amwriting – Page 5 – A. L. Lester

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

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.

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.

Why the 1920s?

Sylvia Marks is coming soon! A 1920s lesbian romance. With magic and suspense. And tea. The first of a new trilogy set in the Border Magic universe.

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.

Publishing Delays

wood desk laptop office — Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

As those of you who follow my newsletter know, the last couple of weeks have been a real nightmare here at Lester Towers.

Littlest had an accident at school and broke her nose, which has caused all the fuss you’d expect, plus worry that she’d have to have it re-broken and re-set to ensure it’s still possible to naso-gastric tube her in the future if necessary. This has, thankfully, turned out not to be the case, but it’s taken ages for ENT to decide. I’ve had a visit to hospital for a minor procedure which was more tedious than worrying, Talking Child has been stressed about school and her sister and me. And finally Mr AL has put his back out lifting Littlest, which has caused our whole family raft to list alarmingly to one side.

So, we’re struggling, basically. Writing itself and my somewhat intermittent early morning writing sprints with my Office Colleagues, Ofelia Grand, Nell Iris and J. M. Snyder have been what’s keeping me going.

The cherry on the top of the disaster-Bakewell tart however, has been that my dear friend and editor has been hospitalised with covid. She is home and recovering now, which is an enormous relief, but as everyone knows, it’s a long haul.

The result of all this non-writing stress is that we are pushing the release of The Fog of War back until 16th August. I’m very sorry about it, but there it is, people are more important than stories when it comes down to it. The Starling story (which still doesn’t have a name, this is clearly my brand) is puttering along but again it’s all a bit up in the air.

School breaks up for summer in the last week of July, so I have no idea what my writing schedule will be over the weeks after that–last year I did quite well getting up before everyone else and getting on with it. The plan is to release the Sylvia trilogy three months apart, and I’m still hoping that will work, although I’m starting to wonder whether I’ve over-faced myself. Time will tell!

Anyway, that’s it. We’re all okay, but it’s been a tough few weeks. I hope you’re all doing all right too in these uncertain times.

Taking Stock: Deleted Scene

Here’s a deleted scene I found from Taking Stock. It’s Patsy Walker, who runs the Post Office, talking to HER friend Sally, who’s Laurie’s housekeeper. It’s whilst he’s in hospital recovering from his stroke. I took it out because it didn’t move the story along at all.

Book cover of Taking Stock — Taking Stock

“He’s going to be a handful,” Patsy Walker said to her friend Sally Beelock as she filled the tea-pot. “You’ll have trouble with him.”

Sally pulled a face. “You don’t need to tell me that,” she said. “He’s already talking about coming home and the stupid idiot can’t even stand up without help yet.”

“He’s improving though, yes?” Patsy asked.

“Yes, definitely. And it’s only been a week. They say that he needs to keep trying to move everything, his arm, his fingers, his leg, and the more he does that the more it’ll help.” She sighed. “They don’t know if it’ll all come back properly, but they say there’s a good chance.”

Patsy passed her a mug of tea and sat down opposite her at the kitchen table where she could see in to the shop. There weren’t any customers at the moment, but the early autumn day was warm and she had the outside door propped open as usual, which meant the bell wouldn’t ring if anyone came in.

“How are you managing?” she asked Sally. “It must have been a shock. He’s only what, thirty?”

“Thirty-three,” Sally said absently. “Yes. I thought it was curtains for him to be honest, Pat. Jimmy came down to get me at Carsters once the ambulance had gone. He didn’t tell me much, just said I should get into the hospital. Apparently he was unconscious, pretty much.”

Patsy patted her hand. “Well, he’s going to be fine, love. You’ll see. Look at Roger Chedzoy. He had a stroke four years ago and you’d never really know to look at him now.”

“He’s sixty-three though,” Sally said. “I mean, there’s never a good age, is there? But Laurie’s so young.”

Patsy nodded. “And that means he’s got more fight in him and he’ll get over it quickly. You’ll see.”