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Lurking Musings

~ Musings of a newly published writer

Lurking Musings

Tag Archives: bbw romance

Judy Bagshaw

12 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Musings

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bbw romance, facebook, female protagonists, Judy Bagshaw, RIP, Romance, Skyla Dawn Cameron


 Sometimes Facebook can be a right bitch and hit you so hard in the feels with something so innocent as a birthday reminder. Judy009cropped

This morning it decided to tell me that it was Judy Bagshaw’s birthday. The feels came because Judy died in 2015, leaving behind a writing legacy that includes me and a hell of a lot of other people who are trying to follow her. She wrote romance stories that included female protagonists that were not ‘standard size’, positive stories in which their size was not part of the plot nor the subject of comic relief. From her I learned a number of things – how to stay positive in the face of adversity from your own self esteem, how to edit effectively and how to approach publishers. It is thanks in part to her (with Skyla Dawn Cameron taking credit too) that I got published in the first place.

OppositeAttraction_AuthorCopy_revised I never met her in person, though I always wanted to, but she was my mentor, a cheerleader and a self confessed fan of my work. She owned one of the ten ‘limited editions’ of Lurking Miscellany that came out of the first print run with the error on the cover. I would have sent her it for free (she helped edit parts of it) but she not only insisted on paying for it, she insisted on me signing it and sending it to her despite the fact she could have got it cheaper by Amazon. She even told me to add the international postage cost to the invoice (which I didn’t… I owed her at least that much).

That Facebook reminder this morning woke all these feelings in me again so I just had to share. I urge you to do her the honour of looking up one of her books and buying it. I feel it is the best way to celebrate her birthday.

Lurking Miscellany release

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Publicity

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

a collection of short stories, bbw romance, Book Release, D.A Lascelles, Lurking Miscellany, Ninfa Hayes, Paperback, Paranormal, Romance, Urban Fantasy, Waypoint


The release of Lurking Miscellany was on Saturday in Leeds, so now it is time to open up the book to the rest of the world.

The blurb (written for me by the wonderful Ninfa Hayes):

“It’s you!” She stood up and backed away, pointing accusingly at Orchil. “You’re doing this to me! You’re using some form of… of… magic.” What else could explain it? A spell, a curse, an inexplicable phenomenon. Magic!

Orchil laughed. “You really that stupid? I thought you followed the great god, Science? Sit, girl, sit and let me tell you how the trick was done. And that’s a rare thing, a Shaman explaining their magic, so you better listen well!”LurkingMiscellany-lg

An environmental activist with the power to control the elements;

A xeno-anthropologist Gate Tech seeking to learn the secrets of an alien race;

A shape changing fey playing havoc in a nightclub.

These are just some of the characters that live in the shadows of the secret worlds that surround us. Discover their stories in this enthralling anthology. Embrace the lurking miscellany.

If you want to acquire a copy of this collection of short stories you can do so in one of two ways.

First (and quickest) method is to go via Lulu and order a copy from their online shop. The link for this is to be found on my webpage under publications. I have even made it easy for you with a quick and simple buy link that gets you straight there.

The second method is to contact me either through this page (comment below) or on facebook or via my email address (dalascelles-writing@yahoo.co.uk) and ask me for a copy. You can even ask me to sign it for you if you like.
 
It is hoped that there will be more places to buy from soon. Just negotiating the delicate issues of self publication (which is totally new to me at the moment so learning a lot) and working through all possible routes of delivery and format. Hoping for Amazon listing to be available soon, for example. I will keep you all informed as to when a new way to purchase a copy emerges. Will at some point also be considering ebook formats too, though I think that may take a while as I suspect there will have to be a lot of formatting changes to make it work.
 
Also worth knowing that this collection is intended as a taster and also a chance for readers to tell me which story they liked the best. The one that gets the most votes will be developed further as a longer piece of fiction – either as a series of short stories/novellas or a complete novel. Once you have acquired a copy you can cast your vote by contacting me using the methods outlined in the Afterword. You can also post in the comments to this blog post.
 
