Ally – Page 29 – A. L. Lester

#AmReading

This week, three gay romances with lots of suspense. Hard Line by Sidney Bell, Box 1663 by Alex Sorel and Hell and Gone by Tal Bauer.

Can I say first that I love all three books in this trilogy? This was the first one I read and it did stand alone; but obviously you’ll have more backstory if you start with Loose Cannon. This one is my favourite out of the three though. It’s about two misfits who are struggling to come to terms with themselves. Tobias is weighed down with his family obligations and has no head-space to work out what he really wants from life. Sullivan has shut down the part of his life that is open to relationships because he got burned really badly by someone who was frankly an arse to him about his kink. Combine the two likeable, well drawn characters with the realistic dom/sub relationship and a rollicking suspense plot and I couldn’t put the book down. The kink was really well done—on a par with Alexis Hall’s For Real. It’s a comfort re-read for me.

Box 1663 by Alex Sorel

This was rec’d me by a friend and I’m so pleased they did. It’s a WW2 gay romance set at Las Alamos, among the team building the nuclear bomb. A spy plot provides all the tension you could want. The romance is between an army photographer and a British scientist. The photographer, Nick, pursues Ian, the scientist. He’s lovely. He’s clearly head over heels in love with the man and Ian is carrying a whole load of angst and back-story that make it extremely hard for him to respond, even though he returns Nick’s feelings. I felt that the historical background was extremely well researched and I even went looking for photos of Oppenheimer and co so I could fill in the gaps in my internal narrative! I read the whole book in one sitting and I’ll definitely re-read.

Hell and Gone by Tal Bauer

Another reliably re-readable (is that too alliterative?) contemporary who-dunnit-with-romance from Tal Bauer. This time our hero is a stock detective—a career I didn’t know existed!—who is sent into the Crazy Mountains of Montana to track down the person rustling cattle and now, killing people. Everett is drawn to Lawrence, the ranch manager who has been pushing for an investigation. But there’s a thundercloud of questions hanging over Lawrence’s head—his past, his relationship with the dead man he found hanging on his property, and where he’s getting his extra money from. The tension is beautifully spun out both with the investigation and the development of the relationship. Definitely a re-read.

That’s the lot for this time!

Taking Flight: Branwen’s Grave

So, it’s release day for Taking Flight! Yay! I’ve been around and about visiting at various blogs over the last few days…Nell Iris (10^th), Holly Day (11^th), Addison Albright (today!) and I’ll be over at Ofelia Grand’s place on the 16^th.

Taking Flight by A. L. Lester. A short contemporary gay romance in the Celtic Myths collection.

Taking Flight is based on a tale from The Mabinogion, about Brânwen, sister of King Brân of Wales. Her brother marries her off to Matholwch, King of Ireland, but the marriage goes bad for complicated reasons to do with her step-brother mutilating her husband’s horses. Once Matholwch gets her home to Ireland, he banishes her to his kitchens. She tames a starling and sends it with a message to her brother for help. I’ve made the Brânwen character a trans man called Gwyn; and he extracts himself from his own difficulties with the help of Darren Starling rather than passively waiting to be rescued.

It’s a tiny, tiny bit of the whole legend. The tales in the Mabinogion tend to be very complicated and pretty dark and wouldn’t fit into a short story. They were handed down orally in Wales until they were written down in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

My background before I was a parent, a writer, a chicken-farmer, an audio-visual technician, an IT teacher and an IT professional was archaeology and history. I have always thought of myself as an Archaeologist and/or a Historian—I studied both at York for three years. However, I have never been on a dig! It’s a weird way to still self-identify thirty years after my time in that world ended; but I still do. I read a lot of history and of course I write historical stories. Even these Contemporary Celtic Myths are based in the past.

For some of the saints stories, there are obvious bits of physical evidence tied in with them. There’s a St Dwynwen’s Chapel on Anglesey—the one with the well full of fortune-telling eels I mention in Playing Chicken. St Kevin from As the Crows Fly has a hermit’s cave you can look at in a valley in Ireland. But the tales in the Maginogion go back far beyond the Christian era.

