Ally – Page 28 – A. L. Lester

Ofelia Grand: Remember Us

Let’s welcome Ofelia Grand today! She’s talking about her re-release, Remember Us. It’s a story about older characters and memory loss and I love it, although Ofelia doesn’t like the first-person POV very much!

Hello, everyone! Thank you, Ally, for letting me drop by today. At the beginning of this month, one of my short stories, Remember Us, was re-released through JMS Books. I love that story.

I write under two names, Holly Day is my alter ego, and by now I’ve written a few stories. Most of them are short, so the backlist isn’t quite as impressive as it looks at a first glance, but by now I’m pretty secure in my writing style. I write third person, past tense, dual point of view unless it’s a really short story, then I might only do one character’s point of view.

What I don’t do is first person. I never buy a book where the blurb is written in first person. If I’ve bought a book, and you should know I never do my research – never read the entire blurb, never read excerpts etc. I might glance at a few reviews (and then I browse for the bad ones, so in my case, a two-star review often is what sells the book LOL). But if I’ve bought a book, and it turns out to be written in first person, I might read it if it doesn’t annoy me in the first pages. If the first thing I read under the chapter heading is a name, we’re done, though. First person, dual POV, not going there.

After having trashed first person, I feel I need to explain a little. They say you should write in first person because it brings the character closer to the reader, makes it easier for them to connect, to feel with the character. And I think I’m malfunctioning because for me it does the exact opposite. When a story is written in third person, I can forgive stupidness. I can chuckle at how foolish the character is. If it’s written in first person, and I read an ‘I threw myself at the snarling beast instead of staying safely hidden’ I just get annoyed because I *knocks on chest* never would. It’s even worse when we get to steamy or emotional parts. If it says I, the I damn better act like I would, and the Is never do LOL

Why do I ramble on about this, you wonder. Well… Remember Us is written in first person.

Yes, I’m as stunned as you are.

And I still like it. I don’t know why. I think it might be because it’s more of an emotional journey than a physical one. There are no snarling beasts, no awkward flirting or sweaty sex scenes where I lose connection with the character due to unfortunate reactions or actions LOL. It’s not even a romance story, it’s an established-couple-at-the-final-stretch-of-their-lives story.

Charles and William have been together for over forty years. All Charlie wants is to spend the rest of his time with William, but William’s memory is failing him, and Charlie is unable to look after him.

"It sucks, getting old, doesn't it?" William looked straight at me. "I'm sorry, Charlie. I never meant to become old."
I placed my hand on top of his, hating the way my voice threatened to break. "We fought it for as long as we could."
"We did, and now look at us"
Remember Us by Ofelia Grand.

Excerpt from Remember Us

The door to the nursing home opened, and I almost ran into one of the nurses.

“Oh, there you are, Charlie.” Relief flooded her eyes as the heron woke in my chest.

“What happened?” If she was coming to get me, something must’ve happened to William.

“Nothing, everything is fine now. I just got a little worried when I couldn’t find you.” She smiled and held the door open for me.

I nodded. Was I late? I glanced at the clock—about the same time as always. Of course, she wouldn’t find me if I hadn’t arrived yet. “Is William all right?”

“Yes, he’s fine, just fine.” She smiled and started to walk back to the front desk. I hurried through the foyer towards the corridor leading to William’s room, wanting to make sure nothing had happened to him.

Sucking in a breath, I knocked on his door. The nurse had given me a scare, and my heart didn’t want to slow down.

“Who are you?” William glared at me when I opened the door, and I slowly let the air out of my lungs.

“I’m Charles.”

His eyes narrowed as he got out of the armchair. “Charles?”

“Yes, Charles.” I searched his eyes for recognition, but it wasn’t there. I should stop hoping, but now and then, there was a flicker of awareness, a few minutes of presence. It was those moments I lived for—the short seconds when we were ‘we’ again.

“Charles, huh?” He studied me. The ticks of the old wall clock that used to hang in our kitchen were far slower than my heartbeats, and the heron trapped in my chest tried to turn.

William’s lips narrowed; fear grew stronger and stronger in his eyes. “Charlie?” The whisper broke my heart.

“Yes.”

“Babe, what happened to you?” He reached out but stopped short of touching me. “There has to be something we can do. Is it an illness? Or…” He rubbed his forehead. “Were you exposed to radiation or something?” Panic took hold of him as the heron crushed my insides.

