Ally – Page 27 – A. L. Lester

#TheWeekThatWas

The last couple of weeks have been hard here at Lester Towers. It’s the school holidays…cruising on down to the end of week two out of seven now.

Littlest needs constant entertainment otherwise she starts driving her wheelchair around the house throwing things on the floor. And by ‘constant’ I mean you can’t go and put the kettle on. Talking Child has suddenly morphed into a teenager. I’m just stunned by the way they’ve flowered. They went back into school after two years home education last September. Watching them blossom has been wonderful, but also terrifying. I am now living with a highly strung bundle of judgemental anxiety I assume will relax a bit as time goes on and they achieve adulthood. There’s a lot of boundary pushing and on occasion I regret it’s no longer socially acceptable to sign your child up to a career in the navy at age twelve.

To keep us all on point however, I have designated Tuesdays Mandatory Fun Days. We have something planned every week–zoo, theatre, animal sanctuary etc–and I have arranged for Littlest’s carer to help get her ready to go out on those days. And we are piling into the car and having Mandatory Fun. Everyone has to be cheerful and if they’re not they will face my wrath.

So far it’s been two weeks, the zoo and the theatre, and it’s worked. Yesterday we had to change Littlest down to her skin and shower her, MrAL and I and bleach two wheelchairs in the fifteen minutes before we left. It was exhausting and if you’re a carer you’ll find it hilarious but if you’re not, you’ll be baffled. Something always happens to knock us off our stride.

The other thing I’ve been wrestling with is getting the children a vaccine. Government policy in the UK now says that Clinically Extremely Vulnerable children age twelve and over should be vaccinated. And so should children over twelve living with people who are CEV. So both children come into that category. Quite a few of Littlest’s peers around the country have already been vaccinated, some on the advice of clinicians before the government policy change. However in our area, it isn’t happening. I have been pushing formally with emails since mid June and we now haw a clinician’s letter saying she should have the vaccine. But GPs are reluctant to administer it because of liability issues, the hospital won’t do it because it’s a public health issue and the local oversight board keep fobbing me off by telling me she’s on the list. Which is great. But…not actually a vaccine. In frustration I have gone to the media and we had a regional TV chap come round yesterday and interview us about it. I desperately resent having to do it–it’s a waste of time and it shouldn’t be necessary. I’m also very twitchy about the media as a whole–the possiblity of us losing control of the narrative is there and scares me. I just want what’s best for my kids and I’ve been backed into a corner…I’ve explored literally every other avenue over the last few months and this is where we’ve ended up.

Anyway. That’s the week that was at Lester Towers. Tomorrow we go on a family seaside holiday donated by a holiday park associated with the children’s hospice and we are all looking forward to a few days off.

The difference between writing in the 1920s and 1970s. And a bit about colonialism in historical romance.

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.

Map of Webber's Farm by Elin Gregory — 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!

I have pages on the website with an overview of my research for The Flowers of Time and about the world of Taking Stock . You can also read all about the Border Magic universe and how the books fit together.

Guest Post: Ellie Thomas, Artistic Inspiration

Thank you so much, Ally, for having me as your guest today! I’m Ellie Thomas and I write Historical Gay Romance. In this blog, I’ll be chatting about my latest story with JMS Books, released on July 10th. It’s a Hot Flash entitled A Roll of the Dice. It can be uncanny how inspiration comes out of the blue from an unexpected source. The idea for this tale started when watching an excellent three-part tv documentary on the story of Welsh art – of all things!

I love all things eighteenth century and especially writing about that period of history. So, when the programme focused on artists of that particular time, I was completely rapt. I heard for the first time about the landscape artist Richard Wilson (1713-82), who was one of the first of his peers to popularise the landscape genre. I was not only fascinated by his story and his artwork, but it also got my imagination whirring.

In the same way, my main character Joshua has Jones as a surname in honour of the Welsh artist Thomas Jones (1742-1803). Like his namesake, Joshua studies in London under the great Richard Wilson. While writing about Joshua’s experiences, I couldn’t resist including a real-life humorous anecdote about students misbehaving in class which Thomas Jones had recorded in his diaries.

