Anna Butler's Blog, page 46

An Awful Warning to bear in mind…

… as I think about Suave Molecules!

Prepping for Suave Molecules

I took a day off Shield today and had a very happy afternoon starting my “Prep” book for Suave Molecules – a sort of mood book full of notes and pictures of handsome Victorian men and lovely rayguns and airships.

The premise of Suave Molecules is simple. It’s mostly set in a coffee shop in Museum Street, just down from the Britannic Museum, in 1890′s Londinium. This AU version of Victorian London is as dark and intriguing as the real thing was, but the Kingdom of Britannia is ruled not by Parliament, but by the Queen (God Bless Her!) and the Convocation Houses, an oligarchy of rich and powerful families. There are 8 Convocation Houses, constantly politicking between themselves and in shifting alliances with another 30 or so Minor Houses, all of which seek (and are denied) Convocation status.

Edmund (Ned) Winters is First Heir of House Gallowglass, currently the most powerful of the Convocation Houses. A widower with two small children (Harry, 6, and Thomas, 18 months), Ned is also Professor of Aegyptology at the Britannic Museum and curator of the mummy gallery (Harry describes this as “The dead people Papa keeps in the cellar.”).  Despite having to give up his first lover, Professor Daniel Meredith, to marry Laetitia Tomlinson of House Archiator in a marriage arranged by his father (Lord Henry Winter, the Gallowglass) Ned is on good terms with his parents. He’s not yet under pressure to remarry since he’s provided the House with an heir and spare. But the time will come when he will be faced with another arranged marriage to further House interests in the never-ending game the Houses play as they jockey for position.

Ned Winter, First Heir House Gallowglass, Aegyptologist

Rafe Lancaster was an airman in the Britannic Imperium Forces. He’s a junior member of Minor House Stravaigar but has stayed out of House politics all his life. Injured in a fire fight between the airships of Her Britannic Majesty and the Realm of the Americas (let’s just say that the Revolutionary War is still ongoing…) he’s forced into retirement because of damage to his eyesight. Rafe isn’t blinded, just he no longer has the perfect vision required for airship fighter pilots. More than tripling his service gratuity in the casinos in Paris, he returns to London and invests his capital in a small coffee shop near the Museum. A coffee shop that numbers Professor Winter amongst its habitués.  When the Professor’s reaction to the newly name Lancasters isn’t complimentary, can Rafe win Ned over with a pumpkin spiced double-shot dry latte with an extra pump of sugar-free vanilla and chocolate sprinkles, all made on his steam-powered coffee machine?

Ex-Captain Rafe Lancaster

So. This story will revolve around the slow friendship that builds between the shy Aegyptologist and the sexy, knowing captain. How will the smouldering passion be affected by Ned’s having to go to Aegypt for the excavation season and what will Ned find there amongst the tombs? How will Rafe react when he realises the business of his friend and neighbour, the baker and confectioner extraordinaire, is threatened and may be bought out by the FCC, the biggest most faceless coffee conglomerate – a move that would put Lancasters out of business? And how will the Gallowglass take the news that his eldest son refuses to contemplate another political marriage while Rafe Lancaster is in his life?

Oh, I can’t wait to get started on this over November. While I doubt I’ll formally do NaNoWriMo, I’m setting aside the month to write Suave Molecules before diving back into Shield. Can hardly wait.

In the meantime, I feel a very pressing need to go and stick pictures of pretty men and pretty rayguns into my book.

Lovely, lovely crit groups!

I was invited by fellow writer Sarah Madison to join a (very small, but perfectly formed!)  crit group recently, and a couple of weeks ago we had our first session via Skype.  I can’t tell you how helpful that was. Well, actually, I can. And I’m about to.

I’m revising the very first draft of Heart Scarab, the second of the Taking Shield series. Problem 1: I’d started it with a short prologue reintroducing the hero’s love interest, Flynn (who doesn’t really appear until ch 5).

Two Hornet squads curved in from the dreadnought’s flank, cutting across the bow of the destroyer following in Gyrfalcon’s wake. The other ships of the First Flotilla, the frigates and corvettes, were further back behind the Patroklus, faintly lit by their own navigation lights and little more than greyish shapes against the bright star field. 

