Or in non-cat speech, I have a new website designed by the lovely Celia Kyle of Get Cesigned

See my lovely new website here

and it has an attached blog, to which I can post to using the same interface. 

The idea was that I could simplify all my blogs into one place, so I’m no longer crossposting everywhere and cluttering up the internet with duplicate copies of everything.

I’ve exported all my posts from this blog into the new one, so all of the content is now over there, and I’m going to be retiring this blog as of now.

If you’ve been following this blog, please change your bookmark to

 http://alexbeecroft.com/blog/

and I’ll hope to see you over there!

As always after the holidays it’s really hard to get back to some sort of productive routine, and today was not an exception.  Mind you, I did find some great morris dancing videos on YouTube, so I count that as a win.

Milford Women’s Morris v. the Daleks

Extreme Morris from Dogrose Morris side

I did get some work done, though.  I’m struggling with a time-line for a short novella (long short story?) for a YA, military anthology being put together by Mark Probst.  The deadline for submission on that one is the 30th of April, and currently I only have 2500 words.  But both of my characters now have names! And I do have a timeline!  I hate trying to figure out how old people are in which dates, as my mathematics is not up to all that addition and subtraction. 

Am continuing my tradition of one character with a sensible name, and one with a silly one – Harry and Garnet (which really was used as a boy’s name at least once in the 18th Century.)

And I’ve managed to figure out a couple of points at which it touches some real history, and find a real conveniently deserted but inhabitable island for the setting.  And it has a name; “Fool for love.”  So now it’s just a case of writing it!

We didn’t know where to meet.  ‘In the market square’, I’d been told, but I didn’t know where the market square was, and the town was much bigger than I thought.  Fortunately, however, we bumped into some jingling ladies in the car-park, so the whole meeting up thing was accomplished with no difficulty.

Here we are lined up about to start off with Ely Stars:

Which is a stick dance for 6 people

As you can see, I gave it my all:

My all is not very much at present, but I’m hoping that with enough practice it will increase.  I also started a diet yesterday with the aim of eventually being able to close my waistcoat without the extra stomacher!

And then we did several more dances including Pottersbury, Goose Green, Country Gardens and finished off the set with Padnall.

It ain’t over until the fat lady dances!

After that we wandered up the high street, passing organ grinders and jesters and people riding penny farthings

and donut stalls and cheese stalls etc etc, stopping to do one or two dances every 500 feet or so.  By half one we called it a morning and went to the pub for lunch.  And unfortunately after that I had to leave because Ailith needed to be taken to a birthday party, and Rose wasn’t feeling well, so needed someone to be at home with her.

I messed up only one dance, and even in that one I managed to find my place again without disrupting anyone else.  So, the duck is broken and I’ve done it once now (returning home with a celebratory rosette )  I’ll feel a bit more confident on this coming Thursday when I’m dancing out again at 7pm in the evening in Whittlesea.

Wish me luck!  I’m going on my first dance-out with the Ely and Littleport Riot Morris dancing side in an hour.  Eek!  I’m terrified.  I have my waistcoat, I have my hankies, I have bells on my shoes, and sticking plaster on my heels because the shoes still murder my feet if I let them.  But I’m still making very basic mistakes in every dance, and I only know three dances all the way through.

It’ll be a disaster!  So if anyone is near March in Cambridgeshire and fancies coming to see us dance in March town square, we’re on at 11.30.  Will report back later with photos, if I’m still alive

Somali Pirates

As may be apparent from False Colors, I don’t buy into the romance of pirates.  But having said that, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.  For example

http://shewhohashope.livejournal.com/143545.html

2. We’ve become aware that censorship on Amazon is an ongoing problem:

Additional Reasons to Not Forget #amazonfail

and hopefully we’ve become aware that while one huge company retains control over the visibility of books in general, there is always going to be a threat that the thought police could disappear entire segments of writing, thoughts and information, just by de-ranking them and taking them off the search facility.

What can we do?

1. Make an effort to buy from somewhere else.  Currently I’m all for supporting Barnes and Noble with my buck, because they have been brave enough to begin shelving m/m romances in the ‘Romance’ section as well as the gblt section.  Pretty much the opposite of what Amazon was doing.

