Lavinia Collins's Blog, page 16

Dating Advice from Chaucer

You’ve had dating advice from Shakespeare, but now bask in the wise advice of the Father of the English Language!

Deere Maistre Chaucer��

Love Advice from the Fourteenth Century��

Deere Maistre Chaucer,

I’m a young widow thinking of marrying again, but I am having some reservations. I’m in love, and this new man’s certainly much younger and more handsome than my old husband, but I’m just not sure if I should marry again so soon.

Eager but Confused, Bath��

Wytte ye welle, Godde ynne alle hys wysdome wolde natt have yeven ladye partes that fytted so welle togidyrs with mannes partes yf he deyde nat wante yow to make use thereof. Y seye yow marrye and be happye! Whatte cowde go wronge?

Chaucer

Deere Maistre Chaucer,

I’m in a long-distance relationship, and it’s really difficult. I’m not sure if I love him anymore, and he’s become jealous and possessive. What should I do?

Torn, Troy

Herken ye welle at the advys I will gyve yow. Fynde ye a more handsomer manne close to where yow are. In especiall, if yow can, he sholde be one of thnne exes enemyes. Thys ys evir a goode planne and maketh for goode tayles.

Chaucer

Deere Maistre Chaucer,

My best friend and I are in love with the same girl. She’s the most perfect girl in the world, but he’s my best friend. Still, I saw her first. What should I do? Is it bros before hoes or finders keepers?

Conflicted, Thebes��

Soothe that ys a harde tale. Yf Y were yow, I would go thee unto that wommes kepar and telle him that yow muste marye her. Worye nat about thye frend, Y am sure he wolle take yt welle. There ys no resoune why thys shoulde ende wyth some kynde of excytynge tragedie…

Deere Maistre Chaucer,

I’ve got the hots for this old guy who lives round the corner’s wife. He’s old, so that’s fair game, right?

– Horny, London

Do as thou list, but be natt pokynge your buttockes out of any wyndowes yn case thou havest a nastye surpryse…

On Falling in Love with a Book��

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What makes us fall in love with a book? Often, this question is as complex as what makes us fall in love with a person. We all have a type (I like fantasy and romance), but we have all fallen in love outside of that type in our lives (I have loved some sci-fi and crime thriller novels that I would never have thought I’d have enjoyed). 

So what is it? Because we’ve all had that moment. That book that gets in your head, that you can’t stop thinking about. For a little while, the lnandscape of that book becomes the landscape of the inside of your mind. That’\s how powerful writing is; it’s the only way we ever get close to being inside one another’s heads. And the thing is, the book you imagine – the world you imagine – is like, perhaps, what the author imagined, but not exactly like it. It’s that magical meeting-point between your own imagination and the imagination of the writer. 

I don’t know quite when the first time this happened for me was. I’ve been in love (in the literary sense) so many times now, that I don’t remember the first time, but I think I must have been seven or eight. I certainly remember that by the time I read Harry Potter (and I am youthful enough to have read them as they were coming out, but also old enough to remember a time long before the films) it was a familiar feeling, to have someone else’s imaginary world shape the inside of your own mind, just for a while. 

And at that age I hated anyone talking about books, or trying to talk about what I was reading with me. It felt too private, too personal. And part of reading – part of the reason that reading is the sanctuary of the introvert child ��� that is so lovely is the private element. I found it so hard to share what in many ways felt so private to me. 

Of course, I’m  largely “over” that now – it’s hard not to be, when you’re writing. You’re inviting other people in, then. You’re inviting them to come into the landscape of your own imagination. It’s not really going to be that, because it’s going to be shaped by their own ideas, their own thoughts and backgrounds and everything they have read. But it’s a deeply personal process all the same. 

And it’s a magical thing, and a wonderful thing. Reading and writing, they’re all part of the same desire. The desire to communciate and to touch the mind of another and to admit that – on some level – we are the same as someone else. They may feel what felt when we read or wrote the same thing. There’s nothing more special to that. Not to me. Falling in love with a book. That’s powerful enough to connect with writers thousands of years dead. Literature is precious; it lets us know we are human, and that is all we need to be. 

Please feel free to add in the comments below any books you fell in love with – does anyone remember the first one? 

Author Guest Post! Ten Fantasy Novels You Must Read (Or Re-read) ��� Part 2

laviniacollins:

Here is the second part of my 10 must-read fantasy novels for chapterandversereviews.com ��� enjoy!