I had a nice sci-fi image in mind – lots of lovely fighter ships, Hornets, curving their way around big destroyers and frigates to land in the Hornet bays of the huge dreadnought, the Gyrfalcon, that leads the First Fleet Flotilla.  I could see that scene, you understand. Imagine a backdrop of a million stars, the big ships of the Flotilla all hulking metal that’s been scoured silver by years of cosmic dust, lit up along their length with navigation lights and bristling with laser cannon, and the nippy little single-pilot Hornets with their swept back delta wings and fiery engines swooping around them to a stirring soundtrack. Can’t you just see this as the opening scene when they film Shield? (cough cough.  As if!) Dramatic, pretty, techno. Perfect. Just great for a visual medium.

Shit for the reader though.  Boring, boring, boring. Would that induce you to read on, breathless with anticipation about what happens next?  Yeah. Me neither.

Problem 2 was just stupid. Get into chapter one and just as the Maess arrive on a planet to lay it waste, the hero breaks off from herding colonists into rescue transports to wax lyrical with his second in command about his unsatisfactory and selfish partner, Joss. All good stuff, but really? In about two seconds Maess drones are going to be bombing him and he’s worrying about how he and Joss are sliding apart and always fighting? Way to show military priorities, Bennet!

I knew that the pacing was off in that chapter, and it was really good to get Sarah and Claire’s views on that and the prologue.  Their comments were trenchant – ditch (or move) the prologue, move the conversation with Rosie to somewhere it makes more sense (which latter bit of advice echoed some I’d had from other friends who read this guff over for me). The rest was okay. The action was fine. But heck, sort those two things out, girl.

Actually, one was the solution to the other. I didn’t want to lose my prologue altogether as it had some nice sidelights into Flynn’s state of mind, eight months or so since he and Bennet had parted. And it had some fun bits that made me grin. I’m sad like that. I hate deleting stuff if I can reuse it some place else. So the prologue was folded into Flynn’s chapter to kick that off with those lovely techy mind images.

And I moved that conversation with Rosie to front and centre. Instead of Bennet distracting himself (and Rosie!) in the middle of a battle with a silly conversation about how mad Joss is with him for going off the Telnos and not leaving the military, the book now starts with Bennet getting the house door slammed into his face. Literally, that’s how it starts now.

The apartment door crashed shut in Shield Captain Bennet’s face so hard it rattled on its hinges.

K M Weiland, in her great book “Structuring your novel” says that “The beginning of every story should present character, setting and conflict.”   And she says “The opening line of your book is your first (and if you don’t take advantage of it, last) opportunity to grab your readers’ attention and give them a reason to read your story.”

The new opener’s a bit better, don’t you think? Closer to what Weiland recommends, and a far better hook to land all those little reader fishies than my pretty pictures of spaceships. I think it makes them ask questions like “Whoa! What’s going on here? Who’s having the temper tantrum? What’s a Shield Captain when he’s at home? What did Bennet do to deserve/provoke that? Did his nose escape being mashed flat? I’d better read on and find out.”

So what I’m trying to say in this sadly circumlocutory way, is that before the crit group I had an opener that would have had readers turning off in droves. Now I have one that does a much better job of pulling them in.

Join a crit group, people, if you want some real, sterling help with your craft. Be prepared to be told what sucks and what works. Be prepared to work with your fellow members’ comments and don’t get so invested in your immortal words that you get all butthurt when they tell you that the pacing is off or your prologue’s wasting your chance of getting readers hooked.

I can’t wait for our next meeting on Sunday. I really want to know what they make of Joss and his extended, sexy flashbacks…

25 years

“Friends, I take this my friend, D— J—-Butler, to be my husband, promising, with God’s help, to be unto him a loving and faithful wife so long as we both shall live.”

That was my wedding vow, 25 years ago today, taken before 126 witnesses at Westminster Meeting House, the Society of Friends, in St Martin’s Lane, London.

We’re still here, so I guess that’s one promise I’m managing to keep.

Champagne and a good meal later to celebrate. Right now… Mr Butler, I still think you’re the bees knees.