But, rather than buy on the internet from the USA, I’m also going to make the effort to go into my local town, where there is a little, independent bookshop, and I will be ordering most of my new books through them in future.  Not only will this help them survive, but once they’ve seen the level of my demand for gay books, maybe they’ll actually start stocking them as a regular thing!

If you’re in the USA, this website will help you find your local independent book shop.

2. If you’d like to return something to the GBLT community in lieu of the total lack of any kind of apology from Amazon, consider buying

I Do: An Anthology in Support of Marriage Equality

(Dear Author’s review here)

all the proceeds of which go to helping Lambda Legal fight the legal battle for equal marriage rights for gblt people in the States.

Why did Amazonfail grow so big so fast?

*g*  Well, they banned Stephen Fry’s autobiography, ‘Moab is my Washpot’.  That on its own would have been enough to piss off the entire UK, where he’s considered something of a national treasure.

Stephen Fry on the relationship of the British to their language here:

(Beverage alert )

False Colors

http://ebookstore.sony.com/ebook/alex-beecroft/false-colors/_/R-400000000000000157378

And Transgressions

http://ebookstore.sony.com/ebook/erastes/transgressions/_/R-400000000000000157379

no cheaper, alas, than the real thing, but considerably more electronic

~*~*~*~

Amazon’s “Glitch” Myth Debunked
by Francine Saint Marie

CONCLUSION: Censorship was clearly built into Amazon-Kindle’s digital-text-platform years ago when it was programmed to constantly crawl itself for new content and trip the automatic censors whenever it found certain keywords that Amazon’s leadership had designated as forbidden.: Publishers and customers need to be aware that those dirty words (like “gay” and “lesbian” as well as “erotic” or “sexuality” or “adult”) will still cast you into the great Kindle abyss for all eternity and that missing sales rankings are really only the tip of the censor’s iceberg. Moreover, even though sales rankings appear to have been restored throughout its site again, now that Amazon has also introduced this program code into its paperback listings, it’ll take awhile for them to completely clean up their system.. That is, if they really want to.

http://www.afterellen.com/node/48877

Edited at 10.30 to say that the article linked to seems to have disappeared! Sometimes it’s hard not to see conspiracies at work!

Edited at 10.50 to add this link to the meta_writer community, which has saved the whole post.

Today has even had a lot of squee in it, after the large doses of OMG!WTF of the weekend.  I must say I’ve missed my squee!

Causes of joy today:

False Colors and Transgressions, after all, represent an attempt by m/m romance to storm the fortress of m/f, ‘mainstream’ romance fiction.  An attempt to get same sex love stories to be treated the same way opposite sex love stories are treated; not hidden, not shameful, not classified as ‘adult’ just because they are a love story between two men.  If anything, Amazonfail just proves that we are up against something much bigger than we thought, and the right wing are prepared to pull out all sorts of unexpected tactics to stop the attempt from succeeding.

So as part of my resistance to Amazonfail and to anti-gblt prejudice in general, I *am* going to talk up these books.  When m/m, f/f and trans romance is occupying the same shelf space in every bookshop, that will be the time to be modest

So please come and read about the launch of False Colors and Transgressions, those first rate battleships of the m/m romance war:

Here at JesseWave’s blog

On Monday, April 13 as part of its ground breaking new line of gay historical romances which tap into a growing market of Male/Male stories marketed to straight women as part of an attempt to introduce m/m romance into the romantic mainstream, Running Press Book Publishers is proud to announce the release of Transgressions and False Colors

A lovely review of False Colors by Christian Otto

So, altogether this is stunning and brilliant book, one of those essential reads if you are interested in historical stories.

On Friskbiskit Erastes and I chat about the allure of the 17th Century, and why I like filth so much

M/M Goes Mainstream Today

And on Jeanne Barrack’s The Sweet Flag blog, you can see me being a bit prophetic (I wrote this post about three weeks ago, before any of this struck )

What is going on here then? Well, simply this; Running Press are making a bid to make m/m romance mainstream – to make it as respectable as m/f romance. No more confining m/m fiction to a little ghetto on the internet where the uninitiated can remain ignorant that it exists at all. No more being treated as second class citizens by RWA and Romantic Times because we don’t fit their notion of what is a ‘traditional’ story about people falling in love with one another.

