Inheritance of Shadows – A. L. Lester

#AMA: Dinner and a Show

Today’s #AMA question comes from Liz Welch: Which of your characters would you most like to have dinner with, and why? And what would they make for you to eat?

I thought this would be an easy one to write about and actually I’ve sat here for ages thinking about it. There are so many characters and so many different things we could talk about over a meal.

Finally though, I’ve come to a conclusion. I’m going for Rob and Matty from Inheritance of Shadows.

Character Sketch of Rob & Matty from Inheritance of Shadows

Webber’s Farm

Sitting with Rob and Matty at the scrubbed wooden table on the battered oak chairs in the kitchen at Webber’s Farm would definitely be my first choice. Rob would cook something like sausages and mash. Straightforward, plain food. The range would be fired up hot to cook on and the kitchen would be warm and cosy.

We’d eat with our elbows on the table and to follow, because it would be Saturday and no-one had to rush back out to work afterwards, we’d have big slabs of the fruitcake Anne Beelock had baked that morning along with slices of sharp cheddar from the larder, and drink cups of tea out of the cups and saucers with roses round the rim—Matty would have got out his mother’s china for my visit—and talk about how the cattle were doing and whether the harvest was going to be a good one this year.

The Webber’s of my mind is a dim, warm, welcoming place, with slightly fraying thatch and a muddy track with the pot-holes filled in as and when they’re needed. It has a yard surrounded by low, ancient barns filled with machinery dating back a couple of hundred years, dusted with the red soil of the hills. The back door is always ajar to let the dogs in and out and the kettle is always almost-boiling on the range.
As you knock on the door and go on in—the back door, no-one uses the front unless it’s a wedding or a funeral, or they’re a stranger—Rob looks up from the kitchen table where he’s standing next to a pile of potatoes, peering down at the newspaper he’s supposed to be using to peel them on, wire-framed glasses perched incongruously on the bridge of his nose.
“Ah,” he says. “It’s you. There’s tea in the pot.” And he looks down again to finish whatever he’s reading. Something about the football, probably.
“Where’s Matty?” you ask him, poking at the kettle.
“Gone to town,” he says, taking off his glasses and folding them carefully in to their case beside him on the table. “Picking up the seed potatoes.”
“Oh, yes, it’s Saturday,” you say.
“Nothing for the market today,” Rob tells you, to explain why he’s at home and Matty’s gone by himself. “And I needed to get on with one or two things here. He’ll be back shortly though. Are you staying for dinner? He was going to the butcher. Sausages.” He grins and raises his eyebrows. He’s a big fan of sausages.
“That would be lovely, if you have enough,” you say. “Shall I help you peel the potatoes?” You gesture to the pile.
“No, no,” he says. “You sit down and pour us some tea and I’ll get on with this. There’s no rush. I just thought I’d get it done. Annie’s gone off to see her sister.”
So you sit and make small-talk. Nothing big. Nothing of moment. Who’s working where. Who’s walking out with who. Whether Flo the big plough horse is in foal or not.
And when Matty comes home it’s more of the same, all through the meal and into the afternoon.

That’s what I like about Webber’s and the stories I’ve set there. Both Inheritance and Taking Stock are about people finding a home. Inheritance has a paranormal element. But it’s still mostly about both Matty and Rob finding a way to be happy with themselves and exploring how they might fit together. I guess in these troubled times I need that security and if I can only get it by going back fifty or a hundred years then so be it!

Rob is the most reassuring of my characters I think. He’s so steady. You’re not going to get cordon-bleu cuisine or conversation about philosophy with your meal. But you’ll get nourishing, comforting food, insightful local gossip and some national political discussion. And maybe a bit of chat about what he’s been reading. He likes to read, but not a lot of fiction—biographies, that sort of thing.

Callum has narrated Inheritance of Shadows for me. You can listen to the first (long) chapter for free at Bookfunnel and hear his interpretation of Rob and Matty. I love them both, he’s got them exactly as I pictured them—Rob’s depth and steadiness really come through.

I hope this answer’s Liz’s question! I’m really enjoying having these thrown at me and I hope you’re enjoying reading them. If you’d like the chance to ask me something yourself, please pop in to my Facebook Group or join my newsletter–I will be regularly asking for questions!

Thanks for reading!

British Accents now and then

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.

Lost in Time, Shadows on the Border, The Hunted and the Hind by A. L. Lester. Narrated by Callum Hale.

Definitely not Magical Realism: The Border Magic system

orange cat on focus photography — Photo by Alexas Fotos on Pexels.com

So, The Fog of War is out next month and I thought it was probably time for another post about how the magic system works–that seems to be one of the main questions that comes up when I do Q&A’s about the series. Basically, my process can be summed up if you visualise me sitting on the floor in a room full of kittens, with different coloured balls of wool all heaped up around me and letting the kittens do their thing. And if the kittens are also crazed on catnip then it’s even more accurate.

