Free Christmas novella for download

All For One, or Four For the Price of Three...

True fact. All four of the Uncivil Wars books are now available in rather elegant paperback, and from now until Christmas there's 25% off each of them. 

Which means you can buy all four, and only pay for three! 

Red Horse (An Uncivil War 1 - discount code at checkout is YMNTQP4M

Command the Raven (An Uncivil War 2) - discount code at checkout is 7EACLL7F

A Wilderness of Sin (An Uncivil War 3) - discount code at checkout is KJXPTBD7

The Smoke of Her Burning (An Uncivil War 4) - discount code at checkout is 6JQNFC4E

Get them quick....before Cromwell cancels Christmas! 

About Face - thoughts on disability in fiction

Too often in fiction we like to see characters with a disability as "brave" or "tragic" - something that can be mended, or magicked away, or ignored, or overcome. Sweet, and gender-neutral, and slightly romantic, but broken: a thing not quite right, that can be made "right" - and socially acceptable - by an external agency, under the right circumstances. Because that's the point of fiction, isn't it? We can edit out the things we don't want to know about, airbrush over the horrid bits, especially in historical fiction.

Well, I've been reading a lot lately about the soldiers in the first World War who suffered facial disfigurement, and the reconstructive surgery they were (and weren't) offered. It's been an ongoing battle in my head, around Thankful Russell, hence the research around facial disfigurement. Because it's so hard not to slip into romantic hero mould and have him just lightly damaged but noble, like a sort of 1640s Heathcliff - dark and brooding and, well, Ross Poldark. After all, he's handsome, right, our Russell? Fair and elegant and rather stunning from the right side - he can't be too disfigured, not so it shows: that's not how it works in books, he's got to be just a little bit enigmatically damaged.

And he ain't. The stories of those young men in the early twentieth century were heartbreaking - young men who'd lost their beauty by shrapnel, by machine gun, by fire, and who came home to find their sweethearts turning away, or that nurses didn't want to remove their bandages because they didn't want to see underneath. Their children cried to see them. Many of them turned to drink, many committed suicide because they were -
"..not meek and biddable, He was not grateful. He was sullen-mute and his cheek was an agony for most of his waking hours, itching and burning and throbbing. He whimpered and sobbed through most nights. He was barely worth the pennies Parliament paid for his care." ( -A Cloak of Zeal)

I used to work with a man, some years ago, whose face had been badly burned in an incident at his old workplace and who had ended up having to be redeployed because he could not bear to be looked at. He'd grown a beard, which was possibly not one of his better ideas, because it had grown in patchy and fair over the scars. (He was rather gorgeous, actually, with or without the scars, but he wouldn't have believed me if I'd told him.)

I had a really interesting review of the short story in which Russell meets the lady who will eventually become his wife (which is called "Si Tu Dois Partir" and it's available in the anthology "Steel and Lace" HERE) in which it was described as the story of two less physically-fortunate people who manage to find a touching and meaningful love. I get that, I get that absolutely, but why on earth should the fact of Russell's scarred face preclude him from romance?  Imagine a hero who isn't sure if he can still kiss a woman, who slurs his words when he's tired, who's not prepared to meekly put up with being stared at by the curious and patronised by the great and the good. Imagine a man with a conspicuous facial disfigurement who's still got a sexual identity, who is bloody good at his job, and who, every now and again, falls off the wagon when the strain of conforming to everybody else's normal is too much for him.

Thankful Russell's not pretty, not any more. Get used to it.

A Wilderness of Sin free to download 17th May

To commemorate the execution of the three Leveller Martyrs on this day  in 1649, A Wilderness of Sin is free to download to your Kindle on this day only.

A Wilderness of Sin free download

They're Rosie Babbitt's lads. And if he doesn't speak for their fair treatment, no other bugger will....

Writing. Responsibility. Ramblings.

Someone sent me a review of Wilderness earlier on and I am still pondering this one. Lots of bits in my head but heck, if you read my meandering regularly you'll know all about that.

My late father was a jazz musician in the Swinging Sixties, playing the club scene. My mum has always told me the story of how they first met - you have to imagine, Michael Caine with a tenor sax and the incredibly glamorous, slender, black-haired dolly-bird in matching mini-skirt and knickers, in a smoky dive where you had to buy chips to stay after pub closing time because that made it not a pub and therefore not subject to the same opening hours legislation. Anyway. I am responsible, he told her, very seriously. I am responsible for making all these people happy.