Originally posted on Chapter and Verse Reviews:

Lavinia Collins, author of Arthurian #1 bestselling fantasy romance The Warrior Queen, picks the second half of her top ten must-read fantasy novels.��

She regularly blogs��here, and you can follow her on Twitter here.��

5.��The Magician���s Nephew��and��The Voyage of the Dawn Treader�������C S Lewis

If you���re only going to read some of the Chronicles of Narnia, make it these two. Tired of the Oh-So-Obvious Christian allegory of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?��Replace it with the guinea-pig-related genuinely batshit crazy antics of��The Magician���s Nephew and the swashbuckling (including talking mouse) of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.��Just avoid��The Horse and His Boy.��That���s a filler novel if ever I saw one!

4.��The Princess Bride�������William Goldman

This is just a classic. Also, if you haven���t seen the film with Robin Wright then���

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World Book Day Special Post ��� The First Novel I Read

Everyone remembers the “first grown-up book with no pictures!” that they read, right?

Wel, for me it was J.M.Barrie’s��Peter Pan. Somehow this feels, on reflection, appropriate, since reading and writing have always been ��� for me ��� a wonderful escape from the mundane world.

I think that’s why I am so drawn to fantasy both as a reader and a writer; it’s more of an escape, it’s more of a neverneverland all of your own.

I still love��Peter Pan. I’ve always been more of a Peter than a Wendy ��� and all those panto versions with Peter played by a woman only went further in my young mind to confirm that this was a role that was open to me ��� always more of a dreamer than a practical person. (Although, in the disney film I always wanted to be one of the mermaids, but then who wouldn’t want to be a mermaid?)

So that’s my first “proper” book, and I suppose the beginning of a lifelong love affair. Please join in in the comments with an early book ��� perhaps a first ��� that has stayed dear to you.

And most of all ��� HAPPY WORLD BOOK DAY :)

Author Guest Post! 10 Fantasy Novels You Must Read (Or Re-read) ��� Part 1

laviniacollins:

This appeared on chapterandversereviews.com a couple of weeks ago as a guest-post by me. The first half of my top-ten fantasy read picks. Enjoy!

Originally posted on Chapter and Verse Reviews:

Lavinia Collins, author of Arthurian #1 bestselling fantasy romance The Warrior Queen, picks her top ten must-read fantasy novels. Expect Part 2 at the same time next week!

She regularly blogs��here, and you can follow her on Twitter here.��

10.��The Mists of Avalon ��� Marion Zimmer Bradley

I have to recommend this one. It���s like my moral duty. Oddly enough this book was something of a sexual awakening moment for me. I was only eleven when I read it, which probably goes some way to explaining why I have ended up writing in the genre that I���m in���

9.��The Dark is Rising����� Susan Cooper

If you didn���t read this as a child, read it now! Seriously, go away now and read it. It���s dark, it���s engrossing, it���s perfect in every single way.

8.��Sabriel����� Garth Nix

A great young adult fantasy, from before when���

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The “Author” Life & Imposter Syndrome

Imposter syndrome is a phenomenon that is only just entering the public consciousness (or so it seems) and something that as an erstwhile graduate student I heard often enough, but I am sure that it is something that almost all authors must feel almost all of the time.

You know that feeling? “I’m not good enough to be doing this”. Or, “I wouldn’t call myself that. Not yet.” It’s a feeling that huddles at the back of your mind, and tells you that the one voice saying that you’re bad is the only one telling the truth. Or that success is just a fluke, and you don’t deserve it, and you’ll get caught. It’s the reason that that one bad review sent Kathleen Hale into a stalking-spiral.

You can read a hundred good ones and it’s only the one bad one that sticks with you. That’s because that’s the one that the nasty voice in the back of your head sympathises with. That voice knows you’re a failure, and so when you hear an echo outside of yourself, it’s impossible not to listen. It’s that heckling voice at the back of the room that you’re not sure whether you hear or you imagine.

But even J.K.Rowling has bad reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. (And anyone who speaks ill of Harry Potter is dead to me). And from some of the critics come some of the most thought-provoking words. I myself have spoken on my blog in response to a reviewer who questioned my education based on the genre I write in. Writing a novel is always to an extent a conversation, and there are going to be people who talk back, and say things we don’t like.

So how do you get both? How do you absorb the helpful parts of criticism without hearing that imposter voice at the back of your mind telling you that you’re no good? That you should regret writing? That you should be ashamed? I don’t know what helps. I would love to hear from anyone who does.

