personal – A. L. Lester

RAtR: Kind of, anyway

Read Around the Rainbow

As you’re probably aware, #RAtR is a blogging project I am doing with a few friends who also write LGBTQIA romance. You can find everyone by clicking here or on the image to the right.

Hi! Hello! The observant among you will have noticed I have been absent from RAtR, and pretty much everywhere else, for the best part of a year. In that time I’ve sent out a couple of newsletters I think and put one or two things on my FB group. But essentially I’ve been focusing on family.

Littlest became very ill with a respiratory infection last September. She was in hospital for five months and became critically ill the week before Christmas. We prepared for the worst; and then the day before Christmas Eve she didn’t quite sit up and demand a bacon sandwich. But she pulled round very quickly and was discharged to home in the second week of January. We knew we were on borrowed time and amended her Advanced Care Plan accordingly.

Health and Social Care pulled a number of rabbits out of their various hats and we had an incredible amount of help put in place at home. She was largely confined to bed initially, but then towards the end of February she improved further and was able to get out and about a couple of times a week. She thoroughly enjoyed it, as she was so bored in bed. We focused on ‘quality over quantity’ and organised for her to go back to school for a few hours a week.

Luck was always against us though, and at the end of June, she passed away of COVID. It was quick, at home and surrounded by family who loved her. She was fifteen.

We are now at the end of August and I am just beginning to realise she’s not coming back. I lie in bed at night, and in my head I imagine she is asleep next door, and I can hear the quiet thump of the oxygen condenser and swsssh of the ventilator. That any moment she will mutter in her sleep or call out for one of us to come and reposition her, or pick up the cuddly toys she has thrown overboard.

It is inconceivable to me that she is gone, although we knew that this moment would happen. The house is bare without her mobility aids and when the team came to remove the ceiling hoists, I cried. If we go out, I still rush, and check my watch, and count minutes off on my head so we won’t be back late for her carers. Our grocery shopping no longer has regular bumper-packs of wet-wipes and hand sanitiser, or tins and tins of tinned fruit and yoghurt and other things to put in her tube feeds. The carpets are exponentially cleaner because she is not tracking half the countryside in on the wheels of the wheelchair. Our washing machine use has halved.

I cannot watch TV programs with bereavements, or ones with young children who giggle when their parents boop their nose. Watching, I get a physical pressure in my chest, a stone sitting on my heart and I cannot bear it.

My daughter is dead, and nothing will ever be the same again. I feel guilt, that perhaps I didn’t do enough. I constantly feel I’ve forgotten something; that ‘Oh shit I left the baby at the Post Office!’ feeling. But there is no baby now and the Post Office has been permanently closed.

A part of me is relieved. Relieved for her, that she no longer has to struggle. But also selfishly relieved for myself that I no longer have to write emails and make phonecalls and fight and fight for her care and her health and her education. I am tired. We are both so tired. If you’ve never cared for anyone long-term, you have no idea how tired you can be.

For the first month, we both just wandered around in a daze. We had nightmares, we had insomnia, we slept at odd times. Now, at the end of the second month we are sleeping better. I am dragging myself out of bed each morning instead of staying in my pyjamas all day. We are trying to keep occupied. If I’m not occupied, I seem to go into a fugue state where all I do is stare at the wall and feel the enormous weight of my grief, like a horsehair blanket thrown over me, muffling everything in the world.

Writing has been impossible for the last twelve months. I am starting, very slowly, to feel neurons come back online though. Memories I had lost pop up regularly now I have all that extra processing power freed up and can sleep for eight hours a night. I am hoping I might be able to begin to write again soon, but I’m not going to push myself. For once in my life I am going to take the time that I need. That’s why I am writing this instead of the Dark Romance topic. Next month, I hope I can join in with the team and get back on track.

For their thoughts on Dark Romance, check out their blogs:

To read what my Read Around the Rainbow colleagues have written about Dark Romance, click through below!

Nell Iris : Ofelia Grand : Lillian Francis : Fiona Glass : Amy Spector : Ellie Thomas : Holly Day : K. L. Noone : Addison Albright

#ReadAroundtheRainbow: Writing advice I take with a grain of salt

Read Around the Rainbow

As you’re probably aware, #RAtR is a blogging project I am doing with a few friends who also write LGBTQIA romance. You can find everyone by clicking here or on the image to the right.

