Please welcome Jessica Skye Davies!

Defining Distance in a Relationship

Long-distance relationships are nothing new, just ask Antony and Cleopatra.  But with the advent of internet and the infinite ease of communication, they have gotten a lot more common and rather less fraught with angst (well, theoretically).  Most people take “long-distance” to mean that a couple is in separate states, countries, or even hemispheres, or any such distance as to create a barrier to seeing one another frequently.  Here in Pittsburgh, a long-distance relationship is defined as having to cross a river, of which we have three.  The sad thing is I’m not joking.

Distance between people isn’t always just geographic, though.  One can see a person every day, live in the same house even, and still be light years apart.  

In Half the World Away, Dade (from London) and Elliot (from Australia) face the question of whether their budding romance is strong enough to withstand 10,000 miles, or indeed if it is worth trying to make it work.  The reason they even have to ask is less to do with the mileage and more to do with the men.  

Dade is a city-boy.  He loves London and urban living.  As a photographer he’s always hoping for more urban assignments where he can explore how people live and bring out sides to cities that most people overlook.  Dade usually feels that nature photography is “hacky” – not that he doesn’t appreciate the beauty, but in his opinion the natural world is so beautiful it presents no challenge to a photographer.  

Elliot, on the other hand, is all about his Aussie bush lifestyle.  He has a strong respect for nature and all its inhabitants.  Sure, crocodiles and snakes can be very dangerous, but Elliot knows better than to tangle with them.  Elliot emphasizes understanding your environment as safety tip number one.  And he’s never stopped being awed by seeing whales and dolphins near Australia’s coastline.  

Dade and Elliot are two very different lads, and when they first meet it certainly looks as if it’s going to stay that way.  Dade is annoyed about getting stuck with yet another nature shoot for the travel magazine he works for, and Elliot is het up about Dade and his assistant going out wandering after having been warned about the crocs.  Naturally, England and Australia being separated by a common language, not all information gets across smoothly.  

Once they get a little more at ease with one another, though, Dade and Elliot learn there are some commonalities between them – such as serious mutual attraction.    

There is a little hiccup though, in the form of Dade’s boss/erstwhile boyfriend, Jackson.  Jackson and Dade’s “relationship” is a perfect example of distance between two people who live in the same city.  Dade knows it’s over with them, Jackson never has time for him (or anything other than what his personal assistant tells him is next on the agenda).  But Jackson might have been a little too busy to notice Dade’s unhappiness with the state of things.  Dade and Jackson may be geographically much closer, and perhaps even closer in personalities than Dade and Elliot, but that doesn’t mean there’s any real chance for them to have a Happily Ever After.

The question is, is there a chance for Dade and Elliot to have one?

Blurb:  Photographer Dade Faber keeps hoping for assignments on a big city beat, but time and again he’s sent into the wild. This time, he’s half the world away from London shooting the Australian bush. When Dade is nearly attacked by a crocodile, it leads to a shouting match with Elliot Harris, who owns Dade’s hotel. Elliot is both hot and persuasive, and when he offers to play tour guide, Dade accepts. After a week spent mostly together in the bush, Dade begins to fall for Elliott. The attraction is mutual, and when circumstances lead both men to London, they find they have much in common. But can their romance bridge the 10,000 miles between London and the Australian bush?

Bio:  Jessica Skye Davies has been a writer since her first works were “published” in her grandparents’ living room and written in crayon. She is a lifelong native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she has been active in the community, including serving as library director on the executive board of a local GLBT community center. Outside of writing, Jessica has a wide range of interests and hobbies: from Mozart in a music hall to punk in pubs, from Shakespeare to Vonnegut, from salsa dancing the night away to afternoon coffee in the square to kicking back with a good movie. She loves meeting new people and exploring new places, always open to whatever elements might inspire her next writing project.

Links:

Half the World Away: http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=4282&cPath=399

Blog: http://jessicaskyedavies.blogspot.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jessicaskye.davies

Spica in Zagreb

Have you preordered Housekeeping yet? It releases in 4 days. To celebrate, there will be a tweetaway very soon. You should follow @dreamspinners on Twitter right away and keep your eyes open, especially if you're in a European time zone (or you're a nightowl or early bird in the USA).

Roughly 800,000 people live in Zagreb. On Saturday mornings, nearly every one of those people converges on a few square blocks in the center of the city for a ritual called spica (pronounced shpeetzah). The ritual requires that you shop at dolac, the big greenmarket, and meet your friends at one of the zillion cafes for coffee. You will dress up for this, and possibly get your hair done as well. You might also do some shopping for clothes, shoes, or whatever catches your eyes in the stores. You will probably hang out at the main square, taking part in whatever festival is going on or maybe just waiting for your tram. Then you go home and have a big midafternoon lunch with your whole family.

