I reckon I can easily read 10 m/m books by the end of August, so I’ve entered.
But what will I read? My tbr list so far contains
#1. St.Nachos by ZA Maxfield
#2. The Queer Wolf anthology – various authors
#3. The Night Moves anthology – ditto
#4. Pirates by GA Hauser
#5. Like an Animal – (another werewolf anthology) from Circlet Press
#6. Drawn Together by ZA Maxfield
#7 A Strange Place in Time by Alyx Shaw
So I’d love to hear recommendations for what I should read for the last three books!
I feel as though I’m always opening my reviews of Erastes’ fiction with some variation of ‘I know she’s my friend, but that doesn’t mean I’m just sucking up.’ I guess it keeps needing to be said. The fact is that when I find a writer whose work I like, I comment on their blogs to say how much I liked it, and then we get chatting. Maybe they read my stuff too and like it as well. Maybe we discover we have common interests… and before long we’re friends and I’m having to write disclaimers like the one above.
But becoming friends with someone doesn’t mean that you automatically stop loving their writing 🙂 And Transgressions is a case in point.
Was it C.S Lewis who said ‘you can never get a cup of tea too big or a book too long for me’? That’s quite applicable to me too, so I was delighted when I got the ARC of Transgressions in the post to find that it’s a really big book. There’s meat on its bones, and it gave me the wonderful luxurious feeling of knowing that I’d be spending the whole weekend or longer savouring it and chewing it over. It’s not one of those flimsy things that you read in an hour and wonder where the rest of it is.
Partly because of that, I think, it reads like a book that has world enough and time. Time to set the scene in the opening chapters with wonderful sensual description of the forge and the fields and the sky and our two young heroes when they were unscarred, naive and feckless.
There’s world enough and time for plot! Two plots, in fact, because David’s fatal flaw – his inability to speak the truth – leads both young men to be flung out of the idyll of their early days together. David learns a soldier’s trade, on the King’s side in the interminable and soul destroying battles of the English Civil War. Without any heavy-handedness, the reader can see him hardening, growing wiser, being on the other side of that slippery silver-tongued avoidance of the truth and learning from it. Through his relationships with the trooper Tobias and Hal, the scout, we rejoice and suffer and grow up with him.
Jonathan, in the mean time, stinging from David’s lies, is drawn into a company of people who seem to embody the truth – who hunt the truth out, no matter how awful it is. He joins Matthew Hopkins, the Witch-Finder General in his crusade to rid the country of witches and servants of the Devil. I have to admit that this is my favourite thread in the plot, not just for the agonised and abusive and kinky relationship between Jonathan and his mentor in witch-finding, the over-zealous, sadistic and slightly unhinged Michael. But also because I loved the fact that Erastes treats the subject completely believably from Jonathan’s POV.
I’ve noticed a tendency in some historicals for the sympathetic characters to have terribly modern attitudes – for them to be instantly anti-slavery, pro-the rights of women, pro-class equality and universal suffrage, etc, and in the hands of a lesser author I would have expected the hero to be instantly on the side of the poor defenseless old women. But it wouldn’t have been very authentic if he had. I loved that Jonathan took the threat of witchcraft seriously, and that it was part of his goodness as a good man to want to protect society from the ultimate evil, even if it cost him his autonomy and dignity.
Naturally he’s wrong about the good he’s trying to do, but that makes it all the more tragic and poignant when he starts to work it out.
If David is hardened and made responsible by his journey through the book, Jonathan is taken apart, and there’s something gloriously right about the fact that it’s David – the one who began his disintegration – who is the one to rescue him at the end and begin the process of healing him.
But Jonathan is now an important man in Cromwell’s government, and David is under arrest as a known soldier of the King. How on earth are they going to get out of that? Is Jonathan his own man enough not to condemn the one he loves, or is the happy ending only going to last for a single night? I wish I could say. All I can say is that this is absolutely gagging for a sequel! And I for one would also love to read about Jonathan’s career as a spy for Cromwell.
I think I might even like this book better than Standish; it’s more realistic, but it’s also more lyrical. The slower pace meant that I had time to get to know the characters more and the twists when they came were more startling.
