celtic myths – A. L. Lester

#SampleSunday: Sleeping Dogs

I finally got Sleeping Dogs out in time for Halloween! Here’s an excerpt so you can see whether you fancy a slightly spooky low-heat short sapphic short story. It’s $1.99 on Amazon and also in KU.

Sleeping Dogs

Alice doesn’t think she’s ready to start dating again. Or even to make new friends in the village where she’s come to live with her sister’s family. Will a rainy autumn day and an encounter with a mysterious black dog, a beautiful woman, and a fox cub change her mind?

A 10 500-word Halloween short story in the Celtic Myths Collection. With dogs, bats, a camper van with a woodburning stove, and a fox cub.

Available at Amazon and in KU

Excerpt from Sleeping Dogs

As she picked her way down the steep, stony path toward the stream, she was pulled out of her thoughts by a dog barking in the distance. And, perhaps… someone shouting? She stopped and cocked her head as she listened. Where was it coming from? Difficult to say but she thought it was in front of her, down in the valley. It could be echoing around though, bouncing off the hills. She pulled a face and hurried down the path. As she moved forward, both the barking and the shouting got louder and as she rounded the corner that finally took her to the stream, the culprits came in to view.
It was a woman, and the barking was coming from a black Labrador. The woman wasn’t shouting any longer, but she was holding the dog’s collar apparently to prevent it from lunging into the water. On the other bank stood a fox, with three fat cubs ranged behind her, snarling back. Between them in the water was a fox cub, struggling against a rock in the middle of the stream, trying to scramble out of the current. It was having problems and was getting weaker as she watched.
“Can you help?” the woman gasped, struggling with the dog. “I think it’s hurt. I can’t let the dog go because she’ll go for the vixen.”
Alice was already stripping. She didn’t bother to say anything. She ripped off her coat and boots and plunged in up to her hips, gasping at the cold. She could just… just… reach it. She overbalanced and nearly lost her footing as she grasped the struggling cub, but she recovered her balance and backed out as carefully as she could. The fox was limp in her hands.
She passed it up to the woman before scrambling out. “I think it’s dead,” she said. The woman had to let go of the dog before she could take the cub and instead of running off after the vixen, it lay down and crossed its paws. Oh! Her memory tumbled into place like a key in a lock. The dog was the one from yesterday.
And the woman was Morwenna.

Available at Amazon and in KU

#RAtR: What were your characters like as teenagers?

This month’s topic for Read Around the Rainbow is another brainchild of Addison Albright! As some of you already know, #RAtR is a blogging project I am doing with a few friends who also write LGBTQIA romance. You can find everyone by clicking here or on the image to the right, and I will link to everyone’s post on this month’s topic at the bottom of this page.

This month, we have chosen to pick a character and write about what they were like as teenagers. I’ve chosen to write about Kevin from As the Crows Fly.

Kevin is a veterinarian–I keep having to remember to write the word out in full as in the UK we usually shorten it to vet and I think in the US that’s more commonly used for a military veteran!–and he’s also an artist. He lives on the edge of the sea in Wales and he has befriended a murder of crows, one of which lives in the house with him.

That’s pretty eccentric, right?

When I was writing the story I didn’t work up a back-story for him, he more or less sprang fully formed from my pen/keyboard/fingers. I very rarely do a lot more than an an initial sketch for my characters anyway; any back-story usually develops as I go along. For longer length stories I usually have quite a good feel for where they’ve come from by the time I’ve finished writing. It’s not so usual for me to have that relationship with the characters in my shorter stories and it’s only now I’ve sat down and thought about it hard that I’ve worked out what Kevin might have been like in his last few years at school.

I think Kevin probably wasn’t out at school. But he wasn’t closeted either if that makes sense. He was one of the nerdy kids who concentrated on his results and getting into uni so he could follow the career path he was set on. He was very conscious that if he tanked his grades it would be much more complicated for him to get where he wanted to go.

He was also working really hard at the weekends and in the school holidays, helping at the local veterinarian so he built up relevant experience. And when he wasn’t working he spent time drawing. It was a kind of chill-out thing for him and it began when he started sketching the animals at work.

He had friends; but he didn’t have much time to hang out with them because he had so much else going on. He’s always been a bit of a loner. Not a lonely person, but just as happy with his own company and those of his animals as with people he likes.

Apologies that this is a really short post from me this month…I only got back from holiday on Monday and so far, today being Thursday, I have had two zoom meetings, one in person meeting and…erm…about eight sizeable phone-calls from various professionals about one or other of the children. I’m finding it very hard to get in back in to a post-holiday routine, let alone a blogging routine, but I’m hoping next week will be a bit less mad!

As always, to catch up with the character sketches of my Read Around the Rainbow colleagues check out their blogs here: K. L. Noone, Addison Albright, Nell Iris, Ofelia Grand, Holly Day, Fiona Glass, Ellie Thomas, Lillian Francis, Amy Spector.

Read Around the Rainbow. Writers and bloggers of LGBTQIA+ Romance.

