I stopped blogging over Christmas because I thought I’d have a break—things were a bit tough with the kids and my mental health wasn’t great. And then…my mental health still wasn’t great and there we were in January. And then I got a bit anxious about not having posted…so here we are in February!
I pushed back the release of the third Bradfield village novel to try to take some weight off; instead my March release (on the 26th) will be Out of Focus, a twenty-thousand word contemporary novella set in a theatre community in Wales. I think I might revisit some of the secondary characters at some point, I enjoyed writing it so much.
It began as a bit of a joke…Ofelia’s other pen name is Holly Day, and she writes stories to celebrate different days all through the year. (Her latest release is The Wingman, a 11,000 word short story to mark National Wingman Day on 13th February!)
She and Nell and I were laughing about there being a day for everything in our early-morning writing session one morning and eventually we decided it would be fun to write something together. We are all writing stories of between fifteen and twenty thousand words that will be released on 7th May. Each one features…you guessed it…naked gardening in some way. I’m about half way through and hope to be finished in the next week or so.
I may revisit Bradfield then; or I may write something else first. I needed a palate-cleanser I think. It all felt very heavy and difficult and once I made the decision to put it down for a while I felt quite a bit better.
This is a something-and-nothing blog post in a way, just to get back on the horse. Those of you who follow my newsletter or facebook group will know that Littlest has had a mild dose of covid this week. It’s been a bit stressful because she’s clinically extremely vulnerable and we panicked when she got the two lines last Friday. We spent last weekend trying to sort out antibodies for her—we had a letter saying she was eligible for the treatment when it became available a few months ago. However, it turns out that you need to be over forty kilos and she is only thirty four, so we needn’t have wasted our time and everyone else’s. She’s okay now though, a week on. Asymptomatic, just very, very tired.
The rest of us have been testing consistently negative, but both Mr AL and I have had what could be mild symptoms. It’s only the last couple of days that I’ve felt like a human again.
I’m not usually the sort of person who celebrates New Year’s Eve and this year it was a bit peculiar anyway, because Mr AL spent it in a hotel near the airport so he could collect Talking Child from her Big American Adventure. I had an early night and woke up to find TC’s flight had landed and they were on their way home. It was the best New Year’s present I could have had, really.
This is the first morning I’ve got up to write in the office for a couple of weeks—I had a horrible cold in the week before Christmas and it knocked me completely off track. I have been having serious problems with the third Bradfield book that my editor and I finally tracked down to the fact I don’t actually like my main character; which is a bit of an issue. I have decided to put it on the backburner for a bit and try and reframe her in my mind whilst I write something else in the interim; but I’m still not sure what.
This year I have in my mind that I am not going to write any series. It’s going to be the year of the stand-alone story. And I want to write something new. I’ve been dealing with monsters and the border and all that for six years now and whilst I love my magical world it’s time to try something different, even if I come back to it in a while. That’s why I wanted to write Bradfield #3 early this year and be able to draw a line under it for a bit.
I want to write the companion novel to The Flowers of Time and expand the mm romance between Edie’s brother Hugh and his friend Carruthers. That involves immersing myself in the 1780s again and is something I’ve been looking forward to for a while. And I have another idea I’m calling Space Gays that I haven’t fleshed out yet…I thought it might be a trilogy though, so that’s a no-no for a while under my current rules!
In my half-started folder I have a post-pandemic dystopia I began well before covid hit. I really want to finish it; but since covid I haven’t been able to even look at it…too close to home. I thought I might try and finish it; but I have serious doubts about anyone wanting to read that sort of thing at the moment. Last week’s newsletter poll more or less confirmed that! And I want to write some more Celtic myths. I’m really enjoying them and people seem to like reading them. They’re very satisfying to write.
In among all these ideas, JMS Books has some interesting submission calls this year; particularly one for time-travel romances. I am now wondering about that…but time. I need a way to fold time.
So. That’s my vague writing plans for the new year. I also have more audiobooks on the backburner—I have a lovely person lined up for The Fog of War and I’d like Callum to voice The Quid Pro Quo for me if he’s available.
I do have a spreadsheet that I’m putting things in to so I don’t overwhelm myself; which is basically what happened toward the end of last year. I tend to fill my coping mechanism up to the top and then when something unexpected happens there’s no room and everything overflows. Leaving myself some headroom is definitely a better strategy.
Among all that we have been shielding Littlest again against Omicron. She’s had two jabs and hopefully clinically vulnerable children in the UK will be able to have a third soon, which will put my mind at rest.
I wish you all the very best for 2022. Let’s hope it’s a bit less stressful than the last couple of years.
This week, we bought a new mattress. My back’s been increasingly creasing me and we’ve progressed through putting a board under the mattress, adding a memory foam mattress topper and then, finally, adding a big duck-feather thing on top of that. Making the bed is a bit like an out-take from The Princess and the Pea. (Yes, this is a genuine picture of me and Mr AL, in our night attire. Enter our bedroom at your peril.)
