Ally – Page 10 – A. L. Lester

#SampleSunday: An Irregular Arrangement

For #SampleSunday this week I’ve got the first chapter of An Irregular Arrangement for you. It’s free when you subscribe to my newsletter.

An Irregular Arrangement: Chapter 1 : Val

“I do not think,” announced the vicar’s wife from the lane with some gravitas, “that you should be up there, young man.”
Val peered down from the top of the crumbling orchard wall where she was balanced, reaching over to get the very last apple. “Blast!” she exclaimed quietly and aloud said, “Just one more? It’s the last one. Mr Scott’s only going to let them all drop and then turn the pigs in, I heard him say.”
Mrs Downs sighed. “Oh, it’s you, Miss Wilkinson. Hurry up, so I can pretend you’d already finished by the time I saw you.”
Val flinched at being called Miss Wilkinson but did as she was bid and carefully scrambled down the way she’d climbed up. The apples were gathered in her cap and she passed them to Mrs Downs as she took a moment to brush her clothes free from dust. Mrs Downs observed quietly as she straightened her trousers and pulled down her waistcoat. Val eyed her cautiously. The vicar and his wife had only been in the village a few months and although everyone seemed to think they were decent sorts; decent sorts generally didn’t have much truck with people running round in unsuitable clothing and stealing apples.
“Flora Downs, by the way,” the woman offered a hand to shake, and Val took it. “Do call me Flora, please. I’m very pleased to meet you properly, we’ve only seen each other in passing. Would you like to come for breakfast?” Flora said, after a moment contemplating each other. “The vicar is away today…I’ve just walked him to the station, actually…and it would be nice to have some company.”
Val looked at her. She didn’t look much older than Val. Val was twenty-one but probably appeared younger with her hair cropped short and masculine clothing. “Valentine Wilkinson. Val. Hello. I’d love to,” she said in a burst of honesty, finally shaking the hand she was still holding. “But I need to drop the apples into Mrs Porter behind the smithy first. She’s not doing well since the new baby came and the other two young ones are hungry all the time. I said I’d see what I could do help.”
Flora gave Val an assessing look. “Come on then,” she said. “We can do that and then go and have some porridge at the vicarage. I’ve met most people by now, but I haven’t managed to pin you down.”
Val made a muffled yelping sound and juggled the apples to avoid answering. She’d made a categorical mistake in being noticed at all. Fading into the background was one of her special skills. She pulled energy from the border and thought herself small and people seemed to ignore her. She’d been so focused on the apples though, that she’d forgotten to keep it up when Flora spoke to her and now she was stuck. Although… Val glanced sideways to the small woman striding along beside her, skirts kicking around at a modest length above her ankles in the dust of the road, boots and dress pretty but practical, long hair turned up sensibly under a neat cloche hat, clear skin, pretty smile…it perhaps wasn’t the disaster it could have been.
“Have you met Mrs Porter?” she asked.
“No, I haven’t. I was told she probably wouldn’t appreciate a visit because she goes to the chapel, not the church.”
Val nodded. “That’s true. But none of them are talking to her because they realised she caught for the baby after her husband had died.” She grimaced. “No-one asked her what happened, they just judged her. I found out what was going on yesterday.”
“Well,” said Flora. “We need to get that sorted out as soon as possible, then. I’ll talk to the vicar when he gets home. We can help her if she’ll allow it.”
Val nodded. “I brought some bread and things this morning and dropped in and then I remembered the apples and thought I’d get them before the pigs. The children aren’t very old.”
****
It wasn’t long before they were in the vicarage kitchen. The ancient range was lit and Lily Richards, who came in every day to look after the house, was taking off her coat. “Morning, Missus, morning Miss Wilkinson,” she said. She didn’t quite meet Val’s eye. Quite a few of the more respectable villagers wouldn’t, these days. They didn’t like the trousers and they couldn’t see Val as a man, in the way that people who hadn’t know them growing up usually did if they met her dressed as she liked to dress.
“Good morning, Lily,” Flora said. “Are you going to get on with the bedrooms this morning?”
“Yes, Missus. I was going to strip the sheets from yours; and Sally’s coming to do the laundry in a couple of hours. I’m just going to light the copper for her.”
Flora nodded. “Wonderful, thank you. I’ll make a cup of tea and give you a shout when it’s brewed, shall I?”
“Lovely, thank you, Missus.”
“Take a seat,” Flora gestured to the long, scrubbed kitchen table. “We eat in here unless we’ve got company. The dining room is like something out of Dickens, it’s so gloomy. We get the sun in here.”
The room was on the corner of the house and faced both south and east. The early autumn sun was pouring in. It shot the soft brown of Mrs Downs’ hair through with red highlights, like a fox’s coat glinting russet against a hedgerow.
Val sat whilst Flora pottered about putting porridge in a pan and boiling the kettle.
“Don’t you have servants for this?” Val asked.
“Only Lily. I don’t much like having people in and out of the house, to be honest. I grew up keeping house for my father, so I’m happy taking it on for Tim and me.”
Val nodded. One of the reasons she spent so much time out of the house was that it was always flooded with people. The servants, then Mama, and their brothers’ friends. Val didn’t like the crowds and she didn’t like the way it felt, dressed up in girl’s clothes as Mama insisted, with the young men all looking at her like dogs eyeing a biscuit.

