An Interview with Alex Beecroft!

This brilliant author and wonderful person was kind enough to open her blog to me not long ago. Now I have the honor of opening my own to her.
  Please welcome Alex Beecroft!

Alex, what was your motivation to become a writer? What took it that step further to publication?

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Or at least, I wanted to be a writer from the point at age 11 where I realized you had to want to be something other than merely alive. It feels as though it was built in. I’ve also always wanted to be published. I began trying to be published as soon as I got to the stage where I believed my writing was of publishable standard – that was about age 23, though I have to admit I didn’t try very hard until I reached my 40s and it began to feel as if time was running out.

Who is your muse and inspiration?

I’m a serial monogamist as far as muses go. They’re mostly actors. I’ll get inspired by some guy and he’ll prompt two or three novel ideas, which will occupy two or three years of my life. Then I’ll suddenly go off him and find someone else. When the whole ‘everything this guy does makes me want to tell a story’ thing is in full flood it’s a wonderful experience. And it does lead me to watch some amazing TV/movies which I wouldn’t normally touch with a barge pole, so it’s an educational thing as well as an inspirational one. This is my muse for most of my Age of Sail stories:

Who is your favorite character of all time? Why?

Therem Harth rem ir Estraven from The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin. This is a profoundly personal one, I guess. I’ve always had trouble with gender – didn’t understand it, didn’t want it, wanted to be treated like a person, like a human being, not like a man or a woman. I’d say I was genderqueer or - more closely - of no gender at all. And Estraven is still the only character I have ever come across in literature who is exactly that. Ey is also subtle, intelligent, heroic, vicious, motherly, reflective and altogether admirable. I would love to grow up to be as awesome as Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, on a world where nobody worried about what gender or sex you were because everyone was neither or both.

Which of the characters you've created is your favorite? Why?

I couldn’t choose between my characters. I love them all, even the villains. I don’t think you can write them properly unless you do.

How would you describe yourself?

Weird. Ideally suited to be an absent minded professor, providing I didn’t have to bother with having students.

How would others describe you?

Standoffish? Inclined to take the middle ground? It’s hard to say. (Heh – maybe ‘indecisive’ is the way to go.)

Would you survive a zombie apocalypse? Why/Why not?

You know, I just might. My husband is a marksman with a rifle and I’m not too bad an archer. Also, having done a lot of reenacting, I know how to build a shelter, light a fire with flint and tinder, spin and weave wool, make leather and work it, knap flint to make knives, turn wood on the pole lathe etc etc. So as long as we could get to our own island, or other defensible hold-out, we’d be all set to survive without any modern mod cons.

What is your creative process?

That’s hard. I’m not entirely sure. Ideas arrive. I don’t quite know how, but I’ll find myself thinking “ooh, what if there was a murder on HMS Endeavour and Joseph Banks had to find out who did it?” or “Maecenas and the Emperor Augustus are old drinking buddies – together they discuss poetry and fight crime.”

Usually these ideas, which seem so exiting at the time, will not survive more than a few days, but every now and then one of them will persist, and I’ll end up elaborating on it in my head – “ooh, Maecenas could be hiding something. He’s secretly building a replica Great Pyramid in his bath house using dog skulls and mortar made of incense.” Really? But why?

If the idea keeps growing and gaining complexity it will eventually reach the point where I know it’s self-sustaining. Then I’ll sit down and spend a week or so hashing out the details. (Who is Augustus’ sinister servant? Why is Livia trying to poison him, and what has this to do with the one eyed Gaulish child-catcher?)

Then I’ll wrangle these details into a rough plot plan, so I know approximately what’s happening every 1500 words or so. And when I’ve got that, I’ll start writing and find out the fine detail as I go.

What are some of your favorite things? (Color, Animal, Season, Music, etc)

Favourite colour – green. Initially through patriotism towards the land of my birth, Ireland. Now that I’ve accepted that I’m actually as English as they come, the favourite colour has persisted just because I like it.

Favourite season – Spring. I get SAD, and can’t describe the relief and reprieve of realizing that winter is finally over. Huzzah, I have made it! I haven’t died, and there are a blessed nine months ahead of me before I have to go through all that again.

If you were a blueberry, how would you like to end your existence?

In slow dissolution on the grassy ground, on a sticky hot summer day, with leaves dancing above me against the blue sky.

Alex has some remarkable books out, her latest promises to be something extra special too!

The faeries at the bottom of the garden are coming back—with an army.

Under the Hill, Part 1

When Ben Chaudhry is attacked in his own home by elves, they disappear as quickly as they came. He reaches for the phone book, but what kind of exterminator gets rid of the Fae? Maybe the Paranormal Defense Agency will ride to his rescue.

Sadly, they turn out to be another rare breed: a bunch of UFO hunters led by Chris Gatrell, who—while distractingly hot—was forcibly retired from the RAF on grounds of insanity.

Shot down in WWII—and shot forward seventy years in time, stranded far from his wartime sweetheart—Chris has been a victim of the elves himself. He fears they could destroy Ben’s life as thoroughly as they destroyed his. Chris is more than willing to protect Ben with his body. He never bargained for his heart getting involved.

Just when they think there’s a chance to build a life together, a ghostly voice from Chris’s past warns that the danger is greater than they can imagine. And it may take more than a team of rank amateurs to keep Ben—and the world—out of the elf queen’s snatching hands… 

What made you write this particular book?