When I started writing the series, I dabbled with making one of the MCs a shifter. I thought he might be a centaur. And then the whole thing fell apart when he turned out to be living in a small flat above a laundry in 1920s London and it just wasn’t practical. I mean. Think of the floors! He turned out to be a magician, effectively, although he’d loathe the word. No-one who uses magic with good intent in my world actually calls it that.

I have to confess, the kitten thing didn’t really happen. Although it should have. Because kittens! And I didn’t sit down and plan out the system before I started. It just evolved as the books went on. I knew I wanted my people to be able to pull energy from somewhere. And I knew there needed to be a price, because if you have unlimited magical energy available you’re all-powerful and where’s the fun in characters that are all-powerful?

photo of woman holding a mirror — Photo by Miriam Espacio on Pexels.com

The system works on the principle that there’s power everywhere. It’s called kias. Everyone has some as part of their life-force, some people more, some less. And there’s a source of it in a thing called the border or the shimmer. Some of my characters know this, some don’t. And some of them know that the shimmer doesn’t just exist in isolation. It’s a border between our world and another one. The other one is where people like Fenn (Shadows on the Border & The Hunted and the Hind) and Linn (Inheritance of Shadows) live. They’re sort-of-elves and are magic-users as a matter of course. Fenn and Linn work for a group called the Ternants, who are responsible for maintaining the border between the two worlds. There are definitely other groups who are working to break it down.

We don’t know a lot more about any of the not-quite-elves as yet, pretty much because I’m making it up as a I go along. (Let’s hear a big “YAY!” for discovery writing!). There will be more in forthcoming books, but at the moment I’m enjoying writing about the reactions of characters who live in our own world and touch the magic to a greater or lesser extent and finding out how they each embrace or reject it.

If you know anything about reiki and similar energy practices you will see similarities between those and how my magic system works. Healthy people have healthy energy and sick people have low or wobbly energy. It’s possibly to help people’s health by balancing their energies up. I have taken that further by allowing my magic users, or workers, to pull energy in to themselves (from other people, from their surroundings, from the shimmer, from charged objects) to manipulate both kias and physical matter. Small things like lights in the palm of your hand, and big things, like opening a gate in the energy border between the worlds.

If you’re a responsible person you try and keep the overall energy system balanced and don’t steal kias from people or pull so much from the shimmer that you make it weak and allow nasty things like carnas or hollows to push their way through. If you’re an irresponsible person you do just that. And sometimes you can set up a line or a cord linking you to someone else that is a constant drain on their energy and constantly replenishes yours.

The magic system is really very simple. It works on the basis that energy follows thought. The irony of the green book being that it’s supposed to be a ‘book of spells’ or a book of instructions to make the magic work for you…but actually you don’t need to do any of that ritual stuff. You just need to pull the kias toward you, form your intention and hold it strongly in your mind…and if you are powerful enough and have enough kias available, pow! it happens.

If you’re trying to do things that are selfish or greedy, or badly thought out, the potential for the kias to spring back at you and sproink you on the nose like a stretched elastic band is enormous. My main characters tend to realise this, earlier or later in the stories. Sometimes after being sproinked.

As the series has gone on the system has developed and I’ve found myself using a sort of retroactive kitten-method to make interesting plot happen. I tend to write very messy first drafts that mean I have to go back and do an enormous amount of pruning to make things fit together logically. Having to make sure that the magic works as well is another layer of complication and having energy-follows-thought as it’s base principle makes it both simple and very complicated. It allows an awful lot of wiggle-room, which means there’s an awful lot of ways to mess it up! But most things I write seems to have the paranormal in there somewhere and my worlds don’t seem complete to me without it.

You can read more about the system and how the books fit into it here.

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.

Inheritance of Shadows Audio, 99c!

The audiobook of Inheritance of Shadows is on sale this week! Until 10th July it is 99c on Chirp and Apple and FREE on Authors Direct.

It’s 1919. Matty returns home to the family farm from the trenches only to find his brother Arthur dying of an unknown illness. The local doctor thinks cancer, but Matty becomes convinced it’s connected to the mysterious books his brother left strewn around the house.

Rob knows something other than just Arthur’s death is bothering Matty. He’s know him for years and been in love with him just as long. And when he finds something that looks like a gate, a glowing, terrifying doorway to the unknown, it all starts to fall in to place.

Matty’s looking sicker and sicker in the same way Arthur did. What is Rob prepared to sacrifice to save his life?

(And the ebook is ALWAYS 99c!)

And can I ask a favour? If you’ve already read or listened and have a minute, please could you take a moment to leave me a rating and/or a quick review? It makes a difference to how the Amazon and Bookbub advert engines treat things, apparently, and I’m starting to experiment with them, really, really cautiously!