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#AMA: Genres and Rainbow Representation

This week’s Ask Me Anything…You write both M/M and F/F. How are these two genres or markets different? And what are your top 5 book recommendations in each?

I guess firstly I don’t think of myself writing M/M or F/F per se. I think about myself as writing ‘queer romance’. I know that’s a pretty technical difference; but it does affect how I market my books. Some authors I know have different pen-names for the different romantic pairings or genres they write in; but I made a conscious decision that a) it would be too complicated for my chaotic self to maintain and b) it would make it more difficult for me to actually write. The reasons for a) are self-evident; and b) is because of my particular process I think.

Certainly historically I haven’t been a plotter. I do plot more now…I often begin a story by writing a blurb. I then move on to character sketches and perhaps location sketches. It’s all a bit free-form though and I’m not very good at sticking within the lines I’ve drawn for myself. I like to have the freedom to shoot off in a different direction if a plot idea comes to me or a character seems to require that. I sometimes begin with the idea that someone is one gender/sexuality and as the story unfurls it becomes obvious to me that they are different from the way I initially imagined them. Walter from The Quid Pro Quo is a case in point. Initially he was trans; and then I hit a historical issue with him being in the army on the cusp of the 20^th century where he’d have found it hard to have remained undiscovered. So I tried very, very hard to make him cis. But he wouldn’t have it and I had to fudge the whole joining-the-army thing to accommodate him.

Author wisdom has it that M/M readers are voracious consumers who spend a lot of time in KU; and that F/F readers are hard to win over but loyal once you have. I honestly don’t think I have enough experience to be able to comment on either of those things; but I do know that I don’t feel I fit precisely in to either of those categories. I do use the letters as a shorthand for readers to know about my characters at first glance; but I prefer to call my books with M/M pairings ‘gay romance’ rather than M/M romance. I don’t feel they are high heat enough to be ‘proper’ M/M if that makes sense?

I try and pitch my books as being about LGBTQIA people rather than any particular stripe of the rainbow and I do think that affects the way readers perceive them, and probably me as a writer too. I have a free story for subscribers who join my newsletter and to begin with that was a M/M offering. Last year I changed that to be a poly story with sapphic/non-binary and M/M relationships as I felt that better reflected my catalogue. I think it gives people who don’t know me a better idea of what they are going to find in my books and that can only be good.

I know not everyone likes to read and write across gender and sexuality pairings but it’s what I’m happy writing and that’s really important to me. Being true to my own identity is something I came to quite late and I am very conscious of it, although I have no truck with the idea that one can only write characters and genders from personal experience. It’s perfectly possible to write any character you want to, the only responsibility you have is to do it well. I like the variety that brings to my work and I guess identifying as non-binary, pan and grey-ace, I sit firmly in the meh, whatevs part of the spectrum. It’s nice to be able to write from and about different perspectives.

So this is where I sit and why, I guess!

Instead of answering the second question about my favourite books in the M/M and F/F genres, here are fifteen books I rate with LGBTQIA main characters and they are all excellent. They are in alphabetical order by title and are mix of different identities. Some of them I’ve blogged about in my #AmReading posts over the last few months, but I do hope you find something new here!

If you have an #AskMeAnything question, do drop me an email or pop in to Lester Towers to ask.

Ellie Thomas: London in the Rain

This week Ellie Thomas is dropping in to talk about her new release, London in the Rain. Welcome, Ellie!

Thank you so much, Ally, for having me as your guest today! I’m Ellie Thomas, and I write Gay Historical Romance. In this blog, I’m chatting about London in the Rain, my story for the April Rain or Shine submissions call for JMS Books.

