Category: personal

The difference between writing in the 1920s and 1970s. And a bit about colonialism in historical romance.

With The Fog of War coming out in August I thought it might be interesting to blog about the differences between writing in all the different time-periods I seem to dip in to. I went straight from writing The Flowers of Time, set in in India in the 1780s to Taking Stock in England in 1970. It was a bit of a mind-jump.

Cover, Taking Stock

Firstly, the main difference between writing Taking Stock in the 1970s and my books before that point, was that there was no magic. Up ’til then, I’d written in the 1920s and the 1780s with a with a paranormal twist. My magical world lies underneath the real one and I try to be as accurate as possible with that. But by education I’m a medievalist focusing on Britain, so the intricate historical detail of the 1970s was all new to me when I began.

For the 1920s books, I took inspiration from family stories about living in the East End of London in the first part of the twentieth century and there was a lot of documentary stuff to read. I’m a Dorothy L. Sayers fan, too, so it was quite easy to get a 1920s murder investigation vibe going.

Initially The Flowers of Time was supposed to be in the 1920s, too—it would have worked much better with plucky lady plant collectors toddling off around the world on behalf of Kew Gardens at that point in time and I already had a universe they could have slotted in to. However as I began writing, the characters got really bolshy and insisted they were from an earlier time period and we ended up in the 1780s. This is one of the disadvantages of discovery writing. Things can take a corkscrew turn quite quickly.

The Flowers of Time

The bolshy characters made a lot of reading for me, as not only was the geographical area very new to me but the history was as well. I started off reading about the East India Company from resources that were easily available to me—British historians—and then I moved on to contemporary accounts of people’s travels and finally felt I knew enough to read from Indian historians and get a proper understanding. Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire was particularly good for that. Contemporary accounts of women travellers in India the eighteenth century are very patchy and a lot of the story was based around Isabella Bird’s account of her journey across the Himalayas in the late nineteenth.

I was very conscious of not wanting my characters to be horrible colonialists–it’s one of the real risks of setting anything in British history. Everyone has some sort of connection to exploitation. Rich people trot around exploiting their empire in order to provide romantic heroines with fainting couches in pretty Georgian houses. Poor people join the army and serve in India or join the navy and collude in the slave trade. It’s easy enough to ignore all that. But does that make your main characters nice people with whom the writer and reader can empathise? Not so much, in my opinion. The Flowers of Time was hard to write for that reason and although I feel like I did a reasonable job, towards the end I felt like I maybe shouldn’t have been writing it at all because it’s basically about English people travelling through the sub-continent for fun.

I like the book because I love my characters–Jones, the non-binary academic in particular is very close to my heart. But I am very uncomfortable with the setting now and if I had given it more thought before I began to write I would probably have done it differently. On the one hand the sweeping adventures of the Kew Gardens’ plant collectors are fascinating and they were interesting to me because of my family background–my Mama used to work at the Botanical Gardens in Dublin. But on the other hand…they’re a perfect example of white people travelling all over the world ‘discovering’ things that have always been there.

I have a companion story wafting round in my head, focusing on the male secondary characters and I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. One of them is an East India Company soldier. He’s busy mapping the Himalayas and is of course, queer and a nice person. But should I be writing it in that setting? Probably not. I need to think about it some more and maybe find a different setting for the story that will still dovetail.

Anyway, after all that soul-searching with Flowers and a spell in hospital for a month to try to get a handle on the Functional Neurological Disorder–which worked very well as quiet time to write away from the family thanks!–for some reason, I decided to set Taking Stock in 1972. Firstly, this made me feel old, because I was born in 1970. Secondly, it appalled my mother, who is still cross that the second world war is being taught as history. Thirdly, it’s almost impossible to find cover art for people that gives a 1970s feel without also feeling that one is advertising a Sirdar knitting pattern. Apart from that though, it’s fine.

Map of Webber's Farm by Elin Gregory
Webber’s Farm

A lot of the farming references in Taking Stock are from my own childhood memories—the sheep dipping scenes for example—and from talking to older friends and family. I pigeon-holed a friend who worked in the City of London in the mid-1980s and extracted stock-exchange information from him, and I found a fascinating contemporary documentary on YouTube about stockbroking in the early 1960s. It was much easier to find that sense of place that I think is needed in historical fiction, because the references were all to hand. I can happily google ‘what happened in 1972’ and have a whole list of things come up that my characters would have been aware of. And the same for the 1920s really – there are millions of words written about the years immediately after the Great War and the social changes that were happening.

Those social changes make it easier to write characters who are conscious about those things and more easily sympathetic to the modern reader without ignoring all the horrendous colonialism behind British history. The 1970s are even more so, in my opinion. It’s easy to write fairy-tale historical romance stories if you ignore colonialism, social inequality and bad teeth. But if you want to do it properly, you need to take all those things into account.