And I think in that respect I am my father's daughter (although I look nothing like Michael Caine). I read the review, which was a wonderful piece of writing in its own right, and I was very flattered and I sat about looking smug and the cats looked at me oddly and then I thought - yes, and that's going to go Out There. People will read that and think, that's an author who can write, who can entertain me, who can maybe teach me a bit about history, who can make me feel like I'm there. And actually, that's a hell of a responsibility.

On the one hand - there will be more hands going on than Kali here - I've got Rosie Babbitt muttering darkly that he's bloody sick of being called a Crophead, with his hair halfway down to his backside, and how come people don't know that half of it's cobblers - there was no more poets in the King's Army than there was in Parliament's, and even Cromwell's fearsome Ironsides were just lads doing a job, wanting to get home, wanting to get paid. And Russell with his head up, quivering like a greyhound, passionately declaring for freedom of thought and conscience, and the poorest he that is in England having the same right to a voice as the richest. And Het in the background, carefully piecing them all back together, having the same problems as wives and mothers through the ages: trying to keep a safe, secure roof over her family's head, bringing up her children right, trying to make a pound stretch till payday.

So there's that lot, the fictional lot, wanting me to tell it like it was, to make the lived experience of ordinary men and women in the 1640s real to you guys. On both sides, King and Parliament. Not people in books who talk in thees and thous, but people like me and you, who loved and hated and felt just like we do. Had favourite foods, got cold, worried about the state of their linen. And, you know, I hope I do a sort of okay job there. Someone told me once they could imagine bumping into Rosie Babbitt out shopping, to which I could only think God help them both, then, for I'd not imagine he'd be good at queuing.

And then on the other hand there's the real lot. The people (who will remain nameless) whose good opinion matters to such an extent that the Babbitt-boy keeps the cursing down to a dull roar unless under extreme provocation. Who expect good writing, and a bit of adventure and a bit of sweariness and a bit of romance and a bit of intrigue, and who'd be disappointed if they got less. Who are proud to say they know me as a friend as well as an author.

So. Well. It's hard work,.then.

And speaking of Hapless...."A Cloak of Zeal" free to read until 2nd March (with a link that works....)

A Cloak of Zeal by M. J. Logue 

A Cloak of Zeal - free until the 2nd March

 The first blood to be drawn in the English Civil Wars, at  the Battle of Edgehill in autumn 1642. The King raises his standard against Parliament, and for bright, handsome young Puritan Thankful Russell, his new officer's commission in the Army of Parliament is the gateway to a freedom and a happiness he has never known before. Freedom, and friendship, and an escape from his zealot sister, and a new purpose in life. (And girls, and laughter, and music, and the other things that any ordinary good-looking young man at nineteen takes for granted.)

But Thankful is no ordinary young man, and these are not ordinary times, and before the day has ended his life will take a turn that he never, in his wildest dreams, imagined.

Or his worst nightmares.

It's a brief novella dedicated to my late friend Sjt Tiny Castle of the 32nd Cornwall Regiment of Foot Napoleonic re-enactment group - what? the model for France Hale? Surely not! ;-) 

And in this current climate of Ross flippin' Poldark and his scar that really, isn't a patch on Thankful Russell's, I think we need Russell the tragic, scarred hero with a social conscience to get... early modern.

By! It's either a feast or a famine....

(As the lovely Hollie would say, being a North Country boy, and prone to such peculiar expressions.)
Three people are going to be very fortunate - my rather elegant new cover!

 
 

    Goodreads Book Giveaway
 

   

       
   

   

     

          Red Horse
     

     

          by M.J. Logue
     

     

         
            Giveaway ends March 30, 2015.
         

         
            See the giveaway details
            at Goodreads.
         

     

   

   

      Enter to win

Shameless hussydom

I have spent a productive day today tidying up (not toadying up!) my Amazon author pages.