“No, no radiation or illness. I grew old.”

“But how? You were fine this morning.”

This morning? How I wished I could tell which morning he was in—I’d have given everything I had to be there with him. “What did we do this morning?”

“You don’t remember?” His eyes widened, and I feared I’d only made the situation worse by asking.

“We had coffee.”

“Of course, we had coffee! What else do you remember?”

Yes, of course, we had coffee. What else could we have done? I searched his face for a clue. He wasn’t giving much away. “We ate breakfast.”

“I did! You didn’t. You were too busy trying to get that freaking cat down from the tree. That’s it, isn’t it? It had some disease, and now you’re ill.”

Cat? I winced. There was only one cat I’d ever rescued from a tree, and it had been a long, long time ago—before we were married, before we had Ann, before we lived together. “No, it wasn’t the cat.”

I glanced at the clock. I needed him to start thinking about something else. “Want to go grab some coffee?”

“We just had coffee! I’m taking you to the hospital. Now.” He started towards the door, throwing a confused look around the room as he went. “I need to pee, real quick, and then we’ll go.”

I sank down on his bed as he slipped into the bathroom. My hands were shaking. I didn’t want him to get angry, but there was no way we could go anywhere. We could go to the cafeteria and David—no, Daniel was his name—had said we could sit on the balcony if we wanted. I hoped Daniel was here today. The few times William got angry enough to get violent I always feared for the young women trying to soothe him.

I startled as the door banged against the wall. William hurried out of the bathroom. “There’s an alien in the mirror.”

“What?” Oh, no…

“In the mirror. I always knew there was something strange with this place.”

“I don’t think there is an alien in the mirror.” I could see William getting ready to argue and took a deep breath. “It was probably only the light or something.”

“You’re in on it.” He poked a finger in my chest. “I knew it! You’re not my Charlie. Of course, you aren’t. My Charlie isn’t old, and he would never lie to me.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Yoda is living in the bathroom mirror, and you’re saying there aren’t aliens here.”

Yoda? I looked at William. He didn’t look anything like Yoda…or maybe a little, but didn’t we all these days? “How about that coffee?”

William curled his hands into fists. “You aren’t listening to me. We need to get out of here. They have us under surveillance. Yoda is living in my bathroom!”

My bathroom. The heron picked at my intestines. He had never named anything in this room his. It was silly how a little word could hurt more than him thinking I was a stranger.

“Okay, let’s get out of here.” I hoped he’d forget about the aliens before we got anywhere near the door.

“We need to be sneaky about it. I’ve tried to leave before, but they never let me.”

“Yes, sneaky.” I bit my cheek. “Maybe we should go to the cafeteria and have a cup of coffee.” William started to object, but I cut him off. “Then on the way back, we’ll slip out.” Fingers crossed he wouldn’t remember when we got there.

“Smart. My Charlie would have suggested the same thing.”

Buy Remember Us: JMS Books :: Amazon :: Everywhere else!

Remember Us

Charlie Wilkins had everything he wanted—a husband, a daughter, a house that was his home. He still has his husband, but William has forgotten who he is. He still has his daughter, but the roles have switched, and Ann is now the one taking care of them.

There is only one thing Charlie wants, and that is to spend the rest of his days with William by his side. But William is living in a nursing home, and Charlie is living … somewhere. Ann says she will fix it; she’ll make sure they’ll get to live together again. Charlie hopes she will before William either escapes or figures out Charlie has left him in someone else’s care.

He promised William they’d stay together till death did them part, and he meant it, but what was he to do when he no longer could take care of William?

Buy Remember Us: JMS Books :: Amazon :: Everywhere else!

About Ofelia

Ofelia Gränd is Swedish, which often shines through in her stories. She likes to write about everyday people ending up in not-so-everyday situations, and hopefully also getting out of them. She writes romance, contemporary, paranormal, Sci-Fi and whatever else catches her fancy.

Her books are written for readers who want to take a break from their everyday life for an hour or two.

When Ofelia manages to tear herself from the screen and sneak away from her husband and children, she likes to take walks in the woods…if she’s lucky she finds her way back home again.