There’s no actual evidence for the Irish King Matholwch ever existing, I understand he only appears in the Mabinogion. It’s probable he was a minor leader, obviously near the coast because he had ships. The one thing that is possible evidence for the story being true is the Bronze Age burial mound known as Bedd Branwen on the Isle of Anglesey. This is such a good article, I do recommend it, there are links to the Mabinogion and photos of the site. In the tale, after lots of war and horrible things only eight people were left in Ireland and eight in Wales. The Welsh came home and

“…they came to land at Aber Alaw, in Talebolyon, and they sat down to rest. And Branwen looked towards Ireland and towards the Island of the Mighty, to see if she could descry them. “Alas,” said she, “woe is me that I was ever born; two islands have been destroyed because of me!” Then she uttered a loud groan, and there broke her heart. And they made her a four-sided grave, and buried her upon the banks of the Alaw.”

When Bedd Branwen was excavated in the 1960s by Frances Lynch, various Bronze Age burial urns and grave-goods were found and the site was dated to between 1650BC-1400BC.

So the original story had its seeds sown 3,500 years ago.

I find this absolutely fascinating. Oral history has handed that story down in one form or another with embellishments and omissions for all those years and in all those different languages. What we have in The Mabinogion is a faint echo of the past, resonating down the years from a small grave-mound by an insignificant river in a far corner of Europe.

Anyway. Here’s the blurb for Taking Flight. I do apologise for missing out the bit about the resurrection cauldron, but I just couldn’t get it in and keep the word-count low enough!

Taking Flight

Gwyn Mabler is on secondment at the Kings of Ireland Hotel at Tara. He and his brother Brân are in the process of buying the place and Gwyn is getting to grips with the everyday running by shadowing the current owner, Mal Reagan.

Gwyn’s an idiot, though. Mal made it clear from the start he’d like to get Gwyn in his bed and after a couple of weeks of pursuit, Gwyn gave in. Mal was hot and pushy and just the kind of dangerous to pique Gwyn’s interest. He honestly thought Mal knew he was trans.

Since that horrible night, Mal has had Gwyn ‘workshadowing’ Chef in the deeply unhappy kitchen. He doesn’t want to go home and cause a fuss that might make the sale fall through, but when a huge row breaks out over a flour delivery and Mal backhands Gwyn across the face, he finally decides enough is enough. With the help of Darren Starling, one of the line-cooks with whom he’s formed a tentative friendship, he leaves.

During the two-day journey from the middle of Ireland home to Wales they have plenty of time to exchange confidences. Could the delicate pull of attraction between them grow into something stronger? Is it safe for Gwyn to out himself to Darren? Will Darren want to go out with a trans guy? And how will his brother Brân take Gwyn’s arrival home with a stranger?

A 14,500-word short story in the Reworked Celtic Myths series.

Buy Taking Flight: Amazon US – Amazon UK – Everywhere Else!

Taking Flight banner. A short gay romance in the Celtic Myth collection.

Interview: Marie Sinclair

A big welcome to Marie Sinclair this week! Marie is here to talk about her new release and the aromantic main character!

Marie Sinclair interview: Nothing like forever

Greetings to Ally and her readers! I’m Marie Sinclair, a new author in the MM/gay romance genre. Thank you to Ally for letting me come talk about my upcoming release, Nothing Like Forever. It’s the second book in my Finding Forever series, and my fourth release this year.

I call Nothing Like Forever a soulmates to partners love story because it follows Jake and Micah over the course of the twenty years it takes them to figure out how to turn the instant connection they had when they met at eighteen into a sustainable relationship. On the surface, they’re a classic can’t-live-with-him/can’t-live-without-him couple whose attempts to be together lead to crash-and-burn disasters and silences that last years. Something always brings them back together, whether it’s a friend’s wedding or a chance encounter on airplane, and makes them keep trying to be together. It isn’t until they’re in their late-30s that they recognize and understand that Jake is aromantic and that, in order to build something together, they have to redefine their expectations of each other and what being in a relationship means.

This novel is all about learning what you can and can’t expect from your partner and what you can and can’t accept for yourself, what are lines you’re willing to cross, and where do you have to stay true to who you are no matter how you feel about the other person.

The idea for writing a romance with an aromantic character is based in a 30+ year friendship I have with a guy I met in college. We met, much like Jake and Micah do, when he came to visit his best friend, who lived on my dorm floor. It truly was an instant connection between us as soon as we saw each other. (And, yes, we have tried to turn that connection into something more a few times, but unlike Jake and Micah, we aren’t actually attracted to each other in that way – figuring that out took us years, and it was every bit as bumpy a road as Jake and Micah have, full of hurt feelings and a sense of betrayal that the universe would bring us together in a way that all the books and songs and movies say is meant to be, and yet…it wasn’t).

