research – A. L. Lester

#RAtR: Weird Internet Searches

This month’s topic for Read Around the Rainbow is the brainchild of Addison Albright—and I’m really looking forward to her post revealing whatever prompted this suggestion! As some of you already know, #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, and I will link to everyone’s post on this month’s topic at the bottom of this page.

So. My weirdest internet search? For this question, I usually talk about researching butter lamps for The Flowers of Time and making my own butter from scratch and then rendering it to ghee and making a lamp in a jam-jar with a bit of string. I got a bit obsessed. I’ve downgraded that particular search to ‘only mildly obsessive’ over the last few years though, as things have moved on!

photo of brown metal cage with lighted candle — Photo by Craig Adderley on Pexels.com

I’m pretty sure that everyone who writes about murder or death has a disturbing search history story; and for The Quid Pro Quo I joined the team. I researched what a body would look like after being submerged for twenty four hours. I don’t recommend googling this for fun—I can still see some of the images in the articles I read and it was deeply unpleasant and upsetting.

When I’m researching things I know nothing about I find it very easy to get sucked into a rabbit-hole where I spend an unnecessary amount of time on subjects that are only going to be mentioned in passing in the story. I need to get the background straight in my head in order to be able to drop a couple of colourful details in there. If it’s something I know a bit about already, even if that’s only incidental knowledge, it’s much easier to know what it is I don’t know, if that makes sense?

For example, Out of Focus is set in the world of contemporary theatre. I know quite a bit about how the technical side of that works and I knew what I didn’t know…I went off and found out about scissor lifts and health and safety regulations and it took me a couple of hours. In contrast I spent two days searching and reading up on how eighteenth century women dealt with menstruation for The Flowers of Time—not because it featured in the story particularly, but just because I felt as if it was something that would impact my characters even if I never mentioned it.

I think that’s partly why I’ve set seven books in the post-WW1 period now. I’ve done my research and I feel confident with the background colour of the era. Yes, okay, I have to toddle off and read up on what treatment you’d use for migraine, or whether medicals were required by then to join the army. But I’ve got all the building bricks in place, I know where to find the resources and I’m comfortable.

It’s a very nice feeling, being able to hunker down in a setting you’re reasonably knowledgeable in and just get on with the narrative. I think that’s why I’m enjoying writing my short contemporary stories so much—the only searching I did for Surfacing Again for example, was to use Google Earth to walk the old pilgrim route to Lindisfarne.

When I have the time and inclination I try to gather my research sources together for particular books and time-periods. You can find them under the menu Interesting History Stuff at the top of the page. It’s a bit of a work in progress and it’s not comprehensive, but it also serves to remind me what I looked at 😊.

So what am I going to leave next in my browser history? Honestly, I don’t know. This year I have crashed and burned a bit as far as longer projects are concerned, but I had planned to write the final book in the Bradfield trilogy, so if that happens I’ll be going back to the 1920s. And perhaps a companion book to The Flowers of Time, which is going to take a bit of a jump-start as I’ve forgotten quite a lot about the 1780s. I feel as if I want to get those done, interspersed with contemporary Celtic myths and the Theatre Fach world, before I begin a completely fresh project. However, it might be that I just stick with the contemporaries for now rather than forcing myself to concentrate on anything longer.

Watch this space and you’ll be the first to know!

http://www.amyspectorauthor.com/blog2To find out what’s in the internet search histories of my Read Around the Rainbow colleagues, visit their blogs here! K. L. Noone, Addison Albright, Nell Iris, Ofelia Grand, Holly Day, Fiona Glass, Ellie Thomas, Lillian Francis, Amy Spector.

Read Around the Rainbow. Writers and bloggers of LGBTQIA+ Romance.

#AMA: Blending real people and fictional characters

I’ve been having a bit of blog-block recently, so I asked in my facebook group for suggestions and a lot of lovely people gave me questions to answer and topics to write about. To start with today, I picked Anabela’s…Are there any real people or personalities you’d like to turn into fictional characters? (I’ll also be asking this regularly in my newsletter if you don’t do facebook).

