So, here’s our New Thing! My Office Writing Buddies ™, Nell Iris and Ofelia Grand and I all run blogs and we like to drop in to each other’s places and make things collaborative. So we have set up a little group of like-minded people who write similar stories and we are all going to pick a topic once a month and write about it.
I have [please insert your drumroll here] set up a webring. Webrings are an ancient and venerable part of the internet and some of you might not even know what they are. My memories of them from the glorious nineties and noughties are…variable. There weren’t many easy options to find like-minded people on the world wide interweb, so bloggers and website hosts with similar interests got together in groups and directed one-another to our sites. You signed up, stuck a bit of code on your webpage that produced something like this and off you went:
(Purely in hopes of admiration, I need to say at this point that I forked a repository on Github to make this happen—I regularly say my coding days are over and they definitely are, I found it tortuous!)
The result of all this is that a handful of us are going to pick a topic, write about it on the last Friday of the month and link to each other’s posts. Because we are all high-stress people, the plan is to be very easy going and not put pressure on ourselves…if we don’t fancy a topic one month, we just don’t do it.
Our first posts will be going up on the Friday 25th of March, so do keep an eye out! We hope to see you around!
I’ve been having a bit of blog-block recently, so I asked in my facebook group for suggestions and a lot of lovely people gave me questions to answer and topics to write about. To start with today, I picked Anabela’s…Are there any real people or personalities you’d like to turn into fictional characters? (I’ll also be asking this regularly in my newsletter if you don’t do facebook).
Well…
It’s a tricksy subject, because I think as a writer no-one would ever speak to you again if they thought you spent every interaction making mental notes about them to slide them in to a novel. Also…it’s a bit rude, I think? As if you’re using real people for other people’s entertainment. It seems immoral to me to pinch someone wholesale from real life and stick them in a work of fiction for other people’s entertainment, particularly if it’s painful situations or trauma that one’s writing about or putting the character through. It just doesn’t seem right.
So the broad answer to that is no, there aren’t.
But then we get to the narrow answer, of which there are two!
Firstly, my the development of my main characters is sometimes sparked by real-life people. For example, Edie in the The Flowers of Time was inspired by the artist Marianne North, a British woman who travelled all over the world painting flowers in the second half of the nineteenth century. She was remarkable both for her travels and for her talent. And a lot of Edie and Jones’ travels are based on those of Isabella Bird, another Victorian woman from Britain who travelled widely and wrote travelogues. (She was casually racist in the standard manner of the British at that time, so do be aware of that if you want to explore her work further. I took some of her travels as inspiration and I left her personality well behind.)
Sylvia Marks in The Fog of War was sparked by an Edwardian lady doctor I remember my grandmother telling me about in Wellington in Somerset during her childhood. I know nothing about her personality apart from her nephew’s wife, a friend of mine, reporting that ‘she was a game old bird who smoked like a chimney’ when he knew her in the 1960s. Granny was struck by the fact that she’d come to visit her mother and sit on the kitchen table and swing her legs and smoke. So that was where Sylvia began. I jumped off from those two things and went and researched women doctors of that era.
For main characters like this I begin with a glimmer from somewhere and the character then grows on their own. Sometimes it doesn’t work…I have an abandoned post-apocalyptic-plague thing I began six months before covid where the MC is based on a dear friend and I made them too alike—even talking to him about it to check whether it freaked him out too much—and I can’t write it. That’s possibly for covid reasons but also because I don’t want to think about him naked (sorry about that, P, if you’re reading this!). And for my upcoming May release, the one for Naked Gardening Day, I got stuck when I realised I’d drawn heavily on my memories of my father for George, one of the protagonists. It made things just a tad awkward until I realised and could rewrite him so it didn’t make me need therapy.
So that’s the main character bit. I sometimes start with a snapshot of a real person and develop a main character from there. If I try and make them too like a real person, then it doesn’t work.
