alex_beecroft

Yesterday my new morris side, Sutton Masque – a mixed Border Morris side – welcomed in the official start of summer on the 1st of June by dancing outside a couple of pubs in Ely. It was freezing, rainy and grey. A hardy Greek family sat outside The Cutter, under the porch heaters and watched us dance by the river. I hope we were a properly bizarre glimpse into the literal local colour for their holiday. We certainly appreciated having them as an audience because none of the natives had dared venture out.

Later we went down to The Fountain and danced there for another hour, still in the drizzle, with the light failing around us. Here our only audience was an Australian couple in fantastic Aran beanies (I covet a beanie like theirs.) They took our picture and told me they liked my face. I take that to mean that they liked my face paint. This made me very glad, because my attempt to look like a Wood Wose takes me a good half hour of preparation before I even make it out of the door. The dark green of the background colour doesn’t half stain your flannels when you wash it off!

This is my face:

taken after we’d given up on dancing and gone inside to play music and eat birthday cake. (Happy birthday Neil!)

I’m very proud of our new kit, which is dark green and gold, with a wild-man-of-the-woods, Jack-in-the-Green feel to it, and I am even beginning to get used to dancing in a top hat. You can see the full outfit here if you like, because the above is the indoors look without the tattered jacket.

In more relevant writing news, I’ve been spending my time finishing the first Porthkennack book for Riptide Press. Currently called Foxglove Copse, this is a contemporary m/m romance set in a fictional Cornish town with a slightly gothic twist. I’ve also done the first content edit pass for my huge long queer historical fantasy The Glass Floor, which should be coming out next year, and found a new home for Labyrinth, which had been contracted to Samhain Publishing but for which I got my rights back recently.

Right now, I’m working on the third book in my queer space opera trilogy Lioness of Cygnus 5. Have I told you about this? I don’t think I’ve told you about this. But it probably justifies its own post, so I’ll do that next time.

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

Mostly today my work in progress was finding all my royalty statements and filling in my spreadsheet in order to be ready to do my self-assessment tax form tomorrow. Which was useful and even interesting work, but not the sort of thing that lends itself to an entertaining quote.

However, I did also do ten pages of editing on The Glass Floor, and solved the knotty problem of why there was only one magic charm available, and why – in that case – it wasn’t immediately given to the sultan. Poor old Zayd has found himself now officially without magic talent of any kind, but hey, he’s still the archmage. That has to count for something, right?

I’m coming into the final straits as far as the edits go, which means that the hardest bit is still in front of me. I wrote the final battles at double speed and as a result they don’t necessarily make much sense. Also the whole business with Frank’s father being coincidentally present is too coincidental, and will have to come out in favour of some stuff with magic mirrors and newspapers.

I was pleased to find that it passed the Bechdel test, though:

~*~*~*~

Off the side of the right hand aisle a series of carved oak partitions had been set up, marking chapels dedicated to individual saints and martyrs. They ducked into the smallest, where an all but extinguished candle gave out a dim storm light in its amethyst lantern, and a silver-mounted icon of Saint Parascheva watched them out of solemn painted eyes.

Ecaterina cast the veil back over her face. Mirela knelt beside her, and in the process of lowering herself she turned from girl to old lady, wrapped in black shawls, concealed beneath a heavy headscarf and a shape that proclaimed her of no interest to anybody. “I envy your gift,” Ecaterina said softly. “To pass unseen. I had to choose between peacock and gargoyle, and never truly wanted either.”

“Always the same on the inside, though, isn’t it? Who you are.”

Mirela exchanged a glance with the flat saint. The stuttering light made her eyes seem to stir. If Ecaterina looked at her long enough, it was as though her face bulged out of the frame, became rounded and real. She was listening, though she didn’t speak.

“About the monsters,” Mirela whispered. “My lord is taking them away. I thought you’d like to know that. We have wagons and everything arriving. I hear the idea is to jam them in, tight as in slave ships, in the bottom of the carts and cover them up with supplies. Then when the army gets down to the coast, they’ll sneak aboard ship and we’ll take them with us. So you’ll be all right, back here. They’ll all have gone to war, like the boyars.”