When I decided to pick the Rain option, I immediately thought of London (for some strange reason!) and, after exploring the city during the Elizabethan era in my Valentine’s story, The Spice of Life, it was fun to move five centuries forwards to the 1930s.

As I wanted my story to be atmospheric, I turned to the Lord Peter Wimsey books by one of my favourite Mystery Golden Age authors, Dorothy L. Sayers, to see the scale of early 20th century London through her eyes and get an ear for the language of the times. I have to say it felt like an indulgence to leaf through my well-thumbed copies of Murder Most Advertised and Strong Poison to get a mental map of 1930s London.

In homage to the author, my main character, Raymond, lives in Bloomsbury (like Sayers herself and her mystery writer heroine Harriet Vane) and he also works in Southampton Row, where Pym’s advertising agency is based in Murder Most Advertised. Also, David, Raymond’s love interest is an Oxford graduate, like Lord Peter Wimsey, and if asked, he’d confirm he’s also a Balliol College man.

As Raymond, although sexually active, lives an outwardly closeted life, I had already decided that David would be much more open in his attitude and was at least an observer of the vivid Berlin scene in the late 1920s and early 1930s, where anything went in terms of artistic and sexual expression. What I was fascinated to discover, was that by the mid-1930s, London had a vibrant LGBT (or to use the contemporary term, “queer”) scene of its own, despite draconian laws.

Unsurprisingly, as it has been for many years, Soho was also the centre of this earlier hub. Although Charlie’s, the bar in my story, is a figment of my imagination, other clubs that I mention like the Shim Sham and Billie’s were real if relatively short-lived due to police intervention.

I discovered a fascinating virtual walking tour that rediscovers and celebrates this forgotten and colourful world and is well worth a look.

I also used references from the National Archives for my chapter set in Billie’s club, including descriptions of the spacious club room featuring a grand piano. Also, regular performers and some of the clientele mentioned in this excellent article.

Billie’s Club: Queer club culture in 1930s London

Much of the writer’s observations are taken from the criminal and prosecution files, which is a desperately sad indictment of that period, but also contain fascinating details of the décor, acts, and the atmosphere of fun and escapism.

These sources inspired to me recreate that ambience in the concluding scene of my story, set in Billie’s Club. Here, at last, Raymond relaxes his inhibitions enough to dance in public with David, surrounded by an inclusive and vibrant crowd.

London in the Rain

A life of set routine is the norm for Raymond Smith. Now in his mid-thirties, a fleeting wartime romance far behind him, he is an exemplary clerk at a London insurance firm where he’s perceived as dry and conventional.

But Raymond has a secret. Every month or so, he visits Charlie’s, one of the more understated bars in Soho’s flowering gay scene in the 1930s. There, he seeks relief with strangers to get him through the next few weeks.

On one of these visits, he encounters suave David Carstairs, a well-travelled linguist with the Foreign Office. Rather than a brief encounter, David offers him friendship and even affection. Despite Raymond’s misgivings, the two men, with their contrasting backgrounds and experiences, start to form a bond in the spring of 1936 as Europe inexorably begins to march towards war. Will Raymond fearfully reject this chance of happiness? Or can he unbend enough to allow David into his heart and life?

Buy London in the Rain

Read on!

