😯 Well, it’s been an interesting sort of week over here! After buying Linden Bay romance about six months ago, Samhain have finally decided what to do with us. They are going to retire the Linden Bay line for a little while, and then relaunch it as a Young Adult line. In the meantime, the novels they acquired when they took on all the Linden Bay authors are going through the submissions process again, and if they are accepted they will be re edited, given new covers, and relaunched as Samhain books.
I’m happy to say that I have already signed a new contract with Samhain for Captains Surrender, and am waiting to hear back from the editor to find out how quickly it can be edited. Hopefully the new edition will be out in the autumn, in the e-book form, and approximately 10 months later in print.
But that isn’t the only change! For some time I have been annoyed at the outrageous price of The Witch’s Boy in print from Lulu and frustrated at my inability to do anything to reduce that price. So with the help and recommendation of Ruth Sims, I submitted the manuscript to Lethe press, and I’m delighted to say that they have offered me a contract for it! Woohoo! WB is particularly special to me because it is so different from everything else I’ve written, and proves I can do Fantasy as well as Romance 🙂
I have taken the Witch’s Boy down from Lulu, and the old version is no longer available. I don’t know how long it will take Amazon to realise this, however, so if you see it still being offered for sale, don’t be fooled. I’m afraid it’s not possible to get it any more. The new version of the witch’s boy should also be out sometime in the autumn.
So to sum up:
Captains surrender is moving from Linden Bay to Samhain. I don’t yet know when the Linden Bay version will become unavailable. But if you want it in print, it would be a good idea to get it now rather than waiting the 10 months for the new version.
The Witch’s Boy is moving from Lulu to Lethe press, and in that case the old version is already unavailable. But to compensate I fully expect the new version to be better produced and edited and possibly considerably cheaper 😉
Both of them should be back in the autumn, fingers crossed!
On a more personal note, either all that hanky waving is bad for me, or I am suffering from repetitive strain injury from the typing, but either way one of my wrists is so sore that I can’t type at the moment. I’m dictating this via my voice recognition software, but that the painter used to (that it is a pain to use to dash dash-that it is a pain to use to — oh get it right you stupid machine—) but that is a pain tu use too! So I may be a little silent for a while. The frustration is just too… well, frustrating!
I have a paid LJ account and ad-blocker, so I don’t see any of LJ’s adverts. But you might want to have a look at this post
http://snugglebitch.livejournal.com/54663.html?view=227207#t227207
and roll your eyes because LJ is up to its old tricks again. I’m all for free speech, and I don’t understand the political situation in the USA well enough to be completely sure what’s going on here. But afaik, the fight for gay rights does not = an attempt to stop people from exercising their free speech, and I’m not happy at the implication that it does.
This makes me glad that I have a paid Dreamwidth account. I can shift over there without any difficulty and allow this LJ to revert to basic, thus depriving LJ of my money at least.
If you would like a Dreamwidth account too, I have two invite codes to give away. They’ll go to the first people who comment to say that they would like them. DW is free of adverts and its policy statement has been carefully drafted to be as completely inclusive. Also it seems nice over there! So I’d love to see more of you over there, particularly after this.
Just a couple of pictures of us in front of the cathedral at 5.28 this morning while the sun came up:
Read the rest of this entry »
*g* In the tradition of spacing out the announcement until everyone is sick of the pause… I may be feeling a little punch drunk because I got up at 4.30 this morning in order to go and morris dance infront of the doors of Ely Cathedral while the dawn was breaking this fine May Day morn. And now I’m knackered 😉
However, I haven’t forgotten that I was running a competition; whereby anyone who sent me a picture of False Colors on a bookshop shelf would have their name entered in the hat to win a signed copy. I have now drawn out the name of the winner.
With this photo
And a post of her own where you can see two more here
http://ima-pseudonym.livejournal.com/267797.html#cutid1
The winner is …
(Don’t you just hate it when I do that! 😉 )
Sorry. The winner is lj user ima-pseudonym.