It’s always a rollercoaster, taking such a risk, sharing so much of yourself with readers. It was Ernest Hemmingway who said (something like) “writing is easy: all you have to do is sit at a typewriter and bleed”. Now I don’t have a typewriter ��� I wish I did ��� but I do understand the feeling. How successful do you have to be to stop doubting yourself? I think the answer to that is never. Either you doubt or you don’t. The important thing is making the decision that the nasty voice doesn’t rule you. But that’s hard.

I would love to hear from any other authors about this ��� do you feel this way? What do you do about it? Or do you just have the style and grace to bask in your own awseomness?

Fifty Shades of Valentine’s Day: You are my Rose

Happy Valentines day everyone! And this Valentines day will be like no other, for this is the Grey Day. The Fifty Shades of Grey Day. Hooray.

Not sure I feel hooray though.

I am very torn about ye olde fyfte shaydes. I mean, whenever I say anything against it (and believe me, there is plenty to say) I am met with the old refrain, “but it is written by women, for women! You’re being a snob.” The thing is, though, I don’t think I am. (That’s what a snob would say, I hear you cry! Shush you.)

Objectively speaking, it’s poorly written, bizarre, and painfully heteronormative. But it is what it is; it’s fan fiction. Isn’t it unfair to consider it by the standards of “normal” novels and films? To an extent, I agree. I do. I think that��Fifty Shades is a prime example of the same modern phenomenon that gave us the meteoric cult success of Tommy Wiseau’s��The Room,��the worst film ever made. We prefer the freakish to the sincere.��Fifty Shades is the perfect hate-read, just like The Room is the perfect hate-watch (and just FYI one of my favourite films. I went to a showing just last weekend with Tommy Wiseau. It was perfect except that my date kept yelling YOU’RE TEARING ME APART, GUINEVERE, because he was drunk, and now all I can think of is how they are essentially the exact same story).

Fifty Shades��and��The Room��have an alarming amount in common. They are both deeply, reactively misogynistic; Lisa is a manipulative bitch (God, Guinevere, you’re so manipulative) who only wants men for sex or money and Ana is a virginal innocent who only wants to be good. And we’re back in a medievalesque Madonna/Whore world. In both of these, the ideal man is a besuited breadwinner who is a “good provider”. While Johnny is a victim of Lisa’s “whore” type manipulation, Ana the “Madonna” is the perfect submissive. Mmm lovely. Many empower. Such feminism. Wow.

Because the thing is on the surface��Fifty Shades is dull, normative, tediously “vanilla” and completely oppressive. But so is��The Room��(despite the most awkward sex scene in the world��that is at least more edgy that Fifty Shades as it appears to show sex in the belly button ��� edgy!). Both are hilarious.

I’m sure I won’t be the only person disappointed ��that the film is a slickly made romcom rather than the hilarious train-wreck that the book was. I’m on board with the unapologetically awful. I want to have some fun. There’s a reason��Fifty Shades the book was a cult classic and that the film is too “safe” to be exciting; the perfect satire is indistinguishable for the real thing. And fanfic, beautiful strange thing that it is, is the perfect example of this.

LAST CHANCE TO GET FOR FREE! GUINEVERE, the complete collection, completely free for your kindle!

The complete collection of #1 Arthurian Romance bestseller series is free for a limited time only! Grab your copy here!��

Shallow Love: Judging Romance Books by their Covers

A criticism frequently levelled against romance genre fiction is that it is shallow. It’s trash, or fluff. These criticisms have been voiced about my own work.��I can see why, on one level. Everybody in��The Warrior Queen��is handsome or beautiful, stunning or smouldering or intriguing. Or, Lancelot’s case (as my friend texted me to tell me) “a rugged enigma, wrapped in manly quietness”. In part, I wanted to get across this sense of a kind of golden age, a special world, a time of greatness. Anyone who has read any medieval romance will notice that each man is the “byggest” man that ever there was, and every woman is the “faryrest on lyve”. There’s a sense of wonder and magic and specialness about the whole Arthurian world, especially as Thomas Malory tells it, and I wanted to communicate something of that in my own writing.

Another point is, that��it is also part of the romance genre. It’s part of the giddy escapism, the lure into fantasising that this genre offers. Why shouldn’t we enjoy what we read? Why shouldn’t we want to imagine a sexy encounter between two sexy people?

