Erastes

I posted a question to epubagent earlier regarding a particular gay historical which we reviewed on Speak Its Name and was, at best, Braveheart Universe. The errors within it were legion, beginning with the dates that Hollywood had squished to make it more romantic and continuing with Hadrian’s Wall being in Yorkshire.

The question I asked was—did they think it was part of the agent’s job to check an author’s research, or should they just assume that the author knows what they are doing?  Should it be all the writer’s responsibility, or should it be everyone who represents it—the writer, the agent, the editor, the publisher? I didn’t mean to be confrontational, although I’m sure I sounded it—but it’s something that’s been on my mind for years. Should research be checked prior to an agent selling it, or a publisher sending it off for publication?

I know, from experience, that small publishers don’t have a “history boffin” and certainly there are few people around with a knowledge of all eras who could confidently edit anything from caveman to WW2, so who—if anyone is keeping an eye on their books to make sure they are accurate and aren’t causing people to giggle behind their hands?

I’ve been pretty lucky with my editors now I’m in a settled publishing circle. TJ Pennington is first class and won’t—if she can possibly help it—allow an anachronism past her. Lisa at Running Press (now, sadly moved on) was astounding and it seemed to me that she checked almost every word in Transgressions and gave me a huge list of words that I’d used that weren’t in use in the 17th century. Mark Probst – owner of Cheyenne, and Steve Berman owner of Lethe Books both are passionate about historical novels and want them to be the best product they can produce.

I understand this attitude. It’s not their work. They didn’t slave for weeks and months and years on it. (Although the editors work very hard indeed) but they represent the book, and the book represents them. I DON’T understand a massive concern like Ellora’s Cave—who must, heavens to Betsy, have dozens of editors working for them—who allow such incredible and unbelievable anachronisms to be published.

What do you think? Should it be between the writer and the editor alone—and then if that editor doesn’t know, or is too lazy to check the research, then it’s just too bad if the book goes to print with Regency women having ipods and scotsmen drinking lager in 1283. Or do you think that the book should be checked all the way along the assembly line?

I’ll be very interested if you can add your voice.

I read an excellent post the other day by Alan Chin where he talks about how he creates his characters and how well he knows them. He knows everything from their political persuasion to what hand they use to do what and it was a wonderful insight into how writes work.

I feel such a fraud at times, when I see this level of craft that authors use. I think that I should be working like this. Alex Beecroft has blogged about how she plots every chapter, every scene onto cards and ends up with a whole novel worked out in advance, and then I look at my PC screen and… well, all I have is a WIP which grows—or not—like Topsy.

I did try the character fact-sheet route. After Standish I sat down and started to map out character fact sheets for the two Space Opera merchants that I was planning a series of short stories for, but I only got a few lines down on the first guy before I came to a grinding halt. I DIDN’T know about the character. I knew—roughly—what he looked like: a disarming grin, tousled hair, dark-brown eyes, but that was about it. I had no idea what he’d do in a pinch, because I hadn’t actually created that pinch in which he’d have to do anything. I didn’t know what he thought about puppies and rainbows or whether he got space-sick or whether he’d had sex with women, or anything at all.

I looked at the character sheet, and as so often happens, I felt inadequate. Like I was playing at this, and wasn’t prepared to put the work in. Then I wrote the story anyway and found out more than I ever would have done by giving the character his traits in advance.

You see, to me, writing (and reading) a novel is like making a friend (or getting to know a foe) in real life. When you first meet what MIGHT become your significant other, or your next bosom buddy or the bane of your life, you know little about them. You may have some third hand knowledge from another friend, perhaps they’ve arranged the meeting and you’ll know what they look like, or that he’s vegetarian, but until you’re out together on your own it’s all hearsay, and anyway, how he acts with other people isn’t going to be exactly how he’s going to act with you. Each time you meet you’ll get to know a little more and a little more—and you’ll never get to know the whole package, even if you kid yourself that you will.

So writing is like that for me. I don’t know that person as he hits the page. He might be running (and I don’t even know from what, or where to) – he might be sitting at a desk, he might be in the middle of an argument, he might be lying naked by a river. All I see is the image and as he continues to run, lies thinking in the grass, muses about his poverty, or stops his car at a hotel – until he starts to think and interact with his environment I know as little about him as the reader who is reading it faster than I can write it. Until I throw caltrops in his path I haven’t got a clue how he’ll cope—whether he’s brave or cowardly, whether he knows any kind of fighting, whether he’s corrupt  or has a good soul.

I know this probably sounds like madness to those organised and hard-working authors out there, but it’s unthinkable for me any other way. I’ve found that once I DO KNOW what’s going on with my plot I find it difficult to write, because as far as I’m concerned it’s already happened and I wish someone else would write it down. Same with characters – they’ve got to keep part of their mystery for me, all the way through, even to the end, or I just lose interest in them, which – *laughs * – probably explains many of my endings….

Going to try and “blog” a bit more, instead of just using it as a journal of random thoughts. You’ll still get that stuff, but once a week at least I’m going to do a blog.

