A warm welcome to author Alex Beecroft joining us today on Love Bytes on her blog tour for newest release Blue Steel Chain.
Alex treated us on a lovely guestpost where she also answers some questions and she brought with her a giveaway to participate in
Welcome Alex 🙂

Blurb:

At sixteen, Aidan Swift was swept off his feet by a rich older man who promised to take care of him for the rest of his life. But eight years later, his sugar daddy has turned from a prince into a beast. Trapped and terrified, Aidan snatches an hour’s respite at the Trowchester Museum.

Local archaeologist James Huntley is in a failing long distance relationship with a rock star, and Aidan—nervous, bruised, and clearly in need of a champion—brings out all his white knight tendencies. When everything falls apart for Aidan, James saves him from certain death . . . and discovers a skeleton of another boy who wasn’t so lucky.

As Aidan recovers, James falls desperately in love. But though Aidan acts like an adoring boyfriend, he doesn’t seem to feel any sexual attraction at all. Meanwhile there are two angry exes on the horizon, one coming after them with the press and the other with a butcher’s knife. To be together, Aidan and James must conquer death, sex, and everyone’s preconceptions about the right way to love—even their own.

Available from Riptide Publishing on July 27.

Amazon

It’s no secret by now that I never know what to talk about when it comes to blog posts. Usually if I have some burning issue I want to explore, I do it by writing a book. Just baldly coming out and writing non-fiction feels quite unnatural to me. However, I can answer questions all day long. So in lieu of any better ideas I’m going to ask myself five questions and then answer them. This has the bonus that it accurately reflects my own butterfly of a mind – flitting here and there and never settling on any one thing long.

Tell us about your latest release.

Well, Blue Steel Chain is a book about two characters helping each other to recognise that they are in abusive relationships and eventually escaping those relationships to find a new, healthier love in each other. While it’s fairly obvious from the start that Aidan is being abused, it takes James a long time to realize that he is too. James is somewhat protected by being both absent minded and absolutely fascinated by his work, so when his other half, Dave, isn’t actually right there, he forgets how bad it is.

I am also absent minded. I wish I could remember the title of the book I’m thinking of. It was by Ann Sommerville, and her MC was horribly abused for the greater part of the book. I remember breaking down in tears of sheer relief and joy when things started to turn around for him. While I was re-reading Blue Steel Chain for the editing process, it reminded me of that book, only because the first half is a little gruelling. Hang on in there. I hope it will also be worth it.

Have you read anything that made you feel differently about LGBTQ fiction?Constantly. Writing LGBTQ fiction is a constant process of learning more about the community and more about yourself. When I first started writing slash fanfiction it was assumed that the majority of writers and the majority of readers were straight, and it’s taken years for first the slash writing community and then the m/m romance writing community to be heard when they were saying “No, that’s not true.”

A couple of weeks ago, I had an inquiry from someone at Cosmopolitan magazine doing a piece on straight women who read m/m romance, and five years ago I would have thought that was great exposure for the genre. I wouldn’t have noticed that their focus was on straight people at the expense of ignoring the vast numbers of queer people for whom this genre is important because it represents their very existence. I was very ignorant when I started out.

I probably am still very ignorant. So I read a lot of meta. I hang out on Tumblr and pay attention to the things that distress people, so that I can hopefully learn not to do them. My opinions on many things have become more nuanced as a result. One of the things I’ve learned, for example, is that there are many asexual and bisexual people who don’t feel represented in queer lit, so Blue Steel Chain has an asexual MC. I’m fairly certain I’m going to be writing more asexual, bisexual, trans and genderqueer characters in future as a result.

If you could pick anyone in the world to be the cover model(s) on Blue Steel Chain, who would it be?

Aidan should be played by Tom Hardy 🙂 I’ve even referred to his resemblance to Tom Hardy in the text. Though less Mad Max and more Tom Hardy as he was in Warrior:

James is difficult. There aren’t a lot of actors I can think of who ‘look like an amiable giraffe’. Maybe Andrew Garfield?

He’s certainly got the hair for it.

What’s the most annoying thing people say when you tell them you’re a writer?

“Oh, I’ve often thought of writing a book myself!”

Yes, I’m sure you did. Congratulations. I often thought of being a [dentist/brain surgeon/bank teller/insurance salesman/whatever] myself, but I just couldn’t find the time.