All my love

A lovely review for Happy Holidays

A lovely 4**** review for Happy Holidays from Thomaidha Papa at M/M Good Book Reviews on 30 August 2013.  Thommie enjoyed the Dreamspinner Cuddling anthology as a whole, and this is what she said about Happy Holidays:

“Happy Holidays by Anna Butler ♥♥♥♥4Hearts

“Do you know what day this is?” A harmless question right? No matter how you examine it, what angle you approach it, or how much you shake it. It seems quite harmless…

Oh, the humor bleeding in the lines of the text is delicious. You just gotta love Anna’s playfulness. Ah, I’m still laughing with this story. It’s fun-tastic! Meh I just loved these guys.

And guess who my favorite character was here. No guess! Lol, yeah it was Kit.

Kit and John have been partners and lovers for fifteen years. They started small and finally their designing firm is handling more accounts than they can manage. It’s all good though, they manage just fine and their boundaries of where work stops and where their life picks up make for a good settling.

But Kit’s been playing little games lately out of nowhere. Games that always keep john on his toes. After fifteen years together, they still have their time of fun, but what is the meaning of this constantly repeating question day after day after day?

Did I say I loved this little story? No? Damn, oh well, I loooved it! There!”

You’re more stressed than you realise when…

D and I are in Devon right now, at the Victorian coach house that’s my sister’s holiday home. A week’s break, and tomorrow is our 25th wedding anniversary. 25 years. Oi vey.

Anyhow, getting here was a real exercise in stress management. Or, rather, the lack thereof.

First of all we were late setting out. The original plan was that my sister would come across on Friday night to collect Mum, who’s staying with her while we’re away, and deliver the keys for the coach house. But Den’s nephew Robert starts at Rugby tomorrow and Friday night was the big family get together to celebrate and see him off to school. Rugby will be good for him. It’ll at least get him away from his helicopter mother. But it meant that the very early start we’d planned for yesterday got put back about three hours.

So, Den came and left, we had the keys. So we bundled ourselves and Molly the cockerpoo into the car and set off around 10, stressing out because we knew we had to get through Forest Gate, the district of London immediately north of ours and on our route out, because the police were closing all the roads at 10.30 for a mela festival and procession. We got through just in time and boy, was it colourful. All the ladies in their saris were like jewelled birds. So very pretty.

So. Through Forest Gate and Wanstead and onto the M11 motorway (highway to my US friends) for about seven or eight miles. Now then. We live in East London and Devon is in the far SW of England. No way do you drive through London, you understand, but you get yourself north up the M11 and then turn off west onto the M25, the much-hated and despised London orbital motorway. Ten miles along that and I had a meltdown. A minor one. But I had one.

First, D had forgotten to take the trash out of the kitchen and put it in the bin outside. A week of this heat in the kitchen? The house would have been *full* of flies. And I mean full. Second I’d forgotten to put the remains of Molly’s breakfast into the bin – decomposing dog food would have really helped with that fly problem. Third, I hadn’t put the filing boxes holding all our important papers down into the cellar (I work on the principle that fire will go up the house and stuff in the cellar should be safer). And last, while I’d backed up everything on the computer onto the external hard drives, I hadn’t brought those with me, so if there were a fire, I would lose everything – all of Shield, Suave Molecules.. everything.

We turned around and went home. D, bless him, was as antsy as I was. We’d just left in too much of a rush. So, back along the M25 to the junction with the M11, a route we’d taken literally 100s of times, but as we reached the junction, Molly started fussing and I turned around to deal with her. When I looked up again, we were already on the M11. Two minutes later a light plane went past us to land at North Weald airstrip, a tiny private ex-WWII airbase. An airbase that is *north* of the junction with the M11. You may not have realised this if you weren’t paying attention earlier (grins) but London is *south* of the M11/M25 junction. D was merrily taking us to Cambridge…

Turn around at the next junction and head south. Forest Gate is closed now so we have to go around it. Sort everything out, have cups of tea to calm the nerves, and set off again an hour or so later, now a full six hours after we originally intended.

We stopped off for chocolate to eat en route. We felt we’d been thoroughly Demontored and J K Rowling knows what she’s about when it comes to comfort.