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Definitely not Magical Realism: The Border Magic system

orange cat on focus photography — Photo by Alexas Fotos on Pexels.com

So, The Fog of War is out next month and I thought it was probably time for another post about how the magic system works–that seems to be one of the main questions that comes up when I do Q&A’s about the series. Basically, my process can be summed up if you visualise me sitting on the floor in a room full of kittens, with different coloured balls of wool all heaped up around me and letting the kittens do their thing. And if the kittens are also crazed on catnip then it’s even more accurate.

When I started writing the series, I dabbled with making one of the MCs a shifter. I thought he might be a centaur. And then the whole thing fell apart when he turned out to be living in a small flat above a laundry in 1920s London and it just wasn’t practical. I mean. Think of the floors! He turned out to be a magician, effectively, although he’d loathe the word. No-one who uses magic with good intent in my world actually calls it that.

I have to confess, the kitten thing didn’t really happen. Although it should have. Because kittens! And I didn’t sit down and plan out the system before I started. It just evolved as the books went on. I knew I wanted my people to be able to pull energy from somewhere. And I knew there needed to be a price, because if you have unlimited magical energy available you’re all-powerful and where’s the fun in characters that are all-powerful?

photo of woman holding a mirror — Photo by Miriam Espacio on Pexels.com

The system works on the principle that there’s power everywhere. It’s called kias. Everyone has some as part of their life-force, some people more, some less. And there’s a source of it in a thing called the border or the shimmer. Some of my characters know this, some don’t. And some of them know that the shimmer doesn’t just exist in isolation. It’s a border between our world and another one. The other one is where people like Fenn (Shadows on the Border & The Hunted and the Hind) and Linn (Inheritance of Shadows) live. They’re sort-of-elves and are magic-users as a matter of course. Fenn and Linn work for a group called the Ternants, who are responsible for maintaining the border between the two worlds. There are definitely other groups who are working to break it down.

We don’t know a lot more about any of the not-quite-elves as yet, pretty much because I’m making it up as a I go along. (Let’s hear a big “YAY!” for discovery writing!). There will be more in forthcoming books, but at the moment I’m enjoying writing about the reactions of characters who live in our own world and touch the magic to a greater or lesser extent and finding out how they each embrace or reject it.

If you know anything about reiki and similar energy practices you will see similarities between those and how my magic system works. Healthy people have healthy energy and sick people have low or wobbly energy. It’s possibly to help people’s health by balancing their energies up. I have taken that further by allowing my magic users, or workers, to pull energy in to themselves (from other people, from their surroundings, from the shimmer, from charged objects) to manipulate both kias and physical matter. Small things like lights in the palm of your hand, and big things, like opening a gate in the energy border between the worlds.

If you’re a responsible person you try and keep the overall energy system balanced and don’t steal kias from people or pull so much from the shimmer that you make it weak and allow nasty things like carnas or hollows to push their way through. If you’re an irresponsible person you do just that. And sometimes you can set up a line or a cord linking you to someone else that is a constant drain on their energy and constantly replenishes yours.

The magic system is really very simple. It works on the basis that energy follows thought. The irony of the green book being that it’s supposed to be a ‘book of spells’ or a book of instructions to make the magic work for you…but actually you don’t need to do any of that ritual stuff. You just need to pull the kias toward you, form your intention and hold it strongly in your mind…and if you are powerful enough and have enough kias available, pow! it happens.

If you’re trying to do things that are selfish or greedy, or badly thought out, the potential for the kias to spring back at you and sproink you on the nose like a stretched elastic band is enormous. My main characters tend to realise this, earlier or later in the stories. Sometimes after being sproinked.

As the series has gone on the system has developed and I’ve found myself using a sort of retroactive kitten-method to make interesting plot happen. I tend to write very messy first drafts that mean I have to go back and do an enormous amount of pruning to make things fit together logically. Having to make sure that the magic works as well is another layer of complication and having energy-follows-thought as it’s base principle makes it both simple and very complicated. It allows an awful lot of wiggle-room, which means there’s an awful lot of ways to mess it up! But most things I write seems to have the paranormal in there somewhere and my worlds don’t seem complete to me without it.

You can read more about the system and how the books fit into it here.

#TheWeekThatWas: don’t punch down

It only occurred to me a few weeks ago that Gwyn in Taking Flight is a bit out of the ordinary, because he’s trans. And some people still find that edgy, or unusual or something to be looked down on.

