lesfic – Page 6 – A. L. Lester

Liz Faraim: Stitches and Sepsis

Liz Faraim is here today as part of her OWL blogtour for Stitches and Sepsis, the second in her brilliant Vivian Chastain series. Welcome back, Liz!

You can read her visit to talk about Canopy, the first in series here!

Howdy. My name is Liz Faraim. I am the author of the Vivian Chastain series. I thought I’d take a moment to answer some questions that I get asked a lot. Enjoy!

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever done in the name of research?

While researching Stitches and Sepsis I had to do extensive research on how sepsis impacts the body and what types of medical intervention might happen while hospitalized with it. I spent many hours watching videos on how to insert and remove foley catheters, nasogastric feeding tubes, and IVs. Also, don’t do an internet search for images of septic wounds (or do?).

Have you ever taken a trip to research a story? Tell me about it.

Yes! I have hiked every single one of the trails that I write about, I have ridden my motorcycle on every one of the routes described in the series, and I have run every jogging route too. I like to write about places I can describe in detail, which is why Vivian stays mostly in northern California.

What do you do when you get writer’s block?

Writer’s block hits me every time I reach the midpoint and end of each manuscript. Breaking the writer’s block sometimes means taking a writing break for a few weeks to re-read familiar novels or just wallow in self-loathing before getting back to the keyboard.

Do you use a pseudonym? If so, why? If not, why not?

Yes, I use a pseudonym. I chose to do this because I work in a very conservative and heavily scrutinized field for my day job, and for me to feel truly free to write what I want to write, I need to do it under a different name.

If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?

Liz, just as you assumed, not everybody is going to like your work (including family). But do it anyway. You don’t have to please everyone. Write what you want, because someone out there will connect with it.

Do you ever base your characters on real people? If so, what are the pitfalls you’ve run into doing so?

Yes, I have based a few characters on people I have come into contact with over the years. The only pitfall I have run in to so far is that the person I based the character Bear on (who plays a much larger role in book three) passed away before my books were published. Bear was my best friend, and we used to do writing exercises where we’d each write an excerpt and pass the story back and forth, continually adding to it. I know she would be so proud of me for finally getting published. I just wish she had lived long enough to read about herself in my books.

How long on average does it take you to write a book?

It depends! Whatever project I happen to be working on during National Novel Writing Month gets wrapped up in about six to eight weeks. If I am writing any other time of the year it takes about six months. I balance a demanding day job and solo parenting, so I don’t have much time to dedicate solely to writing.

What do you do if you get a brilliant idea at a bad time?

This happens all the time! I have random notes stored in my phone, on sticky notes on my desk, and scribbled on note pads. One thing I have to get better about is giving more context when I make a note for myself, because the current sticky note on my desk just says “gloves,” “daffodils” and “foghorn.” I think I know what I was trying to say, but who knows!

Liz has a prize draw as part of the Stitches and Sepsis launch! Win a $20 giftcard!

Stitches and Sepsis

Contemporary, thriller, ff, lesbian, polyamory, poly, Dom/sub relationship, multiple partners, ex-military, bartender, LGBTQ, queer, thriller, new release, announcement

Adrenaline addicted veteran, Vivian Chastain, confronts the man who has been following her for days, only to find he has a message of dire consequence for her. Spurred into action by his news, she barrels head on into a tumultuous and violent series of events. Stoic and stubborn, Vivian lands in the hospital, fighting for her life.

During Vivian’s lengthy recovery, her partner is released from jail and the two reconnect, stoking up the flames of their toxic union all while Vivian dives into a blossoming relationship with a new love interest who offers fulfillment and love, if only Vivian can figure out how to allow it all in.

Still on the mend, she learns that the coast is not clear as former threats return and continue to endanger her. While she cannot rest easy; friends, her work crew, and customers at the night club where she tends bar provide her with much needed fun, comradery, and support.

Vivian wrestles with her temper, her penchant for physical violence, and her overwhelming emotional baggage. Struggles from within and without threaten her existence, and in the moment when death is just a breath away, Vivian’s brother shows up and changes everything.

Warnings: This book contains sexually explicit content which is only suitable for mature readers, graphic violence, self-harm, references to PTSD, domestic abuse, animal abuse, homophobic slurs, sexual assault (reference to past), death of a secondary character

Buy Stitches & Sepsis

Meet Liz

Liz has a full plate between balancing a day job, parenting, writing, and finding some semblance of a social life. In past lives she has been a soldier, a bartender, a shoe salesperson, an assistant museum curator, and even a driving instructor. She focuses her writing on strong, queer, female leads who don’t back down.

