Guest Blog: Erastes

This week, we're welcoming historical novelist, Erastes, as she celebrates the release of her latest novel, MUFFLED DRUM, her first release with Carina Press. Please leave a comment for a chance to win one of two generous prizes from Erastes; details below! Here's the blurb:

Bohemia, 1866

They met in a port-side tavern, their lust-filled moments stolen from days of marching and madness. After eighteen months, Captain Rudolph von Ratzlaff and First Lieutenant Mathias Hofmann have decided to run away from everything they hold dear. Resigning their commissions is social suicide, but there's no other choice. Someone will eventually see Rudolph's partiality toward Mathias.

Now their plans have gone horribly awry... When Mathias goes to Rudolph's tent after their last battle, his lover looks at him without a hint of recognition. Mathias can hardly believe the man he knew is gone. He wants to fill in so many of Rudolph's missing memories, but the doctor says a shock could result in permanent damage. The pain of seeing Rudolph on a daily basis, when Rudolph doesn't remember their love, is excruciating. Now Mathias must decide whether he wants to fight for the man he loves or forget him completely...

What makes your recent release, MERE MORTALS, an unusual historical?

It’s great to be back here!

It’s set during a period I haven’t read much fiction about—the Austro-Prussian war of 1866. More correctly called the Austro-Prussian-Italian war, or—if you are from Germany, it’s just called “the German War”! My mother did her thesis on this war and I remember her studying it, and using tapes to do the whole sleep memory thing. Perhaps something rubbed off on me, because I’ve always found the period to be quite fascinating. I thought that a campaign that was rarely mentioned, and a road trip rather than a set-piece with country houses and balls would be fun to do.

What’s it about?

It’s a story of loyalty, and friendship and how far one goes to hold on to something that may or may be gone forever. It takes the trope of amnesia as its theme, and twists it to incorporate a homosexual romance, which goes wrong in so many ways! (It is me, after all—can’t have it going smoothly!) It’s also a road trip.

What gave you the idea?

Well, partly it was from my Dad. He has Alzheimer’s you see, and although he’s still functioning in a “get up every morning and wash, dress and tidy up” kind of way, he’s slipping away from me every month and he can’t forget the simplest things like my birthday, or even my late mother’s birthday. I wanted to explore the devastating effects of memory loss, and how it might affect not only the onlookers, the person themselves.

I have to be honest, too and say that much of the inspiration came from the hussar uniforms, because they are just gorgeous!

Why is it called Muffled Drum?

It was inspired by a poem I found in The Gentleman’s Magazine published in 1805

Ah me! how sorrowful and slow,

With arms revers’d, the soldiers come—

Dirge-sounding trumpets, full of woe,

And, sad to hear, the Muffled Drum!

John Mayne, 1805, The Gentleman’s Magazine

It immediately spoke to me of memory loss, as well as the loss of comrades, and seemed a perfect title.

You tend to use war as a theme often, Transgressions was set in the English Civil War and Tributary was set between the two world wars- why is this?

Well, it’s probably a lazy writer’s way to create conflict. When you place a story in a war you have as many action scenes as you might wish, and the possibility of injury and/or death of characters, whether they are main ones or not. I like to have another edge to my stories, one that doesn’t necessarily concentrate on JUST the relationship, because that would be too limiting for me.

However, in both Transgressions and in this, the battles are pretty much all off-stage. In Muffled Drum you see the pre-battle preparation, and the aftermath—the dead, the wounded and the celebration. The way men can put horror behind them and carry on.

What’s your writing routine?

I’m lucky enough that I have been able to give up my full-time work. I look after my Dad 5 days a week (or at least, I’m with him 5 days a week, obviously I do stuff for him 7 days!) So I go over there, make us breakfast and then set to writing while Dad does his own thing. I try to write 1000 words a day, but as I said, it’s been a struggle this year, and I’m lucky if I can do a fraction of that.

I try to write two books a year, because I’d like ideally to publish two books a year and so far, that’s been happening. I just need to write another one this year, or I’m only going to have one out next year!

On that note, what have you got planned for the future?

I have another novel coming out this year (I’ve had three this year, which is a record for me!)  called Junction X. It’s set in the early 1960’s and is a love story but definitely not a romance. That’s all I’m saying. What I’m writing? A kind of spy/mercenary story set during the Blitz, and a 1920’s murder story, which is very loosely based on Hamlet. Both are kind of stalled though, I’ve been going through a rough spot this year and have written almost nothing.

My second novel for Carina will be out in March 2011, and is a vampire story set in 19^th century Florence; it doesn’t have a title yet though!

Thanks for being here, Erastes—do you have anything for our readers?

Yes!  I will be giving away two prizes to commenters. The first one is a download of Muffled Drum and a goody bag sent by post, and the second is either a download of Muffled Drum or any paper book from my back catalogue. Please say which you’d prefer in the comments. I welcome questions too, so please don’t hold back!

Thanks you, Erastes. Please leave your comment to win one of these generous prizes.