Secondly though, there are definitely aspects of people I’ve met that I make a part of my supporting cast. Of necessity supporting cast members tend to be more caricatures, I think? So they have one or two traits that make them useful in the story, to move it along or provide comic relief or pathos or even just background depth. I’m thinking in particular of Jimmy from Taking Stock, who acts a bit like a local chap I know who used to help my Mama with her sheep. His appearances are third-party, we only ever see him through the eyes of the main characters. We never know what he’s thinking or what his feelings are. He’s just a foil for my main characters and the story and I don’t ascribe him any motivations.
Similarly in Out of Focus(out on 26th March, pre-order now etc etc!) some of the supporting cast have traits of people I’ve met on my travels. Things like the way they swear, or something someone said…that sort of thing. But again…nothing that is actually them, if that makes sense? Nothing about what they might be thinking or feeling.
I think that’s the crux of it, Anabela! I sometimes use a real-life situation as a spring-board for character development. And I sometimes attribute something I remember someone doing or saying as part of a minor character. The idea of taking a real person wholesale and making them in to a fictional character doesn’t ring my bell at all—quite the opposite.
Next time…a New Thing I’m doing with some author friends…Reading Around the Rainbow!
I’m not usually the sort of person who celebrates New Year’s Eve and this year it was a bit peculiar anyway, because Mr AL spent it in a hotel near the airport so he could collect Talking Child from her Big American Adventure. I had an early night and woke up to find TC’s flight had landed and they were on their way home. It was the best New Year’s present I could have had, really.
This is the first morning I’ve got up to write in the office for a couple of weeks—I had a horrible cold in the week before Christmas and it knocked me completely off track. I have been having serious problems with the third Bradfield book that my editor and I finally tracked down to the fact I don’t actually like my main character; which is a bit of an issue. I have decided to put it on the backburner for a bit and try and reframe her in my mind whilst I write something else in the interim; but I’m still not sure what.
This year I have in my mind that I am not going to write any series. It’s going to be the year of the stand-alone story. And I want to write something new. I’ve been dealing with monsters and the border and all that for six years now and whilst I love my magical world it’s time to try something different, even if I come back to it in a while. That’s why I wanted to write Bradfield #3 early this year and be able to draw a line under it for a bit.
I want to write the companion novel to The Flowers of Time and expand the mm romance between Edie’s brother Hugh and his friend Carruthers. That involves immersing myself in the 1780s again and is something I’ve been looking forward to for a while. And I have another idea I’m calling Space Gays that I haven’t fleshed out yet…I thought it might be a trilogy though, so that’s a no-no for a while under my current rules!
In my half-started folder I have a post-pandemic dystopia I began well before covid hit. I really want to finish it; but since covid I haven’t been able to even look at it…too close to home. I thought I might try and finish it; but I have serious doubts about anyone wanting to read that sort of thing at the moment. Last week’s newsletter poll more or less confirmed that! And I want to write some more Celtic myths. I’m really enjoying them and people seem to like reading them. They’re very satisfying to write.
In among all these ideas, JMS Books has some interesting submission calls this year; particularly one for time-travel romances. I am now wondering about that…but time. I need a way to fold time.
So. That’s my vague writing plans for the new year. I also have more audiobooks on the backburner—I have a lovely person lined up for The Fog of War and I’d like Callum to voice The Quid Pro Quo for me if he’s available.
I do have a spreadsheet that I’m putting things in to so I don’t overwhelm myself; which is basically what happened toward the end of last year. I tend to fill my coping mechanism up to the top and then when something unexpected happens there’s no room and everything overflows. Leaving myself some headroom is definitely a better strategy.
Among all that we have been shielding Littlest again against Omicron. She’s had two jabs and hopefully clinically vulnerable children in the UK will be able to have a third soon, which will put my mind at rest.
I wish you all the very best for 2022. Let’s hope it’s a bit less stressful than the last couple of years.
One of the things I love about working with Callum Hale on my audiobooks is his ability to throw himself into pretty much any British accent and bring the character to life. To my British ear each of the people I’ve created sound exactly as I’ve envisaged them as he brings them off the page.
I asked him to make Rob, from Inheritance of Shadows ‘less ooh-arr’ and he toned the accent down so to me at least, Rob doesn’t sound so much like a heavy-handed son of the Somerset soil. And I wanted Will Grant in the 1920s London Trilogy to sound more like Lord Peter Wimsey. Callum obliged, perfectly. (These are my two favourite of all my characters, ever, incidentally).