Liz transplanted to California from New York over thirty years ago, and now lives in the East Bay. She enjoys exploring nature with her wife and son.

Website : Facebook : Twitter : Goodreads : QueeRomance Ink

Banner. Stitches and Sepsis by Liz Faraim

Some different audiobook options

It will quickly become clear that this is a blatant promo post about my new audiobook set-up, but I’m combining it with some info about the different listening platforms out there too, as I know a growing number of listeners are looking to move away from Audible. I hope it’s useful from that point of view.

I’ve recently moved the three books I have with Callum away from Audible and they should now be available via local library services as well as other places like Chirp and Kobo. I get as much money from borrows from your local library as I do from Audible credit sales, so knock yourselves out with that and don’t think you’re ever doing any author down by legitimate borrowing rather than buying!

Because of /technical reasons I don’t understand/ I don’t seem to be able to ALSO distribute them via Audible at the moment, but I’m hoping that when I have a free weekend and a bottle of gin handy I can plough through what I need to do to make that happen, as a matter of fairness to people who may have bought the first ones with Audible credits but perhaps haven’t yet got to the rest in the series. For the same reason, I think I will put The Hunted and the Hind up with Audible as well as everywhere else when it comes out in the summer.

HOWEVER, having said that, Audible set their own, quite high, prices for all the audiobooks they sell to people who don’t subscribe in some way. On the non-Audible platforms I have been able to set the price of Lost in Time and Shadows on the Border to $9.99 and the stand-alone, Inheritance of Shadows, to $5.50. A lot of places like Kobo and Google Play will add sales and reductions of their own to those prices and on Authors Direct I am able to directly control pricing without negotiating with anyone else, so I have made the prices $7.99 and $4.40, respectively. The Flowers of Time is still available from Audible and I won’t be moving that away from the platform.

These are some of the different audio platforms out there:

Alternative audiobook platforms are all gradually growing. It’s definitely worth checking the different platforms for your favourite authors.

Plus: Binge Books

And then we have Authors Direct:

Authors Direct is part of Findaway Voices, the audio arm of Draft2Digital, which is the service I use to distribute my self-published books. Each author can set up a little shop of their own for their audiobooks and direct readers/listeners to it. It’s quite new I think, but so far it seems really sensible and flexible. I load up the audio files Callum sends me, they check them for quality and then they send them out to all the different platforms I’ve selected as retailers. And at that point I can also add them to my own shop. Listeners download the app onto their phone and bosh, off they go.

It has an easy-to-use app (as do a lot of the other options) and it’s ad free. And apparently it has a safe-for-work mode where you can blank out your screen so no-one can see what you’re listening to :).

They have a handy infographic to explain how simple it is!

The downside as far as I can see is that there’s no main storefront where you can search for eg LGBTQ books or cook books or books about llamas. Listeners find each author’s books via a direct link to the author’s ‘shop’.

Anyway. I hope that makes sense…speaking as a creator this is much more transparent—the sales information is laid out clearly with a straightforward relationship between units sold, what platform they have been sold via and the sale price. Plus we get seventy percent of the list price of sale rather than roughly forty at the other platforms and twenty-five of whatever price they decided to set themselves at Audible, which is obviously very attractive.

So there we are. I really hope some of these non-Audible alternatives suit some of you, too. As a consumer I find the Amazon machine very convenient; and as a seller it is to some extent too. I just think that there should be alternatives should people choose to use them and this is my little effort to bring notice to the audio options. And sell more books!

Happy listening, whichever platform you choose!

Coming Soon: Sylvia Marks!

Sylvia Marks is a minor character in Inheritance of Shadows. She’s a doctor, who was part of the Scottish Women’s Hospital at Royaumont, France, during the First World War. Down entirely to the encouragement of my lovely editor Lourenza Adlem, she is now about to have her own trilogy set in the little English village of Bradfield in the early 1920s.

Cover: An Irregular Arrangement, four people in 1920s dress.

I don’t have a title for any of the books yet, but I’m sure something will spring to mind before too long!

You can read about other inhabitants of Bradfield if you are a subscriber to my newsletter, in An Irregular Arrangement, a 10,500 word free story.

Read on to find out a bit about Sylvia and her friend Lucy.

Excerpt

“Sylvia! Are you coming?” Lucy called up the stairs.

Sylvia Marks is coming in July! 1920s England! Lesbian Romance! Mystery! Paranormal Shenanigans!