It’s a book that transcends the bounds of romance and can be just as easily read as a piece of literature. Or it’s a piece of literature which is as easily and enjoyably read as a romance. It’s haunting and unforgettable. It’s very very good! It goes on my ‘I wish there were more like this’ shelf, or at least it will do once I’ve finished reading it again 🙂
Surprisingly enough, although we’re sort of partners, (running mates?) in the launch of Running Press’ new line of m/m romances, I hadn’t actually read Erastes’ Transgressions and she hadn’t read my False Colors, until now. But we had a brainwave and decided to swap ARCs, so over the weekend we each got to read the other’s book. It was rather nerve wracking! Suppose we hated them? How would we continue to do joint promotion when we couldn’t honestly say nice things about the other book?
Fortunately, it didn’t turn out that way. I loved Transgressions pretty much unreservedly – more about that tomorrow, I hope. And she’s just reviewed False Colors here
Review of False Colors
“There are a very few books on my list of “essential reads” for anyone interested in Gay Historical Fiction. The Charioteer, At Swim Two Boys, As Meat Loves Salt and now False Colors.
Yes, it’s that good. If you are interested in the genre at all, or are planning to write the genre in future I hold up False Colors and say “this is how it should be done.””
And I am over the moon and frankly rather relieved to find that she liked it 🙂 Hurray!
she shall bite things and jingle wherever she goes 🙂
Another miscellaneous post, as lots of things are happening at once.
Probably the biggest thing is that finally, after at least six months if not a year of dentistry, the tooth has landed! On Tuesday I went to the dentist for the final time. He took out the phillips-head screw which had been screwed into my gum to give the gum something to grow around, and screwed on a vicious looking spike instead. I almost had a heart attack when he said to his assistant “pass me the torque-wrench”, but fortunately it turned out to be a really cute little torque-wrench, about the size of a finger. So they tightened up the spike until it couldn’t get any tighter. Then they covered it in cement (dental cement!) and cemented the porcelain and metal tooth onto the spike.
Yesterday, the top of my gum did not come down far enough to cover the dark metal at the top of the tooth, and the shape of the tooth made me lisp. But today the gum has lowered, and I’m speaking normally again, so I am desperately looking around for things to bite, while sometimes I forget that I can’t take my tooth out any more, and tug on it. It’s extremely odd to have a tooth there again, but rather wonderful. Is it all worth it? Ask me when the post-dentistry headache goes away 😉
Unpleasant photo alert – scroll past fast 🙂
Blurry before
Blurry after
I’m sure I have a lack of perspective on things, but I squeed far more about making some bell-pads for my black shoes so that I could use them for morris dancing:
I just got some soft black leather, folded it over and sewed down one edge, and then sewed the bells onto the resulting tube. This way I can slip them onto the straps of my shoes for morris dancing, and take them off again for normal life.
Andrew has to make the full shin-pad of bells for his side, but that’s because he’s a man 😉
Another week of very little progress on ‘Boys of Summer’, this time because Rose was been off school ill over Monday and Tuesday, and Ailith was off school on Wednesday because she had several teeth extracted, and then she was off again today having caught Rose’s cold.
You know how sometimes your characters decide to do something you had not foreseen and certainly hadn’t planned for? You sit there being gobsmacked at further evidence that you are not as in control of their lives as you thought, and thinking ‘so this is why people believe in the muses’.
Boys of Summer is *that* close to the end. Tony has met Darren’s horrible family and decided not to be scared off. Darren was supposed to meet Tony’s differently horrible family and be snubbed and humiliated and driven into the final confrontation with the villain. He was *not* supposed to suddenly decide to take up with a random trucker and leave the country for Budapest! How did that happen? The trucker was supposed to be set-dressing. He doesn’t even have a name!
I’ll have to persuade Darren to come back or I foresee a very sad ending, but when I gave him a tendency to run away from his problems, I didn’t think he’d try and turn it on me!
