Introducing Read Around the Rainbow

Read Around the Rainbow, Writers and bloggers of LGBTQIA+ romance

So, here’s our New Thing! My Office Writing Buddies ™, Nell Iris and Ofelia Grand and I all run blogs and we like to drop in to each other’s places and make things collaborative. So we have set up a little group of like-minded people who write similar stories and we are all going to pick a topic once a month and write about it.

I have [please insert your drumroll here] set up a webring. Webrings are an ancient and venerable part of the internet and some of you might not even know what they are. My memories of them from the glorious nineties and noughties are…variable. There weren’t many easy options to find like-minded people on the world wide interweb, so bloggers and website hosts with similar interests got together in groups and directed one-another to our sites. You signed up, stuck a bit of code on your webpage that produced something like this and off you went:

Read around the RainbowVisit the rest of The Rainbow bloggers!

Previous Random Next

(Purely in hopes of admiration, I need to say at this point that I forked a repository on Github to make this happen—I regularly say my coding days are over and they definitely are, I found it tortuous!)

The result of all this is that a handful of us are going to pick a topic, write about it on the last Friday of the month and link to each other’s posts. Because we are all high-stress people, the plan is to be very easy going and not put pressure on ourselves…if we don’t fancy a topic one month, we just don’t do it.

Our first posts will be going up on the Friday 25th of March, so do keep an eye out! We hope to see you around!

Ofelia Gränd/Holly Day :: Nell Iris :: A.L. Lester :: Lillian Francis :: Fiona Glass :: Amy Spector :: K.L. Noone :: Ellie Thomas

Read Around the Rainbow

#TheWeekThatWas

Right then…it’s been a while and this is a bit of a rambling personal post to get myself back in to the swing of things.

patio table and chair set on a garden
Photo by Deeana Arts on Pexels.com

I stopped blogging over Christmas because I thought I’d have a break—things were a bit tough with the kids and my mental health wasn’t great. And then…my mental health still wasn’t great and there we were in January. And then I got a bit anxious about not having posted…so here we are in February!

I pushed back the release of the third Bradfield village novel to try to take some weight off; instead my March release (on the 26th) will be Out of Focus, a twenty-thousand word contemporary novella set in a theatre community in Wales. I think I might revisit some of the secondary characters at some point, I enjoyed writing it so much.

At the moment I’m working on a project for May with Ofelia Grand, Nell Iris, K. L. Noone and Amy Spector. We are all writing short stories/novellas for World Naked Gardening Day.

The Wingman, Holly Day

It began as a bit of a joke…Ofelia’s other pen name is Holly Day, and she writes stories to celebrate different days all through the year. (Her latest release is The Wingman, a 11,000 word short story to mark National Wingman Day on 13th February!)

She and Nell and I were laughing about there being a day for everything in our early-morning writing session one morning and eventually we decided it would be fun to write something together. We are all writing stories of between fifteen and twenty thousand words that will be released on 7th May. Each one features…you guessed it…naked gardening in some way. I’m about half way through and hope to be finished in the next week or so.

I may revisit Bradfield then; or I may write something else first. I needed a palate-cleanser I think. It all felt very heavy and difficult and once I made the decision to put it down for a while I felt quite a bit better.

This is a something-and-nothing blog post in a way, just to get back on the horse. Those of you who follow my newsletter or facebook group will know that Littlest has had a mild dose of covid this week. It’s been a bit stressful because she’s clinically extremely vulnerable and we panicked when she got the two lines last Friday. We spent last weekend trying to sort out antibodies for her—we had a letter saying she was eligible for the treatment when it became available a few months ago. However, it turns out that you need to be over forty kilos and she is only thirty four, so we needn’t have wasted our time and everyone else’s. She’s okay now though, a week on. Asymptomatic, just very, very tired.

The rest of us have been testing consistently negative, but both Mr AL and I have had what could be mild symptoms. It’s only the last couple of days that I’ve felt like a human again.

So…to round off! I’ll be blogging regularly from now on (they said, very firmly). AND finally…JMS Books has a 40% Valentine’s Day Sale on ebooks, Friday through to Monday!

Valentine's Day Sale, 40% off all ebooks at JMS Books.

New year, new stories

pexels-photo-3401897.jpeg
Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

I’m not usually the sort of person who celebrates New Year’s Eve and this year it was a bit peculiar anyway, because Mr AL spent it in a hotel near the airport so he could collect Talking Child from her Big American Adventure. I had an early night and woke up to find TC’s flight had landed and they were on their way home. It was the best New Year’s present I could have had, really.

