Meme: tagged by Joyful_molly

Comment to this post with ‘comment!’ and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

My subjects were:

Saxons

Tolkien was responsible for getting me into the Saxons.  Way in the mythical age, when I was a teenager and read Lord of the Rings from front to back to front to back about fifty times, I wanted to live in it.  Really, I wanted to be an elf.  But I recognized practical difficulties in that plan.  So when I found out that Tolkien had based his Rohirrim on the Saxons, I decided that being a Saxon would have to do.  Eventually I managed to fulfil this ambition by joining

Regia Anglorum

I don’t know why everyone loves the Vikings but thinks the Saxons are boring.  The Saxons were much nicer people.  (Except for the parts where they weren’t.)

Morris Dancing

My new passion!  I’ve joined the Ely and Littleport Riot side, made myself a waistcoat and acquired all the rest of the uniform – white blouse, black skirt, blue and red streamers, red handkerchiefs.  I’ve learned about the Ely and Littleport food riots from which they took their name.  I also know five dances (not very well) – Ely Stars, Padnall, Goose Green, and Country Garden, and another one whose name I don’t remember.  It’s a whole new world, and a very friendly and welcoming one.

Also my husband has joined Coton morris dancers – in order to show that anything I can do, he can do better.  (Or possibly just because he enjoyed it too!)

Music

I’ve always wanted to be able to play an instrument, but I’ve never wanted it enough to actually buckle down to practicing.  Still, I can pick out several tunes on the bone flute and the Anglo-Saxon hearpe (which is a lyre really.)  And I can play a rock drum kit, as long as you don’t need too much fancy stuff.

As far as listening to music goes, I have eclectic tastes.  I love trance music, prog rock, a lot of folk music and world music, early medieval and a lot of classic music, but I hate modern classical and jazz.  I shun the devil’s interval, and I like the mathematical regularity of Palestrina and Bach.

Age of Sail

Apparently my paternal grandfather (who I never knew) was a fisherman all his life, so perhaps the sea is in my blood?  It would be nice to think so.  I get seasick on ferries, mind you.  But then again, my brother in law John taught me to sail a one man sailing dingy in my youth, and I never got seasick in that.

My grandfather was also a champion bare-knuckle fist fighter, and went a bit odd when he got older – retiring to his own island because he couldn’t bear people around him.  He sounds a little lower-deck, but I could see him as a Killick type 🙂

Guilty Pleasures

LOL!  If I had any pleasures about which I felt guilty, I wouldn’t confess them here.  I suppose that once you’ve come out about enjoying slash, there’s not much left to feel guilty about.  Or maybe it’s just me who doesn’t think I need to feel guilty about occasionally binging on chocolate biscuits or parsnip crisps.

Book Trailer for False Colors

I had a terrible time finding pictures of anything even vaguely naval related.  Plenty of tall ships, lots of cartoon pirates and little kiddies in tricornes, but nothing of people actually fighting the ships.  I did find some great pictures by the Historical Maritime Society, and asked if I could use some, but they haven’t got back to me yet.  So I’ve gone with stock photos for now.

I decided to keep it short and to the point.  I think the duel of love between John and Alfie – which does almost get them both killed – is the theme of the book, so there’s not much more to say than that 🙂

Some lovely reviews

for the I Do anthology 🙂  I like to think that our high standards are showing, as both reviewers remarked on what a pleasant surprise it was to find an anthology in which all the stories were good ones 🙂

From ‘Dear Author’

“I finished each story, whether it was long or short, feeling that I’d just gotten a vivid glimpse into someone else’s life. And I found myself pulling for all of them to be able just to live an ordinary life, like everyone else, with no fingers pointed, no judgments made, no fanfare or hoopla. Just to be accepted. Maybe one day. Good job, one and all. B+”

http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2009/02/17/review-i-do-anthology/

From <lj user=”genrereviews”>

“It’s been awhile since I’ve picked up a book that absorbed me to the point where I was putting other things off so I could keep reading, so imagine my surprise when an anthology, of all books, was one that did just that.”

http://community.livejournal.com/genrereviews/103307.html#cutid1

Yay!  It’s so good to know that after all that work and worry, people are liking it 🙂

Facebook TOS. Also, me planning things again

I don’t know if anyone here is also on Facebook, but, if you are, you might want to go and look at their new Terms of Service.  If I’m reading them correctly, they are claiming that users license them in perpetuity to do anything they like with any content posted *to* Facebook and also any content posted *through* Facebook – in other words, any content on the other end of your links.  And even if you take the content down or delete your account, they retain copies and the rights to do whatever they like with it.

