#AMA: Blending real people and fictional characters

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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!

The world of The Flowers of Time

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.)

The Fog of War by A. L. Lester, First in the Bradfield Trilogy, part of the Border Magic Universe

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.

Jimmy, age 84. Extremely elderly farmhand from Inheritance of Shadows. Married. Lots of children and grandchildren.

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.

Out of Focus by A. L. Lester

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!

The Flowers of Time: Deleted Scene

Look what I found! I’ve been trying to organise my documents folder a bit–don’t laugh, I bet you’ve all been there–and I found this deleted scene from the the first draft of The Flowers of Time.

The Flowers of Time. A determined lady botanist and a non-binary explorer. Mystery, suspense, monsters and romance in England and the Himalayas in 1780.

My first draft was a mess, honestly. I wrote it over a long period, some of which was during the three weeks I spent in a specialist hospital unit trying to get my seizures sorted–and there were quite a few repeated scenes and double-ups that eventually got chopped out.

Sometimes taking things out is fine, I can see the story will run more smoothly and effectively and I have no emotional attachment to the words I’m deleting. And sometimes I can see that things need to come out and it still really hurts to pull them. This was one of the latter.

Here Edie, our plucky botanical-artist heroine is well on the way to becoming a seasoned traveller. I wanted the physical journeys the characters made (to England for Jones and to India for Edie and then on over the mountains together) to reflect their character growth. There were a lot of strands to plait together and I said quite a few things more than once and had a lot of scenes in there that didn’t move the story forward. This really slowed things down–it’s basically an info-dump about Edie’s initial experience of India, which is interesting if you’re a history nerd (raises hand) and in love with Edie (raises other hand) but less useful to a reader who wants to find out what’s going on for goodness sake! rather than read a history book.

So here we have a deleted scene…part of Edie’s journey.

Despite their father’s occupation as a navy captain and two of her brothers following the same profession, and despite her mother’s early married years taking place on the oceans on board her father’s ship, Edie had never left dry land before this adventure. It had been a terrifying and amazing journey. The cramped quarters and frankly noxious living conditions had been a revelation. She had much more sympathy with her father and brothers now she had lived for a few months in the way they did their whole lives. It had taken seven months from leaving Portsmouth on the Athena to their arrival in Bombay. She had spent the time sewing rough hessian and linen in to bags that would hopefully help to keep alive the plant specimens she planned to send home by retaining moisture round the roots.

When they finally arrived at Bombay it had been a feast to her sense-starved self. The sea-voyage had been magnificent, but the ship was so confining. She wanted to be off seeing the countryside, drinking in all the new experiences she could.
She had left the practical travel arrangements to Bennett and Henry since they seemed to wish to be busy and were dismissive of her assistance. They had procured good quality square tents, one for each of them, a folding camp bed each, some stools and chairs that also folded and the various bedding and cooking accoutrements that were necessary. There were conical tents for the servants and Carruthers’ assistants to sleep in and some mules and camels to carry everything. All in all there were a couple of dozen in their party, which included a handful of Company Lieutenants that were both to assist Carruthers in his geographical and astronomical measurements and serve to protect them.

She had refused to travel in a litter around the city or on their journey like the few other British ladies. Most of them thought her peculiar. Why take up the time of four men though, when she could just as well ride her own horse? She found the handful of ladies married to the East India Company men a little tedious, if she was honest with herself. The whole of the John Company, really. They were very concerned with keeping up standards as though they were in London and had seized on her the moment she had crossed the pounding surf in the small boats that ferried passengers and goods from ship to shore, wanting to know the latest gossip and fashions.
More interesting were the ladies who were not quite ladies, married to some of the soldiers and lesser Company employees.

There had been a pair of sisters on the ship who had been going out to join their cousin. Because Edie had left her maid at home, she had engaged both of them to help her with her toilette aboard ship. Their cousin was married to a soldier and ran a millinery shop. Both sisters were hoping to find husbands. One was a seamstress who would to join her cousin’s business and the other was a baker who was hoping to open her own patisserie near the Company accommodations. There were a number of women in equivalent trades in the small British community and to Edie, their way of life seemed much more sensibly geared to the foreign heat and customs than that of the greater ladies who strove to maintain British manners.
That aside, Bombay was fascinating. A swirl of heat and noise and color and dust and smells that turned her head inside out and round again . They had stayed in the city for three weeks preparing for their onward journey to meet Miss Jones and her party at Srinegar in late May in order to travel over the Himalaya to Leh before the monsoon came in July
.

You can find The Flowers of Time at all the usual ebook retailers (yadda yadda yadda!) and it’s available in paperback and audio too.

