Hello from Alex Beecroft J I write gay romance that is on the sweeter side of the spectrum, and I will be in charge of the CTR blog all day today.
I made my name with books set in the 18th Century Age of Sail, but there’s only so much you can write about the navy in one go.
Now my settings range all the way from Bronze Age Crete to the modern day UK.
You might be able to guess from that brief introduction that I love history. I do! I enjoy being a tourist in other times – looking at the clothes, admiring the scenery and finding out about the different ways humans have looked at things over the years.
I did Philosophy at university, and I enjoy having my assumptions about what’s ‘normal’ challenged.
For that reason I also love fantasy and paranormal fiction. Fantasy is another place where you can travel to worlds that are exotic, and thrilling because of it.
I’ll tell you more about some of my fantasy and other novels later.
It wasn’t until recently – by which I mean about ten years ago and less – that I started to appreciate the life I was actually living.
What changed was this; I moved into the beautiful countryside of the English Fenlands. This is an area of England that used to be underwater.
Before the 17th Century, it was a wide expanse of shallow lakes where the people lived in houses on stilts, or on the rare islands. They harvested reeds for thatch, and fished for eels in the teeming water.
In the 17th Century, Oliver Cromwell – famous for having deposed the monarchy and briefly making Britain a Republic – drained the fens and turned them into arable land.
This created a landscape much like Holland. It’s flat as a pancake and you can see to the very edges of the world, while the sky goes on forever.
I fell in love with the place at once.
It probably helped that moving into the Fenland happened at the same time that I had my first book accepted for publication. That was a joyous and life-altering event – I’ll tell you about that later too.
But almost as life-changing was discovering morris-dancing and joining three different morris dancing groups. (The technical term for a morris-dancing group is a ‘side.’)
Morris-dancing is a traditional folk activity, and as such it plugged me and my family directly into the seasonal life of the area. We met dozens of local people who would go on to become good friends, and we became involved in the country year in a way that we hadn’t known we had missed before.
Of course morris dancing found its way into my books almost at once. Billy from Blue Eyed Stranger is a morris dancer, as is Chris from Under the Hill.
But finally loving the place I lived had another effect.
I began to be able to write contemporary fiction.
I suppose I finally understood what it was like not to need to escape from the modern day. I learned that life can be good even where you are. And from that came my Trowchester Series.
More on that next!
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