Alex Beecroft's Blog, page 53
February 28, 2011
Written in ink
Well, given how much the diet has slowed down, I don't see myself hitting my final target weight in April any more. So I'm rethinking the whole tattoo schedule, along the lines of "I've already lost 2 stone, do I not get a reward for that?!" and "I've got an interim target coming up which I only have to lose 1.5lb to hit. I could lose that by next week. How about I get the tattoo to celebrate hitting that instead?"
Impatient, moi? Well, yes. I'm not getting any younger, you know 
But at any rate, I'm continuing to browse the tattoo sites and I just happened on this one: The Word Made Flesh
which has a whole load of photos of tattoos which are quotes from people's favourite books. Why on earth – as a writer – did it not occur to me before this that I could have words rather than pictures inked in? You would have thought that was an obvious thing to think of. Not to me!
On the other hand, I'm having difficulties coming up with a single quote that means as much to me as a cross or a vine scroll. I suspect that this is a situation in which a picture is worth a thousand words. All that leaps to mind is
"If this is the Royal Music, no wonder the Kings of Karhide are all mad."
From Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness.
A moment's Googling, mind you, turns up a treasure trove of quotes from Tolkien. I've always admired not only the way he wrote but also the things he had to say about writing, and here he is talking about the happy ending and why it's a good thing:
"The consolation of fairy stories, the joy of the happy ending; or more correctly, the good catastrophe, the sudden, joyous "turn" (for there is no true end to a fairy tale); this joy, which is one of the things that fairy stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially escapist or fugitive. In it's fairy tale or other world setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace, never to be counted on to reoccur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, or sorrow and failure, the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance. It denies, (in the face of much evidence if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."
— J.R.R. Tolkien
I could see
"Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."
making a good tattoo.
How about you? If you had to choose a quote to have tattooed upon your person, what would it be and why?
February 24, 2011
How I learned to stop worrying and love the war
I'm going a bit mad with this blog posting thing this week. Updated this one on Tuesday, and today I'm blogging on Samhain's blog about how book research is a good excuse to watch more TV 
http://www.samhainpublishing.com/2011/02/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-war/
February 23, 2011
Macaronis chat
The Macaronis (me, Lee Rowan, Erastes, Charlie Cochrane, Stevie Woods, Syd McGinley) will be chatting from 3pm to 6pm EST (8pm to 11pm GMT) today at the Coffee Time Romance yahoo group. Charlie is giving away a copy of one of her books in print. I may too, if there's any interest in it
February 22, 2011
Waistcoat reduction
I don't know if anyone remembers me blogging about my morris dancing waistcoat back in the day when I had only just started dancing, and I had to make my first one? I was a size 18, so I naturally bought a size 18 pattern, only to be told (when the waistcoat didn't fit) that a size 18 pattern makes a size 14 garment. Goodness knows why!
Anyway, I solved the problem briefly by giving the waistcoat two sets of buttonholes and making a stomacher to button between the two sides. As you can see in action here:
http://alexbeecroftblog.wordpress.com/2009/04/19/april-was-in-march-and-so-was-i/
After that, I made a second, yellow, waistcoat which actually was big enough. But the second waistcoat, and the third (apple green) were not as well made as the first one, because the first one got all my waistcoat-making enthusiasm, whereas the others were just knocked together in a rush.
I've been having a couple of disheartening weeks on the diet recently, where I've stopped losing weight despite sticking to the regime. So it cheered me up no end on our recent morris-taster-and-recruitment day (when we danced for four hours almost non stop, with numerous suspecting members of the public dragged in) to discover that I can finally do it up!
I've had to narrow the stomacher to a single strip of buttons and fasten the same buttons through both sides, but you can't tell that once it's done up. I also had to find a new skirt at the charity shop because I'd been having to hold the old one up by safety-pinning it to my shirt. So the diet may have hit a bit of a plateau at the moment, but the results over all are still fairly dramatic. As is the fact that I could dance for 4 hours on end! I couldn't have done that when I started.