#amazonfail twitter thread, started by storm_grant spreads to be a world wide phenomenon

Numerous blogs, newspapers and TV stations pick up the story and run with it: this is just a sample:

• CRAIG’S POP LIFE: Is Amazon.com Homophobic?

It appears on the TV in the UK (fast forward to 8 minutes in)

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1529573111?bclid=19074616001&bctid=19406704001

(and spot the appearance of ‘Captain’s Surrender’ )

Amazon claim it was just a mistake:

Amazon calls mistake ‘embarrassing and ham-fisted’

and start re-ranking the de-ranked books.  Various internet hacks come out and say hahahaha!  I did it for the lolz.  But as the code they claim they used does not actually do what they say it would, their claims seem doubtful.

Amazon’s ‘it was all a mistake’ gets this response from Slashdot

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/14/0057203

which I think says it all.

I personally fail to see how any kind of mistake or glitch could cause gay-positive theology like John J McNeill’s “The Church and the Homosexual” to be de-ranked as an adult title, but leave right wing anti-gay theology like “Can Homosexuality be Healed” by Francis MacNutt’s sales rank intact, catapulting it and its like to the top of the bestseller list.

That’s a mighty selective and convenient mistake!  That’s a mistake with an agenda to push.  An agenda that’s willing to silence anything that it doesn’t agree with.  I’ll come out and say here that I think it’s hideous.  McNeill’s book saved my faith when I was questioning the church’s stance on homosexuality.  Without it, I would not now be a Christian at all.  I can’t imagine how many gay people’s lives it must have saved, giving them hope that God doesn’t hate them; that they might actually be made right, and be loved.  To de-rank that book as if it was some sort of obscenity is itself an obscene act of hatred and suppression of honest theological and moral debate.

Because it’s such a staggeringly bad move even from a sheer economic POV for Amazon to make, I’m willing to agree with them that it was certainly a mistake on their part.  What caused it, I don’t know.  Some Christianist fundamentalist inside the organization taking the chance to push his own agenda?  I don’t know.

But in the light of Easter, and the message of resurrection – of God bringing good out of evil and life out of death – I find it rather wonderful that all Amazon has achieved by this ‘mistake’ is to bring massive publicity to all the GBLT books on its website, and to get gay romance as a genre into the pages of the NY Times, the UK’s Guardian newspaper, and the mainstream media as a whole.  We could not have bought better publicity if we’d tried.  Good out of evil – it’s very appropriate for Easter Monday, and lets hope it continues

However, although many books have had their sales ranks restored, some have not.  It’s premature to celebrate too much while some books and some people are still being discriminated against.

If your book is still de-ranked, consider joining #stilldelisted, #glitchmyass, and #amazonfail on twitter

and post your book name and Amazon URL on

metawriter’s Are you still Delisted?

Let’s keep the pressure on until everyone has their rankings back!

Copied from

storm_grant ‘s LJ

On the issue of Amazon suddenly stripping sales ranks from m/m, f/f and erotica, actual facts have been obtained.

Amazon is protecting is general readership from the evol gay and the pr0n. Read here: http://markprobst.livejournal.com/15293.html

http://vashtan.livejournal.com/490173.html

asknosecrets is collecting links here: http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11560.html

storm_grant

got #amazonfail going on twitter. Go tweet and protest! Think of it as signing an e-petition, only with 140 characters to express your outrage!

vashtan is compiling a list of books that have been affected, here: http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11992.html

What can you do?

Copied from erastes LJ

1. Sign the petition

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/in-protest-at-amazons-new-adult-policy

2. Write to the CEO

Jeffrey Bezos.
1200 12th Avenue South,
Seattle,
Washington 98144-2734,
United States
Phone: 206-266-1000
Fax: 206-622-2405

3. Contact info for Amazon for calls, emails, faxes letters

http://clicheideas.com/amazon.htm

Also, if you have a book or books affected by the censorship, add their names to the list on meta_writer above.
Inform your publisher.
Write to any gblt paper you may be associated with.
Change your buy links for your books so they no longer link to Amazon.
If you were thinking of buying a Kindle, don’t!

