problems:
Excerpt
Read the rest of this entry »
If you’ve got a gmail account and a Google profile, you may not even be aware yet that Google’s new Buzz social networking service makes all your email contacts public. As far as I understand it, that means that anyone gets to check up on who you email, and who you have ever emailed to in the past.
OK, I’m not ashamed of anyone I write to, but I don’t see why that’s anyone’s business other than my own.
There is a little button at the bottom of your gmail account which says “turn Buzz off”. However, it seems that that doesn’t actually work. Thanks to catdancerz, here is the real way to get rid of this feature that no one asked for in the first place:
gmails-turn-off-buzz-still-does-not-turn-off-buzz-heres-how-to-really-do-it/
