JANE'S JOTTINGS

Late October 2007

 

 

Hello again everyone.

Coming today

NEWS NEWS NEWS!

 

Plus, an interview with up and coming author, Alex Beecroft

 

 

Time as usual has gotten away with me.  Here we are nearing November . Where has the year gone? Well I can tell you that.  It's gone to 3 book sales (the most recent this morning in fact!!…but more about that soon), plus edits, proofing, family, playing mum's taxi service and just surviving.

Now for the news!

 

HE'S THE ONE!

It's out.

It's drumming up a storm in reviews.

This was a beautiful love story that included all the necessary elements to make it close to perfect …read more Review-The Romance Studio  Overall rating: 5 cups!

 

 

Wedding consultant Taylor Sullivan is sensible, successful, and creates fantasies for a living. The fact that business is booming isn't enough. She wants to be the best and one thing is holding her back—her own lack of sexual experience. What Taylor needs

is a good teacher!

Enter bad boy Cade Harper. Cade is known for his talent in the bedroom and the long string of broken hearts that he's left behind. When Taylor approaches him with a simple business proposal he can't say no. In exchange for one night of no-strings-attached passion, she'll help him develop a promotional plan for his new business.

As things heat up between them and business turns into pleasure, the man who doesn't believe in lasting love, roses, and the white picket fence finds himself falling hard and fast. Weddings, love, and commitment are Taylor's business. Can she put her fears aside long enough to make her own fantasy come true? Maybe…if he's the one.

 

 

As you'll gather, I'm absolutely thrilled with the reviews.  Go check out HE'S THE ONE at Linden Bay Romance.

 

Also HIRING CUPID, my first Linden Bay release has been getting great reviews. 

 

Fallen Angel Reivew

Hiring Cupid by Jane Beckenham is one of the most entertaining books I've read recently. It is a delight, and I know I'll read it again in the near future, just to experience this love story again.

Reviewed by: Carly

            Fallen Angel Review – 5 Stars

            Recommended Read

 

 

AND ….(drum roll please…) announcing today! 

The contract of THE SHEIKH'S PROPOSAL

by www.redrosepublishing.com for their Desert Rose line.

 

Go, or lose her job. 

Callie Baxter has no choice, but then does her heart have a choice when forced to face her nemeses, the man she blames for her father's death and whom she is determined to destroy.  The man, who also tugs at her heart strings.  Her mind says one thing, her body another.

Home for Sheikh Tariq bin Ahmed al Sulamein is La isla Perfumada, an island paradise his family have ruled for 800 years. Callie's public tirade via her newspaper column is threatening to tear all he holds dear.

For Tariq, facing Callie is a fatal error.  She is the one woman who could change his future, force him from his protective world, and make him place his needs above those of his country.  But Tariq is determined to control the game and play it his way, and not lose his country, or his heart. 

But is there really any choice when the heart is involved? Can paradise seduce estranged hearts?

 

 

 

 

INTERVIEW WITH ALEX BEECROFT.

Alex Beecroft got lucky this year, but then she got lucky a long time ago, probably at birth when the writing genie decided Alex deserved the writing gene and gave her a good dollop of it.  Fast forward a few years and Alex, now married and with the responsibility of children decided to take on another challenge.  Actually submitting her writing.  It's a hard ask of any writer.

 

Alex: Tell us what lead to this leap of faith?

 

Oh it's a story full of so many co-incidences I wouldn't believe it if it hadn't happened to me.  I'd been writing m/m fiction for my own amusement for a long time, with no idea that there was a market for it out there, when one of my friends on Live Journal mentioned this great book she'd read, called `Ransom' by Lee Rowan.  As an Age of Sail m/m romance, this was like finding gold at the back of my garden!  So I bought the book, and devoured it, and later Lee herself dropped by at my friend's LJ to say thank you for such a nice review.  She and I got talking, and I mentioned I wrote similar stuff myself, whereupon she said `oh, my publisher is running a competition to see who it will publish next.  Why don't you try submitting your stuff there?'