The Flowers of Time

The Flowers of Time

:: A determined lady botanist : a non-binary explorer : mystery, suspense, monsters and romance : England and the Himalayas in 1780 ::

A determined lady botanist and a non-binary explorer make the long journey over the high Himalayan mountain passes from Kashmir to Little Tibet, collecting flowers and exploring ruins on the way. Will Jones discover the root of the mysterious deaths of her parents? Will she confide in Edie and allow her to help in the quest?

It’s a trip fraught with perils for both of them, not least those of the heart.

“…an enjoyable escapist story, with magic, romance and adventure. The characters were eminently likeable, and I wanted to spend time with them”- The Lesbian Review

Amazon : Audible : Everywhere Else

The Flowers of Time: Travelling in the Himalayas in 1780

The Flowers of Time

I’ve been revisiting The Flowers of Time over the last week or so because I’m thinking about writing a companion novel. One of my betas described the book as ‘an eighteenth century road trip’ and that’s a good description of quite a large chunk of it. Jones, Edie and their companions travel over the Himalayas from Srinagar in Kashmir to Leh in Ladakh.

Before the two hundred and fifty mile Srinagar-Leh Highway was built in 1962, the journey between the two cities took about three weeks on two or four feet. The Highway was pre-dated by a track named the Treaty Road from about 1870. The Treaty Road in turn followed the path of the old Central Asian trade route north to Yarkand and in to China. People talk about The Silk Road as if it’s a single route…actually, there are a lot of different Silk Roads winding all over the area that have been used for thousands of years.

You can click through and see the rough route on Google Maps – there are also satellite photos and some Street Views, which give you a really good idea of the landscape. The modern highway is closed for a significant period of each year because of snowfall.

Edie and Jones’ journey is loosely based on that of Isabella Bird, a British woman who followed the same route a hundred and ten years after my story is set, in 1889. She wrote about her travels in a book called Among the Tibetans, which I drew on heavily. The route would not have changed all that much between Edie’s day and hers.

Whilst in one sense Isabella was firmly rooted in her time and her British Empire background she was also unusual in that she traveled a lot, often without the requisite-at-the-time white male company. The biography I have of her describes her as ‘the foremost travel writer of her day’. She began her travels in the 1850s as a young woman, when her doctor recommended it for her health. Between then and her death in 1904, she wrote books about her travels in the Americas, Hawaii, India, Japan, China and Persia. She has a really good turn of descriptive phrase and I’d recommend her books if you can stomach her paternalistic attitude to her servants and the people she meets. It’s a fascinating insight in to how simultaneously closed and open minded people can be.

landscape photography of snowy mountain
Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Pexels.com

The route Edie and Jones follow was only accessible on foot and it wasn’t always possible to ride. It was sometimes so narrow that if you met someone coming the other way, one of you would have to get off the track out of the way, if there was room. If there wasn’t room, sometimes people lay down so the pack animals coming from the other direction could jump over them.

Traders and travelers used mules, ponies, yaks and even sheep as pack animals. I found some really interesting descriptions of salt being brought down to Srinagar from Tibet on the backs of sheep.

There are three high passes on the trip, the tallest of which is the Zoji La, at 11,500 feet. You can start to feel odd with altitude sickness at about 4,500ft and become seriously unwell at 8,000. I wanted to talk about the potential for that and did some looking around for historical account. The earliest I could find for the Himalayas was a cautionary tale by some Chinese traders who traveled between Xian and Kabul in about 35BC, who wrote about the Great and Little Headache Mountains.

“On passing the Great Headache Mountain, the Little Headache Mountain, the Red Land, and the Fever Slope, men’s bodies become feverish, they lose colour and are attacked with headache and vomiting; the asses and cattle being all in like condition.”

Jones knows all about this, obviously, so she’s watching out for it.

dark silhouette of camping tent
Photo by Skyler Sion on Pexels.com

Edie’s snowlotus obsession encompasses about three hundred species. The one she’s particularly interested in is the Saussurea Lappae or Costus. Like all its family it likes high altitude and low temperature. I don’t know whether Edie was successful in bringing any live plants home. It seems unlikely they would have survived the journey at sea-level very well. That part of Edie’s character is loosely based on my mother, who is a very skilled plantswoman and at the time of writing this still runs her own horticultural nursery, in her eighties. She was also drawn heavily from Marianne North, a botanical illustrator of the same period of Isabella Bird, who travelled all over the world painting both plants and the landscape around her.

The most challenging thing I found to write about the journey itself was the camping kit! I couldn’t get the feel of what the characters were up to settled in my head unless I could visualize what they were drinking from or sleeping on, or using to cook with. I started off with the TV adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels (Sean Bean was just a bonus) and spiralled out in to the many and varied webpages by immensely skilled re-enactors out there as well as museum inventories and lists of what soldiers on the march might carry.