There’s an article about it here

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/facebook-founde.html

This new TOS doesn’t go into effect until the 24th of February, I think.  So if you’re worried about it (as I am), it might be a good idea to take down your links and photos and other content over which you want to retain ownership, from Facebook now, before it’s too late.

….  OK, breaking news is that they have abandoned those TOS and are reverting back to the old ones.  However, that’s just a temporary measure until they can come up with a new more acceptable version.  So I am not putting my content back up until I’ve seen the new version for myself.

Read the rest of this entry »

Repost of lost article – Beer, Bells and Bears

Beer, Bells and Bears

from Alex Beecroft’s Blogger blog by Alex Beecroft

Nobody who has suggested that the British are a phlegmatic, rational, buttoned up and repressed sort of people can have possibly ever been to any of the folk events that go on around the country on various obscure saints days and festivals.

I’ve just come home and thawed out from attending the Whittlesey Straw Bear festival, which was, I have to say, absolutely fabulous in a ‘this makes no sense but go with it anyway’ style.

It was bitterly cold.  So cold that in T-shirt, woolly jumper, fleece and calf long fake-fur coat, *with* the hood up over my knitted hat, looking a bit like a straw bear myself, I was still chilled to the bone.  However, it was the weekend before Plough Monday – the day when the ploughs are blessed and work begins on the fields in preparation for planting the corn.  The little town of Whittlesey had held a straw bear festival from time immemorial to mark the day.

(This year they had three bears, a daddy, mummy and baby, but sadly we arrived too late to see baby bear.)

Traditionally one of the ploughmen would be chosen as the bear, and would be wrapped up so tightly in straw that he couldn’t see.  Then he would be led about the village by attendants, and presented with gifts of food and beer (which presumably the attendants drank!)

This tradition was similar to many of the Jack-in-the-Green traditions about the country, and seems to me to have been clearly some sort of agricultural ritual designed to get the corn-growing year off to a good start.

In Whittlesey the tradition was stopped some time in the 1800s because it was regarded as a form of begging.  But 80 years after it stopped, and 30 years ago now, they started it up again, and it’s grown to become a big festival of morris dancing and beer.

Fleeing from the arctic cold into the first pub we came across, which happened to be The Boat Inn, we discovered these lads, who for my money were the best dance side I think I’ve ever seen.  They are the Stone Monkeys, a Northumbrian rapper sword dance side.  The bendy metal strips they’re holding there are the rappers – a kind of bendy metal strip with a handle at each end.  To quote their own article:

The rapper dance was traditionally performed in the mining villages of the Northumberland and Durham coalfield of England and involves five people connected by short, two-handled, flexible swords (called rappers) forming an unbroken chain.

Without breaking this chain the dancers weave in and out of one another twisting the swords to form locks and breastplates, sometimes even jumping or somersaulting over the swords. The dance commences by the five dancers forming a circle each holding one sword in his right hand, often clashing their swords together before grasping in their left hands the free end of the sword held by the dancer in front. The only time this chain is broken is to present a star of five interlocked swords. The dancers step or ‘jig’ in a characteristic way throughout the dance.

Intricate figures are danced with the dancers passing between and around each other, under and over the swords, seemingly into an irretrievable tangle which resolves at intervals into open circles with the swords linking the dancers or into a closed circle with the swords interlocked into the star which is presented aloft to the audience.

It was amazing to watch, and their musicians – a lady violinist in a red hat and a male accordionist – were also extremely good, as was their ‘Tommy’, who narrated what was going on and made jokes.

I’m not sure there’s a lot better than thawing out inside a warm pub with a pint of ‘Straw Bear’ bitter, listening to the kind of music that makes you tap your toes and watching this really clever and ever so slightly dangerous dance.

