So! It’s Ace Week! My perception is that asexuality hasn’t been spoken about all that much until quite recently. But since 2010, Asexual Awareness Week has done it’s best to remedy that.
An asexual person experiences little to no sexual attraction and/or sexual desire. Like most things, this is a spectrum, from people who are repulsed by sex to people who enjoy sex but only with people they are emotionally attached to and all sorts of variants in between. You can read about the asexual umbrella here.
Finally, a quick mention for my own The Flowers of Time. Jones is demisexual…she experiences desire for Edie, although we never find out in the book whether that translates in to more than simply wanting to give Edie pleasure. This is largely because I didn’t know when I was writing it :).
Lost in Time and The Flowers of Time came out last month… and today… we are proud to introduce Shadows on the Border, the sequel to Lost in Time.
Both Lost in Time and Shadows on the Border are narrated by the inimitable Callum Hale. I cannot emphasize enough wonderful and on-point his interpretation of the characters is and how brilliantly the foggy, war-tired atmosphere of post First World War England comes across in his narration.
I am currently working on the third book set in the 1920s, so look for that in both ebook/paper and audio some time next year.
Back in the 1780s, Zoe Brookes has done a wonderful job with the The Flowers of Time and has struck just the right note with Edie and Jones… in particular Jones, who as a non-binary character is very close to my heart.
Again, look for more Jones and Edie next year, if I can get my works-in-progress ducks in a line!
I am so pleased with all three audiobooks. I feel very lucky to have found narrators who ‘got’ each of the stories and brought their own expertise so brilliantly to bear.
The second scene in The Flowers of Time has Jones and Edie meeting for the first time at Lady Nailsbourne’s ball, at her house in London. Jones is pretty far out of her comfort zone, poured in to a smart dress and corseted within an inch of her life. It’s 1780 and neither of them wear wigs-they had gone out fashion for ladies a few decades before-but they would probably have had hair pieces to bulk out their own hair and have lightly powdered them an off-white colour.
I dragged my family to Bath one day last year and we visited the Assembly Rooms and the Fashion Museum tucked in the basement of the building. I was looking for inspiration. I found various dresses that were definitely worthy of Edie and one or two that I could see Jones wearing.
I had already written the scene and I
was really cheered to see virtually the dress I’d described for Edie on display.
It’s the fourth one along in this montage, with a light pink gown over a
contrasting petticoat. I can also see her in dress numbers one and three,
puttering around painting. I can picture Jones in two and five, extremely
uncomfortable and feeling very out of place. If you want to find out more about
the different kinds of fashionable gowns for ladies at the time I recommend this post by Costumeholic.
We then found this working man’s frock
coat from about 1790. It’s a little later than the story, but working men’s
fashions wouldn’t have changed that much and I can see Jones comfortable in
something like this as she travels around exploring and later as she does her science
experiments.
Ordinary work-a-day clothes tend not to
survive because they were worn ‘til they wore out and/or were ‘made over’ for
other people and purposes, so this is very unusual. Clothes were incredibly
high value and very expensive before the advent of factory production, so your average
working class adult would probably only have two sets at a time.
I had a bit of a to-and-fro with my lovely editor about the use of bodies to describe the stays that Edie wears on her travels and in the end we decide to keep it. Working women who dressed by themselves without the help of a maid to lace them still wore a kind of corset called a pair of bodies. This was for practical reasons to support the back and bosom as well as to give them a bit of help with their figure and they generally laced up the front as well as the back. There is a fascinating reconstruction of an ordinary person getting herself dressed in the morning here on YouTube from Crows Eye Productions and I based Edie’s morning routine on this.
On our visit I also took some pictures of the Assembly Room itself. It has a sprung floor and my minions were happy to demonstrate.
It was quite chilly the day we went and
it was difficult to imagine the room packed and sweaty; but with hundreds of
candles and people it would soon have become unpleasantly warm.
We only live an hour away from Bath and
there is so much to see, I thoroughly recommend a visit if you are in the area.
It was wonderful to be able to pop up there and gather some more fuel for my
story-mine.
And that’s the end of The Flowers of Time blogtour! Thank you so much to everyone who has hosted me, it’s been a pleasure and a privilege to visit. Here’s a recap of the topics and where you can find me:
It’s been a lot of fun and an immense privilege to host such a wonderful set of people and I’m so grateful that they took time out of their busy lives. Thank you!
PS. If you’d like to buy The Flowers of Time that would quite frankly make me extremely chuffed.
Plus, to celebrate the launch I am off on a blog-tour over the next ten days. You can see the schedule below and the things I’ll be talking about.
I’m also hosting some lovely people here on own site to talk about magic, gender and journeys (not necessarily all at once!) in their own books. I’ll be putting a post up introducing them tomorrow.
Today though, I am over at Queer Sci-Fi, answering questions about my writing process. And other things. Because otherwise that would make for a short interview! Thank you so much to the QSF guys for hosting me.
Finally…scroll down to enter the Rafflecopter draw for a universal e-reader cover and a leather-bound notebook, not at all unlike the book in the story!