It wasn’t until a few years ago, when I was describing my relationship to this man to a new acquaintance, that I began to have an understanding of what was going on. As I described our relationship and the way in which I can often sense when he’s in distress or the time I called him after I came across puppy pictures of our dog who’d recently passed only to have him tell me he’d just (and I mean, just, he had it in his hands when I called) found a pamphlet his vet had given him after his dog passed away a few years before, this acquaintance said, “That’s so romantic! Like something out of a movie!”

Something in that moment made everything click, and I started to research aromanticism. The more I learned, the more I realized that my friend is aromantic, and the more I wanted to take on the challenge of writing a romance with a main character who does not experience romantic attraction.

Aromanticism is often linked with asexuality (aro/ace) in the queer community, but that’s a bit misleading. There are people who are both asexual (experiencing little or no sexual attraction) and aromantic, but they don’t necessarily go hand in hand. There are people who don’t experience romantic attraction but have a high sex drive. One of the challenges for aromantic individuals is that romantic attraction is so ubiquitous in most cultures that we don’t recognize there’s a difference between sexual and romantic attraction.

I did a lot of research as well as worked with an authenticity reader to make Jake’s experiences as true as I could. In the end, I settled on Jake being demi-aro, meaning that he can develop romantic feelings but only for someone he’s intensely connected to. While Jake intentionally comes off as a player at the beginning, I tried to be careful with the language I used in his POV chapters to highlight physical and sexual attraction to Micah. As the story progresses, that language begins to include more romantic attraction and then, as I hope you’ll see because I’ve enticed you to read the book, results in some epic fails for Jake as he tries to master what it means to be a boyfriend.

If you’re interested in more information about aromanticism, I highly recommend starting with the LGBTQ Wiki https://lgbta.wikia.org/wiki/LGBTA_Wiki. There are also some wonderful IG accounts such as aro.aro.ace and aromantic_support that can provide resources as well as information.

Nothing Like Forever

Fairy tales say that when you meet the love of your life, you know. Micah and Jake definitely knew they’d met someone special the instant they saw each other. Only Jake doesn’t believe in fairy tales, and Micah believes in them too much.

Nothing Like Forever is an insta-lust, soulmates-to-partners, can’t-live-with-him/can’t-live-without-him unconventional love story in which Jake and Micah learn that loving someone isn’t always enough for a happily ever after, and sometimes the journey is as important as the destination.

Now available for pre-order on Amazon and releases on KU on 10 August 2021.

Excerpt

Jake knew someone was in his house as soon as he opened the front door. It was something in the way the air moved, or the echoes sounded in rooms that should be empty, maybe the trace of a scent that was out of the ordinary. Whatever it was, it put Jake on alert that last night’s hookup had stayed longer than was either necessary or welcome.

He put his briefcase down on the table by the front door and toed off his shoes before shrugging out of his wool overcoat and taking off his leather gloves. An arctic blast had blown in from Alaska over the weekend and the temperature in the Bay Area was still in the low forties. Jake left his coat draped across the lime green chair that had been a gift from an interior decorator he’d slept with a few weeks ago.

He’d assured Jake it was fun and kitschy in a 1960’s Palm Springs pool party way, totally in keeping with his ocean front bungalow. Jake wasn’t sure he was a fun and kitschy type, but he was definitely not an interior decorator kind of guy. The more times he saw the chair, the more he hated it. Not to mention it reminded him of the less-than-stellar sex they’d had, and the way the guy had screamed dramatically as he came. Jake was not a fan of performative orgasms.

At the moment, though, Jake had more pressing issues than a walk down memory lane and deciding whether he wanted to hurl the chair out the door. There was a twink to send home as well. The guy had been a fun fuck, maybe he’d gift him the chair on his way out.

Jake had very specific and clear-cut rules for hook-ups and made sure potential partners understood them before he brought them home. No kissing. No overnights unless given an invitation. No sharing his bed: fucking happened in the guest room and that’s where hook-ups stayed. There were no repeats, and no exceptions.

He’d long ago accepted that he was interested in sex not relationships. Romantic gestures and sentimentality made his skin crawl, and finding Mr. Right had never been his goal, and, even though he’d tried relationships a couple of times, Jake was only ever looking for Mr. Right Now. He had little patience for anyone who thought they could change his mind or expected him to make an exception for them.

He climbed the stairs to the living room, and stepped through the archway on alert for anything that might have been moved. The room looked the same as he’d left it with its leather sofas and dark wood tables and blond hardwood floors. The big picture window looked out over Great Highway and towards the Pacific Ocean beyond, both sea and sky gray. He didn’t stop to admire the view, focused instead on finding the location in which his visitor was overstaying his welcome. When he saw the roller suitcase tucked into a corner, he realized he had a different issue to deal with entirely.

