#WritersLife – Page 4

Killing your pretties

crop unrecognizable person with bright eye and rare eyelashes — Photo by lilartsy on Pexels.com

Content warning for this whole post: I’m talking about writing about death, bodies and the dead. There are no photos here, but there are disturbing photos in some of the articles I link to at the bottom of the post. I detail this after each link so you can exercise your own judgement.

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

I’ve sent the manuscript of the sequel to The Fog of War this week…The Quid Pro Quo will be out on the 20th of November. So now it’s time to blog about all those interesting things I found out whilst I was writing it. And I’m starting with rigor mortis. Yay!

The book begins with the discovery of a body in the village duckpond and the characters need the time of death in order to work out people’s alibis. I’ve never written a body for which I’ve needed time of death before, so I went googling. The number of writers who do this must be extraordinary–presumably we’re all on some sort of watch-list somewhere.

When it came down to it, there’s only a page or two at most about it in the actual book, but I felt that I needed to know a lot more about the subject before I could move on with the story. This is standard for me. One of the things I find most frustrating about my own creative process is that I need to find out a lot more about subjects like this than I put in the book. To illustrate how easily I over-research, I always use the example from The Flowers of Time where I made my own butter, then clarified it to make a butter-lamp as a light source.

I didn’t go that far this time. I’m not so dedicated to my art that I’m prepared to create a corpse and observe the stages of decomposition in order to write about it properly. For both moral, practical and legal reasons. I did do a lot more reading that I probably needed to though, and squicked myself out thoroughly in the process.

Up until that point, my body, Charlotte Fortescue, had been a narrative tool–she gets offed very early in the book and she wasn’t a terribly nice person. We’re not really supposed to spend much time feeling sorry for her, she’s just the doorway for us to get into the actual plot. However, after I read all these truly gruesome accounts of what happens to a body after death, I began to feel very sorry for her indeed.

It was most uncomfortable. I didn’t want to feel pity for her…and I didn’t want reader not to feel for her, exactly, but I didn’t want people to feel they had to waste their emotions on her when she’s effectively a means to an end. I’m now stressing slightly whether I’ve struck the right balance, but it’s too late now, it’s gone off for edits and that’s that.

Here are the resources I found most helpful, whether you’re a writer looking for information, or just an interested bystander. I’ve given additional info about how distressing they are, so please do take heed. I felt wonky for a few days after reading the final one.

For an overall summary, I recommend the lovely Ofelia Grand’s blogpost, For when the poor sod needs to die. No gruesome pictures, respectful approach with a light touch, very helpful.
I then moved on to the Wiki article about rigor mortis (which has one photo of bodies in rigor, exercise care) and has a broad overview of technical stuff–also links to articles to all the other stages a body goes through after death. It’s very well-referenced.
For the forensics part of the story, I read Methods of estimation of time since death (no pictures) from this very in depth NCBI* article. Interesting, mentions maggots, don’t read at lunchtime.
However, I needed to know about bodies found in water. So I ended up at Decomposition changes in bodies recovered from water also at NCBI*. This comes with a very serious content warning, I’m not kidding people. There are photos of people who died in very unpleasant circumstances and I found it very upsetting.

*National Center for Biotechnology Information

Next time I plot something out like this I’m going to try and avoid needing forensics as a time of death because I really don’t want to have to read all these again!

#TheWeekThatWas

If you follow me on social media, you might have noticed that I’ve been quieter than usual over the last couple of weeks. I’ve been a bit poorly with lots of seizures, the kids have required back-to-school organising, Mr AL has been a bit peaked and so has my Mama.

I’m scheduling this post in advance on the Saturday before you’ll read it, because as of Monday, Mr AL and I will hopefully have left the kids and the zoo with our brilliant carer and run away together for a whole five nights break. We’ve picked a pub on the coast in Devon which has a HUGE terrace overlooking the sea, my thinking being that we can sit out there for meals even if it’s raining and avoid other people.

We’ve already had one close-contact covid scare with a child on Littlest’s school bus testing positive at the beginning of last week. Littlest has had a proper PCR, which hasn’t yet come back–good news as apparently they prioritise contacting positive cases–and we are all getting negative lateral flow tests daily. No symptoms at all, so big yay! I can only hope the other families are doing the same thing. A school of clinically vulnerable kids is not the place to muck about with this sort of thing. Today is not the day and I am not the person, as they say.

Talking Child has had a rubbish time nearly every single day this past week with identity-based harassment kicking off at breaktimes. We’d really hoped it would be old news this term, but apparently not. School are on it, but it’s like whack-a-mole, the minute one gets the mandatory in-school exclusion another one pops us. TC is coping very well, but it’s really unpleasant to have to deal with on a day to day basis and it’s a big mental health drain.

All in all, here at The Towers we’re a bit flat. I’ve been sticking rigidly to my to-do list in order to try and keep some sort of routine going, because I feel as if once I start to let one or two things slide, the whole lot will go. I’m really hoping that by the time this post is published you’ll have seen some cheery pics on my various social media feeds and I’ll be able to write a brighter post telling you all about the lovely things we got up to while we were away!

Author expectations versus reality

person riding kayak — Photo by Aleksey Kuprikov on Pexels.com

I’ve been writing one way and another since Miss Lowe told me off for using ‘again and again’ repetitively in my story about a man climbing a mountain circa 1978. I don’t think I’ve ever really thought of myself as ‘a writer’ or an ‘author’. It was always something I was going to become in my future.