Excerpt Thursday: Erastes

This week on Excerpt Thursday, we're welcoming historical novelist, Erastes, as she celebrates the release of her latest novel, MUFFLED DRUM, her first release with Carina Press. Join us on Sunday, when Erastes will be here to talk about the novel and give away a copy! Here's the blurb:

Bohemia, 1866

They met in a port-side tavern, their lust-filled moments stolen from days of marching and madness. After eighteen months, Captain Rudolph von Ratzlaff and First Lieutenant Mathias Hofmann have decided to run away from everything they hold dear. Resigning their commissions is social suicide, but there's no other choice. Someone will eventually see Rudolph's partiality toward Mathias.

Now their plans have gone horribly awry... When Mathias goes to Rudolph's tent after their last battle, his lover looks at him without a hint of recognition. Mathias can hardly believe the man he knew is gone. He wants to fill in so many of Rudolph's missing memories, but the doctor says a shock could result in permanent damage. The pain of seeing Rudolph on a daily basis, when Rudolph doesn't remember their love, is excruciating. Now Mathias must decide whether he wants to fight for the man he loves or forget him completely...

*Excerpt*

Mathias sat by his tent, bone-weary and half-slumped in his canvas chair. Becher, his batman, knelt before him, struggling with the loops on Mathias’s blood-soaked jacket.


“The threads have swollen, sir,” he said. “My fingers…”


Mathias turned his face away from the man’s sour breath. “Cut them.”


“Sir?” Becher looked positively shocked at the suggestion—whether it was for the uniform or for his fingers, Mathias didn’t know.


“Cut the damned things off.” When Becher reached for his knife, Mathias took it from him. “Give it here.” He ripped the frogging apart, gold threads trailing and the brass buttons scattering around his feet. “Now. Get over to Rittmeister von Ratzlaff’s tent and see how his day went.”


“I should wash—”


“You should damned well do as you’re told, Becher, that’s what you should do!” Breathing heavily, Mathias pulled his hat from his head and leaned on his knees, listening to Becher’s footsteps squelching away through the mud. He knew he’d been too harsh, too quick with the man, but his side hurt damnably, and he’d not seen Rudolph once since right at the beginning of the battle, and even then he wasn’t sure that the man he’d picked out—the dark-haired rider galloping on the far side of the copse, riding straight and fierce—had been his lover.


Gingerly he pulled the dolman off and dumped it on the ground next to his pelisse. The blood wasn’t pouring out of him—or I wouldn’t have made it from the horse lines, I’m sure of it—but his shirt was wet to the touch. Cold, though. That has to be a good sign, surely?


Becher had a pan of salted water on the boil, and he’d put some clean rags beside it. Mathias dipped the rags into the water, then waited a moment for them to cool before wiping at the flesh under his shirt. Soldiers—officers and enlisted men—passed him as he worked, but he didn’t look up. Each man had his own concerns after a battle. One kept to oneself until one could present oneself in a better light than bloody and broken.


Damn it. Let Rudolph be alive. Please, God. Let Rudolph be alive.

He hadn’t allowed himself to think what he’d do if the reverse was true—wouldn’t even allow himself to think the words. Death was something he expected for himself, but never for Rudolph. Rudolph was one of those men who would live forever, the type who would grow huge gray moustaches and bore his grandchildren and possibly even great-grandchildren about the battles he’d been in, the charges he’d led.


Mathias knew he wasn’t half the fighter Rudolph was. While his own sword work was passable— certainly as good as most of the Regiment—Rudolph could disarm him without breaking a sweat. No matter how often they sparred, no matter how often Rudolph taught him the trick of it, he had never taken Rudolph’s sword, not once. Their horse-craft was on a par, just, but Rudolph had been born in the saddle—his family had put him on a sturdy little pony in his first months of life, while Mathias had worked hard from enlistment and trained several times a week. He was, along with all the other men, perfectly capable of guiding a horse without saddle or rein—a man didn’t stay with the hussars for long if he couldn’t master a horse by touch and voice alone—but he never achieved that perfect symbiosis that Rudolph did with his mounts.


He paused for a moment at the image of Rudolph as a fond grandfather, with those ridiculous moustaches. He hadn’t been shocked when Rudolph told him he was married. Not shocked exactly. Rudolph had—although Mathias had never met any of them—a large aristocratic family and a fortune which, although Rudolph rarely spoke of it, was something that needed to be managed. There were always letters that required answering, and sometimes—only sometimes—Rudolph would complain about the incompetence of estate managers who couldn’t manage to find their arses with both hands.


“How is it that your family allows you to risk your life the way you do?” Mathias had asked him once. It had been the only time he’d asked a direct question about Rudolph’s family, and he’d deliberately not said “wife.”


“My parents are both dead—oh, I hardly knew them. Brief visits to the drawing room, that kind of thing. They were both dead—typhus—before I was six. I’ve had the inheritance ever since, but other people have always run the place. And my life is my own to dispose of—to do with what I like. I made that very clear. My aunt Gretchen von Ratzlaff took over my upbringing. Her and a gaggle of visiting relations. Aunt Gretchen was a crotchety widow with firm views on many things. One thing she taught me was to speak my mind, so I did. And I have a healthy younger brother. I’m expendable.”


“And you prefer to do this?” That Mathias found hard to understand. A choice between luxury and comfort and servants and clean sheets—and life in the army.