Nine Worlds

Oh deary me, I somehow forgot to blog yesterday - I was so caught up in going to the Nine Worlds Geekfest! So here's a live-action report from my darkened hotel room before breakfast...

I've been to a few talks so far - the Skeptics thread did one on the psychology of ghosts and hauntings which included some fascinating EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) recordings and - for the first time for me - the famous Led Zep recording which when played backwards supposedly invokes "my sweet Satan". This was a shocking example of what they call Top-Down psychological processing: the way your brain overlays patterns on ambiguous data. Unprepared, it is all but impossible to make any words out of the gibberish recordings. But once you've read the supposed 'script' the words become clear as a bell and almost impossible not to hear. I was aghast!

Then we went to a Steampunk 101 talk and signed up for the gin-tasting on Saturday (huzzah!). And then the guys had a dancing lesson ... with Syrio Forel!!! After a pizza we attended a gig by comedian Helen Keen which was all about the history of rocket science and WAY funnier than that sounds. She's great. And now I know way too much about the Nazi and Satanist roots of NASA...

And we've done things with the hotel-room copy of the Book of Mormon that you wouldn't believe.
Or maybe you would...

Off to breakfast and to see Judge Minty ... or maybe watch a Quidditch game :-)

Bosnia and Herzegovina

So after a few days in Montenegro, I moved on to Bosnia.

At the village of Lukomir, a remote village in the high mountains

We swam at the falls of Kravice

The fort above the walled town of Počitelj

Derelict concrete building destroyed by war: ancient symbols, shell-hole from the 1990s.

Bosnia and Herzegovina was also part of the former Yugoslavia federation, of course, and was the area worst-hit by the appalling civil wars and genocidal slaughter of the 1990s. Nowadays it is divided administratively between a Serbian (Orthodox) area, and a Bosniak (Muslim) + Croat (Catholic) area. Politically it's in a sad way - religious tensions, corruption, lingering war-damage both physical and mental. But our Bosnian guide was optimistic that things will improve as the younger generations slowly take power from the entrenched old guard. Here's hoping.

Sarajevo: on this spot started World War 1. Some places just can't catch a break.

I actually found Sarajevo one of the most beguiling cities I've ever been in. Here's the old Ottoman trading area:

And here's the Austro-Hungarian area, which is just like any European city-centre:

You can step from one to the other in two paces. Everything changes - the paving, the skyline, the smells, everything. Most peculiar. It's like teleportation from one continent to another!

A cultural contrast in coffees, at the Viennese Cafe

We arrived on the first night of the Islamic festival of Ramadan. We went up the hill to see the mosque lights go on when they fired the mortar signalling sunset. Several local people handed us turkish delight and special Ramadan bread - it was really touching.

We went, of course, to the town of Mostar - famous for its medieval bridge that was destroyed by Croat forces but rebuilt in 2004 from the original designs.

"Don't Forget Srebenica" says the banner - it was the annual mass burial that week

It's still a divided city, and a bit of a tourist-trap, though very beautiful.

I climbed this minaret ... in a thunderstorm. Some atheists are just asking for it!

The medieval necropolis at Radimlja. Adherents of the local Bosnian Christian church came under persecution as heretics and Bogomils by the papal Inquisition, and so, unsurprisingly, took the first opportunity to bail out of the Catholic church and convert to Islam in the 15th Century. 

And finally I proudly include another dessicated piece of saint: Queen Helen of Anjou (13th Century), who founded the first girls' school in Serbia.

Bosnia's fascinating and beautiful. And HOT. I'd like to go back and see more one day. I didn't get long enough there, or in Montenegro!

Cover Her With Icecream

Back away from the peanut butter jar, Janine...

I couldn't have done it without...

Photobombed by my toes...

These are the main print books I used as reference and research in writing Cover Him With Darkness. Note that the Bible is the King James version (copyright-free for quotations, yay!).
As a novel set in a foreign country it presented me with some interesting challenges!

Books about Montenegro are actually in pretty short supply, but I thoroughly recommend travel guides of the more detailed warts-and-all kind (Bradt, Rough Guides) as a starting point for any writer using a foreign setting.

Some of my research material can't appear in this photo because it's on my e-reader. Which is definitely the cheaper option.

