I like to read blogs, when I'm not busy doing something else, and I have a long and ever changing list of blogs that I visit fairly regularly - about once every six or eight weeks. What I especially like is finding blogs that describe people's lives or interests that are different to my own, or which talk about my own interests (which are fairly varied) in an interesting way. Over the years, I've followed the blogs of gay men who knit, American Buddhists, several women priests and ministers, craft blogs, history blogs, writing blogs....and it was a writing blog that I was reading yesterday. This was the LGBT Fantasy Fans and Writers blog. Well, I'm a fantasy fan and writer, so that was my own interest, and I wanted to see fantasy looked at from a different angle.
That's how I came across Alex Beecroft, one of the writers of the shared blog.
It was the post about morris dancing that piqued my interest, and how dancing is used or ignored in fantasy novels. Alex Beecroft is a morris dancer, so she knows what she's talking about - and she posted a scene from one of her novels which talked about morris dancing and English folklore and wells, and I immediately wanted to know more. So I looked at the books she has written, and found the cover pictures for Bomber's Moon: Under the Hill and the sequel, Dogfighters. Bomber's Moon has a Lancaster Bomber on the front cover, and Dogfighters has a Mosquito fighter/bomber - fighting a dragon!
This brought a huge grin to my face without me needing to know anything else about the story. I love Mossies! I used to go to airshows when I was a kid, and I loved the World War Two aircraft. I've seen the City of Lincoln fly (the Lancaster) and the Battle of Britain flight with the Spitfire and Hurricane, and a Mosquito. I grew up watching films like 633 Squadron and The Battle of Britain, and the one where John Mills is a Lancaster pilot, and the Dambusters (this is in addition to the swashbucklers, of course - I'm sure anyone reading this blog is starting to get the impression that I was never a 'girly' little girl).
The thing to remember about the Mosquito is that it is a wooden plane. It's made of a wood frame with canvas stretched over it - and this writer has the pilot going up against a dragon. That speaks of extreme foolhardiness, or desperation - and I wanted to know more.
I bought Bomber's Moon yesterday evening, as an ebook, and I'm already up to chapter nine. The plot is intriguing - the main character's house has been attacked by fairies/elves and he needs protection, while the other main character's lover is trapped in the elven world, trying to get home. The characters are interesting - and I have no idea how the story will be resolved, so I'll have to keep reading! My guess is that it will take more than knocking down the new extension to Ben's house and putting some bowls of milk and honey out to appease these elves!
Oh, and there is also gay sex, which is not a subgenre that I had really looked at before. As a young teenager, I read several novels by Mary Renault set in Ancient Greece, where the main characters were gay - her Alexander the Great trilogy, for instance (and I remember reading The Persian Boy, the second of the trilogy, while hoping my gran didn't look over my shoulder to see what I was reading in case she was shocked!) But that's really been my whole knowledge of gay and lesbian literature until now, apart from Captain Jack in Doctor Who and Torchwood (in some ways I have led a sheltered life). In this book the main characters are gay men, but the romance goes alongside an action filled plot - it's just that the romance happens to be between the male characters. I'm not a great fan of slushy romance, so this was much more to my taste, and I can't wait to see how it will work out for them!
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