Alex Bell - fantasy author

I seem to have neglected the blog a bit recently. This is partly because of the party I had for Jasmyn last week, which took a lot of preparation. Those ice swans don’t carve themselves, you know . . .

Here I am with the giant swan, stuffed full of champagne. The swan, that is. Not me. Not by that point anyway. That swan weighed almost exactly the same as I do, which I found quite strange.

Here I am with fellow Princesses of Fantasy Fiction, Jaine Fenn and Suzanne McLeod:

Please note that, despite what this photo may suggest, I am not a freakishly tall person. It’s just that Jaine and Suzanne are both quite petite, and I was wearing heels. I dislike being called Gigantor to my face, and am likely to react unfavourably towards anybody who does so.

In spite of my earlier fib, I did not carve the swans myself. Ice sculpting is not something I can add to my list of talents. But I did help make the cupcake mountain:

Three hours. It took two people three hours to decorate the thirty eight cupcakes on that stand. They tasted good though - once I got over the fact that people were actually going to eat all our hard work.

Jasmyn really suited itself to a themed party. When it went dark, all the twinkly lights in the marquee came on and made it look gorgeous. I think, from now on, whenever I go to start a new book, my first thought should be: will this make a good party later?

It was a great evening. A great night, actually, as I didn’t go to bed until seven o clock the next morning. A sure sign of success in my book. Big thank yous to everyone who came and made it so much fun. It just wouldn’t have been the same sitting in the marquee and drinking bottle after bottle of champagne all by myself.

It’s good to be home. I like going on holiday but towards the end I start to suffer from intense cravings for two things: meat (of the vegetarian variety, obviously), and my animals.

On our last night in Las Vegas, we stayed in the Luxor. Nowhere near as nice as the Mirage, and we were all having a bit of a whinge about it, and saying we should have stuck with the first hotel. But then we went into breakfast and there, on the menu, was a side order of vegetarian sausages. Vegetarian sausages! I wouldn’t go so far as to say I actually wept with delight but . . . well, it was a near thing. There’s only so much lettuce a person can take, after all. Now I won’t hear a bad word said against the Luxor.

I was probably suffering from meat cravings even more than usual at that point because of the white water rafting we’d just done in Colorado. This involved a night of camping. And, believe me, there is nothing more painful than watching bacon sizzling away on a campfire, smelling all tasty and delicious, when you know you can’t have any of it. Later on they got the marshmallows out but these ones had gelatine in them, so I couldn’t have any of those either. By this time I could feel the cold sweat starting to prickle the back of my neck. Given all this, can I really be blamed for feeling so profoundly delighted by the veggie sausages at the Luxor?

Anyway, the bacon aside, the white water rafting was fantastic. What I loved most about it was that my brother fell out of the raft about five minutes after we set off down the river. Much amusement was had at his expense, but we dragged him back in eventually. I did not fall out at any time during the two days. At one point, however, I did neglect to jump in quickly enough. We got to this bank in the middle of the river and were carrying the raft across to the other side. Everyone else seemed to leap in nimbly enough. I slipped, or something, and ended up clinging to the side of the raft as it started to move on down the river. The problem with this is that when the water is moving faster than the raft, you have to hang onto the side tight in order to avoid being dragged underneath it. I had horrible images of being, effectively, keel-hauled beneath the raft. So I clung to the rope like a limpet, all the while shrieking, ‘Pull me in! Pull me in! Stop laughing and help me!’ Finally, my brother and his other half managed to drag me in between them. It was quite undignified though. I ended up sort of sprawled on the floor of the raft like a landed fish.

Anyway, now all that adventuring is behind me and I am back home with the menagerie. Moose has outgrown her car seatbelt whilst we’ve been away. She’ll outgrow my car soon too. My Siamese cat gave me the cold shoulder for the first few hours after I got back. But, since making her displeasure known, she has spent virtually the whole time glued to my lap. If there was any animal I missed more than Moose, it was Suki. That little cat is the absolute apple of my eye. Nothing she does ever irritates me. Not even when she shits on my bed. I mean, obviously, I’m irritated that there is shit on the bed, but I’m not irritated with Suki. She is a Siamese, after all, she can’t help being neurotic. Here is a photo of her:

I have been told she looks evil in this picture, but I just think she looks ridiculously cute. Something between a kangaroo and a gremlin. It makes me want to kiss her feet. In fact, I’m gonna go do that right now.

On the next leg of our journey, we have now finally left Flagstaff. I say finally because the Monte Vista Hotel was, to be frank, quite horrible in a number of different ways. A lot of famous people - from John Wayne, to Humphrey Bogart, to Anthony Hopkins - have stayed there in the past. If it’s good enough for Bogie, and all that . . . But perhaps the place was nicer in his day.

