Paranormal Romance – Page 6

The Fog of War, out today!

And…we’re off! The Fog of War is live today! I am so grateful to everyone who has reviewed and let me drop in to their blogs with posts and such-like. It’s a sapphic, historical, paranormal, romantic mystery set in rural England in 1920.

To celebrate today, I’m hosting a party at the Lester Towers facebook group with lots of friends dropping in to say hi and offer giveaways.

I’ve also got a Rafflecopter draw running from the 13th-17th of August with a chance to win a $10 Amazon gift-card if you fancy throwing your hat into the ring.

Finally, I’m doing a bit of a blog-tour talking about the characters, settings and the history behind it and you’ll be able to find the other posts listed on my website as they come out this week. I’ve already visited Anne Barwell’s blog to talk about the village of Bradfield, Elizabeth Noble’s blog to talk about where I’d go if I could time travel and The Sapphic Bookclub to talk about the women-led hospitals in WW1.

The Fog of War

Publisher: JMS Books LLC
Editor: Lourenza Adlem
Release date: 14 Aug 2014
Word Count: 50,000 words
Genre: Sapphic, found-family, historical, paranormal romantic mystery set in 1920s England.
Content Warning: Mention of domestic violence.

The quiet village of Bradfield should offer Dr Sylvia Marks the refuge she seeks when she returns home from her time in a field hospital in France in 1918. However, she is still haunted by the disappearance of her ambulance-driver lover two years previously ,and settling down as a village doctor is more difficult than she realised it would be after the excitement of front-line medicine. Then curious events at a local farm, mysterious lights and a hallucinating patient’s strange illness make her revisit her assessment of Anna’s death on the battlefield.

Lucille Hall-Bridges is at a loose end now her nursing work is finished. She felt useful as a nurse and now she really doesn’t know what to do with her life. She hopes going to stay with her friend Sylvia for a while will help her find a way forward. And if that involves staying at Bradfield with Sylvia…then that’s fine with her.

Will the arrival of Lucy at Bradfield be the catalyst that allows both women to lay their wartime stresses to rest? Can Sylvia move on from her love affair with Anna and find happiness with Lucy, or is she still too entwined in the unresolved endings of the past?

The first in the Bradfield trilogy, set in the Border Magic universe.

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Excerpt

It was a beautiful late August day when Sylvia motored down to Taunton to collect Lucy from the railway station. The sun shone through the trees as she followed the lane down the hill from the village and the sky above was a beautiful summer blue. She had left the all-weather hood of the Austin down and wore a scarf and gloves against the wind, topping her trouser outfit off with her new hat, which she pinned firmly to the neat coil of her long hair.

Walter had watched her fussing with her appearance in the hall mirror, stuffing his pipe. “Are you sweet on her?” he asked, somewhat acerbically.

“It’ll be cold with the hood down,” she said, crushingly.

“Yes, yes, so it will be.” He turned his attention back to his tobacco, face straight. “Be careful on the bends.”

“I will,” she said. “She’s a beast to drive, smooth on the straights and handles well on the corners, but I’ve no desire to end up in the ditch.”

The Fog of War. Historical, paranormal, 1920s England

She’d bought the big Austin coupe late last winter when she’d got fed up riding her motorcycle out to some of the more remote houses she was called to in the dreadful weather. It was huge, far bigger than she needed really, although the back seat was useful to transport a patient if she had to. She still preferred her ‘cycle, but it wasn’t exactly suitable as a doctor’s vehicle. Not very staid at all. The Austin wasn’t very staid either, in that it was huge and expensive; but one of the benefits of a private income was that she could afford it; and so why not be comfortable?

She pondered all this and more on the drive down to Taunton, mind floating along with no real purpose. She loved to drive and for some reason it calmed her thoughts and allowed them to drift.

It would be lovely to see Lucy again. As Walt had said, she was a sweet little thing. Although Sylvia didn’t want to revisit the grim minutiae of some of the worst times at Royaumont, it would be lovely to reminisce about some of their happier moments of camaraderie. It had been four years of extreme stress and grim terror lightened with moments of laughter and fun. Working with a team of competent women all pulling together for one purpose had been extraordinary. She’d never experienced anything like it before and she doubted she would again. She was delighted some of the staff had set up a regular newsletter so they could all stay connected.

And so what if Lucy was sweet on her. Sylvia wasn’t interested in that kind of complication anymore. She didn’t want to cause gossip in the village for a start…although she supposed people wouldn’t make any assumptions about two women living together these days after so many men hadn’t come home from France. But anyway, even if it wouldn’t cause gossip, she didn’t think about Lucy like that. And she doubted Lucy thought about Sylvia like that, despite Walter’s teasing. He was stirring the pot a little to see what bubbled up, that was all.