And this post is to say, I am so sick of that. Of all of it. I’m sick of it from the wider world and I’m sick of it on a smaller, punching-down scale from within the LGBTQIA+ community.

I came across a post on a facebook group the other day where someone was bemoaning all these new genders and sexualities people can identify with. It really, really upset me. It was from someone within the community, who I would therefore hope would have know better. How dare that person imply that identifying as an even more marginalised identity than their own was somehow unacceptable?

We’ve always been here. The fact that there are words now when there weren’t before doesn’t mean we’re new.

Homosexual can only be traced back to 1880. Lesbian has an earlier origin but was only used commonly as a noun to describe same-sex attracted women from about then as well. Transgender dates from the early seventies. These are all labels that are now in common use and have a common cultural meaning to most of us. Labels are helpful for our understanding of ourselves and our understanding of those around us. They’re not cast-iron boxes we’re locked in, they’re a starting point for dialogue and exploration.

Just because you don’t understand the label doesn’t make it any less real.

That goes for those people out there who don’t understand how people can be lesbian, gay or trans, as well as those within the community who can’t understand how one can be non-binary, or bi, or pan, or demi, or use neo-pronouns, or identify however one bloody well wants to.

Don’t punch down, basically. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of living in a racist, ableist, transphobic, discriminatory-on-all-levels society where it’s okay to say these things. I’m sick at myself for not calling this person on their comment. I feel stupid for writing a story about someone very marginalised and not realising what I was doing because to me, being trans is just as normal as not being trans. About the first four iterations of the blurb didn’t mention it, for fuck’s sake! And then I thought… Oh! that might be something readers might like to know about! How stupid is that? There’s a major drama in there, where a prospective lover discovers he’s trans…and it initially didn’t occur to me to put that in the blurb.

Was that because being outed is such an everyday worry to a load of people I know that it was another normal thing for me? Probably. Who knows?

I’m so tired of all of it. Everything is a fight, a fight to force people to be kind. And it shouldn’t be.

K. L. Noone: Magician!

Hi, I’m K.L. Noone—many thanks to A.L. Lester for letting me drop by to talk about Magician today!

Magician comes out July 24 from JMS Books, and it’s m/m high fantasy, with bisexual main characters—at least, Gareth is bi, and Lorre is whatever ancient weary shapeshifting magicians are! (He’s been and done quite a lot, over the years, and at this point what he mostly is…is tired. But Gareth’s got a lot of enthusiasm…)

It’s very much about magic—probably obvious! And also it’s about past mistakes and guilt, and redemption, and trying to hide from the world on a deserted tropical island (because one might as well hide and feel guilty for one’s past mistakes in comfort!), and then it’s about what happens when an optimistic young prince shows up on one’s island and believes with all his heart that the world’s last legendary magician has to help with his quest, because that’s how quests go, isn’t it…

(It’s also the novel I once referred to on Facebook as, “Well, now there’s a lot of tea and magical sex diamonds.” So if those sound like your cup of…er…)

This might be one of my favorite novels that I’ve written; it’s one that’s lived in the back of my head for at least a decade. It’s technically a spin-off for a side character (in fact, the antagonist—though he’s not a bad person, just thoughtless!) from my short story “Sorceress,” which was my first-ever romance sale, way back then! I always knew the sequel was Lorre’s story: what does a magician do after he’s been reckless with his power and caused problems? And who would he fall in love with? The answer to the second question was, obviously, an Earnest Young Hero, someone who still believes that other people will help you if you ask them nicely, and who looks at a lonely and dangerous magician and asks how he can help, in turn.

(A fun and true trivia fact: Gareth’s name wasn’t necessarily going to be Gareth! I wasn’t sure it felt like him, but I needed to call him something—I thought I might change it later. But, around 30k in, I’d been writing him and thinking of him as Gareth, so…he was! And I actually quite like it now—the Arthurian reference fits nicely, I think. Gareth would also get along well with Prince Lir from Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, I suspect…)

There are also nectarines. And some discussion of giant turtles. And a bandit or five.

Magician also has two of my favorites of my own ending lines—one for the main story and one for the epilogue. I sometimes find ending lines tricky, but both of these just turned up and felt right. (The last word of the novel overall, by the way, is “yes.” It’s an answer.)

