Hi guys, today we have Alex Beecroft stopping by with her newest release Blue Eyed Stranger, we have a fantastic guest post, a great excerpt, a brilliant giveaway and my review. So enjoy the post and leave a comment (with a way to contact you) for the giveaway. <3 ~Pixie~
Blue Eyed Stranger
(Trowchester Blues 02)
by
Alex Beecroft
Billy Wright has a problem: he’s only visible when he’s wearing a mask. That’s fine when he’s performing at country fairs with the rest of his morris dancing troupe. But when he takes the paint off, his life is lonely and empty, and he struggles with crippling depression.
Martin Deng stands out from the crowd. After all, there aren’t that many black Vikings on the living history circuit. But as the founder of a fledgling historical re-enactment society, he’s lonely and harried. His boss doesn’t like his weekend activities, his warriors seem to expect him to run everything single-handedly, and it’s stressful enough being one minority without telling the hard men of his group he’s also gay.
When Billy’s and Martin’s societies are double-booked at a packed county show, they know at once they are kindred spirits, united by a deep feeling of connectedness to their history and culture. But they’re also both hiding in their different ways, and they need each other to be brave enough to take their masks off and still be seen.
http://www.riptidepublishing.com/titles/blue-eyed-stranger
The Black Dog
by Alex Beecroft
It’s easy to romanticise depression. Even some of its more poetic names, like ‘the black dog’ have a touch of gothic grandeur about them. Enough books have been written about depressed poets and depressed novelists and depressed painters to tie mental illness in with creativity in people’s minds to the extent that sometimes artists resist getting treated because they believe it will silence their muse.
I initially decided that I would write a novel in which a morris dancer fell in love with a historical reenactor because I had a personal interest in both subcultures, and I thought the clash of worlds must inevitably be fun.
But I was looking for a villain. You can’t write a story with no conflict, and I had just finished writing Trowchester Blues in which the villain(s) were two annoying petty thieves and a local magistrate with an itchy trigger finger. There was much arson, kidnapping and other external threats. I didn’t want to do that again.
Which left internal villains, and I was familiar with just the mental illness. I can’t claim to have any detailed medical knowledge of depression. Technically I’m an ignoramus. All I had was a lifetime’s experience of…
God, I can’t finish that sentence. It’s hard to explain how a lifetime of being unable to get off the sofa, of missed appointments and forgotten birthdays, of self-loathing and guilt and paranoia and uncertainty about whether I’m really only imagining this, and endless grey days in which all meaning and joy were gone, and days when deciding what to eat for dinner felt like an insurmountable task… It’s hard to explain how all of that went into the depiction of a fictional character without somehow looking as if you too are claiming that it was all worth it because it ended up turning into art.
Billy’s depression, though, isn’t a marvellous thing. It isn’t a source of wisdom or inspiration for him. In a way it’s an enemy he fights every day. In order to be able to function even slightly like a regular member of society, Billy has to find cunning ways of surmounting his own mind. He starts the day tired and it all goes down hill from there.
Because I don’t have a universal experience of this – I only have my own experience – I don’t know if Billy’s oversensitivity to noise, stimulation, crowds and light is a general thing or if he shares that only with me. My theory is that since I am in fact human, I must share my symptoms with someone at least, even if it’s a fictional someone.
Where am I going with this? I don’t know, exactly, except that for a lot of my life I’ve been told that I was selfish for not pulling myself together and acting like a normal person. So it matters to me that there are books out there in which depressed characters exist and don’t end up either killing themselves or somehow ‘reduced’ by having attained a slightly higher level of happiness in their lives.
I don’t believe that falling in love can cure depression, but I do believe that having someone there to tell you that you’re not worthless can be a great comfort. Having someone there who has the mental resources to get you to the doctor when you can’t move out of the curled up ball on the floor – it’s not a cure but it’s certainly a help.
I know that depressed people are probably not easy to love. It’s hard for us to hear anything other than reproach, and it’s sometimes impossible for us to tell or show our loved ones how much they mean to us, but I think it’s important for us to see ourselves reflected in books. To know that we’re not just making it up, we’re not just being selfish (because of course any sensible person would want to be a heap of self-loathing), but that we are people bravely fighting an insidious villain. That’s Martin’s battle too now. In taking on Billy, he also takes on Billy’s depression. But like most enemies, it’s easier to fight when you’re not alone.