But one of the great things about morris is that every side has its own character.  The Old Glory Morris side have these very sinister musicians who are almost more entertaining than the dancers.  The dancers (all male) dance like men who are dancing like men – if you see what I mean.  Lots of wide legged stances and clenched fists, which made it extra amusing when they danced ‘Lord Nelson’s Revenge’, which is an 18th Century dance originally danced in Regency ballrooms by ladies in floaty white dresses.  But that whole OMG gender WTFery thing was very much a feature of the day.  While the majority of Old Glory’s menfolk were in trousers and waistcoats, this bearded gentleman had a fetching green gown and bonnet on:

Old Glory are very traditional indeed 🙂  A rather younger side were Boggart’s Breakfast from up Manchester way.  They made quite a contrast!

They call themselves ‘cyber-punk morris’, and had a mixture of male and female dancers, dancing with lots of energy and obviously having great fun at it.

(The ragged clothes are traditional though – field workers in the fens used to sew rags inside their jackets to make them warmer.  On festival days they would wear the jackets inside out, with the multi-coloured motley rags showing.)

In the market square, the Kings Morris side (from King’s Lyn) were dancing with handkerchiefs.  They were one of the few sides which actually looked as you would expect morris dancers to look.  And I must say that they did prove that men can wave hankies in a manly sort of way 🙂

I keep harping on about gender here, because it’s an important issue in morris.  Traditionally only men could dance the morris dances.  Women might be among the musicians, but they were not allowed to dance.  If there was a ‘woman’ among the dancers, it was usually the biggest and most beardy man who was wearing a dress.

Men wearing dresses also formed the core of the Molly dancers.  This is the Pig-Dyke Molly side:

who are in fact a mixture of men and women, all in dresses.  In this case the women are pretending to be men pretending to be women 🙂  The Pig-dyke Mollies (not an offensive name, as they are named after the pig-dyke drainage ditch) were wonderful.  Their musicians included a man on a tuba, which always sounds amusing to me no matter what it’s playing.  They danced both traditional dances with brooms and one they’d made up themselves, which was a dance called ‘Wardrobe Malfunction’ 🙂

These are the Gog-Magog Molly dancers:

another mixture of men and women, but where everyone is wearing a dress.

Do not ask me what this is all about, as I don’t know!  I suspect it has something to do with the ‘Lords of Misrule’ tradition, where on certain days the strict social order of society was eased or even reversed.  Men at least could have a day of doing what they liked (there was no corresponding tradition of women dressing as men and dancing the Morris) and the molly dancers prove that some of them quite fancied being women for the day.

These days, however, just to even out the spectrum, there are ladies morris sides, who are women who dance the morris and do not allow men to join (except as musicians).  The Ely and Littleport Riot side are one of these, but I wasn’t able to get a picture of them as they’d finished before we arrived.

But no folk festival is complete without a hobby horse.  I never got to find out what this one was called.  There was another, attached to the Pig-dyke Mollies, which was called Nodger, and as we drove in to Whittlesey in the car we passed Nodger the hobby horse who was riding a bicycle up the high street.  It set the tone for the whole day.

Morris has deep connections to the agricultural life of Britain.  But these days few of the rest of us share those connections, and as a result it looks immensely silly, out of date, and slightly embarrassing.  But I love it for its silliness and flagrant not giving a damn about what people think of it.  So I’m off to join the Ely and Littleport Riot side, if they’ll have me.  They meet only twenty minutes drive away from me.  Maybe next year I can be dancing through the streets behind the straw bear myself 🙂

They’ve also done a great slideshow of the festival HERE

A good day for ‘I Do’

The anthology gets a wonderful exhaustive and intelligent review by Val Kovalin of Obsidian Bookshelf:

Review of I Do, an Anthology in Support of Marriage Equality, edited by Kris Jacen.

And is no.1 in Amazon.co.uk’s anthology chart already!

