alex_beecroft

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.

So, I’ve got the contract for Too Many Elf Princes, and we haven’t quite started on the copy editing process yet, but on the content editing side, my editor said to me “I’m curious about Kjartan’s relationship to his mum, can we have a bit more explanation there? Oh, and could you beef up the romance with a capital R in the second half of the book?”

I thought “well, the first thing will be easy enough. His relationship with his mum isn’t really relevant, so I’ll just put a paragraph in early on explaining this, and that will be done.” But clearly my editor knew more than I did, because when it came to the big commitment scene, it turned out that Kjartan’s (non)relationship with his mum was pivotal, and I’ve just spent the morning crying over it as I typed.

A good editor and an obliging muse are two wonderful things.

Have an excerpt to celebrate

Too Many Fairy Princes

In the throne room, the king had been dressed in gold, and a thin film of gold leaf had been blown onto the exposed white, waxy skin of his face and hands. The great cavern of a room faced due east, and as the sun came up, the king caught its light and threw it back in a dazzle that lit the walls.

The night’s damp air was held back by a magical shield such as closed off Kjartan’s rooms, and the scent was all dust and dryness, cracked and sifted as desert sand, spiced with turpentine and frankincense and other preservative resins.

Volmar’s eyes were dry as they gazed on his dead son, dressed still in his white sleep robe, but covered in a blanket of polar-bear fur, and with an emerald circlet in his fiery hair.

The King’s eyes could not be other than dry, the moisture in his tear ducts having evaporated a dozen years ago. They made a scratching noise when he blinked, and the hall was so silent, Kjartan could hear it from where he stood at the foot of the dais, on the circle of mother of pearl set into the floor that marked the traditional place for an accuser.

On the circle of slate opposite, Tyrnir yawned and failed to raise a hand to cover it. He could not – his hands being bound together behind him in three cords of marsh grass and one of twisted seaweed.

They stood together, dark holes in the radiance of the morning, while the conches blew harsh and mournful notes to welcome another dawn, and the silver trumpets echoed them, in threat and warning to the sea-elves. We are still watching. We are still ready. Our knives await you.

Then the sun slipped a little higher into the heavens and its beam slid off the golden king onto the floor, and in the suddenly dimmed light they stirred back to life.

“So,” Volmar creaked, looking down at the bruises around Gisli’s mouth. “After an age of stagnation, we move and strive again. Which one of you was it?”

“It was Tyrnir, my king.” The strange not-pain had given way to a kind of hollow lightness beneath Kjartan’s breastbone. It gave his voice a tone like metal, and made him feel tall as thunderclouds. “Lob here, and Tuburrow will tell you I took this…” he held out the button like a soul-stone in a palm that didn’t shake, “from Gisli’s hand as they brought him here.”

“They fall off all the time,” Tyrnir scoffed. “And he collects them. You know he does – rooms and rooms of buttons and belt toggles, boot plaques and broken pendants. And you think this is enough to accuse your own brother of fratricide?”

“I have the coat you were wearing yesterday…”

Lob held it out in two of his six arms.

“Look where the material has been torn. That button didn’t fall off, it was grabbed, wrenched, when our brother fought back against you.”

Tyrnir gave a sharp sigh and shifted his weight onto one foot, either deliberately or genuinely nonchalant. “One of the riding birds tore it off, when Gisli and I were at the scrapes yesterday. It rolled to the boy’s feet and I told him he could keep it. For his collection, you know? He was grateful.”

Avenging angel did not seem to be one of Kjartan’s talents. His lightness crumpled in on itself. He ground his teeth. “You came to ask me, yesterday, if the youngest son always won. I said yes. So you made it that you are the youngest son. You killed him, brother. Don’t try and…”

“I agree,” the king sat straighter in his seat, hitching himself upright with slow, deliberate toil. Already the gold foil had begun to flake off onto his collar, leaving him particoloured in glory and decay. “Do not try to deny it, if it’s true, Tyrnir.” He flicked his fingers towards the black clad woman who stood behind the throne, her mother of pearl skin gleaming beneath her deep hood. “Aud, does he lie?”

“He does, my king.”

“You see. Simpler then to tell me the truth. Did you kill Gisli, Tyrnir, or must we look elsewhere for our prince-slayer?”