Despite having a paranormal twist in most of my books, I really think of myself as writing historical romance and I take pride in getting the history right. It’s a balance though, it has to give colour and a setting without throwing the reader out of the story either with factual errors—someone one-starred my first book because I shifted the publication date of The Beautiful and the Damned back a year to fit my timeline and it clearly spoiled the whole thing for them—or with colonialist assumptions, or with making them feel they’re reading a history text-book.

As a writer it’s my job to do that and I hope I make a reasonably workmanlike job of it. I enjoy swapping between time periods, despite the dislocation that initially comes with it!

I have pages on the website with an overview of my research for The Flowers of Time and about the world of Taking Stock . You can also read all about the Border Magic universe and how the books fit together.

Publishing Delays

wood desk laptop office
Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

As those of you who follow my newsletter know, the last couple of weeks have been a real nightmare here at Lester Towers.

Littlest had an accident at school and broke her nose, which has caused all the fuss you’d expect, plus worry that she’d have to have it re-broken and re-set to ensure it’s still possible to naso-gastric tube her in the future if necessary. This has, thankfully, turned out not to be the case, but it’s taken ages for ENT to decide. I’ve had a visit to hospital for a minor procedure which was more tedious than worrying, Talking Child has been stressed about school and her sister and me. And finally Mr AL has put his back out lifting Littlest, which has caused our whole family raft to list alarmingly to one side.

So, we’re struggling, basically. Writing itself and my somewhat intermittent early morning writing sprints with my Office Colleagues, Ofelia Grand, Nell Iris and J. M. Snyder have been what’s keeping me going.

The cherry on the top of the disaster-Bakewell tart however, has been that my dear friend and editor has been hospitalised with covid. She is home and recovering now, which is an enormous relief, but as everyone knows, it’s a long haul.

The result of all this non-writing stress is that we are pushing the release of The Fog of War back until 16th August. I’m very sorry about it, but there it is, people are more important than stories when it comes down to it. The Starling story (which still doesn’t have a name, this is clearly my brand) is puttering along but again it’s all a bit up in the air.

School breaks up for summer in the last week of July, so I have no idea what my writing schedule will be over the weeks after that–last year I did quite well getting up before everyone else and getting on with it. The plan is to release the Sylvia trilogy three months apart, and I’m still hoping that will work, although I’m starting to wonder whether I’ve over-faced myself. Time will tell!

Anyway, that’s it. We’re all okay, but it’s been a tough few weeks. I hope you’re all doing all right too in these uncertain times.

Writing and Allyship Around Non-Binary Gender

Writing and Allyship Around Non-Binary Gender

This was first published in Romance Matters, the magazine for members of the (UK) Romantic Novelist’s Association, Autumn 2020. It was intended as a very brief guide to introduce writers to the subject, but I think it also stands as a good introduction to people wanting to understand more about the gender spectrum, regardless of whether they’re writers or not.

@cogenthippo

#NonBinary #TransDayOfVisibility #RainbowMafia #PanSexual #LGBTQ #ComingOut #QueerBookTok #Writertok #authortok #over50 #over40

♬ Steven Universe – L.Dre

Non-binary, genderfluid, genderqueer, agender and bigender are all descriptions of the fuzzy middle of the gender spectrum and people who sit there may choose any of those labels. 

The main thing to remember about all types of gender diversity (transgenderness) is that it is about how you feel inside, not about how you present to the outside world.  

I generally present as a short, round, grumpy middle-aged lady with purple hair, however I am feeling. This is probably because I only worked out what was going on for me in my mid-forties and I’m used to bottling it all up. Other people feel more comfortable presenting as masculine one day and feminine another. Some people present as androgynous all the time. It’s about where you need to be for mental comfort, not a fashion choice.

Good Allyship

There are no standard pronouns to use for non-binary people. As a good ally, what matters is using the pronoun people ask you to and not making them feel excluded by using gendered language. Some non-binary or gender neutral people like to be called he or she. Some prefer they. Some use zie or xe or per. A few people use ‘it’ and lots of people find ‘it’ offensive. Apart from that, the other way to make gender diverse people feel less uncomfortable is to try to use non-gendered language. ‘Children’ instead of boys and girls. ‘Parent’ rather than mother or father. ‘People’ or ‘folks’ rather than ‘ladies and gentlemen’. 

