Rowan Speedwell's Blog, page 7

Bitterwood

      Sounds like a sad story, right? But it's not. The "bitter" in Bitterwood is just the translation of a family name in the fantasy novel(la) I just finished.  FINISHED!  Well, of course, except for the reread, the beta-reads, the edits, the publisher's edits (assuming it gets accepted!), et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the main part is done. The rest is just window dressing.

     The story is a simple one; it was supposed to be a short story, but I seem to be congenitally unable to write short, so it's about 43,000 words long. Which is a short novel or a long novella, not sure which.  

     At any rate, a troop of soldiers, in company with a young mage, arrive at the aforementioned Bitterwood Manor in the far north of the country known as Elbe, outracing a terrible winter storm. The manor's lord, one Joss Daene ("daene' in the Old Tongue means "bitter"; hence the title), gives the men and their horses shelter in his stables, and even invites the captain of the troop, Faran (just Faran) and the young mage Meric to stay in the manor with the lord, his sons, his sister, and the hundred or so local residents (it's a very large manor).

     The captain and the mage are in search of a mysterious yellow cat which is linked to the mage somehow, and have been searching across the northern part of the country for weeks. Bitterwood Manor is the farthest north they have yet come. The mage meets the young son of the manor and they fall into True Love.  Faran meets Joss, the lord of the manor, and they fall Into Bed. And coincidentally—or perhaps not—the "device" (main feature of a coat of arms, thank you SCA) of the Daenes is a yellow cat on a red field.

     Sooo, of course, once the storm is over, the whole bunch of them go off hunting (but not hunting, because they can't kill it; it's too important) the mysterious yellow cat. But the cat's not the only one that has secrets….

     Okay, that sounds rather blurbish. But I'm not there yet.

     I'm sort of ambivalent about this one. I love the story, like the writing, and love the characters, but it's soooo different from my other stuff (okay, I know I've said that before) that I'm not sure how people will greet it. For one thing, it's not particularly fast-paced; not much really happens till towards the end. But it's got a lot of medieval-ish features. In fact, it's really kind of my love letter to the SCA.  With magic. And a little sex.

     So now to hunt some betas….

This is kind of how I imagine Meric & Eissa. Thanks to Heidi for the picture

Oh, for a muse of fire!

     I could use a muse of fire. Or any kind of muse, at all. Feeling plenty stalled on the writing front, which of course leads to doing Other Things instead of writing.

     Because my life isn't quite full enough, I'm taking an online, non-credit class called Shakespeare for Writers. It's taught by Heidi Cullinan, who has a master's degree in teaching, so she knows what she's doing. Heidi's also the one who organized the LGBT Authors table at Capital City Pride in Des Moines this past weekend, where I met and spent some quality time with other authors of gay and lesbian literature, specifically Marie Sexton, M.L. Rhodes, and Catherine Lundoff, along with Heidi, of course. Lovely people, all of them, and a good time was had by all. I'd never been to a Pride event before, and it just made me so happy to see so many people—young, old, gay, straight, whatever—just having fun and hanging out. I'm looking forward to going to the Chicago one in a couple of weeks so I can compare them—I have the feeling, though, that the Chicago one is going to be huge and scary (for me) so I'm glad I got my feet wet at the Des Moines one.

     The quote above is the opening line of Henry V, also known as TGMEM (The Greatest Movie Ever Made). That distinction is not mine, but that of my friends Henry and Philippa, who go about quoting from it willy-nilly. Specifically, they are referring to Branagh's version of the play. I'm very fond of Branagh's Shakespearean plays myself, even taking into consideration Love's Labour's Lost. On second thought, let's just forget that one altogether.

     I like Shakespeare, a lot. I never took a class on the subject before; everything I know about the plays is simply what I've read or seen. When I was a kid my family had a copy of Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, which were simplified prose versions of some of the plays, and I loved that book. It had elegant line drawings illustrating it in the style of maybe Blake or Beardsley—something Art Deco-ish, anyway—and I just absorbed the stories. (For some reason, one of the less-performed ones sticks in my head: The Winter's Tale. I just adored that story, and still remember the drawing of the betrayed wife, Hermione, pretending to be a statue in front of the husband, Leontes.) The high drama of the tales really did a number on me, and I credit that little book with triggering my over-the-top imagination.

     We didn't cover the Bard in high school—mine was a very progressive one, and in English classes we studied things like Magazines and Newspapers, and Song-Writing, and Myths and Legends. The latter, actually, helped a lot later when I finally did get into reading the plays, because Shakespeare flung poetic references to mythology around like a parader flinging beads at Mardi Gras. In college, though, my brother Jay discovered Oak Park's Shakespeare in the Park, and it was there that I really discovered the best way to experience the plays. The way they were meant to be experienced—live.