I live right smack in the middle of this. I wish I could convey with words the crowds and bustle, the way people chat with their usual purveyors at the market, the rumble of ten thousand conversations going on at once, the calls of friends greeting each other. There is no equivalent to this in the US, and I haven't seen the like elsewhere in Europe. I imagine it's a much larger version of what market days must have been like in medieval times.

 I have some photos from this morning. You can click on them to see them big.

 

Here you see the  flower sellers. That's my building on the left. My door is between two of those pillars.

And here's a corner of dolac. Today I bought a kilo of apples for 4 kuna (70 US cents), and also a kilo of potatoes for 4 kuna. And a large bottle of homegrown honey for 20 kuna. I managed everything in Croatian. The people selling the stuff are the people who grew it, and they always have a pleasant smile for their customers.

 

Looking down the stairs from the upper level of dolac, past the flower sellers, to the main square. You can see a blue tram in the background. Again, the tall grayish building on the right is mine. Look at those crowds! They're nonstop from early morning until 2ish on Saturdays.

The main square.  Nominally, the booths are set up in celebration of St. Martin's Day. But really they're an excuse to have an event in the square. There's a stage on the right, where children were doing folk dancing. You can see some adults in traditional costumes waiting their turn. I think folk dancing is a popular thing here. I see it a lot.

This is about a block from the main square. It's the sun. Several years ago an artist made planets to go with it. He scattered his planets around town, each of them at the appropriate distance--to scale--from the sun. So Pluto is way out in the suburbs somewhere (it was still a planet then). He didn't tell anyone where he'd put them, so for months there was a sort of city-wide scavenger hunt as people searched for planets.

When we lived here 2 years ago, this was my daughter's favorite cafe. They have very good ice cream.

This is Flower Square, one of the main places to meet for coffee. That's the Eastern Orthodox church on the right. (Over 90% of Croatians are Catholics, but there are a few Eastern Orthodox, Muslims, and Jews.)

 

Another shot of Flower Square. Thousands of cafe tables, and every one of them is occupied.

 Saturday is also a good day to gather petitions or, if you're a Hari Krishna, have a parade. I caught this photo from my window right after I got home.

Spica is one of the many things I miss about Zagreb when I'm not here.

Please welcome Bru Baker!

Thanks for having me as a guest on your blog, Kim! I've been keeping up with all your gorgeous photos from Zagreb and Warsaw, and I have to say I have a little bit of travel envy. The biggest trip on my radar right now is a ten-hour drive to Columbia, South Carolina, for Thanksgiving. (And with a four year old and a seven year old in tow, that hardly counts as a vacation, I say.)

I'm no stranger to international travel, but having young children has grounded us Stateside. I'm excited to introduce them to travel when they're a little older, but right now I don't think there's enough wine (for me) and fruit snacks (for them) to get us through a transatlantic (or even cross-country) flight.

Before kids my husband and I used to pick a week to take off from work and then wait until a few days before to decide where to go, literally picking whichever far-off location had a last-minute flight sale. It was a fun way to explore the world, and a few times we really lucked out, finding fares to places like Honduras and Belize. (Other times we didn't have the travel gods on our side and ended up in places like the Bahamas, Jamaica, and one very unfortunate trip to Cancun on what turned out to be college spring break. Not a great time for anyone on the north end of 20 who doesn't have a special affinity for Señor Frog.)

I miss that travel spontaneity, and my fond memories of exploring new places is part of what inspired Island House, which comes out Nov. 11. It's available now for preorder as an ebook or paperback from Dreamspinner Press.

I chose to set Island House on the island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands because it seemed to combine beautiful scenery with a hometown feel. I've never been to that part of the Caribbean, so I relied a lot on Google Images searches and travel sites to get the lay of the land. Niall Ahern is a British ex-pat who picks up and moves to Tortola after the death of his longtime partner. He'd hoped being on the island would help him move on, but four years later he's still mired in grief and the guilt, since he blames himself for Nolan's death.

Niall meets Ethan Bettencourt when Ethan comes to the island to buy a vacation home, and the attraction is instantaneous. Life intervenes, as it tends to do, and the two of them go their separate ways at the end of Ethan's stay. Later, Niall travels to Seattle to confront Ethan, and that was a deliberate setting on my part. It's a city I absolutely love to visit, so I got to take a bit of a virtual trip through some of my favorite places there while I was writing. (It backfired a bit, since instead of satisfying my travel urge it just underscored all the things I love about Seattle and made me even more itchy to visit again!)

