Most of the action in The Fog of War and The Quid Pro Quo takes place in Bradfield…it’s a fictionalised version of a small village on the Quantock Hills. The dead body at the beginning of the story is found in the duck pond on the village green.
When I talk about the village green, you probably see the same mental image I do…a green space in the centre of the village, with a big shady tree and a bench, maybe a pond. It’s used for cricket on Sunday afternoons, Maypole dancing, maybe a bonfire and fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night.
However the actual evolution of the village green is much more practical and it actually wasn’t always at the centre of the village. They served as places to graze or gather stock, with the pond to water them or to protect them against thieves or for market trading. The Inclosures Acts of the nineteenth century and finally the Commons Registration Acts of 1965 formalised what was left of English Common Lands into what we have today, including Village Greens. New areas can be designated Greens if they’re used for recreation for more than twenty years, but otherwise the pattern is static. You can read about it here.
I envisage the Green at Bradfield to be about the size of a football field. It’s bounded by lanes and by houses that have clustered around the edges—the church, the shop, the Post Office, the blacksmith and the Police House. Since the inception of regional police forces in the mid-nineteenth century, rural police forces had place constables in tied housing in country villages and they were very much a part of the community.
I think the English have always had—and continue to have—and idealised idea of their countryside. Here’s a piece of 1930’s footage of a drive through rural England. No poverty or damp housing to be seen.
Bradfield is a very rural community and my characters are mostly middle and upper class. I think that’s because I started off with an Agatha Christie but make it gay sort of vibe. Walter is from the East End of London and is working class. But his particular situation and the vagaries of the war have separated him from that. Simon is working class but has worked his way up in the police to a position of authority and relatively good wages—watch out for another blog post about the police service before too long.
If you want a realistic account of English rural village life between the two world wars, I recommend Laurie Lee’s autobiographical Cider with Rosie. It’s beautifully, bucolically written, a moving memoir that takes you back to Slad in Gloucestershire.
I leave you with a clip of haymaking in 1904. These days the hay is made into bales and stacked by machine…but it’s still hot, heavy work. I can remember playing in the drying hay like these Edwardian children.
This week a lovely debut mm novella set in Eastern Europe by K. C. Carmine, a sweet fantasy mm novella by R. Cooper and a mmf poly thriller by Layla Reyne.
I loved this mm novella (and the paperback cover is gorgeous!) set in Eastern Europe in the first decade of the 21st Century. The setting is an un-named post-communist country with endemic prejudice toward the LGBTQ+ community. Humanity is also prejudiced toward the recently out-in-public fae community, who when they first became widely known about suffered from terrible prejudice and eventually a campaign of medical suppression. The parallels between the two minority communities are not dissimilar. I liked the world building. The different fae–tree shifters, a selfie, a chap with snakes around his head–are all really interesting. And I loved the contrast between the prejudice and/or acceptance humans showed these different species contrasted with the tolerance/ intolerance they show the queer community.
The love story between Tomek and Robert was a sweet, gentle river that flowed through the world. I hope there’ll be more stories forthcoming. I recommend it.
I really enjoyed this first-in-a-new-series by Layla Reyne. It’s a contemporary second chance romance, written from the POV of Sean, a FBI agent who’s come back to his small town after ten years to investigate a series of murders based around Shakespearean tragedies–little quotes are left with the bodies. His exes are a detective (Charlotte) and a literature professor (Trevor). When he left them, their romantic relationship couldn’t sustain itself and they’re now best friends.
I found that bit a bit hicky…to me, poly relationships shouldn’t depend on each other to sustain themselves. However, YMMV. And the murder plot, the suspense and the characterisation let me put that aside, regardless. There are no bad guys here, just three hurt people who still have feelings for each other being given a second chance amid a terrible killing spree. The murder investigation is definitely weighted as heavily as the romance and it was all seamlessly interwoven. Between the emotional suspense and the murder-mystery suspense I was on edge all the time I was reading. And I had real trouble working out who the killer was!
A short, sweet little story set in an alt-medieval world. There’s tension between an undefined ‘church’ and traditional festivals. I loved the whole concept of the festival where blue flowers indicate you’re up for kisses or more. Owin, an older, slightly embittered guardsman, is in love with Maschi, a younger priest. Maschi returns his feelings, but Owin doesn’t realise. The story is a short, sweet resolution to their pining. As usual there’s wonderful world-building and I’d happily return to this universe.