Writing

Obviously then, given all the fuzziness, there are no absolutes for fictional  characters. I’ve written three books now with non-binary protagonists. In first one (Shadows on the Border) I experimented with all the pronouns under the rainbow and in the end I changed pronoun depending on POV. Some characters saw my MC as male, some as female and some as neutral. The character sees themselves as ‘they’ and uses ‘they’ for everyone, because they come from a gender-neutral culture. My 1780s historical romance with a non-binary character (The Flowers of Time) was more difficult. Although my character is born female, she definitely feels herself to be gender-neutral. I decided in the end to work within the historical framework and stick to she and he pronouns. 

If you create your character and you aren’t sure you’ve got it right, think about finding a sensitivity reader to give you some feedback.

Finally…please ask if you are unsure what pronouns to use for someone. Very few people will mind a good-faith question!

Further Reading

Growing hydroponic greens

Hydroponics bed, straggly lettuce
Ebb and flow bed.

I’ve been meaning to write about my hydroponics bed for ages and haven’t got round to it. I started it in the winter and made a whole big deal about being able to grow my ‘Brexit lettuces’ because of the uncertainty about fresh food prices after the UK crashed out of the EU trade networks. It’s working pretty well now, so here’s a summary of what I did. It cost about £100 to set up.

Hydroponics bed under polythene
Wrapped up for night with heat pad underneath and polythene over the top. You can see the reservoir, the red bin, bottom right.
  1. I took a plastic under-bed storage box that’s about eight inches deep.
  2. I fitted ebb-and-flow fittings in two of the corners—an in and an out. They’re also sold as flood-and-drain fittings. I paid about £12.
  3. I repurposed an old waste bin as my water reservoir. You need something that will hold more water than your under-bed storage box and if you can rig up a lid that’s good because it stops evaporation. It needs to be positioned lower than your grow bed.
  4. I bought a small air pump and a small aquarium pump for about £10 each. These both go in your water reservoir. The air pump stops the water going horrible.
  5. And I got a cheap LED grow-light for about £40.
  6. I filled the storage box with clay pebbles to about an inch from the top. Don’t do this until you’ve got it in situ because of the weight. Wash them first because they’re dusty and that clagged up my little pump.
  7. I bought four-inch mesh pots and some flat trays. The mesh pots I use for tomatoes etc and the flat trays for green leaves. I use coir in the flat trays and a grow-sponge surrounded by coir in the pots. The flat trays are only half an inch deep and aren’t ideal. I need something longer and deeper and narrower to fit my set-up, but haven’t got round to making anything yet—I’m thinking that old plastic milk cartons with lots of holes punched in them might work. You need it to be net-like so the roots can work their way out. The pots work fine, I start them in the bed and then when the plants get tall I move them into large individual jars on the floor. This needs changing regularly because it goes green.
  8. I use Formulex liquid, on a 1:10 ratio. So my set-up takes 20 litres and I put in 200ml of liquid and change it every two or three weeks. It costs £12 per litre.
  9. I set the pump on a timer. Over the winter I had it going for fifteen minutes four times a day. Now it’s got warmer, I have it going for a extra two slots during the daytime.
  10. The light I initially had on for twelve hours a day. BUT I didn’t get very good growth and so I kept it on permanently and the lettuce seemed to really like that. Now we have more than 12 hours daylight, I’ve turned it off completely.
Hydroponics bed, lots of lettuce
Lettuce! Yay!

I also used an old vivarium heat pad during the coldest months—the set up is in my conservatory which gets pretty cold in the small hours. I slid that under the box, on top of the wooden surface and it kept the heat of the clay balls up sufficiently that the water flowing in was warmed and wasn’t a shock to the roots. If you have it in the house where it’s doesn’t get too cold at night, you won’t need that.

Tomatoes in cut-down 2l pop bottles. Not successful--too wobbly.
Tomatoes in cut-down pop bottles. Too unstable, I moved to big glass jars.

I read up a lot on EC levels—the mineral and nutrient content in the nutrient mix. Different plants need different kinds. It baffled me, quite frankly—I include links below so you can be baffled yourself. By random luck I seem to have hit on something that lettuce and tomatoes love, so I just change the solution every two or three weeks and it seems to be working.

Conclusions

I think this is one of those things that it’s quite easy to set up in a rough-and ready sort of way, which is my modus operandi, quite frankly. And harder to do precisely, which I have no interest in at all. My aim was to have fresh salad for the family that would survive even if I had three days unable to get out of bed and no-one else remembered to water it; and to avoid having half-liquid bags of leaves in the bottom of the fridge. I have achieved this.

The initial set-up cost was a bit eye-watering, largely because of the cost of the light. The ongoing cost is obviously the electric for the pumps/light and the Formulex, which costs about £5 per month, less if I change the solution every three weeks rather than two. You can make your own, but for me the cost offsets the faffing around.

