That’s the relationship I had with my father – it was hard to ask him even when his birthday was, and then later too hard to admit I didn’t know. I say “had” though he’s still alive because I have no relationship with him now. It’s better that way.

Thinking about it, I write about father/daughter relationships quite often. In The Loves of Leopold Singer, the woman with the better father (and by that, I mean the father who is there for her and actively cares for her) ends up with the hero. When a rake becomes a good father, he becomes a better man. Even in my fantasy Bleeder, a king who is a good father goes against ingrained custom to give his daughter something royal first-borns are always denied: a name.

A lot of my heroines are orphans.

In the upcoming Bride of Fae, the fairy Aubrey is tormented by feelings for his daughter Elyse. He’d rather not deal with the inconvenience. Hm. A psych candidate could write a dissertation on my books….

At any rate, I don’t wish my father many happy returns of the day. It isn’t a sad thing. I’m glad to be free of him. But then, maybe I’m not.

If I don’t get at least 10 verifiable entries for the second question in the Rafflecopter widget, I’m going to have to cancel the giveaway. It’s not a fundraiser if it doesn’t raise any funds.

The classic Waterhouse painting of the nymphs finding Orpheus definitely wasn’t working. I bow to the mighty naked man cover gods. Here’s the new cover for The Loves of Leopold Singer

KindleObsessed shared a link.

Spreading The British Love…

www.kindleobsessed.com

I was sitting around the fire* the other day (*looking through Pinterest) when I saw a poster I just had to have. It said: “Stay calm, the Brits are here.” I thought this was genius, of course, (in part because it was covered in pictures of Mr. Darcy, and Mr. Thornton…& in part because they were sh…

Please name the format you’d like.

The usual profit from the book will be donated to the Zapstone LC Evans fundraiser.

Second Chance to Win: Enter the Rafflecopter widget below to win a $25 gift card, Amazon or B&N, winner’s choice. No purchase necessary – answering the first question gives you an entry. BUT you get 5 extra entries for each LC Evans book you’ve purchased (or do purchase) throughout the month of February. If you’ve purchased Discovery, that counts too!

You can find Linda’s books here:
Kindle
Nook

And here is the Zapstone fundraiser page with all the options.

Good luck – and happy reading!

NOTICE … GIVEAWAY CANCELED

As I explained in the post “I Suck At Fundraisers” – I designed this one badly. There were no entries that denoted any actual fundraising activity for the LC Evans family. I’ll make sure everyone in this one gets an extra entry in the next giveaway, and it will be for an equal or better value prize.


a Rafflecopter giveaway

I remember that she was always nice. Never insane (as authors are wont to be). Classy.

I didn’t know Linda well, but her death hit me hard. I cried when I learned about it. I’m sure I projected things onto her.

LC Evans’s last book is a space opera, SFR (science fiction romance) romp called My Planet or Yours? In keeping with the theme, Zapstone Publishing is donating all the proceeds throughout February from their book in a similar genre, Discovery: A Far Out Romance. It’s available in about every format.

I’m sure readers of this blog will remember how much I like Discovery. We had a fun giveaway here when I was in the middle of reading it. Well, Zapstone liked my review and lifted a blurb from it for their gorgeous new edition of the book – and they included an excerpt of Give Me in the ebook version as well. How fun is that?

Long story short: Tomorrow in conjunction with Zapstone, this site will give away more copies of Discovery: A Far Out Romance, and the usual profit for each book donated to the February LC Evans fundraiser.

-oOo-

But wait – there’s more! We’ll also have a Rafflecopter giveaway for a $25 Amazon/B&N gift card – winner’s choice.

You know how it works! Only newsletter subscribers can play – so your odds of winning are very good!

Open your newsletter tomorrow to find the password to the rafflecopter gift card giveaway and the secret word to win a copy of Discovery – in either Kindle or epub format.

This is a story about how we often touch each other without knowing we’ve done it, and how sometimes the connection comes back to us in surprising ways.
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SATURDAY, JUNE 09, 2007

The Cure(d)

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Granny seems to remember promising the story of The Cure and Charlotte Sometimes - the song -a long while back. She is about to start posting more, much heavier stuff, about the care home for people with mental problems. But she thought she’d post this first as light relief. Yet again, though, she’ll be writing in the first person.
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Years and years ago, in the late sixties, I wrote a book called Charlotte Sometimes, a book set in the kind of English boarding-school my twin sister and I attended/were incarcerated in – take your pick – for part of the fifties. The main character – Charlotte – finds herself switching back and forth between the year 1918 and her own time, taking the place of another girl in 1918, while that same girl takes her place in the 50′s. The whole book turned – though I didn’t see that when I wrote it – on identity; how do people identify you as you? How could they accept one person as quite another (assuming the two people look reasonably similar to start with as Charlotte and her 1918 equivalent did)? This happens to be a particularly relevant question for twins in general, and still more so for two not identical but similar looking twins like my sister and me, quite different in character and ability – even opposites in many respects, she right-handed, me left – but always taken together not singly. This was another connection I did not make at the time I was writing. The book would probably have worked less well if I had.

But other people made connections; the book struck chords; became my most successful by far. Just how successful I didn’t realise till more than twelve or thirteen years later when one of my children came home from school and said ‘Did you know, mum, there’s a song called ‘Charlotte Sometimes’?

No, Mum did not. Nor did her agent, whom she alerted immediately. Neither listened to rock much, neither had heard of the group called The Cure that performed this song. ‘Get a copy’ ordered the agent, so Granny went out and bought the single. The lyric to the song was on the record sleeve. Not only was it about confused identity, much of it consisted of quotes from the book. The title of the instrumental track on the B side, what’s more, was another quote from the book.