“Nearly ready, just a moment,” Sylvia’s voice was muffled. “My hair isn’t behaving.”

Lucy trotted up the stairs to her bedroom. They were going to be late for the beginning of the film at this rate.

“Let me help,” she said.

Sylvia sat in front of her mirror, mouth full of hairpins and arms cocked up behind her head, shoving them into her coiled hair.

“It’s got to look half-way neat if I’m going to take my hat off,” she said.

“You can keep your hat on,” Lucy said.

“It always seems rude to the people sat behind me,” Sylvia said. “The seats aren’t very well laid out.”

“Hang on, then,” Lucy said.

She stood behind Sylvia and wrested her hands away from her head. “Give me the brush,” she said.

Sylvia’s hair fell in a curtain to below her waist and was thick and wavy. It was brown, a delightful range of shades from light to dark. Some of the women at Royaumont had cut their hair—bathing facilities had been rudimentary—but Sylvia had kept hers long, wound up in a chignon every day.

She handed the brush from the dressing table back to Lucy and Lucy began to run it through from crown to ends. It didn’t really need much brushing, Sylvia had already done that, but she used the brush to gather in all up into one hand, a heavy tail of soft raw silk in her palm. The faint scent of rosemary that she had always associated with Sylvia was from her hair, Lucy realised.

Sylvia removed the hairpins from her mouth and watched Lucy in the mirror. Her eyes were soft. “No-one’s brushed my hair for years,” she said quietly.

“It’s beautiful,” Lucy said.

She began to wind it into a rope around her hand, twisting it up onto Sylvia’s head as she went. She pinned as she twisted, making a flattish coil that would sit easily under Sylvia’s beret. She focused on what she was doing, getting it right. The hair was fine and thick against her palms and she could hear Sylvia’s breathing slow and soften.

As she tucked the last pin in, securing the ends, she said “All right?” and dropped her hands to Sylvia’s shoulders.

Sylvia met her eyes in the mirror and nodded. She was relaxed and pliant under Lucy palms.

The moment hung in time.

Sylvia arrives on 10th July from JMS Books!

What happens when it’s over?

This week I’m back in the saddle with Sylvia Marks. This has meant a lot of reading about early women doctors and the ways women served in the First World War and generally immersing myself in the world of 1920. I’m not quite talking in the slang of the era, but it’s a near thing.

Cover, Elsie and Mairi Go to War by Diane Atkinson

One of the things I’ve been reading is Elsie and Mairi go to War, the story of Mairi Chisholm and Elsie Knocker, who met at a motorcycling club in 1912 and when the war began joined a private ambulance service and shipped out to Belgium. They spent four years so close to the front that they could hear the men in the trenches talking, running a first aid post in the basement of a ruined house in a destroyed village.

Elsie was quite a bit older than Mairi and I took an instant dislike to her…she was clearly an adventuress who thrived on adrenaline. She lied about being a divorcee and having a child to the Belgian nobleman she went on to marry during the war. Afterwards when he found out and they parted, she flitted from one thing to another…for example setting up a first aid post in the East End of London during the General Strike and actually causing more problems than she solved.

Mairi on the other hand settled back to post-war life with comparative ease. She, a close friend and a couple of other women opened a chicken-breeding farm in Scotland, temporarily moved the whole shebang to Guernsey and from thence back to Scotland again.

It made me think about a conversation I had with a friend when I first began to kick this story around. My grandmother had memories of Dr Fox, a lady doctor from Wellington in Somerset in the years before the First World War. She used to come round and visit my Great-Grandmother and sit on the kitchen table with her skirts hitched up, smoking and swinging her legs as they chatted. My friend is part of the Fox family and says that her husband can remember Dr Fox from when he was a child, probably the 1950s/60s? A tough old bird and smoked like a chimney are the two things that most stood out to him then. My friend also has a vague memory of another woman who was a doctor in France between 1914 and 1918 and then came home, got married and left medicine. I am hoping she’ll be able to find her name so I can do some more research about her.

I knew when I began writing about Sylvia…at the urging of Loukie*, who fell in love with her bit-part in Inheritance of Shadows…that whatever I was going to be writing would have elements of lesbian romance. But it’s also turning out to be a story…three different stories, because it’s a trilogy…about what you do when the thing that defined you really strongly for a long time suddenly stops.

That’s the thing I’ve taken away from Elsie and Mairi go to War—the way some people can throw dreadful, traumatic things off to an extent and settle back into what passes for ‘normal’. And other people, like Elsie Knocker, simply can’t.

