Someone asked me on twitter about an antiquated French word and there was a short discussion (after all it is Twitter) about whether people liked foreign words inserted into a book to “give a flavour” and remind people that the people are actually speaking a foreign language, even though the book is written in English.

What do you think about that?

Personally it irritates the hell out of me. The only way I think it works is when the object described is alien to western eyes, and there’s no translation for it. Like “obi” for example (traditional sash) or other Japanese words. As long as the explanation is given gently in context, then that word becomes the staple word for that thing.

However, what I CAN’T STAND to the extent I want to stabbity stabbity is when a person’s speech is peppered with the words of the language he’s speaking. E.g (not from anything) “Ah, bien, Louis, you are here, we must hurry to save La Reine, vite!”

I mean, the book is set in France. We are reading them in English because it’s a novel. They are speaking French. So why are they speaking double-French? Or double Spanish, or double whatever language they are “really” speaking…

The only exception to this, to my mind would be if all the characters were speaking another language apart from their own and they interspersed their sentences with words from their language. Poirot is a good example of this: “Tiens, Hastings! I have been stupid! Je suis un imbecile! Nom de Nom!”

But what do you think? Do tell!

In other news - I’m pretty anaemic, despite scarfing down iron pills—prescription strength—for a couple of days. I wish there was some way to tell in advance when this was going to happen so I could get ironed up in advance. I do take normal iron pills every day, but the super-strength ones help me get back to normal. I’m tired, gasping for air—even talking—and want to go to bed. I think that I’ll do dad’s lunch and then go home. It just makes me completely “meh” about everything. I open a word file and I just get tired looking at it. Can’t concentrate on a tv programme, can’t concentrate to read a book. I hate it.

I’ve just discovered that there’s a fucking TREATMENT for Menorrhagia: It’s called Endometrial Oblation (which sounds like something out of Philip Pulman) and it involves burning away the lining of the womb, permanently. Can’t be done at childbearing age, for obvious reasons, but why the fuck hasn’t my doctor suggested it? It can be done in outpatients for Christ's sake. Oh, I know why. Because he’s a MAN and he can’t BELIEVE that my periods are anywhere near as ghastly as I make them out to be. Yeah, that’s right. We treat our periods in the same way that men treat fishing stories.

I’ll be having a word with my doctor next week…

It’s hot. 28 degrees today, 34 yesterday and so I’m in a ranty mood. (More especially as as soon as I arrived at Dad’s I got pounced on by the owners of the house next door who are trying to sell the bungalow who accused Dad of throwing teabags up against the windows there. There’s no point trying to have that conversation with Dad, whether it’s true or not.

Anyway. THE ARCHERS.

We have an established gay couple in the show, but no lesbians that I can recall – it’s a comfortable gay relationship, accepted by simply everyone and they are married and until recently very happily settled.

However, something came out of left field this week, that has made me wave my Bisexual button with a vengeance. Harry has been in the show a while, and hasn’t really had any role to play other than getting a job as a milkman and competing for all the local girls with his flatmate. He has been shown as positively aggressively heterosexual, and even followed one of the Polish temporary workers back to Poland before coming home empty handed.

This week, he’d gone on holiday with Fallon (the young woman whose mother owns the pub, keep up do) and Jazzer and today I found out he never made it back because he’d met up with an old flame and they have trotted off into the sunset. And the old flame was a man.

It was SO FUCKING LAME. And hugely git-like on the behalf of the writers, because they probably thought “oh, how can we write Harry out of the show and give him an interesting end, as his life in Ambridge has been so tedious up to now?” and so they gave us this.. duhn duhn duhn…. disappearance to spice it all up and to give the residents of Ambridge something to talk about for another five minutes. They seem to have gone all coy in their language recently as the dialogue was much like this:

“You mean to say that…”

“What?”

“Well, you know… he’s…”

“Yes, exactly.”

“But he was all over that Polish girl!”

The conversation then goes on to say how the “Polish girl” had never been right for him and how lovely it was he had found his true love.

Not a MENTION of his obvious bisexuality. Once again the red-headed stepchild of the GL(B)T “family” (although it is very like a family, the Simpsons, the Borgias, the Corleones…) is invisible and sitting in a corner Not Being Named. It was a cop-out and although there was a massive opportunity to raise the awareness of bisexuality, the writers just went with “oh, he was gay all along.”

Pah.

