Anna Butler's Blog, page 44

Author spotlight : Sarah Granger on breeches, French spies and Swedish massages…

I am over the moon today to have my very first guest here at the website, and for it to be author Sarah Granger, who has just released the most wonderful Regency m/m romance, A Minor Inconvenience. I confess that I grew up reading Georgette Heyer and love her ability to create and make real a world that’s very different to our own. Sarah, too, has this ability in spades. As I remarked in my review of the novel: The writing is beautiful, some of the wry, clever speeches laugh-out-loud funny, and throughout the whole there is such a sense of time and place that you forget that this mundane world of ours isn’t one of breeches and Almacks, Vauxhall gardens and opera dancers. Sadly.

And without further ado, over to Sarah to tell us about Swedes, and oiled muscular bodies and why research for a novel takes you to some very strange places… 

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Sarah Granger
Thanks so much to Anna for hosting me. I’m a fan of her blog as well as her fiction, and am chuffed to bits to be here to explain just how Swedish Massage crept into my newly released Regency romance.

 In A Minor Inconvenience, Colonel Theo Lindsay displays rather impressive massage skills for a Rifles officer. I realised when writing the book that Hugh Fanshawe, who suffers from a permanent and painful limp, would benefit from massage, but I was also aware I knew nothing about how widespread knowledge of massage techniques might be in Regency England.

Several rewarding if distracting hours later (my research of course involved looking at many pictures of oiled, muscular bodies being massaged), I had part of my answer—in the first decade of the nineteenth century, a Swedish gentleman, Per Henrik Ling, had formalised a series of exercises and massage techniques into a system he called medical gymnastics. This was designed to ease joint injuries and muscle pain—precisely what Hugh required!

My next challenge was to find out if Theo could plausibly have encountered anyone familiar with medical gymnastics. When I discovered his regiment spent two months in Gothenberg in 1808, the answer was clear—of course Theo would have gone adventuring during that time and met a number of Swedish gentlemen, all of whom were undoubtedly skilled in manipulating the human body.

Hugh, typically, decided the entire subject of medical gymnastics was fascinating and ended up being one of the very first applicants to Ling’s newly established Institute for the Training of Gymnastic Instructors in Stockholm. History doesn’t record precisely what Hugh did with his new found skills, but I’m fairly certain that Theo’s willingness to allow Hugh to practice on him was not entirely selfless.

Excerpt from A Minor Inconvenience:

Throwing pride to the wind, Hugh took Theo’s offered arm on the slow, painful journey to his bedchamber. Theo swiftly undressed him, but it was very different from the previous night—this time his concentration appeared to be on how best to remove Hugh’s clothes rather than what lay beneath them. He instructed Hugh to lie upon his front on the bed while he lit the newly laid fire.

“The room will soon warm,” Theo said, closing the door to the bedchamber. “Now, have you heard of Medical Gymnastics?”

Hugh had not.

“When I was in Gothenberg with the Rifles, back in ’08, I almost went out of my head with boredom for they would not let the men disembark for two months, which kept the officers also confined to the ship. I did, however, slip ashore just often enough to preserve my sanity, and I met a very accommodating young gentleman who taught me much about the human body.”

“Did you indeed?” Hugh muttered into the counterpane beneath him. If he sounded sulky, that was because his leg hurt like blazes and not because of the existence of an accommodating young Swedish gentleman.

“I did,” Theo said, and the smile in his voice came through loud and clear. “Among the things I learned was how certain procedures can relieve pain.”

Hugh turned to look at Theo and found he was picking up a bottle from a small collection of such items on the dressing table. “I may have refined the technique a little,” he explained, as he came over to the bed. “I find the judicious application of oil makes everything so much easier. Head down again, Hugh, and try to relax.”

 

 

Duty, honor, propriety…all fall in the face of love.

Captain Hugh Fanshawe returned from the Peninsular War with a leg that no longer works properly, thanks to a French musket ball. Now his fight against Napoleon is reduced to quiet, lonely days compiling paperwork at Horse Guards headquarters.

His evenings are spent dutifully escorting his mother and sister to stifling social engagements, where his lameness renders him an object of pity and distaste. But his orderly, restricted life is thrown into sudden disarray with the arrival of Colonel Theo Lindsay. 

