Alex Beecroft's Blog, page 58

Pocket hoops!

I have finally finished my pocket hoops, the first step towards making myself slightly posher 18th Century clothes.  They look like small covered wagons and involved about the same amount of engineering, since each one is boned with three lengths of steel.  They also have padded channels at the top to make the tops rigid.  I will be able to keep a brace of pistols and a small library in them, but a slight disadvantage is that they're so big I can't reach to the bottom of them.  I also have to go sideways through doors.  Which is as it should be, of course.

Next step is to go to the reenactor's market at the end of October and buy enough material to make a petticoat and matching flouncy jacket (possibly with a contrasting stomacher) to look something like this:

I may also need a wig, because while I can conceal my short hair under a big lower-class cap, it's going to be blindingly obvious under one of these little lacy postage stamps.

Rose's Robe a l'Anglaise is cut out and I've made the petticoat which goes under the gown and shows at the front.  (The whole ensemble should end up looking a bit like this):

She gets posher kit than me because she's young and pretty – it would be wasted on me.  So the sewing list for this year goes a bit like this:

To make before the season starts again in February.

18th Century.

Petticoat, jacket, stomacher and posh cap for me.  (Haven't even bought the material yet.)

Robe a l'Anglaise for Rose (cut out and lining made.)

Frock coat and embroidered waistcoat for Andrew.  (Have the material, but haven't touched it yet.)

Saxon

Nun's dress, scapular, cap, hood and wimple for me.  (Have the material, but haven't touched it yet.)

Tunic and trousers for Ailith.  (Have the material, but haven't touched it yet.)

Under-dress for Rose.  (Have the material, but haven't touched it yet.)

New cloaks for Andrew, Rose and Ailith.  (Haven't even bought the material yet.)

I think it's about time I sold some of our Regia kit which is now inauthentic in order to finance all of this.  I foresee myself being very busy over December and January!

Passed along from Gehayi

I found out about Katie Babs/KB, who is doing something about the recent rash of teen suicides due to bullying and cyberbullying. She's made a post about them and has pledged that for every comment she gets, up to five hundred, she'll donate a dollar to an organization dedicated to helping kids.

500 comments = $500.00.

To quote her:

$250 will go to The Trevor Project, "the leading national organization focused on crisis and suicide prevention efforts among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) youth."

$250 will go to the Matthew Shepard Foundation, [which] was founded by Dennis and Judy Shepard in memory of their 21-year old son, Matthew, who was murdered in an anti-gay hate crime in Wyoming in October 1998. Their mission is to "educate and enlighten others on the importance of diversity, understanding, compassion, acceptance and respect."

I commented in support, and I hope that the rest of you will do so as well.

Aha, I have seen it and I eat (some of) my words.

A couple of people have now sent me a copy of what was written in Rolling Stone magazine and I feel I owe the reporter an apology.  It turned out not to be an article so much as just a mention, and it went like this:

Hot Broken Paperbacks

M/M Romances

Around 2007, amateur online scribbler and UK housewife Alex Beecroft discovered a burgeoning small-press genre called "M/M Romance" – books in which men fall in love, get it on and get it on some more in assorted historical settings. Today, Beecroft (alongside writers Erastes, Laura Baumbach and Donald Hardy) is one of M/M's premier authors, and women just like her abound in her audience. Says Beecroft, "There are straight women who just don't connect with society's construction of what it means to be a woman."

And apparently was illustrated by a picture of  the cover of Tangled Web by Lee Rowan.

The line that I objected to so strongly, in the Hot List 2010 about m/m romance being "Man on man porn for straight women," was not actually the title of the article.  The reporter, therefore, was telling me the truth when he said he wouldn't use that as a title, and I apologize unreservedly for thinking otherwise.  Furthermore, he says "women just like her abound in her audience," and this is entirely true, and does not imply that there are no other sorts of people who read m/m romance. Donald was mentioned too (and his name spelled right!)  So it seems I went off half cocked in being insulted that GBLT readers and writers were being deliberately excluded.

I can't say I like the description of the genre, which appears to have been lifted entirely from the Out magazine interview and ignores the many different heat levels and different sub genres (it really isn't all historical!) of m/m romance, but I can't expect too much of a single paragraph. And I did actually say what I'm reported as saying, so that's good too.

I stand by my annoyance at the "Man on man porn for straight women," thing, but I'm a lot happier now that I've seen that the article itself was not guilty of that. I feel I was listened to after all, and that's something for which I'm grateful.  I'm also grateful to see the genre get a mention in such a huge thing as Rolling Stone magazine, and I can only assume that whoever wrote the introduction on the Table of Contents was not the same person I talked to at all.

