Part Three has just gone off to my dear, reliable First Reader on the other side of the world, at a fraction over 11,000 words, bringing the thing as a whole to roughly 30,000 at the moment.  I'm expecting to do at least another 9,000 for Part Four and can't see how it can be any less than about 11-12,000 in reality, then go back and insert some scenes in earlier sections which I had debated about and eventually left out.  So we're looking at maybe 45,000 words altogether, to be uploaded to the website in September once the whole beta/edit process is complete.

- - - - -

Meanwhile, I have been discovering Lewis/Hathaway.  They are not going to be a high priority for writing since I have these other two so firmly lodged in my head.  [I have just succeeded in surviving the 1982 RSC 'Nicholas Nickleby' in which the child Ravenscroft is sporting a red wig and a very cod Welsh accent.]  However it is a delightful area of fan-fiction to explore and has served to reunite me with an old friend I had lost touch with a long time ago, so I am seeing the benefits already.

Kings, however, take precedence.  That's just the way it is.

At some stage during the past couple of days Hearts'-ease passed the 25,000 word mark.  I am not sure exactly how much there is of it at the moment but I've just done a mediaeval Christmas which was great fun.  I'm expecting this thing to top out round about the 35-38,000 word mark, although it could well be more.  We're looking at a total of 60-80 pages here.  Part Three will be going off to my friendly neighbourhood reader round about Thursday or Friday, fingers crossed.

I've given up cataloguing the crossed time-streams I'm encountering whilst pursuing Messrs. Branagh and Ravenscroft through their respective filmic careers, but today's treat has been the RSC 1982 Nicholas Nickleby in which I was delighted to renew my acquaintance with the wonderful song "England Arise!" which also features in the West Wing episode 'Posse Comitatus'.  (Can we all say 'Roger Rees', kiddies?)  Lyrics - not mine, of course - below, but the effect of seeing this sung by a choir comprising John Woodvine, Alun Armstrong, David Lloyd Meredith, Teddy Kempner, Griffith Jones, Roger Rees, David Threlfall, Christopher Benjamin, Suzanne Bertish, Ian MacNeice, Edward Petherbridge and the aforementioned Ravenscroft (to name but a few) can better be imagined than described.  A cheap and totally legal high!

- - - - -

England arise! Join in the chorus!
It is a new made song you should be singing.
See in the skies, flutt'ring before us
what the bright bird of peace is bringing!
See upon our smiling land
where the wealths of nations stand
where prosperity and industry walk
ever hand in hand.
Where so many blessings crowd,
'tis our duty to be proud.
Up and answer, English Yeoman,
sing it joyfully aloud.
Evermore upon our country
God will pour his rich increase,
And victorious in war shall be made glorious in peace,
And victorious in war shall be made glorious in peace.

See each one do what he can to further God's almighty plan.
The benificence of heaven help the skilfulness of man.
Ev'ry garner fill'd with grain, Ev'ry meadow blest with rain:
Rich and fertile is the golden corn that bear and bears again.

Where so many blessings crowd,
'Tis our duty to be proud.
Up and answer, fellow Britons,
sing it joyfully aloud.

Evermore upon our country
God will pour his rich increase
And victorious in war shall be made glorious in peace,
And victorious in war shall be made glorious in peace.

Just got back from the supermarket.  I was only out an hour, and I had to keep stopping and dragging the notebook out of my handbag to write down snatches of dialogue.  It's been years since anything like that has happened to me.  In fact, probably the entire fifteen years I've been on what turned out to be totally unnecessary and paralysingly brain-numbing medicine.

Mind you, I'm on a high after getting up at 4 a.m. and watching Peter's Friends.  Why has this film never been part of my life before?

I've been asked to 'teach' a couple of people to beta, and I decided that the best approach was to write down my understanding of the role. Anyone on my f-list who either writes or betas, I would very much appreciate your comments. Have I left anything out?

- - - - -

Probably everybody who writes has their own idea about what a beta does, or should do. The following is what I need from a beta reader and how I see the relationship working.