I always write with music, and this playlist has a lot of The Proclaimers, The Pretty Reckless, and Volbeat on it—flavors of Edinburgh, of wild magic, of aging, of falling in love, of finding home at last. And some Against Me! because I suspect Lorre would sympathize with “I Was A Teenage Anarchist,” and The Cars’ “Magic” because, well, magic!

Here’s an excerpt, and buy links, and everything—I hope you enjoy this world and these characters. I’ve loved them for a very long time, and I’m excited to share. And if there’s a third story in this world, it’s got lesbian romance—a sorceress and a princess, in fact, but we’ll get there when we get there…

Buy Magician! JMS Books : Amazon

The beginning of Magician

The world’s greatest living magician, lying on his back on a rocky ledge halfway up a cliff and bathed in sunshine, felt the boat’s arrival on the island shore below like an uninvited knock at a private door. He did not enjoy it.

He didn’t move for a moment. He did not feel like it, and there’d be no rush. Nobody’d get past his wards.

He kept both eyes closed. Sun streaked red behind his eyelids; gold warmed his skin, his hair. His body soaked in the sensations of strong heated stone, sank into stone, became stone: learning how the rock felt when bathed in lush late-morning light. His edges blurred, softened: time slowed, thrummed, grew earthen and deep, salt-lapped and wind-etched. He might’ve been here for centuries, unhurried. Equilibrium and erosion, solidity and reshaping: a balance.

He had needed balance. Something he’d thought he’d known, once. Something he no longer understood.

He’d thought the island might help. Being rock for a while, or the wind, or the seaspray: being suspended amid them all. Being alone, because he was not sure he recalled how to be human, not well enough.

The island was warm—Lorre had always shamelessly adored being warm—and far enough from the mainland that he’d been mostly undisturbed, and close enough to trade routes that he could occasionally walk on water out to a boat and barter some repairs or some healing for some news of the Middle Lands and King Henry’s court at Averene and the Grand Sorceress Liliana. Lorre had promised not to magically check in on Lily or their daughter; he was attempting to keep that promise.

Equilibrium. Difficult. Sunlight was easier. Sunbeams were weightless. Stones did not have to think about human promises. Human perceptions.

The knock came again. It was not physical, or not entirely. It was a presence, an unexpected intruder standing below, shuffling feet in the sand and no doubt wondering where precisely a magician could be found, being faced with a towering blank cliff and no visible habitation.

Lorre sighed, pulled himself back from frayed edges and heavy sleepy light, and sat up, pulling a robe on in an unfussy tumble of blue and gold, mostly just because he liked the caress of silky fabric on bare skin. His senses shifted, dwindled: more human, though not entirely. He’d been a magician too long to not feel the threads of brilliance—cliff, vines, fish, grains of sand, sea-glass polished by waves—all around.

He peeked over the side of the ledge. Behind him the cave yawned lazily, reminding him of sanctuary: he could simply walk back inside, the way he had for several years now, and ignore the new arrival. That generally worked.

He was rather surprised someone’d found him at all. He wasn’t exactly hiding—oh yes you are, said a tart little voice in his head, one that sounded like Lily’s—but the island, after a bit of work on his part, nearly always concealed itself from maps and navigation charts. At the beginning a few enterprising adventurers had managed to track it down, young heroes on quests or proving their worth by daring an enchanter’s lair or begging for Lorre’s assistance in some revenge or inheritance or magical artifact retrieval scheme.

He’d ignored all but two of them. The illusion-wall kept everyone out, simple and baffling; the island had fresh water but little in the way of food. Mostly the adventurers’d given up and gone home, years ago; he couldn’t in fact recall the face of the last one. Two had become nuisances, loud and shouting; one of those had actually threatened to drink poison, melodramatically demanding Lorre’s assistance in collecting a promised bride from a glass mountain, claiming he’d die without her.

The young man currently standing on the beach was neither loud nor melodramatic. In fact, he was calmly considering the sheer cliff-face, which revealed nothing; he stepped back across the small curve of beach, shaded his eyes, seemed to be measuring. After a second he put a hand up, obviously checking the edge of the cliff: having noticed the very slight discrepancy where sea-birds dropped behind the illusion-wall a fraction sooner than they should vanish in reality.

Intelligent, this one. Lorre dangled himself over the ledge at an angle which would’ve been dangerous for anyone else, and watched.