The whole process has been massively stressful, largely because it’s such a first world problem. Firstly there’s the cost. And secondly there’s the number of choices. And thirdly there’s my sneaking and increasingly unpleasant feeling that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and I should care more about the fact other people don’t even have safe spaces to lie down rather than the number of poxy springs I can afford to sleep on.
Yes, this is a post about guilt. But it’s also a post about nurturing your spoons. This is a bit of a stupid example–I could simply donate the cost of a mattress to an organisation helping the homeless and stop flailing about on the internet about it. It’s an analogy that I’ve been pondering though…how much is enough? In a society so unequal, how much is enough? Do I have to put up with a bad back to enable other people to have somewhere safe? Or can I make myself comfortable and help others too? It’s a really simplistic analogy, but I guess I’ve needed simplistic this week, because it’s what’s finally straightened my head out.
I’ve been really upset these last few weeks by the cess pit that’s the public discourse over trans rights in the UK. I’m saddened and upset by the level of hatred and silencing directed at trans people and a few weeks ago I decided I’d try and be a bit more active amplifying trans voices, and share things people can do to help. This has involved following accounts that share trans news. And even in this short amount of time, it’s devastated me.
I don’t know how these people manage it. There’s so much bile directed at them. I just pop onto their twitter timelines, check out the day’s events and see if there’s anything practical I can do to help…sign and share something, amplify news about a protest, that sort of stuff. I belong to a couple of blocklists and often the blocked responses scroll down and down and down the page. But then I come across a few people I haven’t blocked and the responses are vile; so I block them too. They are often accounts with followers below a couple of dozen, some only one or two.
After only a few weeks I feel worn away, exhausted by the horribleness of it all. I am non-binary. I present as a short, round, middle-aged straight person, married with children; and as such, my level of privilege is huge. I don’t get spat on in the street, or threatened at school, or shouted at in public bathrooms. Even watching the courage of these people with high public profiles from my safe position behind a keyboard I am awed at their strength. It’s the least I can do to keep trying to amplify their voices.
But…I can’t do it to the exclusion of the rest of my life…the looking after the kids, all the adulting I have to do on the day to day. And that includes the caring for myself. That’s the balance that’s so hard to get. And I guess it loops back to the stupid first-world thing about the mattress…it’s okay to look after myself and it’s okay to not feel guilty about that. As we travel along, our capacity to hold the light for ourselves and for others changes, whatever activism we participate in.
Some days you can’t even hold the light for yourself. Some days you can hold it for the village. It’s really important to a) remember that and not beat yourself up about it…you’re not failing if you can’t do it, you’re doing self-care. And b) you can’t do everything. Even on a good day, you can’t do everything. You’re in it for the long haul and whatever activism you’re doing, that’s enough. One step at a time and hopefully we can change the world.
It’s all gone a bit mists and mellow fruitfulness here at Lester Towers over the last week or so.
The garden is having a last frantic burst of activity before everything starts to shut down for winter…there are two roses on the white rose bush outside the bedroom window that I have watched come into full bloom over the last few days; and the autumn cyclamen in the scrubby area where we took down the tree are blooming like mad. Every time we go out, Littlest and I collect leaves and ash-helicopters to add to our basket of Things To Sort–swan feathers and shells and interesting stones.
The most noticeable thing about the change of season though, is the way the soundscape has changed. I’m not sure whether it’s just because it’s getting dark earlier and I’m still awake when they wake up…but the Tawny Owls are busy in the hedgerow.
There’s a family of them and they work their way down the field border every evening having long conversations to-and-fro, getting closer and close, then fading away. And the little birds are back on the feeders in a steady sort of way–early in the year when they had babies to feed, the mealworm feeder needed refilling every couple of days. Then in the high and late summer they didn’t much fuss with it at all; and now I’m refilling it once a week or so. We still have goldfinches and siskins on the seeds as well as our usual varieties of tits and the robins. They’re quieter than they were in the spring and summer, more chatter than song.
The sound that really heralds autumn though, is the bellowing of the red deer.
There are a lot of them wild on the Quantocks and they come right down to the village edge here, and sleep against the edge of the woods in the parkland around the manor house. When we lived in the old gardener’s cottage up there they were literally in our back garden. It’s a haunting noise, very eerie when you hear it drifting across the hill as the dusk comes down. I associate it with being curled up on the sofa with a book, curtains pulled shut and the fire lit.
The time of year always makes me feel as if I need to lay in stocks for the winter. It’s a primal sort of response, I think, gathering in the last of the harvest to see us through the cold. These days I mostly confine myself to making gin or vodka or brandy with hedgerow fruit and Mr AL and Talking Child are collecting the windfalls apples and we’re eating a lot of crumble. In more enthusiastic times I’d be processing everything I could and freezing or drying it; and we used to make elderberry and rosehip syrup and all sorts of wine and chutney and jam. I’ve got spinach I need to plant out in the greenhouse and the perennial kale in the garden; but other than that, my gardening is sadly lacking these last few years.
Life turns as the wheel of the seasons does I suppose, and I’m doing other things now. I regret it…but I can’t worry about it. I just tell myself that the wheel will come round again and to enjoy what we have.
