Blog Tour: Guestpost & Giveaway Alex Beecroft – Blue Eyed Stranger

 

Today we give a warm welcome to author Alex Beecroft visiting Love Bytes today on the Blue Eyed Stranger blog tour!

Alex asked herself some interview questions which she shares on here and there is also a Riptide giveaway to participate in

Welcome Alex 🙂

 

Blurb

 

Billy Wright has a problem: he’s only visible when he’s wearing a mask. That’s fine when he’s performing at country fairs with the rest of his morris dancing troupe. But when he takes the paint off, his life is lonely and empty, and he struggles with crippling depression.

 

Martin Deng stands out from the crowd. After all, there aren’t that many black Vikings on the living history circuit. But as the founder of a fledgling historical re-enactment society, he’s lonely and harried. His boss doesn’t like his weekend activities, his warriors seem to expect him to run everything single-handedly, and it’s stressful enough being one minority without telling the hard men of his group he’s also gay.

 

When Billy’s and Martin’s societies are double-booked at a packed county show, they know at once they are kindred spirits, united by a deep feeling of connectedness to their history and culture. But they’re also both hiding in their different ways, and they need each other to be brave enough to take their masks off and still be seen.

 

I never can think of things to write blog posts about – which is a problem when I have to sit down and write five of them at once. It’s far easier to be interviewed. So I’m going to try to solve that problem by interviewing myself.

 

So, Alex, tell us, why did you decide to write a m/m romance between a morris dancer and a reenactor?

 

Well, Alex, thanks for asking 🙂 Both of these things are hobbies that I’ve been involved in for many years. I’m a member of Regia Anglorum and have been a member since 1990. (I remember the first event I attended in kit was the one thousand year anniversary of the Battle of Maldon. That’s how I remember the date.) I had a brief stint of reenacting the 18^th Century too, but that didn’t take. However, in the last seven years I’ve been discovering the joys of morris dancing instead. I now dance with Ely and Littleport Riot’s ladies border side, Sutton Masque mixed border side, and I play the pennywhistle for Coton Morris Men, who are an all-male Cotswold side.

 

They say write what you know, don’t they? This was a big case of doing just that.

 

Why did you choose to make Martin, your Viking character, black?

 

A couple of reasons, actually. Firstly, as a person who didn’t even know they were asexual until their forties, I’m aware that representation is important. If asexuality had been in the media I consumed while growing up, it might not have taken me so long to realize. I look at TV and movies and wish there were more women, more people of colour, more mogai people in our stories. And if I wish that, I really ought to do something about it in my own work. I’m probably not the best person to write a half Sudanese gay man, but you do what you can.

 

Secondly, I’ve been hanging out on Tumblr for a while and discovered that there are people out there who think that the ‘medieval’ period in Europe was entirely populated by white people. This is manifestly not true. Even as early as Roman times, there were black Roman legionaries in Britain. Certainly in Saxon times it was common to go on pilgrimage to Rome or to Byzantium, and in those cosmopolitan cities people from all over the world did business. There is no reason why a Viking from York might not spend a while in the Varangian guard and then come home with a Kushite wife. There is no reason why a church official sent from Byzantium with a large delegation of warriors and clerics from his own homeland would be white. Certainly Ahmad ibn Fadlān who travelled among the Vikings as an ambassador from Baghdad was not white, and he was held in very high regard.

 

My point being that so many pseudo-medieval stories justify having no people of colour in them because they say it wouldn’t have been authentic to the time. I wanted to let Martin demonstrate that that’s just not true.

 

If you’re so concerned with racism, why did you choose to have your morris dancers wear blackface?

 

Firstly anyone who googles ‘border morris’ will come across pictures of people dancing with their faces covered in black facepaint, so it’s a question that’s literally in your face. I don’t think it ought to be ignored. And secondly, I think there are worrying elements of British society that want to be able to coopt English folk dancing in favour of a kind of fascist nationalism that I don’t want to have anything to do with. The bad news is that the BNP (British Nationalist Party) certainly tried to get themselves associated with morris on the grounds that it was the real deal, the pure expression of Englishness, or whatever. The good news is that the folk community by and large reacted by forming Folk Against Fascism and going “fuck off. By ‘folk’ we mean any and all folk who are interested in being involved.”

 

That hasn’t stopped some of the more traditional sides from retaining the face paint. I put it in the book so I would have space to unpack the reasons why the sides who do it think it’s OK. My own position is that traditions change all the time, and when they’re hurtful to real life people then they ought to be dropped. My fictional side come to this realization themselves eventually.

 

So is this novel all doom and gloom and political agendas?

 

No! Are you joking? What’s better than one person with an utterly ridiculous hobby which he takes far too seriously? Two, fighting it out between them and falling in love! I’m hoping it’s fun all the way 🙂

 

 

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 theCharleston 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 draw for a $15 Riptide gift card. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on April 11. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Don’t forget to add your email so we can contact you if you win!