If you’re willing to talk to me about what your book idea was, and how it was developed into a plot plan, and who the characters were, and the fact that you did in fact start writing it, but due to a tragic accident the river flooded, the manuscript dissolved and you never had the heart to start again, then we can talk. I’ll be interested in that. If you’re just saying it as the equivalent of “Oh yes, I’ve had daydreams of being a rocket scientist too,” you may find yourself being skewered by a hard look and the question, “Well then, why didn’t you?”

Do you think anyone can write a novel? Why/Why not?

On a related subject 🙂 Yes, I absolutely think that anyone can write a novel. That is, anyone who is capable of reading and writing well enough to write a business letter is also capable of writing a novel.

However – you knew there was going to be a however, right? The caveat is that anyone can write a novel if they are willing to put in the work. Having an idea, expanding the idea so it’s intricate and interesting enough to support a story, plotting the story, writing the actual words. Finishing. Revising. Polishing.

Suppose it’s a short novel of 60,000 words. You’re looking at writing 2,000 words a day every day for approximately a month – if you’re doing it on a NaNoWriMo kind of schedule. Most people don’t. Most people take years to write their first novel. Are you willing to either devote every scrap of your free time to writing a novel quickly, or to spend years of your life writing it slowly?

Bear in mind that the initial rush of euphoria – the “woo! I’m writing a novel and it’s so exciting” stage – wears off around chapter five. After that (I speak from experience) it’s all toil. You will hate the sight of it. You will be convinced it’s weary, stale and unprofitable. You will want with all your being to be doing the ironing instead. The middle of any novel is not fun.

If you’re willing to push through the fact that your leisure activity now feels like harder work than your work, there may be some hope that you are in fact the kind of person who can write a novel.

If you do actually get to the end of your novel, you have already achieved more than about 99% of the people who started out thinking that they could be a novelist.

Now look at your first novel and see that it is crap.

Because it will be – first drafts of first novels are all about teaching yourself how to finish, how to write. Unless you’re a vanishingly rare beast they’re not about being good.

Now read a lot of books on how to write, and sit down and write that thing again, taking another couple of years, practising, refining your use of words and style all the while, closing up plot holes, learning enough about human psychology to make your characters seem like real people. Put some effort into it.

If you’re willing to do all of that, then yes, you can write a novel. If you’re not, then even if you could theoretically do it, you never will.

What separates a writer from a non writer is not innate talent. It’s willingness to actually sit down and write. You learn by doing, so if you’re sitting there going “I wish I could write a book, but I don’t know how to start,” start by imitating your favourite writer, get some words down on paper. Write two or three novels just for practice. You’ll be learning all the time. By the time you reach your third novel, you’ll be able to tell yourself “yes, I am the kind of person who can write a novel.” But I don’t know of any other way to find out.

Don’t forget to check out Carissa’s wonderful review on Blue Steel Chain that was just posted HERE!

Alex Beecroft is an English author best known for historical fiction, notably Age of Sail, featuring gay characters and romantic storylines. Her novels and shorter works include paranormal, fantasy, and contemporary fiction.

Beecroft won Linden Bay Romance’s (now Samhain Publishing) Starlight Writing Competition in 2007 with her first novel, Captain’s Surrender, making it her first published book. On the subject of writing gay romance, Beecroft has appeared in the Charleston City Paper, LA Weekly, the New Haven Advocate, the Baltimore City Paper, and The Other Paper. She is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association of the UK and an occasional reviewer for the blog Speak Its Name, which highlights historical gay fiction.

Alex was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and grew up in the wild countryside of the English Peak District. She lives with her husband and two children in a little village near Cambridge and tries to avoid being mistaken for a tourist.

Alex is only intermittently present in the real world. She has led a Saxon shield wall into battle, toiled as a Georgian kitchen maid, and recently taken up an 800-year-old form of English folk dance, but she still hasn’t learned to operate a mobile Phone.

She is represented by Louise Fury of the L. Perkins Literary Agency.

Connect with Alex:

• Website: alexbeecroft.com
• Blog: alexbeecroft.com/blog
• Facebook: facebook.com/AlexBeecroftAuthor
• Twitter: @Alex_Beecroft
• Goodreads: goodreads.com/Alex_Beecroft

 

Every comment on this blog tour enters you in a drawing for a signed paperback from Alex Beecroft’s backlist. (Any title which has a paperback edition, excluding Blue Steel Chain.) Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on August 1. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Don’t forget to add your email so we can contact you if you win!