Today I’m going to continue with the much lapsed “a-z” and I think we are up to B.

Which shows you how well i did with it before.

However!

These subjects are not particularly “writer-worthy” or serious, hell, it’s me after all. But I hope it might pique your interest, give you a bunny or simply make you go, “gosh that’s interesting.”

B is for beer. One of my publishers said, a while back, that he thought many historical books were full of alcoholics because they all seemed to be drinking beer. He had no idea until I bored him rigid (also B) the reason for that, which is simply that the water up to quite recent times, was not fit to drink.

Most drinking water came from rivers. There was a reason why most towns and cities were built on rivers, after all. People arrived at an area, had a look around and built their house close enough to a water source so they didn’t have to walk too far to fetch some. This was perfect when your neighbourhood looked like this:

but not so good once it looked like this:

All water came from the river, and all water—and more solid things—went back to the river. People didn’t so much drink beer (and small beer) because heating water made the water safer (they may not have known why, but people aren’t altogether daft) but because it made it taste more palatable.

Places like Venice, where the water around the islands are undrinkable, were reliant on rainfall for water and even now, the ancient rainfall tanks can still be seen—and indeed are being modernised, even today. Imagine how horrible a drought must have been.

http://www.venicethefuture.com/schede/uk/338?aliusid=338

Small beer, by the way is a low alcohol beer made from the re-using of  the mash from the first brewing. Its low alcohol content though didn’t have enough “oomph” to keep the water pure.

There’s a gravestone which reads:

Here sleeps in peace a Hampshire Grenadier,
Who caught his death by drinking cold small Beer,
Soldiers be wise from his untimely fall
And when ye’re hot drink Strong or none at all.

Previous blogs: A-antagonist

I’ve been having to cope with the older laptop which is temperamental and sticks on "shift" at annoying moments. (no,it’s not a crumb, i’ve taken the key completely off so it’s a loose wire or something)

Anyway, my new laptop cable arrived today so I’ll be back cooking on gas (as opposed to twigs) this evening. It might have been £15 cheaper to buy it online but it came from HK,so took 2 weeks!

Anyway, in the meantime, enjoy some "Goggies are our friends" pictures. Severus and Sasha are really good mates now and even play fight together, but they move too fast for me to capture them, so you have a couple of poses instead. Click on the pictures to see them bigger. You can also see Lili’s toes to the left.

In complete contrast to my Titanic Yawn of the other day– may I enthuse about a couple of TV series that has entirely gripped me and let me say right now that I don’t actually watch many contemporary shows, let alone contemporary crime dramas because I can get depressed any time I like reading the newspaper. But two are standing out for me right now, and it’s a crying shame that one of them won’t be continuing.

Those Who Kill has been on ITV3 for the past six weeks and it is absolutely brilliant. Granted, with the success of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo book and films there’s been a bit of a Scandinavian love-fest over here, but TWK really deserves more attention and more praise.  I haven’t been able to take my eyes off it (mainly because the dialogue is subtitled and so I had to concentrate every moment so I didn’t miss anything) other than the few times I had to close my eyes in case it got as gory as I feared it would. Basically it’s the story of a serial murder unit in Copenhagen who takes on a consultant psychiatrist to do the profiling to join the maverick female feisty cop as her partner. It sounds like a cliched plot line, but for some reason it doesn’t seem to follow the same conventions as many others.

Aside from bloody marvellous scriptwork, incredibly interesting and you’ll-never-guess plotlines (each one is like a movie in itself and even though I sort of knew that the main characters weren’t going to get killed off they still managed to rack the tension up to the max.) There’s one where Tomas (the shrink) goes and puts himself into a criminal gang without telling the team, because he’s the only one that won’t get recognised and I was literally glued to the screen, expecting one thing or the other to happen but it didn’t – what happened was a whole lot of Other Stuff. There’s much of the same in the last episode. You really think you know what’s going on and BAM it hits you from left field like a hunting velociraptor and you never saw it coming. And the end of the series. Well, just WOW. And the very end of it, too. Can say no more because you need to watch it. Seriously. It’s TV like this that really inspires me. I want to write something so gripping, something so surprising. I probably never will, not in the genre I’m in, I suppose, but I’d like to anyway.

The other show that I’m loving is the second series of Scott and Bailey – kind of a British Cagney and Makepeace. Although really , really, not.Again, it’s beautifully scripted – there’s none of the stupid “let’s discuss this case walking along a road, or down the corridor” stuff that Law and Order (and so many other shows do, stupidly) people are stuck to their desks and their desks are a MESS. Relationships get in the way—it’s NOT all about their love lives, although that does take up a portion of the plotline—and both women (and their tough-as-arseholes woman boss who I adore) are damned good coppers.

Highly recommended, both of them. If you can find them online for non-uk viewers, then do try and do so.

Next: a rant about things that authors do that I really really wish they didn’t.

I was very happy to see Mere Mortals reviewed for the second time by a different reviewer–and showcased on Lambda Literary’s “Book Lovers” column this week. It helped to salve a little of the disappointment of neither Mere Mortals nor Junction X getting shortlisted for the awards. I know I put on a brave face but I do hope, same as everyone else!

