LOL! I don’t know whether to be flattered or flabberghasted, but my Google Alert this morning turned up a person on a pirate site requesting a download of “Shining in the Sun.” It’s not even due out until the 8th of June!
It’s nice to know that the word is out and there are people eagerly anticipating my next novel. And if they read it and think “wow, I’ll have to get this one,” and go out and buy it afterwards, then I’m fine with that. Given this article about free Kindle copies of books, I am definitely thinking that I will sign up for Samhain’s monthly Kindle giveaway scheme as a form of publicity. But at some point money needs to get back to the publishers and the writers or they will not be able to afford to write or publish the next book. Then the whole thing stops and everyone loses out.
So yes, I’m flattered that I’ve got a fan, but I’m thinking “If you like my work, please buy it. Do your bit to support the writer and the infrastructure which enables the books to be produced. That way there will be more books, and you’ll get to read those too.”
The high street where I live has long had an empty shop on it. It was briefly a printer, and I tried to encourage trade by going in there to have some postcards printed. They said they could do it, no problem, but when I came back at 3pm a couple of days later with my image on a memory stick (having to climb the steep hill to get there from my road) they were closed. Closed at 3 on a weekday afternoon! Needless to say, a month or so later they were closed permanently and the shop shut again.
On Wednesday (in my exciting writerly life) I was walking to the corner shop to buy milk when I noticed that the shop was now occupied by a photographic studio. It just so happened that I’d had three requests for signed photos that week, and no photo to give. So I went in and booked a slot to have a promo photo taken.
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I’ve been incommunicado the past few days as I spent the weekend at the Whittlesey Straw Bear festival.
Last year we went to this as spectators and it was mind and body numbingly cold but just so bizarre and amazing and fun that we determined to learn to morris ourselves. All year long I was thinking “in 2010 I’ll be dancing in the Straw Bear festival!” But as it turned out, my shoulders have been getting worse and I can’t flick a hanky above waist height any more. I certainly can’t do stars or swings, and even the stepping jars everything and makes things hurt more.
So, no dancing after all. However, all was not lost. Ely and Littleport’s regular bodhran player, John, was dancing at Straw Bear, in a side called Mepal Molly. I loaned him my 18th Century working woman’s clothes for the occasion, and he looked better than I do in them!
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I have finally forgiven my local bookshop for refusing to put my book on the shelves on the grounds that I wasn’t famous enough. After Amazonfail, I decided that I would swallow my hurt pride and go and buy my books at my local bookshop anyway. But I carried on doing it a bit begrudgingly, with a sort of subconscious grumble every time I came through the door.
However, this Tuesday I went into town to go to the library, couldn’t find anything at all relevant to Gandharvas and Apsaras, either celestial or historical, so I thought I’d check the bookshop on the way home. There weren’t many people in the shop on a rainy Tuesday lunchtime, so when I asked one of the people behind the desk where I might find something, he accompanied me up the two flights of stairs (I didn’t even know the shop had that extra third floor!), looked for me in the Religion and Folklore sections, was most distressed not to find anything, had a sudden brainwave and found the Mahabharata and Upanishads in the Poetry section, and then he put them on a table next to a window, brought me a chair and a pot of coffee on a tray, and left me sitting looking out over the High Street with a pile of books and not a single implication that I might want to pay for anything.
Of course, I bought them both, and a book about the Gnostic gospels which I happened to see in passing. But all the same, I can’t possibly continue to grumble about a shop that brought me free coffee and left me alone to read enough of Anne Rice’s book about her journey back to her faith to decide that perhaps I didn’t need to buy that after all.
Another good thing that I discovered yesterday (good for those of us with WordPress blogs anyway) was a WP plugin wordcounter. This displays your wordcount discreetly in the sidebar of your WP blog, and it means that you can update your daily wordcount for your own benefit without annoying your friends by posting about it every single day.
You can find that here Dave’s Whizmatronic Widgulating Calibrational Scribometer if you’re interested 🙂
THE BLURB
Charles Latham, wastrel younger son of the Earl of Clitheroe, returns home drunk from the theatre to find his father gruesomely dead. He suspects murder. But when the Latham ghosts turn nasty, and Charles finds himself falling in love with the priest brought in to calm them, he has to unearth the skeleton in the family closet before it ends up killing them all.
THE REVIEW
If you love the deeply Gothic, then this will certainly be your cup of horror, as the book positively drips with it…. an utterly spellbinding and spooky read, a cracking mystery and a really lush piece of Gothic literature.