Salad is £2 a bag and we buy a bag or more a week. So I’m £5 in hand a month and it will take two years to pay for the kit, ish. I’m happy with that—it wasn’t meant to be a cheap solution. I feel that I’m balancing my desire to have a proper permaculture garden and feed us all from scratch with what I can manage by myself with my physical and temporal limitations!

What I’d do differently

I’d probably not have such a deep container. For cut-and-come again and baby leaves, the eight inches isn’t necessary. Five would probably do, which would mean you could cut down on the clay pebbles needed, and therefore the amount of solution and the amount of nutrient.

These articles were helpful

Personal post: it’s a lot, folks

I’m genuinely struggling to know what to post about this week. I’ve got all sorts of things going on–Littlest had another COVID scare in the week and had to go in to the Children’s Ward to be tested and my Mama had her radiotherapy orientation yesterday and has her fortnight’s treatments scheduled to start in a week’s time and both kids have needed bloods taken and we’ve all had flu-jabs.

open book on table
Photo by Polina Zimmerman on Pexels.com

Then…Morris got out whilst Mr AL was taking Littlest in to the ward on Wednesday and when I went to collect him up, he wouldn’t be collected (because badger setts are more interesting than people, doh) and I ended up having a mahoosive seizure in the middle of a ploughed field a quarter mile away from home, in the dark, in the rain. Without my locator-watch gadget, which meant that poor Talking Child, the passing Lovely Jogger, my sister and my friend–both of whom I managed to call in a garbled fashion before I went full-on kipper–spent quite a while searching for me. I’d just got out of the bath and was in my nightie and house-trousers and unsuitable shoes, and I’d semi-fallen in to the ditch whilst trying to jump from one field to another.

Morris Dachshund of Lester Towers, Badger-Hunter Extraordinaire. Butter wouldn’t melt, obvs.

I felt pretty grim on Thursday–I get a sort of hang-over after the siezures–and that was made even worse by feeling so useless with everything else that is going on. Mr AL will be driving my Mama the ninety minutes up and down to the hospital, with my sister. It’s more comfortable and less tiring for Ma to travel in her powered wheelchair in our vehicle rather than transfer in and out of my sister’s and take a folding chair. I can’t participate in any of that, because I can’t drive any longer and no-one wants me to ride along only to have a fit in the middle of Mama’s appointment.

In addition, it’s not really safe for Littlest and I to be on our own without supervision. She’s a choking risk and I’m a fitting risk and if those two things happen simultaneously, well, that’s not ideal for her. This has been the case for quite a while and we work round it, making sure we always have oversight.

But after Wednesday, my nearest and dearest are having a conniption fit about me being alone at all.

Littlest, when she was in hospital for something-or-other earlier in the year. Honestly, we lose track.

I’m really, really pissed off about it. I relish my time alone and need it to recharge. Being stuck with a carer in the house is horrible, however much I like them personally. It’s not that I want to hoover naked or turn cartwheels in my underwear; but that possibility doesn’t exist at all if you have someone else in the house. And if they are pottering around unloading the dishwasher and changing the beds…both of which I am massively grateful that they help with…I feel guilt-wracked sitting on the sofa watching them and not helping.

In addition to all that, we have lost our usual support from the Children’s Hospice. Because of bloody COVID, they have had to change the way they look after their families. Usually we all go for three or four nights every three or four months, Littlest gets twenty-four hour care and we get looked after too. There are people to talk to and discuss different care approaches, there are comfy sofas and a nice garden and lovely food and we have a real rest. Now though, they are only open for end of life care for children (both COVID and other ‘normal’ conditions) and emergency stays for children when families are on their knees. Littlest went in the summer when we were doing really badly and she didn’t enjoy it as much as she usually does–it was all a bit different, the main parts of the house were shut off, she couldn’t interact with everyone like she usually does and of course all the carers were in scary PPE. They have us on the emergency list again, but it’s not the regular respite that we have been relying on.

Plus I’m bricking it because although we’re in a relatively low-incidence area COVID-wise, it’s on the rise everywhere and if we get locked down again we will have to cut back on some of the carers we have coming in to the house, just to keep everyone safe. That will mean we get progressively more exhausted–Littlest needs help in the nights. And there’s the risk to Littlest on top of her general respiratory fragility. And the risk to my Mama, with the lung cancer.

My mental health is for shite, basically, and not really because I’m becoming extra-depressed, but because there’s so much going on.

I’m trying to crack on with the rewrite of The Hunted and the Hind, but I’ve stalled a bit. All I want is to be in an alternate fantasy world, to be honest. Somewhere I have control over, unlike here. But I’m not sure that makes for good writing.

That’s it. That’s the blog post. Tomorrow is another day, we’ll laugh about this later etc..

It’s just a bit tiring, is all.