Ecaterina was ashamed of herself, because the first thing she thought was that the gypsy was lying. But lies ought to at least be more plausible than the truth, or how could they ever be believed? “How? How could he control them enough to do that? How could he get them to cooperate?”

Nightmares flickered into her thoughts like the death-throes of the candle. She saw again the look that had passed between Vacarescu and the strigoi in the white silk – the old man who had taken Stefan from his family, and walked beside him as a surrogate father.

A priest looked in through the pierced work carving of the wall. “Well,” Mirela clucked in mingled disapproval and amusement, just like an old lady sharing scandalous gossip. He shook his head, tolerantly, light running like quicksilver over his pectoral cross – the only part of his outfit that wasn’t black. All the colour had been sucked from Bukorest, it seemed. How appropriate.

“He brought the strigoii with him from Valcea. The white one and the lady. They listen to him, maybe a little. Though God knows for how long, now there’s only one of him and hundreds of them.”

Ecaterina took far too long to understand this news. Her father admired the man, had told her of his awkward reception to the prince’s court. The reason he’d given for not being seen in town before. ‘I have been containing a plague.’

The White Death had come to Bukorest, but days after he arrived in it.

Her teeth were chattering. She had to raise both hands and dig in her thumbs beneath the jaw to keep them silent, though the shudder worked through her wrists and arms and into her shoulders. The emotion she felt was still almost too big to put a name to, too big to be contained within herself – she felt it like a wall of fire around her ten paces deep. The altar was inside it, and the green-faced saint, and the sense of something teetering, teetering, about to fall.

Her father liked him. Had welcomed him without reservation, brought him into their house. She had liked him. He was the only one left who still treated her as he had before her glamour slipped – the only one who saw her as she was and was not repelled.

And why should he be repelled by anything human if his household was made up of monsters?

How smoothly he had lied when she asked about the old man, led her to believe he was an unpleasant surprise he found waiting for him when he moved in. She should have known the timing was far too coincidental for that. She should have known when he hacked her brother’s head off in front of her that he had no human sensibility in him.

But for him, Stefan would still be alive. The strigoi, oh yes, she could hope and plan for it to be destroyed, but it could not help its nature. It had little choice but to be what it was. But Vacarescu had chosen to expose her family to its notice – to expose all Bukorest to its curse.

Had Stefan done something to him, to be so targetted? No! Absurd. Stefan was the kindest child who ever lived. It was worse than that. Vacarescu had killed him and not even meant to. Simply did not care enough to make it stop.

The sphere of fire had reached its largest point – almost out to the street. Now it slowed, turned and rushed back together into a fireball centered in her gut. Every part of her felt incandescent like the sun with rage, powerful, unstoppable. I will kill him for this. I will have vengeance. For my brother and for every other mourner in the city today, I will have justice.

~*~*~*~

Which, when you have three heroes and two heroines turns out to be harder than you’d think.

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

This was not the post I was looking for:

http://betweenfactandfiction.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/happy-writers-society-love-lists-by.html

The one I remember reading, which made me think “I must do that for my WIP!” was a different post which I can’t seem to find any more. And I clearly remember the title wrong, because when I googled it, this was the one I came up with.

But no matter! This one has much the same gist to it. That being that it is both fun and motivational to make a list of the things that you love about your current WIP.

My current WIP has just reached the end of the final climax whereby the heroes all got to save each other from certain death by their martial prowess, magical badassery, ability to look like an elderly Islamic saint and sure hand with a bottle of perfume, respectively. So there’s only the winding down to go now – arranged marriages to be solemnized, fathers to be reconciled with, tortoises to be illumined etc.

So I’m at the stage where I’m pretty damn motivated anyway. Another week or two should see the first draft finished.

But then there’s editing, so I may need the extra push for that. Here’s my list then, of things that I love about The Glass Floor

Radu: He looks like this http://pinterest.com/pin/44402746297416457/ and he’s everything I love in a character – rude, arrogant, isolated, violent, raised by monsters. But then I found out that he’s also a closet extrovert, poor man. He really likes people, he just hasn’t the faintest idea how they work.