No writing today because I’ve got both children at home (one ill, one post-tooth-extraction). But I will be taking part in a Macaronis chat on the Coffee Time Romance list
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/karendevinkaren
a bit later today. So I can ponder what to do with him properly before tomorrow 🙂
Hee! I am honoured and a bit staggered to find out that Captain’s Surrender has been short-listed for the Dear Author Bitchery Writing Award for Hellagood Authors (DA BWAHA for short).
Why am I honoured and staggered? Well… (a) it’s Dear Author and they don’t take any prisoners 🙂 and (b) I’m up against people like Diana Gabaldon, Josh Lanyon and Laura Baumbach!
Clearly I need all the help I can get!
I normally wouldn’t try to get people to vote for me by the underhanded expedient of actually asking them to 😉 But this case seems different because (a) voters can get prizes, up to and including a Sony e-reader. And (b) Captain’s Surrender is up against Lord John and the Hand of Devils! I repeat: I need all the help I can get!
The explanation of the rules of the contest is here at DA BWAHA.com
and the 8 books in my category are on the GBLT page (click the link at the top right hand side of the page.)
Voting isn’t live until tomorrow (the 15th of March 2009), but if you genuinely did like Captain’s Surrender more than those other books, I’d love it if you felt able to vote for it. Thank you! (And here’s hoping the e-reader will be yours!)
Hee! And would you believe it, it’s from the Salt Lake City Weekly in Utah 🙂
After Transgressions, (review under the link) the folks at Running Press have sent us another “M/M romance,” False Colors, a story populated by many strapping sailors (oh, yes, we like the sound of this!)
He seems to have liked them both. Yay!
I probably ought to mention that Alfie is not Spanish, though that actually sounds like quite an interesting idea for a future tale 😉 You know, I’d been so immersed in Rictor Norton and the molly culture that it gave me a shock to see the reviewer surprised that my bit of rough calls himself ‘Sweet Bess’. I’d forgotten that it might look odd!
Raw first draft excerpt of ‘Boys of Summer’, as written yesterday, complete with note for today:
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In the long saga of the new tooth, I’ve just been to the dentist to have an impression taken of the bone of my upper jaw and the metal post sticking out of it, so that they can make the tooth to fit. They vaporized my gum with a medical laser, which smelled horrible, and did something painful in there that involved not being able to close my mouth without skewering myself in the gum with a spike for twenty minutes (it felt like). Then, having taken the impression, they put on a sort of metal cap to stop the gum from sealing up again – because they want it to make room for the new tooth. So I now have a round metal bit sticking out of my top gum and look like I have an interesting cyber implant. On the plus side, I can actually bite again on that side of my mouth! Woohoo! After almost a year! On the minus side, after all the lasering, twisting and jerking about, it hurts 🙁
Another two weeks of letting that heal, and I should be able to go back and finally have my new tooth fitted! I hope it will all be worth it.
Ailith was at home today with head and stomach ache, so another day of no writing on Boys of Summer. I’ve decided to put my daily progress metres up on my website, because I know they are demotivating and annoying for some of my FL. Sticking it on my WIP page will be just as good for me. (Particularly when, like today, there has been no progress.)
Also no progress on Rose’s dress. I bought cheap sheeting material and cut out the pattern pieces:
(That long thin piece at the bottom there is the *top* of the skirt, using the full width of the fabric – then you measure 48″ down and cut it off at the bottom.)
Then I sewed up the bodice:
and it fitted perfectly. Then I added the arms, doing two lots of stitching so the seam wouldn’t fray:
And lo and behold, when she tried it on this time, the arm-holes were much too tight. So I have to unpick my four arm seams and either clip the curves to make them lay down flatter, or extend the shoulder straps. None of which I’ve been able to face just yet. I’ve pleated one side of the skirt but not the other, and it’s waiting for my next burst of interest.
Creatively on a different front, I’ve been making business cards and postcards for myself. I wanted a nice gay historical theme, but couldn’t find an image I could legally use. Besides, I don’t just write historicals, though it might seem that way at the moment. So I went for this. I’m just a little worried that it’s too generic. At least the Navy theme is coming through in the colorscheme!
Because my Advance Review Copies of ‘False Colors’ arrived in the post this morning:
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