Finally, I also learned a lot about yaks. Yaks only have to eat 1% of their bodyweight daily, as opposed to cows, who have to consume 3%. And they get heat exhaustion if it’s warmer than 59f. They are extremely cool creatures and I wish Mr AL was more amenable to me keeping a small herd in the garden.

The Flowers of Time is available in ebook, paperback and at Audible and Apple Books.

The Flowers of Time is available in both ebook, paperback and at Audible and Apple Books.

Trans people in history

This morning I want to talk a little bit about trans people in history. Transgender is a word that can only be traced back to 1974, but that didn’t mean trans people didn’t exist before that date! Walter, one of the main characters in The Quid Pro Quo is transgender—he’s caused me all sorts of plot issues, but has sent me off to do lots of really interesting reading, which I’m delighted to share here!

One of the things that gender studies academics all agree about is that it’s almost impossible to know how people in the past that we now see as trans would have seen themselves. The records are very sparse, often sensationalised and are usually other people’s view of the person rather than their own. Who wanted to put that sort of thing down in writing when it would get you prosecuted or put in a mental hospital? So it’s hard to tell whether past figures were transgender; or whether they were passing as a man or woman in order to access spaces and privilege they would be otherwise denied. This is particularly true of people who were assigned female at birth and lived the bulk of their lives as men.

The most famous of these cases is Dr James Barry, who after his death in the mid-nineteenth century was revealed to be AFAB (assigned female at birth). I won’t write much about him here because this is the article I would write and Rebecca Ortenberg has already done it better than I would. Suffice to say that after he began his medical education at Edinburgh, Barry never presented or referred to himself as female again. He was only discovered to be AFAB after the person laying his body out for burial spoke about him. In recent years he’s been absorbed by the ‘plucky girl breaking the glass ceiling by putting on breeches’ narrative, which I personally feel is wrong.

This article at the British Library about Transgender Identities in the Past is fascinating. It focuses on two people, Eliza Edwards, who on her death in 1833 was discovered to be AMAB. And in 1901, someone we’d now understand to be a trans man who at the age of sixty and after several marriages and a career as a cook on P&O liners was revealed to be AFAB. The newspaper article calls them by a woman’s name. It completely erases the life they lived. The article has audio clips of a 2018 discussion between E-J Scott, curator of the Museum of Transology; Dr Jay Stewart, the chief executive of Gendered Intelligence, and Annie Brown, an activist, artist and GI youth worker. It’s worth your time.

In The Flowers of Time, my story set in the late eighteenth century, Jones the non-binary character eventually decides to present as masculine because it makes their life with Edie easier. They fudge the record, more or less blackmail close family into accepting them and that’s that. However, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that as time went on, communication became quicker and easier and records of births and marriages became more common it became much more difficult to pass. British army records mention Phoebe Hassel, who was discharged in 1817 when she was flogged and discovered to be a man (bottom of page seven, you have to register, but it’s free). We don’t know whether she was a passing woman for financial or social reasons or whether she was what we’d understand today as trans. Her male name is not mentioned. However, she must have passed well enough or had enough support by her peers to have concealed her natal gender for some years.

However, The Quid Pro Quo is set a hundred and fifty years later than Phoebe’s flogging and The Flowers of Time. By the time Walter joined up in 1898, there were medicals for army recruits. This was such a sticking point for me that I bottled it and I honestly tried to write the book with him as cis. However, he just wouldn’t play…he’d been trans in my head as I was writing The Fog of War, right back as far the planning stage of the trilogy. But when I came to write it, I couldn’t make the story work with him as trans because of the army regulations; and I couldn’t make the story work with him as cis because he’s not cis.

I threw the question to some of my lovely friends at the Quiltbag Historicals facebook group (join us, we’re cool!) and they immediately began working out ways I could fudge the story. So Walter begins his army career as his twin brother and has a little help from the people around him to keep his origins concealed. And I reassured myself that if people are prepared to suspend disbelief about the paranormal aspects of my stories then they can allow me this tiny (enormous) stretch of possibility to get it off the ground!

I love Walter. He’s so very pragmatic about his life and his place in the universe. He’s just getting on and doing his thing. I wanted him to have a happy ending so badly all the time I was writing The Fog of War and I was very pleased to be able to give him one here in The Quid Pro Quo.

I like to think of my stories as realistically historical first and paranormal second. My characters are just getting on living their lives—which have greater or lesser levels of complexity—and the paranormal comes and whacks them round the back of the head with half a brick in a sock. I try and make the history as accurate and the paranormal as twisted as I can! I think I’ve done Walter justice, as he’s one of my favourite people. I hope you like him too.

Lastly, here is a brilliant collection of books about trans history and trans issues, curated by Christine Burns and available from independent bookshops.