It transpired that the rooms pictured on the internet were the refurbished ones. Our rooms were most decidedly not refurbished (even if it was the one Spencer Tracy reportedly stayed in). When I went into our bathroom upon arrival, the toilet bowl was full of smelly wee that someone had neglected to flush away (never mind actually cleaning the toilet). I go on holiday for several reasons, but smelly wee ain’t one of them. Nothing spoils a holiday faster than some stranger’s smelly wee.

But moving on from that - the main problem I had with the hotel was that it absolutely scared the wits out of me. I don’t believe in ghosts as such, but I do believe in the possibility of them, especially in a place like that. It was like something directly out of The Twilight Zone. And if any hotel was really haunted, it was this one. There was all this ancient dark wooden furniture, and creaking floorboards, and strange mirrors, and rusty hinges on the doors, and scary posters of girl-wonder Shirley Temple looking all smug and curly. . .

When the five of us went out for dinner, I suppose we all wound each other up a bit with ghost stories, so by the time we returned to the hotel my thoughts were veering towards wondering if I would survive the night, and so on. It didn’t help when the elevator came down to the lobby with two little girls clinging to their father and sobbing because they were too terrified of the hotel to stay the night. Kids can sense evil, y’know. I was a bit on edge by the time we got up to our floor. Perhaps that was why, when a large tattooed man burst suddenly out of the room next door to ours, I . . . well, sort of screamed in his face. He was very nice about it though.

I did, however, survive the night. Even if I did spend much of it sitting up in bed and peering owlishly into shadows, in search of ghostly figures, or horrifying Shirley Temple apparitions.

Now, we are staying in Monument Valley in a brand spanking new hotel. This is the view from our balcony:

Nice, eh? A very definite improvement on last night even if, mere minutes after our arrival, a storm blew up, knocking out the electricity and water supply. They got them back up and running eventually though.

All in all, this place pleases me tremendously. I may very well refuse to leave.

Well, perhaps not stranded as such, but I am in a Marriott in a little town called Kingman when I’m supposed to be in Flagstaff by now in the Monte Vista.

This morning we went to visit a little ghost town called Oatman. http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/az/oatman.html This was the highlight of my trip so far. I liked Las Vegas, but a person can only take so much of all that glitz. Clark Gable spent his honeymoon with Carole Lombard in Oatman. And if it’s good enough for Clark Gable then, by heck, it’s good enough for me. We had lunch at the haunted Oatman Hotel where the walls of the bar area were entirely covered in dollar bills. We worked out that there must have been several thousand dollars worth there.

After having a wander around, we set off along Route 66 for the three-hour drive on to Flagstaff. We’d been on the road for a while, and I was sat in the back, happily engrossed in Best Served Cold when, suddenly, the car went over a stone and then started making this suspicious rattly noise. We pulled over, and confirmed what we all dreaded - we had a flat tyre. Not a big deal, usually, but no one wants to get a flat tyre when the view from the side of the road is this:

Not only that, but we hadn’t seen another car for a very long time (not counting the rusty, abandoned crashed one we spotted halfway down the cliff). And none of us had any mobile signal whatsoever. Mild panic ensued. Especially when, for a horrible few minutes, we thought there was no spare tyre. Finally, through a gargantuan group effort, we discovered a tyre shaped thing underneath the car. It took another lengthy period to actually get to it, because you had to lift up the drinks holder inside the car and then unscrew the floor, geez, it was like some sort of Chinese puzzle box.

In the meantime, a lovely American family came along in their car and stopped to help us. We did look quite helpless and pathetic, with all our luggage piled up on the side of the road. This is one of the reasons why I love America. Everyone always seems so friendly and ready to help you. It took about an hour to jack up the car and get the spare tyre on but they stuck with us and didn’t leave until we were all set to go. Before they left, they checked our other tyres. This was fortunate as it turns out that there’s a bubble or something (hey, I ain’t no mechanic) in one of the front tyres that makes it unsafe to drive very far on. They said we’d need to get a new tyre at the nearest town.

In the meantime, my Mum was almost killed by a jumping cactus. Well, not almost killed as such, but the prickly little thing attached itself to her leg, and it looked quite horrible. Luckily the American ladies helped us out with that too. Jumping cactuses. Who knew? My brother’s girlfriend pointed out that bad things come in threes. We went to get back in the car, and instantly discovered the dreaded third thing. It was the Ding Dongs. We’ve wanted to try one since watching Transformers. All over New York and Washington we hunted last year, trying to find this elusive chocolate but to no avail. Finally we located a packet in Las Vegas, and had them in the car with us to sample later. Unfortunately, in all the panic and commotion, someone had put the Ding Dongs on my seat before folding the top part down, effectively squashing them flat. They’d also melted, seeing as they’d been in the car in the searing heat for over an hour.

