A warm welcome to author Alex Beecroft who is stopping by Love Bytes to talk about new Riptide release “Labyrinth”.

Enjoy the fascinating , interesting guestpost and feel free to join the giveaway at the bottom of the blog post.

Welcome Alex 🙂

Three years ago—maybe four, in fact—I was at the UK Meet with a choice of panels to attend, and I opted to go in to the “Writing the other letters” panel. This was a room full of people who were attending this m/m romance writers convention, but who were interested in writing main characters who were L or B or T or one or more of the other letters.

 

I still recall this as a life-changing experience in the same way that the discovery of slash fiction had been a game changer for me. When I first encountered slash (m/m) fanfiction, I had a profound moment of there are other people like me! I’m not a solitary freak! Oh, thank God, I’m normal! (For a given value of normal which meant I was no longer alone.)

 

I look back on that discovery as a blessing and an important step towards figuring out who I really was, as well as a doorway out of the heteronormative world I lived in to somewhere that fitted me much better.

 

The realization I felt in the “Other Letters” panel was less purely comforting and more of an awakening or a challenge. As I was sitting there, listening to people lament that there still wasn’t much bisexual fiction, or many transgender main characters, and saying that as asexual or genderqueer people they felt they were still invisible, I came to the understanding that I had never written these characters because I felt like I wasn’t allowed to.

 

And in that room I suddenly thought, Who is telling you you aren’t allowed? You’re the only one telling yourself that. You could do it! You could write about people like you.

 

Way, way back when I was a child, I discovered Norse mythology and the god Loki became very important to me. I didn’t know why at the time – I thought it was probably because he was funny and clever – but looking back from the perspective of someone who now realizes they are agender, I see that his genderqueerness called to me. He moved easily between being a man and being a woman, and while the other Norse gods seemed to think that was a proof of his perversity, it was something that I felt a kinship with.

 

On other posts in this tour I’ve said how much I identified with sexless beings like angels and with eunuchs, and with the people of Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, who only have a sex drive and gender on a couple of days a month. I didn’t know why these things were so important to me then, but I know now.

 

To cut a long story short, when I think about writing characters who are like me, I think about writing asexual, non-binary people.

 

Writing is a glacially slow business. If you decide you’re going to write about an asexual character, you have to first finish the thing you’re working on now. Then you have to edit the thing you’re working on now, and do the blog tour for the thing you were working on before that. Then you can start writing the new book, which at my pace takes 4-6 months just to finish the first draft. Then another couple of months of polishing. Then you submit it and wait for the publisher to get to it. That takes another 6 months to a year.

 

Then they give it a release date of a year in the future, and in that time you edit it and start thinking about the next thing.

 

So although I acted on my realization fairly soon after having it, it’s only just beginning to bear fruit. The first fruits of which was Blue Steel Chain, which has an asexual main character.

The second fruits (if there is such a phrase) is Labyrinth. Kikeru, my young inventor, is genderqueer in a slightly different way from me, in that while I am agender (I don’t recognise myself as having a gender at all,) Kikeru is gender-fluid (sometimes he’s a boy and sometimes she’s a girl.) There have been many cultures and civilizations in the world which acknowledge the existence of third-gender people and Kikeru is lucky enough to live in one of them – the ancient Minoan civilization of Crete.

 

However (there’s always a however) – humans can never just let themselves be what they are without trying to stuff each other into boxes. The ancient world’s preferred way of dealing with nb people who appeared male seems to have been to call them ‘holy’ and suggest they should chop off their genitals and become a priestess full time. And Kikeru is not really into religion. Kikeru just wants a normal life married to the man of their dreams.

 

Interested in how Kikeru manages to avoid a destiny as a castrated priestess of the Minoan mother goddess? Oh, and I forgot to mention singlehandedly winning a war? It would take me as long to explain the plot as it would to read it, so I’m just going to cross my fingers and hope you choose to do that. Thank you!

 

 

About Labyrinth

 

Kikeru, the child of a priestess at the sacred temple of Knossos in ancient Crete, believes that the goddesses are laughing at him. They expect him to choose whether he is a man or a woman, when he’s both. They expect him to choose whether to be a husband to a wife, or a celibate priestess in the temple, when all he wants to do is invent things and be with the person he loves.

 

Unfortunately, that person is Rusa, the handsome ship owner who is most decidedly a man and therefore off-limits no matter what he chooses. And did he mention that the goddesses also expect him to avert war with the Greeks?

 

The Greeks have an army. Kikeru has his mother, Maja, who is pressuring him to give her grandchildren; Jadikira, Rusa’s pregnant daughter; and superstitious Rusa, who is terrified of what the goddesses will think of him being in love with one of their chosen ones.

 

It’s a tall order to save Crete from conquest, win his love, and keep both halves of himself. Luckily, at least the daemons are on his side.

 

Labyrinth is now available from:

Riptide Publishing

Amazon

About Alex Beecroft

 

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

 

 

To celebrate the release of Labyrinth, one lucky winner will receive their choice of an eBook off Alex’s backlist! Leave a comment with your contact info to enter the contest. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on November 26, 2016. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Thanks for following the tour, and don’t forget to leave your contact info!