Janine Ashbless's Blog, page 110

Glitter

I'm probably going to finish my novel "Cover him With Darkness" today.
I've certainly run out of space on my wordcount.
I'm editing, tweaking, changing one crucial word here and there...

I may be doing this "churning out genre-books at a rate of knots" thing wrong.

Montenegro

I spent a few days in Montenegro earlier this month - researching the setting for "Cover Him With Darkness" of course - not on holiday or anything. Honest!

On the walls of the Old Town of Budva "Where is Montenegro?" Well, you're not the only one to ask. My bank, when I rang them up beforehand, couldn't find it on their list of European countries. But I swear, go to Italy and head east, and after you've had a little swim in the Adriatic there it is: south of Croatia, and only about the size of Wales (or Connecticut, if you prefer). It's one of the nations of the Former Yugoslavia, but luckily escaped much of the horror of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s.


The walls of Kotor old town, and the shortest river in the country - 300m from source to sea But it was famous at one point - I have a book by a British woman traveller published 1904 which says "The road out from Cattaro [Kotor] has been so often writen of that it is idle to describe it once again, nor can any words do it justice."

25 switchbacks, and took 3 hours to ascend in a horse-drawn carriage. That's whyHere's the view I took from the top:



Montenegro ("Black Mountain") is, well, mostly mountain. And a strip of Mediterranean coast. It's beautiful. It has the southernmost fjord in Europe (the Gulf of Kotor) and the tallest men, on average, in the continent (and boy are they proud of that! - the local tour guides couldn't wait to reel off the heights of their historical heroes and current politicians).

Once you get away from the coast, the landscape is Alpine.

The "city" of Zabljak (pop.1937)
And in the high mountains, incredibly bleak:

This is where CHWD starts out! Yeeeeeees!

It's overwhelmingly an Orthodox Christian country so I went in as many churches as I could (RESEARCH!!). I did get to see the Right Hand of St John the Baptist, but sorry no photo.

"You're from England?" said the priest. "Where's that? Somewhere near Ireland, right?" Snrrrrk.
The cliff-face monastery of St Vasilija (Basil) at Ostrog:



The mummified body of the Blessed Ozana: visionary, shepherdess and defeater of the Ottoman Navy:

I got permission. Never piss off any saint who looks like she could get up and eat your brains.
Of course the research wasn't all dry and ecclesiastical. I delved deep into the traditions of Montenegrin cuisine too:


And picked up this local guy who hung out with me for a couple of days...


So don't feel too sorry for me guys. It's a tough life being a writer, but I'm up to the challenges :-)

Impossible Spaces

Rarely do I talk about my Other Writing on this blog ... but I very much want to give a shoutout to Impossible Spaces , edited by Hannah Kate and published by Hic Dragones. It's a brand-new anthology of dark fantasy stories themed around looking-glass worlds and dimensions that can't really exist but intrude nonetheless into our reality - just the sort of meta-Lovecraftian theme that gives me the delicious horrors.

"Sometimes the rules can change. Sometimes things aren’t how they appear. Sometimes you can just slip through the cracks and end up… somewhere else. What else is there? Is there somewhere else, right beside you, if you could only reach out and touch it? Or is it waiting to reach out and touch you?
Don’t trust what you see. Don’t trust what you hear. Don’t trust what you remember. It isn’t what you think.

A new collection of twenty-one dark, unsettling and weird short stories that explore the spaces at the edge of possibility."

Plus, Hic Dragones are a pleasure to work for. They are based in the UK and are a creative writing and literature team who come up with workshops, conferences and (hopefully soon) murder-mystery games as well as publishing books.





Twenty-one stories make up this chunky collection, including one by British horror stalwart Ramsey Campbell, and one by ME! Except that I'm writing under my other name ... and there's no sex in my nasty urban horror tale, for which everyone ought to be grateful ...

You can buy the book in either paperback or Kindle/mobi/epub format, and amuse yourselves trying to identify me from my writing style alone.

Oooh - it's a CLUE!

Or you could cheat and read the author bios, I suppose ...
;-)

Buy links here (including Amazon)

Eyecandy Monday

Yes, I'm back from my travels!  I drove in gone midnight last night, hallucinating from sleepiness. Not smart, I know.

Hoorah: I didn't kill my parents during the trip, either accidentally (though I came alarmingly close at one point) or on purpose :-)
The house is still standing - and so is the blog :-)
I met some old friends I haven't seen in years :-)
I have a load of photos of Furrin' Climes to share :-)
I have a NOVEL TO HAND IN VERY SOON 8-0

Holiday weight gain: 8lbs

Fitness Plan: write

Eyecandy Monday

I'm taking a break from this blog for a couple of weeks. Some intensive research coming up ;-)

There is a possibility the blog won't be here next time I sign on. Apparently many people (though NOT me) have received notice from Blogger that adult-rated blogs with monetized links (and ONLY adult-rated blogs, which is pure discrimination) will be deleted from this month. Now, my blog isn't monetized ... in my opinion. I don't carry third-party adverts to any sites, sexually-themed or otherwise. I don't do reviews for money or freebies. I'm not even an Amazon associate. But the definition of "monetized" is vague - if I say "Look, my books are on sale at Sainsbury's!" or  "I've got a hot excerpt up on the Sh! site"- is that advertising? What about links to my books on publishers' sites and booksellers?