This month, we’re all blogging about writing advice we take with a grain of salt… and…I’m not sure about this one! Do I say I rigidly follow all the rules? And have people think I’m a formulaic work-to-rule sort of writer? Or do I say I pick and choose what received advice I follow, and have people think I’m arrogant and self-important and not a proper writer?

It’s a dilemma! Probably the first advice I should actually listen to is to ignore imposter syndrome 😊.

In all honesty though, there’s so much completely conflicting advice out there for people who write, whether they’re published or not:

Write every day. It doesn’t matter if you write every day. Attend a writing group. Write alone. Self-edit. Always have an editor. Have lots of social media. Don’t bother with social media. Write different genres under different pen-names. Put everything under one pen name. Hone your skills in fanfiction. Take a course. Self-publish. Look for a publisher. Get an agent. Don’t bother with an agent.

And Oxford commas…well. That’s how decades long feuds begin.

I think the only thing you can say for certain is that what suits one person won’t suit another and the less you get hung up on all the dos and don’ts, the happier and more confident you’ll be.

I’m definitely not confident enough to self-edit for example. But I know several people who do, very competently. The writing every day thing…well. My life is very, very fragmented right now and that’s impossible for me. But it doesn’t make me any less of a writer. Everything is still ticking away inside my head and when I do sit down with my laptop I often find it springs more fully formed onto the page than it does if I’ve been writing every day. Not always! But sometimes.

So, I’d have to say that the only thing I’d take with a grain of salt is to follow all the advice you’re given. Pick what works for you and have the confidence to say ‘I tried that and it was rubbish for me, it didn’t work’.

It’s not a competition, there are no rules that dictate conformity or success. If you’re happy as you’re actually writing and happy with what you’re creating, then…that’s working. You’re a successful writer.

Here’s everyone else who wrote this month. Click through to read what they have to say!

Nell Iris : Ofelia Grand : Lillian Francis : Fiona Glass : Amy Spector : Ellie Thomas : Holly Day : K. L. Noone : Addison Albright

Gallbladder Summer followed by Children’s Respiratory Illness Autumn

Nenna, smiling in her new pyjamas with pineapples on them.

If you follow me on social media at all, you’ll know that Littlest has been in hospital for a couple of weeks now. She went in with a respiratory infection that necessitated us flying back from our holiday/respite break and she’s having trouble throwing it off. She’s been in and out of the local ICU, swapping between there and the children’s ward HDU. There isn’t a dedicated PICU locally and we are waiting for a bed in the children’s hospital in Bristol. They are snowed however, because the Children’s Respiratory Illness Season ™ has come early this year.

She doesn’t currently need non-invasive ventilation and is on nasal oxygen of either the high-flow or low-flow kind; IV antibiotics; and having a lot of chest physio and suction. Her SATS keep swinging up and down and she is getting very tired. Last week we had a very difficult conversation with her doctors about the pros and cons of invasive ventilation. It needed to be had, but it was emotionally gruesome.

I’m updating every couple of days on tiktok, more for myself than anyone else really–it feels good to talk about it a bit, it releases some of the pressure inside me. She’s a strong-minded little girl–not so little now at fourteen–and we are hopeful she will throw this off. But also, we have been living with the knowledge that she is life-limited since we were first referred to the children’s hospice when she was four.

Every time she is poorly like this, her overall health and wellbeing steps down. Even if she throws it off, it’s probable she won’t ever regain the strength she had before. One of the reasons Bristol want her there is so they can assess her for overnight non-invasive ventilation when she is well enough to come home.

I am swinging between bursts of activity on social media and managing to write as displacement, to not being able to do anything. My own health still isn’t back to normal after my Gallbladder Summer and I’m having to pace myself. Consequently Mr AL is spending most of the time in hospital with Littlest–because of her communication issues and special needs she needs someone who knows here there pretty much all the time. I’m trying to do a few hours in the morning and early afternoon and he’s doing the late afternoon and evening; and when we don’t have help from one of her lovely carers, the night as well. No-one needs me overdoing it and having a seizure on the ward, although they’ve been very nice when I have.