So, as I had sketched in the artistic backdrop for my story, my next task was to devise my characters. When the story started unfolding in my mind, I happened to come across an article on influential black composers and musicians in Europe in the eighteenth century, including the Chevalier de St. Georges (1745-1799) who was dubbed ‘The Black Mozart’. This inspired me to make Joshua both an aspiring artist and a man of colour.

Many artists at that time, including Richard Wilson and Thomas Jones, were drawn to London to study, exhibit and establish their names in artistic circles, so that city seemed the ideal setting. In my story, Joshua leaves his home city of Bristol in the West of England to stay with relatives in London to try to make his mark on the art world.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, although a major city and growing fast, London was not endless urban sprawl familiar to us now, but could still be crossed on foot. This relatively short distance made me consider in which specific districts to place my characters and how to arrange their first meeting.

Since the Royal Academy of Art in London was based in Old Slaughter’s Coffee House in St. Martin’s Lane in those very early days, that got me thinking about nearby Whitehall and the St. James’ Palace area, lined with exclusive masculine gambling and drinking clubs which were a core of political power and influence at the time.

These qualities embody the character of Frank, Joshua’s love interest, who moves easily amongst influential diplomatic circles. As Joshua funds his daytime art studies by working as a waiter in a gambling club by night, this seemed an ideal meeting point for my couple. In such an intensely male, hot-house situation, I could easily imagine how a spark of mutual attraction could flare into romance.

A Roll of the Dice

Joshua Jones is in London to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. As a young black man from a modest background, he works hard to pay for his painting classes, both as a fencing master’s assistant, then as a waiter in an exclusive gaming club, which his uncle manages.

During the London Season when the club as at its busiest, the last thing Joshua expects is to find romance. But when mesmerising older man, Frank Bartlett, is determined to seduce him, how can he resist? Joshua now finds he has another problem. How can he stop himself falling for the object of his desire?

Buy A Roll of the Dice

Read an Extract from A Roll of the Dice

As they sat by the fireplace, Joshua looked around him with interest, noting the shelves of books and the writing desk piled high with correspondence. Pouring them both a glass of wine, Frank sat back and smiled at Joshua’s observation.

“Does my home meet with your approval?” Frank asked.

Joshua grinned. “I was expecting more of a palace,” he replied, which make Frank laugh, revealing that strong column of his throat that made Joshua catch his breath.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” Frank said, smiling.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say I was disappointed,” Joshua said with a tinge of flirtation, knowing he was playing with fire. Frank glanced at him with a knowing flickering glimmer that set Joshua’s pulses racing. He was achingly aware that the consideration and snatched conversations of previous evenings would escalate in this intimate setting.

“If you are in the mood,” Frank said silkily, reaching for a pack of cards and moving a nearby side table between them, “I thought we might play a game.”

Joshua almost blurted out that he did not gamble, when he suddenly realised that the stakes were far riskier, or rather risqué, than money. “Pick a card,” Frank invited him. Breathlessly, Joshua did so and putting it down on the table, he saw he had selected the Ten of Hearts. Frank followed suit, placing down the Two of Spades. “I lose,” he said, smiling as he shrugged off his coat.

Joshua’s eyes widened. “I think I like this game,” he said, picking the next card. As it was his turn to select a lower card, he chose to remove his neckcloth as slowly as possible, his adversary glued to his every movement. Then Frank lost his waistcoat, his large body visible under his linen shirt which made Joshua’s mouth go dry. He gulped his wine before picking the next card. They chose an equal number and in accord, both removed their shirts. Joshua could not take his eyes from that massive chest and brawny torso and Frank seemed equally breathless at the sight of Joshua’s lithe and sinewy brown body.

“Perhaps we should take this into the bedroom?” Frank suggested, rising and holding out his hand. Joshua followed willingly and as soon as the bedroom door was shut behind them, they were in each other’s arms.

Buy A Roll of the Dice

Meet 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

Why Paranormal?

Why do I set a lot of my stories in a paranormal universe, you ask? It’s a question I often grumble about to myself.