Raymond was almost breathless when he entered Charlie’s, the doorman lifting the curtain for him without hesitation. He paused in the inner doorway, taking in the quiet scene. As it was so early, very few tables were occupied, and the pounding in his head increased as he fruitlessly looked around the room. At last, his gaze locked on a familiar figure, sitting in the same position as Raymond had occupied the previous Thursday.
Charlie, the owner, elegant in black satin with her brassy hair piled high, was leaning over the bar talking to him in a familiar way that indicated long association. As he approached, the man gave a welcoming smile and Raymond’s headache vanished.
“Scotch and soda?” The man queried before giving his order to Charlie. As he chatted with the proprietress, Raymond looked at him surreptitiously. He’s not out on the town tonight, he thought, as the stylish dress clothes had been replaced by a tailored Savile Row suit. He must have come straight from work in much the same way as Raymond, and he wondered if his gentleman was something in the city or even a cog in the wheel of government.
Placing down their drinks with a vermilion-lipped beam, Charlie moved down the bar to serve the next customer. The man smiled at Raymond, picked up his glass, and said, “Cheers!”
Braced for the first taste of harsh spirit, Raymond’s eyebrows rose when the contents proved to be far superior to what was normally served. He must be more than a vague acquaintance of Charlie’s, thought Raymond, as this is the good stuff. He took a long swallow, appreciating the fine flavours.
“Bad day?” The man asked sympathetically.
“Oh, you know,” Raymond shrugged. “The usual ups and downs of office life.” Although his companion smiled understandingly, Raymond would have been astonished if the man had any familiarity with his humdrum routine.
The gentleman took a sip of whisky, and after hesitating, he began, “Well, whatever happened today, despite any inconvenience to you, I’m glad it brought you here. I was hoping I might see you again,” he finished with a shy smile.
Raymond said nothing, hiding his confusion with the rest of his drink. He must be joking. Why would someone like him give me a second glance?
Embarrassed, he changed the subject, pretending to peer into the corners of the room, saying, “Your young friends not with you tonight?”
The man laughed, “Thankfully, no. One round of the delights of Soho was sufficient for my young cousin and his chums. From the amount and variety of booze they put back, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are still suffering from sore heads. Talking of which, would you like another?”
He gestured to Charlie, who took away their glasses to refill them from her private supply, returning their replenished drinks with a conspiratorial grin. Raymond took a sip of his fresh drink, letting the fine whisky roll around his mouth.
“By the way,” the man said, “I don’t know your name. How remiss of me. I’m David Carstairs.”
Taken aback by such openness, Raymond paused before he shook the proffered hand, his own captured briefly by a warm, firm grip.
“Raymond Smith,” he muttered in response. Meeting David’s amused, slightly disbelieving glance, he laughed and said, “No, it’s not a false name.”
“There are plenty of genuine Smiths in the world, I suppose,” David said lightly. “And not merely assumed for reasons of disguise.”
Raymond felt keenly aware of their surroundings and all the secrets this place of assignation held, including his own.
As though on the same wavelength, David said casually, “This bar is a pleasant place to unwind and not too far from King Charles Street where I work.”
So he’s in the Foreign Office, then, Raymond thought. I should have guessed. He’s got the looks and poise and, no doubt, the education too.
He cleared his throat, “I’m not far away either. My office is in Southampton Row.”
It seemed oddly personal to trade such information here, where Raymond had exchanged greater intimacies with men, never knowing a single fact about their lives.
David glanced at his watch. “I assume you haven’t had the chance to eat as yet? Perhaps after we’ve finished these, we might get a spot of supper somewhere?”
After gulping down his first drink, Raymond had been slowly sipping his second glass of whisky to remain as long as he could in David’s presence, convinced the other man would excuse himself at the first opportunity.
Raymond blinked, taking in the import of the invitation. “I’d like that very much,” he replied. David’s shoulders relaxed as though they had held some invisible tension.

Buy London in the Rain

About Ellie

Ellie Thomas lives by the sea. She comes from a teaching background and goes for long seaside walks where she daydreams about history. She is a voracious reader especially about anything historical. She mainly writes historical gay romance.

Ellie also writes historical erotic romance as L. E. Thomas.

Website : Facebook

#AMA: The Nix List

This week’s question is another by Anabela (who gave me a wheelbarrow-load of really good ones!) Do you have subjects you think you could never write about?

Yes! Definitely! Is the short answer—I should think everyone does. And I should think everyone’s answer is very different and probably changes with time.

The first one that jumps to mind though is children. I’ve always been very disinclined to write about characters with children. Mine are in their early teens now and I was first published in 2017 when they were…thinks very hard…nine and ten. The absolutely last thing I wanted to do was revisit that in fiction. Likewise now, I can’t see myself writing in the parental romance genre any time soon. I had a rubbish time when they were tiny babies and it’s simply not something I want to explore, whether it would be a story that sells or not. I’m utterly baffled by epilogues in romance that show characters having children. I read them and they leave me cold, they’re not my thing at all. So I can’t ever envisage me writing one.

Having said that I do have a character in the Theatr Fach world who has a child; but that’s accidental—I wrote them as a side character in Out of Focus and threw in a kid they had to pick up from school as an excuse to leave Alex alone at the hospital; and I’d quite like to explore them further, so ta-da, they’re a parent. But generally speaking…writing about characters with children is a nix.

Also a nix is mpreg. Does that come under the ‘people with children’ caveat? It probably does, but it should also be a category on its own. I just…can’t. I think it might be my own dysphoria that makes me so revolted by it. Let me emphasise people should absolutely read and write what they want, this is my own personal reaction, not a judgment. I think, actually, giving it more thought whilst writing this, it’s not just mpreg, it’s an entire pregnancy thing. So let’s expand the nix to cover pregnancy. I cannot envisage ever writing a pregnant character. Even writing this paragraph has made me shudder. I did not enjoy being pregnant—I loathed it, every single minute of it. I had the two children very close together—sort of by design as I was nearly forty by the time the first one came along—but so close together that at one point I was pregnant and had post-natal depression. When Littlest was born, my lovely obstetrician wrote me a letter of congratulation expressing the wish never to see me in her clinic again. So a nix to pregnancy completely, please!

