Janine Ashbless's Blog, page 109

I've got Mail

Oh dear god, I've got my picture in the Daily Mail. David Woolfall's photography project has hit the national papers!

I'm pleased, sure. With reservations. The Mail is one of Britain's most right-wing (though not by American standards) and anti-feminist (though not by American standards) newspapers, and its comments sections online is notoriously bitchy. I imagine we can now look forward to hundreds of people telling us we are ugly, boring, can't write for toffee, aren't getting any real sex (Ha!) and have no moral standards.

Which I guess means we've finally arrived!
:-)))

Eyecandy Monday

Well, I have been hanging out in the Steampunk room this weekend, drinking free gin. It was bound to rub off on me...
;-)

Geek contraception

Nine Worlds

Oh deary me, I somehow forgot to blog yesterday - I was so caught up in going to the Nine Worlds Geekfest! So here's a live-action report from my darkened hotel room before breakfast...

I've been to a few talks so far - the Skeptics thread did one on the psychology of ghosts and hauntings which included some fascinating EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) recordings and - for the first time for me - the famous Led Zep recording which when played backwards supposedly invokes "my sweet Satan". This was a shocking example of what they call Top-Down psychological processing: the way your brain overlays patterns on ambiguous data. Unprepared, it is all but impossible to make any words out of the gibberish recordings. But once you've read the supposed 'script' the words become clear as a bell and almost impossible not to hear. I was aghast!

Then we went to a Steampunk 101 talk and signed up for the gin-tasting on Saturday (huzzah!). And then the guys had a dancing lesson ... with Syrio Forel!!! After a pizza we attended a gig by comedian Helen Keen which was all about the history of rocket science and WAY funnier than that sounds. She's great. And now I know way too much about the Nazi and Satanist roots of NASA...

And we've done things with the hotel-room copy of the Book of Mormon that you wouldn't believe.
Or maybe you would...

Off to breakfast and to see Judge Minty ... or maybe watch a Quidditch game :-)

Bosnia and Herzegovina

So after a few days in Montenegro, I moved on to Bosnia.

At the village of Lukomir, a remote village in the high mountains
We swam at the falls of Kravice
The fort above the walled town of Počitelj Derelict concrete building destroyed by war: ancient symbols, shell-hole from the 1990s.
Bosnia and Herzegovina was also part of the former Yugoslavia federation, of course, and was the area worst-hit by the appalling civil wars and genocidal slaughter of the 1990s. Nowadays it is divided administratively between a Serbian (Orthodox) area, and a Bosniak (Muslim) + Croat (Catholic) area. Politically it's in a sad way - religious tensions, corruption, lingering war-damage both physical and mental. But our Bosnian guide was optimistic that things will improve as the younger generations slowly take power from the entrenched old guard. Here's hoping.

Sarajevo: on this spot started World War 1. Some places just can't catch a break.
I actually found Sarajevo one of the most beguiling cities I've ever been in. Here's the old Ottoman trading area:


And here's the Austro-Hungarian area, which is just like any European city-centre:


You can step from one to the other in two paces. Everything changes - the paving, the skyline, the smells, everything. Most peculiar. It's like teleportation from one continent to another!

A cultural contrast in coffees, at the Viennese Cafe
We arrived on the first night of the Islamic festival of Ramadan. We went up the hill to see the mosque lights go on when they fired the mortar signalling sunset. Several local people handed us turkish delight and special Ramadan bread - it was really touching.


We went, of course, to the town of Mostar - famous for its medieval bridge that was destroyed by Croat forces but rebuilt in 2004 from the original designs.
"Don't Forget Srebenica" says the banner - it was the annual mass burial that week
It's still a divided city, and a bit of a tourist-trap, though very beautiful.


I climbed this minaret ... in a thunderstorm. Some atheists are just asking for it!
The medieval necropolis at Radimlja. Adherents of the local Bosnian Christian church came under persecution as heretics and Bogomils by the papal Inquisition, and so, unsurprisingly, took the first opportunity to bail out of the Catholic church and convert to Islam in the 15th Century. 
And finally I proudly include another dessicated piece of saint: Queen Helen of Anjou (13th Century), who founded the first girls' school in Serbia.


