This week we have two old favourite gay romances I’ve rediscovered in audio by Harper Fox and Z. A. Maxfield and a brilliant dystopian sci-fi with a tentative background sapphic love interest by Micaiah Johnson.
Another comfort-read for me that I have discovered included with my renewed Audible subscription. Beautifully narrated by Chris Clog, it’s a two-part novel set just after World War 2. Archie is a car-mad vicar without vocation. Rufus is a disgraced, shell-shocked archaeologist sent to investigate his church. It’s a story evocative of the shattered period after the war ended, bombed out houses still standing stark in London streets, men and women bent out of shape by years of fighting trying to fit back in to a more ‘normal’ life. Rufus and Archie are both damaged and hurt in different ways and Harper Fox’s delicate, precise writing paints them as perfect creatures with depth of character and emotion. The rural idyll of Archie’s village is laid over the top of past horrors in the same way the veneer of normality is starting to be laid over the horrors and displacement of the war. It’s one of my favourite books and I really recommend it, both in written form and narration.
I really love these ‘cops and psychics’ stories and am digging into as many as I can find at the moment. This one has a big hurt-comfort plot as Kevin, an ex cop who has become psychic because of an accident, tries to help cop Connor track down a child murder. Things are complicated because Connor’s childhood boyfriend was also taken and murdered by the same person. (I don’t think this is a spoiler, it’s pretty obvious right from the start where it’s going). Both men are vulnerable and hurting and the audio just hit the spot for me when I picked it up on Audible Whispersync. Recommended.
Wonderful far-future multiple worlds story. A brilliant scientist on Earth Zero (Our world? Who knows?) has discovered how to slip people between universes that have a similar vibration to ours…ie, that aren’t too different. But people can only traverse to another universe if their counterpart there is dead. Climate deterioration has split the world–all the worlds accessible to our characters–into haves and have-nots. And because the have-nots are less likely to survive in each world–poor food, no protection against the heat of the sun, poisoned water–they tend to be the traversers. There’s a fantastic plot, a tentative background sapphic love story and brilliant worldbuilding, all wrapped up in truly lyrical prose.
Thanks for letting me stop by and share a guest post with your readers! I’m Liz Faraim and am pleased to announce the release of the third novel in my Vivian Chastain series, titled Concussion and Contentment.
When speaking with readers, bloggers, and podcasters I get asked a lot of questions. I’d like to share some of those with your readers.
Q: Do your books spring to life from a character first or an idea?
A: The first three books (the Vivian Chastain series) came from Vivian Chastain bumping around inside my head demanding to be let out. My most recent project, titled Pinned, started out with one moment in time. It happened to be that I went down to the pier in my town to watch the water during a particularly bad storm and everything in that moment – the sounds, smells, and sights – all needed to be captured. Pinned sprang into life from there.
Q: How did you deal with rejection letters?
A: It is very frustrating to receive a rejection letter, and the process of submitting and being rejected over and over is very disheartening. But the big picture of it is that I just have to keep trying.
Q: What tools do you feel are must-haves for writers?
A: For me, I have written both by hand and on a computer. I hugely prefer writing on a laptop. I also recommend some good headphones and your favorite non-distracting play list.
Q: If you had a grant to write any book you wanted as a freebie without worrying about sales, what kind of story would you like to tell?
A: I actually did do a writing project last fall with one of my writing groups. The task was to write a horror short story for a Halloween radio show we were putting together. I had never written a true short story before, nor had I written horror. It was really interesting to see how the story flowed out of me and how twisted it was. When I finished editing it I sat back and thought “Where the f*ck did that come from?” I think I would like to explore writing horror some more.
Q: What’s the funniest or creepiest thing you’ve come across while researching for one of your stories?
A: While writing Stitches and Sepsis, I spent a lot of time researching hospital protocols, as well as septicemia and septic shock. The biggest thing that stays with me is when I spent an afternoon looking at online images of septic wounds.
Read on to find out about Concussion and Contentment, read an excerpt and find out more about Liz.
Concussion and Contentment
Warnings: This book contains violence, attempted murder, homophobic slurs, alcohol/drug use, references to suicide, abuse of a child by a parent, abuse of a child by an adult, attempted suicide, racism
Vivian, an adrenaline junkie and U.S. Army veteran, goes about her life as a bartender, avid runner, and polyamorous lesbian. Life in Sacramento, California is going well until she is blindsided by unforeseen financial issues which lead her to consider a new career.