     Now generally, if I'm given a choice between a performance and a book, I'll go with the book most times. The book lets me cast the story and set the settings and arrange the pacing in my own head, and I live most happily in my own head. But Shakespeare needs to be heard. It needs to be seen. And it needs to be felt. It doesn't require extensive, elaborate sets; it doesn't require props. In most cases, you don't even get stage directions ("Exit, pursued by a bear" is about as detailed as it gets). But you get the language and the faces and the passion behind it all.

If the enemy is an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb, is it meet, think you, that we should also, look you, be an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb? in your own conscience, now?  – Henry V

    That's kind of a run-on sentence in print. Read it aloud, and it's damning. More passion: Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. She's just found out that her cousin has died for love of Claudio, who has rejected her: "Oh, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place!" Sounds kind of over the top. Watch Emma Thompson in Branagh's film version of that play and it will give you chills. (A shorter, but just as chilling line from her: "Kill Claudio." Brr!)

    I really had intended this blog to be about James Joyce and Ulysses (speaking of mythology) in celebration of Bloomsday, but I had to download some of the plays for the class and started thinking about Shakespeare, and you know, once that happens, it's all downhill from there.

Plot bunnies – with big, nasty teeth.

I don't write fast enough, that's all there is to it. I'm halfway through one book, a quarter of the way through another, have outlines and notes for at least three more, and now have more unresolved plot bunnies than ever before. And the worst thing about it is that they are absolutely useless for incorporating into the Works In Progress.

I have a tough time with plotting. Characters—no problem. Dialogue—bring it on. Settings, descriptions, research—I'm right there. Plots… oy vey iz mir. My plot bunnies tend to be vague ideas for a story involving characters that I love ("Let's put them in such and such an impossible situation and see what they do!") but when it comes to actually plotting out the scope of the story—hopeless. I could never write a mystery or thriller, because it requires the verb to plot.

Not just plot, but intricate plotting. Setting timing and dropping hints and twisting the story around so that you end up precisely at the point you need to be. It's not how I write. I throw the characters into the deep end and see how they want the story to go. Seriously, it's a crapshoot. And given that I am totally not a multiple-draft kind of writer, it really is up to the characters to tell the story in their own way. They'll take over anyway; might as well let them.

For example: Finding Zach? Had a completely different ending mapped out in my mind involving David's art, a scar, and a tattoo. The characters had other ideas, and the tattoo never saw the light of day.

 If it's a short piece, it's different. In those cases it's usually the end I write first, or at least I'll have a good idea what the end will be. Since there's not a lot of time for character development, short stories have to have a plot, but size constraints mean that the plot will be fairly simple. I can do simple. It's maintaining plot for the length of a full-sized book that's the hard part.

So right now, I have this story I'm working on, with a whole bunch of characters that I love, and vaguely ahead is some kidnapping plot, or maybe a custody battle, or something… something…

And in the meantime, my characters are all talking nineteen to the dozen in my head and making me crazy because I can't write fast enough for them. They all want their happy endings. They all want their resolution. They all want their climax (in more ways than one) and their denouements. They're all yelling at once and it's making me crazy.

So shut up, John and Nick and the rest of you. You'll get your say, sooner or later. I can only write so fast!

I'm all over the place, talkin' my fool head off.

Okay, the A&S Junkie podcast has been… um… podcasted?  Not quite sure what the verb form of podcast is.  To podcast?  Casting pods? (I have the image of someone blithely flinging milkweed seed pods hither and yon, willy-nilly.)  Unfortunately, I had to record it over the phone, with the result that it's rather fuzzy. *sads* I'll have to figure out a way of recording it directly and then sending Verena the MP3 file.  In my browsing today I see that you can record Skype calls, but I'm not sure how that would work. If anyone has any ideas what I can do, short of spending a hundred bucks on a half-way decent MP3 recorder, let me know. I'm spending all my disposable cash for the next few weeks (months…) on travel.

The guest blog post I wrote for Farida Mestek's blog Regency Sketches is also up. There, at least, is clarity!!  It's on doing historical research in the age of Google. The title is Historical Research in the Age of Google. (See, there are capitals. That makes it Official.) http://faridamestek.blogspot.com/2011/05/guest-blog-with-rowan-speedwell.html is the link.  (My blog link thingy is apparently broken.)  Many thanks to Farida for letting me pimp, I mean promote myself on her blog!! 