Rolling Stone magazine

Has anyone seen Rolling Stone magazine this month?  They interviewed me a couple of weeks ago.  I told them in no uncertain terms that I didn't write porn, that (from what I could tell from my fan mail) more than half of my readers were gay men, that I didn't write for straight women only and wouldn't know how, that there were gay men and women of all sexualities in m/m romance, and that of the four authors of Running Press' m/m romance line, I was the only straight woman.  They seemed interested and surprised about this last fact, so I thought for sure that bit of information might make it into the article.  I asked them to assure me that they would not put the article out under a title that suggested m/m romance was gay porn for straight women, and they said that no, of course they wouldn't.

I haven't seen the resulting article, so I can't tell whether any of that got through or not, or whether I might as well have saved my breath.  Despite asking if I could see the article before it went out, that never happened.  I can't subscribe to the online magazine in order to read the article because it insists I need an American address and post code.  But the title of the article appears to be "Man-on-man porn for straight women" so I don't hold out a lot of hope.  Is it as bad as it sounds?

I suppose it was naive of me to think that I might actually be listened to and believed.  After all, what do I know about m/m romance, right?  But it makes me angry.  And it makes me angry because at the same time that this is going on, I'm getting emails from men saying "I just found your book.  I'm so delighted to know there is romance out there for people like me."  "I've wanted to read this kind of book for years.  Now I'm going to go back and finish my own."  And I hug that kind of feedback to myself, because that's what I want my writing to do.  I want it to tell the world that gay men want and deserve love, that the love between two men is as holy as any other love.  That gay men can be heroes too, and above all that there can and should be a happy ending for you, even if you're gay.

Right at the moment, that's clearly a message that's every bit as needed as it ever was.  I can't contribute a video to the "It Gets Better" collection but I can write stories that teach people to believe that a happy ending is possible – that despair isn't the only option, that God loves them, even if some of his followers claim otherwise. And I'm sorry, but no matter how many times we go through this argument, I cannot believe – in a world that so often tells people there's something wrong about being gay – that it can be wrong of me to write stories that say no, the world is wrong, gay love is every bit as powerful, as romantic, as wonderful, as human and as divine as straight love and it's worth celebrating.

The absolute last thing I want happening is for gay men to read these articles and think that my books weren't written for them.  They were.  They were written for anyone, everyone, who thinks that a story about two guys falling in love with each other sounds like a good thing.

And yes, that does mean that they are also written for straight women.  I happen to know from my own personal experience that slash and m/m romance can be a catalyst for straight women readers to think through their own prejudices and to go from being unsure about LGBT rights, or not to having thought about them, to being supporters of LGBT rights.  Perhaps it doesn't work that way all the time, but it works that way enough of the time to be worth doing.

So, to me, there's a good result of m/m romance no matter who writes it, no matter who reads it.  We have a genre here that is being written and read with enjoyment by gay men, straight women, bisexual men, bisexual women, lesbians, genderqueer people, transgender people, maybe even some straight men too, who knows, and I'm sick of people trying to force us all back into our pigeonholes, and disappearing the LGBTQ people in the genre in the process.

And to that end I'm angry that yet again the mainstream media has chosen to ask me for my opinion only to ignore it.  Why bother?  Why bother asking me if you're not going to listen?  Equally, why do I bother agreeing to talk to them if they're not going to listen?  I should learn better.

But maybe I'm getting all irate for nothing, and the actual article is better than the title would have me believe.  Does anyone know?

another test

will be deleted when finished.

testing Wordbooker

So please ignore this post.

Research – a perk of the job.

I've blogged over on the Samhain blog today on the subject of research for historical novels and why it's really not as horrible as it sounds:

http://samhainpublishing.com/blog/2010/09/30/research-a-perk-of-the-job

I think I should perhaps do a follow-on blog about "fascinating people I'd never heard of (but really should have.)"   The main drawback of research, as far as I can see, is that you so rarely have anyone else to enthuse to about it.

Shrinking Violets

One of the blogs I follow regularly is Shrinking Violet Promotions (subtitle – Marketing for Introverts,) who are always interesting and provide a much welcome contrast to the rather extrovert advice I get elsewhere.  Today for some readon the RSS feed sent me two of their posts instead of one, and I thought I'd pass them along because they're both things I've seen people getting depressed and stressed about recently.

This one is particularly encouraging, addressing the reasons why an author c...

Woohoo! The Mysterious anthology is out!

Massive apologies to anyone who was hoping to get this book for Halloween last year, but the good news is that it's out in perfect time to get it for Halloween this year

The Mysterious Anthology

Containing:

Shadows in Time by Laura Baumbach: Trying to avoid ruin and disgrace, young naive Neal Clifton, wealthy heir to a sizable Boston family fortune faces the illicit and dangerous complication of his first affair with man–a scheming, unscrupulous man with influence and power that reaches...

Feel the need for plans

Or maybe just a plan.  The trouble is that I can't help but suspect that if I post about my plan something will occur to make sure it doesn't happen.  However, I'm going to take that risk.

This year has been a year of things not getting finished, so I want to end the year by completing some writing projects.  To that end, my plan is (God willing):

Finish the space opera novella I'm currently writing, before the end of October.

Use NaNoWriMo to finish Under the Hill.

If I can do that, I can end...