This week my friend Ofelia is here in her persona as Holly Day to talk about her new release How to Soothe a Dragon and explain that it’s actually about aliens...take it away, Holly!
Hello! Thank you, Ally, for letting me crash the blog. (You’re most welcome!) I’ve written a story titled How to Soothe a Dragon. I was visiting Nell Iris yesterday where I talked about how this story turned into something completely different from what it was supposed to be.
I believed I was writing sci-fi – I have aliens! – but this is a fated mates dragon shifter story. (I mean, this could happen to anyone! – Ed.)
It has all the components of a paranormal romance story plus a badass alien race that has taken over Earth. The aliens are from the planet Pacuria, and they’re big and burly but mostly human-looking.
Pacurians are working all the top positions in society, leaving only minimum wage jobs for humans, and they can control minds. Most humans are lulled into a false sense of security and believe the Pacurian race has taken control to help them. Derek sees them for what they are, though. He’s not affected by their mind control, but he’s as powerless as every other human.
It has the premise of being a dark story, but it isn’t, not really. All Pacurians are dressed in uniforms similar to those The Beatles wear on the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover, and they’re allergic to lemons.
Yup, lemons.
Derek has heard about Pacurians being allergic to lemons, but he doesn’t believe it. There are still lemons to be bought in the shops, and he doesn’t believe there would be if the rumours were true.
It isn’t until he finds a button in his apartment that doesn’t belong to him – oh, I didn’t say I wrote it to celebrate National Button Day, did I? I wrote How to Soothe a Dragon for National Button Day, which is on November 16, so buttons play an important part in it 😆
Derek comes home one day and finds a button in his apartment from one of those Sgt. Pepper uniforms. A black button and his neighbour Ocren wears a black uniform. Derek has had enough. For years, Ocren has been chasing him up the stairs in the apartment building where they both live, but finding Ocren’s button on his living room floor is the last straw. He cuts a lemon in half and goes to confront him.
Excerpt
He grabbed a lemon, cut it in half, and opened his window. If Casey was wrong about the lemons, Ocren would get a good laugh, and then he’d kill Derek, but this had to end.
His legs were unsteady as he walked down the grid stair to Ocren’s apartment. With a deep breath, he stopped at the landing outside his living room window and squeezed the lemon so the juice trickled through his fingers.
Ocren was there. His green eyes bore into Derek, his dark skin was duller than he’d ever seen it, and the little ridges the Pacurians had where humans had eyebrows stood out like horns. They were similar to humans—lips, nose, the shape of their eyes, everything was the same. But they were bigger, and they had those little horns almost as lizards did. Ocren had one on each cheekbone too—most of the others didn’t.
And the eye color was wrong. Pacurians had different eye colors, as humans had, but they were more intense. And at times they glowed.
Ocren’s glowed a vivid green.
Derek held up a lemon, waiting for Ocren to laugh at him—he didn’t.
Seconds went by and neither of them moved. Derek’s heart banged hard in his chest, but he had no idea what he’d do now.
With the glass between them, they continued to stare at each other. The November chill was creeping into Derek’s core.
An eternity went by, and Ocren continued to stare at him. Slowly, he reached for the sash lift and pushed the window up.
“Derek.”
The growly tone made him shiver more. “Stay out of my apartment, fucker.”
Ocren raised his lips like an aggressive dog, showing off piranha teeth identical to those he’d seen at the bar. What the hell was wrong with the world? Had they suddenly been invaded by crazed aliens? Not suddenly—they’d been invading since long before Derek was born, and he’d always known they were far more dangerous than they’d let on, hadn’t he?
He nodded in reply to his inner monologue which had Ocren conceal his teeth with a frown. The color of his eyes grew more intense and pressure built behind Derek’s eyes.
“Hey! Cut it out!” He flung half a lemon at Ocren but missed, and it swished by him into the apartment. Ocren hissed, and Derek wiped at his nose to see if he was bleeding—he wasn’t.
“I’ll report you. I know you’re a cop, and you can threaten me all you want, but I won’t let you get away with this.”
He took a step back and Ocren paled. “No.”
The hoarse word made him pause. It wasn’t like a demand, more like a plea.
“No?” Derek glared at him, and he clearly had a death wish because he continued to speak. “No, you won’t get away with this? Or, no, I shouldn’t report you? I have the right to be here too, you know? I was here before you moved in, and you have no right to harass me.”