But beneath this is something more uncomfortable. I’ve talked a little before about the idea that if women are clever, they should be like men, and women’s-interest fiction is generally held to be the trashiest of the trashy, and I’m not going to rehash that, because that’s such complete bullshit that it isn’t worth my time, but I will say, that is a part of it. The other part is, there’s an underlying idea that anything about love, sex and emotions is somehow shallow. Oh, but wait, it’s only shallow if it’s written by a woman.����

That’s right ladies. A man writing about women and feeling and all that is breaking boundaries. If we do it about ourselves, for ourselves, we’re ��� what? ��� being shallow? I just don’t understand what is shallow about emotions. Just because some characters are attractive, does that mean their emotions are shallow? Or, because the plot develops according to genre-defined conventions��that means the whole writing is shallow? And who ever called Shakespeare shallow?

It’s a crazy idea. And just think of all the literary fiction written about women by men. Stories about love and sex. The one that springs to mind, of course, is D.H. Lawrence’s��Women in Love.��Here is how I remember the whole book:

“Ursula, come and look at this,” said Rupert.

Ursula was weighed down by an inchoate sense of something just beyond her reach. She sighed.

“I cannot come, Rupert,” Ursula said. “Rupert, don’t you ever wonder what it all means? And not just��that window, Rupert, but all windows? And all views beyond those windows? How can we live in a world where the windows look out onto such things? And what will it mean when all the windows are gone?”*

So, that’s deep, and love’s shallow? I guess it’s all a matter of perspective, because I don’t get the same feeling of emptiness from something that’s truly emotionally engaging ��� and often, that is done through love ��� than I do from something that, however good, strikes me as abstract, or philosophical, or somehow too cerebral and cold. It’s the same reason that I read all the way through��Lord of the Rings,��and never really��felt anything. There was no human connection. No love. It felt shallow. I think love stories ��� any kind of love, with any ending, in any context and between any people ��� is what saves stories from shallowness. Different strokes for different folks, I guess, but to me, it’s love that gives this world meaning. And I mean, thank fuck for��Wuthering Heights.

* I actually love D.H. Lawrence, ��although tbf mainly��Lady Chatterley’s Lover….

On Author Shyness : The Pain of the Personal

So I got my January royalty cheque ��and I was feeling pretty flush and fancy, the way ya do when you never have any money and suddenly you have enough bonus money to do something fancy. Something ��really fancy. So I put my best dress on, and decided to take my current squeeze (hello squeeze) out for a fancypants dinner. And boy were those dinner’s pants fancy. The thing is, at fancypants restaurants, the waiters ask you all the polite things they are supposed to, so the opening chitchat went a little like this:

Waiter: And are you celebrating anything in particular tonight?

Me: [Looks awkward]

Squeeze: Yes… [looks at me as though I am going to speak, looks back at the waiter]

Waiter: What is it?

Me: [Awkward silence, extremely non-debonair blotchy blushing] It’s a secret.

Not my finest/most seductive hour. Why, I hear you all cry, did I not jump forth from my seat and declare to the whole restaurant that I, Lavinia Jane Collins, am a fabulous author of many marvellous fantasy/historical romance��tales? Why did I not cry forth, ‘my paperback is out, good sir, and many of the good folks of the internet have approved my books!’?

Why why why. I asked myself why. My date asked me why. Well of course I know why. One element, of course, is my enduring small-town-religious-upbringing shame at having written what my mother creatively described as a��“bonkbuster”, but I’m not that shy about that sort of thing. After all, I wrote the mucky book in the first place! Part of it, also, is growing up in an environment��where I was constantly told not to “boast”. It’s unladylike to blow your own trumpet. Of course, in the wise words of Edmund Blackadder, I could at least have told the waiter that I had a trumpet, but I didn’t want to.

And this is why. Somehow, it all feels to personal. I know I’m always here on the net, spilling my heart and soul via the blog, and tweeting away, but the internet is ever the safe space of the introvert. We can socialise when we want to, how we want to. We can control how much we interact, and what we keep private. We don’t have to deal with big groups, or embarrassing outpourings of attention. We can interact with people (which we love to do) but while also being on our own, having time to think, having time to reflect. Now, I don’t know this, but I imagine that many writers are introverts at heart, or at least people who like the time to reflect, to think about what they say. I, myself, too (and I’m sure others feel the same) feel that I have given a lot of myself away in writing those books, laid a lot bare (no pun intended). I don’t feel confident enough to draw the attention of anyone who is actually in the room with me to the book.

And I think that’s the crux of it. For those of us who do feel shy about sharing, who don’t feel daring enough to be proud and tell people in the street they are a��writer,��or an��author. And I kind of want people to know. I kind of want to be fussed, but that part of me is too inhibited, not ready yet. I hope that one day, I will be.

Please share in the comments, shy and bold alike, your experiences of being an author in public!