1. First and foremost, ask awkward questions. "How did they get from A to B so quickly?" "Why didn’t he take his gun?" "How did X find out about Y?" It may be something I haven’t explained properly.
2. Don’t let me embarrass myself. Have I used a word incorrectly? Have I muddled up two minor characters? Does the sun rise in the west and set in the east? Don’t assume it's deliberate; it may not be!
3. Think about the plot. Does it make sense? Are the loose ends tied up, and if not does it matter? Is it coherent? Does it work?
4. Are the characters (a) internally consistent and (b) consistent with their originals, if you know them? Do they sound like the people they're supposed to be, or hormonal teenagers from the wrong side of the tracks?
5. Is it clear what's happening and why? Have my prepositions wound themselves in knots, are the pronouns appropriate, can you follow who is doing what, to whom, with what, upon what, and when?
6. What about the pacing? Does it race like a train at times and slow to a dawdle at others? That may in fact be a good thing in some cases, but if it doesn’t seem right I want to know about it!
7. Register; I can veer wildly between colloquial and pompous. Have I held it in more or less the same register/voice throughout, and is the register appropriate for the story?
8. Grammar, spelling and punctuation are a low priority as the spell-checker catches most of the real howlers. It won't, however, spot a mistake which is also a proper word - 'gold' for 'golf', 'orison' for 'Orsino' - so please grab those as they go past! Missing punctuation - probably due to sections having been deleted - may be a problem. Sometimes whole words escape this way, too.
9. It is not essential to say something nice. This is not a fishing expedition for compliments. Of course I'm delighted if you like it, but the object of the exercise is to make this the best piece of work it can possibly be. Feel free to push me to my limits, to nit-pick, to send me back to my sources to check things - anything that in your opinion is going to strengthen the story.
10. I would not be asking you to do this unless I trusted your judgement. No apologies or excuses are necessary, and if you don’t like either the story or something that happens in it I hope you'll tell me. I might ask you to explain, but I will not refuse to listen.
11. I don’t guarantee to accept all your suggestions but I do promise to consider them. Nothing you can say is wrong and unless you are setting out to be unpleasant (which I doubt) it's very unlikely that you will offend me. In return, I will not be asking you to handle any piece of work which I know is likely to be offensive to you. If I do so by mistake, I hope you'll give me the chance to remedy the situation.
12. I will not forget that you are doing this out of the kindness of your heart, and I will try very hard not to give you an implacable deadline. Again, if I ask more of you than you feel able to give, I trust you will tell me so.

- - - - -

If anyone has anything to add to or subtract from this, I'd be very grateful to hear from them.

My grandson passed his 'brown belt with white stripe' at karate this week. He can only take one belt a year now since his original instructor committed suicide and doesn't turn up for meetings as often as he used to. So this is cause for rejoicing in the household. OTOH they are still waiting for news of their new home and the expected baby is getting imminenter and imminenter.

- - -

My mother OTOH is slipping further from reality with every day that passes. Apparently she is very annoyed with me because I've been 'playing loudly and annoying the neighbours'. A quick calculation from other things she said shows that she seems to have slipped back about 45 years - or, alternatively, forward six, because the last time she committed herself to the date she thought it was 1958. I'm sure I was annoying in 1964, but I don't think I ever played loudly enough to annoy the neighbours. I wouldn't have been allowed to.

- - -

And then there's this.



Mr Second-From-The-Left, 38 years old, thin as a rail, shoulders to die for and boots up to his ears ... not to mention short hair and chain mail. Solely responsible for climate change on two continents. The RSC own the picture; I'm just sharing it.

Oh, and in keeping with the theme of this post, he was being Catherine of Valois's grandson at the time - i.e. Henry VII. Keeping all these Henries straight is ... not going to happen.

1. A 6 ft Christmas tree
2. A full size bicycle (without taking it apart)
3. A water butt and stand

Not all at once, of course. If you try the first, be aware that you will still be finding bits of it ten years later. BH has just demonstrated the accuracy of the third.

Things you can't get in a Mini:

1. Radio Five
2. Heating
3. Comfortable

WE've had ours about seventeen years now. Where does the time go?

Another giant topples. He was 97, which I assume would have made him the oldest surviving acting Oscar winner. I mention this because the other day someone said on the radio that Ernest Borgnine was the oldest Oscar winner, yet he is only (!!!) 92. And still working, apparently. Maybe this has to do with the understandable fudging of birth dates by these guys earlier in their careers. Either way, the longevity of some senior actors never ceases to amaze; Mickey Rooney is still touring.

