writing

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What fanworks mean to me.

The Organisation for Transformative Works (OTW) which has Archive Of Our Own (AO3) as one of its projects, asked members for contributions to Fanworks Day on February 15th. One suggestion they made was 350 words (max) on ‘what fandom means to you’. I jotted down my thoughts then spent ages getting them into some kind of coherent shape and exactly 350 words. Then I found the ‘box’ in the communication form didn’t actually allow for 350 words… I emailed them but got no reply, so Fanworks Day passed me by. However, I thought my social media friends might be interested in what I came up with. (I shall also post it to my AO3 account as Meta.) Any omissions are due to the constraints of the word count. Today’s picture is my new membership icon/badge which arrived by email this morning. Clearly they’ve forgiven me for leaving the staff!

What fanworks mean to me: an A to E of fanworks.
A.

Fanworks mean adventure: they take me to places I never imagined. This applies to the ones I enjoy and the ones I create myself, whether they are text, art, video, crafts, or anything else. My life is enriched.

Fanworks mean ambiguity: I can now find subtexts and subtle new agendas in almost everything I view. My imagination is stimulated to find new perspectives and I can share those imaginings with others who will not think me mad!

B.

Fanworks mean belonging: a space where (mostly) women come together to share. It’s a homecoming, of sorts. Finding fandom was like sinking into a warm and welcoming bath after a lifetime of feeling ‘different’. It’s empowering to find others react to canon creations in a similar way.

Fanworks mean brilliance: some fanworks can be much better than a lot of mainstream creations. Yes, there is dross, but then there is in all creative output. Yes, there is a mass of material by young creators who may or may not improve; they have to start somewhere – and should!

C.

Fanworks mean community: the people who create, consume and critique them. People come together online and offline and have a common starting point.

Fanworks mean continuity: the characters and worlds I love get new life and fresh ideas. They don’t just die or remain encapsulated in their original form.

D.

Fanworks mean development: storylines and characters are developed beyond their origins by creators. The creators themselves, and their fans in turn, develop their skills and perceptions. Even the occasional disagreements contribute.

Fanworks mean discussion: comments and ratings, in archives and on social media add to the pleasure and interest of finding new works. In turn, they add to discussions among friends both at conventions, and in private conversations online and off.

E.

Fanworks mean enjoyment: the pleasure of seeing works from known and trusted creators and the pleasure of finding new ones.

Fanworks mean excitement: the thrill of seeing something from a totally new point of view, or in a new medium.

And if anyone wants to look at my fanworks, you can find my account under moth2fic (same as my Dreamwidth pseudonym).

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Knocking at heaven’s door (a ficlet).

The Watchtower lady was very attractive but seemed more concerned with her soul than her body. Anyone’s body. Julia lounged in the doorway in her half-open housecoat watching the play of sunshine on the Watchtower lady’s blonde hair and wondering what lay beneath the prim but pretty beige coat. She tried, too, to get a gleam from the blue eyes but for once her famed charm wasn’t working.

“You see,” the lady was saying earnestly (odd how she was definitely a lady and not a woman or a girl), we believe that human beings are doing their best to ruin God’s world and we are trying so hard to stop them. Aren’t you concerned about the state of the world?”

‘Nowhere near as much as I’m concerned about the state of my arousal,’ thought Julia, but she managed some kind of non-committal reply about how she believed in humanity’s innate goodness and the likelihood of a successful outcome.

“And then,” the beige angel went on, “there’s the worry about getting into heaven.”

Julia considered. Getting inside the beige coat and further might be glorious but probably wasn’t worth the extra hassle. After all, this was Sunday and she’d promised herself a lie-in till the doorbell had dragged her down to this delectable but irritating visitor.

“Don’t your lot believe there are only so many places?” she asked. “What are my chances?”

“Nil, if you don’t even try,” came the glib retort. Like the lottery then. If you didn’t play you couldn’t dream. But Julia could go back to bed and dream of playing.

She heard some kind of query as to whether she was interested in the bible and heard herself saying, “ Not today thank you,” as if it was an encyclopaedia or a new kind of vacuum cleaner rather than the chance of an afterlife. The lady muttered about ‘no interest at all’and flounced in an extremely ladylike fashion down the path.