Kindred Hearts has been getting some pretty good reviews, or at least the only people who are posting them are the ones who like it.  I luv you all. Mwha!

Okay, this weekend it's off to MediaWest, a large fandom convention in Lansing, Michigan.  I'll be manning Dreamspinner's booth along with Marguerite Labbe, Ashlyn Kane, Bethany Brown and Morgan James. If you're there, stop by and say hi!!

Then in two weeks I'm off to Des Moines for their Pride Parade, again manning a booth, this time with Heidi Cullinan, Marie Sexton, M.L. Rhodes and Catherine Lundoff. This time the booth is sponsored by both Dreamspinner Press and Amber Allure (I think…?  Pretty sure, anyway).  It should be interesting, and if you're in Des Moines that weekend, again stop by! 

I'm not doing a booth at the Chicago Gay Pride Festival, because it's ENORMOUS, but a bunch of us from the Goodreads M/M Group will be hanging out watching the parade and stuff.  Then after that, it will be all SCA, all the time until October and GayRomLit in New Orleans.

And on a personal note, may I say hello and welcome to the world to my beautiful niece Grace?  Congrats, Matt & Amy!!

A & S Junkie

No, that's not some new kind of drug. Well, maybe it is. Because there are an awful lot of us addicted to it.

A & S stands for Arts and Sciences. In the SCA, it's one of the ministries, and it's where Laurels come from.  Laurels are one of the three types of Peers:  Laurels for arts and sciences, Pelicans for service, and Knights for fighting and knightly behavior. People are chosen for these honors by the existing Knights, Pelicans or Laurel. If you're really dedicated to one of those things, someday you, too, might aspire to the position. But not too hard – humility is one of the peerage virtues. Supposedly. ANYWAY.

Arts and sciences includes everything from armoring to archery, leatherworking to cooking (have you TASTED my cooking?). If it's a craft, it probably has an equivalent one in the SCA. After all, the Middle Ages is where modern Western culture was born, and we're not so awfully far from them as we think.

I've always been a craftaholic. I get totally into a craft once I start, and get obsessed with it, including having all possible materials to do the craft. At one point my shrink said my hobby isn't crafts, it's buying craft supplies. I usually go about 5 years per craft; then I lose interest and have to find a new one. With the SCA, I have more crafts than I know what to do with, so that old scale has to be tossed out. (What? Wait! I know I can use that old scale for SOMETHING…)

Crafts + imagination + pack-rat tendencies = Not Good.

So when Lady Verena Entenwirt told me about her podcast, I had to volunteer. (One day I'll do a whole post on Helium Hand.)  I will be recording the podcast tonight, along with an interview that Lady Verena will conduct. I think the actual podcast will go out on Friday. The subject is on medieval writing materials, as much as we can squeeze into 3 minutes. Although I suspect my presentation is longer than that…

The A & S Junkie website is www.aandsjunkie.com. I admit to doing the banner header. It sucks. But I think her site won't.

Just a quick note…

Quick post since I'm up to my arse in alligators, as usual.

Good response so far to Kindred Hearts – nobody's hating it and there are several people who love it! Who'd 'a thunk? Yu so naise, hoomins.

Happy birthday to the hottest man on the planet, George Clooney.

And, speaking of romance readers, librarians, and decapitated Peeps:

http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/index.php/weblog/comments/i-learned-a-lot-from-librarians/

Kindred Hearts is (are?) here!

Kindred Hearts is now available for purchase. Here's the Dreamspinner Press link:

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=2291

And the All Romance Ebooks link:

http://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-kindredhearts-545362-145.html They left the opening "C" off the blurb. Tris isn't "harming" anyone but himself…

I am bracing for the backlash.

Sadly, it will probably be days or weeks before Amazon gets it posted. Amazon has its own ways of doing things. But if you have a Kindle and you can't wait, get it at either DSP or ARE and download the .prc file. Then sideload it from your computer.

Speaking of Dreamspinner Press—the company is celebrating its fourth anniversary during the month of May, with discounts and stuff like that!  Deep discounts, too!!  Click here for more info:  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com. Each week has different themes, so keep checking back for great deals on the best in m/m romance!!

I had a great time this weekend visiting with people from the Goodreads M/M Group who live in the Chicago area. We met at Borders in Orland Park (shout-out to the good folks there who let us take over a corner of their café and supplied cake and coffee) and spent several hours talking about books and what we want to do as a group. Most of us that met are going to GayRomLit in New Orleans in October, so it will be nice to know more people there. Then we popped over to Olive Garden across the street for dinner. Thanks especially to Cat for organizing the outing. A very nice time was had by all. Oh, and good luck to Harper, who has books coming out from (I think) Loose Id and Silver, and up for consideration at DSP. You go, girl!

