Uh-Oh...

For the past week I have been editing, for moderately serious money, an absolutely godawful book that calls itself "historical erotica." Uh-HUH.

Yes, well, they got the erotica part right. I, however, call it smut. And smut it is! And not even good smut.
And you guys all know how prudish I am about sex in my own books, so this is a pretty big revelation, that historical fiction, which to me means Thomas Costain and Anya Seton, may their names live forever, now is pretty much pornographically rife. It isn't just those lances that are well couched, if you get my drift...

No, the uh-oh comes because all this William the Conqueror-era activity has got me reverting to my Viking book, "Son of the Northern Star." About Alfred the Great and his Viking adversary, whom I like to think of as Guthrum the Greater.

The editor suggested I sex it up a bit, and after I stopped going eeeeeewwwwwwww, I thought, well, I would never want to write the kind of stuff I've had to edit (trust me, you don't wanna read it, either), but maybe I could romance it a bit more than my usual.

I have about a hundred pages done on it. Guthrum and Alfred were a very odd couple indeed. Guthrum the Dane, last real Viking warlord left in England, and ruler of everything but Alf's little kingdom of Mercia. They fight, they disagree, they make treaties, they break treaties, they win battles, they lose battles...fun stuff.

Then Guthrum and his Vikes lose a decisive battle, down West Country way, and Alfred, instead of slaughtering them all, makes them turn Christian, at least nominally, and gives Guthrum half of England to rule, the whole north and east (now called the Danelaw), keeping the south and west for himself. Civilized and very, very shrewd on both their parts: Guthrum couldn't win by then, and Alfred knew the Vikings were never going to go away.

Marking the first occasion of the great British political weapon: partition! To be followed by Palestine, India/Pakistan, Northern Ireland, etc., etc.

So, since there's very little known about Guthrum, I've basically made him into a Viking Lawrence of Arabia, with a bit of Turk thrown in: tall, blond, bearded, hunky. And there's a witchy Welsh girlfriend, Malen, with coal-black hair and rain-colored eyes...all of which is utterly fabricated, since there's some evidence that Guthrum was well into his fifties or even older. But that's the beauty of undocumented times...

So now I'm all het up to write some more on this. Must. Not. I really have to finish "Monterey", at least...and nobody is buying Viking books any more now than they were two years back.
Unless I get all romancey about it. Which I'd rather not do. So we'll see. I just want to play in the 860's for a while, not the 1960's...