Jenyfer Matthews

I went to my favorite vegetable stand to pick up a bundle leeks which cost me approximately US$0.60. I arrived during their breakfast but didn’t have time to stay and share. I walked out with my leeks, a bag of foul (fava bean dip) and a tamaiya sandwich (like falafel). Not bad for US$0.60! And the sandwich was delicious.

While walking back from swimming, I witnessed a low speed traffic accident in which a car broadsided an SUV at an intersection. Both drivers got out to inspect damage – then began to load up detached headlights and bumpers into their respective vehicles before they went their separate ways. Every man for himself!

The day began bright and sunny, suddenly became dark and gloomy as a sand storm struck, and then ended bright and sunny.

Never a dull moment!

What’s on in your corner of the world?

I haven’t mentioned my book club lately because they went silent on me. We met in March to discuss the previous month’s selection and adjourned with the plan to find out which of the proposed titles were actually available locally (the bookstores here in Cairo are not always all I could wish for) . Haven’t heard from anyone since.

And I admit it’s something of a relief. While I liked the getting-together-and-chatting aspect of the group, I’ve only really liked one of the three books we read as a group – one I loathed and one was merely meh.

A friend of mine recently loaned me her copy of The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. I know I’m way behind reading this one, but honestly, I was reluctant. First of all, I heard way too much hype about it when it was released. Second, time travel? I like linear story lines. In my mind, I likened the time travel aspect to The Matrix – a movie I still just don’t “get”.

At any rate, I took the book along with me when we went to Luxor because if it had nothing else going for it, at least it’s long.

I. Loved. It.

You know how when you hear how wonderful a movie is, then you see it and think, “Hmmm…well, it was okay. But it wasn’t that great. What was the all the hype about?” Maybe because I was expecting to be let down, I was pleasantly surprised. Or maybe it’s just that the book is *that* good.

Unlike the books I’ve read for my book club, the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife wasn’t trying to show off her massive vocabulary or her ability to write cleverly crafted prose. The story was written in a refreshingly straight forward manner. There was some back and forth in the plot – it is time travel after all – but it was never difficult to follow. At the root of it, it’s a love story – the story of Clare and Henry and how they meet…and meet again. The characters were beautifully drawn and it wasn’t hard to suspend disbelief to enter their world at all. In fact, it was much more difficult for me to leave it.

I’m going to have to buy my own copy because this one is definitely a keeper.

Reading The Time Traveler’s Wife brought to mind a movie I’d seen as a child “Somewhere in Time” with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour – lovers separated by time. The details of the movie are fuzzy now but I do remember absolutely loving that movie. I haven’t seen it since it came out but I have an urge to track it down now. Guess I like time travel stories more than I realized…

Please welcome author Chris Power !

Chris lives in the southwest of England, in the heart of what once was the ancient kingdom of Wessex, and close to Stonehenge. For more information about Chris or her books, please visit her website.

Trained all his life to serve the will of the Great Goddess, Kherin is her Chosen, her warrior, mage and priest. Betrayed by one he trusted, given as a slave to a barbarian lord, when he learns his goddess’s purpose, he finds it hard to obey.

Rythian, having challenged for the leadership of his tribe and won, is forced to put the future of his people before his beloved wife and family. He refuses to let his sacrifice be for nothing. With enemies on the borders of his land threatening invasion and enemies within the tribe working against him, Rythian fights his god’s intent every step of the way.

Aided by family and friends, two very different men must learn trust and friendship to combat their enemies and become weapons for their gods to wield.

Buy this book!

Life has been hellish busy for a while now. This is a good thing, generally. Apart from a visit to the dentist for a filling which was amazingly untraumatic until I had to pay the bill, it means I have been visiting other people’s blogs and pimping my two e-books recently released, and traveling around the UK visiting and sometimes cat-sitting for friends. It also means the various muses have been cooperating and I have been writing many many words, but only on my stand-by novel. This is the one I return to time and again whenever I am afflicted by the bloody writer’s block on the current project. In this case, FOX HUNT.

SEA-CHANGE [working title] is flowing so well, I’m actually on the brink of finishing it. Then I will *have* to get back to FOX HUNT. It has been sitting there patiently for a few months now – well, it was its own fault for deciding to inflict me with the dreaded block.