Tyrnir cast Aud, the court’s archmage, a glance that promised retribution. She smiled, and the smug invulnerability of it seemed to puncture his resistance. “Oh,” he said, “very well. Yes, I killed him. I want to win. I will do what it takes.”

Kjartan thought his father coughed, at first – weevils lodged in his throat, perhaps. But then that part of him, inside, where the not-pain was, flinched and contracted, as it had learned to do very early in his life. Things became – if not more bearable – at least more numb. For his father laughed, laughed so wildly he had to press his arms around his middle to stop his stomach from bursting.

“Well, good. I’m glad to see one of you has some gumption. Surprised to see you’ve stopped at one, though. Kjartan stayed awake all night, I suppose?”

Tyrnir laughed and raised his dark eyes to regard his father fondly. “Kjartan is no threat. Once I’ve killed Bjarti, Kjartan will give me the kingdom freely. All he wants is to be left alone. He doesn’t care.”

And that was true enough. He didn’t want any of this. If he had stopped to think, he would have acknowledged it, stepped down, surrendered, glad to be spared the unpleasantness. But somewhere inside, squeezed by pressure into a heat like that at the earth’s core, Kjartan was angry, and his anger worked his mouth without going through his mind.

“I do care now! Now I care! I won’t leave my home in the hands of a man who killed his own brother. Don’t either of you hurt for him? He was your kin and he liked you both. How can you stand there and look at his corpse and laugh? I will have this dung-grown kingdom just to pay you both back for that.”

“Aha,” Volmar settled back with a sigh like a dying breath and gave his youngest a patronising smile. “Lose one enemy, gain another, eh, Tyrnir? Stamp on the eggs before they hatch, for even a baby dragon can give you a nasty searing. I must say I haven’t had this much fun since I died. My boys, you may just have been worthwhile after all.”

He motioned Aud forward, and with a touch of her finger the cords that bound Tyrnir fell away. Tyrnir rubbed his wrists one after another and looked at Kjartan thoughtfully. Then he smiled like the curve of a scythe as it approached a field of long grass.

“But Kjartan is no dragon, father. And soon he will be nothing at all.”

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.

OK, there may not be such a word as ‘bewonderment’, but I’m sure there should be. In this case I’m using it to mean ‘a state of wondering about’ my works in progress.

I’ve finally re-read Elf Princes’ Quest, which seriously still needs a better name. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. I laughed aloud in parts, and I stayed up reading late into the night because I wanted to find out what happened in the end. This is always a good sign.

The trouble is that it’s nothing like the kind of book that I might write. It’s the light-hearted elvish rom-com that Under the Hill was meant to be before UtH swallowed Bomber Command and turned into a two volume epic. It’s… it’s a meringue of story, where I normally make fruitcake. Meringue is a lovely thing, crisp, light and sweet, but when I’ve only ever offered heavy and rich before, people coming to me for Christmas cake are going to be disconcerted to get pavlova instead.

Enough with the comestibles! To speak more plainly, I mean that normally I do serious, earnest stuff, with themes and everything, whereas EPQ is a tongue in cheek romp with no deeper meaning at all. I am thinking that perhaps the thing to do is accept that it’s nothing like an Alex Beecroft novel and publish it under a different name.

The Glass Floor is just rubbing EPQ’s strangeness in, because The Glass Floor is doing my much more normal thing of ramifying beneath my hands: “But muuum, I don’t want to be a novella! Muuum, I want to be a trilogy. I want you to learn everything about the Balkans in the 18th Century. Why can’t you become an expert on the Ottoman Empire in a couple of weeks? They can visit the Sultan! There could be a cool scholarly antagonist who was a Turkish physician, and the second book could be from his POV, so we see that he’s a hero too….”

Radu doesn’t want to be the hero of some petty little domestic drama, he wants to FREE HIS PEOPLE FROM CENTURIES OF OPPRESSION. He’s decided that Dracula is his role model after all, and he’s somewhat peeved that he got named after Vlad’s passive, syphilitic little brother. (I keep telling him it’s only because I thought it was a cool name – you may have noticed that I like saying it whenever I can – but he’s not happy.)

Naturally, this means a complete re-plot. But I can handle that. I’m encouraged, in fact, as it’s very typical of my longer novels. To go back to the baked goods metaphor, it’s like adding yeast to bread dough and letting it rise, knocking it back and kneading it and letting it prove again. If a story doesn’t swell in the telling, I’m never quite sure if it’s properly alive.

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