Excerpt
An hour and a quarter later, Billy slammed on the brakes outside Werrington church hall just as the van was leaving the car park. He hurled himself off his bike and ran into the centre of the road, waving his arms. The minibus lurched to a halt with a grind of gears, and he saw Matt at the wheel, looking at him like a man who’s just woken up and realised he’s missing an arm.
While the minibus backed apologetically into a parking space, Billy locked his bike to a lamppost and unstrapped the stick bag from his carrier. His back tyre looked considerably worse for wear after carrying the weight of twelve long ash sticks and a further six short ones. Billy’s legs weren’t too happy about it either. Next time, one of the blokes with a car could bring the sticks.
“Sorry, Billy!” Parked again, Matt rolled the window down and hung a white-shirted elbow over it. “I thought you were on board already.”
“No problem.” Billy smiled through the residual panic, disappointed but not surprised that nobody had noticed he was missing. “Can someone—”
The doors at the back swung open, pushed by Graham and Pete. Billy passed them the sticks and clambered inside, over the dozen bags that cluttered the aisle and jingled when he nudged them with his feet. Nancy’s drum in its carrying case stood like a small table in front of the only spare seat. Both seat and drum had been piled with ragged jackets, Colin’s cameras, and the blacking kit.
“Are we all in now?” Matt called. “Okay, I’m going.”
Billy had to hold on to the roof while they jogged and swayed over winter-pitted concrete, out of the car park and onto the smoother tarmac of the road. Then he dumped the jackets on the floor, resituated the blacking tin on his lap and eeled into the seat next to the other Billy.
“How do, Constant.”
“How do, Billy-boy.”
Billy-boy was a gentleman of seventy-five, with a beer belly and a beard that would have done Father Christmas proud. He had blacked up already, so his white moustache and eyebrows stood out startlingly from a face whose features could have been called handsome, fifty years ago. He passed Billy a battered hip flask with the top unscrewed, which Billy took hesitantly.
“That’s last year’s plums, Constant. You look like you need it. Up all night poaching, were you?”
“Something like that.”
The side had solved the problem of having two Billies by the traditional means of nicknames. Naturally, the older of the two became “Billy-boy,” or “the Boy” for short. Billy himself, since he had never yet missed a practice or a dance-out, had been christened “Constant Billy” after the dance of that name. This was often shortened to “Constant” to avoid confusion. He wasn’t sure that there was really any confusion at work, but he liked the name and the praise that it implied.
The home-distilled plum brandy was hot and sharp on the tongue. It burnt his throat like paint stripper and settled uneasily in a stomach empty of anything but a slice of cold toast. Still, he took it for the kind gesture it was, and smiled. “It’s not bad. Have you got a new still?”
“No, not at all. More like the old one’s just getting settled. She’s a bit of patina on her now. Stills’re like people, aren’t they—better when they’ve had a bit of time to mature.” The Boy smiled and accepted Billy’s hip flask in return. There was nothing special in it, just the same Famous Grouse whisky from the bottle he’d managed to eke out all year.
Traditionally, both flasks, having been opened, now had to be handed around to everyone in the side, and all other owners of flasks were obliged to join in the informal communion. So for a time, the minibus was full of hands rising out of seats, curving around seat backs to grope for the next bottle and pass it on. Seven men in the side meant seven flasks, seven sips of concentrated spirits, and it was only half past nine in the morning.
By virtue of their sex, the women of the side, in the four seats closest to the driver, could refuse to drink alcohol at any time without incurring the raised eyebrow of shame. They were having their own communion of coffee from a thermos, and declined the offer of early morning drunkenness in favour of talk about music and the birth of Nancy’s first great-grandchild.
Fatigue and alcohol settled into a warm glow of peacefulness in Billy’s chest, a bubble strong enough to hold back depression and darkness for a while at least. “How long until we get there?” he asked, wondering if he should black up in the van or wait until they arrived, when things might be a little more stable.
