Alex Beecroft's Blog, page 37

Olympic Torch

And I don’t just mean my hair (though, seriously, that mop needs a cut.)

Nah – not a post about my hair. The genuine Olympic torch containing fire from Olympia passed through Huntingdon on Sunday morning. Knowing that loads of people would turn out to see it, the town council decided to organise a bit of a fete around it. “I know,” they said to themselves, “what we need to welcome the sportsmen is a Day of Dance, because dance is so well represented at the Olympics.”

(Or something like that. I may be putting words into their mouths.)

At any rate, the upshot of their cogitating was that they invited Ely and Littleport Riot to dance in the square and entertain the people waiting for the torch to jog past. We of course said ‘yes please!’

Those of us – like me – who are the kind of grouches who get all huffy about sport were brought round into genuine excitement by the promise that there would also be a group of Hungarian dancers visiting from Huntingdon’s twin town, Szentendre. The Olympic torch, I can take or leave, but actual folk doing their actual folk dance is much more my thing.

We arrived at 7.45am and found hordes of people already there. I think you can tell I was enjoying myself –

(Portrait of the artist as a middle-aged folk dancer.)

We felt we had to raise our game a little because the Szentendre dancers were so good. Lo! There was much thigh slapping and boot-heel clicking and super-voluminous skirt twirling.

 

Some of it while balancing bottles of booze on their heads!

The Riot watched with much admiration, and a lot of commentary. We all agreed that the men’s dances are very similar in spirit to our morris jigs – there’s a lot of “I can leap higher than you! Look, ladies! Look at how springy and sprightly I am. I’m much better than him! Flock to me, little birdies” sort of thing about it. And while the women’s dancing is much lower key and more stately, it’s clearly designed to show off a lot of leg. We felt like undisciplined violent thugs in comparison. Or well, I did. I quite liked it.

At some point the Olympic torch passed by:

After which everybody in the marketplace did Zumba for a bit, lead by the teachers of the local Zumba class. Szentendre were unfairly good at that too! Then we were delighted to be invited to the tea in the town hall, where we danced for the mayor and various other organizers, Szentendre danced again, and then – joy – we got a chance to learn a dance from them.

This was a very simple circle dance, suitable for teaching someone who’s never danced before, but I still found it a lot harder than it looked. Hard to get my head around the asymmetric patterns of the stepping, and hard work physically too.

It was glorious. And they even let us be in the group photo.

Well worth getting up very early on a Sunday morning for. Even if the Riot almost managed to live up to the history of our name when one of the organisers told us we weren’t allowed to have any of the cakes we’d been promised. They had undercatered and now they were afraid  that if they let us eat, other more important people wouldn’t get any. Fortunately hangings and deportations to Australia were averted when someone nipped out to Marks and Sparks and came back with a couple of tubs of chocolate rice crispie cake. Which was infinitely better than custard danish pastries any day.

Meme borrowed from aunty_marion

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.
1.) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2.) Italicize those you intend to read.
3.) Underline those you LOVE.
4.) Put an asterisk next to the books you’d rather shove hot pokers in your eyes than read.
01. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
02. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
03. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

04. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
05. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
06. The Bible

07. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

08. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

09. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy (I may be mistaken, but this was the one where there’s a terrible storm and her grave spits her back out? That’s all I remember, so it might be some other book I’m thinking of.)

13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (Can you semi-underline? I wouldn’t say I love his stuff, except possibly The Tempest, but I am awed by how brilliant it is.)

*15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

20. Middlemarch – George Eliot (Makes you want to weep, it’s so dull.)
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
*23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (I think I’ve read it, but I don’t remember anything about it, so I may be mistaken.)
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh A book of two halves – I liked the first half.
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Or it may have been this one I read. I know I read some well known doorstop of a gloomy Russian saga. I remember the sense of achievement on finishing it. Now I can’t even remember which book it was, so what was the point of that?)
*28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
*31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres (Does it count if you started it and couldn’t get past the first chapter? At least I now know how to extract a pea from someone’s ear.)
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell Not exactly loved it, but thought it was utterly brilliant.

42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown If I could only discover the secret of his success, I’d be a happy author.

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery (Another one where I think I read it but have blanked the actual experience thoroughly.
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy Dullsville.

48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding Gripping but too disturbing to get an ‘I loved it’.

50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert (Now this was cool!)
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
*67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville (Well, I started it and put it away, thinking ‘what does everyone see in this?’)
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (I’m surprised I’ve read so little Dickens, but what I did read, I didn’t like.)
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson Hilarious!
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton (Why these and not the Famous Five?)
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas (I started but couldn’t continue with this. Good proof that all action, all the time, makes for a dull read.)
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare The underlining is for watching the play. It’s a bit hard going to read, but to watch it’s the most amazing piece of characterisation ever.