Then on Sunday I spent the day popping in and out at the Chatting with Joyfully Reviewed Yahoo Group, which had been turned over to the authors who will be attending GayRomLit. I posted a couple of comments and an excerpt, and put up an e-copy of Kindred Hearts which was won by one of the folks participating. I'm waiting to hear back which format she wants her book in, and then I will send it to her. I haven't heard yet, which I hope is due to her not being able to respond rather than her not wanting a copy.

The weather is improving, with the result that I went an entire three days without once succumbing to the need for Excedrin. Yesterday, though, I was hurting, so this morning I had Excedrin for breakfast again. I did some research into Lyrica, which they're advertising for fibromyalgia, and after reading all the side effects, I think I'll stick with Excedrin as long as I can. I know taking acetaminophen for long term might have an adverse effect on my liver, but as best I can tell, taking Lyrica would have an adverse effect on EVERYTHING. Pretty name, though.

April is National Poetry Month

Write your best haiku!

April, with its showers sweet

is Poetry Month

People think that verse

is for the highfalutin'

not the average Joe

but the verse came first

Homer and his epic songs

and old Gilgamesh

were the Idols of

the proto-literate bunch

like TV stars now

long before novels

by Cervantes and Trollope

or King and Grisham

Try to remember

the last novel you read and

quote from memory

or quote from a show

without having to look up

the words on Google

you can't. But I bet

you can remember a poem

you read as a child

maybe Mother Goose

or a limerick by Lear

you can quote by heart

because poetry

does not touch the human brain

it touches the heart

that is why when we

memorize, we will forget

but to learn by heart

means we will not lose

what we have learned, but always

keep it to savor

It quiets the soul

when the brain gets in the way

poetry is love

but if you want a

less pretentious offering

here's one from high school:

Deep dish hot pizza

with glistening seas of cheese

and boats of sausage

Kindred Hearts has a release date!

Monday, May 2nd.  So I make my goal of two books in 12 months by a whopping 5 days!!

Less than a month to go. Oy.

Here's the link to the "Coming Soon" page for the paperback:

Kindred Hearts Coming Soon!

More forn words: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Which translates, of course to "when Gloria feels ill on Mondays, she takes the bus." (Or was it "taking the bus on Mondays makes Gloria ill"? I can never remember which.) 

It's about the fleeting nature of fame, but as usual the title doesn't have much to do with the content of this post. Today's post is more about the things that stick with us, and link us together. Or at least, one thing. A soap opera, and a vampire. Okay, I guess that's two. Math was never my strong suit.

I'm a Boomer. The tail end of the Baby Boom, 1957, to be specific. Which I read someplace was the year in which more babies were born than any other year before or since. I guess that means it was the boom year of the Boom. At any rate, I have a lot of fellow 53- & 54-year-olds, more than half of them women, and most of them named Kathy. 

And what was the defining element of our year group, those white, middle-class girl babies like me? What was the cultural landmark, the zeitgeist, if you prefer (assuming that's the right term, and I'm not taking bets)? 

Not the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. We were 6 or 7 when the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. I don't remember that, myself, because my family weren't big Ed Sullivan watchers. We were probably watching "Sing Along with Mitch" instead.  But even if we had watched Ed, I probably wasn't all that interested.  In fact, after a brief, very informal poll, I found that most of the women my age who didn't have older sisters, didn't remember the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. 6 is too young to appreciate the charm of the Fab Four. 

Not the hippie stuff. We were 11 or 12 during the Summer of Love. We missed out on the Age of Aquarius era. (I read an article around then that talked about a drug hangout and described the inhabitants as "pimply-faced kids." For a couple of years I thought that that was what was so wrong with drugs: they caused acne.) We were mostly still playing with dolls when the astronauts landed on the moon. The Civil Rights movement was happening in the far South and we didn't even know any black people. The Vietnam War was something that was on TV, and probably in black and white. (Or in the case of my cousins' new color TV, a weird shade of green.) 

No. The single defining element of my birth year-mates was… Dark Shadows. 

Seriously. Ask any woman my age about Dark Shadows, and she'll tell you the same thing. "Oh, my gosh! I loved that show! I used to run home from school every day to watch it." 

I used to run home from school every day to watch it.  That, my friends, is the kicker. They all say the same thing. Every single one of them. 