As he should have expected, this prompted a round of I know the roads better than you do one-upmanship from which he tentatively drew the conclusion that there were five different ways they could get to the Trowchester Summer Festival and that the timings could vary from an hour to an hour and a half. Once this had been properly chewed over, everyone had forgotten that Billy had asked the question at all. He was far too bored with the subject to ask again and risk setting it off a second time.
“Did we ever get a vote on Cotswold versus Border?” Matt called over his shoulder, prompting a general groan.
“I’ve just put the face paint on!”
“We’ve only brought the ragged jackets.”
The Boy reached into his bag and triumphantly flourished a set of red baldrics. “I brought Cotswold kit. I could go for a bit of proper dancing instead of all this galumphing. There’s no art in this Border stuff at all; it’s just skipping about like big girls’ blouses.”
Billy sighed as the bagman’s feathers began to flutter with wrath.
Graham, the bagman—the man in charge of the side’s finances and bookings—was already fully dressed for the Border style of dancing. His face was so heavily matt black it looked like a hole beneath his top hat, which was festooned with crow feathers. Despite the heat from the risen sun warming the white metal roof, he sat like an angry blackbird in full plumage, tattered jacket closed to hide all evidence of a shirt. “I’ve said it a dozen times, Boy, the public don’t want to watch Cotswold. They think it’s silly. They like Border because it’s masculine and aggressive and it looks pagan, and that’s what’s in at the moment.”
Howls of protest burst from various corners of the bus, but Graham waded on like a lone voice of reason. “And big shows like this will pay us to do Border because it fits in with their . . .” he waved his hands in the air like windscreen wipers, describing vague shapes of indignation and scepticism “. . . theme—which seems to be a sort of ‘Robin of Sherwood woowoo mystic ancient greenwood’ sort of thing. So what they don’t want is Cotswold with its ring of church bells and cricket and ‘Is there honey still for tea?’ fuddy-duddy wholesomeness.”
At the continued cries of indignation, Graham’s hands flew up, tossing a ball of helplessness into the air. “Don’t look at me, I think it’s as stupid as the rest of you do.”
“I quite like Border,” Annette put in. As the fiddler, she was theoretically entitled to leadership of the musicians, but she was locked in a polite war for the position with Margery, the melodeon player, whom nature had fitted out with a more dominant personality. “They have some very good tunes.”
Cotswold versus Border was a conversation topic that could run and run. Everyone in the side had an opinion, and a strong one. Billy liked both, but that wasn’t the point, of course. It was undeniably true that Cotswold required more technical expertise, was more of a challenge to dance, and was far less of a crowd pleaser.
Cotswold was also the real deal in terms of being the tradition that had been handed on intact from its fifteenth-century roots. The ethnologists of the nineteen hundreds had got there just in time to record the original Cotswold dances and tunes as they had been handed down for generations in each of the villages where they had been danced. By the time the erudite gentlemen had tried collecting the dances of the Welsh borders, the tradition had almost completely died out, with only a handful of original dances surviving. When revival fever blew through the borders, the majority of dances had had to be made up from scratch.
It irked Billy on a deep level that the public—having decided that Border looked more ancient, looked more pagan, and was therefore more exciting—had taken to the modern reconstruction with far more enthusiasm than they ever showed the real thing. It was surely wrong, on a moral level, to prefer the fake to the true. Yet people seemed happy to lie to themselves gleefully about the past, turning it into some kind of theme park and refusing to look at what was really there.
Billy hated it, hated playing along with it.
But, on the other hand, the Border styles were also fun and alive, changing with the times and vibrant with possibilities, an honest reflection of what the folk enjoyed right now, and he loved that. He also quite enjoyed the fact that the outfit scared the willies out of small children and gave the side an air of danger that Cotswold with its flowers and hankies, bless it, could never dream of.
Billy’s opinion was complicated and would take a long time to explain. He supposed it was fortunate that no one ever left a gap in the conversation long enough for him to give it.
As if to mock their careful discussion of routes, the A23 was closed due to flooding, and the diversion choked with such heavy traffic the journey took an extra hour to complete. It was almost lunchtime when they pulled up in the exhibitors’ car park at what looked like a very impressive affair indeed. Three finely shorn fields around the showground shimmered with multicoloured rows of vehicles. In the distance, a wire-mesh fence curved around several acres of enclosure. Feather-flags on carbon poles bent and strained at each gate. Inside, distant bouncy castles bulged like overweight rainbows. Billy could hear the cheery boom of someone talking over the PA in the central exhibition ring.