I'm thoroughly sick of the dreadful author photo, in which I appear to be sighting down a pistol and am in fact squinting at a small cheap digital camera held at arms' length. Regrettably I have burned most of my skin off after an unfortunate interlude with some cheap colloidal silver cream to deal with a rash I often get on my nose when I wear the glasses I need to read by (I know, I know, vanity...) so I refuse to appear on any kind of film until my horrible red peeling skin retains its customary elegant pallor.

I'm also heartily sick of describing myself as food historian and mad cat lady, although I am both and it was funny to start off with.

I wonder if anyone will notice if I replace my photo with that of Elizabeth Cromwell - occupation: Lady Protectress and She Who Must Be Obeyed.

Anyway - here they are for your edification and amusement:

M J Logue's Amazon UK page

M J Logue's Amazon US page

PS do feel free to pass unhelpful remarks. It's ever so lonely here in 164*thinks about it*5, now....

A Cloak of Zeal - preview

A sneak peek at the novella due out at the end of this month. Set in the summer of 1642, with a family split by more than just politics and religion....

He wasn't paying very particular attention. He was looking at his neatly folded hands on the scrubbed white tablecloth, and thinking how black his bruised knuckles looked against the linen, and how much he hoped she wouldn’t notice. And that his cuffs were wet, and he hadn’t managed to scrub all the spatters of blood from Symonds' nose completely out of the linen.

Far off at the top of the stairs, he heard the familiar buzzing whirr as the longcase clock wound itself up to strike the hour, and thought, with a deep sense of resignation, that Roger Coventry had been going for a good half hour already and was like to go for another. Without looking up, he let his mind wander on its customary idle conjecture, imagining his stiff, righteous sister in bed with her appalling husband, the pair of them laid side by side like a pair of marble statues on a tomb, their nightcapped heads rigid on identical stony pillows. What exactly Fly-Fornication and Roger Coventry - and he could never think of his brother-in-law as either Roger or Master Coventry, but by his full name, all run together, Rogercoventry - might say to each other, in the privacy of their chamber. His imagination had never stretched that far, but whatever it was, it had not run to the engendering of children, in five years of marriage.

It was an odd thing. Of his many besetting sins, Thankful Russell did not consider false modesty as one. He was not ill-looking: he was tall and as lithe of build as a sight-hound, with long, thick, pale hair that he wore plainly tied back in a tail at the nape of his neck. His limbs were straight, he did not have a crook-back, or a limp. He had, he flattered himself, a not unhandsome face: high, wide cheekbones, a straight nose, neither too long nor too short; dark eyes that contrasted vividly with his barley-blonde hair and fair skin.

Thankful Russell had been described as beautiful, before now. (Though it had been dark, and she had been three parts drunk at the time, and he had been under her petticoats. Regardless. She'd called him beautiful.) His sister Fly-Fornication had the same build, though on her, it was as lean and comfortless as one of the Egyptian kine in Pharaoh's dream. Her fair hair was lank and stringy, yanked back from her face and confined under a starched plain white cap. Her eyes were as dark and wide-set as his own, but without any leaven of humour, or kindness, or wit. Afire with zeal, for sure, but he couldn’t imagine Fly as afire for Roger Coventry.

She was looking down the table at him, and Roger Coventry was winding to a confused halt partway through his grace. Fly even unmanned her husband, a man she confidently described as an upright member of the Lord's Elect. (Thankful would concur with that description. Roger Coventry was, indeed, a prick.)

"Your devotions, sir!" she said, glowering. "You fail to attend!"

"On the contrary, good sister. I am present." Over twelve years of her sole care, he had grown quick in verbal ambiguity.

Tonight, though, she was having none of it. Tonight her little brother was the worst of miserable sinners, destined to burn for eternity unless he turned to the Lord's grace and repented his sins. It had frightened him, badly, as a little boy. He had been very, very afraid of the fires of hell. She was fifteen years older than he was and when their mother had died, Fly had taken her duties very seriously. She had held his chubby little five-year-old hand in the kitchen fire until he screamed and told him, very earnestly, that if he was a sinner, he would feel that for all eternity. He'd believed it, too. He had been an unnaturally dutiful little boy, haunted by the twin ghosts of hellfire and the lack of his mother's love. Had thought that Fly did not love him because he was naughty - because he sinned, even when he didn’t mean to - and that if he was a good boy, she might love him, and then he might be happy, and she might not make him afraid and hurt him. She didn’t mean to hurt him, but he made her angry, because he was bad, and then she had to punish him to make him good again.