With The Fog of War coming out in August I thought it might be interesting to blog about the differences between writing in all the different time-periods I seem to dip in to. I went straight from writing The Flowers of Time, set in in India in the 1780s to Taking Stock in England in 1970. It was a bit of a mind-jump.
Firstly, the main difference between writing Taking Stock in the 1970s and my books before that point, was that there was no magic. Up ’til then, I’d written in the 1920s and the 1780s with a with a paranormal twist. My magical world lies underneath the real one and I try to be as accurate as possible with that. But by education I’m a medievalist focusing on Britain, so the intricate historical detail of the 1970s was all new to me when I began.
For the 1920s books, I took inspiration from family stories about living in the East End of London in the first part of the twentieth century and there was a lot of documentary stuff to read. I’m a Dorothy L. Sayers fan, too, so it was quite easy to get a 1920s murder investigation vibe going.
Initially The Flowers of Time was supposed to be in the 1920s, too—it would have worked much better with plucky lady plant collectors toddling off around the world on behalf of Kew Gardens at that point in time and I already had a universe they could have slotted in to. However as I began writing, the characters got really bolshy and insisted they were from an earlier time period and we ended up in the 1780s. This is one of the disadvantages of discovery writing. Things can take a corkscrew turn quite quickly.
The bolshy characters made a lot of reading for me, as not only was the geographical area very new to me but the history was as well. I started off reading about the East India Company from resources that were easily available to me—British historians—and then I moved on to contemporary accounts of people’s travels and finally felt I knew enough to read from Indian historians and get a proper understanding. Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire was particularly good for that. Contemporary accounts of women travellers in India the eighteenth century are very patchy and a lot of the story was based around Isabella Bird’s account of her journey across the Himalayas in the late nineteenth.
I was very conscious of not wanting my characters to be horrible colonialists–it’s one of the real risks of setting anything in British history. Everyone has some sort of connection to exploitation. Rich people trot around exploiting their empire in order to provide romantic heroines with fainting couches in pretty Georgian houses. Poor people join the army and serve in India or join the navy and collude in the slave trade. It’s easy enough to ignore all that. But does that make your main characters nice people with whom the writer and reader can empathise? Not so much, in my opinion. The Flowers of Time was hard to write for that reason and although I feel like I did a reasonable job, towards the end I felt like I maybe shouldn’t have been writing it at all because it’s basically about English people travelling through the sub-continent for fun.
I like the book because I love my characters–Jones, the non-binary academic in particular is very close to my heart. But I am very uncomfortable with the setting now and if I had given it more thought before I began to write I would probably have done it differently. On the one hand the sweeping adventures of the Kew Gardens’ plant collectors are fascinating and they were interesting to me because of my family background–my Mama used to work at the Botanical Gardens in Dublin. But on the other hand…they’re a perfect example of white people travelling all over the world ‘discovering’ things that have always been there.
I have a companion story wafting round in my head, focusing on the male secondary characters and I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. One of them is an East India Company soldier. He’s busy mapping the Himalayas and is of course, queer and a nice person. But should I be writing it in that setting? Probably not. I need to think about it some more and maybe find a different setting for the story that will still dovetail.
Anyway, after all that soul-searching with Flowers and a spell in hospital for a month to try to get a handle on the Functional Neurological Disorder–which worked very well as quiet time to write away from the family thanks!–for some reason, I decided to set Taking Stock in 1972. Firstly, this made me feel old, because I was born in 1970. Secondly, it appalled my mother, who is still cross that the second world war is being taught as history. Thirdly, it’s almost impossible to find cover art for people that gives a 1970s feel without also feeling that one is advertising a Sirdar knitting pattern. Apart from that though, it’s fine.
Webber’s Farm
A lot of the farming references in Taking Stock are from my own childhood memories—the sheep dipping scenes for example—and from talking to older friends and family. I pigeon-holed a friend who worked in the City of London in the mid-1980s and extracted stock-exchange information from him, and I found a fascinating contemporary documentary on YouTube about stockbroking in the early 1960s. It was much easier to find that sense of place that I think is needed in historical fiction, because the references were all to hand. I can happily google ‘what happened in 1972’ and have a whole list of things come up that my characters would have been aware of. And the same for the 1920s really – there are millions of words written about the years immediately after the Great War and the social changes that were happening.
Those social changes make it easier to write characters who are conscious about those things and more easily sympathetic to the modern reader without ignoring all the horrendous colonialism behind British history. The 1970s are even more so, in my opinion. It’s easy to write fairy-tale historical romance stories if you ignore colonialism, social inequality and bad teeth. But if you want to do it properly, you need to take all those things into account.
Despite having a paranormal twist in most of my books, I really think of myself as writing historical romance and I take pride in getting the history right. It’s a balance though, it has to give colour and a setting without throwing the reader out of the story either with factual errors—someone one-starred my first book because I shifted the publication date of The Beautiful and the Damned back a year to fit my timeline and it clearly spoiled the whole thing for them—or with colonialist assumptions, or with making them feel they’re reading a history text-book.
As a writer it’s my job to do that and I hope I make a reasonably workmanlike job of it. I enjoy swapping between time periods, despite the dislocation that initially comes with it!