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo I could have done without the play-by-play recounting of the battle of Waterloo, but otherwise it was so gripping I stayed up all night reading it, and even voluntarily read The Hunchback of Notre-Dame afterwards.

Dogged jogging on.

My eldest, who has now finished her A levels and is waiting to hear her results before being shipped off to uni, has been off school since mid May. This firstly caused me to do a lot of huffing and slamming about the house complaining that I never get any time on my own to do the things I want to do.

Secondly, quite recently, a solution occurred to me – start writing earlier. Eldest rarely comes down before 11am. If I ablute and eat breakfast and start work at 8am, I can do three hours a day, and that’s enough to do 500 words first draft plus 10 pages of editing, or 1500 words first draft, or – in today’s case – 1600 words of plot plan.

I’m doing the Get Your Words Out challenge this year, to produce 200,000 words in 2012. This looked like no problem at all during those months where the kids were in school. I’d be doing 2000-3000 words a day, and had hit 100,000 by May. Since May, though, it’s been a disaster, and the limited amount of writing time has lead me to massively prejudice first draft writing over editing and other necessary parts of the job.

I’d been writing along on The Glass Floor, thinking “I don’t know what happens next! I don’t know if I even started in the right place. I don’t know what my heroes want (other than to survive.) I don’t know if this will have a decent shape, or make sense. I can’t do this, I need a plan!”

Sure, I used to write without knowing anything, but in those days it would take me an hour and a half to write a paragraph of perhaps 50 words. Most of the time I was staring out of the window waiting for the next idea to coalesce. These days I like to feel assured that I have a plot that hangs together before I start to write it. So I threw up my hands melodramatically and wrote one.

And still, despite knowing that a plot plan is vital for me nowadays, I resented the fact that if I was writing one, I was not accumulating words for the GYWO challenge.

Then I thought “well, heck, I needed to write them for the book, so I’m going to count them as if they were first draft words.” Why not? I had no plan before today, now I have one. That has to be worth celebrating.

I also need to do second drafts/edits. I wonder if there’s a way of counting them, or if that really is cheating?

I wonder too whether it would be better to concentrate on getting the second draft/editing of one book done before starting the next. I already have two novels and the first third of a novella in first draft and my editing is not keeping pace. Would it be better to pick one and finish it, then move on to the next, then begin writing the next and stick with that until it’s done?

They say you should write every day. Does doing the second draft/editing count? It seems like it should, but it won’t help me get my 200,000 words out.

Oakworth Weekend

I’m finally recovered from the Oakworth weekend – an extravaganza of morris dancing Up North, where a number of fortunate sides got taken on a coach tour through spectacular Yorkshire countryside to dance at a number of villages on the Saturday. Then we got taken on a steam train to dance at different villages on the Sunday.

Saturday alternated between pouring down and too sunny. Sunday settled down to a steady diet of rainy and cold. But nevertheless this was a wonderful weekend and I’d like to thank our hosts, Oakworth Village Morris Men, for laying it all on.

We started out in Skipton, dancing outside the town hall, and the programme went very much like this:

 

Weekend of Dance Programme

The sides on the first day were Persephone Women’s Morris, a North West clog morris side:

Who had apparently recently redesigned their kit to attract younger members. It’s very appropriate to their name, with the black for Hades and the green and yellow for Persephone’s returning in the spring. They have a yellow underskirt which shows through as they twirl and makes for a nice touch. They were very impressive – both precise and energetic. Normally a side will be one or the other, it’s rare to get both. Also they made a wonderful noise in their clogs

Kinnerton Morris Men, a Cotswold side:

Rainbow Morris, a mixed North West clog morris side:

Oakworth Village Morris Men, our hosts, who are a Cotswold side:

And of course, us – the Coton Morris Men (with their fabulous –and controversial- lady musicians.)

I am rocking the pirate look here entirely because it was raining at the time. I went prepared for various atmospheric conditions, in black trousers, white shirt, black waistcoat, white jumper, black coat, black and white scarf. With judicious putting on and taking off of each of these elements, I more or less stayed equipped for the weather throughout.

As Gerard says in his introduction, Coton Morris’s kit is black and white ‘because colour hasn’t reached the Fens yet.’

This is Gerard, in case you wondered how far to take him seriously:

On the Sunday, we lost Persephone and Rainbow Morris, but we gained Leeds Morris Men:

whose owl waistcoats I rather envy. They are another Cotswold side and were accompanied by (I think) a Fool borrowed from Oakworth.