The Quid Pro Quo

Cover: 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?

Add The Quid Pro Quo on Goodreads

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The Flowers of Time: Jones and Gender

Let’s talk about gender with regard to Jones in The Flowers of Time today, just because, including a deleted scene.

The Flowers of Time, cover

It got to the point as I was writing where I felt there was altogether too much pondering and self-examination by Jones in the early part of the book. Although she’s doing a lot of self-examination, there’s another part of her that just wants to get on with things. And I began to feel as if I was making her an info-dump type of character and the book was becoming a bit more of an examination of how she felt about herself than a road-trip with botany and monsters who melt people.

So… generally speaking, Jones is pretty grumpy at having to make any sort of choice about gender. She never really had to think about it before she went to London. She was extremely reluctant to carry out the death-bed promise to her father to travel to England and try out being a lady of good family. Coming home to the mountains was a huge relief and she now has mixed feelings about her budding friendship with the Mertons if it means she has to behave in a particular way to meet their social expectations.

She’s a bit confused all round, really, and she resents having to put thought in to these messy, human relationships rather than concentrate on her work. She’s definitely a person who sees her mind as important rather than her body. I love her dearly and it hurt a lot to have to delete this scene about her deliberations–it had to go because it was slowing down the pace of the story. It was part of her growth as a person and it still definitely happened in my Jones-head-cannon!

Deleted Scene: Jones’ Preparations

So by the time the Mertons arrived, she was ready. They took a week to make their own preparations for the mountain trails, but Carruthers and Merton seemed to be competent and she left them to it, mostly spending her time with Miss Merton. Initially she felt that it might be a chore, but her initial impression of Edith as a correct English Miss had become modified as the days progressed and she showed her around the lakes and rivers of the city. Jones had always liked Srinagar. It was one of the places she and her father crossed through fairly regularly, both to send communications south to Bombay and several times to take a house there for a few months. Miss Merton’s excitement and pleasure in the scenery and her interest in talking to the residents and attempting to learn their language as she spoke with them meant the time went much more quickly than Jones had anticipated.

Likewise, the party seemed perfectly content with her natural choice to dress as she pleased. Carruthers’ young assistants simply accepted her as a male. She didn’t have much to do with them regardless, but it was pleasant not to be looked at with askance as she had feared when she had seen Miss Merton’s face on the road outside Srinagar. Edith had quickly schooled her expression, and her treatment of Jones had not changed. She had invited her to call her by her first name that evening and that seemed a mark of confidence in their budding friendship. Neither had Carruthers and Merton spoken to her with any caution or disapproval and their example had led to the rest of their party treating her as she wished, which was to essentially ignore her sex and rather pay attention to her thoughts and wishes.

It was very nice to feel that she might have made a friend in Miss Merton. They had been few and far between in her travels with her father, particularly with women, simply because they had been almost constantly in motion and when not in motion, absorbed in the work. She had never had the opportunity before simply to have a friendship that was not also complicated with the bonds of family- as with Dechen, Sonam, Amit and Kishor- or overshadowed by her discomfort at being forced in to female apparel as she had been on her long round trip to England.

Thinking about it now, she had a led a lonely sort of existence based entirely around her father’s obsession with the cause of her mother’s death. And it seemed that Jones might be taking up his mantle. Did she want that? She wasn’t sure. But she was sure that she needed to know what had been driving his obsession. He had been such a rational man. It seemed ridiculous that he had died believing in magic. That he had believed in it all this time and not said a word to her.

Her whole life has changed. Not only did she lose her father; but when he sent her to England ‘to find her roots’ he actually cut her off from her life in the mountains…her source of independence and strength.

She had to re-evaluate her sense of self and the way other people saw her whilst she was in England. And now she’s home, but because the Mertons are following her she may not be able to settle back in to her comfortable old way of doing things where she just toddles along thinking about history and people and plants. She’s gaining friends and a social network. But she may have to give up some of her independence of thought and self-definition as part of that social contract.

I do want to revisit this part of the universe at some point in the future because I do love the characters; but in the meantime there’s also a short story called A Small, Secret Smile that is almost stand-alone if you’re feeling brave, but probably makes more sense if you’ve already read the book.

The Flowers of Time is available in ebook, audio and paperback

"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!"

Now in audible.

A determined lady botanist and a non-binary explorer make the long journey over the high Himalayan mountain passes from Kashmir to Little Tibet, collecting flowers and exploring ruins on the way. Will Jones discover the root of the mysterious deaths of her parents? Will she confide in Edie and allow her to help in the quest?

It’s a trip fraught with perils for both of them, not least those of the heart.

A stand-alone f/enby romance set in the Lost in Time universe, in the Himalayas in 1780. About 50,000 words.

Buy here