I’ve been writing one way and another since Miss Lowe told me off for using ‘again and again’ repetitively in my story about a man climbing a mountain circa 1978. I don’t think I’ve ever really thought of myself as ‘a writer’ or an ‘author’. It was always something I was going to become in my future.
I’m fifty-one now and my first book was published about four years ago with JMS Books. I now have a dozen books and short stories out in the wild. The future is here… but I still don’t really feel like a ‘proper’ writer. It’s a strange sort of disconnection. I’m published, people bough the first book and presumably quite liked it because they went on to buy more. But I still don’t feel like a real author. Not that being published or not published is a distinction, at all- if you write, you are a writer. But for me it’s a confidence issue.
It’s not that I expected to lay on a chaise in a negligee a la Barbara Cartland and have a crowd of beautiful persons of all genders peel grapes to hand-feed me whilst I dictated to my pug. But somehow, I expected that by this point I would feel more at ease with the idea that people like my work.
I didn’t expect to spend so much of the time writing-but-not-writing. My non-family time is carved out with a pickaxe around medical and education appointments and the care of a severely disabled child. My own health limitations compound that. So sometimes I have three hours in the day to work, sometimes I have none.
The thing that has really amazed me, naively probably, is that I spend as much time on social media, marketing and networking as I do writing. I blog and I have Facebook, Instagram and Twitter presences that need keeping fresh. I don’t think there’s much point having them if you’re set on transmit the whole time and don’t interact. And I like interacting. I make graphics using Canva for my social media. I write my newsletter. I’ve just started experimenting with tiktok. I use Facebook mostly to chat with other genre authors rather than reader groups and I use Twitter to ramble about life in general rather than having a closely curated online personality.
Sometimes I feel spread very thin. On the other hand, if I don’t have enough head space for writing or for research, still being able to write and schedule a blog post feels like I have achieved something, even if it’s not another thousand words of my work in progress. For example, I’m writing this with a child sat beside me attempting to deconstruct my glasses and get me to watch Mr Tumble on her iPad. It’s unlikely I’ll manage many actual words, but a post like this I can pick up and put down as required.
A lot of my support network is online, particularly in these COVID-times. That was something I expected- I’ve had an online presence one way or another since the mid-nineties and as far as I’m concerned there’s not much difference between online friends and real friends. But sometimes it’s nice to sit in a room with actual warm bodies and kick ideas around.
I perhaps didn’t expect there to be such a community feel to writing. The first group I ever joined was a Goodreads writer group and I got such a lot of support from there that it really did give me the confidence to submit for publication. I don’t think I would have if they hadn’t been so supportive. (Thank you, if any of you read this). I think QRI and groups like it are a fantastic resource for authors to support each other.
We are essentially lone wolves, but it’s nice to have a pack when you need one.
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.
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!
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.
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 25th 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.
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.
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
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)
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.
It may have come to your attention by now that I like to write in the 1920s! So, what inspired me to do that and why do I keep coming back to it?
My first foray into the decade was Lost in Time, and that was a sort of incidental kind of period piece. I began writing as the hundred year anniversary of World War One was marked and I was doing a lot of thinking about my grandparents. My father’s father was the only survivor of a tank crew; and my mother’s great-uncle was a runner between the trenches who was killed before he hit twenty.
I began thinking about how our experiences a hundred years later contrast with the experiences of that earlier generation. Those thoughts grew into Lost in Time, with Lew from 2016 bringing his modern lens to bear on the 1919 world he found himself in.
At that point in my writing I really didn’t have a plan. I discovery-wrote Lost in Time without any idea of what I was doing—I was just telling the story. It’s a happy-for-now rather than a happy-ever-after and Shadows on the Border was a natural extension that allowed me to explore the happy-for-now a bit more; and then I ended up needing a resolution for Will and Fenn, so The Hunted and the Hind came about. Once I began the story in book one, I just had to carry on until I got to the end. And of course, people’s stories don’t end when they begin a relationship, quite the opposite. That’s always something I’ve found difficult in my writing and my reading too.
In the meantime I was writing a serial for my newsletter subscribers. I had written a short-story called The Gate, set in 1919 as an introduction to the world before Lost in Time was published. It was short and full of paranormal stuff, but the relationship resolution was very tentative and I wanted to know what happened afterwards. That became Inheritance of Shadows. That’s a rural story, with a lot inspired by the old farmers I remember as a child—the ones who’s names are on the local war memorials as serving in the First World War.
These four books concentrate on men and the male experience of the war and what happens afterwards, when you come home.
With The Fog of War I’ve done various things a bit differently.
Firstly, it’s a book about women. Dr Sylvia Marks is a minor character in Inheritance of Shadows. I loved her when I wrote her and so did my editor, who encouraged me to write more about her. I think she was envisaging a kind of village doctor solves cosy mysteries kind of series, but it appears that I am congenitally unable to write long stories that don’t contain some sort of paranormal shenanigans. So here we are.
I began reading around women doctors and how they contributed to the war effort and I came across Dr Elsie Inglis and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and Dr Flora Murray and Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson, who ran the Endell Street Military Hospital. The institutions were staffed almost entirely by women and additionally, Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson were together as a couple.
I then remembered my grandmother telling me about a local lady doctor who would visit her mother in the pre- and post- World War One years and hitch her skirts up and sit on the kitchen table, smoking and chatting. I have a friend who is part of that family and I asked if her husband could remember anything about her. She passed on that he remembered her from family gatherings in the 1960s and she was a tough old bird who smoked like a chimney. My friend, who is, handily, an archivist, also mentioned she had wind of another lady doctor who served in France but then came home and gave up the profession, got married and had children.
It was all grist to my mill.
Plus, the snappy dialogue and the Dorothy L. Sayers vibe I can bring to it makes it fun to write. I read a lot of 1920s and 1920s detective novels…The Toff, Miss Marple, Miss Fisher…what’s not to like?
So to answer my own question, I began with one idea and it’s all snowballed from there. I keep finding more and more interesting snippets from the 1920s that I want to explore.
The Fog of War will be published by JMS Books on 16th August 2021.