And Briggate Morris, another North West clog morris side

with a little girl who was an absolute star. She was a really good dancer and looked like she was having a great time.

Curious not to have any Border sides at all, but then often, down here, we’ll have events with Border and Cotswold only and no Clog, so it was nice to see the native dance of the area was so well represented.

I may be enjoying being a musician more than I enjoy being a dancer, which makes my future with the Riot a bit problematical. At the moment I’m trying to do both, but if I can’t fit both in, I would probably choose to carry on playing rather than dancing.

A bonus photo, taken about a fortnight ago when Coton danced at the garden party of St.Edward’s College, Cambridge. What’s notable about this one is that the entire side was in attendance, every single one of us:

that doesn’t happen often!

Work in Progress Wednesday

Heh, still trying to think of things to blog about over here, when really nothing blogworthy happens from day to day. (A fact I’m quite glad about. I know better than to want to live in interesting times.)

So, why not blog about what I’m writing? At least I should have more of that every week. And I have three works in different stages of progress at the moment, so there’s a variety to choose from.

Here we have something from today’s output on the new novella, tentatively titled “that vampire novella which, having just re-read Dracula, I’m fairly happy to say is nothing like it so far, even if it does have a hapless young man from England getting into trouble with bloodsuckers in the Balkans.” Or The Glass Floor, for short.

 

Seriously, how could anything spooky happen in a castle that looks like this?

In which our concussed and amnesiac linguist hero, Frank, finds his grand tour going terribly awry in 18th Century Wallachia:

~

"What are your names?" he asked, belatedly, as the young mother helped him into the clothes they’d brought for him – big, baggy, once-white shirt and flimsy once-white trousers. "I should know who to thank."

He put together the scrupulous care with the soap and the fact that their young people had been out scavenging in hedgerows for their food, and felt again a vague consciousness of guilt – they had so little and he was making them give it to him. "I should know who to repay."

"We are nobody." The old woman smiled again, wise and harsh. "We belong to the Vacarescu – we are his slaves. And slaves have no need of names, or payment. It is enough that we are permitted to live, and to serve."

Did she say this because she thought him some kind of spy? "I can carry no tales except of kindness," he insisted, not sure what he felt at the thought. Rejected? Repelled? "Who would I betray you to? I have nowhere to go. I have no one to turn to. I don’t even know who I am."

"I am Constanta," the young woman handed him a rabbit to skin and gut, picked up her infant, which was fretting beside her on the ground and set it in her lap. She stripped the reeds to get at the tubers in their roots and set them boiling in another pot. "And you can be Ivan, for now. This, our mother, is Lyuba and she is married to–"

Lyuba cut her off in a flood of angry speech that made him lean in and listen to the rhythm of it, something practiced in him trying to pick out individual words, listen for repetition and patterns. She saw him doing it and snapped her mouth shut, hard, giving him the first overtly hostile look he had had from these people. But he understood it better now – he was a master stumbled defenceless among slaves. Whatever he individually had done or not done, they must look at him and see a chance to repay a very long history of grief.

"You will not be alone for long," Lyuba said sternly. "You are not a person whose death is shrugged over like a dropped pot. They will come looking for you. And when they do, you will tell the Vacarescu that we are good servants and loyal. That is all we wish or need of payment. You will not give him cause to punish us, and you will not give him our names."

"I swear it," he said, holding his hand as though it rested on a book. "I have forgotten so much, it is easy to forget this too. I won’t bring trouble to you. I swear it."

Blogging and Pinning

Ah, if only all blogging was this effortless! Today, courtesy of Charlie Cochrane, I’m talking about the differences between m/f and m/m romance on the Flirty Author Bitches blog:

http://flirtyauthorbitches.com/2012/06/not-your-mothers-historical-romance/

Thanks Charlie!

I’ve also recently started using Pinterest. I’m always curious to try out the latest new thing in social media – largely in a vain attempt to find one that will suit me. Often I make a great, enthusiastic start and then lapse into silence again. Who knows whether that will be the case here or not? But I will say that I actually see a way to use Pinterest in the cause of writing.

I’m currently doing galley proofs for the Under the Hill books, and then I’m going to move on to editing The Pilgrims’ Tale (and then I’m going to move on to editing Elf Princes’ Quest.) So I’m saving my “but I still need to write, or else I’ll go insane” brain by doing 500 words of a new vampire novella in the morning before I get to work on all that editing. And – coming slowly back around to the point here – Pinterest is being brilliant for keeping all the research pictures that I’ve never known what to do with before.