In an attempt to recharge and take a break, she visits her best friend, Jared, only to be sidetrackedby a motorcycle trip with her other best friend, Bear. The adventure does not turn out to be the carefree break Vivian had hoped for. A mess, she returns to Sacramento where her partner, Ang, tries to push her down, rather than help her pick up the pieces. Meanwhile, Vivian takes big steps with her other partner, Audre, which fills a void in Vivian’s life left behind by her dysfunctional and abusive childhood.
While out on a day trip to her favorite hiking trails, Vivian has an epiphany about what line of work she wants to pursue, and chases after it head first while also beginning to mend fences with her brother, Joey.
As things start to stabilize, one of Vivian’s partners commits an act of grave violence, resulting in life-changing consequences for all concerned. Surrounded by friends, Vivian turns over a new leaf and finally finds the contentment she has sought for a lifetime.
You can purchase Canopy (book one) here, Stitches and Sepsis (book two) here, and Concussion and Contentment (book three) here.
Excerpt from Chapter One of Concussion and Contentment:
Sweat dripped and bass pulsed as hundreds of women writhed and bumped to the music. Tick, the club DJ, was killing it. The vibe was so good that I was high on it. There was a line at my station ten people deep, customers jostling for position while dancing and shuffling forward each time I finished a drink order. One of my regulars stepped up and waved a twenty-dollar bill at me. She was in her forties, sporting a bowler hat and forearm tats.
“Viv, show me them titties and tats!” she shouted over the thumping and chatter. I had already stripped down to my sports bra, with my beater hanging from the back pocket of my Dickies. It was hot for April, and the press of sweating, dancing bodies had made the nightclub a sauna.
“Aw, Tig, you know I can’t do that,” I said with a smirk and turned my back to the crowd. Behind the bar was a wall-to-wall mirror. I gyrated my hips to Bubba Sparxxx’s “Ms. New Booty,” which had become a club favorite. I made eye contact with Tig in the mirror as she jumped to the beat, still waving the twenty-dollar bill at me. Shoving down the shyness that crept up, I slapped on the façade of the confident butch barkeep I wore to work. I pulled my sports bra up, just a bit.
Amidst the chaos, they leaned to the side to see my reflection in the mirror, their mouths
agape, eyes laser focused on me. I kept the tease up for a minute, dancing to the song, pulling my bra up a bit and lowering it again. Each time I lowered it, there was a chorus of “Awwwww’s” behind me. I finally relented and pulled my sports bra completely off. Their hoots and hollers made me grin, and I continued dancing for myself in the mirror.
Just as the song was ending, a bright light flashed in the mirror, reflecting straight into my eyes. I traced the light back along the mirror and saw it was coming from near the front door.
Buck, our bouncer, stood on the rungs of her barstool by the door, flashing her Maglite at me. When we made eye contact, she tapped the top of her head three times, which was the sign that the cops were coming. I shimmied back into my sweaty sports bra, which was no easy feat, and turned back to my customers. Tig pulled me into a hug across the bar. She tucked the bill into my waistband, her rough fingers lingering far too long on my skin. “Thanks, Viv. Looking good. Those tits and tats, you are so fucking hot. If I weren’t married, things’d be different.”
I patted her cheek and ended the hug, doing my best to keep my cool and stay in my role.
“Good to see you, Tig. The usual?”
She nodded and I poured her an Irish Car Bomb. She slapped some more cash on the bar, dropped the shot glass of whiskey and Bailey’s into her pint of Guinness, and chugged the whole frothing mess while her crew cheered her on. She slammed the pint glass down, wiped her mouth on her bare arm, belched, and disappeared into the fray.
Jen, the barback, bounced up to me with her usual level of cheer, and began unloading glasses fresh from the washer. “Tig still trying to get into your pants?” Her voice dripped with disgust as she fingered the American Spirit cigarette tucked behind her ear.
“Always.” I uncapped some beer bottles and rang up my next customer. “You know, I’ve been doing this job a few years now, and know that there’s a certain level of shit we have to put up with if we want those tips. And I need those tips. But it’s getting less amusing when people forget we are human and not a piece of meat.”
Liz has a full plate between balancing a day job, parenting, writing, and finding some semblance of a social life. In past lives she has been a soldier, a bartender, a shoe salesperson, an assistant museum curator, and even a driving instructor. She focuses her writing on strong, queer, female leads who don’t back down. Liz transplanted to California from New York over thirty years ago. She now lives in the East Bay Area of California and enjoys exploring nature with her wife and son.
Let’s talk about gender with regard to Jones in The Flowers of Time today, just because, including a deleted scene.
It got to the point as I was writing where I felt there was altogether too much pondering and self-examination by Jones in the early part of the book. Although she’s doing a lot of self-examination, there’s another part of her that just wants to get on with things. And I began to feel as if I was making her an info-dump type of character and the book was becoming a bit more of an examination of how she felt about herself than a road-trip with botany and monsters who melt people.