The taster day was brilliant fun, run jointly by the Riot and Coton Morris Men. The members of the public who joined in seemed to enjoy it, and we got to try out each others' dances. Coton are a Cotswold side, the Riot are a Border side, and the two traditions are quite different. It was nice that both sides came away from the day going "I don't know how you do that! That was really difficult!"
Apropos of nothing, Coton have a dance called Willow Tree in which they call for a female 'sacrifice' from the audience for them all to dance around. They always pick someone young and pretty, and I have always had ambivalent feelings about the dance. However, Sompting Ladies' Morris have shown me what the correct response should be:
(Probably only amusing if you've seen its opposite:)
February 16, 2011
Branding Revisited
In my further attempts to narrow down the sort of things I'm likely to end up writing stories about, I have abandoned text and gone for a diagram. Lo! The Venn of Alex:
So, we've got
Plain Historical, Plain Fantasy, Plain Romance and Plain Mystery.
Shining in the Sun is a plain romance, and I have an idea for a plain mystery and a plain historical which may or may not come to pass. But I'm not as happy writing in a single genre as I am writing in at least two at once.
So False Colors, Captain's Surrender and Blessed Isle are all AD – Historical Romance.
The Witch's Boy is AB – Historical Fantasy.
Under the Hill is ABD – Fantasy with a strong element of History and Romance.
The Wages of Sin is ABCD – Mystery, Historical Romance and elements of Fantasy.
Future projects include
Whirlwind Boys (AD), an idea for a Historical Mystery (AC) and an idea for a Historical Fantasy Mystery (ABC)
The most consistent thing in the lot is the A – the historical element. That's interesting, as I didn't realize I was quite that wedded to it. My new tag line definitely seems to sum it all up, though
It was interesting thinking this through. It does give me a brand of sorts, but also plenty of room to manoeuvre. Why haven't I tried Steampunk yet, I wonder? You'd have thought it was everything I liked in a single package.
February 14, 2011
Valentines Day on the Macaronis
We're posting love letters from our characters on the Macaronis blog and on
The hashtag if you want to join in on Twitter is #themacaronis
I tried my hand at 18th Century lyrical verse on behalf of Garnet from Blessed Isle, because you just know he's the kind of man to write overblown poetry on scented paper and fold it into the shape of a rose and put it in a box tied with red ribbon and covered in cherubs. He's the only one of my characters who is!
http://historicromance.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/love-letter-from-garnet-littleton-to-harry-thompson/
February 13, 2011
Interview in Canada's Globe & Mail newspaper
Erastes, Heidi Cullinan and I were interviewed last year by a reporter from the Globe and Mail, and they clearly saved the feature up so that they could post it around Valentine's Day:
It's a lot less hostile in tone than some of these things, as long as you don't read the comments. (Seriously – don't read the comments unless you're feeling up to a dose of homophobia). A couple of factual errors – Erastes isn't married, let alone been married for 15 years. I'm not Irish unless you count being born in N.Ireland to English parents as making me Irish.
I was at first a bit disappointed by how – when my position was simplified to fit into a couple of paragraphs – it felt as if I was misrepresented. For example, I may write this stuff as an expression of my own being, but that doesn't mean that I'm not also invested in the idea that writing it can be a kind of advocacy (and that I am also involved in advocacy outside writing.) But I think that if I have only reached the stage of "queer in various ways that require a lengthy explanation" about my own gender/sexuality after 45 years of living with it, it is unreasonable of me to expect a reporter to sum it up perfectly in two paragraphs after half an hour on the phone. My mistake, I think, is in trying to explain it, rather than just using the word "genderqueer" as convenient shorthand. I don't like to apply labels to myself or to anyone else, since I know how rarely labels actually fit the full complexity of a real person, but I can see that sometimes they come in useful.