Well…

It’s a tricksy subject, because I think as a writer no-one would ever speak to you again if they thought you spent every interaction making mental notes about them to slide them in to a novel. Also…it’s a bit rude, I think? As if you’re using real people for other people’s entertainment. It seems immoral to me to pinch someone wholesale from real life and stick them in a work of fiction for other people’s entertainment, particularly if it’s painful situations or trauma that one’s writing about or putting the character through. It just doesn’t seem right.

So the broad answer to that is no, there aren’t.

But then we get to the narrow answer, of which there are two!

Firstly, my the development of my main characters is sometimes sparked by real-life people. For example, Edie in the The Flowers of Time was inspired by the artist Marianne North, a British woman who travelled all over the world painting flowers in the second half of the nineteenth century. She was remarkable both for her travels and for her talent. And a lot of Edie and Jones’ travels are based on those of Isabella Bird, another Victorian woman from Britain who travelled widely and wrote travelogues. (She was casually racist in the standard manner of the British at that time, so do be aware of that if you want to explore her work further. I took some of her travels as inspiration and I left her personality well behind.)

The Fog of War by A. L. Lester, First in the Bradfield Trilogy, part of the Border Magic Universe

Sylvia Marks in The Fog of War was sparked by an Edwardian lady doctor I remember my grandmother telling me about in Wellington in Somerset during her childhood. I know nothing about her personality apart from her nephew’s wife, a friend of mine, reporting that ‘she was a game old bird who smoked like a chimney’ when he knew her in the 1960s. Granny was struck by the fact that she’d come to visit her mother and sit on the kitchen table and swing her legs and smoke. So that was where Sylvia began. I jumped off from those two things and went and researched women doctors of that era.

For main characters like this I begin with a glimmer from somewhere and the character then grows on their own. Sometimes it doesn’t work…I have an abandoned post-apocalyptic-plague thing I began six months before covid where the MC is based on a dear friend and I made them too alike—even talking to him about it to check whether it freaked him out too much—and I can’t write it. That’s possibly for covid reasons but also because I don’t want to think about him naked (sorry about that, P, if you’re reading this!). And for my upcoming May release, the one for Naked Gardening Day, I got stuck when I realised I’d drawn heavily on my memories of my father for George, one of the protagonists. It made things just a tad awkward until I realised and could rewrite him so it didn’t make me need therapy.

So that’s the main character bit. I sometimes start with a snapshot of a real person and develop a main character from there. If I try and make them too like a real person, then it doesn’t work.

Jimmy, age 84. Extremely elderly farmhand from Inheritance of Shadows. Married. Lots of children and grandchildren.

Secondly though, there are definitely aspects of people I’ve met that I make a part of my supporting cast. Of necessity supporting cast members tend to be more caricatures, I think? So they have one or two traits that make them useful in the story, to move it along or provide comic relief or pathos or even just background depth. I’m thinking in particular of Jimmy from Taking Stock, who acts a bit like a local chap I know who used to help my Mama with her sheep. His appearances are third-party, we only ever see him through the eyes of the main characters. We never know what he’s thinking or what his feelings are. He’s just a foil for my main characters and the story and I don’t ascribe him any motivations.

Similarly in Out of Focus (out on 26^th March, pre-order now etc etc!) some of the supporting cast have traits of people I’ve met on my travels. Things like the way they swear, or something someone said…that sort of thing. But again…nothing that is actually them, if that makes sense? Nothing about what they might be thinking or feeling.

I think that’s the crux of it, Anabela! I sometimes use a real-life situation as a spring-board for character development. And I sometimes attribute something I remember someone doing or saying as part of a minor character. The idea of taking a real person wholesale and making them in to a fictional character doesn’t ring my bell at all—quite the opposite.

Next time…a New Thing I’m doing with some author friends…Reading Around the Rainbow!

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.