Pah, I say. And double Pah.

And also: Speak its Name is running their interview spot again, thanks to the lovely Elin Gregory who is mirroring her Comfy Chair posts there. If you want a spot, slip either me or Elin an email. however, authors, I would be grateful if you were 1. at least a little familiar with the blog before applying and 2. Don’t start preaching to me me on the policy of the site and saying how limiting it is. There are plenty of other places that do interviews, but at Speak Its Name we do gay historicals. That’s all.

Had a horrible temperature last night of about 102  (all gone now, these things only last about 12 hours) and my mind was amusing me as I tossed and turned by giving me re-runs of The Big Bang Theory. Suddenly I thought “This is stupid, I don’t want to watch ones I’ve seen before, I’m a writer, invent some new episodes!” So my mind obliged and promptly had Haroun and Tanweer (the gay indian couple mentioned in The Grasshopper Experiment) who came to stay on holiday with Leonard and Sheldon – and Leonard was talking to Haroun about their relationship, and Haroun said “oh, we have an open relationship – but Tanweer doesn’t know that, of course.” I spent the rest of the horrible night worrying about Tanweer!

Stupid brain.

Firstly, I think publishers underuse the promotional capability of ebooks, but that’s up to them. It seems an ideal place to link to books and videos and goodness knows what, it surprises me how many don’t.

Secondly, I get sick and tired of chapters not being put at the beginning of an ebook, and if they are – they aren’t LINKED – what’s with that?  Who wants to hit “page forward” sixty times, looking for the last place you were at, or if you want to read a particular chapter again?

Thirdly, PUBLISHERS. PLEASE PUT YOUR PROMO NEWSLETTERS and letters of thanks and letters regarding piracy and gawd knows what fucking else AT THE END OF THE BOOK. The amount of persiflage I have to get through to find the start of books sometimes reminds me of this wonderful Danny Kaye moment.

As you may know, I’ve been trying to get Standish into ebook form for some time, and I’ve been having discussions about PD Publishing regarding this. We’ve decided—on a purely mutual agreement—that the rights will now revert to me, for all formats.

I’m really excited because Lethe Press have made me an offer for it, which I’ve accepted and I’ll be able to rework the book completely, give it a much-needed overhaul (particularly in relation to the POV switches *grin*) and take out the major mistake that must not be named. Then I’ll get a spiffy new cover, a relaunch and it’ll finally be available not only as a pretty paperback, but also as an ebook. There was an illustrator interested at some point, but she never followed through. *sadness*

I know that SOME PEOPLE have probably already got an e-version of Standish on their readers and smack wrist if you have, as it wasn’t ever available in that form!

Just a word about PD Publishing, in case people think I left them for any acrimonious reasons, I absolutely had no problem with them. They have never missed a royalty payment, their statements have always been spot on, and I’ve always found them to be prompt in replying, courteous and professional.  It was a ten year contract, and in this fast moving world, within the m/m genre, that’s a bit too long. It’s been out in print with PD for six years now, so it had a good run. The cover (although I shall always be fond of it, and it’s sort of iconic for me) looks a bit old, and as I said, the book badly needs a rewrite.

So! Watch this space! I need to get reversion letters signed, and new contracts signed and I’ll let you know when you can expect the Lethe version to be out. I’m really excited about it. 

The opening ceremony for the Olympics was Just AMAZING. Boyle was right that he could never deliver the kind of WOW that China did, that was something else entirely, but what Boyle did was to garner all the best and the worst of the British, going from an agricultural feudal society to Dark Satanic Mills (in spectacular fashion, sort of like going from Hobbiton to Isengard in five minutes), and a sense of FUN (the Queen even had an acting cameo with James Bond) and a very broad sense of Humour. The highlight for me was Mr Bean playing the one note in the Chariot of Fire theme, and dropping into a doze to dream of those hunky runners on the beach.

But there were so many great moments. I was dreading it, to be honest, because our segment at the closing ceremony of the Beijing games was buttock curlingly embarrassing, and I thought it might all be like that, but somehow it encapsulated so very much that was great about England, and some of the Not So Great. One error though, they had a section on children’s literature and The Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang—although invented by Roald Dahl—was NOT in Ian Fleming’s book, he was purely a film creation.

I wish I’d been there, but I’m sure I got a better view from my sofa. If you haven’t seen it—then it’s really worth watching.