‘Oh, there’s interest, all right,’ thought Julia, sighing. ‘Just, probably the wrong kind. Although it would lead to heaven, that’s for sure.’

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Work in Progress

Ever wondered how a trilogy gets turned into a quartet?

Having cleared Christmas and New Year out of the way, I took a deep breath and opened up my writing folder. I have a couple of projects in the pipeline but stuck a virtual pin in and came up with the final (hah!) volume of my fae trilogy (double hah!) Living Fae.

You may recall I’ve already published Growing Up Fae, which is in the form of a journal, written by Harlequin, one of my main characters, and I followed that with Tales from Tara which takes Harlequin and his boyfriend Yarrow separately off the Edge (Alderley Edge in Cheshire) and recounts their adventures at the royal fairy palace in Tara. The last volume was intended to update the stories of Harlequin and Yarrow after their return from Tara and also the stories of various members of their extended family. I called it, in my head, and in various posts about it, Life on the Edge.

Most of the original material was written on Live Journal some years ago starting in a ‘drama’ community, in the form of role play – diaries, letters, responses to memes, etc. The rest was written in response to prompts in an online writing group. It was all on my hard drive. So, I thought, how hard could it be to collate and edit the final part of the story?

Well, not a stroll in the park (or on the Edge, which is a great place for dog walks). Turning diaries etc. written in the first person (various characters) and present tense into a smooth narrative requires concentration and a strong reliance on my editor who is a rock of strength and will pick up any errors of person or tense. (Any other errors, for that matter.) However, it was done, and I quite enjoyed myself because I was re-reading some of the stories for the first time in years and they came as a pleasant surprise.

Then I started to worry about whether I actually had enough for a novel. I didn’t want a novella as the finale. So out of curiosity, I checked the word count.

Oh. Double oh. 118,000. Far too many words for this kind of genre novel (fantasy m/m). And hard to split because of the intertwined storylines of the family members. After a sleepless night (literally) I managed to turn part of the story into a novel of about 70k. Fine. Except that now I was left with under fifty thousand words for the last volume and I was back to my worries about a novella as a finale.

After a lot of angst and tweaking, volume 3, Flying Free, is now with my editor and I am not allowed to touch it till she tells me what to amend, delete, add, etc. That’s one load off my mind. I have updated the glossary (on a separate WordPress page) and am working on the timeline which will join it. Those aren’t a problem. For light relief I’m working on the covers for both volumes.

I think I’ve already mentioned elsewhere that Harlequin is my ‘muse’ for all my writing. That, I think, is what comes of creating a character and developing it in first person journal entries over quite a period of time. Anyway, he has been quiet for a while but came out all guns blazing to develop more story to extend the last volume. I am vaguely bemused (I use the word advisedly) as to how my fairly vanilla fairy couple have ended up in a ménage à quatre. I had no idea my younger secondary characters would grow up the way they did. There is romance that girdles the earth (though not in 40 minutes) and there are dark episodes on and off the Edge. There are at least two m/f sub plots, too.

I am sleeping badly, and wake up with my brain spinning with ideas. I am quite excited but also daunted. Life on the Edge is now in progress. I only have about twenty thousand words to write. How hard can it be? And more to the point, how do I rein in my muse so that I don’t end up with too many words again in the end?

I seem to be unintentionally writing a fae quartet – for now.

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Tales from Tara

TALES FROM TARA: fantasy mm with solstice celebrations. Yes, that’s right.

And yes, I’ve managed two books out in one month, which explains why I haven’t actually been doing a lot of writing these last few weeks.

‘Tales’ is the comparatively short second volume of my Living Fae series. In this book (40k words) the ‘heroes’ leave Alderley Edge (separately) to spend time on royal guard duty in Ireland, meeting (and romancing) all kinds of other fae. And celebrating the winter solstice, of course, in the underground palace.

So it’s suited to the season, and if you don’t know the story so far, you can get a lot of information from the Living Fae page here (my WordPress account) or you could buy Growing Up Fae…

The story is erotic without being explicit if that makes sense, and I hope it gives a taste of magic to readers.

The buy links for Tales from Tara are:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/913151

If you have problems with the Amazon link (Amazon is behaving strangely at present) try my Amazon page – just type Jay Mountney into the search box.