• The Book of Enoch - an apocryphal text written about the 1st Century, translated into English in 1917. Batshit-crazy as these things are, but perfect for what I needed. The fundamental research text for this novel.
• The Orthodox Way (theology, prayers, doctrine) - an absolute essential as far as I was concerned.
• Satan: a biography - a backup to the Stanford book pictured above.
• Through the Lands of the Serb - a travelogue by Edith Durham, an intrepid and unflappable Englishwoman writing in 1904, full of colourful incident and just pure entertainment.
• The Land of the Black Mountain: the adventures of two Englishmen in Montenegro, 1903.

And there was Youtube - for footage of Serbian Orthodox religious ceremonies (very musical) - and of course Wikipedia. Good grief, what would I have done without Wikipedia?

Say I'm musing, "Okay, so this priest is going to cite some historical incident of man's inhumanity to man ... If he was British he'd certainly use Auschwitz as the obvious example. But he's not British or American, he's Serbian. What's he likely to think of first?" And lo, a swift Google search and I have my answer - though ignorance might be bliss in that case.

And of course I went to Montenegro for a few days. Okay, so strictly speaking this changed maybe 500 words of the book. It's not like there's room for huge swathes of landscape description in a modern genre novel: that sort of thing just isn't wanted nowadays. But goddamn, I want to get things right. I want to be able to picture things accurately when I write. Every word counts.

'Technically right' is the best kind of right ;-)

And yeah, I know there will still be errors. It's embarrassing me already.

This is what happens when you have Troll Sex in public

Earlier this year I read out the Troll Sex scene from Named and Shamed to an appreciative and giggly audience at Eroticon. The result? John D bought the book and has posted a wonderful 5-star review online.

He says:

"I found it easy to empathise with the lead character, Tansy, and just adored her personality; she is no bland slut, merely providing a vessel for sex, but a person with a rich, colourful personality. I loved her and bought into her quest, and enjoyed every lustful experience she embraced with wild abandon."

And:

"One day I want to be able to write a book as good, as erotic and as engrossing, as Named and Shamed."

Full review here

To be honest there are days I wonder why I don't just submit to the marketing gurus and write the same old Fifty-Shades-alike novels as every other writer - they sell like hot cakes, they are given shelfspace in supermarkets and feature in newspaper articles. They are successful and mainstream. Why do I bother writing something that's different? Something that has its own plot, and its own voice? Something not every reader will get?

And then people like John D remind me. And it's all worthwhile again.
Thank you.
:-)

Eyecandy Monday

 

Have I posted this picture before on an Eyecandy Monday? I know it's from a post Jo did...

I'm coming to realise that my memory is going. It's clearly filled up with too much writing stuff and basically whenever anything new from real life is shovelled in on top, it has a 75% chance of falling straight off again. Mr Ashbless is slowly coming to terms with the fact that just because he tells me something, it doesn't mean I'm hearing it. My mind is elsewhere. Off with the angels.

Life would be a lot more memorable if it followed fictional rules. Like if, every significant piece of information was flagged up by meaningful looks and dramatic weather. Or if there was, you know, less padding and repetition and redundant incident.


Oh, what the hell. The pic's worth seeing again, I reckon.
And as long as I can still write and follow the plot-arcs in Game of Thrones (I'm just fine with that sort of thing!), I don't really care that much.

Glitter

I'm probably going to finish my novel "Cover him With Darkness" today.
I've certainly run out of space on my wordcount.
I'm editing, tweaking, changing one crucial word here and there...

I may be doing this "churning out genre-books at a rate of knots" thing wrong.

Montenegro

I spent a few days in Montenegro earlier this month - researching the setting for "Cover Him With Darkness" of course - not on holiday or anything. Honest!

On the walls of the Old Town of Budva

"Where is Montenegro?" Well, you're not the only one to ask. My bank, when I rang them up beforehand, couldn't find it on their list of European countries. But I swear, go to Italy and head east, and after you've had a little swim in the Adriatic there it is: south of Croatia, and only about the size of Wales (or Connecticut, if you prefer). It's one of the nations of the Former Yugoslavia, but luckily escaped much of the horror of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s.

The walls of Kotor old town, and the shortest river in the country - 300m from source to sea.