I’m fifty-one now and my first book was published about four years ago with JMS Books. I now have a dozen books and short stories out in the wild. The future is here… but I still don’t really feel like a ‘proper’ writer. It’s a strange sort of disconnection. I’m published, people bough the first book and presumably quite liked it because they went on to buy more. But I still don’t feel like a real author. Not that being published or not published is a distinction, at all- if you write, you are a writer. But for me it’s a confidence issue.

It’s not that I expected to lay on a chaise in a negligee a la Barbara Cartland and have a crowd of beautiful persons of all genders peel grapes to hand-feed me whilst I dictated to my pug. But somehow, I expected that by this point I would feel more at ease with the idea that people like my work.

I didn’t expect to spend so much of the time writing-but-not-writing. My non-family time is carved out with a pickaxe around medical and education appointments and the care of a severely disabled child. My own health limitations compound that. So sometimes I have three hours in the day to work, sometimes I have none.

The thing that has really amazed me, naively probably, is that I spend as much time on social media, marketing and networking as I do writing. I blog and I have Facebook, Instagram and Twitter presences that need keeping fresh. I don’t think there’s much point having them if you’re set on transmit the whole time and don’t interact. And I like interacting. I make graphics using Canva for my social media. I write my newsletter. I’ve just started experimenting with tiktok. I use Facebook mostly to chat with other genre authors rather than reader groups and I use Twitter to ramble about life in general rather than having a closely curated online personality.

Sometimes I feel spread very thin. On the other hand, if I don’t have enough head space for writing or for research, still being able to write and schedule a blog post feels like I have achieved something, even if it’s not another thousand words of my work in progress. For example, I’m writing this with a child sat beside me attempting to deconstruct my glasses and get me to watch Mr Tumble on her iPad. It’s unlikely I’ll manage many actual words, but a post like this I can pick up and put down as required.

A lot of my support network is online, particularly in these COVID-times. That was something I expected- I’ve had an online presence one way or another since the mid-nineties and as far as I’m concerned there’s not much difference between online friends and real friends. But sometimes it’s nice to sit in a room with actual warm bodies and kick ideas around.

I perhaps didn’t expect there to be such a community feel to writing. The first group I ever joined was a Goodreads writer group and I got such a lot of support from there that it really did give me the confidence to submit for publication. I don’t think I would have if they hadn’t been so supportive. (Thank you, if any of you read this). I think QRI and groups like it are a fantastic resource for authors to support each other.

We are essentially lone wolves, but it’s nice to have a pack when you need one.

adventure backlit dawn dusk — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

#TheWeekThatWas

The last couple of weeks have been hard here at Lester Towers. It’s the school holidays…cruising on down to the end of week two out of seven now.

Littlest needs constant entertainment otherwise she starts driving her wheelchair around the house throwing things on the floor. And by ‘constant’ I mean you can’t go and put the kettle on. Talking Child has suddenly morphed into a teenager. I’m just stunned by the way they’ve flowered. They went back into school after two years home education last September. Watching them blossom has been wonderful, but also terrifying. I am now living with a highly strung bundle of judgemental anxiety I assume will relax a bit as time goes on and they achieve adulthood. There’s a lot of boundary pushing and on occasion I regret it’s no longer socially acceptable to sign your child up to a career in the navy at age twelve.

To keep us all on point however, I have designated Tuesdays Mandatory Fun Days. We have something planned every week–zoo, theatre, animal sanctuary etc–and I have arranged for Littlest’s carer to help get her ready to go out on those days. And we are piling into the car and having Mandatory Fun. Everyone has to be cheerful and if they’re not they will face my wrath.

So far it’s been two weeks, the zoo and the theatre, and it’s worked. Yesterday we had to change Littlest down to her skin and shower her, MrAL and I and bleach two wheelchairs in the fifteen minutes before we left. It was exhausting and if you’re a carer you’ll find it hilarious but if you’re not, you’ll be baffled. Something always happens to knock us off our stride.

The other thing I’ve been wrestling with is getting the children a vaccine. Government policy in the UK now says that Clinically Extremely Vulnerable children age twelve and over should be vaccinated. And so should children over twelve living with people who are CEV. So both children come into that category. Quite a few of Littlest’s peers around the country have already been vaccinated, some on the advice of clinicians before the government policy change. However in our area, it isn’t happening. I have been pushing formally with emails since mid June and we now haw a clinician’s letter saying she should have the vaccine. But GPs are reluctant to administer it because of liability issues, the hospital won’t do it because it’s a public health issue and the local oversight board keep fobbing me off by telling me she’s on the list. Which is great. But…not actually a vaccine. In frustration I have gone to the media and we had a regional TV chap come round yesterday and interview us about it. I desperately resent having to do it–it’s a waste of time and it shouldn’t be necessary. I’m also very twitchy about the media as a whole–the possiblity of us losing control of the narrative is there and scares me. I just want what’s best for my kids and I’ve been backed into a corner…I’ve explored literally every other avenue over the last few months and this is where we’ve ended up.

Anyway. That’s the week that was at Lester Towers. Tomorrow we go on a family seaside holiday donated by a holiday park associated with the children’s hospice and we are all looking forward to a few days off.

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.

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 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.