Talking Child is bottling it all up, as are we all I suppose. Every so often they have a meltdown, completely understandably. We are taking it in turns.

That’s the news, anyway. If you’d like to contribute to a crowdfunder to help with additional carer costs and for hospital food when we don’t have enough spoons to take sandwiches and a thermos, I have set one up here. Alternatively if you’d like to support us by buying one of my books, you can find them here. Any help is very gratefully received <3.

There’s been a bit of a hiatus

So the observant among you will have noted that I’ve been missing in combat for the last couple of months–I’ve written about it in occasional newsletters and on my social media, but not here. I was in hospital for a month for emergency gallbladder surgery with complications; and I’ve been home for a month convalescing. The doctor thinks it’ll probably be another couple of months before I’m back up to speed.

It’s all been very frustrating and upsetting for the whole family and I’m finding convalescence very hard–I’m never good at pacing myself.

I’ve been doing a bit of writing when I feel up to it and trying to avoid social media as much as possible because I seem to have been left with this terrible inability to manage anxiety; and what is social media these days other than a swirling pool of bad news?

I felt up to writing a brief blog post this morning though, and I’m hoping to get back on the horse with regular posts over the next couple of months. I’m finishing the second Theatr Fach contemporary short story and I have plans for another Celtic Myth for Halloween if I can get my act together. It’s just a case of one foot in front of the other!

#AMA: The Nix List

This week’s question is another by Anabela (who gave me a wheelbarrow-load of really good ones!) Do you have subjects you think you could never write about?

Yes! Definitely! Is the short answer—I should think everyone does. And I should think everyone’s answer is very different and probably changes with time.

The first one that jumps to mind though is children. I’ve always been very disinclined to write about characters with children. Mine are in their early teens now and I was first published in 2017 when they were…thinks very hard…nine and ten. The absolutely last thing I wanted to do was revisit that in fiction. Likewise now, I can’t see myself writing in the parental romance genre any time soon. I had a rubbish time when they were tiny babies and it’s simply not something I want to explore, whether it would be a story that sells or not. I’m utterly baffled by epilogues in romance that show characters having children. I read them and they leave me cold, they’re not my thing at all. So I can’t ever envisage me writing one.

Having said that I do have a character in the Theatr Fach world who has a child; but that’s accidental—I wrote them as a side character in Out of Focus and threw in a kid they had to pick up from school as an excuse to leave Alex alone at the hospital; and I’d quite like to explore them further, so ta-da, they’re a parent. But generally speaking…writing about characters with children is a nix.

Also a nix is mpreg. Does that come under the ‘people with children’ caveat? It probably does, but it should also be a category on its own. I just…can’t. I think it might be my own dysphoria that makes me so revolted by it. Let me emphasise people should absolutely read and write what they want, this is my own personal reaction, not a judgment. I think, actually, giving it more thought whilst writing this, it’s not just mpreg, it’s an entire pregnancy thing. So let’s expand the nix to cover pregnancy. I cannot envisage ever writing a pregnant character. Even writing this paragraph has made me shudder. I did not enjoy being pregnant—I loathed it, every single minute of it. I had the two children very close together—sort of by design as I was nearly forty by the time the first one came along—but so close together that at one point I was pregnant and had post-natal depression. When Littlest was born, my lovely obstetrician wrote me a letter of congratulation expressing the wish never to see me in her clinic again. So a nix to pregnancy completely, please!

I don’t think there’s anything else I am conscious of definitely not wanting to write about. I’ve written about death and violence and assault, all sort of horrible things. I do find writing about sexytimes quite difficult sometimes. I don’t think that’s an inherent disinclination though, more that sex is inherently messy and funny and stupid and I find it hard to do right without slipping in to cliché. I’m always worried that readers will come across a sex-scene and it’ll throw them out of the story because I’ve done sexing in a way that no-one else will find acceptable/interesting/arousing/relevant to the narrative.

I’m sure there are other things and I don’t know it, simply because I haven’t come across them yet or I’ve buried them so deeply I don’t have a clue they’re there!

I’m really enjoying these posts…if you have an #AskMeAnything question, do drop me an email or pop in to Lester Towers to ask.