 But it was famous at one point - I have a book by a British woman traveller published 1904 which says "The road out from Cattaro [Kotor] has been so often written of that it is idle to describe it once again, nor can any words do it justice."

25 switchbacks, and took 3 hours to ascend in a horse-drawn carriage. That's why.

Here's the view I took from the top:

Montenegro ("Black Mountain") is, well, mostly mountain. And a strip of Mediterranean coast. It's beautiful. It has the southernmost fjord in Europe (the Gulf of Kotor) and the tallest men, on average, in the continent (and boy are they proud of that! - the local tour guides couldn't wait to reel off the heights of their historical heroes and current politicians).

Once you get away from the coast, the landscape is Alpine.

The "city" of Zabljak (pop.1937)

And in the high mountains, incredibly bleak:

This is where CHWD starts out! Yeeeeeees!

It's overwhelmingly an Orthodox Christian country so I went in as many churches as I could (RESEARCH!!). I did get to see the Right Hand of St John the Baptist, but sorry no photo.

"You're from England?" said the priest. "Where's that? Somewhere near Ireland, right?" Snrrrrk.

The cliff-face monastery of St Vasilija (Basil) at Ostrog:

The mummified body of the Blessed Ozana: visionary, shepherdess and defeater of the Ottoman Navy:

I got permission. Never piss off any saint who looks like she could get up and eat your brains.

Of course the research wasn't all dry and ecclesiastical. I delved deep into the traditions of Montenegrin cuisine too:

And picked up this local guy who hung out with me for a couple of days...

So don't feel too sorry for me guys. It's a tough life being a writer, but I'm up to the challenges :-)

Impossible Spaces

Rarely do I talk about my Other Writing on this blog ... but I very much want to give a shoutout to Impossible Spaces, edited by Hannah Kate and published by Hic Dragones. It's a brand-new anthology of dark fantasy stories themed around looking-glass worlds and dimensions that can't really exist but intrude nonetheless into our reality - just the sort of meta-Lovecraftian theme that gives me the delicious horrors.

"Sometimes the rules can change. Sometimes things aren’t how they appear. Sometimes you can just slip through the cracks and end up… somewhere else. What else is there? Is there somewhere else, right beside you, if you could only reach out and touch it? Or is it waiting to reach out and touch you?
Don’t trust what you see. Don’t trust what you hear. Don’t trust what you remember. It isn’t what you think.

A new collection of twenty-one dark, unsettling and weird short stories that explore the spaces at the edge of possibility."

Plus, Hic Dragones are a pleasure to work for. They are based in the UK and are a creative writing and literature team who come up with workshops, conferences and (hopefully soon) murder-mystery games as well as publishing books.





Twenty-one stories make up this chunky collection, including one by British horror stalwart Ramsey Campbell, and one by ME! Except that I'm writing under my other name ... and there's no sex in my nasty urban horror tale, for which everyone ought to be grateful ...

You can buy the book in either paperback or Kindle/mobi/epub format, and amuse yourselves trying to identify me from my writing style alone.

Oooh - it's a CLUE!

Or you could cheat and read the author bios, I suppose ...
;-)

Buy links here (including Amazon)

Eyecandy Monday

Yes, I'm back from my travels!  I drove in gone midnight last night, hallucinating from sleepiness. Not smart, I know.

Hoorah: I didn't kill my parents during the trip, either accidentally (though I came alarmingly close at one point) or on purpose :-)
The house is still standing - and so is the blog :-)
I met some old friends I haven't seen in years :-)
I have a load of photos of Furrin' Climes to share :-)
I have a NOVEL TO HAND IN VERY SOON 8-0

Holiday weight gain: 8lbs

Fitness Plan: write

Eyecandy Monday

I'm taking a break from this blog for a couple of weeks. Some intensive research coming up ;-)

There is a possibility the blog won't be here next time I sign on. Apparently many people (though NOT me) have received notice from Blogger that adult-rated blogs with monetized links (and ONLY adult-rated blogs, which is pure discrimination) will be deleted from this month. Now, my blog isn't monetized ... in my opinion. I don't carry third-party adverts to any sites, sexually-themed or otherwise. I don't do reviews for money or freebies. I'm not even an Amazon associate. But the definition of "monetized" is vague - if I say "Look, my books are on sale at Sainsbury's!" or  "I've got a hot excerpt up on the Sh! site"- is that advertising? What about links to my books on publishers' sites and booksellers?

