Alex Bell - fantasy author

The dark gods and goddesses at Headline Towers have worked their magic to give you a sneaky peek into your future. Want to know whether great riches or great doom or great foolishness lie in store for you? Just go to http://www.lextrent.co.uk and play the Lex Trent game, if you dare. This is not a game for the faint of heart. These are guaranteed fates, guaranteed to come true, guaranteed.*

*Please note, that neither Alex Bell, nor the Headline Gods, can be held legally or morally responsible for any consequences, reasonably foreseen or otherwise, of someone’s reaction to learning their fate. These include, but are not limited to, unwise investment decisions, making premature funerary arrangements for oneself or for one’s friends, refusing to leave the house, or running away to sea or space in despair.

It seems hard to believe now that I never used to wear heels. I think I was frightened of them – frightened that I’d fall over, or that I wouldn’t be able to walk in them, or that the heel would snap as soon as I put my weight on it. I remember my friend at college sternly lecturing me when I was seventeen about the fact that I only ever wore ugly trainers. So, one day, I took the plunge and bought a pair of ankle boots. They had the smallest heel you could imagine but they seemed pretty daring to me at the time and I felt immensely proud of myself as I wobbled into college the next day.

I’ve moved on from that since then. I can even navigate heels when I’m drunk now - a fact of which I am immensely proud. At the Lex Trent launch party in October, I left the bar at 5am (4am if you count the clocks going back), and walked all the way back upstairs to my room in 10 cm heels without falling over once! That’s the mark of the true professional, that is. No more bruised knees for me (I’ll never forget the look of horror on the faces of my Mum and Aunt the time I got undressed at the spa only to give away that both my knees were black – an unfortunate consequence of trying to navigate a cobbled street in heels outside a pub after a night of drinking). Here is the fantastically named Jezebel shoe:

Yep, I’m a dab hand at the high heel thing now. I’ve got a weakness for a pretty shoe. It tends to play out like this:

But then, just as I’m reaching for my wallet to buy the shoes, I realise that they’re made of leather or suede or that they’re almost vegan but not quite because they have leather soles. And I have to put them back on the shelf and weep because my ethics prohibit me from buying the shoe no matter how pretty it is. So, for a long time after discovering my love of heels, I had to stick to ugly flat shoes because there were no pretty vegan heels. That’s not the case anymore, however. The Jezebel shoe above is entirely vegan and came from Dune, which is a great place to find dressy animal-friendly heels. I also got the shoes for my Jasmyn party there, as blogged about here.

Sadly, many of my shoes have met a messy end since I got my Great Dane (sob! I had to learn to keep my shoes away from her the hard way) but one of my favourite pairs to have survived Moose are these Vivienne Westwood Melissa Lady Dragon heels, made entirely from rubber plastic that smells like bubblegum:

And then, of course, there is Beyond Skin, which makes the best selection of the most beautiful vegan shoes I have ever seen anywhere. I have never seen an ugly shoe on their website.

I went to a baby shower last weekend and was going to buy a babygro or something but then I found these:

A teeny tiny pair of Ugg lookalike booties. So, so cute. I couldn’t stop taking them out of the bag and looking at ‘em once I got home. And whilst browsing the Vivienne Westwood website today I found these:

Are they not gorgeous? The Vivienne Westwood Mini Melissa. I feel like I must have a baby at once in order to be able to buy these shoes. Still, perhaps that’s taking the love of high heels just a little bit too far. Splashing out a week’s wages or suffering from toe blisters is one thing - a proportionate sort of sacrifice. Getting knocked up for the sake of a shoe is probably in a different league of shoe obsession altogether. A slippery slope into madness, no less. And if you’re going to go crazy then it ought rightly to be for reasons a bit more lofty and impressive than the love of a baby Viv Westwood shoe, no matter how fabulous it is.

Or: Elena versus Sam.

I love I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched but there’s always a slight jarring element for me – particularly in Bewitched – with the way both female leads try so hard to please the male lead. Their lives revolve around making their men happy. The suggestion is that, as Darrin’s wife, it’s Sam’s duty to obey him and so if he doesn’t want her to use magic then she simply accepts this without question, and tries to live like a human for him, meaning that she’s cleaning floors on her hands and knees and pushing a hoover around by hand rather than simply snapping her fingers (or twitching her nose, as the case may be) and doing it all by magic. It’s a ludicrous premise and one that would surely make the hackles rise on any modern housewife. I don’t think such a show could be made today. In these post-Buffy years, people want strong heroines of the kick-ass variety rather than the housewife variety. Heroines have moved on and are now expected to be stronger, sexier and sassier than ever before.

Or, at least, that’s what I’ve always thought. But then I watched an episode of The Vampire Diaries soon after an episode of Bewitched and thought yikes, there’s no way that Elena is a better role model for women than Sam. I watch and enjoy Vampire Diaries but, Christ, Elena is one hell of a wet blanket. She doesn’t seem to really know what she wants, and she doesn’t appear to have any kind of life or personality beyond Stephen. If she has any career ambitions or plans for her future then the audience are left entirely unaware of them. There’s also a disturbing trend in YA heroines nowadays to drop friends, family and, indeed, their entire lives, in order to be with their boyfriends. It’s a single-minded devotion and obsession far beyond anything Sam or Jeannie ever displayed.

