non-binary – A. L. Lester

#SampleSunday: An Irregular Arrangement

For #SampleSunday this week I’ve got the first chapter of An Irregular Arrangement for you. It’s free when you subscribe to my newsletter.

An Irregular Arrangement: Chapter 1 : Val

“I do not think,” announced the vicar’s wife from the lane with some gravitas, “that you should be up there, young man.”
Val peered down from the top of the crumbling orchard wall where she was balanced, reaching over to get the very last apple. “Blast!” she exclaimed quietly and aloud said, “Just one more? It’s the last one. Mr Scott’s only going to let them all drop and then turn the pigs in, I heard him say.”
Mrs Downs sighed. “Oh, it’s you, Miss Wilkinson. Hurry up, so I can pretend you’d already finished by the time I saw you.”
Val flinched at being called Miss Wilkinson but did as she was bid and carefully scrambled down the way she’d climbed up. The apples were gathered in her cap and she passed them to Mrs Downs as she took a moment to brush her clothes free from dust. Mrs Downs observed quietly as she straightened her trousers and pulled down her waistcoat. Val eyed her cautiously. The vicar and his wife had only been in the village a few months and although everyone seemed to think they were decent sorts; decent sorts generally didn’t have much truck with people running round in unsuitable clothing and stealing apples.
“Flora Downs, by the way,” the woman offered a hand to shake, and Val took it. “Do call me Flora, please. I’m very pleased to meet you properly, we’ve only seen each other in passing. Would you like to come for breakfast?” Flora said, after a moment contemplating each other. “The vicar is away today…I’ve just walked him to the station, actually…and it would be nice to have some company.”
Val looked at her. She didn’t look much older than Val. Val was twenty-one but probably appeared younger with her hair cropped short and masculine clothing. “Valentine Wilkinson. Val. Hello. I’d love to,” she said in a burst of honesty, finally shaking the hand she was still holding. “But I need to drop the apples into Mrs Porter behind the smithy first. She’s not doing well since the new baby came and the other two young ones are hungry all the time. I said I’d see what I could do help.”
Flora gave Val an assessing look. “Come on then,” she said. “We can do that and then go and have some porridge at the vicarage. I’ve met most people by now, but I haven’t managed to pin you down.”
Val made a muffled yelping sound and juggled the apples to avoid answering. She’d made a categorical mistake in being noticed at all. Fading into the background was one of her special skills. She pulled energy from the border and thought herself small and people seemed to ignore her. She’d been so focused on the apples though, that she’d forgotten to keep it up when Flora spoke to her and now she was stuck. Although… Val glanced sideways to the small woman striding along beside her, skirts kicking around at a modest length above her ankles in the dust of the road, boots and dress pretty but practical, long hair turned up sensibly under a neat cloche hat, clear skin, pretty smile…it perhaps wasn’t the disaster it could have been.
“Have you met Mrs Porter?” she asked.
“No, I haven’t. I was told she probably wouldn’t appreciate a visit because she goes to the chapel, not the church.”
Val nodded. “That’s true. But none of them are talking to her because they realised she caught for the baby after her husband had died.” She grimaced. “No-one asked her what happened, they just judged her. I found out what was going on yesterday.”
“Well,” said Flora. “We need to get that sorted out as soon as possible, then. I’ll talk to the vicar when he gets home. We can help her if she’ll allow it.”
Val nodded. “I brought some bread and things this morning and dropped in and then I remembered the apples and thought I’d get them before the pigs. The children aren’t very old.”
****
It wasn’t long before they were in the vicarage kitchen. The ancient range was lit and Lily Richards, who came in every day to look after the house, was taking off her coat. “Morning, Missus, morning Miss Wilkinson,” she said. She didn’t quite meet Val’s eye. Quite a few of the more respectable villagers wouldn’t, these days. They didn’t like the trousers and they couldn’t see Val as a man, in the way that people who hadn’t know them growing up usually did if they met her dressed as she liked to dress.
“Good morning, Lily,” Flora said. “Are you going to get on with the bedrooms this morning?”
“Yes, Missus. I was going to strip the sheets from yours; and Sally’s coming to do the laundry in a couple of hours. I’m just going to light the copper for her.”
Flora nodded. “Wonderful, thank you. I’ll make a cup of tea and give you a shout when it’s brewed, shall I?”
“Lovely, thank you, Missus.”
“Take a seat,” Flora gestured to the long, scrubbed kitchen table. “We eat in here unless we’ve got company. The dining room is like something out of Dickens, it’s so gloomy. We get the sun in here.”
The room was on the corner of the house and faced both south and east. The early autumn sun was pouring in. It shot the soft brown of Mrs Downs’ hair through with red highlights, like a fox’s coat glinting russet against a hedgerow.
Val sat whilst Flora pottered about putting porridge in a pan and boiling the kettle.
“Don’t you have servants for this?” Val asked.
“Only Lily. I don’t much like having people in and out of the house, to be honest. I grew up keeping house for my father, so I’m happy taking it on for Tim and me.”
Val nodded. One of the reasons she spent so much time out of the house was that it was always flooded with people. The servants, then Mama, and their brothers’ friends. Val didn’t like the crowds and she didn’t like the way it felt, dressed up in girl’s clothes as Mama insisted, with the young men all looking at her like dogs eyeing a biscuit.

