Guest blogger – Stevie Carroll

May 21, 2012

I’m shattered and hoarse this morning after my first ever cricket match yesterday – the Fourth Day of the First Test between England and the West Indies at Lord’s, London.

I realise that won’t mean a thing to 50% of my blog visitors but I loved every minute if it, even though cricket is a summer sport and it was freezing!

Anyway, it’s another very busy week on the blog kicking off with two guest authors. Tomorrow is Nell Dixon with her new novel, Passionate Harvest but today we have Stevie Carroll, whose LBGTQ short story anthology is published this month. Over to you, Stevie:

A Series of Ordinary Adventures: Stevie Carroll

Stevie Carroll was born in Sheffield, England’s Steel City, and raised in a village on the boundary of the White and Dark Peaks, Stevie Carroll was nourished by a diet of drama and science fiction from the BBC and ITV, and a diverse range of books, most notably Diane Wynne-Jones and The Women’s Press, from the only library in the valley. After this came a university education in Scotland, while writing mostly non-fiction for underground bisexual publications under various aliases, before creativity was stifled by a decade of day jobs.

Now based in Hampshire, Stevie has rediscovered the joys of writing fiction, managing to combine thoughts of science fiction, fantasy, and mysteries with a day job writing for the pharmaceuticals industry and far too many voluntary posts working with young people, with animals and in local politics.

Stevie’s short story, ‘The Monitors,’ in Noble Romance’s Echoes of Possibilities, was longlisted by the 2010 Tiptree Awards jury. Other short stories have appeared in the anthologies British Flash and Tea and Crumpet. A Series of Ordinary Adventures is Stevie’s first solo collection, and is published by http://www.candlemarkandgleam.com/store/

Stevie has a livejournal, http://stevie-carroll.livejournal.com, for writing updates, and really needs to get a website.

I started off writing short stories; my first were produced for school assignments, and then I wrote a few while at university as part of the ‘Edinburgh Women Writers’ group run by three of my friends. Short stories don’t always come easily to me, however: I have three complete novels two of which I wrote because their original short story format was insufficient to tell everything I wanted to impart about the characters. On the other hand, all three of my novels are awaiting a good edit before I think about starting submissions rounds for them, while I’ve had quite a few of my shorter stories published.

A Series of Ordinary Adventures came about after I was contacted by Kate at Candlemark and Gleam. She’d read ‘The Monitors’, and wondered if I could come up with a whole collection of (sometimes) romantic speculative fiction. So I made a spreadsheet (something I find soothing, so long as no one else is involved in the process: other people just complicate matters), and worked out what ideas would be suitable, and how I could combine them to produce a suitably varied selection of characters, settings, and themes.

In the end I wrote seven stories that were included in the collection (two were novellas, while the others range from 6,000 to 17,000 words). They were:

• Hawks and Dragon: a story of female friendship, castles and daring adventure
• Breaking the Silence: a short horror story set at a school reunion
• The Woman Who Hatched a Fairy’s Egg: a gently romantic novella set in Hebden Bridge about the growing friendship between an incomer and the local Wildlife Officer
• Mr Singh Confronts the Minotaur: another romantic friendship story, set against the backdrop of a Mediterranean cruise for travellers of pensionable age
• Charmed by Prince Charming: a slightly unconventional romance between actors in a rather unusual theatre company
• Seven for the Devil: a novella about the perils of wishing for the unobtainable
• The Footballer’s Mistress: a sweet almost-romance about a ghost and the woman whose flat she haunts

Three of the stories introduce readers to characters who already know each other, which is one way of fitting the romance format into the structure of a short story, although of those only one was primarily a romance, and one featured no romantic elements whatsoever. The short horror format is definitely easier when several elements are already known to the characters: ‘Breaking the Silence’ sees characters confronting a long-buried collective fear. ‘Seven for the Devil’, being longer, allowed me to set the characters against new dangers, while backgrounding the romantic plot in favour of the central mystery and its solution.

With short stories, even more than with novels, I find it easier to stick with one character’s point of view for the whole narrative, which again helps keep within the ideal length for both the story and its structure. I like dropping my protagonist straight into an unexpected situation, and that can draw the reader in, as the character learns about this new person or environment along with them.

For instance, the beginning of ‘The Footballer’s Mistress’:

***

It was the men that woke her up. Noisy men, with their machines, their tools, and their shouted conversations. After so many years of silence, the din would have deafened her, had she still ears to hear; the clouds of brick dust would have choked her, had she still needed to breathe. Cooped up within the walls for two score years or more, before she had finally slept, she found she could now drift outside. It intrigued her that she could do so, and made her curious to see if the world she remembered was much changed by the passing of the ages.

The copse stood as it always had, in the space between the mill and the mill workers’ cottages. The iron railings surrounding it had bent and rusted over the years, and the trees had grown taller; now a rope swing hung from the lowest branch of the great horse chestnut and a den, constructed of planks and sacking, nestled amongst the tree’s smaller brethren.

As the sun sank lower in the sky, the copse filled as it always had, with laughter and movement. Children climbed the trees, hid in the den, and swung on the rope. Their clothes—very similar whether worn by boys or girls—were brightly coloured under fresh dirt, and they called out unfamiliar names, but their presence served to reassure Poppy that all was right with the world.

A horseless carriage rumbled along the road, unremarked by all but one of the children; he merely waved to its occupants. Two young women, wearing trousers rather than skirts, pushed tiny babies in wheeled chairs. They chattered happily to each other and to their babies in sentences that contained more unfamiliar words than words Poppy recognised. A roar in the sky sent her flying back into the mill; the men inside must have heard it, too, yet they carried on with their tasks as if it were an everyday occurrence.

Reassured, she passed back through the walls to watch the children again.

***

Poppy’s story is a romance (of sorts) between two women, and it does sometimes seem as if LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) romance has taken off in the past few years. I’m not so sure, although it has certainly become more visible. Back when I was at university, and before, most of the ‘gay and lesbian’ books (with the exception of some titles from The Women’s Press that managed to sneak into my local library and a few of the classics that could claim to be Literature with a capital ‘L’: possibly including Radcliffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness) either came from specialist bookshops (West and Wilde in Edinburgh, a couple of Women’s bookshops on Charing Cross Rd in London, etc) or were tucked away on a couple of shelves at the back of big bookshops (with the romance, other fiction, and self-help books all jumbled together).

The internet has changed all that. It’s easy to find all genres of fiction featuring romance involving LGBTQ characters, and specialist publishers are springing up all over the place. Sadly this has also pushed a lot of the old independent bookshops out of business, and I miss them, their staff, and the joys of finding something unexpected on display at the front of the shop, or nestled between the books I was browsing. On the other hand, the internet has opened up a wealth of opportunities for authors to meet each other: I met Phillipa in person at last year’s Festival of Romance, I’m going to my third Meet for Writers and Readers of UK LGBTQ Fiction (http://ukglbtfictionmeet.co.uk/) later in the year, and I regularly have lunch with Charlie Cochrane and Kay Berrisford who are two other local authors I initially met online.

I’m not a member of the RNA yet, but watch this space once I go back to those novels I mentioned earlier.

Thank you, Phillipa, for hosting me today.

No problem, Stevie – good luck with the anthology!

Comments

1. On May 21st, 2012 at 6:10 am
   Nell Dixon Says:
   

   Loved the excerpt, Stevie and it was good to meet you at the festival. Hope you’ll join the RNA.

2. On May 21st, 2012 at 4:19 pm
   Stevie Carroll Says:
   

   Hi, Nell.

   Glad you liked it. I’ve heard all about what you get up to at the RNA, and I definitely want to join in one day soon.