In any case, SEA-CHANGE will have to be put aside for a short while so I can come back to it with a fresh eye to do work on the next draft or two. Once I’m certain I have the plot and relationships solid, then I’ll make sure I have all the location details as right as I can get them without actually flying out to Honolulu.

‘Okay, why is she blathering on about what is any writer’s working status quo?’ I hear you mutter. Well, because of the genre. It’s a male/male love story. There’s a bit of mystery, a bit of jeopardy in the mix, but generally it’s the story of two men, one of whom is gay and the other thinks he’s straight but isn’t sure, and their deepening friendship that gradually becomes sexual awareness and HEA. The key word is ‘gradually’. It’s over 100 k words and the explicit sex doesn’t start until the last quarter. So it doesn’t fit in with Ellora’s Cave remit. Nor any of the other e-publishing sites I’ve looked at so far. Their homoerotic novels and novellas have a strong emphasis on the erotic, and a simple relationship story will be hard to place. There would be a multitude of other e-publishers to offer it to if Cerridwen Press didn’t want it, if Jon and Drew were Jack and Jill.

But they’re not. They are both uncompromisingly male.

So why write it in the first place? Because they were in my head and their story needed to be written. It doesn’t matter if the book is never taken up and just sits on my hard drive to be read occasionally, and maybe shown to any interested friends. The important thing is that it is written, and completed to be best of my ability.

Does this mean I am not professional in my approach to writing? Should I be working only on stories I know would have a good chance of finding an e-home, aiming at a specific market right from the start? Or do I write what I want to write and think about homing it when it’s done? Until SEA-CHANGE, the ones under that heading have fitted into either Cerridwen Press or Ellora’s Cave, and the ones I have waiting in the queue are also easily categorized under mainstream or erotica. But somewhere down the line I will almost certainly get bitten by another set of characters whose story won’t be so readily pigeon-holed. Then I’ll have another stand-by novel, I expect.

Who do you write for? Or are you in the same place I am, writing about characters that won’t let you go until you’ve got their lives spread out over many pages?

If it comes to that, what *is* a professional approach to writing?

There are so many things to see in and around Luxor that unless you have a lot of time to explore, it can be hard to fit them all in. On our third day, we opted to arrange for a guided tour that included the colossi of Memnon, the Valley of the Queens, the Valley of the Kings, and the funerary temple of Hatshepsut.

Our first stop was at the colossi of Memnon. They are large. It might just be me but they remind me a little of the stormtroopers from Starwars. Or maybe it’s the other way round!

This guy had pigeons nesting in his cracks

Villagers working in the field right next to the colossi. It’s astonishingly lush between the Nile and where the Valley of the Kings starts.

Unfortunately Nefartari’s tomb, the most magnificent of them, was not open when we visited. Also unfortunately, there is a no photo rule inside the tombs. You’ll just have to take my word for it that the ones we saw, the tombs of Amunherkhepshep and his mother, were wonderful.

We went next to the funerary temple of Hatshepsut, the mother-in-law of Tuthmosis III, who ruled Egypt as a pharoah for 20 years. The temple was vandalized by a number of other pharoahs, including Thuthmosis III who removed all the images of Hatshepsut he could find. This temple was also the site of the 1997 Luxor Massacre.

The still visible painted reliefs, with stars on the ceiling

King Tut’s tomb is open but requires a separate (and expensive) entrance ticket. Because he was so young when he died, his tomb is rather small and simple by comparison to the others and all of his impressive treasure has been removed to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Steps leading down into Ramses I tomb

Once again, no photos inside. I bought a package of lovely oversized postcards to make up for it.

Howard Carter’s house, on a hill near the entrance of the Valley of the Kings.

Each of the dark openings on the hillside is a tomb in the Valley of the Nobles. We could have spent our entire stay looking at tombs and still not seen them all!

A ferry boat for local people, loading up on the west bank of the Nile.

Valley of the Kings as seen from the water

We spent the rest of the day lounging next to the pool at our hotel. It was no hardship!

As you might imagine, the kid’s pool was a huge hit with the children!

Don’t forget to stop by over the weekend. Chris Power will be here talking about whether it’s better to write a story for a market or write a story for yourself. See you!