Trans people in history

This morning I want to talk a little bit about trans people in history. Transgender is a word that can only be traced back to 1974, but that didn’t mean trans people didn’t exist before that date! Walter, one of the main characters in The Quid Pro Quo is transgender—he’s caused me all sorts of plot issues, but has sent me off to do lots of really interesting reading, which I’m delighted to share here!

One of the things that gender studies academics all agree about is that it’s almost impossible to know how people in the past that we now see as trans would have seen themselves. The records are very sparse, often sensationalised and are usually other people’s view of the person rather than their own. Who wanted to put that sort of thing down in writing when it would get you prosecuted or put in a mental hospital? So it’s hard to tell whether past figures were transgender; or whether they were passing as a man or woman in order to access spaces and privilege they would be otherwise denied. This is particularly true of people who were assigned female at birth and lived the bulk of their lives as men.

The most famous of these cases is Dr James Barry, who after his death in the mid-nineteenth century was revealed to be AFAB (assigned female at birth). I won’t write much about him here because this is the article I would write and Rebecca Ortenberg has already done it better than I would. Suffice to say that after he began his medical education at Edinburgh, Barry never presented or referred to himself as female again. He was only discovered to be AFAB after the person laying his body out for burial spoke about him. In recent years he’s been absorbed by the ‘plucky girl breaking the glass ceiling by putting on breeches’ narrative, which I personally feel is wrong.

This article at the British Library about Transgender Identities in the Past is fascinating. It focuses on two people, Eliza Edwards, who on her death in 1833 was discovered to be AMAB. And in 1901, someone we’d now understand to be a trans man who at the age of sixty and after several marriages and a career as a cook on P&O liners was revealed to be AFAB. The newspaper article calls them by a woman’s name. It completely erases the life they lived. The article has audio clips of a 2018 discussion between E-J Scott, curator of the Museum of Transology; Dr Jay Stewart, the chief executive of Gendered Intelligence, and Annie Brown, an activist, artist and GI youth worker. It’s worth your time.

In The Flowers of Time, my story set in the late eighteenth century, Jones the non-binary character eventually decides to present as masculine because it makes their life with Edie easier. They fudge the record, more or less blackmail close family into accepting them and that’s that. However, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that as time went on, communication became quicker and easier and records of births and marriages became more common it became much more difficult to pass. British army records mention Phoebe Hassel, who was discharged in 1817 when she was flogged and discovered to be a man (bottom of page seven, you have to register, but it’s free). We don’t know whether she was a passing woman for financial or social reasons or whether she was what we’d understand today as trans. Her male name is not mentioned. However, she must have passed well enough or had enough support by her peers to have concealed her natal gender for some years.

However, The Quid Pro Quo is set a hundred and fifty years later than Phoebe’s flogging and The Flowers of Time. By the time Walter joined up in 1898, there were medicals for army recruits. This was such a sticking point for me that I bottled it and I honestly tried to write the book with him as cis. However, he just wouldn’t play…he’d been trans in my head as I was writing The Fog of War, right back as far the planning stage of the trilogy. But when I came to write it, I couldn’t make the story work with him as trans because of the army regulations; and I couldn’t make the story work with him as cis because he’s not cis.

I threw the question to some of my lovely friends at the Quiltbag Historicals facebook group (join us, we’re cool!) and they immediately began working out ways I could fudge the story. So Walter begins his army career as his twin brother and has a little help from the people around him to keep his origins concealed. And I reassured myself that if people are prepared to suspend disbelief about the paranormal aspects of my stories then they can allow me this tiny (enormous) stretch of possibility to get it off the ground!

I love Walter. He’s so very pragmatic about his life and his place in the universe. He’s just getting on and doing his thing. I wanted him to have a happy ending so badly all the time I was writing The Fog of War and I was very pleased to be able to give him one here in The Quid Pro Quo.

I like to think of my stories as realistically historical first and paranormal second. My characters are just getting on living their lives—which have greater or lesser levels of complexity—and the paranormal comes and whacks them round the back of the head with half a brick in a sock. I try and make the history as accurate and the paranormal as twisted as I can! I think I’ve done Walter justice, as he’s one of my favourite people. I hope you like him too.