I did. Well, not home; I lived too far away to make it there by 3:30, when Dark Shadows aired. I ran to my BFF's house three blocks from school and watched it with her. This was just what we did. I never thought twice about it. And even as we grew older, as the subject of Dark Shadows came up, which it did, because it was so much a part of our cultural identity, when someone said "I used to run home from school every day to watch it" we accepted it as natural. Normal. 

Then, a few months ago, I bought a used copy of  The Dark Shadows Companion. And in the foreword, written I think (I don't have the book in front of me) by Lara Parker, who played Angelique, there is a comment about people running home from school every day to watch it. I said, "Whoa." Because there it was, in black and white, much like the show itself (at least in its early days): The Comment. And it made me think. 

Why Dark Shadows? What drew us to that show? It premiered in 1966, when we were only 9 or 10, and at first was just a gothic soap opera, on a par with the suspense thrillers of the time, all of which featured a woman in a white dress running away from a looming dark mansion. (I think it was a law that all suspense thrillers had to have basically the same cover.) Dark Shadows was the TV version of the suspense thrillers. There was the beautiful young girl, the looming mansion, the creepy inhabitants (including the creepy little kid the BYG was governess to—and seriously, folks, did they even still have governesses in the '60's?), and, of course, the dark, brooding hero who just might be a Bad Guy. 

I've been watching the first season of DS, and it's… well… kinda bad, in a good sort of way. Or maybe I mean the opposite. It takes a while to get into the story, nothing much happens in most of the episodes except people talking about what happened in the one episode where something did, and there's mood music and lighting. Cheesy mood music and bad lighting. Occasionally you get a dialogue flub. In other words, it's a soap opera. But it was an ambitious soap opera, and I kind of think that was the appeal. It was different. 

All of us had grown up on soap operas. We were the last generation with stay-at-home moms, and the TV was always on in the background, even when housework was being done, because in between loads of laundry and batches of dishes and supper preparations, there were moments where our mothers needed to connect with other human beings. And the soap operas usually showcased drama and luxury and forward thinking concepts like women who worked (okay, usually as nurses or teachers or something acceptable like that, but still…), and they were something the stay-at-home mom could watch in those odd moments and feel connected and superior and interested. That's why nothing much really happened, and when it did, the characters talked it to death—because, if the dramatic thing happened when Mom was changing a diaper, she'd have missed it, and thus the characters would let her know what she missed. So everyone's mother had her favorite soaps, and we all knew them almost as well as we knew our own families. 

But they were mostly about ordinary, middle-class white things, things that our SAHM (Stay At Home Moms) could relate to. (This was before the spy stories and demonic possession took over the soaps.) 

DS took the suspense thriller trope and translated it to television, while keeping the standard soap opera format. So the form was familiar, and acceptable, and in the beginning, the stories were familiar, too, because everyone read romantic suspense novels and watched nighttime TV and went to Alfred Hitchcock movies. DS just provided more of the same:  Why hadn't Elizabeth Collins left the house in 18 years? Who was it that sent the money every month for Victoria Winters upkeep at the orphanage? What happened to Roger Collins's wife? Why was David so creepy? What mystery kept Sam Evans drunk all the time? And was Burke Devlin a bad guy—or the hero? Interesting, comfortably familiar, and consistent. 

And then, 200+ episodes in, there is a knock on the door, and the mysterious British "cousin" Barnabas arrives. And the whole dynamic changes.

Because—in a first for daytime TV, if not TV period—Barnabas Collins is a vampire.

And that's where we come in. There's something about girls and vampires—something primal and appealing even as it scares us to death. And adolescent girls are attracted to large, threatening things, like horses and vampires. (What? Horses are scary! I was terrified of them for years. But that's another story.) Or maybe it was the British accent. Whatever it was, Cousin Barnabas was the thing that brought Dark Shadows from original-if-obscure minor-league soap to full-blown cultural touchstone. Even though he may have seemed to be a bad guy, there was something vulnerable that appealed to us about him. We weren't running home so much to watch Dark Shadows as we were running home to see Barnabas. 

The problem is, right now, I haven't gotten to the Barnabas episodes yet. I'm only 18 episodes in, and have something like 185 left to go before I get there. So I don't remember much about him—just that he was mysterious and brooding and interesting. And a vampire.

And the reason adolescent girls ran home every day after school to watch a soap opera. To the point that it is the defining zeitgeist of women my age, the one thing we all have in common. A soap opera. And a vampire.

Not the Beatles, not Free Love, not the Civil Rights Movement, not Neil Armstrong, or the Vietnam War or Watergate or anything like that. A soap opera, and a vampire.

 And Stephenie Meyer probably hadn't even been born yet.