Reasons to be cheerful, part 3

Obviously an auspicious day for going to print
The ‘I Do’ anthology is available, a day earlier than estimated, in print from both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com

I don’t have a lot of faith in politicians, but Barak Obama is certainly a cut above the last president of America, so congratulations to the USA, and a cautious sigh of relief from those of us who will almost inevitably follow where you lead.
On the other hand I do have an awful lot of time for Bishop Gene Robinson, whose inaugural speech seems to have not made it to the news, so here he is, talking on a different subject to the BBC.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7504003.stm 

Thanks to charliecochrane  for the link!

In which I am interviewed, and I Do is blogged

The nice people at Rainbow Reviews interviewed me and that is up today here:

http://rainbow-reviews.com/?p=863

In which I blather on about Captain’s Surrender, False Colors, The Witch’s Boy, The Wages of Sin and Boys of Summer.  Also, (continuing a bit of a  worrying theme here), my favourite words for certain body parts.

On a more romantic note, Lisabea blogs about the I Do anthology here:

http://lisabea.blogspot.com/2009/01/manlovemonday-i-have-dream.html

I’m getting to know some great people through this project!

Positively medieval!

To think I thought morris dancing would be a gentle sort of exercise!  My legs are still wobbly on Sunday evening, after dancing on Friday night.

But I had a great time!  I learned single stepping and how to wave my hanky.  And I learned the choruses of two dances and a figure from each one.  Also I got to use the sticks and hit other people’s sticks, and swagger around with one on my shoulder.

It’s amazing the difference the music made!  Without it I had a terrible time remembering which arm went with which leg.  With it, everything seemed natural.  But I am so unfit.  I had to keep stopping and sitting out while I got my breath back.  One more reason to keep on with the treadmill in between.  I also had no idea that I would come back and find the muscles in my calves, thighs, across my ribs and down my arms aching.  It’s more of a full body thing than I thought.

Altogether I’m very enthused and definitely going back.  And now I’m wondering what colour I want my waistcoat to be 🙂

As for the positively medieval part of the post, I have to recommend this blog

Got Medieval

because my life was not complete without ambulatory genetalia.  I particularly like the one on stilts, and the girl power one with the crowned vagina being carried on high by three phalluses.  I swear that one in the hat is wearing roller skates, though.

meme; tagged by concertigrossi

01. What are your nicknames?

I’ve never had one.  I don’t think I’m cool or memorable enough to merit one.

02. How does your hair look currently?
I’m growing it out of a short layered style, so it’s currently shoulder length, straight at the top and curly round the bottom

03. What’s new in your life right now?
The treadmill I got for Christmas, on which I am just starting to run again.  Also I’ve just joined a morris dancing side, and I’m going to practice with them for the first time on Friday.

04. How many colours are you wearing now?
Three; green (mostly green) with a blue and yellow recycling symbol knitted into my otherwise green jumper.

05. Are you an introvert or extrovert?
Strongly introverted.

06. What was the last book you read?
Inkspell by Cornelia Funke – borrowed from my daughter.

08. Who is your favorite super hero?
The Mighty Thor

09. Is there anything that has made you happy these days?
The signs that my tooth implant might finally be healing.  Finishing my proof edit on ‘False Colors’ and getting my cover art for ‘The Mysterious’ accepted.

10. What’s your current obsession?
I wish I had one.  I miss being enthused about something. 

11. How long does it take you to get ready in the morning?

Not more than five minutes.

12. What websites do you visit daily?
Daily, only LJ.

13. Do you write fic? What was the last fic you wrote?
I’m in the middle of writing ‘Boys of Summer’, which is a m/m rich boy/poor boy surfer romance.  But I keep getting interrupted by editing.

14. What’s the last thing you laughed about?
My husband trying not to scatter polystyrene packing beads over the floor while unpacking a steering rack for the car this morning.

15. What’s the last song that got stuck in your head?
Oh, that ghastly ‘Hallelujah’ song that was out over Christmas.  Don’t remind me!  I had to keep mentally singing ‘Gaudete’ to drown it out.

16. What’s the last movie you saw?
At the cinema, Inkheart.  On the TV, Lara Croft and the Cradle of Life.

17. Do you buy or download the movies you watch?
Buy mostly.  I’m still waiting for a chance to see Hellboy 2: The One With Elves, which I bought for myself for Christmas.