Lastly, here is a brilliant collection of books about trans history and trans issues, curated by Christine Burns and available from independent bookshops.

The Quid Pro Quo

Village nurse Walter Kennett is content with his makeshift found-family in tiny Bradfield. However one midsummer morning a body is found floating in the village duck pond, dead by magical means.

Detective Simon Frost arrives in Bradfield to investigate a inexplicable murder. The evidence seems to point to Lucille Hall-Bridges, who lives with doctor Sylvia Marks and nurse Walter Kennett at Courtfield House. Simon isn’t happy—he doesn’t believe Lucy is a murderer but he’s sure the three of them are hiding something. In the meantime, the draw he feels toward Walter takes him by surprise.

Walter is in a dilemma, concealing Sylvia and Lucy’s relationship and not knowing how much to tell Frost about the paranormal possibilities of the murder. He isn’t interested in going to bed with anyone—he’s got a complicated life and has to know someone really well before he falls between the sheets. He’s taken aback by his own attraction to Detective Frost and angry when Frost appears to twist the spark between them to something transactional in nature.

Will Walter be satisfied to stay on the periphery of Lucy and Sylvia’s love affair, a welcome friend but never quite included? Or is it time for him to strike out and embark on a relationship of his own?

Add The Quid Pro Quo on Goodreads

British Accents now and then

One of the things I love about working with Callum Hale on my audiobooks is his ability to throw himself into pretty much any British accent and bring the character to life. To my British ear each of the people I’ve created sound exactly as I’ve envisaged them as he brings them off the page.

I asked him to make Rob, from Inheritance of Shadows ‘less ooh-arr’ and he toned the accent down so to me at least, Rob doesn’t sound so much like a heavy-handed son of the Somerset soil. And I wanted Will Grant in the 1920s London Trilogy to sound more like Lord Peter Wimsey. Callum obliged, perfectly. (These are my two favourite of all my characters, ever, incidentally).

The question I’m always asking myself about my writing though, is how right can I get it? I want the history in my books to be accurate, unless I’m deliberately twisting the universe out of true with magic. I think this is the same question historians have to ask themselves about looking at anything in the past. We are both looking at things through our own rose-tinted spectacles, coloured with our own experiences and social expectations. My characters in these books grew up in Victorian England. What did they really think about the Empire? What did they talk about in the pub? What did they really sound like? How did they really smell? We’re fudging it, the whole lot. Historians and archaeologists because of lack of data. And writers because of lack of data and because we don’t want our main characters to be unsympathetic to modern audiences.

Anyway…during one or other of my late-night sessions randomly browsing the web, I came across this programme about Edwardian accents. A regional English language specialist in Germany during the First World War, a real-life Professor Higgins, suddenly realised he had a huge pool of untapped research material in the German army’s British prisoners of war. In this documentary you can actually listen to their voices.

I was very interested in how the modern specialists in the programme say the regional accents of the past are broader in the recordings than they are now. It’s as if the rising tide of London-speak has swept the broad vowels of the regional accents back from the centre of the country, into the more remote west of England. So although to me, Rob sounds about right, a farm labourer from Somerset who’s self-educated and likes to read, to his contemporaries he’d probably have sounded out of place. You can listen to Callum’s reading of him here, in the first chapter of Inheritance of Shadows.

I think, listening to those long-ago voices in the programme, it’s important to remember these men were prisoners. That’s one of the filters we mustn’t discard. Were they doing this work in the language lab out of the kindness of their hearts? Because they were bored and wanted an occupation? Because they were threatened in to it? Because they were offered extra rations or privileges? Are these their actual accents? Or are they performative, a joke on the professor? They’re immensely touching, whatever their origin and I hope you enjoy it.

You can buy the 1920s London audiobooks at Authors Direct.

Lost in Time, Shadows on the Border, The Hunted and the Hind by A. L. Lester. Narrated by Callum Hale.