Theo is everything Hugh is not—a man of physical perfection and easy yet distinguished address. Surprisingly to Hugh, Theo appears to be interested in making his acquaintance. Lindsay turns out to be a most convivial companion, and Hugh finds great pleasure in his company. Their friendship deepens when they become lovers.

In spite of himself, Hugh falls desperately in love. But when a French spy is suspected at Horse Guards, Hugh discovers nothing is as it seems…and the paper he shuffles from day to day could be the instrument of his lover’s death. 

A Minor Inconvenience is published by Samhain Publishing and is currently available with a 30% new release discount.

Opinions needed!

This is a simple one, I think.

I am writing a vast space opera of 6 planned books (five of them substantially written and in review right now). The premis is simple: thousands of years after an alternate universe Earth went dark, the people of one of her colonies, Albion, struggle for survival in the war against the Maess. The hero, Shield Captain Bennet, fights to prevent the destruction of humanity at the hands of an implacable alien enemy.  Bennet’s relationships with lovers (of both sexes) and family are set against this background. When the series opens, Bennet is at odds with his long term partner, Joss, who wants him out of the military and back in an academic, archaeological career. He’s estranged from his father, Caeden, who is a Fleet commander. Events of the first book, in which he is sent to his father’s ship to carry out an infiltration mission behind Maess lines, improve his relationship with Caeden, but bring with them the catalyst that will destroy the one with Joss: one Fleet Lieutenant Flynn, who, over the course of the series, develops into Bennet’s main love interest. Bennet and Flynn meet and part more than once before finally, at the end of book six, they have the chance to be together permanently.

So, now that’s clear, you’ll appreciate that with a story of this size, I have a timeline. I have a detailed timeline worked out using a perpetual calendar based on Albion’s year of 414 days (ten months of 41 or 42 days each), with each week being of 9 days. That means I know what day anything happens. Now, I can hug this bit of information to myself and make the reader work it out, damn it! Or I can share.

Here’s an example. The opening paragraph of the first Shield story, Gyrfalcon:

Something that might be a bird broke out of the bushes, wings blurring as it beat up into the sky. Its tooth-ringed mouth gaped wide on a hoarse shriek. The Maess drone appeared so suddenly behind it, pushing through the thick forest undergrowth, that Shield Captain Bennet just had time to hurl himself sideways to get out of the line of fire. The photon pistol built into the cyborg drone’s right arm spat out a plasma bolt that smacked through the air so close to his side he felt the kick to his ribs. The air smelled of burnt ozone.

Or:

Septimus 21st, 7489 : uninhabited planet designated A2T-486G

Something that might be a bird broke out of the bushes, wings blurring as it beat up into the sky. Its tooth-ringed mouth gaped wide on a hoarse shriek. The Maess drone appeared so suddenly behind it, pushing through the thick forest undergrowth, that Shield Captain Bennet just had time to hurl himself sideways to get out of the line of fire. The photon pistol built into the cyborg drone’s right arm spat out a plasma bolt that smacked through the air so close to his side he felt the kick to his ribs. The air smelled of burnt ozone.

Which do you prefer, my pretties? Is the second version a cop out for proper world building and story telling, do you think? Or acceptable?

Publish? Or be damned?

I have to make a big decision in the next few days. I have the first two Shield novels – Gyrfalcon and Heart Scarab – about ready to send into the big bad world out there. And I have to decide if it’s worth trying to interest a traditional publisher in them, people like TOR or Pyr.

Here’s the rub:

Shield is not easy to stick in any one genre and is likely to fall foul of the devotees of the two to which it’s closest. The series is traditional science fiction with not a vampire or zombie or magic ring in sight and the main protagonist is gay. There are two main story themes, intertwining with each other: the war against the Maess and Shield Captain Bennet’s efforts to prevent the destruction of humanity, and, set against that, his relationships with his partner Joss and the distraction offered by Fleet Lieutenant Flynn.

The science fiction people are likely to complain about the amount of relationship stuff in there getting in the way of the military science fiction story. There are infiltrations of Maess bases and lots of people running around shooting their lasers, but Bennet’s relationships get equal billing. The reaction is likely to be that all that stuff just gets in the way of the fights and the deaths and the explosions.  But equally, the expectations of m/m romance readers won’t be met either, and they might bemoan the fact that there are very few sex scenes, that the relationship isn’t full and centre stage, that the Maess war and everything Bennet has to do there gets equal billing with the slow unfolding of his relationship with Flynn. They will *hate* the lack of commitment, the infidelities, the lack of a happy ending and the fact that Bennet and Flynn will meet and part, meet and part until they both get dizzy.