Bosnia's fascinating and beautiful. And HOT. I'd like to go back and see more one day. I didn't get long enough there, or in Montenegro!

Eyecandy Monday

Hell. No time. Gotta hammer out an Eyecandy Monday and run...

Cover Her With Icecream

Back away from the peanut butter jar, Janine...

I couldn't have done it without...

Photobombed by my toes...
These are the main print books I used as reference and research in writing Cover Him With Darkness . Note that the Bible is the King James version (copyright-free for quotations, yay!).
As a novel set in a foreign country it presented me with some interesting challenges!

Books about Montenegro are actually in pretty short supply, but I thoroughly recommend travel guides of the more detailed warts-and-all kind (Bradt, Rough Guides) as a starting point for any writer using a foreign setting.

Some of my research material can't appear in this photo because it's on my e-reader. Which is definitely the cheaper option.
The Book of Enoch - an apocryphal text written about the 1st Century, translated into English in 1917. Batshit-crazy as these things are, but perfect for what I needed. The fundamental research text for this novel.The Orthodox Way (theology, prayers, doctrine) - an absolute essential as far as I was concerned.Satan: a biography - a backup to the Stanford book pictured above.Through the Lands of the Serb - a travelogue by Edith Durham, an intrepid and unflappable Englishwoman writing in 1904, full of colourful incident and just pure entertainment. The Land of the Black Mountain: the adventures of two Englishmen in Montenegro, 1903.
And there was Youtube - for footage of Serbian Orthodox religious ceremonies (very musical) - and of course Wikipedia. Good grief, what would I have done without Wikipedia?

Say I'm musing, "Okay, so this priest is going to cite some historical incident of man's inhumanity to man ... If he was British he'd certainly use Auschwitz as the obvious example. But he's not British or American, he's Serbian. What's he likely to think of first?" And lo, a swift Google search and I have my answer - though ignorance might be bliss in that case.

And of course I went to Montenegro for a few days. Okay, so strictly speaking this changed maybe 500 words of the book. It's not like there's room for huge swathes of landscape description in a modern genre novel: that sort of thing just isn't wanted nowadays. But goddamn, I want to get things right. I want to be able to picture things accurately when I write. Every word counts.

'Technically right' is the best kind of right ;-)

And yeah, I know there will still be errors. It's embarrassing me already.

This is what happens when you have Troll Sex in public

Earlier this year I read out the Troll Sex scene from
He says:

"I found it easy to empathise with the lead character, Tansy, and just adored her personality; she is no bland slut, merely providing a vessel for sex, but a person with a rich, colourful personality. I loved her and bought into her quest, and enjoyed every lustful experience she embraced with wild abandon."

And:

"One day I want to be able to write a book as good, as erotic and as engrossing, as Named and Shamed."

To be honest there are days I wonder why I don't just submit to the marketing gurus and write the same old Fifty-Shades-alike novels as every other writer - they sell like hot cakes, they are given shelfspace in supermarkets and feature in newspaper articles. They are successful and mainstream. Why do I bother writing something that's different? Something that has its own plot, and its own voice? Something not every reader will get?

And then people like John D remind me. And it's all worthwhile again.
Thank you.
:-)

Eyecandy Monday

 
Have I posted this picture before on an Eyecandy Monday? I know it's from a post Jo did...

I'm coming to realise that my memory is going. It's clearly filled up with too much writing stuff and basically whenever anything new from real life is shovelled in on top, it has a 75% chance of falling straight off again. Mr Ashbless is slowly coming to terms with the fact that just because he tells me something, it doesn't mean I'm hearing it. My mind is elsewhere. Off with the angels.

Life would be a lot more memorable if it followed fictional rules. Like if, every significant piece of information was flagged up by meaningful looks and dramatic weather. Or if there was, you know, less padding and repetition and redundant incident.


Oh, what the hell. The pic's worth seeing again, I reckon.
And as long as I can still write and follow the plot-arcs in Game of Thrones (I'm just fine with that sort of thing!), I don't really care that much.