alex_beecroft

The summer holidays have thankfully come to an end, edits on the Trowchester books can only last so long, and that leaves me with the rest of the year to write something new. So, what should it be?

I’m currently writing a fantasy about three sets of people from diverse cultures who get stranded together on a floating island due to shipwreck/the death of the gods. That’s slow going as I gradually work out the world building, but very entertaining. But after that, I have a choice of:

1. Another 3 Trowchester books – small British city contemporaries featuring the occasional murder and a bit of morris dancing.

2. A follow up of The Reluctant Berserker where Brid the slave gets a story of his own. (For which I need to do some research on Celtic Britain in the 6th Century.)

3. Kind of tempted to do a sort of action/adventury jewel thief m/f romance with an option of turning it m/m/f later on.

4. A follow up to The Wages of Sin.

5. A follow up to The Crimson Outlaw.

6. Something else of your suggestion?

I’d welcome anyone’s advice, as I really don’t have a preference at all.

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I keep thinking I ought to leave Tumblr because it’s such a time sink, but I find so many interesting things there. For example, this post about a multi-racial casting for founders of the Hogwarts houses

http://themarysue.tumblr.com/post/97309699977/supernatasha-part-ofthecult-hogwarts

particularly the erudite response of supernatasha to the claim that everyone was white in Europe during the middle-ages. I feel sure this is going to be of particular relevance to me once Blue Eyed Stranger comes out and people discover that one of my main characters is a black Viking reenactor. As a matter of fact, the knowledge that people of colour have probably always been in Britain is a fact that Martin himself is passionate about passing on to his own pupils. It’s nice for me not to have had to assemble the research on that myself. I can just refer anyone who objects to go to the excellent Medieval POC.

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And since I appear to be doing a bit of a tombola – pick three tickets at random and see what you get – kind of blog post, I’m going to end with something that made me happy this week:

I just wish I could buy it somewhere!

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

I’m blogging over on the LGBT Fantasy Fans blog today on a subject close to my heart – ritual dance.

http://lgbtfantasyfansandwriters.wordpress.com/2012/12/03/dancing-with-destiny/

Which was prompted by a great time at Mill Road Winter Fair at the weekend. One problem with playing music for one side while dancing for another comes when both sides turn out to the same event. Then who do you support? Crisis! Clash of loyalties! Woe is me! Who should I let down this year? Or can I figure out a composite kit and support both? I will give you a clue:

There seems to be no rule that the waistcoat you wear for the Riot can’t be black. So with a black waistcoat and a zebra blanket thrown around the shoulders for those chilly muso moments between dances, I mostly fitted with both sides at once. And boy did I need that blanket! It was perishing.

I must say, it’s excellent practice for your breath control – finishing a dance, then taking half a minute to throw on a hat and cloak & going out to play the whistle. I was out of breath most of the time, but I don’t think it showed.

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

I’ve had Ely Apple Day on my mind for a week. I blogged about it last week, full of enthusiasm with the memory of good dancing and good music on a day when it didn’t rain, even though it looked like it wanted to. I’d been looking forward to seeing the photos, but when we did, several members of the side noticed that everyone was wearing blue. The idea of our kit is that our white shirts represent the white skies of the Fens, our black skirts represent the rich black Fenland soil, our red handkerchiefs represent the blood spilled in the Ely and Littleport Riots after which we’re named, and the many different colours of our waistcoats represent the individuality of each dancer.

This is totally scuppered if we all go for the same colour, and somehow, despite differences of shade, we all seem to have gone for variants of blue. This could mean only one thing – time to make another waistcoat. I wanted lime green, but they didn’t have enough of that on the roll, so – in an unexpected move which surprised even myself – I’ve bought some royal purple material instead

with some tacky yet sparkly buttons to match. This should clash in a most satisfactory way with my orange hair and lime green shawl. Good taste being yet another of those things which the true zen masters of folk have ascended beyond.

Speaking of Ely Apple Day, I had a lovely exchange with a member of the crowd who had drawn up to watch us.