Now if I Google “18th Century Wallachian Boyar” I don’t have to just look at the picture and try to remember it, or bookmark it, or download it and upload it into an awkward research folder somewhere. I can just pin it, and then I can go and look at all my similar pins together and get a pictorial overview which is wonderful for giving a feel for the atmosphere. And I can organise all of this by book, which makes lots of sense to me, and also ends up looking very pretty.

http://pinterest.com/alexbeecroft/

So yes, I can see myself using Pinterest on a regular basis. I have no idea whether it will be of any use, social media or promo-wise, but I suspect that’s always been very secondary to me anyway. As a research tool, it’s prime

A post about obsession

Heh, after having written a novella called His Heart’s Obsession, which is a properly romantic title, I go and shoot myself in the foot over on Carina’s blog by claiming that obsession is a bad thing, and not in any way a synonym for ‘love.’ Is this heresy? What do you think?

http://carinapress.com/blog/2012/06/if-you-love-someone-set-them-free/

It took five years but it is finally here!

Huzzah! It was in 2007 that I signed the first contract to publish the story that was then called “90% Proof”. It got past three rounds of editing, and then the anthology project was shelved due to editorial illness and I was offered the rights back.

Then in 2008 I signed the second contract to publish it, and in 2011, when nothing had happened to it in three years, I asked for the rights back. After a re-write and an expansion, I offered it to Carina, and they re-titled it, and today it is actually published as His Heart’s Obsession! I can un-cross my fingers, finally

As if to reward me for my patience, it’s already had some lovely reviews, and topped Carina’s bestseller list, so I’m officially removing it from my ‘most jinxed story’ category (re-crossing my fingers just in case that was unwise.)

I’ve never had so many reviews before a book was actually out!

The Book Vixen says

This is an excellent MM historical romance with full-developed characters and an emotionally intimate romance. MM fans will do well to read this one.

Tracy’s Place says

Though the story was short it was filled with emotion, friendship and love and had me turning page after page.

and The Novel Approach says

As with Alex Beecroft’s False Colors (which I loved), His Heart’s Obsession is as much an homage to the Age of Sail as it is a story of forbidden love and the danger it represents. While I’d have liked a bit more exploration of the whens, hows, and whys that lead up to Robert falling in love with Hal, I very much enjoyed what came after.

Thank you to all of them

If you are feeling so inclined, you can get a copy here :) Thank you!

~*~*~*~

Review of Under the Hill: Bomber’s Moon

And while I’m doing a reviews post, I think I’ll sneak in this lovely review for Under the Hill: Bomber’s Moon from Talking Two Lips

This book is a MUST READ for fantasy fans, and even if you’re not a fantasy fan, I urge you to get it anyway. You won’t be disappointed.

Thoughts on Fanfiction?

I’ve volunteered to do a talk about Fanfiction at the UK Meet. I don’t think anyone can be in any doubt that I love fanfiction and write it myself. Sometimes you just want Captain America and Loki to have adorable evil babies together, so much so that you have to make it happen. And if I want a comfort read where I can pretty much tell beforehand that I will like the characters, and the story will obey no rules of romance, but will be either comforting, or whimsical crack, or make me cry, or all three together, I go to fanfic.

What I didn’t know was how much controversy there was about it in the m/m genre, both its plain existence and the existence of original fiction which was initially written as fanfic. It seems to me that an author’s story is their own. Offering it for free first doesn’t take away their ability to alter it so that they can legally offer it for a price later. The existence of 50 Shades of Grey and other books bears me out here, I think. But I look at the mass of indignant comments here

http://www.reviewsbyjessewave.com/2012/05/04/fanfiction-when-is-it-original-fiction

and think “OK, I’m missing something. I don’t understand where this outrage is coming from. I just don’t get it.”

Given that that’s the case, perhaps I’m not the right person to have volunteered to talk about fanfic at the UK Meet. As I clearly have a blind spot here, can I put it out to you – what are the points that you think ought to be covered in a talk about fanfic? What questions ought I to think about answering?

To me, the energy, inventiveness and sheer right-outside-the-box-ness of fanfic is a well of invention that I think benefits m/m fiction immensely. I understand that one cannot use someone else’s copyright protected characters or invented universes and legally profit from them – that these things have to be altered or replaced in a way that makes them the author’s own – but if that’s done sufficiently well, what is the problem?

Bestselling author, here I come!

LOL! Sorry to blow my own trumpet two days running, but woohoo! His Heart’s Obsession is Carina’s number one best seller at the moment, and By Honor Betrayed is their number five. Serious glee!

Link for proof http://ebooks.carinapress.com/C0287AF... even though probably by the time I post this, it will no longer be there.

Now I had better go and tackle the galley proofs for the Under the Hill books. /glee