 

I didn't actually have a book at that point!  Just a series of connected short stories, and a month to go before the deadline.  But – I think because I'd never realized there were actually people out there who would publish m/m – I thought this was my best chance ever.  So I sat up `til about 1am every day for a month writing the connecting sequences for the stories and turning them into a book.  And I submitted it exactly one day before the competition ended.

 

I really did not expect to win!  I still find that absolutely unbelievable J

 

 

Your book Captain's Surrender is different in two areas.  Firstly it's a romance with male/male characters. Did you find it difficult writing this genre, and the question I'm sure lots of readers want me to ask (tsk) is that what research did you do?

 

No, I find that m/m is what comes naturally to me.  It's just the way my mind works and has done since puberty.  Watching TV or movies I always paired up the hero and sidekick, and my own stories have always revolved around m/m love, even if I sometimes disguised the fact because I thought it wouldn't sell.

 

I'm not sure that I've done much research – I firmly believe that my characters are people first, and gendered later.  I approach them as individuals and rarely assign them traits just because of their sex.  (Though how their traits express themselves can be different depending on gender).  Sex-scene wise, I have watched gay porn and read some illustrated articles by gay men specifically written as guides for m/m writers who haven't the equipment to experiment themselves - just to make sure I wasn't writing anything that was physically impossible.  But I tend to be focused more on what the characters are feeling during sex, rather than a technical `insert tab A in slot B' view, and that again is very much more a function of the character than of the gender, I think.

 

 

Also it's set in the era of sailing ships.  Was there any specific research you did, or visit any locations in England where you live?

 

Oh now here I did do lots of research!  My absolute top book recommendations for anyone interested in the Royal Navy are `The Wooden World' by N.A.M Rodgers, and `Trafalgar: The Making of an English Hero' by Adam Nicholson.  But those two are only the tip of the main-mast.  I read every book I could get about the Navy, and 18^th Century British society.  An excellent resource about the gay subculture in the 18^th Century  is this website: http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/eighteen.htm

I scoured the internet for information about the history, politics and personalities of the time.  A lot was going on in 1779!  And for real hands on experience of what it was like being inside an 18^th Century ship of the line, I visited HMS Victory several times in Portsmouth and chatted with the historical re-enactors of the Historical Maritime Society: http://www.hms.org.uk/hmshome.htm

 

None of which was a hardship, as I love this period in history.  It's such an amazing mixture of archaic and modern in a way that no other century is.

 

 

Your other work is fantasy?  Tell us a bit about this, and how easy or difficult it is for you to switch between genres.

 

The Witch's Boy is set in a country very like early Norman England, but where magic exists.  This is the blurb:

Are the sins of the fathers really visited upon the sons? And is there no way of breaking that cycle? Is evil doomed always to repeat itself, ruining everything good through its tainted seed?

These are not the questions young Oswy is asking himself when he is sold to the witch-Lord Sulien FitzGuimar - he's too busy wondering 'why me?!' They are, however, the questions which plague Sulien himself. Locked in a struggle for freedom, sanity, the very survival of his soul, Sulien must daily battle not only angels and demons, but the core of evil in his own heart.

When the King's vile sorcerer stages a coup, dragging ancient magic, the elves, and the royal court into his Empire-building plans, the woman he has set his sights on as a bride - timid, aspiring nun, Adela - sets out to find someone to oppose him. It's just unfortunate that the only candidates are cowardly Oswy, Adela herself and Sulien - who, deep in his heart, wants to surrender and join him.

When the hope of redemption is balanced against the lure of revenge, which will prove stronger, flawed good or perfect evil?

Because I love exotic settings, where everything is strange and wonderful, I don't really have a lot of difficulty in switching from one strange world to another.  The past feels to me just as alien – and therefore fascinating - as anything in Fantasy or Science Fiction. I think I would have an enormous problem writing something contemporary though!