“Where are these dances from?” she asked me.

As I’m sure you know, the same question can have several appropriate answers depending on the context, because the context helps clarify what is actually being asked. I’m not much good at picking up the subtle clues which show what the context is, so I started off by trying to explain that these were dances from the Welsh Borders, but there were other styles of morris dancing from other areas, such as Cotswold and North West Clog, and that the local style – Molly – was similar to what we were doing, but slightly different.

But by that point I could tell from her continued look of bemusement that I was not really answering the question she’d intended to ask. Then I put together her Mediterranean looks and slight lisp of an accent and struck out with what I thought might be a lucky guess. “The prevailing theory is that the Morris dance is originally from Spain,” I said.

Her face cleared – this was obviously what she’d really been asking about all along. “I’m from Catalonia,” she said, “and our dances are just like this. I wondered if there had been some sort of cultural exchange programme.”

I laughed. “There was indeed. It was in the 15th Century.”

And this is why history, and Folk, are neither boring nor irrelevant – because the cultural ties our two countries had five hundred years ago still help make sense of our behaviour, and allow us to feel like part of a family, even today. It’s a small world and dancing makes it a better one.

Music does too. On a different subject, we were walking around Cambridge today, and in three different places we were surrounded by music played live on the painted pianos that have been scattered around the town

http://elfringham.co.uk/cambridge-street-pianos-2/

proper music, mind you. People had obviously discovered they were there, gone home for their sheet music and come back prepared. There was some wonderful concert standard stuff going on al fresco, in the balcony of the shopping centre and outside in the park.

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

So, after the excitement of Saturday I got steadily sicker, until by Wednesday it took me the whole day to write 700 words. On Thursday I gave up and awarded myself a sick day, which I spent reading blogs.

As a result of Chuck Wendig’s “promote yourself” post I added a whole load of new blogs to my friend list, which is good. But this morning I find the RSS feed thingy has given me all their recent posts in one huge slab of ‘OMG, my FL is broken!’ I hope that will settle down from now on or some of them will have to go again. I don’t mind reading one post of a particular blog a day, but I can’t cope with five.)

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As if the prospect of learning the 5000 tunes in my handwritten, photocopied stack of ‘essential music for morris musicians’ sheet music on the whistle wasn’t enough, I seem to have decided to take up the pipe and tabor. This is the original morris one man band – a three hole pipe that you play in one hand, while you simultaneously play a drumbeat with the other hand, like so:

This makes the overblowing you do on the whistle to get the second octave seem like child’s play. To get a single octave on the tabor pipe you have to overblow once and twice, and to get the higher octave, three and four times. (What am I talking about? See here: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Pipe_and_tabor)

I can feel my brain protesting, but I can at least play “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” with drum accompaniment, and almost play the morris tune “Balance the Straw” with rhythm. I’m fairly sure that this time next week I could do a good job of “Balance the Straw,” if I practiced it every day between then and now. Maybe that’s what I’ll do.

Mustn’t stop practicing the whistle too, though, or this will just end up destroying the progress I’ve made on that.

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What is this ‘promo op’ of which you speak? Well, I thought it was a really good idea of Chuck Wendig’s to throw open the comments section of his blog to people who wanted to promote their book/blog/vid/editing/dogwalking service/any other thing. So naturally I thought it would be a good idea to do it here too.

Basically, if you have a new book out, or any other thing you want to shout about, leave a comment here. I don’t guarantee I’ll reply to them all, but I’ll see them all and so will anyone else who comes here. And it can’t hurt, right?

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

I was very bad last Saturday and totally forgot to attend a chat for members of the Macaronis.  In my defence, my husband had come home with tickets to see the Demon Barber Roadshow, and after that everything else fled from my mind.

Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t look at this picture without a massive internal squee.  Is this not the coolest thing ever?

So at the prospect of a night in the theatre watching a roadshow based on a fusion of hip-hop, clog, rapper and morris dancing, I dropped everything and ran out, only regretting that I hadn’t taken time to change into my morris kit first.

This will give you a better idea than I can about what I saw