You see my dilemma? Who is likely to want to read this and wait for 6 books before they get the hint of an ending for the romance story? Which genre publisher will want to take a chance on producing something that probably doesn’t fit their usual reader demographic? I’d like to think a trad publisher will decide that the time is right, in a space-bound Brokeback kind of way, to have a story where the hero is gay and for *it not to be a big deal*. The fact he’s gay is integral to the story, but not the reason for it. Has the time come yet where mainstream publishing can accept that?

Who am I kidding? The press couldn’t look beyond the gay. Brokeback was always dubbed the gay cowboy movie (they were bloody shepherds, dammit!) and maybe the best that can be said for it is that it didn’t ruin the careers of the two leads.  Brokeback was maybe a baby step in the right direction to a place where we can just write about *people* and it not matter a jot who they sleep with. We aren’t there yet.

So, do I even bother trying to sell it to mainstream publishers?  I dunno. I am thinking of trying TOR and then maybe Pyr after that, but you know, I’m also thinking that this will just be another six months delay until the inevitable rejection and that’s another six months lost. Six months to finish the rewrite of Book 3, though…

 

Merry Christmas, everyone.

When D and I bought this house, one of the things that was rather quirky about it (it’s otherwise a rather ordinary Victorian house in East London – a generous size but nothing remarkable) was that we had a 30 foot high flagpole in the garden, courtesy of the last owner of the house. We’ve never flown a flag on it, but we did love the weathervane on the top and it made a grand support for a venerable ivy that had stems as thick as tree branches and where half a dozen birds nested every spring. The flagpole was rather a landmark as you approached the house and turned into the streets around us.

Last night we had a severe storm with a lot of wind. It brought the flagpole down. Not all the way down, thankfully! But just enough so it leaned at a very perilous angle, caught in the cherry tree. We had to complete the task of bringing it down to ground level as more wind is forecast and we can’t afford to allow it to damage our neighbour’s property. As you can see it was leaning at a crazy angle

  

My plans for Christmas Eve had been to partake of a leisurely breakfast, walk the dog, post Christmas greetings to you all, potter around while waiting for the Muppet Christmas Carol to come on TV (my favourite version, definitely), walk the dog again, take Mum across to my sister’s, enjoy a good supper with family… all the sorts of things you want for Christmas Eve.

Instead D and I spent the day moving huge plant pots around and hauling flagpoles down to the ground – we had to go and buy the ropes first – tugging it out of the cherry tree and lowering it down. Surprisingly, it did actually come down slowly and under control, thanks to our neighbour hanging onto a rope at the back and slowing its descent. The next few hours – mostly in spitting rain – was spent hacking away the ivy (7 large bin bags full and we still didn’t finish) and repotting my poor broken lollipop holly tree. I was soaked to the skin and my hands so wet and cold, that when I came and started warming them, they were tingling and red and felt like they belonged to someone else.

 

Helpful neighbour and I, astonished that we got that sucker down without killing anyone…

 

We didn’t have time today to actually do anything with the flagpole which is now lying the full length of my garden. It will have to stay there until the new year, I think, when D will attack it with an angle grinder and cut it into lengths that we can manage to move to the local dump for recycling.  We didn’t have time to got to my sister’s, but instead they came and collected mum and headed home again within ten minutes. I don’t blame them. No one sane wants to be on the M25 on Christmas Eve. It’s manic.

I don’t feel very Christmassy. I really feel like I’ve been hit by a truck and then the driver came around in a circle and did it again. I ache in places I’d rather not think about.

But I am about to go downstairs and have an indulgent supper of baked beans on toast (grins) washed down with champagne and followed by a very sinful chocolate dessert. And then I’ll read A Christmas Carol, which has been my habit on Christmas Eve for probably more years than some of you have been alive. I love that story, even though I usually hate Dickens’ depiction of children and am tempted to brain Tiny Tim with his own crutch. Scrooge makes up for Tiny Tim’s imperfections.