Thanks Wave and thank you Erastes! I’m particularly happy to know that the spooky bits work, as I’ve never written a ghost story before and wasn’t entirely sure if I could do it. Also to know that I’m not alone in liking Charles and Jasper the way I do. These two have been the first of my characters about whom I’ve thought “I really haven’t finished with them yet.” I may have to give them a sequel 🙂
Just finished reading Tangled Web, and I have to say the RP books make one classy series! Tangled Web is the least melodramatic of the four books, but I like it for that. There’s a proper Regency restraint and elegance about it. In their own ways, the 17th Century, the Georgian period and the Victorian period were all prone to over-ripe emotions and big displays of angst and violence. But the Regency was a time when subtlety was the order of the day, and Tangled Web sometimes reminds me of one of those excellent adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, where volumes of emotion and social criticism can be read from the lifting of an eyebrow.
This is Lee Rowan at her finest, I think, with the great storytelling of Ransom combined with the restraint and irony of Gentleman’s Gentleman and applied to another couple where deep and true feelings have to be barely hinted at in public, but you’re left in no doubt that in private they are fathomless and very sweet. This has a complex plot you can get your teeth into, smugglers, scandalous gentlemen’s clubs, blackmail, horses, and even a sub-plot about Brendan’s sister’s wedding which made me think of a Georgette Heyer novel. But I think the best part is the protagonists. I never had any doubt that both of them were the kind of people I would be proud to meet in real life (not always something you can say of romance heroes!). They were so honest and decent, and so transparently in love with each other it warmed the cockles of my heart.
The disadvantage of having holidays is that it’s always so hard to get back into the swing of writing again afterwards. It may also have been a mistake to try to start again with a scene from the POV of a WW2 airman when I’m only half way through reading “Bomber Boys” and keep stumbling over things I’ve wrongly assumed I knew about him. (I’m very disappointed to find that they didn’t actually wear leather flying jackets with sheepskin collars, as in my icon.)
So, 975 new words today and lots of correction of what I’d already written. (Also lots of having to get up every 20 minutes because the physiotherapist insists on it for the sake of my shoulders.)
Plus going out to the library and bringing home three books for research purposes which I should probably read before I do much more with him. Then there’s three books I promised to read and review for SiN. So although my list of books tbr for pleasure also keeps growing, I’m not doing very well at getting to them. There needs to be more time in the world.
So, I’m writing a book in which there’s one guy who was briefly a prisoner in faeryland, one guy and one girl who are being held prisoner in faeryland when the book opens, and one guy who is kidnapped by the fae half way through the book. Naturally I think to myself “‘Away with the Faeries’ would be an awesome title”. And then just this morning it occurs to me to think “hold on. What if people think that’s some kind of pun on the fact that my heroes are gay men?!”
Argh! The curse of my titles strikes again. Clearly I can’t call it that any more. So I will rename it “Grand Slam” for now (given that two of my heroes are a Lancaster bomber pilot and his navigator) and worry about a better title when it’s finished. *Makes hurried replacement icons.*
A while back I entered some of my cover art in the EPIC cover art competition. Then I promptly forgot that I had done so. So it was a nice surprise to get a Google Alert on Thursday that informed me that my cover for Ransom
Ransom will now go on to compete with the other category winners for the Quasar award for best cover overall. I don’t see it winning, because there’s some lovely covers there, but I can’t deny being highly chuffed to have got this far, and to have the little award logo thingies to put on my website 🙂
Due to yet another flare up of the “ew, girls writing gay fiction, that’s just wrong” debate over Christmas, I ended the year wondering if I wanted to carry on writing m/m romance at all (and thinking that I probably didn’t.) So it’s taken me until now to make resolutions (as they say in PotC, they’re more like guidelines), because for a while there I didn’t know if I wanted to start writing Fantasy or Mystery instead of Romance. I needed to get that sorted out before I decided what to start working on next.
Fortunately, the release of Wages of Sin and the review of that, plus finding this review of False Colors this morning (due to the wonders of Google Alert) has made me think that maybe it was more important to do what I liked than it was to worry about the opinions of someone with a bad attitude who may never have read anything I’ve written anyway. So my writing resolutions of 2010 are:
1. Finish “Away with the Faeries” – a m/m contemporary rural paranormal, now looking like at least 80K
2. Write a novella. Possibly a sequel to Wages of Sin
3. Plot a Fantasy novel for a follow on to “The Witch’s Boy”, which should be being re-released this year.
Non-writing resolutions:
1. Learn to ignore the wank.
2. Go back to practicing the bodhran every day
I should include something about eating more healthily and exercising, but I know from experience that I don’t keep those, and I don’t want to set myself up to fail again.
