Beautiful Ones

So I’m on the home stretch with Murano, aka Italian Knights 7, aka Beppe’s story. There are about ten or so scenes that will connect the story from beginning to end and finish the flow. It’s not been an easy write, I’ll be honest. I knew what I wanted to write and I knew essentially what would happen and that the focus would be on Bep. Everything played in my head like a Christopher Nolan story, to the point where The Dark Knight Rises soundtrack has been my go to with everything. I mean not the bang-bang scenes, that would have been weird – but all the deep bits, the funny bits, the ‘where is this going mate’ bits, have had Hans Zimmer cheering it along. But I had a George RR Martin moment. The story got too big for me. I worried about how people would take to Mimi. Really worried. Because everyone knows that the heroine has to earn the hero – rarely the other way around, especially if he’s been established in previous books. Mimi is like a best mate and I want to protect her from any nonsense. It made me think what Beppe likes about so much that he falls for her and pretty damn hard. Let me try to do this without giving anything away. No spoilers.

1.       She’s a surgeon and she really enjoys it to a sort of perverse level. You kind of have to, in order to cut up people for a living and go home to sleep like a baby at night, no drugs involved.

2.       Speaking of drugs, she understands Bep’s vocation. You’ll get that when you read it.  

3.       She listens. To be as distracted as Beppe can be and to be patient enough to wait for him to get to his point and to hear what he’s said to have a conversation with him, rather than dismissing him as weird is something wonderful.

4.       She doesn’t give a fuck and she will tell you to your face. There are few people’s opinions that matter to her and they happen to be the same as Bep. Kismet.

5.       She’s kinky like him. You’ll see.

6.       She accepts him for who he is and that’s a lot when you think about the type of dude he is. Man’s wild.

7.       She’ll fight people for him. Verbally and physically. What it is to have a girl bat for you and bat hard with all the tools she has in her arsenal and then some, can only be a sign of true love and affection.

8.       His happiness is her happiness. The simplest things makes them both delight in the world and that shared joy brings the world into focus, excluding everyone but the two of you.

9.       She doesn’t hide her affections, making her as straight as a die. In a world of coded messages and timed communications, it’s refreshing to not doubt how a person feels about you.

10.   She’s fit. Come on, he’s Italian! He likes good looking girls and Amelia Johnson is buff.

Let me do the same the other way around for evens stevens:

a)       Giuseppe Nardiello is ridiculous to look at let alone to touch. There’s a scene where he lets her put hands on and… yah.

b)      He’s a South Londoner and proud of it. He knows the city inside out and enjoys it with her.

c)       He does something for her that heals a crack in her heart like nothing else could have and no one else would have done. Actually, he does that a few times.

d)      He tear gases her neighbours for her. That’s romance when your neighbours are bastards.

e)      He appreciates her dedication to her craft and that sometimes, it comes first. It just has to.

f)        Beppe cracks her up. He’s said things to me that I’ve repeated to other people that has made them laugh just as hard.

g)       He’d kill to protect her. No questions asked.

h)      He loves his friends like family. You’ll see.

i)        He’s a feminist.

j)        He’s a clean freak. He has his places of sanctuary and they must be clean at all times. Good times or no. Think Naomi Campbell in flight mode.

Funny how that’s been the easiest thing of Murano to write – why Bep loves Meems and why Mimi loves her Beppe. They’re just two nice folks, with terrible things happening around and to them who hold on to one another to live through the storms. What they have together in the quiet, the stillness, after the rages have passed, is something that I’m rather proud of.

You’ll see when it’s done. Let me get back to it.

Good To Love

Now I've got all this time on my hands, I'm reviewing the stories that I started and abandoned due to, well the nonsense that's been going on in my life. Last week's post about Black-British history going back to Roman times was partly in connection with my research for a paranormal story that is so much fun to write. I wonder why more authors don't throw it back into the past. Black history is so much more than slavery and absolutely so much more than the Western World. Black women in the Netherlands, in England, in early 20th Century Hong Kong - we've been places!
This week, I've been thinking about my intersectionality, especially after the wonder that was UK Black Pride. If you saw some of the comments beneath the twitter posts from the organisations, you'd dislocate a retina rolling your eyes so hard - the melanin-deficient tears were abundant, despite there being plenty of the paler persuasion being present at the event itself. It made me have another look at one of my stories, and the daughter of my heroine - Jacqueline.
It's hard to be a black woman in this day and age, no doubt about it. We're the "least desirable" on dating sites, but the most frequently copied in fashion, style and looks. We're more than 5 times more likely to die in child birth related complications than our white counterparts. We're paid less even though we're more educated. Throw LGBTQ into the mix and life is inevitably harder. Reading the story with a neutral mind (really not that hard, it's been a while so I can truly question who the hell wrote that!) I can see where my prejudices have come through a little too obviously.
I'm too hard on Jacqueline. Her mother's perfect - truly Carole is a dream, I love her - her brother is getting all the support for his messed up love life, her sister can do no wrong and has the decency to be straight and her father is an emotionally abusive bully, who can't stand Jacqueline for being a lesbian. And I'm more critical of her than the other siblings because a little niggle in the back of my head keeps forgetting to beat me into remembering that her life is just that much harder and she's had to be just as hard to protect herself from a world that berates her for what it considers as "choices" and not what she can't help but be.
Jacqueline is a tough cookie who needs my understanding, for me to lean into that intersectionality I brag I know so much about. She is, despite what she knows, her mother's favourite. Like I said, Carole's perfect. And if Jacqueline is her mum's favourite, then she should be mine. I'm tapping away to do right by her.
It's what she deserves.

