Tag Archives: D.A Lascelles

[Vampire Month] Vampire Photography: part One

19 Sunday Mar 2017

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gothic vampire blood

What is one thing we all know about Vampires? Well, that in the majority of cases they do not show up in mirrors. The reasons for this are never really well defined – some say it is because of some supernatural reason, others try to define it terms of scientific terms. There are even some that say that vampires do not like mirrors because they contain silver (a general ward against evil influences) or because, rather than not showing the vampire at all, they actually show what the vampire really looks like behind their hypnotic glamour.

I am not sure about oriental Vampires (their place in myth is more of a demonic nature than those in the West and they have different rules) but the mirror thing is often universal in western based Vampires, I suspect mostly stemming from the use of it in Dracula. What does differ is their reaction to photography. Do they show up on film or digital media? I suppose it depends on your camera – modern DSLRs usually use a mirror to reflect the image onto the sensor but older cameras, such as box brownies, don’t and so may well be used to capture the image of a vampire. And, of course, if your camera is based on the principle of a tiny imp with a paint box who can paint really quickly, such as Vampire photographer, Otto Criek, uses in the Discworld series you have no issues with vampire models. Just be sure to be careful how you use the flash as Otto’s main job related hazard seems to be his tendency to turn to dust whenever he uses it.

ghost sister vampire

Of course, photographing people dressed as vampires is an entirely different thing. They certainly show up on the image and it is images of people dressed as Vampires we have for you today.

kinky PVC nurse vampireblood asylum patient

These shots were all taken and edited by me as part of a themed Horror shoot in an old factory above a nightclub  in Manchester city centre over the summer of 2016. We covered a lot of different ideas on that day but did end up with two entirely different vampires. One a tragic, gothic horror version played by Jack Cutler with his RL sister Em (who models as Sephirayne) as the ghost of the sister he murdered. The other a more modern, PVC clad kinky nurse and her hapless patient played by Annabella Victoria Stanyer and J C Baxter. I hope you enjoy what we have created for you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Linky Goodness and updates

16 Monday Nov 2015

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Two posts in as many days? Who can live at

lurkerbadge

I am in fact a lurker on my own site site…. That is indeed irony.

that speed? No, your eyes have not betrayed you, I have indeed upgraded my usual plodding post speed for this lightening fast barrage. Yesterday,I told them so about Osgood and now today you have this post with some general updates.

Though this one is your lot for now so enjoy it while you can. Posting this much is tiring and my webgoblins are exhausted…

 

So, over on LM David’s blog I have been spotlighted:

https://lmdavid54.wordpress.com/2015/11/16/spotlight-lurking-miscellany-a-collection-of-short-fiction-by-author-d-a-lascelles/

Click the link to go see what has been put there…. And maybe browse some more pages on there to see what other authors you might discover…

So, what have I been doing lately other than being spotlighted and telling the internet that I told them so about Osgood?

LurkingMiscellany-lgWell, not much really. Not doing Nano this year (good luck to all who are however) due to the phenomenal amount of work I have had to deal with recently. This is also why updates on this site have been few and far between. Hopefully that will change soon and I can get back to more regular updates.

I have been keeping up with my writing, however, and managed to make progress on a couple of projects. I am hoping to send Gods of the Deep to an editor soon and have a final publishing ready version not long after that. Maybe early 2016. I’ve also had some ideas to extend a short I started writing years ago (current working title Fortune and Troy but that will change) and allowed to languish into something more novel length. This will be a SF in the same universe as Dances with Drums and Tryptych of the Gates which can be found in Lurking Miscellany.

Following on from 2015 being the year of all the public appearances (Yorkshire Cosplay Con, MancsterCon, World Book Night) I am already booked on two events for next year. One is the Manchester Authors signing event in August and the other is the EasterCon known as Mancunicon. At the latter I have also made the foolish mistake of volunteering which means I am likely to also be on panels and may even be moderating panels and doing other stuff. So those of you who missed my rambling monologues (with visual aids and statistics) at MancsterCon can catch me at Mancunicon and see what only a select audience of dedicated geeks have seen so far…

So that is everything up to date… I’ll update again soon…

Not so secret society

27 Monday Jul 2015

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I guess over the last few months an insidious and influential group has slowly been showing its hand. You may not have been aware of them, at first. They are an organisation who were cloaked in shadow. However, you may have met some of them, maybe at an author event, maybe passed them in the street. They have guided civilisation from the earliest days, raised kings and toppled princes, manipulated the stock market and contributed to the success of numerous creative artists. They have agents everywhere. Well, mainly in the UK. Actually, mainly in Manchester really with a couple elsewhere. To be honest, not all that many even in Manchester… but, so great are these agents they don’t need many to fulfil their schemes.tea society badge2

The name of this epic organisation? Why, it is none other than the Tea Society.

And if you are at this point thinking ‘Who?’ then that is testament to our ability to so totally blend into the background.

The origins of the Tea Society go back a number of years when a handful of writers who lived in Manchester started having sort of not very regular meetings to talk about writing. The name was a joke that rose out of the fact that we could not think of a name and all we seemed to do at the meetings was drink tea and in the end it sort of stuck.

Later, after some discussions around a shared trade table at a steampunk market, we came to the conclusion that it was really difficult sharing a table as we tended to do and maintaining a solid identity for customers to recognise. So, Elizabeth Morgan arranged for there to be a banner and Rachel Bostwick (Queen of trailers and other graphic design goodness) was hired to give us some brand identity with our official logo.