Now copyright law at the time was a very crude instrument. ‘Moral’ and ‘intellectual’ rights, acknowledging an author’s ownership of themes and ideas, as well as the actual text which incorporated them did not exist. The sole criteria for judging whether copyright had been breached was the proportion of a text used. Taking a mere two lines, from a poem, from a song lyric, in any book of mine would have constituted a breach of copyright unless permission was given for it, and, often, a hefty fee paid. On the other hand the amount of text used in a song lyric, even a longish one like this, was such a relatively small part of an entire novel that it would not count as breach of copyright. Nor did an author have any right to a title. Nor do they still. Googling Charlotte Sometimes for this piece I discovered a relatively recent film of the same name, not related to my book in any way. Such a title is unlikely to be pure coincidence. I suppose it’s a kind of flattery really- even though I’m sure the inspiration here was the Cure song not my book – perhaps I shouldn’t mind; but I do; a bit. I thought up that title first.

The blatant use of the text in the song was another matter; even then, it was, possibly, contentious, despite the limitations of the copyright law. Letters, faxes, were exchanged between my agent and the Cure’s management. The Society of Authors took the matter up and went to consult counsel; counsel’s advice was that yes there might be a case for breach of copyright in this case, but if the matter went to court they couldn’t be sure of the outcome. The Society of Authors, a fairly timid organisation on the one hand, and a fairly poor one on the other, decided to take it no further. As I couldn’t afford to follow it up myself, as the company were threatening to delete the song, and it was already clear it was doing wonders for my sales – and adding somewhat to my fan mail – we decided to back down.

So things went on for ten years or more. The extra income fromCharlotte was useful; it was less than a pittance compared to what the Cure would have earned on their song, but at least it kept the book in print – it is the only one of my books that has always stayed in print, going through 3 or 4 separate editions. I enjoyed some of the other fallout too; the letters from people I wouldn’t normally have expected to hear from; the reports in music journals like New Musical Express about girls deciding they were schizophrenic and renaming themselves ‘Charlotte’ because of the song – and directly or indirectly – because of my book; the naming of a yacht, ‘Charlotte Sometime’ – one year it came second in the round-the-Isle-of -Wight race. I ceased to be annoyed, even enjoyed the whole thing. It’s good to be remembered for something as a writer, if only for one book. Many other writers disappear altogether but I didn’t, entirely.

The Cure themselves went quiet for a while, They issued some new albums from time to time but did not tour. But in 1996 I think it was, I saw that they were going to tour again, starting with a huge gig at Earl’s Court just up the road from Hammersmith where I was living. I decided to try and get tickets; to get myself backstage if possible, to meet the Cure themselves; in particular to meet the group’s lead singer and song writer, Robert Smith. It wasn’t easy getting in touch with them; even when my agent and I managed it between us – discovering in the course of this that The Cure’s base was in a building they’d named ‘Charlotte House’ – the management was deeply suspicious. The law had changed by now, moral ownership was acknowledged, they appeared to suspect I was going after them again. Finally my agent and I convinced them this wasn’t so. They agreed: yes, there would be tickets for me at the Box Office. And yes if I came early and went back stage, I would be allowed to meet Robert Smith himself.

And so it was I offered the second promised ticket to my twin sister’s daughter, my niece, born a year after the book came out and named, appropriately for the evening, ‘Charlotte’ (if I so much as hinted that she might have been called after the fictional Charlotte, my sister would rise up out of her grave to clobber me, so I won’t). On a June evening – or was it July?- we set off together for Earl’s Court for my – if not Charlotte’s – very first – and probably last – rock concert. To be continued.

Labels: Charlotte Sometimes and The Cure
 The Cure(d): Robert Smith for ever…

He journeyed to the underworld and begged Hades to return Eurydice to life.

When Orpheus played his lyre, the music was so sweet that for the brief duration of the song the sufferings of all in the underworld were eased. As reward, Hades granted Orpheus’s request.

With one catch (there’s always a catch). Orpheus was forbidden to look at Eurydice until they were both back on the earth’s surface. You can probably guess from the picture what happened.

In The Loves of Leopold Singer, Leopold Singer (singer – get it? get it?) is an Orpheus figure. When Leopold’s wife is traumatized shortly after their marriage, she sinks into a kind of depression. He’d love nothing better than to save her from her pain, but in a twist on the myth, she has to find her own way through the passage of Taenarus to the bright, sunshiny day.

I’ve strewn references to the mythology of Orpheus throughout LOLS. It isn’t at all necessary to know Greek mythology to enjoy the story, but I hope people who do like it will enjoy that aspect of the novel.

Some other tidbits:

The Lost Bee is the name of a London coffee house in LOLS. According to Greek mythology, Aristaeus was the first to domesticate bees. He’s also the villain who chased after Eurydice, driving her into the path of the deadly snake who killed her. Later, when Orpheus was inconsolable having twice lost his love, the nymphs responded to Orpheus’s grief by destroying Aristaeus’s bees.

Orpheus’s power is centered in his music – his voice and his harp. When the Maenads tried to kill him (because he refused to make love with women, among other things), the sticks and stones they threw were enthralled by his music and failed to hit him. This drove the Maenads into a rage. When their loud frenzy drowned out Orpheus’s song, the projectiles hit their mark with deadly force, and the Maenads ripped Orpheus to pieces.  In LOLS, after Leopold refuses the advances of a woman not his wife, a storm drowns out his voice to dire effect.

I’ve decided to reward my wonderful fans with extra chances in this blog hop. If you leave (or have left) a review of any of my books at Amazon, enter the name of the book in the appropriate Rafflecopter task below.

I love my prize! It’s the first three books in The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare. Winner’s choice – Nook or Kindle.

UPDATE: And congratulations to Biku for the win!

a Rafflecopter giveaway