The young man had dark reddish-brown hair, the color of autumn; he wore it tied back, though a few wisps were escaping. He’d dressed for travel, not in shiny armor the way some knights and princes had: sturdy boots and comfortable trousers, a shirt in nicely woven but also practical fabric, a well-worn pack which he’d swung down to the sand. He wasn’t particularly tall, but not short: average, with nicely shaped shoulders and an air of straightforward competence, not trying for impressive or intimidating.

Lorre, despite annoyance at the interruption, couldn’t help but approve. At least this one had some sense, and didn’t walk around clanking in metal under the shimmering sun.

The young man called up, “Hello?” His voice was quite nice as well, not demanding, lightly accented with the burr of the Mountain Marches but in the way of someone who’d been carefully sent to the best schools down South. “Grand Sorcerer?”

Lorre mentally snorted. He didn’t have a proper title, not any longer; if anyone did, it’d be Lily. His former lover, now wife of the brother of the King of Averene, was by default the last Grand Sorceress of the Middle Lands; she’d started up the old magician’s school again, welcoming and training apprentices. Lily always had been better with people. Lorre was not precisely welcome in Averene.

The young man said mildly, “I expect this is a test; I thought you would do that, you know,” as if he thought that Lorre might answer, as if they were having a conversation; and looked around. “I’m meant to find you, is that it?”

That was the opposite of it. Lorre on a good day barely recalled how to be human, and certainly wasn’t fit to interact with them. He’d lost his temper with the melodramatic poison-carrying prince, strolled invisibly onto the shore, asked the poison to turn itself into a sleeping draught, and then poured it into the idiot’s water flask. Then he’d found a passing ship and dumped the snoring body onto its deck. He hadn’t known the destination, and hadn’t bothered to find out.

His current young man was looking at driftwood. Lorre wondered why. He was getting a bit dizzy from leaning nearly upside down; he considered the sensation with some surprise. A swoop of gold swung into his eyes, distracting and momentarily baffling; he pushed the strands of his hair back with magic.

The young man found a stick, one that evidently met his standards for length and strength. He kept it in front of himself; he walked deliberately toward the cliff, and the illusion.

Oh. Clever. Avoiding traps. Testing a theory. Lorre found himself impressed, particularly when the young man watched the tip of the driftwood vanish and nodded to himself and then set rocks down to neatly mark the spot.

The island was not large, and the beach even smaller: a jut of cliff, a tangle of vines, a small lagoon and a trickle of water down to the shore. The illusion hid the cave-opening, but there wasn’t really anywhere else for someone to be; the young man figured that out within an hour or so of methodical exploration, and returned to the shore, and looked thoughtfully at the cliffs. He’d rolled up his sleeves and undone the ties of his shirt, given the heat; he had a vine-leaf in his hair, along with a hint of sweat.

Lorre, in some ways still very much human, couldn’t not stare. Something about those forearms under rolled-up sleeves. That hint of well-muscled chest. The casual ripple of motion, broad shoulders, heroic thighs.

“I suppose,” the young man said, very wry, still looking at the cliff as if perfectly aware Lorre was watching, “I should introduce myself. I think I forgot to, earlier.”

I suppose you should, Lorre agreed silently. Since you’re here. Disrupting my life.

He ignored the fact that he’d had no real plans. Meditation. Quiet. A hope for calm.

A hint of dragon-fire slid through his veins, under his skin. A memory. Restless. Beckoning. Dangerous.

Blurb: A magician in need of redemption. A loyal hero on a quest. And only one bed at the inn.

Once the world’s most legendary sorcerer, Lorre fled the Middle Lands after his own curiosity — and a misguided transformation spell—turned him into a dragon and nearly killed a king. He isn’t a dragon anymore, but he is hiding alone on a tropical island, avoiding people, politics, and his own reputation.

But now a hero has found him. And not just any hero. Prince Gareth’s full of patience, intelligence, a kind heart…and unfairly attractive muscles. And he needs Lorre’s help: his tiny mountain kingdom is under attack from ice magic, and Gareth hopes the world’s last great magician will save his people.

Lorre’s very much done with quests and princes and trying to change the world. But Gareth might tempt him to believe again…in heroes, in himself, and in magic.