Get your copy here to continue reading

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

:: 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

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.

The Week that Was: Mattresses and activism

This week, we bought a new mattress. My back’s been increasingly creasing me and we’ve progressed through putting a board under the mattress, adding a memory foam mattress topper and then, finally, adding a big duck-feather thing on top of that. Making the bed is a bit like an out-take from The Princess and the Pea. (Yes, this is a genuine picture of me and Mr AL, in our night attire. Enter our bedroom at your peril.)

The whole process has been massively stressful, largely because it’s such a first world problem. Firstly there’s the cost. And secondly there’s the number of choices. And thirdly there’s my sneaking and increasingly unpleasant feeling that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and I should care more about the fact other people don’t even have safe spaces to lie down rather than the number of poxy springs I can afford to sleep on.

Yes, this is a post about guilt. But it’s also a post about nurturing your spoons. This is a bit of a stupid example–I could simply donate the cost of a mattress to an organisation helping the homeless and stop flailing about on the internet about it. It’s an analogy that I’ve been pondering though…how much is enough? In a society so unequal, how much is enough? Do I have to put up with a bad back to enable other people to have somewhere safe? Or can I make myself comfortable and help others too? It’s a really simplistic analogy, but I guess I’ve needed simplistic this week, because it’s what’s finally straightened my head out.

I’ve been really upset these last few weeks by the cess pit that’s the public discourse over trans rights in the UK. I’m saddened and upset by the level of hatred and silencing directed at trans people and a few weeks ago I decided I’d try and be a bit more active amplifying trans voices, and share things people can do to help. This has involved following accounts that share trans news. And even in this short amount of time, it’s devastated me.

I don’t know how these people manage it. There’s so much bile directed at them. I just pop onto their twitter timelines, check out the day’s events and see if there’s anything practical I can do to help…sign and share something, amplify news about a protest, that sort of stuff. I belong to a couple of blocklists and often the blocked responses scroll down and down and down the page. But then I come across a few people I haven’t blocked and the responses are vile; so I block them too. They are often accounts with followers below a couple of dozen, some only one or two.

After only a few weeks I feel worn away, exhausted by the horribleness of it all. I am non-binary. I present as a short, round, middle-aged straight person, married with children; and as such, my level of privilege is huge. I don’t get spat on in the street, or threatened at school, or shouted at in public bathrooms. Even watching the courage of these people with high public profiles from my safe position behind a keyboard I am awed at their strength. It’s the least I can do to keep trying to amplify their voices.

But…I can’t do it to the exclusion of the rest of my life…the looking after the kids, all the adulting I have to do on the day to day. And that includes the caring for myself. That’s the balance that’s so hard to get. And I guess it loops back to the stupid first-world thing about the mattress…it’s okay to look after myself and it’s okay to not feel guilty about that. As we travel along, our capacity to hold the light for ourselves and for others changes, whatever activism we participate in.

Some days you can’t even hold the light for yourself. Some days you can hold it for the village. It’s really important to a) remember that and not beat yourself up about it…you’re not failing if you can’t do it, you’re doing self-care. And b) you can’t do everything. Even on a good day, you can’t do everything. You’re in it for the long haul and whatever activism you’re doing, that’s enough. One step at a time and hopefully we can change the world.

Christine Burns has a curated list of books about the trans experience here.
Here are some resources for trans people experiencing homelessness.

Interview: Chace Verity

Chace Verity joins us this morning to tell us a bit about themselves and their upcoming sexy Snow White retelling, Illusive Wishes! Welcome, Chace!

First questions… why are you doing this interview?

Hello! I’m Chace Verity (they/them), author of romances across multiple subgenres and gender pairings/more-ings. I have a nonbinary/nonbinary dark, sexy Snow White retelling releasing soon called Illusive Wishes. Discover a new kind of Prince Charming on October 15!

What started you writing?

I’ve been writing freely ever since I was a very small child, always looking to discover new worlds. I’ve taken writing more seriously in the last six or seven years. More recently than that, I discovered why I was looking for new worlds. As a very queer person, the vast majority of media around me didn’t resemble my own lived experiences and feelings. Since joining the online writing community, I’ve approached my own writing with more purpose, and I’ve had the extreme joy of discovering new worlds written by other queer authors.

What do you like to read?