We got to Devon without further mishap, had great fish and chips for supper and collapsed into bed. This morning, we took Molly to the big beach at Woolacombe and had a long lovely walk in the surf. That washes away the stress things, I can tell you. At least it did for me and Molly. D doesn’t like getting his feet wet.

But yeah. Normally we’re so organised it’s unbelievable, and I’m not claiming this is anything but a blip that in retrospect was really kinda funny. But hell, I wish to God D’s work would just tell us what they’re doing about his job and stop stringing us along. Stress. It gets you where you least expect it and in the smallest, niggly ways. And no one, not even me, is immune.

A new project springs into being…

Am terribly excited and stoked with planning a steampunk story that’s just sort of sneaked up on me without warning. Airships and Aegyptologists, luminiferous aether and ray guns! No brass goggles or corsets though – we’ll try and keep it a cliché free zone.

It will tell the story  of the meeting between Ned Winter, First Heir to Convocation House Gallowglass and leading Aegyptologist, and retired aviator turned coffee house owner, Rafe Lancaster. All set in Londinium, 1890.

Sighs happily. I love it when an idea grabs like this. I can hardly wait to get started… as soon as I’ve finished the second draft of Shield 2, anyway. In the meantime, I’ve ordered some books on steampunk and am happily plannning…

Happy Holidays published today!

Dreamspinner’s new anthology, Cuddling, is released today.  My short story, Happy Holidays is included.

You can order the anthology here:

eBook version  at $6.99

Print version. at $17.99

The anthology shows couples in established relationships rekindling the fire and romance.

In Happy Holidays, John Hogarth and Kit Lewis met in art college and hooked up there, both professionally and personally. Fifteen years on, they’re running Hogarth Lewis together—a small, but growing, branding and design agency that’s garnering work from some of NYC’s finest institutions and starting to make inroads with larger corporations and significant industry players. They have just landed their biggest contract yet with Bowyer Industries. On the professional front, they’re up and coming.

Kit wants to keep their personal life up and coming too. Feeling that after fifteen years it may be time to make sure John isn’t bored, he comes up with a creative way of injecting a little romance and excitement into their relationship by planning a series of seductions based on celebrating various major holidays from around the world. John doesn’t object to celebrating Physical Activity and Exercise Day in Japan, or the Landing of the Thirty-Three Orientales in Uruguay, but his personal favorite may turn out to be the Day of Union of Eastern Romalia with the Bulga. He particularly likes Kit’s dedication to serial and frequent reunions…

M/m romance vs well, it’s just a part of who they are

A couple of weeks ago I sent the first Shield novel and the synopses of the other five to Aleks at Riptide. I have no idea what he’ll make of it, but in between obsessively worrying about it (grins at all of you out there who will understand that feeling), I’ve been thinking about how I should classify my writing.

The mistake I made with FlashWired, I think, was to classify it as a m/m romance. And really, it isn’t. It isn’t at all. The m/m romance label means there are certain things the reader expects. They want to see two (preferably hot and sexy) men having an instant attraction to each other, overcoming some obstacle to being together, having sizzling, steamy sex as often as possible, never being unfaithful from the instant they meet. And there absolutely must, must, must be a happy-after-ever ending where the heroes stand hand-in-hand and declare their everlasting passion. Bonus points if one of them has adopted his dead sibling’s child and they can create an instant family.

All right, those were generalisations. But it does seem to me that m/m romance stories are defined the same way as their protagonists are – by their sexuality and the way that’s expressed physically. What’s important about the protags in a m/m romance isn’t that they’re an airline pilot, or a doctor, or a nuclear physicist. What’s important in m/m romance is that they’re gay.

FlashWired isn’t like that. In FlashWired, what’s important about Cal and Jeeze is that they are men who have an exciting job to do, who get pulled into what I hope is an interesting adventure, and who happen to be gay and in a relationship. The gayness is part of who they are; it’s not the entirety of who they are. They’ve both had het relationships in the past (Jeeze is divorced and Cal was a bit of a player). There’s very little sex in the story – I’m of the school of thought that sex scenes are pretty boring unless they’re doing something necessary to either characterisation or plot – and one little blow job does not a book of erotica make. And there most definitely is no happy-ever-after ending. The story ends on a very ambivalent note and it’s entirely up to the reader to decide if Jeeze ever does wake and accepts the hand and heart Cal is offering him.