So. Deep breath. At the end of the day, I am minus my quirky flagpole and the garden will take one helluva lot of clearing up, but no one was hurt and nothing serious was damaged. I can thank Him Upstairs for that, I suppose, even as I wonder at His decision to blow hard winds upon us in the first place.

Time to forget the troubles and have a merry Christmas. I hope that yours is all you could wish for and that you have a happy and merry holiday.

God bless us, every one.

Review for Happy Holidays

I love unexpected Christmas presents, and this one was delightful. A lovely review for Happy Holidays by Susan Laine at Goodreads. Susan rated the anthology as a whole with 5 stars and had this to say about Happy Holidays:

John Hogarth and Kit Lewis have been domestic partners as long as they’ve been working partners, running a small but growing design agency in New York. After fifteen years together, Kit wonders if they’re getting stale and takes a typically creative approach to inject a little romance and excitement back into their love life.

I swear, if I hear “Do you know what day this is?” one more time… Kit and John have been together for fifteen years, and then Kit comes up with something to keep things lively in the bedroom. Creative. While Kit is bursting with good ideas, John is at first confused, then happy to be lead around by his dick to wherever Kit wishes. This story had lots of humor and a wonderful established relationship, excellent writing and a good pace.

Grins sappily. Merry Christmas all!

FREE DOWNLOAD: THE GILDED SCARAB, VIGNETTE TWO

This is another little scene from the ditched version of Gilded Scarab – that is, this is the version where the PoV character is Ned Winter, Aegyptologist and heir, House Gallowglass. In this little segment, Ned discovers the coffee house.

To download the .pdf, click on the link below.

Vignette Two

I hope you enjoy it.

All the best for the holidays, everyone, and for 2014.

Hoping that Christmas is a good enough excuse…

Well, I’ve been making chocolates and gingerbread cookies – so good that I’m eating a Christmas tree as I type – and this year, too, I made crisp little crackers for eating with cheese and scattered them with mustard seeds, sesame seeds and carroway. They’re yummy but I am such an idiot about things like “roll out to about 4mm thick” because really, who can measure something as precise as 4mm without a handy dandy ruler?  Not me. The little Christmas Crackers (see what I did there? Ha) are a little more substantial than they ought to be, maybe. Certainly a little thicker. They certainly need a cheese that is assertive and can stand up for itself, and refuses to be bullied. I’ll be laying in a stock of good strong Stilton for this Christmas, I think.

On the writing front, December has been something of a disaster. Poor Rafe Lancaster in Gilded Scarab has been stuck in the strong room at Garrards for about three weeks now, looking over his mother’s jewels with a view to selling them. He sends me plaintive messages about how the rubies are all very fine, but could I please get him out of the cellar and let him buy the coffee shop already! So today I am determined to do just that.

As a Christmas taster, I am going to post another little ‘outtake’ later today from the ditched version of Gilded Scarab and give it to you with my best love.

In the meantime, have a wonderful and happy Christmas – or whatever holiday you celebrate at this time of year. And here’s hoping 2014 is creative and happy!

The Gilded Scarab Vignette One : Free to download

Free. Well, it’s very short, to be honest. A small vignette. Hence the ‘ette’ – it’s far, far too short to make a full-sized vign.

When I ditched the NaNo novel at 25k words because it wasn’t working, there are still parts of it that I liked and didn’t want to lose. I’m filleting that draft for bits to recycle into the new draft, but there are snippets here and snippets there that won’t get used in Rafe’s version. Offering those as free downloads to augment the novel appears to be the best way of making sure they don’t get entirely lost. So here’s the opening scene from the first version, in which Ned Winter discovers the joys of archeology and delights in the discovery of a stone crow.

The Vignette is available from either the Golden Scarab page or the Free Fiction page. Or, you know, from here:

Click on the link below to download the Vignette

Vignette One

Enjoy!

A little progress at last

The second version of Gilded Scarab, with a new main PoV character, is finally falling into place. I had a crise de nerfs about it—not unexpected when the entire premise of the book has had to be turned on its head like that. I still regret the loss of my stone crow of the opening of version one, and I still regret downgrading Ned to love interest for the hero. But as writer Sarah Madison said about version one: “I suspect Ned is lovely to look at, but has to be gently guided around potholes, and out of traffic, and so forth. He can be grand fun, but much better from someone else’s POV.”  She was so, so right. Never a truer word! Ned’s been isolated from real life because of his position in society, and having him as the narrator actually distanced the reader too much as well. None of it felt real.