The bag was the generic black all flight attendants used, but he knew who this one belonged to without looking at the ID tag.

Micah.

What had it been? Six months since he’d left San Francisco? Maybe eight? A year? Fuck, could it have been that long since they’d seen each other? Since they’d last spoken?

Jake tried to remember when Micah stopped flying out of SFO and transferred to Seattle. It had been nearly a year since Micah’s part-time residence in his house had come to a devastating end when Micah crossed a line he knew was unforgiveable. They both had that night. Jake wasn’t enough of an asshole to blame it all on Micah, but they’d also both gone silent afterwards. No texts, no calls, nothing. That wasn’t surprising. In the history of their relationship, they’d done this before, but Micah usually got in touch after they both cooled down. When that hadn’t happened, Jake figured they were probably done for good this time and let the walls he’d erected harden into fortifications.

Now Micah was back, and Jake knew, no matter how hard he tried, he’d never be able to say no to Micah.

About Marie

Marie Sinclair is a queer writer living in San Francisco. Though she’s been a writer all her life, it wasn’t until she stumbled upon MM romance that she knew she’d found a home for herself and all the characters in her head.

Her focus is on contemporary romance, usually on the steamy side, and HEAs are guaranteed, though it might take some work for the couples to get there. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Marie believes in rooting her stories in the real world of queer culture and showing how love can survive even in challenging times.

Her first novel, A Kind of Forever, released in January of 2021, with a prequel novella, A Winter’s Dance, available on Prolific Works and Book Funnel. Jake and Micah’s prequel novella, Nothing Like a Summer’s Romance, which details the month they spent together when they were nineteen, is available on Amazon and KU.

Marie’s Sin Bin readers’ group on Facebook : IG: marie.sinbooks : Twitter @marie_sinbooks : Website and newsletter sign-up: www.sinbinbooks.com

On-the-job skills

So, Taking Flight is out next Tuesday! (It’s already on pre-order at a few places if that’s your thing). I thought I’d do one of those terribly insightful writer posts about how sometimes things work and sometimes things don’t work and sometimes you have no idea which is which until you start to get the words out on the page.

Three covers of Contemporary Celtic Myths

The Celtic Myth stories began almost as a joke. The Cariad Chapter of the Romance Novelists’ Association were talking about Welsh romances for St Dwynwen’s Day. St Dwynwen is known, rather inaccurately, as The Welsh St Valentine. I didn’t have anything to put forward to be promoted for her ‘day’ of 25^th January, so I sat down and wrote something. I took the elements of the Dwynwen myth and made a short, low-heat hurt-comfort story about two men who meet at a remote cottage in the depths of January. It also featured a large dog and some chickens.

I enjoyed writing it so much (and making the cover) that I thought I’d do another one. I have always been fascinated by crows and so St Kevin and the ornithological element to his legend was easy. I still really enjoyed the short-story exercise, so I just kept going and because the previous two stories were about birds, the story of Brânwen and the starling seemed like a natural progression.

It brewed around in my head all the time I was writing The Fog of War, with the starling as the main character. I was going to have him fly off with Brânwen’s message to her brother Brân and then fall for Brân and the two of them go back and rescue Brânwen. But when I came to write it, it really didn’t feel right.

This was partly because it’s such a huge story, I think, and I didn’t want to write a full-length novel. The Mabinogion is not for the faint-hearted. But it was also because as I went along, it felt like Brânwen was just a plot device in the story. And of course, she is, in the original. The poor woman has no self-realisation at all…she gets married off, she gets banished, she gets rescued, her son gets killed (by her half brother!), both Wales and Ireland get razed to the ground around her and the only decision she makes at all is at the end of the story, when she kills herself. It felt really weird trying to craft a low-key romance for two other people around that.

Nevertheless, I tried.

After a while, I realised I was writing rubbish, so I stopped and had a think. And my think led me to the conclusion that I didn’t want to write about Brân the Blessed at all. He’s Gwyn’s big brother in my story and I had great fun with him when I was able to cast him as overprotective sibling. As a main character though, he didn’t work at all.

Once I’d got that straight in my head, I was able to take the Brânwen character and make her/him the master of his own destiny. Gwyn gets himself out of his situation at The Kings of Ireland hotel with the help of Darren Starling. He has some help. But he manages his own life rather than being moved around like a chess piece.