Also Smart Bitches, of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books suggest a Google Bomb, where, by the magic of the internet, you post this link on your site/blog

Amazon Rank

and Amazon get instant bad publicity

False Colors and Transgressions now available in Kindle versions

complete with sales ranks

http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2009/04/09/review-false-colors-by-alex-beecroft/

“Rarely, oh so rarely, I’ll read a book that is so sublime, so transcendent, I actually come away from it a little melancholy, because it’s over and I can never read it for the first time ever again, because I know I’ll never be able to do justice to it in my review or analysis, and because I know I won’t meet its equal for many a year. But the process of devouring the book, of eking out its layered, textured meaning, of savoring its descriptions, and the emotions–oh, the emotions!–leaves me flying for days and the melancholy only makes it all the sweeter.

This is one of those books.  It ravished me. It scoured my insides. I feel like I’m stuck in it and I don’t ever want to get out.”

Rarely, oh so very rarely, does an author get a review that makes her think that someone has read the book they wanted to write – has seen between the lines to the perfect form that you tried so hard to capture, only to feel as if it eluded you every time.  This is the kind of review that authors dream of!  And I can die happy now I’ve achieved it. 

Also squee for Dr.Sarah’s descriptions of the characters, particularly John as “religious, resourceful, smart, and a natural leader.”  I’m so glad John’s leadership qualities came through.  Much of the book he’s in the position of being the nervous virgin, and I really hoped that wouldn’t make him seem somehow weaker than Alfie, because he so is not.  Backbone of steel, that boy

Thank you so much Sarah!  This is one to frame.  I will hang it by my monitor to remind myself that I can’t be that bad, after all

Bad news

Just as I was rejoicing over such a lovely review, I went to check False Colors’ sales ranking on Amazon.  It had been somewhere in the top #5 of gay romance for the past fortnight, and I’d got addicted to watching it go up and down.

Imagine my shock when it had disappeared altogether.  It turns out that False Colors and Transgressions by Erastes were only the first of a purge of sales ranks from innumerable titles in Amazon’s gay and lesbian list, and their het erotica list.  Most of MLR Press’s titles, many Loose Id titles and Samhain titles… Long term bestsellers like JL Langley’s The Tin Star and My Fair Captain have also lost their sales ranks and are suddenly completely absent from charts they have dominated for years.

Now I’d like to think this was a computer glitch, and it will all be restored in a couple of days, but this link from last year about Amazon disappearing its erotica novels in the Kindle store by removing their sales rank makes me wonder whether they’re doing the same thing again, only bigger and to print books.

http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/4/the-kindle-store-blushes-over-smut

And that pisses me off.  In the same world where Dear Author can write about False Colors:

This stunning book is not an erotic romance. It’s a romance between two men, sure, but that doesn’t make it an erotic romance.  It’s not focused on sex, even though it’s all about their sexuality — because the book does NOT shy away from dealing with the fear and shame and hatred of being a sodomite, an “invert” in the eighteenth century.  This book is romance, pure and simple. I don’t think I’m giving anything away to say that John and Alfie don’t even kiss until the end, although there is one incredibly hot sex scene between them. But the emotions are so rich, so bright and hard and painful, even the good ones, that this book can be considered nothing less than the best of romance, heart-wrenching and perfect.

is Amazon choosing to hide my book because it’s a romance about gay men, and that somehow makes it erotica?  Are they censoring it because having two men fall in love with each other somehow makes it automatically shameful and perverse and all about the sex?  I really hope I’m mistaken here.  I thought we’d actually seen some improvement since the 18th Century!

And personal feelings of ‘it’s not erotica!  If I’d wanted to write erotica, I’d have put in more sex’ aside, what’s wrong with erotica anyway?  Not one erotica writer deserves to have their work hidden from potential buyers by an organisation supposedly set up to sell books, with no warning and no explanation.