Buy links for Island House:

Paperback (The first 20 readers who order the paperback will get a signed copy!) www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=4365&cPath=707

Ebook www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=4364&cPath=707

Find an excerpt from Island House as well as excerpts from my other works on my website: www.bru-baker.com

Follow me on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/Bru_Baker

Croatian Obsessions

This afternoon I was talking to a Croatian colleague who'd just returned from Vienna--less than a 4 hour drive from here. Her boyfriend lives there so she goes often. She likes Vienna, but complained because there aren't enough cafes.

Really.

So this brings me to a discussion of three of Croatia's biggest obsessions. The country has other obsessions, too, like sports in general. The local men are particularly taken with dressing in track suits, as if they might at any time decide to participate in a competitive event. The manbags they also like to wear detract from that image, however. Croatians are passionate about wine and rakija (brandy), about local customs, about avoiding standing in line whenever possible (and scowling when they can't avoid the lines). With good reason, they love to share their country. I'm thrilled to see the number of bookshops, too.

But three things all Croatians seem to love are shoes, bakeries, and cafe-bars (the kind that serve coffee and beer). Consider this view from my living room:

From left to right: clothing, bakery, shoes (mostly obscured by window frame), shoes, cafe (with another cafe 2 floors above it).

Now, I'm right in the center of the city, so my situation is a little extreme, But it's no exaggeration to say that within a 2 block radius of my apartment are probably 15 shoe stores, 30 bakeries, and at least 100 cafes.

Shoes, bakeries, cafes. I bet Zagreb has more of those per capita than anyplace on earth. And probably one of the reasons I love Zagreb so much is that I'm awfully fond of those three things myself.

What are your local obsessions?

News and Zagreb

I have arrived in Zagreb, so now Blogger insists on speaking to me in Croatian instead of Polish. Luckily for me, I'm better at not speaking Croatian than I am at not speaking Polish. In fact, today I got through my entire day--grocery shopping, my favorite bakery, buying tram tickets, ordering espresso at a cafe--without a word of English. Croatians are very patient with my rudimentary attempts at their language. The problem is that once I say a few opening phrases in Croatian they assume I can understand more, which I rarely can.

So first some news.

My new novella, Housekeeping, releases November 13. Paul Richmond did a stunning job on the American Gothic-inspired cover. You can preorder now.

In other news, Elisa Rolle is having a treasure hunt to celebrate the 7th anniversary of the Rainbow Awards. There are tons of books as prizes, including my Brute. Here's the link: http://reviews-and-ramblings.dreamwidth.org/3913935.html

So now some pictures of one of my favorite cities, Zagreb. This is my 4th visit. A couple years ago, I lived here for 5 months. Look at the view from my current apartment:

 

That structure near the center of the picture is Dolac. The lower floor houses sellers of meat, bread, cheese, etc, and the upper level has produce and fish. It's surrounded by cafes because Croatia has the most intense cafe culture I've ever seen.  That's the cathedral in the background.

 

This less inspiring view of a courtyard is from my bedroom.  That green netting in the foreground is covering a deep and scary-looking hole. I'm not positive, but I suspect the thing in the middle might be a capped-off cistern.

 

My apartment came with a book called Flirting in Croatian. Here are some potentially useful pickup lines.

 

On All Saints Day, everyone catches a bus in front of the cathedral and rides to the city's lone (and beautiful) cemetery. This line was a good quarter mile long. See that round tower on the left? It was part of the fortifications to protect the cathedral from the Turks. Which worked, but then an earthquake in 1880 did what the Turks couldn't, and destroyed the cathedral. They rebuilt it much prettier, however.

 

You can see the constant stream of buses here. 

 

I was going to visit the cemetery, but the line dissuaded me. I decided my time was better spent here, in the main square, drinking espresso and enjoying the beautiful weather. That guy on the horse is Ban Jelacic, who governed Croatia during Austrio-Hungarian empire times. The statue itself has an interesting story--maybe I'll share it on another day.

Wrasaw Sunday

Boy, I wish Blogger wouldn't insist on being in Polish. Here are photos from a beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

 Wilanow Palace.

 

Look! I sell Polish pottery!

 

Chopin in Lazienki Park. What a gorgeous day!

 

Spike crashes a wedding photo.

 

I don't know what these are called. They're crispy and slightly sweet. We bought them from an old man who had a table outside the park.

Warsaw

Hello from Poland! Here are a few photos from Warsaw, where the weather has been beautiful so far.

Copernicus.

 

Old Town. It's hard to believe, but this area (along with most of the city) was demolished during WWII. They rebuilt it very faithfully.

 

This mermaid is on the city's seal.

 

I love autumn afternoon light.

 

A Trabant. I once rode around Krakow in January in one of these.

 

This is a multimedia bench. It plays Chopin tunes.

 We went to a revue show, which was very funny.