It’s a much more satisfying story and was a salutary writing lesson for me.

I really hope you like it!

Preorder Taking Flight here

Taking Flight

A 14,500-word short story in the Reworked Celtic Myths series.

Preorder Taking Flight: Amazon – Everywhere Else!

Border Magic and The Green Book: A secondary character

All of the Border Magic books (previously the Lost in Time books) are based around The Green Book. It’s featured to a greater or lesser extent in every book in the series and I am starting to see it as a main character who has it’s own timeline. I’m not entirely sure what it contains myself, but it seems like there’s one spell (except they’re not spells, let’s be clear, they’re just instructions!) for each story so far.

Deleted Snippet, The Flowers of Time: The Green Book

The Flowers of Time, now in Audible. "Jones was written perfectly. As a non-binary person I felt seen, and may have shed a tear once or twice". "I loved Flowers. It's sweet and sexy, but also fascinating...and creepy."

As Jones got further and further in to the Green Book (she began to capitalize it in her own mind when thinking about it), she became more and more convinced that her father had believed it to be at least based in fact, if not completely factual.

Some of it she couldn’t translate. It was written in a myriad of different languages and hands. Some of the pages were even printed and had clearly been bound in between other pages retrospectively. The enterprise looked as if it had started out as someone’s journal and then perhaps passed through a few different owners who had continued the work before coming in to her own hands. If Pater had found it in the library at Penel Orleiu, god knew how long it had been there. They’d come out to India in the mid-fifties and Jones had been four when they left England, that much she knew. So he had probably had it a few years before that. It could be forty years old. Or a hundred. She didn’t think it was much older than that, from the gold-tooling on the binding and the way the leather and paper were aged. But it was difficult to tell.

Some of the ink was a faded brown color, clearly not very good quality. And some of it was very clear. One page was written in a very pretty green. It wasn’t a cohesive work at all.

So far, we know the book is bound in green leather with gold tooling and it’s written in lots of different languages with a mixture different handwriting and print, some of it on odd bits of paper that have been shoved in higgledy-piggledy. No-one has been able to work out where or when it originated, least of all me. However, this is what we do know:

1611: The book is known to be in Baden. Piece inserted by an unknown elderly traveller who mentions the Himalayas. They talk about pulling power from the border to make magic. (reference: The Flowers of Time)
1730s to 1779: The book is known to be with Franklin Jones. Franklin finds it in the library in his country house, Penel Orlieu. It probably arrived there in a job-lot of books bought by his Grandfather around 1690. He takes it to India with him in the mid 1750s. (reference: The Flowers of Time)
1779: Jones finds the book among her father’s things. (The Flowers of Time)
1848: Jones leaves it in her cousin’s library at Penel House in London. (The Flowers of Time)
1890 to 1920s: The book is at Webber’s Farm in Somerset, with Arthur, Matty & Rob. (Inheritance of Shadows and Bradfield Trilogy – coming soon!)
2016: Mira finds the book in a second-hand shop in London. The book is left behind at her flat when she and Lew go back to 1919. (Lost in Time)

I have a few more stories for it yet, so this time-line will no doubt expand. Because I write in a bit of a random fashion, the stories start off at one point and I have a fairly firm idea of what’s going to happen; and then the characters all hare off in a different direction with me racing to catch up.

The book seems to have life of its own in much the same manner as my human characters do, and functions as a thread running through all the stories. Because my universe has the possibility of time-travel, that makes the whole thing more complicated. It wouldn’t surprise me if the book turns out to have been made in 2051 and then jettisoned back to the sixteenth century. Or created in 1496 and then jumped a hundred years for some reason.

I see the magic in the universe as very unknown and unpredictable. It’s our own world with a hidden layer beneath, if you like. And there’s always a price to pay if you use it; if you’re lucky, and not a nice person, you can sometimes get someone else to pay the price. If not, you get ingested by a magical squid or sucked in to a vortex of rabid mice or eaten by a guinea pig. (WARNING: These are not real examples).

I like the fact that the reader probably knows more about how the magical bits of the universe work than the characters. Each book is self-contained (except Lost in Time, which has a HFN and sort of runs on in to Shadows on the Border for a proper HEA, because it was my first novel and I wasn’t quite sure how it was all going to work). The central story is always the development of a relationship between two people discovering more about the concept of the Border and pulling energy from it to make magical things happen or stop them.

The characters in the love story change. But behind everything lurks the Border and the magic, and the book.