I so hope I’m getting my knickers in a twist about nothing, and that this is just Amazon instituting some interesting new service, and everything will be back to normal in no time.  But if it isn’t just a glitch, what the hell is going on?

I had been saving up to buy a Kindle, in order to read more of that m/m and f/f fiction of which Amazon currently appears to be ashamed.  This has made me change my mind and decide to buy a Sony and get my books straight from the publishers instead.  And I’ll read my review again to put a smile on my face before bedtime.  Thanks Dr. S!

First of all, I ought to make it clear that this is titled ‘answers for the men’ not because these answers are somehow less true than the answers for the women.  That isn’t the case.  There is just a difference in emphasis, depending on who is asking the question.

Why do women write m/m fiction? Part one – Answers for the women can be found here on the Macaronis blog.  That post was written as an answer to a piece written by a feminist writer who felt that women who write m/m fiction are bowing to the pressures of patriarchal society.  Women should want to write about women, she felt.  Writing about men, and particularly in a format that excludes a woman from the central pairing, is just a case of reinforcing society’s belief that only men are interesting and worthy to be written about.  It’s a kind of gender betrayal.

Obviously, coming at the question from that sort of direction deserves an answer written to take into account the biases and subtext of the question. 

And the subtexts and biases are quite different when a gay man asks the question.  So the two answers are equally true, but slightly differently slanted depending on what really concerns the questioner.

When a gay man asks ‘why do women write m/m fiction’, it’s my impression that the question is often coming from a different place of discomfort:

Exploitation

Isn’t the phenomenon of women writing m/m, because we find the idea of gay sex titillating, just like the phenomenon of straight men watching faux-lesbian porn?

Isn’t it just yet another way for the heteronormative society to oppress gay men?

Isn’t it horrible of women to exploit gay men while also being part of the straight society which denies gay men equal rights?

And isn’t it deeply unfair that m/m fiction written by women is outselling genuine gay fiction, so that straight women have even co-opted the voices of gay men for their own ends, misrepresenting the truth about what it is to be gay?

I wish I could say that this is an unjustified discomfort.  But I don’t think I can.  I think unquestionably some m/m fiction is exactly the same sort of thing as lesbian porn for straight men.

The question becomes complicated however, (because, lets face it anything to do with human beings and why they do things is going to be complicated,) when you realize that not all m/m fiction is the same.  Different authors write for different reasons.  There can be no one size fits all answer.

For example, why did I just post that picture?  Was it because I’m thinking ‘OMG! Hawt, sexy menz and there’s boykissing!  Hey, guys, drop your kecks and give us a show!’

(That, I venture to suggest, would be degrading and exploitative.)

Or was it because as someone who loves romance, the sight of their obvious happiness makes me smile, and I see no reason why I shouldn’t react to that picture in the same way that I would react to this one:

In other words ‘aw! young love!  How beautiful!  I hope they’ll be that happy for the rest of their lives.’

We are, surely, all hoping that our society is tending towards a place in which people make no distinction between the m/m lovers and the m/f lovers.  We’re hoping for a society in which love is valued and celebrated no matter the genders of the people involved.

So why should women – whom history has generally shown to adore a good romance – not decide that they want to write or read about m/m romances too?  Many are undoubtedly reacting as you would to that first photo; ‘they’re a lovely young couple, I’m rooting for them and I want to see them happy at the end of the book.’

But, ‘ew’, you might say.  I could cope with that, but there’s so much sex in these books!  They aren’t rejoicing in the happiness of other people, they’re all about masturbation.  Straight women are using our sexuality to get off with.  It’s disgusting!

Well, as a first reaction I’d have to ask why?  Are straight women not allowed to have a sexuality?  I happen to know that gay men fantasize about straight men – I’ve seen the porn – so it’s not as though the recipient of the fantasizing has to be assumed to be willing to return the attraction.  Or is it just that women are supposed to have such tight control over our sexual fantasy life that we can decide not to find something sexy even though by nature we do?  Are we, in short, supposed to stifle our sexuality because it makes men uncomfortable?

Hm.  That sounds like a very old form of oppression.  Men have put women in chastity belts and insane asylums in the past because they were uncomfortable with the fact that we too are sexual beings.  Stifling our writing is likely to be taken as one more attempt along the same lines.