These days, I read mostly adult romances spread out through many subgenres. Contemporary, fantasy, paranormal, sci-fi, historical, etc. Some of my favorite authors write in multiple subgenres as well, so I get excited following their publishing journey and seeing what’s new from Alyssa Cole, Katrina Jackson, Skye Kilaen, J. Emery, etc. I also have gotten back into reading graphic novels and manga since the pandemic started, and those can be in wildly varying genres. The recent paperback shortage has made it difficult to read those in my preferred format, but I was gifted Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu recently, and I bought a big beautiful volume of Codename: Sailor V by Naoko Takeuchi for my birthday and have enjoyed rereading the manga that compelled me so much as a teenager.

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 used to belong to many different dedicated writing groups, but I’ve had to step away from all of them for one reason or the other in the last couple of years. Not because I think groups are inherently bad, but just because I had personal stuff going on. I’m slowly stepping back into joining groups with people I don’t know, but I’m trying to keep it low pressure. Large groups, in general, may not be for me.

Right now, I want to focus on building friendships one-on-one with mutuals I admire on social media like Twitter, and I am dedicated to protecting my friendships with the writing partners I’ve had for several years. Writing is very solitary, but I value my writing friendships tremendously. It’s nice to have a safe space where I can cry because a book release flopped or because I’m stuck mid-draft. And it’s equally nice to be able to offer an ear when a friend is going through similar troubles.

When I look at my books on my shelf, I don’t see word counts or sales or rankings. I see the friends who were with me on those journeys. Sometimes it’s a bittersweet reflection because some friendships change and dissolve. But overall, I don’t regret any of it.

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

I play a lot of video games and listen to K-pop while playing with my cats. I don’t talk a whole lot about my hobbies because I grew up with people gatekeeping everything I liked, but I’ve realized during this pandemic that people are going to shit on everything I do, no matter how much I try to present myself as worthy. So since the pandemic has started, I have found myself enjoying my hobbies with much more enthusiasm and not caring at all about what others think. When I tweet that I’m playing through the Yakuza series or that I’m excited for BTS’s upcoming online concert, I don’t give one flying fuck who might come into my mentions to fight me or what “friend” decides they don’t want to associate with me anymore. Hobbies refuel my creative vehicle, allowing me to write all the weird books I want. Speaking of weird…

Tell me a little bit about your most recent release. 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?

Illusive Wishes is my favorite book I’ve written thus far, and I think it’s because it’s the first one where I wrote without worrying about making it appeal to a broad audience. This queer Snow White retelling is very niche. Even in contemporary genres, books with trans/nonbinary protagonists still aren’t hitting best-seller lists to the same degree as cisgender leads. So add in fantasy + romance + a hefty list of content notes…

Yeah, I probably spent two years writing a book that maybe thirty people will read. But it’s what I wanted to write. I have a note on my whiteboard from an interview with Alyssa Cole that says, “If it makes me happy, it can make others happy.” Next to it is another note from the famed violinist Stuart Canin. I had asked him during an online event what advice he could give for struggling creatives, and he simply said, “If you don’t love it, don’t do it.”

I love writing. And I very much loved writing Illusive Wishes. It probably won’t pay the bills, but it filled my heart with a lot of excitement and happiness.

Illusive Wishes

Ever since becoming disowned by his family, the person who matters most to Isaac is his best friend. Unfortunately, said best friend is trapped inside a mirror. For two years, Isaac has traveled various kingdoms with Penn at his side, searching for clues to break the curse and earning money however he can. When offered a job as an escort for a lavish party at the Embedded Palace—a place teeming with wealth and potential magic—Isaac is quick to accept. For the friend he’s fallen in love with, he’ll do anything.

Being stuck in a mirror is one thing, but for Penn, it’s even more humiliating because they’re a fairy who should have been able to avoid the curse. Whatever the curse is. They can’t quite remember. If only they had been a storybook Prince Charming instead of a useless fairy, life would have been better. But with a sweet, kind, and alluring friend like Isaac helping them, they refuse to give up.

As soon as the pair arrive at the Embedded Palace, buried memories start surfacing, darker than either of them ever imagined. With a misanthropic knight who has ties to fairies, cursed apples, a queen seeking an enchanted mirror, and a hunter obsessed with Isaac, the inseparable best friends find themselves being pulled apart. Maybe not even a Prince Charming can save the day, but Penn and Isaac will do anything to make their deepest wish come true—to be with each other.

Content notes : Buy on Amazon : Buy on Gumroad

About Chace

Chace Verity (they/them) is publishing queer as heck stories with a strong romantic focus, although queer friendships and found families are important too. Chace prefers to write fantasy but dabbles in contemporary and historical fiction as well. An American citizen & Canadian permanent resident, Chace will probably never be able to call a gallon of milk a “four-litre.”

Website : Newsletter : Bookbub : Twitter : Instagram