 

The new version is already better from Rafe’s PoV. It  starts with a bit of a bang as Rafe crashes his aerofighter—aether and steam powered and with phlogiston acceleration tubes for extra oomph—in the veldt during the Second Boer War. I took great, great delight in having him crash at Koffiefontein. There is nothing I don’t know about flogging a theme to death!

Anyhow, a little more progress means I stand now at just over 13,000 words. And that’s 13,000 words that I am a lot, lot happier with.

On lightbulbs and epiphanies

Have you ever had a great idea for a story, had a wonderful time researching it, spent hours working through the world building and having a blast coming up with a different social structure for your hero to play in, searched the web for inspirational images to create an associated Pinterest board and generally psyched yourself up to write something fun and extraordinary—only to find in the execution of it, that it is just not working?

Welcome to my world.

Gilded Scarab is as flat as the proverbial pancake. It’s as slow as treacle when it’s ten below. It is just not going to fly.

I think I’ve worked out why.

So far I have about 25000 words from Ned’s PoV. I’d originally seen him as my main character—rich, influential family with his father one of the ruling oligarchy, someone who is going to be important politically one day when he inherits his father’s honours but who doesn’t care about that. All he cares about are Aegyptian mummies and his archaeology. Despite the accident of birth, Ned is unassuming and rather modest, a little naïve even, quietly happy in his room in the basement of the Britannic Imperium Museum and not one to throw his weight around. Because those 25k words are from his PoV and are setting up the main novel, they’re filling in a lot of back story before his main love interest arrives on the scene—specifically his affair with Daniel and his marriage to Laeticia. Both are important, but (i) it’s unbalancing the book and everyone is going to be thinking Daniel’s the main love interest and (ii) they’re *taking too damn long*. At this rate, I’ll be lucky to get Rafe on the scene by Christmas and about another 10,000 words.

The pacing is completely and utterly off. There is no pacing in fact. See previous comment about treacle in a deep frost.

And because Ned is quiet and unassuming and he’s very young in this part of the story and a bit unformed, the story is flat, flat, flatter-than-it’s-just-been-run-over-with-steamroller flat. It has some nice passages that I’m proud of, and one or two sentences that I just want to take home and feed turkish delight. But overall? Flat. I think Ned is okay as a character—actually I’m very fond of him and he’s very sweet—and he’s a wonderful vehicle to show how this world and society work, but the story needs to have more pizzazz and flash and energy if it’s going to engage the reader. Ned isn’t the flashy type.

Now, I know that all the pundits say just write and keep writing, and keep your edits for the first pass through when it’s finished. But I am struggling here. I am finding it a chore to write about Ned and Daniel because I want to get on to writing about (older and wiser) Ned and Rafe. And if it is just plain *wrong*, what is the point of struggling on to the bitter end? I’ll just junk the whole thing then and that will be more words and time wasted. I know it’s wrong. I have to fix it now.

In my last post, I was mourning that I had all this good stuff with Rafe that was going to have to be junked, because it would be too late, 35000 words in, to introduce a new PoV character. I thought I might make the Rafe chapters available as freebies when the Gilded Dungbeetle is published, as a sort of taster for the main book.

But I’ve got that the wrong way around, haven’t I? It should be Rafe—flashy, energetic, raffish, rakish don’t-buy-a-used-airship-from-this-man Rafe—who should be the opening of the book, who should be the first (maybe only) PoV character. That would take us BAM into the time period of the main story, not the decade before. We’re almost straight into the encounter between the two leads. And Ned’s back story can be bled through some other way. I can maybe recycle some of Ned stuff in chapter 2 or 3, after they meet, because that won’t be too late to introduce a new PoV character, but it will be in a greatly truncated form. Or I can just make Ned’s chapters the freebie later instead of Rafe’s. I don’t know at this stage and until I start rewriting, I don’t care.

The point is I’ve had my lightbulb moment. I can see where this is going so horribly wrong, and I. Can. Fix. It. Yes, I’m 25000 words down, and I won’t finish NaNo, but who cares? This baby isn’t as dead in the water as I thought. I can do something with it.

Right. Rubs hands together and eyes characters. Come here, Rafe Lancaster. I have a little job for you… there’s a book for you to rescue and you are just the man to do it.