Spilling out of the sweaty hot minibus into the fresher warmth of the late-spring day, Billy wiped his brow on a spare towel and then waited as the musicians finished painting their faces. They had just begun to put the kit away when he plucked it out of Nancy’s hands so he could do his own. It’s like I’m that character from Ballad of Halo Jones, Billy thought. If I don’t remind people I’m here all the time, they forget I exist.
A single strand of bells buckled on around his black trousers at the knee. He clipped his tankard to the black leather baldric he’d made for it and shrugged that over the shaggy jacket, covered in torn strips of cloth, that clipped around the throat and fell to mid thigh. Black silk top hat, somewhat worse for wear for being third-hand, with a pair of steampunk goggles with red lenses strapped to the front. Leather fingerless gloves and a long red-painted stick in his hand and he was ready to go.
The side stepped away from their van, and a change came over them. Before, they had been eleven not very remarkable people. Now, in kit and among the public, they were the strange and fearsome priests of a lost religion. Even the musicians—otherwise ordinary middle-aged women—clad all in black greatcoats, with faces as black as their coats under red-veiled, wide-brimmed black hats, were making festival-goers shiver with delighted terror at their eeriness as they passed.
When Billy walked through a crowd now, heads turned to follow him, eyes widened. He stood tall, let his stride open out, reflecting back confidence, arrogance, a little hint of danger in return for their wariness. His legs had more than recovered from this morning’s bike ride. Warmth and company and half an hour’s snooze had put some fire into him. He was ready to perform, to dance and laugh and heckle. To bask in the fact that, even though it only happened when he had a mask on, everyone was actually seeing him.
For more excerpt click here: http://www.riptidepublishing.com/titles/blue-eyed-stranger (just click the excerpt tab)
About Alex
Alex Beecroft is an English author best known for historical fiction, notably Age of Sail, featuring gay characters and romantic storylines. Her novels and shorter works include paranormal, fantasy, and contemporary fiction.
Beecroft won Linden Bay Romance’s (now Samhain Publishing) Starlight Writing Competition in 2007 with her first novel,Captain’s Surrender, making it her first published book. On the subject of writing gay romance, Beecroft has appeared in theCharleston City Paper, LA Weekly, the New Haven Advocate, the Baltimore City Paper, and The Other Paper. She is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association of the UK and an occasional reviewer for the blog Speak Its Name, which highlights historical gay fiction.
Alex was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and grew up in the wild countryside of the English Peak District. She lives with her husband and two children in a little village near Cambridge and tries to avoid being mistaken for a tourist.
Alex is only intermittently present in the real world. She has led a Saxon shield wall into battle, toiled as a Georgian kitchen maid, and recently taken up an 800-year-old form of English folk dance, but she still hasn’t learned to operate a mobile phone.
She is represented by Louise Fury of the L. Perkins Literary Agency.
Connect with Alex:
Website: alexbeecroft.com
Blog: alexbeecroft.com/blog
Facebook: facebook.com/AlexBeecroftAuthor
Twitter: @Alex_Beecroft
Goodreads: goodreads.com/Alex_Beecroft
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(Ends 11th April 2015)
Review
Title: Blue Eyed Stranger
Series: Trowchester Blues 02
Author: Alex Beecroft
Genre: Contemporary
Length: Novel (246pgs)
ISBN: 978-1-62649-212-7
Publisher: Riptide Publishing (6th April 2015)
Heat Level: Low
Heart Rating: ♥♥♥♥ 3 ½ Hearts
Reviewer: Pixie
Blurb: Billy Wright has a problem: he’s only visible when he’s wearing a mask. That’s fine when he’s performing at country fairs with the rest of his morris dancing troupe. But when he takes the paint off, his life is lonely and empty, and he struggles with crippling depression.