Remember the Time

I see Romancelandia is having one of its moments about historical accuracy and the existence of

melanated folks in the Western world before the 20 Century. Again. 

Did I ever tell you that history was one of my favourite subjects? And if I’d chosen a different path,

I’d be one of those mad history professors, wearing bedazzled glasses, full maxi skirts and pencils in my hair to mark my most treasured textbooks. It always intrigued me that I would never see anyone with my skin tone in period dramas and be told it’s a matter of historical accuracy after all, black people were only slaves.

Huh. Weird then that the Romans who conquered nearly the entirety of Europe and a good portion of the North and East of Africa, whose peoples joined their armies and were promoted in their ranks never stepped foot in Britain - also conquered by the Romans. But yet they did. Evidence of that was found of a lady of mixed heritage buried with seriously expensive jewellery.  The Ivory Bangle Lady. It shows that there was intermarriage and integration into England. Beachy Head Lady dated to 245AD was found in East Sussex. An Arthurian romantic novel depicts the hero as dark, save for his teeth.

Edward III’s consort was said to be a woman of African decent - Philippa of Hainault from 14 Century.  

In trading in gold from West Africa, men travelled to England to be intermediaries, to be translators, already extremely wealthy as a result of the sub-Saharan trade routes in the early 15 Century. 

We are well aware that Catherine of Aragon, in the course of her marriage to Prince Arthur (King Henry VIII’s brother who tragically died and thereby gave us the biggest marital drama of all time) brought servants and ladies in waiting with her that were from Africa. There is a wealth of information detailing the black Tudors - some freed from the Spanish colonies, others settlers following the trade routes between West Africa and England, others family members of European traders such as the Netherlands, France and Spain. There were Africans in the Scottish Court of James IV. Diplomats and statesmen were part of the Courts of this country. From Benin, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Morocco, Libya.

Liverpool, outside of London, because it is a port, had what was considered to be a large black population, particularly in the 17 and 18 centuries, as not only did you have seamen of African descent settling in England, but you had attendants and servants, who married their white counterparts.

They were shopkeepers, composers, writers, musicians, cooks and soldiers. African Chieftains sent their sons to England to be educated - something that still happens to this day. 

On Nelson’s column, considered one of Britain’s greatest heroes at the battle of Trafalgar (a whole square is named after him!) he is depicted fighting alongside an unmistakably African man. Queen Victoria had a young girl gifted to her. That same girl, Sarah Forbes Bonetta, had a wedding that was a societal event as she was under Queen Victoria’s protection. Many former slaves found themselves at the patronage of rich Britons who gave them means and an education; not just as abolitionists but as just decent people. True Christians - who knew?

Far from writing a history lecture here - there are people who have done this much better and far more in depth than I have David, such as Olusoga’s magnificat Black and British: A Forgotten History, which has also a rather brilliant BBC series that accompanies it. It was his tv series that first alerted me to Nelson’s column and I went to have a look. I mean I live in London, it’d have been daft not to. 

Black people, especially in this country, have not been invented to guilt white people about anything at all. Simple acknowledgement of our existence in this country long before the general populace were able to read and write or even vote will suffice. If there can be hundreds upon hundreds of romance novels of earls and dukes of pale skin and sleek hair and all of their teeth and enormous penises that they know how to use(???), there can be and should be just as many of colour.

Not that I should tell any romance author how to write, but the threads of a thousand tales are woven in the very history of the U.K. They are multi-faceted as well as multi-coloured.

It’s not historically inaccurate to feature other races into a novel and to have those races lead, take your reader on the wildest of rides, to let them fall in love and be happy. The history is there: bold, accurate and realistic - let’s use it. 

Holiday!

I don't know if you can tell, but 2019 has not been kind to me. It's put weight on me. Made me commute on the Northern Line in the morning for work. Not allowed natural deodorant to work on me and I detoxed I swear! It's also trapped me in London - miserably. And I love this city, I do, but I need to be able to miss it once in a while.

My friends (experts in psychology) tell me that I need to have a break at least every three months as I work with members of the public in a stressful job. If you saw the number of grey hairs invading my scalp, you'd agree.

But this month begins the great travels of Billy! I'll be off to Oxford for a bit of boating. Then up to Leeds for some rebonding and meeting a new London descendant! Best of all, I'm going to Greece! Get me kalamalataed! Greece, if you remember, was the scene of drunken Lady London and I talking about getting Windows written up for other people to read. It was our first holiday away together and we spent a lot of it in the supermarket. I love a foreign supermarket! Cheap booze, cheap quality snacks, all those things you’d have forgotten at home are right there for you.

Greece also has an insane amount of mosquitoes who absolutely love the hell out of me and their repellent is the best, cannot tell you. Although I will be popping to Dulwich to get some natural repellent. Expensive as hell, but it smells like luxury, rather than chemical.

I'm not exactly returning to the scene of the crime but going to Corfu instead. It’s all beautiful, turquoise blue waters, sandy beaches, fresh fish and bread and olives and inching to 40 degrees C in August which will deepen this melanin to ecstasy!

I’ll be taking so many photos, probably of my toes in the water or in the sand, but lots that will carry me through the winter. At least until I’m back in Italy. Yep. That’s happening again this year too. I owe it to myself!