 

 

Writing Romance

08 Saturday Feb 2014

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Musings

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BBW Anthology project, bbw romance, BBW Romance writers, Conan the Barbarian, D.A Lascelles, Elric of Melnibone, fantasy novel, paranormal romance, Romance fiction, Transitions


There was a time when I would have said that I would never write Romance. I certainly never read it. That stuff was for girls, after all. When I were a lad my reading was all fantasy and SF, cool stuff with lasers and swords and demons and stuff. Romance was not in the picture. After all, I would hardly consider the sort of relationships that Conan had as ‘romance’, more reinforcing an unhelpful misogynistic male stereotype, and Elric of Melnibone was too obsessed with his own self destructive angst to worry about such things. Typical teenage boy stuff.

Even at school I hardly displayed the most romantic tendencies. Given the choice between studying a play about angsty teenage romance that ends in suicide and a particular Scottish play filled with witches, blood and dark omens (not to mention Banquo’s ‘gory locks’) you would probably not be too surprised at which one won out.

Needless to say I was not known for my romantic tendencies.

So, obviously, when I grew up, I wrote a Romance novella…

Wait… what? How the hell did that happen? I ask myself the same question a lot.

I put the answer down to my desire to challenge myself.

At least Conan got the smouldering hero look about right….

You see, when I was in school my ambitions were to write a fantasy novel. Or a SF novel. Something genre based anyway. I even wrote a very bad SF short about aliens invading the school (I am still waiting for the producers of The Faculty to get back to me on my royalties for that… 🙂 ) and a clichéd fantasy novel about a bunch of characters who join up in a quest to find a magic object. It even had a werewolf in it. Thankfully, those truly awful pieces of literature never survived long enough to sully the world with their awfulness and for a while I put aside writing to focus on other things. Then I came back to it and the first thing I thought was ‘I need a challenge’. I also came to a revelation that romance was an important part of life. More than important, it is fundamental to life. Without it being there to help ensure that certain essential biological processes occur, life pretty much stops. Ok, I guess at some point in human history we did without it, though it is hard to really say when romance first began. Courtly love is cited as a medieval invention but there was romance long before then as evidenced by the love poems of Cattullus (written between 84 and 54 BC). Even older than that is a Sumerian poem or song written 4000 years ago and bear in mind that this is the oldest recorded evidence. Just because there are no surviving written love poems before that does not mean the concept did not exist. Romance has been around a long time.

Though I am not sure why this would be surprising. After all, these ancient civilisations had deities (usually goddesses, there may be a hetero-normative argument to be had there) who were dedicated to romance and love. Safe to say that romance and love have been human concepts for a long time, almost certainly longer than the written records that hold these fragments of the literature of these ancient periods.

So what did this mean for me and my big decision? Well, I argued in my inner Transitions-AuthorCopymonologue, you see romance is everywhere and involved in everything. It is a major motivator for human behaviour. It appears in all forms of story, not just those that come with covers depicting smouldering leading men with a tendency to scowl too much and beautiful heroines trying desperately to keep their bosoms inside a corset. Main characters in war stories, superhero stories, comedies, tragedies and, well, any story really, are at risk of falling in love and doing something stupid because of that. Romance is a vital tool in the storyteller’s repertoire. And I wanted to get better at using it.

So I joined up with a fun group of writers known as the BBW Romance Writer’s group. That’s BBW as in ‘Big Beautiful Women’ because another thing I believe in is realistic bodyshapes for both genders. Our goal was to produce an anthology of Romance fiction novellas with realistic heroines, a project they had already achieved with two previous publications. I set out to try to write a Paranormal love story because I realised early on that I could not do a full romance tale, I had to have some fantasy, some supernatural stuff, to shake things up. Boy/Girl/Trans meets Boy/Girl/Trans [delete as appropriate] is all very well but it is also cool if there’s a ghost or something as well. In the end I actually merged two stories that were sat unfinished on my hard drive – one a contemporary boy meets girl, the other about an ancient Roman and his doomed marriage.