Ocren breathed in deep through his nose. “Derek.” His eyes flashed with the intense green again, and Derek prepared for the pressure to build behind his eyes, but it never came.
“Yes?” He looked away, which most likely was a mistake, but he feared it would be easier for Ocren to control his mind if he maintained eye contact.
“Derek.”
“Yes, dammit! What is it?” He glared at the buttons on Ocren’s uniform—none missing. It didn’t mean anything. He could’ve changed since he’d been there.
“Derek.” This time Ocren whispered his name. Derek frowned at him. The eyes were a soft green now, lacking the intense glow.
“What, Ocren? I’m not a mind reader, I don’t know what you’re trying to say by repeating my name over and over again.”
Viper green flashed in his eyes, and he reached out through the window.
“No! Stay!”
Ocren stilled but narrowed his eyes.
Derek’s heart beat so fast he feared it would stop from exhaustion. “Can’t you be normal for a few minutes?” He was taken aback by the desperation in his voice. “Stay inside and don’t try to grab me. Why are you always trying to grab me?”
Those horned almost-eyebrows pushed down over Ocren’s eyes. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You chase me up the stairs, you abuse my door, you break into my apartment, and you don’t know why?”
Ocren’s eyes flashed green. “I’ve never been in your apartment.”
“Your button was on my floor.”
“No.”
Derek huffed. “Look man, your button was on my floor. I might only be a human, but I’m not stupid.” He took a deep breath. “Okay, I’m a bit stupid, but I’ve kept an eye on your Sergeant Pepper fetish, and this is your button.”
Ocren blinked. “Pepper? I don’t know any Sergeant named Pepper, and I have no fetish… I don’t think.”
Derek snorted. “Right.” He took a step back, putting one foot on the first step of the stairs. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but please stop. The piranha act is getting old.” He walked up another step. “The lemons don’t work, do they?”
“Lemons?”
“You’re not… allergic to lemons.”
The expression, Derek didn’t know if it was a smile, a flash of now mostly human-looking teeth, or a wince. “We’re not supposed to talk about lemons.”
“What?” A small chuckle escaped. He was standing on the fire escape, talking about lemons with a Pacurian who had piranha teeth one moment and normal teeth the next.
His life truly had gone to shit.
How to Soothe a Dragon
Derek Herman is living a nightmare. Long before he was born, the planet was taken over by a mind-controlling alien race, and everyone is affected except for him. Derek does his best not to draw attention to himself, but it’s not going well.
Ocren Starburst is obsessed with his human neighbor. Every time he sees Derek, he wants nothing more than to grab him, hold him, and keep him forever. And four years of chasing him up the stairs in their apartment building has resulted in Derek refusing to even acknowledge his existence. That is, until Derek accuses Ocren of breaking into his apartment.
Derek found a button on his living room floor, the same kind of button Ocren wears on his police uniform. And while Ocren hasn’t broken in, he knows the button means someone has. Ocren’s race has kept their shape-shifting abilities secret for years, but now his other form wants out to slaughter everyone that dares to get too close to Derek. And staying in control proves hard when threats toward Derek increase.
Will they be able to keep Derek safe without Ocren losing control of his dragon self?
According to Holly Day, no day should go by uncelebrated and all of them deserve a story. If she’ll have the time to write them remains to be seen. She lives in rural Sweden with a husband, four children, more pets than most, and wouldn’t last a day without coffee.
Holly gets up at the crack of dawn most days of the week to write gay romance stories. She believes in equality in fiction and in real life. Diversity matters. Representation matters. Visibility matters. We can change the world one story at the time.
This morning I want to talk a little bit about trans people in history. Transgender is a word that can only be traced back to 1974, but that didn’t mean trans people didn’t exist before that date! Walter, one of the main characters in The Quid Pro Quo is transgender—he’s caused me all sorts of plot issues, but has sent me off to do lots of really interesting reading, which I’m delighted to share here!
One of the things that gender studies academics all agree about is that it’s almost impossible to know how people in the past that we now see as trans would have seen themselves. The records are very sparse, often sensationalised and are usually other people’s view of the person rather than their own. Who wanted to put that sort of thing down in writing when it would get you prosecuted or put in a mental hospital? So it’s hard to tell whether past figures were transgender; or whether they were passing as a man or woman in order to access spaces and privilege they would be otherwise denied. This is particularly true of people who were assigned female at birth and lived the bulk of their lives as men.