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My new novel is out.

The fourth volume in my Skilled Investigators series is now ‘live’ on Amazon and Smashwords.

For anyone who has no idea what I’m talking about, the series features a mix of fantasy and crime with a trainee female elf detective, and has a sub plot of gay romance between the detective’s brother and her training mentor. There’s also a telepathic dragon. But I think you’d need to read the first book first, because I never intended the volumes to stand alone.

If you click on the link at the top right of my WordPress site you’ll find a map of The Kingdom to go with the book.

I’m really pleased because for the first time, neither Amazon nor Smashwords had any issues with my formatting and I didn’t (so far as I know) forget anything. That bodes well for later this week when I have another book to publish.

Here are the links – at first for Amazon I could only get a live link for the US site which then redirected me to the UK one. Go figure… Then I managed to get a UK link but at least one friend found it didn’t work. The only reliable answer if you want to use Amazon is to type in my name (Jay Mountney) and my author page will show you all my books including this one.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/911587

 

 

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Five things…

There is a meme going round writer groups that asks you to share five things from your current work in progress. I wasn’t tagged but someone said we could all play…

… so here are five things from my WIP, Life on the Edge, hopefully due out some time in 2019. (I’ve chosen the work that is really in progress rather than the ones that are ready to publish.)

1. implied menage (four hot guys from previous volume)
2. werewolf/fae m/f romance (and cubs)
3. unicorns (plus a panther) and assorted riders
4. a trip to South Australia in search of Mr Right
5. kittens all over the place

Tagging anyone else who wants to join in!

The pic is of Alderley Edge where the story takes place, but isn’t the cover, which is also a WIP.

 

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7.7.7.meme

The meme asked for 7 lines, 7 lines down, from the 7th page of a work in progress. Well, I have two works in progress, both at the editing and formatting stage, so I’ve extracted seven lines from the right place in each. Well, around seven, because in both cases I had to make minor adjustments to make sure they made some kind of sense – which I assume was the idea!

The first is from Tales from Tara, the second volume of my fae saga.

It was the end of Yarrow’s first month in Tara. He was now firm friends with Stripe and Quicksilver, but still hadn’t found a temporary boyfriend, so his temper was less than perfect. Devil was beginning to chafe at the amount of time spent underground, and the unicorn’s mood was rubbing off on his already edgy rider. So Yarrow could have done without the city trip but guards do not get to choose their duties. They started with a riverside ride, almost a parade. The titania hoped her folk would know she was there and come out to see her. Many did, and their jostling and crowding by the barriers that prevented cars from driving into the Liffey also prevented home-going drinkers from seeing the Royal Ride. Yarrow gazed at the grand buildings lining the street, hoping to remember enough to tell everyone at home on The Edge all about his experience. The words of the song ‘In Dublin’s Fair City’ sprang to mind and he agreed that for a human-built place it was fair. He had no idea whether the girls were pretty and didn’t much care. Unlike Harlequin, he was mostly interested in fae, and mostly in male fae, at that.

The second is from The Lantern, the fourth volume in The Skilled Investigators which centres round a female elf detective with her gay brother and her imprinted (and telepathic) dragon as sidekicks.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” the farmer assured them, and then, changing the subject, continued. “Any more than I would dream of ignoring our other guest. We have a goat ready for Scratch. It’s still alive as we didn’t know whether he would prefer to kill his own prey.” He looked at Genef who realised she had no idea.
She sent a quick query to Scratch who replied that he didn’t really mind. He would kill the goat if it would help, but mainly, he wanted to eat it. And eat it dead, of course.
“Would it help if he killed it himself?” she asked. “He’s willing, but doesn’t mind either way.”
“It would,” said Verilla, the farmer’s wife, “and I’ll just bring it to the front of the house so that Scratch can enjoy his meal.” She left the table and went outside to get the goat, presumably from an outbuilding, for all the world as if she was merely bringing another dish to the table. Genef felt pleased that Scratch was being treated as truly one of the company.

Both works are currently in the throes formatting which, let me tell you, is much much harder than writing them in the first place.

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Two guest appearances…

I should have shared these a while ago but for some reason my laptop didn’t like the way I was trying to load them. Huge thanks are due to Jackie for spreading the word about my books!