Martin Deng stands out from the crowd. After all, there aren’t that many black Vikings on the living history circuit. But as the founder of a fledgling historical re-enactment society, he’s lonely and harried. His boss doesn’t like his weekend activities, his warriors seem to expect him to run everything single-handedly, and it’s stressful enough being one minority without telling the hard men of his group he’s also gay.
When Billy’s and Martin’s societies are double-booked at a packed county show, they know at once they are kindred spirits, united by a deep feeling of connectedness to their history and culture. But they’re also both hiding in their different ways, and they need each other to be brave enough to take their masks off and still be seen.
Purchase Link: http://riptidepublishing.com/titles/blue-eyed-stranger
Review: Billy feels like he’s invisible when he’s not wearing a mask, he drops into the background, looked over and ignored, but when his mask is on at country fairs with his morris dancing troupe he shines bright. Billy suffers from debilitating depression and it’s a constant struggle to live a normal life. Martin is a history teacher who has a love for Viking re-enactment, he’s the only black Viking and he doesn’t want to be the only black gay Viking so hides his sexuality. Martin struggles with loneliness and the stress of running a fledgling historical re-enactment society especially when he loses his job. Martin and Billy meet when their societies are double booked at a county show, their connection is instant but with Martin hiding in the closet and Billy’s feelings of self-worth dipping low will they be able to take off their masks and be seen for their true selves or will their masks keep them hidden even from each other?
This is a great story of two men who meet when they most need it, two kindred souls who each have a face they show the world and who only reveal their true selves to each other. Billy struggles every day with depression; he has his good days and bad days and fights for the good days every single moment. He doesn’t have much of a life outside his morris dancing troupe but he tries hard to have some kind of life without his depression controlling him. When he meets Martin he has a glimmer of hope that he might have found someone who he can share his life with, but with Martin being in the closet that insidious little voice seeks to tear down the little happiness that he has found. Martin has hidden his sexuality from fear of disappointing his father and because he is a teacher… oh and because he fears the reaction of his society, meeting Billy has him wanting to share his life, but coming out of the closet is something he isn’t sure he can do.
I enjoyed this story and loved the little history we get about both morris dancing and the rediscover of lost music, we have a history teacher who digs up ethnic history to introduce history to all his students and not just the white history he is told to teach, we see a young man who struggles with depression forge through life the best he can and we watch as a relationship begins to unfold between two special men. We get the black and white picture of depression and not the feeling blue kind; it’s the soul despairing black cloud where you wonder ‘what’s the point of anything any more’. Billy is to be admired, he’s a strong character who thinks he’s weak, yes that little voice might get to him but he tries to beat it down. Martin is an incredible man who only has one fear, and that’s his need to hide his sexuality, he is an incredible support to Billy but his need to stay in the closet is wearing at Billy’s self-esteem.
Seeing these two men together you know they are meant to be, their relationship has its ups and downs and they both try so hard to please the other. Alex Beecroft has written a story that is both entertaining and informative; it is rich with history and the realities of life. You can tell from the way the details of depression have been described that there is some personal experience infused into this story, the dark moods, the clawing desperation, the hopeless despair, the glimmer of bright days and hope and the reactions of loved ones, it’s all there and adds to this story to make us see the true feeling of depression. While Martin’s dilemma is soul crushing for him, his determination of being a rock for Billy overcomes his fear and he really is a very special man.
I recommend this to those who love rich history, fantastic characters, rich detail, a blossoming romance, a relationship where there are emotional struggles and a very happy ending.
Check out the other blogs on the Blog Tour
April 6, 2015 – Prism Book Alliance
April 6, 2015 – Rainbow Gold Reviews
April 6, 2015 – On Top Down Under Book Reviews
April 7, 2015 – Love Bytes Reviews
April 8, 2015 – The Novel Approach
April 8, 2015 – MM Good Book Reviews
April 9, 2015 – TTC Books and More
April 9, 2015 – Boys in Our Books
April 10, 2015 – Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words
Filed under: Author Giveaway, Blog Tour, Book Review, Excerpt, Guest Post, MM Book Review, MM Romance Book Review, New Releases, Publisher Giveaway, Riptide Publishing Tagged: A Trowchester Blues Novel, Alex Beecroft, GLBT Contemporary Romance, Pixie's Reviews, Riptide Publishing