*Editor Extraordinaire

interview: Shelly Greene

Today we have Shelly Greene visiting! Welcome, Shelly. What brings you here today!

Just fun! Programming isn’t a new release, but I think it’s the kind of thing your readers might like, so I just wanted to get it out there. (I have newer stuff as well, but Programming is the only one so far with a transgender character.)

What started you writing?

In second grade, my teacher gave me a folder of writing prompts that I could work on when the other kids were doing worksheets. That wasn’t the first time I wrote stories, but it did cement writing as something I enjoyed and wanted to do more of. Within a couple years I was hand-writing “novels” in pretty journals, and I was unstoppable from there. I was out of college before I finished something I thought I could actually sell—and I did! When I was thirty years old, haha. I’m never going to be a household name, but my writing brings me a lot of joy and a tiny trickle of pocket money. I call that victory.

Where do you write?

I can write almost anywhere. I get a lot done during downtime at work. When I worked retail, I would write on scrap paper and hide it in my pockets. Sometimes I end up writing on my notes app after I’ve gone to bed. Most of it gets done on my laptop at my desk, though. I keep everything on a flash drive that lives in my pocket wherever I go.

What do you like to read?

I mostly read fantasy and science fiction, and have a special fondness for things that blend the line between the two, like Star Wars and the Dragonriders of Pern books. My top three favorite authors, the ones whose new releases I will drop everything to read, are Lois McMaster Bujold, Jim Butcher, and Patricia Briggs.

What are the three books you’d take to a desert island? Why would you choose them?

The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold – I get hungry for this book if I go too long without re-reading it.

Grave Peril by Jim Butcher – I love the entire Dresden Files series, of which this is the third. It’s a favorite because I feel like it’s where the series really hit its stride.

Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen – a change of pace from the others! It’s hard to beat Austen for character development and use of language.

Writing is an intrinsically solo occupation. Do you belong to any groups or associations, either online or in the ‘real’ world? How does that work for you?

I’ve been in writers’ groups in the past, but mostly didn’t find it that helpful. In a writers’ group of any size, it takes so long for it to be your turn to be critiqued! And it’s hard to know whether to trust the other members’ judgments of your work, especially when you’re not familiar with their writing yet. So I’ve long since given up on writer’s critique groups. I am very active as a fanfic writer, though, and that’s quite a wonderful, lively community! You can definitely find critique partners (“betas”) if you ask around for one, or you can just put stuff out there and not worry too much about it being polished. It’s all just very supportive, and it’s hard to beat the immediate gratification of people commenting on things within hours of posting!

What do you like to do when you’re not writing?

I live within two miles of three of my siblings, so they’re most of my social life. I especially like to spend time with my adorable preschool-age nephews. They are a handful, but I love them to pieces. I also have a dog, an adopted senior Corgi/Golden Retriever mix. All fluff, no legs! And I do spend more time watching Netflix than I probably should—my current favorites are WandaVision, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and of course, The Great British Baking Show.

Tell me a little bit about Programming? What gave you the idea for it? How long did it take to write? What did you enjoy about writing it? What did you hate?

Programming isn’t my most recent release, but it is the one I think is most suited to your blog. This one had a very convoluted journey into its final form. Once upon a time, I took two male movie characters from a modern-day canon setting, made one of them an android because the actor had once played an android, and made a sci-fi fanfic out of it. Some time later, I “filed off the serial numbers” to make the story more original and see if I could sell it; that’s when the main characters became female instead of male. One day I saw an anthology submission call at a small queer press for science fiction stories. By the time I’d rewritten the story to fit the submission call, giving it a whole new setting and theme, it had become a very different creature from its fanfic origin. It was accepted for the anthology, only for the publisher to fold before the anthology was ever published. So my twice-reworked former-fanfic 8,000 word novelette ended up being published as its own thing by a different publisher, JMS Books. Bit of a wild ride!

Programming

Simone, a female-identifying android, is part of a scientific team sent ahead of the first colony to return to Earth, which is finally habitable again after centuries of radiation recovery. She mostly finds her human crewmates irritating, and the most irritating by far is Dr. Lucy Zhong… who slowly becomes Simone’s best friend, more important to her than anyone else has ever been.

When Lucy is fatally injured, she kisses Simone during her last moments of consciousness, and only then does Simone realize they may be more than friends. Can Simone go against her programming to save the woman she loves?

Buy Programming

Find Shelly!

I am most active on tumblr, at turtletotem.tumblr.com. You can also find me on Goodreads.