Ugh, ill again.

[alex_beecroft]

I knew I was getting on too well with this Cretan thing – unimaginatively titled ‘Labyrinth.’ I’m on scene 11 out of 15 and should be galloping downhill towards the finish line. (Though tbh, this is the point where everything starts getting really complicated.) But I had to break off to lie down.

Never mind. I usually do a scene a day, so as long as I’m better by Monday I can still have it finished by the end of next week.

I bought ‘The Bull from the Sea’ to make sure I wasn’t covering ground that had already been covered by Mary Renault, but she opens with Theseus coming back from Crete, so that’s OK. I’m amused to find, now, that I’m totally against her whole ‘oh, how dreadful these effete foriegners are with their eyeliner and their fancy belts and their allowing women to participate in the bull games on an equal basis from men!’

I’m now very much thinking ‘I’m sorry? Are any of those supposed to be bad things?’

Anyway, it’s a fascinating time in history, and when I’m less dosed up with flu medicine I need to write a couple of serious posts about it. But now I don’t seem to be able to string two sentences together, so I’m going back to watching Gotham on Netflix. It seems appropriate for this kind of weather.

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.

Comments

[lee_rowan]

hello,long time no see!

I think with Renault, some of her attitude is characterization, and some of it's the time in which she wrote. I never could get into "Bull," though I liked the Alexander series a lot. Shrug.

[alex_beecroft]

Yay! Hello :) It's lovely to hear from you :)

I remembered Bull from the Sea as one of her more kindly, lighthearted ones, and oddly enough it was the modern The Charioteer that finally made me start worrying about her attitude towards 'feminine' things, whether that was women or camp men. I think it's probably a generational thing to be honest, and I'm not sure she can be blamed for that.

[lee_rowan]

Could be generational, could be her own process. I remember a period of about ten years where I avoided pink because I was tired of having "feminine" stuff pushed at me. And maybe she felt that in order to be taken seriously as a writer, she had to echo the popular sentiments. Not that misogyny has vanished in our day, either!