And then Fly had married, at the advanced age of thirty, and it hit Thankful like a bolt of lightning that it was nothing to do with his presumably innate wickedness that made his sister so utterly cold towards him. Fly-Fornication did not love anyone, apart from possibly her own image of God, who was as righteous and unforgiving as she was herself. She didn’t love her little brother, and she never would, and there was nothing he could do about it. She didn’t love her stocky, stolid husband - but as he didn’t seem to love her either, there would be no tears shed on that front. (Two identically night-capped heads, staring upwards on a stony pillow, unspeaking.) The Lord be praised Master and Mistress Coventry had never produced children, to continue the unloving. Fly didn't hate Thankful. He was nothing to her, a blot on a copybook, to be fiercely erased and redrawn over and over until he was as perfect and featureless a copy of God's little template as she thought she was herself.

He looked back at Fly's gaunt face, her mouth moving although he wasn't listening. Thinking of the difference between his sister, who was allegedly female, and Phoebe - whose name was probably Betty, or Joan, but Symonds called her Phoebe when he was drunk, for her rosy-gilt hair. Phoebe was soft and warm and the folds of her skirts smelled of spilled ale and sex. Phoebe liked Thankful. It hadn't been her that had called him beautiful - he couldn’t remember her name, it had been a while ago - but she liked to sit with his arm round her shoulders in the White Hart in Great Missenden, close to him, with her back against his flank and his hand just under the edge of her bodice, resting on the warm flesh of her breast. He'd acquired some facility at eating and drinking left-handed, though he had not yet learned to play the fiddle with his left hand only. He wouldn’t call Phoebe his girl, exactly. He thought it might have been that which Symonds had objected to. Symonds wanted her, and she wanted Thankful, and Thankful had been more than half-drunk and feeling generous and said if Symonds wanted the wench he could have her, it didn’t bother him greatly, and Phoebe had gone off sobbing. Symonds had took exception to it and it had all gone downhill from there, really. He had ended up in bed with Phoebe, because it was that or go home, but he'd been more irritable than amorous. He liked her, she was warm and funny and generous, but truly, out of bed the girl was as thick as pig-shit and she bored him senseless. She was kind, though.

"And the stink of sin follows you," she finished malevolently, and he raised his eyebrows politely.

"Indeed, madam?"

"You reek of whores, you filthy, unclean - abomination!"

"Indeed." In his head, he lowered his lashes with a glance of withering contempt and applied himself to his supper, ignoring her spittle-sodden ranting. In the hall of the house at Four Ashes, he felt the old familiar hot, tight feeling under his collar, and he slammed his chair back and tossed his head and said, "And I imagine you should know, dear sister, as your dear husband doubtless seeks out the cheapest sluts in Buckinghamshire rather than frequent your cold bed."

"See the mark of Cain, there!" Fly shrieked jubilantly. "On his throat!"

"That's a kiss mark, you witless bitch!" he yelled back at her, and Roger Coventry rose to his feet, spluttering. Ordering Thankful out of his own house. He reminded her of that fact. It was his house. He was the last of the Russells of Four Ashes. If he chose to turn her out onto the streets he could do so -

The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil: so do stripes the inward parts of the belly. He could match her, text for text, and the little, cool part of his mind wondered if he'd drive her to an apoplexy, if he kept it up. He felt a little warm glow of satisfaction that fifteen years of punishment had given him that much vengeance. Hours of confinement with no company but his Bible till he had learned his verses to her satisfaction - cold and dark and frightened and hungry, with his head aching because it was too dark to see the words on the page, but not lonely, because if he'd ever known how to be lonely he'd had that broken out of him, and he was now what his sister had made him.

Occasionally, the Lord put words into Thankful's mouth, and he was possessed by the Spirit. Cool, now, calm, he sat down again and bowed his head over his plate and said quietly, "But of course you may remain, good sister, in all charity. I have volunteered myself in Sir John Hampden's regiment this very day, to take arms to defend our liberties against His Majesty's persecutions."

She was silent, choked off as effectively as a noose. "We have the honourable task of guarding the Train of Artillery," he went on. "I shall be leaving to take up my commission as soon as may be."