 

As a newbie to the publishing world, what things have you found easy, or difficult?

 

I'm so impatient!  I don't think I'd appreciated how long it takes to publish a book, and I just want to hold mine in my hand now.  But also, I'm finding the marketing very difficult.  I'm an introvert who would rather shut myself in a room with a computer than talk to people, let alone try to sell things to them.  I can see that selling the book is very important, and I'm trying to do networking and socializing and chats etc, but it doesn't come naturally.

 

On the other hand, setting up my website was quite easy and fun, because I enjoy html coding and making graphics (more introverted activities), and that was a good excuse to do so.

 

I also find coming up with titles incredibly hard, but there I have to thank Lori of Linden Bay Publishing, who came up with `Captain's Surrender' to replace the bland `A Sea Change'.

 

Of the two worlds you write about, the fantasy and the olden day world of ships etc, which would you prefer to live in and why?

 

Definitely the 18^th Century!  I'd have to be fairly well off though.  But in the 18^th Century you've already got novels and newspapers, coffee and chocolate.  New parts of the world are being discovered every day, nothing seems impossible, and while you do have to worry about the French invading, at least if they threaten to turn you into Frogs it will only be figuratively!

 

What is the one character trait you try to bring to your characters?

 

That's a tricky one.  Honesty, I suppose.  Although they can be mistaken about what they feel, or misunderstand what's going on in their heads, I rarely write people who are deliberate hypocrites.

 

How do you prefer for a novel, plotter, or pantser?

 

A little bit of both.  I tend to fly on inspiration, making it up as I go along, until around Chapter 5.  By that time I'll have enough of an idea of what's going to happen in the rest of the novel that I will then sit down and plot the rest of it out.  Then I'll stick to that plot.  It stops me from getting too bogged down at the beginning, and also from wandering off track at the end.

 

Would you like to sit at dining table with your characters? What questions would you ask them?

 

I'd certainly like Peter and Josh of `Captain's Surrender' to come round for dinner.  Peter would bring flowers, Josh would bring wine, and they'd both be perfect gentlemen.  But then the traditions of the Navy require its Captains to be good hosts and to keep the conversation and the wine flowing.  I think I'd ask them `so what are you going to do now?' because there are still some nasty rumors floating around about them, and I worry that they might come home to roost.

 

I don't think I would like Sulien FitzGuimar in my house.  I admire his attempts to rehabilitate himself, but my goodness, the man is a dangerous nutter!  Even if he brought Leofwine and Edith with him, to keep him on his best behavior, I don't think I'd dare.

 

Tell us a bit about your current WIP, and what plans you have for your writing career?

 

Well, I have a couple of novels in the pipeline at the moment.  The first is a Space Opera; it's based on the idea that a bloke from Earth finally gets into outer space, only to find that all those 17^th Century witches and wizards got there before him.  The galaxy spanning civilization he finds out there (and the man he falls in love with) belong to a culture based on magic rather than science.  It regards science as its enemy and Earth as a threat.  But it is also a civilization on the brink of collapse because for three centuries they've been fighting a terrible enemy that just keeps coming and coming, seeming invincible.

 

I hope to get this one finished by December.

 

I'm also working on another Age of Sail m/m romance, featuring the Barbary Corsairs – pirates and white slave traders of the Ottoman Empire – and I'm hoping to have that one done by next spring.

 

Career wise, I just want to keep writing.  If I can only keep telling stories which people want to read, that's the epitome of my ambition.

 

My website: http://www.alexbeecroft.com is the place to come if you want to know more.

 

 Thanks to Alex for taking the time to answer some questions.  Readers, go check out her site!

 

 

So that's my news. 

Hope you're all well, and happy and living life to the full.  Remember, grab it with both hands, hold on tight for the ride. 

 

Happy reading and writing

 

Regards

Jane Beckenham

www.janebeckenham.com (and don't smack my hands coz my web site is a tad behind! Yes I know, time, and technology just don't go hand in hand)