And really, people get off on all kinds of things.  That doesn’t have an awful lot to do with anything.  Surely the question is not ‘what’s going on in their pants’?  But ‘what do they believe in?  What kind of world are they working towards?  What do their books and their other actions in the world say about them?’

You see, I think that the tendency of m/m romance is to make the women who read it think of gay relationships as normal, desirable; relationships to cheer for and fight for and support.  And I think that is the crucial and very important difference between m/m romance and lesbian porn for straight men.

I was just reading Empire magazine yesterday, and I came across a review for a new film called ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers.’

Naturally, being a m/m author and a bit naive to boot, I assumed the title meant that the film was about some lesbians who killed vampires, and that the titillation factor for male viewers would be balanced out by the portrayal of the lesbians as heroic women doing battle with the forces of evil.

I wish!

It turns out the title means ‘straight men who kill lesbian vampires’.  Empire magazine thinks it sounds like just the thing for teens (they say ‘teens’, but I assume they mean ‘male teens’.)  Here is a quote from their interview with one of the stars:

This energy factor has been ratcheted up by the twin poles of sex – “I hold breasts and watch girls get off with each other.  Besides, I’ve always liked protruding incisors,” says Horne – and violence – “I’ve knocked someone’s head off with a frying pan!” says Corden.  “I slice someone’s head down the middle!  I push a naked girl into a shower of holy water and watch her whole body disintegrate!”

Oh, how charming.  Don’t you love the exclamation mark there.  He’s really enthused about getting to kill naked lesbians.

In other words what we have here is a film that exploits lesbians for the pleasure of straight men while simultaneously portraying them as evil monsters who have to be killed.

That’s an ugly package.  And I for one would never presume to defend a woman who wrote and read m/m fiction for her own jollies, but still opposed gay rights, and believed that being gay was sinful or wrong.

Certainly women’s sex drives are involved in their enjoyment of m/m fiction.  That doesn’t necessarily mean it is exploitative. 

It can be, of course.  If, as in the film, the book is all about satisfying the female reader’s desire for titillation and demonstrates a blatant disinterest or even hostility towards the problems of real gay men, then I would certainly regard it as problematic.  But in my experience of the genre I would say I’ve seen very little of that.

I believe that most m/m fiction is transformative, and the women who read it are having their prejudices removed or at least challenged.  I think that can’t help but be a good thing.

So, that preamble over with, why do women write m/m romance?

There are many possible reasons because each author is different, but here are some answers which are true of many women.

1. Because women like romance, and if m/m relationships are as normal as m/f ones, why not write m/m romance?

2. Because straight women think men are sexy, and two men are doubly sexy.  (IMO this reason is only a problem if it isn’t accompanied by any goodwill towards real gay men.)

3. Because women are fed up of dealing with the stresses and strains of being a woman and would like to try being a man for a while, without having to give up the love of a good man.  (Many women always identify with the male characters in books.  m/m romance allows them to do that, and still to enjoy having a male love interest.) 

4. Because male characters in books always get to do more interesting things than female ones.  Particularly in historical fiction.  You get to be the Captain of a battleship *and* have a gorgeous male love interest. 

5. Because women are fed up of traditional gender roles and would like to try a relationship where dominance/submission/power was not pre-determined by sex.

6. Because some people are born into female bodies but identify more as men.  Reading m/m fiction is being allowed to be, for a moment, more who you really are.

7. Because m/m stories are the only stories you have to tell as an author – because this is your own inalienable writer’s voice and you can do no more than tell the m/m stories or write nothing at all.

8. Because one or more of the author’s characters decided, in that mysterious way characters have, that they were gay, and she couldn’t see any good reason to stop them.

9. Because the author has gay friends who love gay romance and they suggested she should try it.

10. Because the author wants to increase the representation of gay people in fiction and she thought this was the way to do it.

I’m sure there are others that I’ve missed.  Some authors write m/m fiction because it seems to be selling well, for example.  But I don’t think that’s a sufficiently mysterious motivation to need spelling out