What I found interesting though, was the reviewer’s opinion of Philip Smallwood, and the difference in the light of the early part of the novel and the dark of the latter half. He says the reader is “blindsided” when Philip’s plans are uncovered.

(spoilers ahead) That was a very deliberate act—I wrote from the point of view of the most naive and ingenuous of the three young men. If I’d written it from Myles’s point of view, he would have sussed Philip out long before, and as for Jude—well Jude was embroiled early on, even though neither of the other two knew it. Crispin was the only viewpoint that would have worked; he had to have that optimistic and kind outlook, neither of which the other had.

I also found it interesting that the reviewer wanted more of a cathartic ending for Philip than what he had had, perhaps meaning that he could have done some good deed or something before dying—I’m hugely flattered that Philip resonated with the reviewer that well, and the kind things that he said about him—but, well, I tried to make it as realistic as I could—under the circumstances. A noble death of any kind would have been wrong – and as the reviewer says: “What he plans is too despicable for our pity”—I could do that for one of the other characters, but never for Philip.

In other news, I am suffering from what is possibly the mildest chest infection I’ve ever had. (So far at least!) usually I get a chest infection after a heavy cold but this time the cough came in all on its own. But it’s only really a problem when I change from the vertical to the horizontal so am very pleased it’s not turning me into Foul Ol’ Ron for a change!

Perhaps the nice weather has helped too! Although with rivers drying up and fish in trouble I hope we get the weather we deserve this time of year pretty soon.

And of course, with a petrol tankers strike on the horizon, the news services have started panic buying simply by saying “do not panic buy.” sigh. I hope I can get some tomorrow—the local garages’ supplies are sporadic at the best of times and if there’s none to be had, I could be stuck in the middle of nowhere.

from “I Knew Him”

He turned the radiance of that brilliant smile around to Stevie. “Stevie, do you want to come?”

“Oh, God no,” she said. “Don’t get me involved in your excursions.”

“Oh Stevie,” Margaret said. “You really should. You don’t get out half enough. And someone needs to keep them in check or the next thing we’ll hear of them is being thrown into some Italian jail or worse.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, all right. But only if I’m promised dinner at The Metropole. And I don’t have to go and look at any horses, or stamp sods back in place.”

“Divots,” I said with mock sternness. “The word is divots.”

“I know what the word is,” she said with a saccharine smile. Claude looked thunderous, but the exchange seemed to have passed Margaret by entirely.

Lifted from Alex Beecroft

Rules

1. Go to page 77 (or 7th) of your current ms
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they’re written. No cheating.
4. Tag 7 other authors. (I am not doing this – anyone who wants to do it can. Those who don’t want to don’t have to.)

I Knew Him (just for clarification, this isn’t an encounter between the couple with a relationship)

“You go to a local school?”

“I did. I came down last week. And no, I’m not going to Oxford, since you ask.”

“I don’t recall asking.” The man was impossible, I rarely feel like taking a man by the shoulders and shaking him, (in anger at least!) but two minutes in Lawrence’s company had that effect on me. Heaven knows I’d had years of putting up with unreasonableness, but Lawrence took not only the biscuit, but the barrel and all the cheese. “Sit down, at least,” I said. “You are blocking my sun.”

He hesitated, looked over towards the house, shuffled once or twice, which made me tempted to tell him not to bother. When he spoke, he still had an edge of defensiveness in his tone, but it was slightly metered, as if he’d finally realised how much of an arse he was being. “Not that I couldn’t. I matriculated pretty damn well, and Margaret said she’d pay the fees if I didn’t get a scholarship.”

“But you decided against it.”

For a moment the sulky look dropped away from his face and I wallowed in his beauty. His long face, the sweeping dark of his hair, this was not the face of a clerk or a draper. He pulled disconsolately at a patch of grass, uprooting it with a tearing sound. “Yes, well. It’s not just the fees is it?”

“No. Look, I understand. I’ve seen scholarship men coming in—and I can tell you you’ve probably made the right decision.”

March 19 will be the start of M/M Week at Carina Press, when Carina will release six m/m romances by Me, Kim Knox, Ava March, KC Burn, Dev Bentham, and Larry Benjamin. Many thanks to Carina Press for offering one lucky commenter the chance to win all six books!

Carina Press M/M Week Blog Tour

Starting March 19th, Carina Press will have an entire week of releases from some of today’s hottest authors in m/m romance, as well as some newcomers to the genre. In celebration of the first ever Carina Press M/M week, the authors are going on a blog tour. At each stop along the tour, you can enter to win an ebook bundle of all 6 book releases! Yes, that means six chances to win!

Blog Tour Schedule:
19th March – Dev Bentham at Fiction Vixen
19th March  – Ava March at The Macaronis
20th March – Larry Benjamin at Joyfully Jay
21st March – Kim Knox at Rarely Dusty Books
22 March- Erastes at The Macaronis
23 March- KC Burn at Babbling About Books, and More