Surfacing Again: Otters and anthropomorphism

Morning everyone! Surfacing Again is 99c for the whole of this week and I thought I’d share a bit about otters. This is largely an exercise in basking in cuteness for five hundred words, so please do excuse me.

close up shot of otters — Photo by Silvia Heider on Pexels.com

As you know if you’ve met any of my Celtic myth retellings, they are all based on some sort of legend from the westward Celtic fringe of the British Isles. I began by making them Celtic (hence the name, doh!), but I’ve expanded a bit for the sake of a good story and St Cuthbert was actually knocking round Northumbria in the very early middle ages, during the seventh century. His church was part of the Celtic tradition, but he wasn’t a Celt. I made an exception for him because I was so taken by the otter story. (The whole Celtic church versus the Roman church is a whole other post, so we’ll go with this oversimplification because it’s a niche interest 😊)

So. Cuthbert was an extremely austere chap, who used to go and stand in the sea to pray. When he got out, a pair of otters would come out of the sea too, and dry him off. We know this because a creepy stalker-monk spied on him and later told St Bede, who wrote it in his Life of St Cuthbert.

This is…not usual otter behaviour.

cute wild otter swimming in lake — Photo by David Selbert on Pexels.com

Here in the UK we don’t have sea otters. We just have otters, some of whom prefer to hang out on the coast. I like to think of them as water-cats, or maybe water-dogs, because they are so active and playful. They are the European otter, members of the Mustelid family which also includes stoats, weasels and mink. They’re all pretty fearsome creatures with an exciting set of teeth that you don’t want predating in your chicken house.

They are also exceedingly rare in the UK at this point, although I believe they are less rare than they used to be. My sister (to whom Surfacing Again is dedicated) is our local point of contact for one of the otter protection organisations and she does counting and watching. This seems to mostly involve dangerously hanging over bridges and wading through unpleasantly deep streams to change the cards in her wildlife cameras and then watching the footage and logging what she sees. She also counts up footprints and spraint that she finds. Because they are so endangered, people aren’t encouraged to deliberately go and search for them.

I think we have this anthropomorphic idea in our heads about some wild creatures that doesn’t serve us well, simply because they are so charming. Otters fall into this category I guess.

They eat mostly fish, but will also eat birds, mammals and frogs if they’re hungry. Because they’re inquisitive they will interact with humans occasionally in the way they do in Surfacing Again…coming up to see what’s going on. But like all wild animals they aren’t tame and we shouldn’t see them like that. Having said that I loved Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water when I read it in my teens. In my opinion it’s the ultimate otter book. Maxwell lived with a house full of otters on the west coast of Scotland—he was a naturalist who travelled widely in the interwar and post WW2 years and brought his first otter back from Iraq . It was a different time and these days you have to have a licence to keep a wild animal as a pet.

In my story I tried to balance my desire for Mustelid cuteness with my feeling that otters are wild creatures who should be respected. I hope I’ve done that.

Surfacing Again

Melinda is staying on Lindisfarne for a Christmas break with her old friend when an unexpected argument leaves her alone for the holiday.

It’s the first Christmas since her mother died and the island’s peace and wild tranquillity bring balm to her wounded heart. Two chance meetings, first with a pair of wary otters and then with cafe-owner Rowan, bring her genuine joy.

Will her tentative relationship with Rowan survive the end of her holiday and the turning of the year?

Buy on Amazon : Buy Elsewhere : Add to Goodreads

otters drinking water from river — Photo by Kieren Ridley on Pexels.com

New year, new stories

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.

Surfacing Again: Otters

Surfacing Again came about because I essentially decided I wanted to write a story with otters, for no other reason than otters; so I went looking for myths I might be able to adapt. There are quite a few otter-myths in the UK—I liked the Otter Kings of Scotland very much and might see if I can write something longer about them at some point. But I was also very drawn to St Cuthbert and his helpful otters on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.

As I wrote in my previous post, Lindisfarne is a small island off the North East coast of Northumbria in England, and the first, wooden, monastery was built there by monks from Iona (in Scotland) under St Aidan in 635AD. St Cuthbert was the Bishop of Lindisfarne from 685AD until he died in 687AD, but he seems to have been ubiquitous to the area for a couple of decades before that. Bede wrote a ‘Life of St Cuthbert’ in the early years of the eighth century and that’s where the otters come in.

“…[St Cuthbert] went down to the sea, which flows beneath, and going into it, until the water reached his neck and arms, spent the night in praising God. When the dawn of day approached, he came out of the water, and, falling on his knees, began to pray again. Whilst he was doing this, two quadrupeds, called otters, came up from the sea, and, lying down before him on the sand, breathed upon his feet, and wiped them with their hair after which, having received his blessing, they returned to their native element.”

It all sounds extremely unlikely, as Lin comments in Surfacing Again…however, it also sounds extremely charming and I couldn’t not use it.

The UK’s species of otter is Lutra Lutra, the Eurasian otter. We don’t have sea-otters, we just have some colonies of otters that like to hang out by the sea. They’re part of the mustelid family, which also includes stoats, weasels, polecats, ferrets and mink…they’re essentially enormous aquatic weasels.

They live in family groups and stay with their parents until they’re fourteen or fifteen months old. Population is gradually increasing again in the UK where they have been very sparse in the last few decades due to river pollution. You can read more about them and their habitats at the UK Wild Otter Trust and there’s a bit more about Coastal Otters in Scotland on the Forestry and Land Scotland website.

Here are some Asiatic Short-Clawed otters from New Zealand, making their characteristic chirping noise:

Surfacing Again: A short contemporary lesbian romance

Melinda is staying on Lindisfarne for a Christmas break with her old friend when an unexpected argument leaves her alone for the holiday.

Will her tentative relationship with Rowan survive the end of her holiday and the turning of the year?

A short sapphic Christmas story. With otters.

BUY SURFACING AGAIN

And finally, you may have realised my title is taken from the Seamus Heaney poem The Otter.