We are pawns in the hands of commercial bodies with their own agendas.

So, if this turns out to be my last post, thank you for reading, guys :-)
If it isn't ... then I'll be back mid-July. With photos :-)

Nine Years realtime ...

... how many D&D rounds is that?

4 dragons and the Goddess Takhisis on the mat...
Yesterday my Dungeons and Dragons group (3.5 edition in case you're interested, and of course you are) finished off the very final fight in an epic campaign that has taken us around nine years of gaming.



The final climactic conflict  - less than 10 rounds of magic-flinging and slaughter, with each "round" being about 6 seconds in character time, so we're talking about a minute tops in-game - took 14 REAL HOURS TO PLAY OUT.

We won, of course :-) Hooray! The world of Krynn is now safe from the nasty dragons and can go back to peacefully kissing the asses of the returned Gods of Good - who have got over their last genocidal hissy-fit, and decided to forgive us all.

In the real world, a decade's play on this one game has seen us collectively through house moves, new jobs, dozens of exciting new recipes, thousands of bottles of beer, several holidays together, and the DM getting married. We're older, balder, kinkier and [a little bit] wiser than we used to be, but we still bloody argue about rules interpretation. And you know what? I hope we're still doing exactly the same thing in another decade, and the one after that, and when we're all in our dotage. This is friendship.

My poor shapeshifted druid Kyron makes a ill-advised  - nay, fatal - decision about who to hit next.
What do we do from here on?
Well, we start on a Deadlands campaign. Because the only thing more epic than dragons is UNDEAD COWBOYS :-))))

Three Legs in the Evening

Gustve Moreau: Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864)
When the call goes out for an erotica anthology, there's almost always a standard set of restrictions: NO incest, NO bestiality, NO non-consensual, NO underage, NO scat or watersports.

So last week I wrote a story for a submission call, and naturally I chose the theme of Oedipus and the Sphinx ... because that's two Forbidden Topics (yes, he shags the Sphinx) right there already. Writing at the borderlines ... it's like picking a scab - how far can you push it before you regret it?

Oh dear.

I don't know yet if the story will be accepted by the editor. I don't know if it'll get past the publisher. But I was asked for a story that "told everyone it was written by Janine Ashbless," and it doesn't get much more Ashbless than that!

But it's probably a good job I ran out of space on the wordcount, because if I'd had another 1000 words it would have been even dirtier :-D

(BTW, my Sphinx is MUCH bigger than the one in the pic at top.)

"Smut by the Sea" pics

Last Saturday I picked Jennifer Denys up and drove through the lashing rain and around herds of stray pigs to Smut By The Sea, the erotica event organised by Victoria Blisse in Scarborough Library.

Jennifer Denys taking the michael out of erotic romance tropes  :-)
There was fudge, enormous quantities of coffee, a book stall, a tombola (I won a pen: Jennifer won lube, grrr) and a purple lecture hall wherein there were MANY READINGS  by erotica-friends new and old:

Victoria Blisse, Lexie Bay, Ashley Lister (standing), KD Grace, Jennifer Denys.Ashley's poetry was particularly dirty. In fact, as the day went on I realised that I had erred too far on the side of caution in picking my own reading.

This was the moment that I realised that Scarborough was actually shock-proof:

Slave Nano, the Duchess, the Red Queen
Slave Nano was launching the paperback version of his novel Adventures in Fetishland , with a little help from his friends, in glorious technicolour PVC. I will never look at yellow teapots ... or cupcakes ... again in the same way, I can tell you!!

After that foray into kink, I realised I had to up my game somewhat. So instead of reading from mostly-harmless  Heart of Flame I switched to scary-fairy
Hiding behind me: Liv Honeywell and Domitri Xavier
Yorkshire can take anything you throw at it :-)

Anyway, since getting home I have been very much inspired to write something really rude again :-) I want to scare myself once more, as I did with Named and Shamed .

My only regret is that I didn't get a photo of the pig on the road....

Event Reportage from Jennifer Denys / Nano Vaslen / Victoria Blisse

Eyecandy Monday:

Okay, so, I watched the Superman movie Man of Stee l , and this is the last thing I can remember clearly ... because I think my brain drowned:

Nothing important happened after this, right?
The wet trousers thing is preceeded by the bit where he bursts in and rescues the doomed oil-rig guys, and he's all beardy and hairy-chested and shirtless and HE'S ON FECKIN' FIRE, and it was the most stupid, glorious, wonderful, Bad Romance Cover moment that I wanted to stand up and cheer:

Man of steel, hair of asbestos
Then he went and got a shave and started to look like Superman, and suddenly I lost all interest. Either because he has a weird boney jaw, or I hate side-partings, or I'm just a sad facial-hair-fetishist. Who can say?

Still, I will always have the behind-the-scenes shots:



And the weird propaganda workout video:



That Zack Snyder... he has facial hair too. Hmmmm.
Goddamn, I'm a sick woman.

Black Horse

See, if I wrote a story about a Big Black Horse that wanted to marry the narrator, it'd cause outrage. Sing a song about it and that's just fine...
;-)

(Can you tell I'm writing a dodgey story right now?)