(Though, having said that, the persistent refusal of reporters to remember that Erastes is Bi, even though she always says so, means that, if I go for the convenient shorthand, it probably won't make any difference.)
Meanwhile I continue to be a voice crying in the wilderness "I don't write porn, dammit!"
Sometimes the fact that everyone assumes that I do makes me wonder if they are right and I am just deluding myself. But then I look again at mainstream het romance novels and see that plenty of them have more sex scenes than mine. If they aren't porn, then my novels aren't either. I know I keep going on about this, but I think it's an important distinction. I write about love. Love is what interests me. Doing that, I must include sex, because sex is part of romantic love. But reducing love to sex is a sad and stupid thing to do, and that is what people are doing when they treat romance as porn.
February 9, 2011
Wow! Fantastic review of False Colors
I am so thankful that this book is still reaching new readers and gaining new positive word of mouth, but I'm beyond thankful for this review by Cecilia Grant in which she says
darned if it wasn't just… magnificent. If I've ever read a better romance, I can't recall it.
It really doesn't get any better than that Thank you so much, Cecilia!
February 7, 2011
A love-affair with war machines
This is one of the reasons I don't blog very often – because I don't seem to be able to open my mouth without saying something controversial. At any rate, this week I am over on the Macaronis talking about the glory of war and the allure of weapons of mass destruction http://historicromance.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/war-huh-what-is-it-good-for/
Actually, it's made me stop and wonder if the modern love affair with werewolves and vampires might be motivated by the same thing – a repressed wish to be able to smash things and get away with it. Maybe that's what people are liking when they like the alpha male? They're actually identifying with his ability to get what the hell he wants, no matter who or what stands in his way?
Sometimes I wish I was a bit more normal and felt these things, instead of having to think my way into them.
January 31, 2011
Talented Friends
This post is a quick big-up to two of my very talented friends, Mirien and Emma Collingwood.
Mirien is an amazing silversmith, and is in the process of setting up her own jewellery making business, Sidhe Silver. If you love all things elvish, historical, Celtic, mystic, with a flavour of ancient stones rising out of a sunlit morning mist, you'll love her stuff. Everything she makes is hand made, one of a kind and unique. Check out her Livejournal for photos, and if you wanted to commission something specially made for you, that would be the place to go.
I was lucky enough to get this pendant as a Christmas present this year, and I've worn it ever since. I think of it as a compass rose, which comforts me for the fact that I've decided not to get one tattooed on my arm after all. (Because I'm getting a cross there instead.)
Emma Collingwood is a writer I've known of from my days in Tolkien fandom, where I admired her and she admired me, but for some reason we never dared to talk to each other and say so. Fortunately that's changed now. About the same time I had Captain's Surrender accepted for publication, she decided to go into professional fiction too, but as her own boss. So she published the first of her Penny, Dreadful & Tarbottom Series – Lieutenant Samuel Blackwood (deceased).
Which I've reviewed here: http://alexbeecroftblog.wordpress.com/2007/12/18/lieutenant-samuel-blackwood-deceased/
Now the second in the series is out, The Radiant Boy: Four Ghost Stories from the Age of Sail
This one, unlike the last, is not a m/m romance, but it does do exactly what it says on the tin It contains four charming and moving ghost stories set aboard ship in the Age of Sail. Slightly creepy, but not the kind of scary that will keep you from sleeping at night, it's illustrated with lots of wonderful woodcut-style pictures by Amandine de Villeneuve, and is the sort of thing you might buy to give to your small relatives and then end up falling in love with and keeping for yourself.
Like Mirien's silver, Emma's writing is very distinctively the work of a unique voice. It's one that I will keep coming back to, whatever she writes, for the charm, good-humour and humanity of it. However, pirates be warned, this book comes equipped with a curse on any thieving gits who try to take it without paying.
Now I badly want her to get her long novel, The Purser, The Surgeon, The Captain and his Lieutenant out, because I've had the chance to see the first half and I'm desperate to find out what happens next.