[Edited to replace missing punctuation, because it made me cross.]

I remember complaining a long time ago about a Harry Potter story in which which Snape 'was really' a fourteen year old Japanese schoolgirl with glossy black hair down to her knees. Now, in one of the groups I belong to, someone has apparently rendered Bertie Wooster the same way in a piece of artwork.

Middle-aged English men turning into teenage Japanese girls.

I know fandom is all about pushing the envelope and taking the courageous decisions and trying to convince people of the impossible, but I don't even know where to start with this one. If 'teenage Japanese girl' is what's required, why the hell would you start with either Alan Rickman or Hugh Laurie? I adore them both, but 'pretty', 'teenaged', 'female' and 'Japanese' are qualities in which they are both unaccountably deficient.

Silk purses from sows' ears would therefore be considerably easier.

- - - - -

IFAC department: 'Hearts'-ease' is crawling towards the 20,000 word mark but is probably only about half complete. The Generic Gay Actors now have a title and are busy dictating into a notebook. The Wallander thing has developed a plot of sorts - remarkably similar to one of my old Perfect Scoundrels stories but I'm not proud. I haven't been 'smit' to this extent since the never-to-be-forgotten day in 1996 when I acquired the Baritone (who, incidentally, I have bequeathed to a certain ex-friend and her crony because they believe they are more suitable fans for him). With the words pouring out of me like ... aces out of Andy Murray ... I'm just going to concentrate on being grateful.

Wandering round some old links yesterday looking for new slash to read, I found a Recs website which had recced no less than five of my stories as well as a story by someone else hosted on my site. For the most part, too, she was very nice about them - one she said was 'nothing special' but she liked it anyway, in one she had some specific comments about the way the relationship was handled, another didn't have enough sex. Guilty as charged on the last, certainly (perfectly happy to accept the other two comments too). But I don't write a lot of graphic sex. Never did, much. Somehow it just doesn't seem necessary. I'm more interested in the romance than the plumbing; what the guys get up to in bed is their business.

Someone said to me recently (and I paraphrase) that people these days are interested in the promotion rather than the product. I'm not all that keen on going out and selling my work; I'd rather just write it and make it available for people to read. Time spent on publicising stuff is, to me, time spent not writing. Maybe I should make more of a noise about my stories, I don't know, but it's just not in my nature. Surely writing good fiction should be enough in itself? God knows there's plenty of crap out there, you'd think well-written things would make their own friends.

This is why I'm never going to be JK Rowling. (It's one of many reasons, actually.)

Anyway, it was nice to have been thought so highly of. Must try to deserve it, one of these days.

If there is one person or more on your friends list who makes your world a better place just because they exist and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the Internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.



hyarrowen, I'm looking at you ...

So I'm up to my proverbials in my Henry V story, currently writing two different sections that don't fit together - today's haul, about 2,000 words in total. Making notes for something called the Generic Gay Actors which you'd better believe has two people in it who look remarkably similar to the other two. Spent yesterday listening to KB's Radio Three Hamlet featuring the eldest Guildenstern in the history of history and what do I do today for an encore? Pull out the bloody Atlas, locate Ystad, and start writing Wallander, that's what. This Swedish plot bunny has been hippity-hopping about in my brain for months and it chooses today, of all days, to make its presence felt.

The only way to escape from this is by watching Naveen Andrews sweat. I have finally started on Series Five of Lost and I must say Hurley's mother's line cracked me up.

"Why there is a dead Pakistani on my couch?"

That's okay, Mrs Reyes, he can come and die on my couch any time he likes.

Unless Kenny's staying over, of course.

So, I've joined the rest of the human race at last. Really, for all this time, dial-up has been so much cheaper that it was worth putting up with the inconvenience. Now, however, we've bitten the bullet. The speed at which this thing moves is enough to astonish me, but I have no doubt that in a week or two I'll be complaining about how slow it is. That's the way the cookie crumbles.

- - - - -

Bought a copy of KB's radio Hamlet off e-Bay and it arrived over the weekend. There was much eager anticipation as the Ravenscroft is also in the cast. Knowing he had played Rosencrantz in the stage version, and thinking he would be a wonderful Horatio, my first question when the thing arrived was which role he had this time. The answer, to my astonishment, turns out to be Guildenstern. I'm still trying to process that.