The Death of Young Wolves - Charles I's Execution

On this day in 1649 King Charles I met his fate. I doubt even the soldiers who guarded the scaffold could fail to be moved. Rosie Babbitt certainly was.... read on.


It was a bitter cold January day and the sky was smoke-white and heavy with the promise of snow.

There were few flashes of colour amongst the ranks of Babbitt's troop of horse, where they lined their horses against the scaffold where the King of England was due to meet his Maker. The sprig of rosemary in Hapless Russell's hatband. The sea-green ribbon holding Hollie Babbitt's hair, looking even more starkly blood-red than usual against his dull plate. (The scarlet end of Luce Pettitt's poor raw nose, despite his best efforts to keep dabbing at it surreptitiously with the back of his hand, thinking it somewhat disrespectful to pull out a handkerchief and provide His Majesty's last moments on this earth with a trumpet accompaniment.)

"Here we go," Hollie muttered, "stand fast."
The rock-steady brown gelding with the unlikely name of Blossom tossed his head a little as the crowd surged forward on a wave or murmurs that sounded like the sea, but he stood still. Russell's sensible bay Thomas put his ears back and looked very dubious indeed about the proceedings, but other than a little sideways skitter he stood. And Luce's Samson looked deeply disapproving about the skittishness of his companions, and led by stern and handsome glossy example, as still as if he'd been carved from black marble while the people pushed and jostled about his legs.

It was odd, how so many people, could be so silent. Babbitt's troop of horse had faced this man across a battlefield so many times over the past six years, and seen as many men, all in the one place. This was different. This was odd. There were faces here that should not have been here - avid, greedy faces, faces as lustful to watch the King's execution as if they were watching a pretty girl, or a man they desired. Faces with silent tears streaming down cheeks. Faces with lips moving in silent prayer, and not so silent prayer. Old faces. Young faces. A woman with a child at her shoulder. A grizzled old veteran of the wars, one eye milky in a ruined socket, his feet wrapped in rags where his shoes were worn through. (Babbitt moved his horse aside to let that one through. England's freedom. Soldier's rights.)

"Crack on," Russell muttered, "my feet are freezing."
"Bet his are, an' all."
The King was arriving on foot. He had spent last night saying farewell to the last two children he had in England, thirteen year-old Elizabeth and nine year-old Henry, under guard at St James's Palace. His wife was in France, in exile. Hollie had no time for the Man of Blood, no time at all, thought he had brought his own destruction on himself with his pride and his arrogance and his treachery. Hollie was also a married man with two daughters, and though he did not consider himself an imaginative man it made his throat go dry thinking of what he might say, given so few brief hours to say a farewell forever to his babies. And as for being parted from his own Het - ah, God, no, he could not have borne that. He might loathe Charles Stuart's intriguing, but his heart ached for any man to go to his public murder so uncomforted, without even his girl's final kiss to speed him on his way. They said Stuart was a devout man, and Hollie hoped that were true, for it would be him and his God, on the scaffold at the last, and that was a lonely place for any man to be.

The king looked almost childlike, small and thin and primly tidy, as he walked towards the scaffold. His eyes raked the crowd, moved over the soldiers who stood between him and the mass of his people whose mood, even now, was uncertain. There were people in this mob who would tear him apart, physically tear him apart, given the opportunity. Hollie didn't think the little bugger accepted that, to this day. There was a nice irony to it, that his Royal person was being guarded from the risk of harm by any of his rebellious subjects, by - in this troop alone - one Puritan and two Levellers. (Or possibly two people who were both Puritans and Levellers at the same time, depending how zealous he and Russell were feeling.) "He's smaller than I thought he would be," Luce said wanly. "Close to."

"Indeed," the implacable Russell said, with a faint smile. "About a head shorter."
Russell hated the King worse than he hated the Devil, which, given his puritanical leanings, took some doing. Hollie wasn't keen, but looking down his horse's shoulder at a man he'd only ever seen across a battlefield, he found it in his heart to pity him. He was wearing two shirts. There was a thin veil of pimpled gooseflesh across the bare skin at the base of his throat, where the pulse beat clear and fast. Het was going to ask him all of this, when he got home, wanting to hear what a king looked like, if he faced his end with courage and dignity. He thought he might make a bit up about what Charles Stuart looked like. He reckoned Het might be disappointed, if she knew he was a little, skinny, sick-looking man with a pallid indoor complexion and receding, lank hair.