First, she interviewed me re my Skilled Investigators series.

The Skilled Investigators | Author Chat with Jay Mountney

Then she invited me to return to talk about my fae saga Living Fae.
https://www.jackiekeswick.co.uk/growing-up-fae-jay-mountney/

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Female characters

There was a meme going round that asked for your favourite female characters in books and films and perhaps in your own work. I thought I’d expand that to talk about female characters in general.

I always loved the Shakespeare female characters who stepped out of the ‘normal’ roles for their time, either by their work (Portia as a lawyer) or by cross-dressing (Viola in Twelfth Night). I was less invested in the ones like Miranda in The Tempest who seemed to conform to all the stereotypes of daughter, girlfriend, etc. As a child, I wallowed in Tales from Shakespeare and was taken to the theatre well before I could really get to grips with the scripts of the plays. I think Viola, in particular, had quite a strong effect on me.

I was presented, at the same time, with the opportunity to read my way through all the Anne of Avonlea books by LM Montgomery, and loved Anne, with her fiery temper and ambitions. I never really put myself in her place; my best friend was a redhead and I think I envisaged Anne as her, with myself in some kind of supporting role. Again, a strong influence. The same people who lent me the Anne books introduced me to Little Women but that was never one of my favourites.

Later, at boarding school, the Brontë sisters were rather shoved down our throats, since Charlotte attended the same school. I disliked Jane Eyre, and thought the heroine allowed herself to be manipulated by events and by other people. I did not find a man who kept his mad wife in the attic a particularly romantic proposition, either. As for the characters in Wuthering Heights, I simply found them tiresome.

I really love Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels and my favourite characters are Granny Weatherwax and the werewolf Angua. Both seem to epitomise independent women with sensible attitudes to almost everything. The Discworld novels are ‘comfort’ reading for me (along with other series that don’t have especially memorable female protagonists). I also love Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances and like best the ones where the heroine is compelled to use cross-dressing to survive. This harks back to my feelings for Viola, I suppose, and is odd, because I have never felt even vaguely inclined to masquerade as the opposite gender in my real life.

I have always enjoyed cop buddy TV series and particularly liked the female detectives in NYPD Blue and in Cagney and Lacey. Recently, I enjoyed Kono’s role in Hawaii 5.O. My favourite shows at the moment are Spiral (French cop show Engrenages) with the lead detective Laure, and The Bridge, with the Swedish detective Saga, who appeals to me on another level because of my interest in autism.

I adored The West Wing and liked CJ, Alison Janney’s role, best of all the characters. I was also fascinated by Donna.

My own female characters are a mixed bunch.

The heroine of my elf detective series, Genef, is quite dear to my heart. She sprang to life when I wanted a story that combined some of my favourite themes and tropes: fantasy, crime, strong female lead, mm romance, and dragons (which are a sub-genre of fantasy, yes). Genef’s mother and sister play little part in the stories but the twins Jinna and Janna, with their own secret language, and Loriela, a young girl, confined to a wheelchair, who is Genef’s brother’s pupil, are all prominent in some sections, as is Princess Briana, a friend to Genef and a licensed pirate.

My fae saga, Living Fae, has two males as the major characters but Harlequin’s sister Moth was actually the trigger for the whole series. She came into being in answer to a child’s letters to the fairies at the bottom of the garden, letters I was asked to answer. Moth generated an entire series about her family (as well as giving her name to my friends-locked social media) and whilst she is not one of the main ‘players’ I feel a great deal of affection for her. Her sisters, Columbine and Peasblossom, have larger roles and are both, I hope, interesting characters. The same goes for their mother, Flame; although I dislike her intensely, I love writing her.

There. That’s over twenty female characters introduced as having affected me in one way or another. Obviously there are others, in the books and shows mentioned above and in my own writing. None of my own are, I hope, any kind of Mary Sue. I have never wanted to be a detective. (If anything, I identify with Fel, Genef’s teacher brother.) Nor are any of them without flaws. Even Genef doesn’t find a solution to everything and has to rely on her brother, her mentor and her dragon in most cases.

I do enjoy reading, viewing and writing strong female characters, and it is interesting to look back at those that have perhaps influenced me over the course of my life.