As for Noble Publishing—the temptation to call them Ig-Noble is quite strong. within the newly formed authors group we have a mole, one of the authors who feels that she is loyal to Noble. She (for ease, could be male for all I know) is passing all the emails from the group up to Jill and/or Jill’s daughter Natasha Noble/Lopez and said Natasha, who styles herself as and “executive assistant” has been emailing some of the authors personally and haranguing them and threatening them with legal actions. I have no idea if this is with Jim Noble’s or Jill Noble’s permission. I won’t say “without their knowledge” because they’d have to have their heads stuck up their bums not to have noticed the broo-ha ha going on, as more and more people post about it.

However, the latest in the saga is that Natasha states that “royalties will be paid” and that Jim is unlikely to return anyone’s rights.  And there will be a statement sometime today. Considering we were promised a statement on Friday, I admit to not taking this terribly seriously. However, we will see.

I’m just glad I’m only in with them for one novella, and not 8 or 12 like some of the authors. More news when I have it.

Read out today by Denise Lewis because of the Olympics, but I think it works for all things, and particularly writing. Particularly the bit about “You’ve got to think high to rise.”

If you think you are beaten, you are
If you think you dare not, you don't,
If you like to win, but you think you can't
It is almost certain you won't.

If you think you'll lose, you're lost
For out of the world we find,
Success begins with a fellow's will
It's all in the state of mind.

If you think you are outclassed, you are
You've got to think high to rise,
You've got to be sure of yourself before
You can ever win a prize.

Life's battles don't always go
To the stronger or faster man,
But soon or late the man who wins
Is the man WHO THINKS HE CAN!

(from something that doesn’t exist at the moment)

Sam has just made love to a boy on the beach. A golden, long, and languid boy with lazy lips and hair curled to his shoulders; too long hair, ending in golden tips. A sand-dusted boy, warm to the touch, as though he’d been buried in white sand for a thousand years and had been delicately brushed and uncovered by experts.

Not a boy at all, though. Sam was a boy at that age, elbows, knees and unable to string a sentence together. This was a young man, man enough to smile, man enough to know what he wanted, man enough to pat the sand beside him; and to smile, smile.

So, I Knew Him is finished, bar the tidying up—I should be sending it off to the agent tomorrow with luck, or the weekend, anyway. And I’m sort of on the horns of a dilemma as to what to write next. (Those of you who have spotted this post for a big fat lump of procrastination, well done.)

You see, I like writing for Carina; the editing is fabulous—Deb Nemeth “gets me” and she pushes hard to make me better. But I’ve been staggeringly disappointed in the sales. What baffles me is that my two books with Carina have done markedly less well than Frost Fair & Speak Its Name with the smallest of publishers. In fact, the latest royalties for FF and SIN for JUST THE EBOOK SALES with Bristlecone (Bristlecone handled the ebooks, whilst Cheyenne pubbed the paper) were twice as high as with Carina. And that’s pretty thought-provoking. Of course Carina’s royalty rate is very low, but I think I thought that it would have much higher sales, so it would even out. Wrong.

I’m sure there are people making good money at Carina, but I suspect they are mostly writers of het.

No, of course I’m not in it just for the money (I’d be mad if I was, seeing as how little I actually make) but money has to be a factor. I rely on royalties to help pay the bills, because my Carer’s allowance only covers the mortgage. I can’t go spending six months of my life and writing something like Tributary (which personally I think was one of my best) only to find, as I have with that book, that it’s making about a dollar a month. Literally – the royalty for the Last Gasp anthology was FOUR DOLLARS AND EIGHTY FOUR CENTS and that’s between four of us. $1.21 each.

I mean – that’s just mad. I would do better self-publishing and I'm definitely not going there. I know I would make more writing het, but I’m even more definitely not going there, because I believe you should write what you feel the passion for, and it’s not het romance for me.

By the way, this is not some plea for a whip-round or anything like that. It’s a serious talking to myself about What To Do Next. Sometimes just writing it down helps. (Or I tend to shove it to the back of my mind along with all the other “I won’t think about that today, I’ll think about that tomorrow” thoughts.

Where’s a set of green velvet curtains when you really need ‘em?

How – HOW – did I miss the news about leni_jess?

That's two people in a month. :( I was never a close daily friend with Leni, but we've been mutual LJ friends like--forever. I'll miss your posts, specially your travels. I'm just glad that you had that last good trip to England.