Ecaterina: I do like the bolshy ones! When I started off, I thought Catia was going to be a bit of a wimp. Her magical talent is to be supernaturally likeable. I thought she was going to be all floaty and nice & I’d struggle to think of things to do with her. Instead she told me that since she was likeable by magic she didn’t have to waste her time trying to do it the old fashioned way. So I should skip that nonsense and get out of her way while she founded Romania’s first university of magic.

Romania: Here’s a country I knew nothing about before I started. I had impressions from Dracula, and far from being disappointed, I’m very glad to say that it seems to me that Bram Stoker got it all wrong. The place is much more interesting than he made it out to be. Did you know that the name Wallachia is related to our Wales? Both coming from Wealh, the Saxon for “foreigner.” Well, OK, that makes me geek out, but is possibly not so interesting to everyone else.

Istanbul: Why are you so complicated yet so terribly romantic?

Zayd and his bucket of jellyfish. Zayd and his awesome mum and auntie.

Nabih, who started off as a walk-on-character entirely there for plot reasons, and ended up as the guy who’s so holy nobody is surprised when he becomes a saint.

Cezar – noooo, don’t say I’m going to have to kill him. Except that I am. I want to hug him and possibly ship him with Radu, but important plot reasons suggest he ought to die instead.

Mirela: Sort of the opposite of Ecaterina. I was sure, going in, that she was going to be so cool, but then all the scenes where she was supposed to do stuff didn’t actually happen. I wondered for a while if I should cut her out. But then she came good in the end. Huzzah!

~

Oh, Frank. Why are you not on this list? Step 1 in the editing, I think – Figure out a way to make Frank more loveable without getting rid of his essential characteristics of being ornamental and insecure.

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

Listen to this. Is this not the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever heard in your life? It’s certainly one of them for me, and I don’t normally like male voice choirs.

How do I convey the same atmosphere in writing? It’s as bad as trying to describe what apple tastes like. Sometimes words are a very blunt instrument indeed.

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

Six Sentence Sunday; I am doing it wrong. I ought to be linking back to the website and list here, but I have failed to be organized enough to get myself included on it. So I’m just going to post it for myself and own my own fail

This is from The Glass Floor, in which our scientifically minded heroine Ecatarina notices her brother in the garden.

~

His eyes had sunk, the tips of his fingers had turned dark, he had smelled, sweet, offensive, as his cheeks began to puff up, and she had had to wave the flies away from settling on him. He had been dead, unbreathing, for days before going into the earth. No doubt about that. No tragic possibility of being buried alive such as she had read of happening in other countries, who disposed of their loved ones indecently fast.

He was dead. And he was looking up at her window with puzzled eyes.

~

At 76K, I’m approximately half way through and everything is about to take a turn to the left, as we find out what on earth Zayd and the mad Sultan has to do with any of this.

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

Charlie’s answers are over here.

WIP meme

What is the title of the book you’re currently working on?
The Glass Floor (temporary title as the actual glass floor got left behind in an older idea for the plot.)

Where did the idea come from for the book?
I have absolutely no idea. You can’t expect me to remember stuff like that.

What genre does your book fall under?
Historical Fantasy.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Frank – Alex Pettyfer, Radu – Julian McMahon, Zayd – Burak Özçivit, Mirela – Neha Sharma, Ecaterina – Alexis Raben

What is a one-sentence synopsis of the book?

A Romanian lord fights for his country’s freedom from the Ottoman Empire, using an army of vampires.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
It’ll be represented by the L.Perkins Agency (providing my agent doesn’t wash her hands of it because she told me vampires were a bad idea and I went and wrote them anyway.)

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
I haven’t finished it yet.

What other books would you compare this story to in your genre?
I… wouldn’t. Maybe Barbara Hambley’s first ‘Travelling with the Dead’ book, but not really. Of course I would compare it to Dracula, though. That’s inevitable since both feature Wallachian noblemen with vampiric associations.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Julian McMahon – saw him in the Fantastic Four films and thought that, while he made a terrible DOOM, he might make quite a good sinister hero of some other sort.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Atlantis. The vril accumulator. A total lack of flying carpets. All the best parties include tortoises.

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