We are pawns in the hands of commercial bodies with their own agendas.

So, if this turns out to be my last post, thank you for reading, guys :-)
If it isn't ... then I'll be back mid-July. With photos :-)

Nine Years realtime ...

... how many D&D rounds is that?

4 dragons and the Goddess Takhisis on the mat...

Yesterday my Dungeons and Dragons group (3.5 edition in case you're interested, and of course you are) finished off the very final fight in an epic campaign that has taken us around nine years of gaming.

The final climactic conflict  - less than 10 rounds of magic-flinging and slaughter, with each "round" being about 6 seconds in character time, so we're talking about a minute tops in-game - took 14 REAL HOURS TO PLAY OUT.

We won, of course :-) Hooray! The world of Krynn is now safe from the nasty dragons and can go back to peacefully kissing the asses of the returned Gods of Good - who have got over their last genocidal hissy-fit, and decided to forgive us all.

In the real world, a decade's play on this one game has seen us collectively through house moves, new jobs, dozens of exciting new recipes, thousands of bottles of beer, several holidays together, and the DM getting married. We're older, balder, kinkier and [a little bit] wiser than we used to be, but we still bloody argue about rules interpretation. And you know what? I hope we're still doing exactly the same thing in another decade, and the one after that, and when we're all in our dotage. This is friendship.

My poor shapeshifted druid Kyron makes a ill-advised  - nay, fatal - decision about who to hit next.

What do we do from here on?
Well, we start on a Deadlands campaign. Because the only thing more epic than dragons is UNDEAD COWBOYS :-))))

Three Legs in the Evening

Gustve Moreau: Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864)

When the call goes out for an erotica anthology, there's almost always a standard set of restrictions: NO incest, NO bestiality, NO non-consensual, NO underage, NO scat or watersports.

So last week I wrote a story for a submission call, and naturally I chose the theme of Oedipus and the Sphinx ... because that's two Forbidden Topics (yes, he shags the Sphinx) right there already. Writing at the borderlines ... it's like picking a scab - how far can you push it before you regret it?

Oh dear.

I don't know yet if the story will be accepted by the editor. I don't know if it'll get past the publisher. But I was asked for a story that "told everyone it was written by Janine Ashbless," and it doesn't get much more Ashbless than that!

But it's probably a good job I ran out of space on the wordcount, because if I'd had another 1000 words it would have been even dirtier :-D

(BTW, my Sphinx is MUCH bigger than the one in the pic at top.)

"Smut by the Sea" pics

Last Saturday I picked Jennifer Denys up and drove through the lashing rain and around herds of stray pigs to Smut By The Sea, the erotica event organised by Victoria Blisse in Scarborough Library.

Jennifer Denys taking the michael out of erotic romance tropes  :-)

There was fudge, enormous quantities of coffee, a book stall, a tombola (I won a pen: Jennifer won lube, grrr) and a purple lecture hall wherein there were MANY READINGS  by erotica-friends new and old:

Victoria Blisse, Lexie Bay, Ashley Lister (standing), KD Grace, Jennifer Denys.

Ashley's poetry was particularly dirty. In fact, as the day went on I realised that I had erred too far on the side of caution in picking my own reading.

This was the moment that I realised that Scarborough was actually shock-proof:

Slave Nano, the Duchess, the Red Queen

Slave Nano was launching the paperback version of his novel Adventures in Fetishland, with a little help from his friends, in glorious technicolour PVC. I will never look at yellow teapots ... or cupcakes ... again in the same way, I can tell you!!

After that foray into kink, I realised I had to up my game somewhat. So instead of reading from mostly-harmless  Heart of Flame I switched to scary-fairy Named and Shamed for the very last reading of the day. And very glad I am that I did, too.

Hiding behind me: Liv Honeywell and Domitri Xavier

Yorkshire can take anything you throw at it :-)

Anyway, since getting home I have been very much inspired to write something really rude again :-) I want to scare myself once more, as I did with Named and Shamed.

My only regret is that I didn't get a photo of the pig on the road....

Event Reportage from Jennifer Denys / Nano Vaslen / Victoria Blisse