Once we were on the road again, we attempted to salvage the Ding Dongs from their packet, but this endeavour turned out to be what can only be described as a complete debacle. A fair amount of melted chocolate mess was involved, and we were finally compelled to throw them away when we stopped at Kingman to try to get a new tyre. Unfortunately, it turns out that the tyre place we stopped at doesn’t have the tyre we need. Hopefully it will be there at 8am tomorrow morning. Otherwise we may be stuck in this place for some while. And I want to get on to the haunted hotel at Flagstaff, not to mention the white water rafting in Colorado.

A week or so after entering a competition, I got a phone call from a woman saying I’d won a makeover and photo shoot at Skylite Studios. I promptly booked a time and handed over my credit card details to pay a deposit for me and a friend. Then I looked the studio up on the internet and found a lot of people saying this was a scam.

I was - I will admit - dismayed. I had just handed my credit card number over to this company. If travelling abroad has taught me one thing, it’s that I’m an extremely gullible person. I’ll fall for any scam going. Perhaps I just have the sort of face that says: ‘Swindle me! Please!’ There was this one particularly memorable occasion in Beijing airport where- Oh well, never mind, that’s another blog post altogether. The point is that giving my credit card to some sort of con artist sounded like exactly the sort of thing I’d do. I had visions of turning up to the studio address in London only to find a ramshackle, rundown shack - possibly with a note reading “Gotcha!” taped to the door.

But after doing a bit of research, it seemed that the people calling it a scam were mostly complaining because they were expecting too much. The refreshments served at the studio, for example, consist mostly of drinks. There is no caviar. People also seemed upset about the fact that they had to pay for photos at the end. And, yes, this is true. If you want photos at the end of the shoot, you do have to pay for them. I suppose you could therefore say that “winning” the photo shoot is not so much a prize as a clever marketing ploy. But calling it a “scam” is extremely unfair. You are never told that you get the photos for free, so it’s unreasonable to expect that you will. It’s the makeover and photo shoot that you don’t pay for. Some of the reviews I read of Skylite Studios were very negative. That, taken together with all the scam hysteria, almost made me not go at all. But I’m very glad now that I did go because I had a really fun day, and so did my friend. We both came away the very epitome of a satisfied customer. So if anyone’s reading this because they’ve Googled Skylite Studios in a blind panic like I did, feel free to email me if you have a particular question about the day or the studio. I’ll be more than happy to give a glowing report of my experience. And I’m not even earning commission or anything.

All the staff there were extremely friendly, and the studio itself was - for want of a better word - swish. We were given a form to fill out, basically saying what sort of photos we were after. One of the options was “tasteful nude”. I resisted the temptation to inquire whether there was a “seedy nude” option.

After getting our hair and makeup done, we got about an hour with the photographer. The only quibble I have with the day is that we were told we could bring 3-6 outfit changes, but we only had time for three. We still got plenty of great photos though, despite any giggling that may have occurred. I fear our shoot may have been a bit like pulling teeth for the hapless photographer who tried in vain to get us to pose like models - sexy pouts and sulky eyes and all that jazz.

‘Look, I’m the quiet, bookish type,’ I announced (like George Peppard in Breakfast at Tiffany’s). ‘I ain’t a hand-through-the-hair, stick-out-ya-hip kinda gal.’

To which he replied that I was, only in the disguise of a writer. Although generally uncomfortable with having a camera stuck in my face, I relaxed more when the photographer started to mock me in this way. I guess I’m just perverse like that. When I first said I was a writer, he even suggested this might be a euphemism for sitting at home all day unemployed. This made me laugh because whenever I tell people what I do for a living, I can tell that’s what they’re all thinking even if they don’t usually say it. Not to my face, at least. I had a copy of Jasmyn with me that day though (I’d brought it for my friend - it’s not my custom to carry my own books around everywhere with me). So, afterwards, when we were sat waiting to see our pictures, and the photographer walked through the waiting area, I leapt to my feet and thrust Jasmyn upon him, all the while quivering with righteous indignation and wounded pride and all that.

‘This is my book, sir! I demand that you rescind all that unemployed layabout stuff! That’s three months of tireless, dedicated work that is!’ etc etc.

Anyway - my friend and I both came away with a nice little selection of photos each. The day was a huge laugh, we had loads of fun, and I would recommend Skylite Studios to anyone.

I came home and duly replaced my author photo on this site. The old one was taken by my Mum two years ago (before I sorted out my hair) whilst I sat on a bench at the bottom of the garden. That set up, I feel, just doesn’t convey the glamour somehow. Plus I had, only the day before, returned from a week of illness in Egypt, so my heart just wasn’t in the whole posing for photos thing at the time. Now, though, I have a brand-spanking-new author photo. Hey, if the moody author look is good enough for Joe Abercrombie, then by heck, it’s good enough for me.

But the “tasteful nude” photos, I regret to say, aren’t here. That would be entirely inappropriate. They’re on Facebook.