- - - - -

Trying to buy a stereo cassette deck on e-Bay, we seem to have fallen foul of shill bidding. I can't take seriously a last-minute bid, ten seconds before the closing time, which puts the price up by 60% - especially when it is only the second bid on the item. It's annoying because it looked like a good deal, but I'm not in the mood to be cheated today - even of only a couple of quid. My mother didn't raise any stupid children. Mean-spirited and avaricious, yes; stupid, no.

- - - - -

Anyone interested in Hearts'-ease, my Henry V slash epic, will probably want to know that Part One got a moderately clean bill of health subject to rewrites and Part Two is going like the proverbial. Part Two is classic fannish stuff - 'my partner is injured'. Gotta love those old tropes, they still work like a charm. Even, it seems, for kings.

Being a sad individual, this is what I did with my day.




Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

My 'mediaeval gay marriage' book turned up today. I bought a hardback because it was the cheapest copy listed online and thought I would be getting an ex-library copy or something. No. It showed up with its original price label from 1994 still on the dustjacket. This wonderful volume has been sitting around on bookshop shelves for fifteen years. Presumably at some stage it was weeded out and passed on to a discounter and I got it in only very slightly less than perfect condition. For under $8/£5, including postage from the USA. I don't know whether to be thrilled at getting such a bargain or deeply depressed that it's taken fifteen years to find the poor thing a loving home.

- - - - -

Mousing around this morning I encountered the BBC's confirmation that a second series of Wallander will be filmed in the late summer/autumn of this year, to fit in with KB's schedule. The books to be filmed are apparently 'Faceless Killers', 'The Fifth Woman' and 'The Man Who Smiled'. There is a new Wallander novel out this year, too, which will definitely be the last, which suggests that there will be two or possibly three more episodes to come at the end of 2010. KB is contracted to do nine 90-minute films. The websites I've been reading suggest that two of the original books are considered 'unfilmable', so I can't see how they can make up the full quota without also filming the Linda Wallander book. This is not a subject I know a lot about but I merely pass on the gleanings of an idle half-hour.

Terence Alexander, the wonderful Charlie Hungerford, has died aged 86.

This is happening rather too often at the moment.

The people who read TALL, DARK AND HANDSOME before it went up on the website were:

1. Me (obsessively)
2. Evil enabler, who did a sterling beta job and really put me through my paces
3. Bezzy Mate
4. Hyarrowen, who made a very important point which I had missed
5. Sidhe-woman, who spotted an ugly mixed metaphor

However after two or three weeks of the thing being up online my friend in the USA has just got back to me - it took her a month to read it - having spotted two typos that everybody else missed.

I'm not saying that the previous proof-readers failed; I'm saying that everybody brings their own expertise to the process and we all notice different things. That's exactly how it's supposed to work and I can't express my gratitude to all these people sufficiently.

I do understand why some people are nervous of the beta process; you need a good beta, not someone with an axe to grind about the characters. You need someone with a good level of written English, who is prepared to read objectively and not afraid to comment. To find one person who fits this description is felicity enough; to have found five feels something like a miracle.

I have just re-uploaded TDH with the corrections, and apart from a little waywardness over the capitalisation of 'pa/Pa' (my fault entirely, but frankly I haven;t got the energy to sort it out) I am satisfied that it is now about as good as it can possibly be. Hooray!

Have you ever discovered a writer who writes in lots of lovely universes that haven't had enough attention and does it really, really, really badly? I've just found one who writes Raffles/Bunny and Neil Burnside/Willie Caine with such utter lack of attention to the beloved originals that I just want to nuke her out of existence.

I hate her with hate like a hating thing.

I'm going out to buy ice-cream. I may be some time.

The date did a slow burn on me. I have only just realised that thirty-five years ago today I got married. Of course, I promptly got un-married again twelve years later.

How do you celebrate the anniversary of your life's profoundest error?

With slash and a left-over half bottle of wine, I suppose. And there may be tennis on the telly.

Just for the record, I'm very happy where I am.

I was just mousing around and found where someone had written Elijah Wood/David Beckham slash.

Seriously.

It makes some of the things I do seem almost normal.

Thank goodness.