Plus, heroines of the likes of Elena and Bella are ordinary human girls constantly needing to be rescued by their powerful vampire boyfriends. In the 60s American sitcoms it was the other way around. Sam and Jeannie are both far more powerful than their men, and if anyone’s going to be doing any rescuing, it’s going to be the women. Sam and Jeannie both know what they want and go after it, whereas Bella and Elena spend most of their time dithering about trying to make up their minds and complaining about how ill used they are. Sam is strong and capable – cross her and you’ll be sorry for it. Darrin probably lost count of the number of times she turned him into an animal or an inanimate object of some kind. But cross Elena and what’s she going to do? Pout at you to death?

Of course, it should be acknowledged that these are two very different shows – one is a sitcom and one is a drama – so it’s not comparing like with like, but it’s still an interesting contrast between heroines considering the difference in decades, and how far women are supposed to have moved on since the 60s. Also, the Vampire Diaries is aimed predominantly at teenagers so maybe that partially explains the fact that Elena is a whiny teenager whereas Sam is a strong grown-up woman. The emphasis is on her being a smart and powerful witch who also happens to be classy and sexy, whereas with Bella and Elena the emphasis is very firmly on the fact that they’re pretty. Well, good for them, but what else have they really got going for them? They never seem to have any fun. They don’t study for exams. They don’t make plans for their future. They just moon over their boyfriends. Yuck, yuck, yuck! It makes me cringe.

So perhaps you don’t have to be some sort of kung-fu Buffy action hero to be a true heroine. Perhaps there is something to be said for the quiet strength, keen intelligence and no nonsense attitude of the housewife heroine who knows exactly what she wants and works hard to get it. Certainly that type of heroine has surely got to be infinitely preferable to a whining teenage girl who only gets by on her looks and whose main hobby – indeed, sole purpose in life – seems to be that of ‘being saved’ and/or ‘being ravished’.

Happy 2011, everyone! As one of my New Year’s resolutions I thought I should probably try to get back into blogging a bit more regularly. What with one thing and another, it fell by the wayside a bit last year. This year I shall try to do better.

So, the first post of 2011 shall be about writing spaces. This is inspired, in part, by the guest post my friend and writing pal, Jaine Fenn, recently did at Book Chick City (http://www.bookchickcity.com/2010/12/where-stories-are-made-with-science.html). I seriously covet Jaine’s writing space. It’s amazing. She actually climbs a ladder to get to it! That is hard core, any way you look at it.

I’m actually quite fussy when it comes to writing spaces. For one thing, the room has to be a sunny one. That’s why writing here didn’t work for me:

This is a building at the bottom of our garden that we call the stable because the woman who lived at the property before used to keep her horse there but, as you can see, it’s more of a giraffe house than anything (my suggestion that we take the opportunity to get a giraffe, or perhaps a llama, was met only with chilly silence). When I was twelve or so, the stable got all kitted out for me as a birthday present – new second floor, new window, new ladder – the works. I’d said I wanted it as a writing space (if I couldn’t have a pet llama, that is), and I used to take a notebook and a cat or two down there and try to work. Not wanting me to crash through the unstable floor to my tragic premature death, my parents wisely decided that a sturdy new floor was the way to go. But even with the new, bigger window, it was just too dark. And the dead woodlice were a problem too. I swear, no matter how many times I hoovered ‘em up, they just came right back – usually in the exact same places too, bizarrely enough. So I mainly filled the top floor of the stable up with Buffy posters and old rugs and coffee tables that people threw out. God only knows what it looks like up there now – I haven’t been in it for yonks.

So although I liked the idea of writing all alone in a little tucked away outbuilding, the dark-woodlouse-reality turned out to be a little different from what I had in mind. So I returned to my trusty old desk (that used to be my dressing table when I was a kid). When taking all the Christmas decorations down this year I decided (inspired by Jaine’s post) to really tidy up my desk and get rid of some of the clutter. As you can see, I failed fantastically:

Still, it’s less dusty than it was, at least. Some writers would probably find it distracting, but I don’t think I would work very well at a desk that wasn’t cluttered up with stuff. I did get rid of a couple of bits, but the things on my desk have come from all over the world, and I like seeing it all there. The lynx and the mummy came from Egypt, the lump of volcanic glass came from Italy (Mount Vesuvius), the mouse mat came from Budapest (Gerbeauds), the glass pink panther came from Venice, the little stone animals on the keyboard came from Washington (and inspired the Wishing Creatures of Desareth in Lex Trent), the storyteller ornament on the mouse mat came from Arizona, the little Viking came from Norway, the Lego wizard came from the Netherlands, the green mermaid on the wall came from some island in the Med (or possibly the Caribbean) that I can’t even remember the name of now. All right, so perhaps the Jesus and Albert Einstein action figures aren’t strictly necessary, but I like gliding Jesus across the desk (his wheels means he comes with gliding action!) and playing with Einstein’s hair when I get stuck with a book. Can you spot all those things I mentioned?! It’s like a Where’s Wally only without Wally. Where’s Writer’s Stuff, perhaps? You could have hours of fun with that, I’m sure.

I have photos of my grandparents and my favourite cat, who have all now passed away, as well as presents from various people. My little cousin bought me the brown cat, writing pal Suzanne McLeod gave me the little witch sitting on top of the speakers, Jaine Fenn gave me the black rose ring (next to the witch), and my Mum bought me the little brass desk-top Mephistopheles when The Ninth Circle was published. And obviously the book covers from my own books that I have propped up there are important because they make me feel more like a real writer when I sit down to work, rather than someone indulging a hobby – which is how it always feels, perhaps because I enjoy it so much.

So, there it is. My desk might look like a ten-year-old’s toy chest but, hey, it works for me. Perhaps one day, when I am a proper grown up, I might get me a nice big clean desk overlooking the sea or something. But the chances are I will probably just fill it up with more clutter, gifts, book covers, photos, and spoils from my various travels.