Meet K. L. Noone

K.L. Noone employs her academic research for writing romance, usually LGBTQ+ and often paranormal, fantasy, or historical! Her full-length romance novels include the Character Bleed trilogy (Seaworthy, Stalwart, and Steadfast), Cadence and the Pearl, and A Demon for Midwinter, available from JMS Books, and A Prophecy for Two, available from Inkshares. She’s also the author of multiple romance novellas and short stories with JMS Books, and previously with Less Than Three Press, Circlet Press, and Ellora’s Cave. Her non-romance fantasy fiction has appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress and the magazine Aoife’s Kiss.

With the Professor Hat on, she’s published scholarly work on romance, fantasy, and folklore, including a book on Welsh mythology in popular culture and a book on ethics in Terry Pratchett’s fantasy. She is happily bisexual, married to the marvelous Awesome Husband, and currently owned by a long-legged black cat named Merlyn.

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#TheWeekThatWas: Growing into yourself

I can’t remember what I wanted to be as a small child. But after I hit about fourteen, I had a plan that involved never marrying, living in a small, remote house with a garden and a duck pond; and keeping a flock of ducks and a string of lovers.

Some of this has happened. Some of it has been sadly lacking.

I grew up on a smallholding. My background is one where ones income comes from growing or making stuff and selling it. After I hit fifteen, my pocket money came from keeping a few dozen ex-battery hens and selling their eggs in the local market every weekend. Ma and Pa took a load of vegetables and flowers in to sell every Friday for the Saturday market and they’d take my eggs as well. Ma paid my sister’s school fees with the sales of apple pies and jam each weekend. She says she knew she had to make a certain amount every week to cover the bill, else that was that.

When I left home, I went to college for a bit and got a couple of degrees. I have never used the first one – Archaeology and History are fascinating but their real world applications are pretty minimal unless you want to actually work in the field – and in between that, I learned to copy- or audio-type at seventy words a minute whilst simultaneously holding a conversation about a completely different subject. That’s the most useful skill I have ever learned. And thinking about it, fantastic preparation for parenthood.

architecture building castle city — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

After a bit of time copy-typing and regretting my college choice, I fell in to a graduate degree in Geographical Information Systems, which was in its infancy then. Now, you can do an undergraduate course and specialise really early on, but then – the mid nineties – you could only go the postgraduate route. It seemed like a really good way to combine my interest in both the past and computers. Afterwards, I toyed with the idea of a doctorate, but in the end, I’d had enough of the ivory tower of academia and wanted to be back in the real world. Retrospectively, this may have been a mistake, but I was in my mid twenties and had a certain amount of judgemental arrogance. Instead, I went to work for a well known UK telecoms company and used the time to discover I really, really hated the corporate world and that the money for nice shoes, whilst lovely, wasn’t more important than my sanity.

I ended up quitting and teaching various levels of IT and office skills in an adult education setting. I loved it. My favourite class, ever, was made up of Hilda, Ada, Muriel and Betty. They had come to my ‘Computers For The Terrified’ class on a Friday afternoon as a change from their usual crochet sessions. Their average age was eighty and they were hilarious.

“Remind me how to save the file again, dear. I’m so sorry. I used to be able to remember things, but it’s all gone now.”

“I can’t get used to this mouse, Ally. My granddaughter has given me her old lapthing and it hasn’t got a mouse, it’s got a trackpad.”

“I’m so sorry dear. I have no idea how this came up on my internet search. I really wasn’t looking for naked men. It won’t get you in trouble with the centre, will it, that he’s got that big erection?”.

man standing on cliff watching punch bowl waterfalls — Photo by S Migaj on Pexels.com

At the same time, I was extracting myself from a relationship where my partner thought it was acceptable behaviour to throw me over the sofa. I eventually moved out and found myself a little house deeper in the Welsh valley I lived in – South Wales is a bit like Narnia, in that further up and further in is the way to go to uncover all the glories. The house was ten feet and one inch wide, with a garden a hundred feet long. I borrowed the money to renovate it from my father and did it up myself. I swore off relationships completely.

And then of course, OH turned up. I considered dating him simply because the house I had bought had no duck pond and I knew that my adolescent dream couldn’t come true whilst I was still there.

Twenty years later … I have had the duck pond. I have had the remote house. I have even had the string of lovers, a long time ago. But never all at once. And I’ve come to the conclusion that whatever you start off wanting – astronaut, scientist, writer, duck-keeper, Madame Bovary – you are pretty lucky if you hit that happy streak straight away. I think you’re more likely to find your groove by the process of elimination.