About half way through merging these two I realised that the romance was not where anyone would expect it to be – in the hands of the two contemporary characters. Their tale is a more modern love story, but it is not as deep and enduring as the tragic tale of Gaius Lucius – a romance that makes a desperate man do terrible things in order to keep hold of it. In a way I suppose I was making a point about perceptions of romance – that in some cases modern ideas of love are more superficial. That epiphany is what, for me, made sense of the whole concept of romance in fiction and the final result of that realisation led to the publication of Transitions.

So, I would say to any writer who works in any genre to not ignore the importance of romance. Explore it and use it and try to understand how it might motivate your characters. It is not just hearts and flowers and hallmark cards.

[Guest Post] What it feels like to be published by Julie Schriver

18 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Guest posts

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

bbw romance, BBW Romance writers, guest blogging, guest posts, Julie Schriver, Love by Proxy, mundania press, paranormal romance, Publication, romance writers, Shades of Love, writing


Today we have a guest post from Julie Schriver who is another of the authors contributing to the Shades of Love anthology and a member of the BBW Romance Writers group. Her story, Love by Proxy, is out now and available from this link. 

Hello, my name is Julie Schriver, and this is my very first  blog post. Hopefully, it won’t turn out to be just a confusing jumble of thoughts.

First off, I want to say thank you to David for allowing me a small voice on here.  You’re very kind to invite me to make a guest post, and I’ll do my best to not make myself look like an idiot.

As has been posted about previously, I am a part of the group of writers who has, with much hard work, frustration, and ultimately elation, finally realized the end goal of our endeavors.  Our paranormal romance anthology is being published by Mundania Press.  One story is being released per month, and later on all of the stories will be put together in one anthology.

For me, this journey has been an incredibly educational one.  I could fill a book with the things I have learned from the talented people I’ve come into contact with while being a part of this project.  I will be forever grateful for having known and worked with them, and I hope we will continue to remain friends even after this collaboration is behind us.

This will be the first time I’ve had anything published, (Thank you, Mundania!), but I’ve been writing, mostly for my own pleasure, since high school.  It’s always been something I’ve truly enjoyed, although I never dreamed I would actually write anything that other people would want to read.  The stories that I write are a part of me, not in a biographical sense, per se, but they have been wrung from my imagination.  For this reason, I was always too timid to share my “brain children” with anyone.  Joining the BBWRomanceWriters group and jumping into this project was a big step for me in overcoming my fears and putting myself out there.  Truly, it’s been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

My contribution to the anthology, Love By Proxy, is about a woman, Gwen, who’s always fought her ability to see and converse with spirits.  Everyone, even her own family, believed that she was mentally disturbed when she would try to talk to them about what she could see.  She was finally able to break away and build herself a new life far away from everything that she knew.  Armed with an art degree, she settled into a small town in Colorado and opened up a shop where she sells her own artwork.  She lives in an isolated, old farmhouse that she shares with a spirit named Rose, a saloon girl killed by a stray bullet over a hundred years ago.  It’s a unique friendship, but it works for both of them.

Gwen is finally happy, but that happiness is threatened when a developer, Evan, blows into town wanting to build a new residential subdivision right behind her home.  More people means more spirits will be attracted to the area, and she is terrified that she won’t be able to hide her abilities any longer.  Her fight to stop the development is a losing battle as the townspeople are very much in support of Evan’s ideas for the land.  It also doesn’t help that she’s beginning to have feelings for him.  She will eventually have to decide whether to stay and hope for the best or leave the place she’s come to love.

If you’ve read this far, thanks! I hope I haven’t bored you too much.  If you decide to take a gander at my story, I hope you enjoy it!

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