Congratulations! I’ll be in touch to find out your address just as soon as I’ve posted this. Then I’ll get the book in the post before the weekend 🙂
Thank you so much to everyone who took part! Hee! I’m now quite convinced that I have in fact got a book in the bookshops 🙂
If anyone else who submitted a photo would like to receive a signed book plate, which you could put into your copy, do drop me a line on alex@alexbeecroft.net and I would be glad to send you one 🙂
LOL! This is hilarious 🙂 Someone has clearly fed Speak Its Name’s review of my freebie story ‘Insubordination’ through Babelfish to a different language and then fed it back again. What else can explain such fabulous turns of phrase as:
“ Despatches from London. Meatman ‘s measure from the
Walrus. Sightings of the Retaliator and the Cruel Castanets.
Documents incorporating intelligence of the warfare, and incidentally, Sir, I
still love you. Why not take an eventide forth from being
respectable? I ‘m owed a opportunity to sodomise you for a
modification, make n’t you consider? ”
I am deeply touched by this sentiment 😉
If you love UST, or if you make n’t rather cognize what it is, or if you ask aid composing it – I can make no better for you than to designate at Alex ‘s penning, especially here as the stress she indites is keen, well-nigh painful and you encounter yourself squalling at the page for them to halt bloody fooling themselves and get along with it because you cognise they desire to.
The whole thing is available at Reassessment: Insubordination by Alex Beecroft and certainly makes me chuckle 🙂
I’ve had two lovely reviews for False Colors this week. This one from nos4a2no9
http://nos4a2no9.livejournal.com/269348.html
who says (among other things, including a very flattering comparison of False Colors and Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade):
False Colors was just as thoughtful and emotionally wrenching as Gabaldon’s second Lord John book (which, um, destroyed me a little) but Beecroft manages to pull off a happy ending for her characters after much suffering and conflict. The book features some of the best plotting and pacing I’ve ever encountered, and for the writers among you who struggle with such things (as I do, endlessly) I’d recommend taking a look at how Beecroft builds her plot around the central romance. She allows the relationship between her characters to develop over the course of many chases, escapes, imprisonments, torture sessions, naval battles and lovers’ quarrels. The book is a scant 326 pages long, and it’s crammed full of historical detail, plot events, secondary and tertiary characters, hot sex scenes and naval description. There is almost too much going on, but Beecroft manages to balance everything out and still find room for character development, introspection, and a very satisfying ending.
and this review on Amazon from Toni V.Sweeney, author of Jericho Road:
http://tinyurl.com/cn5f4x
who says (in part):
I’m totally ignorant of naval or sea-faring terms and don’t know a mainsail from a bosun but that didn’t stop me from loving the vivid, gruesome descriptions of the sea battles or how the British lived in Jamaica and Gibraltar. The bleak, desolation of the Albion’s being stranded in frozen waters after striking an iceberg made me wonder: How did these men manage to survive without computers and other modern equipment on their ships? Surely they had to have an inordinate amount of courage to even attempt such voyages! You have to admire anyone who’d dare choose such a life, much less make a career of it.
The main characters in this story–Alfie, John, and Farrant–are portrayed exactly that way…Alfie, seeking permanent love, Farrant taking medications to help him stave off his vice, and John, questioning in his first tremble of attraction to another man whether both his love of God, his sense of duty, and his chastity are a sham. They are brave men, men with both honor and courage, who hold to duty while flying secretly in the face of public morality, not a limp wrist or a lacy hanky in the lot.
Behold me doing the happy dance and squeeing mightily 😀 Thank you very much, both of you! 😀
another test post to see what’s going on between LJ and DW
origslash_news A community dedicated to original slash fiction (including but not limited to professional m/m fiction.)
There’s a bit of a trainwreck feeling about this, though I’m still hoping to be able to divert the engine into a siding before it falls off the broken bridge into the canyon. Read the rest of this entry »
April 27th,2009
writing |
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