The question I’m always asking myself about my writing though, is how right can I get it? I want the history in my books to be accurate, unless I’m deliberately twisting the universe out of true with magic. I think this is the same question historians have to ask themselves about looking at anything in the past. We are both looking at things through our own rose-tinted spectacles, coloured with our own experiences and social expectations. My characters in these books grew up in Victorian England. What did they really think about the Empire? What did they talk about in the pub? What did they really sound like? How did they really smell? We’re fudging it, the whole lot. Historians and archaeologists because of lack of data. And writers because of lack of data and because we don’t want our main characters to be unsympathetic to modern audiences.
Anyway…during one or other of my late-night sessions randomly browsing the web, I came across this programme about Edwardian accents. A regional English language specialist in Germany during the First World War, a real-life Professor Higgins, suddenly realised he had a huge pool of untapped research material in the German army’s British prisoners of war. In this documentary you can actually listen to their voices.
I was very interested in how the modern specialists in the programme say the regional accents of the past are broader in the recordings than they are now. It’s as if the rising tide of London-speak has swept the broad vowels of the regional accents back from the centre of the country, into the more remote west of England. So although to me, Rob sounds about right, a farm labourer from Somerset who’s self-educated and likes to read, to his contemporaries he’d probably have sounded out of place. You can listen to Callum’s reading of him here, in the first chapter of Inheritance of Shadows.
I think, listening to those long-ago voices in the programme, it’s important to remember these men were prisoners. That’s one of the filters we mustn’t discard. Were they doing this work in the language lab out of the kindness of their hearts? Because they were bored and wanted an occupation? Because they were threatened in to it? Because they were offered extra rations or privileges? Are these their actual accents? Or are they performative, a joke on the professor? They’re immensely touching, whatever their origin and I hope you enjoy it.
You can buy the 1920s London audiobooks at Authors Direct.
So, here’s some news! The Quid Pro Quo will be out on the 20th November and here’s the cover and an excerpt!
It’s the second in the Bradfield trilogy following The Fog of War and stars Walter, Sylvia’s nurse-friend; and Simon, a local detective who visits Bradfield to investigate a murder.
The Quid Pro Quo
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?
As Simon was replacing the device on the telephone table a pretty young woman put her head out of a door at toward the end of the hall. “Sylv!” she said, “Do you want tea? I’ve boiled the kettle.” and then when she realised he wasn’t who she thought he was, “Oh, I do beg your pardon! I thought you were Dr Marks!”.
“She’s still in the surgery,” Simon nodded across the hall.
The woman emerged into the hall. “Lucille Hall-Bridges,” she said, extending a hand. “I’m a friend of Sylvia’s. I help with the house.”
Simon took her hand in his. Her grip was sure and warm. “Detective Frost,” he replied. “Nice to meet you, Miss Hall-Bridges. She had a recent bruise running from her jaw to just below her eye, entering the black-and-purple stage.
“I’ve made a pot of tea,” she was saying. “I don’t know whether anyone will want any, but I do like to feel useful and tea is so…normal-making, isn’t it?”
He nodded, slightly bemused at her chatter. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “Very normal.”
She gave a perfunctory tap on the surgery door, opened it and disappeared inside without waiting for a response. “Sylv, Walter, I’ve made tea. Would you and your detective like to come into the drawing room?” Her voice faded, presumably as she joined them in the examination room.
There was a pause. Then, “Oh!” he heard her say. “Oh.” She sounded a little shocked. “What’s happened to her hands?” she asked.
“Scraped on the bottom on the pond I think,” Simon heard Dr Marks say. “She was face-down in the water.”
“Oh.” Miss Hall-Bridges’ voice was small. “Sylvia…there’s…she’s…I can feel…do you think…?” Her voice trailed off and Dr Marks spoke over her, clearly away they might be overhead.
“Let’s not worry about that now, shall we? The policeman is sending her down to Taunton to a postmortem. You go and take the tea-things into the drawing room. We’ll just cover her up.”