The most famous of these cases is Dr James Barry, who after his death in the mid-nineteenth century was revealed to be AFAB (assigned female at birth). I won’t write much about him here because this is the article I would write and Rebecca Ortenberg has already done it better than I would. Suffice to say that after he began his medical education at Edinburgh, Barry never presented or referred to himself as female again. He was only discovered to be AFAB after the person laying his body out for burial spoke about him. In recent years he’s been absorbed by the ‘plucky girl breaking the glass ceiling by putting on breeches’ narrative, which I personally feel is wrong.
This article at the British Library about Transgender Identities in the Past is fascinating. It focuses on two people, Eliza Edwards, who on her death in 1833 was discovered to be AMAB. And in 1901, someone we’d now understand to be a trans man who at the age of sixty and after several marriages and a career as a cook on P&O liners was revealed to be AFAB. The newspaper article calls them by a woman’s name. It completely erases the life they lived. The article has audio clips of a 2018 discussion between E-J Scott, curator of the Museum of Transology; Dr Jay Stewart, the chief executive of Gendered Intelligence, and Annie Brown, an activist, artist and GI youth worker. It’s worth your time.
In The Flowers of Time, my story set in the late eighteenth century, Jones the non-binary character eventually decides to present as masculine because it makes their life with Edie easier. They fudge the record, more or less blackmail close family into accepting them and that’s that. However, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that as time went on, communication became quicker and easier and records of births and marriages became more common it became much more difficult to pass. British army records mention Phoebe Hassel, who was discharged in 1817 when she was flogged and discovered to be a man (bottom of page seven, you have to register, but it’s free). We don’t know whether she was a passing woman for financial or social reasons or whether she was what we’d understand today as trans. Her male name is not mentioned. However, she must have passed well enough or had enough support by her peers to have concealed her natal gender for some years.
However, The Quid Pro Quo is set a hundred and fifty years later than Phoebe’s flogging and The Flowers of Time. By the time Walter joined up in 1898, there were medicals for army recruits. This was such a sticking point for me that I bottled it and I honestly tried to write the book with him as cis. However, he just wouldn’t play…he’d been trans in my head as I was writing The Fog of War, right back as far the planning stage of the trilogy. But when I came to write it, I couldn’t make the story work with him as trans because of the army regulations; and I couldn’t make the story work with him as cis because he’s not cis.
I threw the question to some of my lovely friends at the Quiltbag Historicals facebook group (join us, we’re cool!) and they immediately began working out ways I could fudge the story. So Walter begins his army career as his twin brother and has a little help from the people around him to keep his origins concealed. And I reassured myself that if people are prepared to suspend disbelief about the paranormal aspects of my stories then they can allow me this tiny (enormous) stretch of possibility to get it off the ground!
I love Walter. He’s so very pragmatic about his life and his place in the universe. He’s just getting on and doing his thing. I wanted him to have a happy ending so badly all the time I was writing The Fog of War and I was very pleased to be able to give him one here in The Quid Pro Quo.
I like to think of my stories as realistically historical first and paranormal second. My characters are just getting on living their lives—which have greater or lesser levels of complexity—and the paranormal comes and whacks them round the back of the head with half a brick in a sock. I try and make the history as accurate and the paranormal as twisted as I can! I think I’ve done Walter justice, as he’s one of my favourite people. I hope you like him too.
Village nurse Walter Kennett is content with his makeshift found-family in tiny Bradfield. However one midsummer morning a body is found floating in the village duck pond, dead by magical means.
Detective Simon Frost arrives in Bradfield to investigate a inexplicable murder. The evidence seems to point to Lucille Hall-Bridges, who lives with doctor Sylvia Marks and nurse Walter Kennett at Courtfield House. Simon isn’t happy—he doesn’t believe Lucy is a murderer but he’s sure the three of them are hiding something. In the meantime, the draw he feels toward Walter takes him by surprise.
Walter is in a dilemma, concealing Sylvia and Lucy’s relationship and not knowing how much to tell Frost about the paranormal possibilities of the murder. He isn’t interested in going to bed with anyone—he’s got a complicated life and has to know someone really well before he falls between the sheets. He’s taken aback by his own attraction to Detective Frost and angry when Frost appears to twist the spark between them to something transactional in nature.
Will Walter be satisfied to stay on the periphery of Lucy and Sylvia’s love affair, a welcome friend but never quite included? Or is it time for him to strike out and embark on a relationship of his own?
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.