The executioner was disguised. Russell tried to make a joke about that, but no one was taking him up on it, now. It just wasn't funny any more. The crowd were beginning to stir, muttering, edgy. You couldn't blame a man for not wanting his identity to be known, when you walked a knife-edge of public opinion. Today, the people's hero. Tomorrow, it was your head on the block. He'd seen it happen too often in the New Model Army. Seen it happen with Colonel Rainsborough, who'd been his mate, and who'd been acclaimed by the common soldiers as their voice, and who'd ended up with a knife in his back. Say nothing. See nothing. Keep your head down. The King was speaking. He strained his ears, but he couldn't hear a word of it. The other men on the scaffold were nodding sombrely, so presumably it was godly and decent, but he couldn't catch it, over the murmurings of the crowd. "Step back," he said absently to one respectable-looking citizen who was crowding forward, "move away, come on- "
Russell, at his side, put his hand on the hilt of his sword, lightly, but meaningfully.
The murmuring swelled. "Thankful, stand down," Hollie snarled at his lieutenant, but the restlessness was none of their doing, thank God, and on the scaffold behind Hollie the King was kneeling down, setting his hands on the block, putting his lank hair behind his ears.

Stretching out his hands in signal to the executioner.

Hollie couldn't watch. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Russell turn his horse slightly, the better to see. There was that same greedy avidity on his lieutenant's scarred face as there was on so many of the crowd - eager curiosity, malice, self-righteousness. Luce was weeping silently, but then Luce got carried away by the gallantry of the moment at the best of times.

There was a moment's total stillness. And then there was a sound like an ox being butchered, the sound of an axe parting flesh and bone. A great sighing moan rose from the crowd, and for a moment there was panic as the people pushed forward, crying out to dabble their handkerchiefs in the King's blood. Scuffles breaking out around them -

"Have you not had enough blood, in Christ's name?"
Luce pushing people back, white-faced and furious. And a heartbeat later, Russell joining him, looking sick and shaken, and nowhere near so sure of himself as he had been. Neither of those two was a green boy. They'd seen blood spilled before. But cold? Like this? Never.

"We are a commonwealth," Hollie said faintly. "May God have mercy on us."

Name that Horse! eBook competition

It's competition time - win a Kindle collection of short stories, including what did happen to Thankful Russell at Edgehill, how a seventeen-year-old Lancashire boy took up arms in the Low Countries in the Thirty Years' War, and more.

All you have to do is name the new equine addition to Babbitt's troop.

A hint:
Rosie himself has Tyburn (large, black, and menacing) and The Rabbit, who's the only remount big enough for him, and whom he cordially dislikes. When Tyburn is invalided out after Marston Moor, he's replaced by Blossom, named by Mrs Rosie in a whimsical moment.
Trooper Gray has Pig, and I think the name says it all about Gray's horse.
Hapless has Thomas, who has doubts about anything and everything, from the threat posed by a strip of rag in a hedge to strange dogs.
Drew Venning's horse is Samson - large, sturdy, well-mannered and hairy. (Not unlike Venning, come to think of it.)
Kenelm Toogood's horse is Charles, and was baptised as same in Lostwithiel church during the Earl of Essex's Cornish campaign in  1643.

Now, at the beginning of the series, Luce acquired a witless and overbred thoroughbred mare which he tagged as Fair Rosamund, in a fit of poetic stupidity. Rosamund is now, predictably, deceased in an excess of equine zeal.

The question is, o gentle reader, who will replace the Fair Rosamund in Babbitt's horse-lines?

The choice is yours, and you have a week to do it in....Winners to be announced on Wednesday 4th Feb!

That Russell story

 I think I've managed to do this properly now. Click on the cover which will take you to the download page of Lulu, and off you go.

(Look, what do I know, I've just about got my head round the internal combustion engine, mentally I'm mostly in 1642 and I don't do technical stuff. What a fascinating modern age we live in, to quote Stephen Maturin.)

Please download and pity poor Hapless. For someone who's supposed to have thrown himself into the jaws of death a long while back, that boy's got himself some admirers!
(For a scarred, bipolar Puritan with a drink problem, that is.)