The banner debuted at the Yorkshire Cosplay con earlier this year and was also seen briefly at the World Book Night event at the Fab Café. It will next emerge this weekend at the Literally Literary event at Leeds Central Library and then at the MancsterCon in Salford on August 29th.

stallSo, now that we are out in the open, you may be able to guess some of our members… they include R.A Smith, Ninfa Hayes, Miriam Khan and of course myself. But there are others such as Pat Keheller, Erica Hayes and Alex Campbell (whose book is out soon, you should totally check it out).

If you see any of us at an event, especially if we have the banner up, feel free to come over and have a chat about books in general or our books in particular (and maybe even buy some). I am also currently pondering a special deal where if you promise to do some publicity – take some leaflets to be delivered to local businesses, tweet or share on Facebook, or otherwise spread the word – you may qualify for a special limited edition Tea Society badge. I’ll get out more details of this once I work them out properly.

Hope to see you all at an event soon!

Lurking Miscellany release

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

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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

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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.

A tale of World Book Night

26 Friday Apr 2013

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So, this Tuesday gone was World Book Night and yours truly was there in Costa Coffee Prestwich for a night of books.

The lucky recipients show off their acquisitions

The lucky recipients show off their acquisitions

It was actually quite a while ago, on one of our regular writers’ group meetings that R.A Smith suggested that we do something for World Book Night. The plan: All five of us apply to be Givers on the WBN webpage and we organise an event together in a local library in order to give them away. At the same time we would do readings and give aways and other things to keep the punters amused. We support the cause of spreading the love of reading, get some local community kudos and maybe a bit pf publicity for our own projects as an added bonus side effect.

So, with alacrity we set this plan in motion by us all logging into the WBN website and submitting our applications. We each applied for different books as our first choices and enough variation in second and third choices in order to hopefully avoid any overlaps and began to discuss the event itself.

Our initial plan of using libraries fell a little flat. We got no response from any of the libraries in Stockport, where a good number of our members lived, so at a quite late stage we had to expand our search to other areas. Being selfish and lazy and not wanting to travel more than a short distance, I offered to check out the possible venues in Prestwich, all of which are only a short walk from my house. Prestwich library were very helpful when I visited them and told me that they were closed on Tuesday afternoon (insert rant about local council budget cuts and their impact on local services here…) which was why they could not host (unless they could find a member of staff willing to work overtime for no pay) but suggested that I talked to the Coffee shop just over the plaza from them as they sometimes hosted events for them. I did just that and very soon we had a venue set. All that remained then was publicity…

The books laid out ready

The books laid out ready

Another problem was when we got the notification of what books we had got. We found that only three of us had been appointed givers (myself, Joy Phillips and Ed Fortune) which was more than 50% which was good. However, despite our careful planning, we got two batches of the same book. This meant we had 40 copies of John Wagner’s The Dark Judges and only 20 of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses. Nevertheless, this gave us the challenge of having 60 books in total to give away to anyone who wanted them…

On the day itself, we got to the coffee shop by 530pm to be ready for a 6pm start. We laid our books out on one table and on another we put all our publicity stuff – bookmarks and leaflets and so on. Ninfa Hayes had thought to provide a double sided A4 sheet with extracts from two of her stories on it which I thought was a nice touch and we’d also each thought to bring along copies of all our in print books for guests to browse through. Since Transitions is not (yet) in print, I had a copy of Pirates and Swashbucklers for this.

I had been concerned that we had not done enough publicity, that no one would bother to show up. However, these concerns were soon dispelled as people began to filter in. Some people we already knew, friends of ours who lived locally, but there were also a good few who were not known to us who had been drawn here by the leaflets and posters. There were discussions, with each of us drawn off into small groups to talk about the books or our books or publishing in general and while there was an initial mistrust of the ‘free books’ (a number of people asked how much they cost…) they were soon snapped up by all there. The ‘demo’ books were also much read, being passed around from person to person. It is to be noticed that Oblivion Storm is not shown in the photograph of the ‘swag table’ This was because it was at the time being ardently read by someone. Ninfa was even nice enough to let one of the guests take one of her paperback copies of Bites away with them – signing it for her too.

We ended the event with two readings, both done by R.A Smith. One was from Oblivion Storm the other from Bites. I had intended to do a reading from Transitions but realised that the only copy of it I had on my Kindle was actually a pre-edit copy and so not the best for a reading.

By 8pm, the official end of the event, the pile of 60 books had been reduced to a much smaller pile. We had only a couple of copies of

The swag

The swag

Noughts and Crosses and about 15 of The Dark Judges. Several of these were snapped up by the event guests as they left. One copy of each was taken to be put into the library of a local school (which I personally consider a win) and several of the rest were grabbed by some friends of ours to give out to random people they saw on their way home (at least one copy was given to the staff of the chip shop we all stopped at for dinner). At the end, we were left with 8 copies of the Dark Judges and none at all of Noughts and Crosses.

I hope that all those out there who took books will enjoy them… I do feel proud of what we achieved on that day and I think a number of the event guests enjoyed the event a great deal. Next year we plan to do the same again and this time make it bigger and better!

As for the 8 books we have left… well, they are there to be given away and we *could* just give them away to people we meet in the street or leave them in a pub or on a train or something like that. However, we have discussed it and decided to run a competition to decide who gets the books. Therefore, myself, R.A Smith and Ninfa Hayes will be taking at least two of the books each and will be announcing how you can win them very soon…