I’d done an awful lot of historical, Age of Sail based stories, and I was aware that people had started to think of me as an author of historicals. I’d inadvertently given myself a brand identity that I didn’t really want. Don’t get me wrong – I love having a historical element in a book. I love the fact that visiting the past is like visiting an alien world. But my first love and my real interest continued to be fantasy, and I thought I would give myself a treat and write something self indulgent and fun.

I can’t say that I intended to write this book the way it came out. I’m not really that kind of an author. I intended to write a lighthearted novella, loosely thinking of it as “gay Tam Lin,” while I researched World War Two for another historical. But then the novella grew (as my novellas tend to do) and it absorbed the WWII research and integrated it into the plot. Suddenly I had a two-volume epic with time travellers. There still is a Tam Lin element to it, but now there are also themes of alienation, the loss of one’s world, how to carry on when everything that defined you is gone.

Part of my process that wasn’t covered above is that when a story wants to grow and expand, I shrug and roll with it. I’ve never yet had cause to regret that. Good things come to those who cling on to the back of a story as if it was a bolting horse and see where it takes them in the end.

If this book was a song, what genre would it be?

Oh, that’s easy. It would be the kind of rock/folk combination of Steeleye Span. Particularly something like this: Seven HundredElves

Would you give us a peek? Share an excerpt?

I certainly would :)

Chapter One

Ben bolted out of sleep, halfway to his feet before he realised he was awake. What was that noise! Something was wrong—he could feel it pressing under his breastbone. He thought he’d dreamed of a subterranean groan, felt again the rush of sticky re-breathed air and then the smoke. God! The smoke, pouring through the shattered windows of the train…

But this was his bedroom. Look, there—the alarm clock cast a faint green light on the claret duvet and gold silk coverlet, familiar as closed velvet curtains and his suit trousers hanging on the back of the bathroom door. 3:14 a.m.

His breathing calmed slowly. Was that what had woken him? Just another flashback? Or could there be an intruder downstairs?

Tiptoeing to the wardrobe, he eased open the mirrored door, slipped on his dressing gown and belted it, picking up the cricket bat that nestled among his shoes. The closing door showed him his determined scowl—not very convincing on a face that looked as nervous and skinny as a whippet’s. Licking his lips, weapon raised, he seized the handle of his bedroom door, eased it down.

And the sound came again. All the doors in the house fluttered against their frames, the ground beneath him groaned, tiles on the roof above shifting with a ceramic clatter. A crash in the bathroom as the toothbrush holder fell into the sink. He jumped, crying out in revulsion when the floor shuddered and the carpet rippled beneath his bare feet as if stuffed with snakes.

Earthquake! An earthquake in Bakewell? Home of well dressing and famous for pudding? The sheer ludicrousness of the idea flashed through his mind even as he raced down the stairs. You… What did you do in an earthquake? Stand under a door lintel, wasn’t it?

As he reached the living room, it happened again. He clutched at the back of the sofa while the entire house raised itself into the air and fell jarringly down with an impact that threw him against the wall. Bricks moving beneath his fingers, he pulled himself along the still-drying wallpaper into the hall, flung open the front door.

There was blackness outside—the streetlamps all guttered out—and silence, a silence so profound that the pressure began again inside his throat. It was so much like being buried underground. As he strained his ears for something friendly—a barking dog, a car alarm—a wind drove up from the Wye, filling his ears with whispering.

No stars shone above. But in the neighbour’s windows, he could see something silver reflected, something that moved with liquid grace.

No way!

The curve of a horse’s neck traced in quicksilver reflected in a driving mirror. A stamping hoof—drawn out of lines of living frost and spider web—splashed in a puddle. Drops spattered cold over his bare ankles.

Coming up from the river, across the bridge, up the sleeping suburban street they rode, knights and ladies. Glimmering, insubstantial shreds of banners floated above them like icy mist. Harps in their hands, hawks on their fists, and now he could hear the music; it was faint, far away, wrong as the feeling that had driven him out of bed. Alien and beautiful as the moons of Saturn.

“No way!”

He clapped both hands over his mouth, but it was too late. The words were out, full of blood and earth and inappropriate, human coarseness. Their heads turned. He caught a glimpse of armour, shadows and silver, as one of the knights reined in his horse, glided close, bending down.

The creature smelled of cool night air. Its inky gaze raked over Ben from head to toe, like being gently stroked with the leaves of nettles, a million tiny electric shocks. His skin crawled with the prickle of it, ecstatic and unbearable, and he gasped, held on the point of a pin between violent denial and begging it to do more.

Long platinum hair slid forward over a face drawn in strokes of starlight. “Which eye do you see me with?”

“I…” croaked Ben, his mouth desiccated, his lungs labouring. “What? I…”

Something in the garden—something huge, covered in spikes, lifted up the house, foundations and all, and shook it like a child’s toy.

“Fuck!”

Terror goaded him into action. Lurching back into the hall, Ben slammed the door, locked it, shot the bolts top and bottom, fumbled the chain into its slide and reached for the phone. Nine-nine-nine got him a brisk, polite young woman saying “What service please?”

Outside, crystalline laughter tinkled in the starless night. The walls flexed like a sheet of rubber. “Police please! I…” …think I’m being attacked by fairies.

And everything went quiet. Down the street a burglar alarm brayed into the night. He opened the door a crack to see the streetlamps shining vulgar yellow-orange over a score of double-parked cars. There was, of course, no evidence the creatures he’d seen had ever been there at all. He took a deep breath, decided against setting himself up for a charge of wasting police time, and let it out in surrender. “Never mind.”

http://store.samhainpublishing.com/under-hill-series-334.html

Thank you so much for sharing with us Alex. 

I have been thoroughly intrigued ^_^