Those musings took her to the station.

The train was on time and was just pulling in as she got out of the car. She walked out onto the platform as the smoke was clearing and through the clouds, she made out Lucy.

She was beside the guard’s van, directing the guard and porters to what seemed like an unnecessarily large pile of luggage. Despite the clement August weather, she was wearing an extremely smart velvet coat with a fur collar over a beautiful travelling suit that hung to mid calf, topped with an extraordinary confection of a hat.

She looked competent and sophisticated and exceptionally beautiful. Not at all the slightly scapegrace young person of 1916 who had persuaded the hospital powers-that-be she was a suitable candidate for France, although she’d been only twenty-one and inexperienced as a nurse.

Well. Gosh.

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Why ‘The Fog of War’?

As I may have mentioned, just in passing, The Fog of War is out tomorrow. One or two people have pointed out that it’s a slightly peculiar title juxtaposed with the 1920s art-deco cover and what the heck is going on?

The Fog of War. Historical, paranormal, 1920s Englandl

I have a confession, then.

Mr AL named it.

I mean, of course I thought it was a good title and went with it, he didn’t elbow me out of the way to fill in the PUT TITLE HERE bit on the submission form or anything. But he came up with it. He did the same for a couple of my other stories, too–he seems to have a bit of a gift for it. He doesn’t read my books or beta for me or anything, we write in very different genres. But he does listen patiently as I whine about plot-holes and helps me tighten up my blurbs. I do the same for him and it works quite well, I think.

When he came up with it, just throwing potential titles out at me at lightening speed, it immediately struck home.

It’s an evocative phrase first used exactly in the 1890s, although fog, twilight, moonlight and similar concepts had been used earlier in the century by a chap called Carl Von Clausewitz. It describes the confusion of battle, how uncertainty about capability and action on the battlefield are a hindrance or can be used to ones advantage.

It immediately resonated for me because Sylvia and Lucy and their friends are drifting round trying to work out what happened to Anna without having enough information to understand the bigger picture. In retrospect I think it probably clashes terribly with the cartoon cover; but I love the title and I love the artwork, so here we are!

Remember tomorrow there’s a release-party in my facebook group to celebrate the book going live. Lots of author friends are popping in the say hi and both they and I have giveaways and games galore. Do pop in and join in! I also have a Rafflecopter draw going to win a $10 Amazon gift card that you can join today.

Why Paranormal?

Why do I set a lot of my stories in a paranormal universe, you ask? It’s a question I often grumble about to myself.

I am slightly resentful of my writing-subconscious, because it doesn’t want to make things easy for me. I love writing historical stories, the research, the social history, getting into how people thought at the time. I suppose I could be writing these stories without the paranormal element…and indeed, I have! But quite often I start off thinking that’s what I’m going to do and then boink, there we are with mysterious howling and people dissolving and what-not.

Obviously, I had to have some sort of ooops, we’ve slipped through time element at the very beginning of the Border Magic series to get Lew back to 1919 in Lost in Time. But initially that wasn’t really the focus of the book. I wanted to contrast the experiences and expectations of a man born in the 1880s with one born in the 1980s, and time-travel just seemed a really cool way to do that.

And the whole Border Magic Universe has snowballed a bit from there.

I am aiming less for Narnia—a world you can easily pop through a wardrobe door to get to that is magical of itself—and more for Lovecraft, where the magic is dangerous and inexplicable and has consequences for the humans who’s lives it touches. Each of the people in my books discovers and reacts to the magic in different ways and readers aren’t meant to have a whole picture of how it works, because the characters don’t. Sometimes they’ll know a bit more about what’s going on than the characters if they’ve read other books; but it shouldn’t make any difference to their enjoyment of the story if they haven’t.

Readers seem to either like the drip-drip of more information about the magical world or loathe it. As a writer it’s a bit of a cop-out because I don’t have a series-bible with all the rules and regulations of the magic written down in advance. This means I can whip a thing out of the hat to make the story more gruesome or coherent if I want to. My rule to myself is that I can’t change things I’ve already written about—so the magic is internally consistent from book to book and the magic system grows all the time. I know what the rules are, pretty much, but I don’t’ have them written down anywhere in a very formal sense. I should also admit I do subcontract out some of my gothic horror…Talking Child came up with the idea of the hollows in The Flowers of Time and is still smug about it however many years later.

Will I write a story set in the Outlands, so people can find out more about what’s going on behind the scenes? Honestly, I don’t know. At the moment I’d say no, I wouldn’t. But three years ago I’d have told you I’d never write contemporary stories or short stories; and I’m quite happily writing my Reworked Celtic Myths in just that format!

Here’s a deleted scene I posted earlier, Fenn in the Outlands with a bit more about the world.

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.