So… generally speaking, Jones is pretty grumpy at having to make any sort of choice about gender. She never really had to think about it before she went to London. She was extremely reluctant to carry out the death-bed promise to her father to travel to England and try out being a lady of good family. Coming home to the mountains was a huge relief and she now has mixed feelings about her budding friendship with the Mertons if it means she has to behave in a particular way to meet their social expectations.
She’s a bit confused all round, really, and she resents having to put thought in to these messy, human relationships rather than concentrate on her work. She’s definitely a person who sees her mind as important rather than her body. I love her dearly and it hurt a lot to have to delete this scene about her deliberations–it had to go because it was slowing down the pace of the story. It was part of her growth as a person and it still definitely happened in my Jones-head-cannon!
Deleted Scene: Jones’ Preparations
So by the time the Mertons arrived, she was ready. They took a week to make their own preparations for the mountain trails, but Carruthers and Merton seemed to be competent and she left them to it, mostly spending her time with Miss Merton. Initially she felt that it might be a chore, but her initial impression of Edith as a correct English Miss had become modified as the days progressed and she showed her around the lakes and rivers of the city. Jones had always liked Srinagar. It was one of the places she and her father crossed through fairly regularly, both to send communications south to Bombay and several times to take a house there for a few months. Miss Merton’s excitement and pleasure in the scenery and her interest in talking to the residents and attempting to learn their language as she spoke with them meant the time went much more quickly than Jones had anticipated.
Likewise, the party seemed perfectly content with her natural choice to dress as she pleased. Carruthers’ young assistants simply accepted her as a male. She didn’t have much to do with them regardless, but it was pleasant not to be looked at with askance as she had feared when she had seen Miss Merton’s face on the road outside Srinagar. Edith had quickly schooled her expression, and her treatment of Jones had not changed. She had invited her to call her by her first name that evening and that seemed a mark of confidence in their budding friendship. Neither had Carruthers and Merton spoken to her with any caution or disapproval and their example had led to the rest of their party treating her as she wished, which was to essentially ignore her sex and rather pay attention to her thoughts and wishes.
It was very nice to feel that she might have made a friend in Miss Merton. They had been few and far between in her travels with her father, particularly with women, simply because they had been almost constantly in motion and when not in motion, absorbed in the work. She had never had the opportunity before simply to have a friendship that was not also complicated with the bonds of family- as with Dechen, Sonam, Amit and Kishor- or overshadowed by her discomfort at being forced in to female apparel as she had been on her long round trip to England.
Thinking about it now, she had a led a lonely sort of existence based entirely around her father’s obsession with the cause of her mother’s death. And it seemed that Jones might be taking up his mantle. Did she want that? She wasn’t sure. But she was sure that she needed to know what had been driving his obsession. He had been such a rational man. It seemed ridiculous that he had died believing in magic. That he had believed in it all this time and not said a word to her.
Her whole life has changed. Not only did she lose her father; but when he sent her to England ‘to find her roots’ he actually cut her off from her life in the mountains…her source of independence and strength.
She had to re-evaluate her sense of self and the way other people saw her whilst she was in England. And now she’s home, but because the Mertons are following her she may not be able to settle back in to her comfortable old way of doing things where she just toddles along thinking about history and people and plants. She’s gaining friends and a social network. But she may have to give up some of her independence of thought and self-definition as part of that social contract.
I do want to revisit this part of the universe at some point in the future because I do love the characters; but in the meantime there’s also a short story called A Small, Secret Smile that is almost stand-alone if you’re feeling brave, but probably makes more sense if you’ve already read the book.
A determined lady botanist and a non-binary explorer make the long journey over the high Himalayan mountain passes from Kashmir to Little Tibet, collecting flowers and exploring ruins on the way. Will Jones discover the root of the mysterious deaths of her parents? Will she confide in Edie and allow her to help in the quest?
It’s a trip fraught with perils for both of them, not least those of the heart.
A stand-alone f/enby romance set in the Lost in Time universe, in the Himalayas in 1780. About 50,000 words.
No party is complete without a dissection of who was there, what they were wearing, who did what, and with whom. All these lovely authors dropped in to Lester Towers at the weekend and they are all very cool, nice people who write fantastic books. Here’s a round-up of their latest releases so you can check them out easily.
Thank you so much to everyone, readers and authors, who came along. It was my first facebook party and I had terrible nerves…you all made it good fun and I actually enjoyed myself, so I can see myself doing it again at some point!
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.
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.”
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.