I don’t think there’s anything else I am conscious of definitely not wanting to write about. I’ve written about death and violence and assault, all sort of horrible things. I do find writing about sexytimes quite difficult sometimes. I don’t think that’s an inherent disinclination though, more that sex is inherently messy and funny and stupid and I find it hard to do right without slipping in to cliché. I’m always worried that readers will come across a sex-scene and it’ll throw them out of the story because I’ve done sexing in a way that no-one else will find acceptable/interesting/arousing/relevant to the narrative.

I’m sure there are other things and I don’t know it, simply because I haven’t come across them yet or I’ve buried them so deeply I don’t have a clue they’re there!

I’m really enjoying these posts…if you have an #AskMeAnything question, do drop me an email or pop in to Lester Towers to ask.

Surfacing Again: Otters and anthropomorphism

Morning everyone! Surfacing Again is 99c for the whole of this week and I thought I’d share a bit about otters. This is largely an exercise in basking in cuteness for five hundred words, so please do excuse me.

close up shot of otters — Photo by Silvia Heider on Pexels.com

As you know if you’ve met any of my Celtic myth retellings, they are all based on some sort of legend from the westward Celtic fringe of the British Isles. I began by making them Celtic (hence the name, doh!), but I’ve expanded a bit for the sake of a good story and St Cuthbert was actually knocking round Northumbria in the very early middle ages, during the seventh century. His church was part of the Celtic tradition, but he wasn’t a Celt. I made an exception for him because I was so taken by the otter story. (The whole Celtic church versus the Roman church is a whole other post, so we’ll go with this oversimplification because it’s a niche interest 😊)

So. Cuthbert was an extremely austere chap, who used to go and stand in the sea to pray. When he got out, a pair of otters would come out of the sea too, and dry him off. We know this because a creepy stalker-monk spied on him and later told St Bede, who wrote it in his Life of St Cuthbert.

This is…not usual otter behaviour.

cute wild otter swimming in lake — Photo by David Selbert on Pexels.com

Here in the UK we don’t have sea otters. We just have otters, some of whom prefer to hang out on the coast. I like to think of them as water-cats, or maybe water-dogs, because they are so active and playful. They are the European otter, members of the Mustelid family which also includes stoats, weasels and mink. They’re all pretty fearsome creatures with an exciting set of teeth that you don’t want predating in your chicken house.

They are also exceedingly rare in the UK at this point, although I believe they are less rare than they used to be. My sister (to whom Surfacing Again is dedicated) is our local point of contact for one of the otter protection organisations and she does counting and watching. This seems to mostly involve dangerously hanging over bridges and wading through unpleasantly deep streams to change the cards in her wildlife cameras and then watching the footage and logging what she sees. She also counts up footprints and spraint that she finds. Because they are so endangered, people aren’t encouraged to deliberately go and search for them.

I think we have this anthropomorphic idea in our heads about some wild creatures that doesn’t serve us well, simply because they are so charming. Otters fall into this category I guess.

They eat mostly fish, but will also eat birds, mammals and frogs if they’re hungry. Because they’re inquisitive they will interact with humans occasionally in the way they do in Surfacing Again…coming up to see what’s going on. But like all wild animals they aren’t tame and we shouldn’t see them like that. Having said that I loved Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water when I read it in my teens. In my opinion it’s the ultimate otter book. Maxwell lived with a house full of otters on the west coast of Scotland—he was a naturalist who travelled widely in the interwar and post WW2 years and brought his first otter back from Iraq . It was a different time and these days you have to have a licence to keep a wild animal as a pet.

In my story I tried to balance my desire for Mustelid cuteness with my feeling that otters are wild creatures who should be respected. I hope I’ve done that.

Surfacing Again

Melinda is staying on Lindisfarne for a Christmas break with her old friend when an unexpected argument leaves her alone for the holiday.

It’s the first Christmas since her mother died and the island’s peace and wild tranquillity bring balm to her wounded heart. Two chance meetings, first with a pair of wary otters and then with cafe-owner Rowan, bring her genuine joy.

Will her tentative relationship with Rowan survive the end of her holiday and the turning of the year?

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otters drinking water from river — Photo by Kieren Ridley on Pexels.com