This is the first morning I’ve got up to write in the office for a couple of weeks—I had a horrible cold in the week before Christmas and it knocked me completely off track. I have been having serious problems with the third Bradfield book that my editor and I finally tracked down to the fact I don’t actually like my main character; which is a bit of an issue. I have decided to put it on the backburner for a bit and try and reframe her in my mind whilst I write something else in the interim; but I’m still not sure what.

This year I have in my mind that I am not going to write any series. It’s going to be the year of the stand-alone story. And I want to write something new. I’ve been dealing with monsters and the border and all that for six years now and whilst I love my magical world it’s time to try something different, even if I come back to it in a while. That’s why I wanted to write Bradfield #3 early this year and be able to draw a line under it for a bit.

I want to write the companion novel to The Flowers of Time and expand the mm romance between Edie’s brother Hugh and his friend Carruthers. That involves immersing myself in the 1780s again and is something I’ve been looking forward to for a while. And I have another idea I’m calling Space Gays that I haven’t fleshed out yet…I thought it might be a trilogy though, so that’s a no-no for a while under my current rules!

In my half-started folder I have a post-pandemic dystopia I began well before covid hit. I really want to finish it; but since covid I haven’t been able to even look at it…too close to home. I thought I might try and finish it; but I have serious doubts about anyone wanting to read that sort of thing at the moment. Last week’s newsletter poll more or less confirmed that! And I want to write some more Celtic myths. I’m really enjoying them and people seem to like reading them. They’re very satisfying to write.

In among all these ideas, JMS Books has some interesting submission calls this year; particularly one for time-travel romances. I am now wondering about that…but time. I need a way to fold time.

So. That’s my vague writing plans for the new year. I also have more audiobooks on the backburner—I have a lovely person lined up for The Fog of War and I’d like Callum to voice The Quid Pro Quo for me if he’s available.

I do have a spreadsheet that I’m putting things in to so I don’t overwhelm myself; which is basically what happened toward the end of last year. I tend to fill my coping mechanism up to the top and then when something unexpected happens there’s no room and everything overflows. Leaving myself some headroom is definitely a better strategy.

 Among all that we have been shielding Littlest again against Omicron. She’s had two jabs and hopefully clinically vulnerable children in the UK will be able to have a third soon, which will put my mind at rest.

I wish you all the very best for 2022. Let’s hope it’s a bit less stressful than the last couple of years.

The Week that Was: Mattresses and activism

Cover, The Princess and the Pea

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.

The wheel turns- the sounds of autumn

It’s all gone a bit mists and mellow fruitfulness here at Lester Towers over the last week or so.

Autumn cyclamen

The garden is having a last frantic burst of activity before everything starts to shut down for winter…there are two roses on the white rose bush outside the bedroom window that I have watched come into full bloom over the last few days; and the autumn cyclamen in the scrubby area where we took down the tree are blooming like mad. Every time we go out, Littlest and I collect leaves and ash-helicopters to add to our basket of Things To Sort–swan feathers and shells and interesting stones.

The most noticeable thing about the change of season though, is the way the soundscape has changed. I’m not sure whether it’s just because it’s getting dark earlier and I’m still awake when they wake up…but the Tawny Owls are busy in the hedgerow.

There’s a family of them and they work their way down the field border every evening having long conversations to-and-fro, getting closer and close, then fading away. And the little birds are back on the feeders in a steady sort of way–early in the year when they had babies to feed, the mealworm feeder needed refilling every couple of days. Then in the high and late summer they didn’t much fuss with it at all; and now I’m refilling it once a week or so. We still have goldfinches and siskins on the seeds as well as our usual varieties of tits and the robins. They’re quieter than they were in the spring and summer, more chatter than song.

The sound that really heralds autumn though, is the bellowing of the red deer.

There are a lot of them wild on the Quantocks and they come right down to the village edge here, and sleep against the edge of the woods in the parkland around the manor house. When we lived in the old gardener’s cottage up there they were literally in our back garden. It’s a haunting noise, very eerie when you hear it drifting across the hill as the dusk comes down. I associate it with being curled up on the sofa with a book, curtains pulled shut and the fire lit.

The time of year always makes me feel as if I need to lay in stocks for the winter. It’s a primal sort of response, I think, gathering in the last of the harvest to see us through the cold. These days I mostly confine myself to making gin or vodka or brandy with hedgerow fruit and Mr AL and Talking Child are collecting the windfalls apples and we’re eating a lot of crumble. In more enthusiastic times I’d be processing everything I could and freezing or drying it; and we used to make elderberry and rosehip syrup and all sorts of wine and chutney and jam. I’ve got spinach I need to plant out in the greenhouse and the perennial kale in the garden; but other than that, my gardening is sadly lacking these last few years.

Life turns as the wheel of the seasons does I suppose, and I’m doing other things now. I regret it…but I can’t worry about it. I just tell myself that the wheel will come round again and to enjoy what we have.