Labelling it as m/m romance was, in retrospect, stupid. It’s a genre science fiction novella in which the protagonists happen to be in a gay relationship. Yes, some of the focus is on their relationship and how Cal reacts to what happens to Jeeze, but it doesn’t fit the m/m romance ‘criteria’. It’s science fiction, not romance with a capital R. Sort of how the Donald Strachey mysteries are mysteries, not m/m romance despite Donald and Timmy being together and married.

Taking Shield is this with knobs on, because it’s not a little 20k word novella like FlashWired, it’s six whole novels’ worth of story. It has a solid old-school science fiction plot—nary a vampire or werewolf in sight—that works through the six books. The relationship between Bennet and Flynn plays out against this background and it fits very little of the established m/m requirement. For starters, to have his few incandescent days with Flynn in book one, Bennet is unfaithful to his long term partner, Joss (Joss is a serial adulterer if that makes you feel better about it). Bennet and Flynn part at the end of book one, never expecting to meet again… and ditto they part at the end of book two and five… In one book in the series they don’t meet at all until the very last line, and Flynn’s barely in the book at all. No one gets any sex in that one. Bennet and Flynn meet and part, meet and part, until you think they’re like a couple of rubber balls bouncing at each other and away again. And throughout there are relationships with other people, some of them het. They do pine for each other, you understand, but they don’t *pine*. They get on with things: life, jobs, fighting the war, saving the planet, and sex (if not love). Only at the end of book six is there some hope they’ll have their chance. But it’s not assured. There’s no real happy ever after. There’s only the promise that there might be.

So, not m/m romance. Like FlashWired, the Taking Shield series is genre science fiction where the protags are gay men. No, where the protags are men who are (mostly) gay. No, not even that: where the protags are *men*. There is some sex in it, some of it graphic-ish.  But it’s all part of the plot, and not front and centre. The heroes of Shield are not defined by their sexuality and the physical gymnastics they undertake to show it. They’re defined by a whole lot more than that.

So, how to relabel FlashWired, and how to label Taking Shield when it eventually gets out there?

The problem is, that the majority of readers still blink at pairings beyond the bog-standard m/f. There’s a bit of me that says “Oh for fuck’s sake, Anna, it’s science fiction. Label it as that, because m/m romance it is not, and if the bigots snort into their cornflakes when they realise Bennet is in relationships with other men, then let’s hope that milk up the nostrils hurts.”

At the same time, I don’t want to readers to feel misled. I want readers to care about Cal and Jeeze and my (much loved) Bennet and Flynn the way I care about and love them, and want them to eventually be happy. I want readers to enjoy the scifi adventure, to shudder over the Maess and what they’re doing to human prisoners, to feel it when the humans suffer a reverse in the long war. I don’t want them to be happily reading about the raid on T18, only to act like an old maiden aunt with a mouse running up her petticoat when they get to the sex bit. And I don’t want those readers who love m/m romance to pick it up and think they’re going to get romantic love and hot sex, with a laser and a space rocket thrown in as a sort of background decorative effect.

So. Maybe it’s predominantly science fiction with m/m relationships. And m/f ones for that matter… damn it. You see the problem? A clean definition is hard.

Taking Shield is science fiction. It’s science fiction with people in it. People with all their warts and faults, all their brilliance and intelligence, all their courage and loyalty and great hearts, all their beauty and all their ugliness. People who love other people, not gender. People who don’t want to be neatly labelled and defined. People who *can‘t* be neatly labelled and defined.

People like you and me, in fact.

And I still don’t know how to classify it.

Molly

One year ago today, we adopted Molly the cockerpoo.  We adore her. D, who has never before been a dog person, idolises her. She’s sweet and affectionate and a helluva lot of fun.

She decided to celebrate the anniversary in style, did Molly.

Fox shit. In the park.

Let’s just say that Molly has had her anniversary bath.  She enjoyed it way more than we did…