I am slightly resentful of my writing-subconscious, because it doesn’t want to make things easy for me. I love writing historical stories, the research, the social history, getting into how people thought at the time. I suppose I could be writing these stories without the paranormal element…and indeed, I have! But quite often I start off thinking that’s what I’m going to do and then boink, there we are with mysterious howling and people dissolving and what-not.

Obviously, I had to have some sort of ooops, we’ve slipped through time element at the very beginning of the Border Magic series to get Lew back to 1919 in Lost in Time. But initially that wasn’t really the focus of the book. I wanted to contrast the experiences and expectations of a man born in the 1880s with one born in the 1980s, and time-travel just seemed a really cool way to do that.

And the whole Border Magic Universe has snowballed a bit from there.

I am aiming less for Narnia—a world you can easily pop through a wardrobe door to get to that is magical of itself—and more for Lovecraft, where the magic is dangerous and inexplicable and has consequences for the humans who’s lives it touches. Each of the people in my books discovers and reacts to the magic in different ways and readers aren’t meant to have a whole picture of how it works, because the characters don’t. Sometimes they’ll know a bit more about what’s going on than the characters if they’ve read other books; but it shouldn’t make any difference to their enjoyment of the story if they haven’t.

Readers seem to either like the drip-drip of more information about the magical world or loathe it. As a writer it’s a bit of a cop-out because I don’t have a series-bible with all the rules and regulations of the magic written down in advance. This means I can whip a thing out of the hat to make the story more gruesome or coherent if I want to. My rule to myself is that I can’t change things I’ve already written about—so the magic is internally consistent from book to book and the magic system grows all the time. I know what the rules are, pretty much, but I don’t’ have them written down anywhere in a very formal sense. I should also admit I do subcontract out some of my gothic horror…Talking Child came up with the idea of the hollows in The Flowers of Time and is still smug about it however many years later.

Will I write a story set in the Outlands, so people can find out more about what’s going on behind the scenes? Honestly, I don’t know. At the moment I’d say no, I wouldn’t. But three years ago I’d have told you I’d never write contemporary stories or short stories; and I’m quite happily writing my Reworked Celtic Myths in just that format!

Here’s a deleted scene I posted earlier, Fenn in the Outlands with a bit more about the world.

#AmReading

This week, sapphic time-travel with One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston and two well-know gay romances that I’ve been listening to in audio, For Real by Alexis Hall and the Adrien English series by Josh Lanyon.

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

This is by the author of Red, White and Royal Blue, which I haven’t read and am now going to! It’s a sapphic time-travel found-family story set in New York in the present. The main character is August, who is twenty-three and searching for a place to fit. She has had enough of her mother, who is obsessed with finding her older brother who disappeared in the 1970s and has moved to start a new life. The other main character is Jane, who August keeps meetings on the subway. To begin with, Jane can’t remember being anywhere else. It’s clever and funny and heart-warming and I loved it.

It’s got a really good range of secondary characters which includes great trans rep.

For Real by Alexis Hall (audio)

This is one of my favourite books on the page and I recently bought the audio. I seem to be on a roll with books about belonging this week. Although it’s about a BDSM relationship, it’s not about sex. Sure, there’s loads of sex in it, but it’s the feelings and the dynamic between the characters and their need to find somewhere to fit that keeps me coming back. Laurie is forty-ish an ER doctor, jaded, sad. Toby is nineteen, lost, not quite sure what he’s looking for in life but knowing he wants someone to submit to him. They’re both clever overthinkers. They fit together and the story is about how they both come to see that.

It’s a dual-narration audio and the characterisation is perfect, particularly Toby, who is just…enchanting.

Adrien English series by Josh Lanyon (audio)

Another old favourite here. Snarky bookseller/writer/amateur detective falls for closeted cop in Pasadena, California. Five books of well-narrated mystery-cum-love story ensue. It’s such a well done series and there’s nothing I can say about it that hasn’t already been said. Fatal Shadows was first published in 2001 by Gay Men’s Press, and it’s now a bit of a blast from the past—pre smart-phone, which is the main thing that stood out to me when listening last week! It’s not dated at all, I emphasise; but it was interesting to listen and remember how things were such a short time ago.

The audio is new to me and is definitely worth a listen.

That’s the lot!