#WritersLife – Page 6

The Day of the Triffids and nightmares

I don’t watch scary films and I don’t read horror…and this is probably why!

When I was about fourteen – in my second or third year at Senior School – we had an English teacher who seemed set on giving us all nightmares. He was thought of as a nice bloke. He played saxophone for Screaming Lord Sutch and his band when Such toured the West Country and he took various groups of kids camping on Dartmoor and Exmoor.

However, he must have had a really sadistic side. He showed us various TV Series as ‘treats’ in one particular lesson slot every week and they were invariably really traumatic. He showed us the 1982 Q. E. D. Documentary A Guide to Armageddon about the consequences of the detonation of a small nuclear warhead over St Paul’s Cathedral; and the TV adaptation of Z for Zachariah, which is a fantastic book, but watching it in the context of the tail end of the Cold War and preceded by watching the St Paul’s Nuke thing was terrifying.

The story that really, really freaked me out, though, was Day Of The Triffids by John Wyndham. I don’t think that we even read the book in class. He just showed us the TV Series. There was a BBC serialisation done in 1981 that had large fibre-glass and latex ‘Triffids’ that were operated by a chap crouched down inside, with a radio-operated clacker-thing to make the rattling noise.

I know this NOW, because Wikipedia. However, then, it was terrifying.

The thing that made it double, triple, a million times more scary was that I lived on a horticultural nursery. Where we grew flowers. Big flowers, small flowers, short flowers, tall flowers. I’d get home from school as it was getting dark and my parents would be somewhere out on the seven acre plot. And I’d run, run, run around the house and down the path along the back of the greenhouses to find them in the flower-packing shed, all the time waiting to hear that rattle. We used to grow huge swathes of Chrysanthemum blooms – globe-shaped single blooms about four or six inches across – and the white ones would look ghostly in the dusk. As you walked, or ran, down the Back Path to the flower packing shed, they spread out in great luminous swathes in the half-light and I was convinced they were watching me.

I’d arrange my music lesson every week in the same slot so that I had an excuse to miss watching the serialisation. When he realised what I was doing, the teacher reported me to my Housemistress and they stopped me and forced me to sit through each episode. I would sit there with my eyes shut for the whole forty minutes, trying not to hear what was going on; and if he noticed, he would try and get the rest of the class to tease me.

Cover of the 1981 Penguin edition of Day of the Triffids

To try to help me not be so scared, my Pa, who was a bit of a old-school Wyndham fan I think, bought me a copy of the book. I can remember him watching the series on the BBC every week as it was time for us to go to bed and he wouldn’t let me sit with him, so he must have known it would affect me. I was a voracious bookworm even then, but I couldn’t even bring myself to even touch the covers of the paperback he bought. That episode of Friends where Rachel puts Little Women in the freezer for Joey? That was me. I couldn’t even have it in the living room. In the end, Pa put it on the table by his side of the bed. When he died, twenty five years later, it was still there. Nothing has ever, ever scared me like that, since.

Strangely, I grew in to be a huge science-fiction fan. Some Wyndham I love. The Chrysalids is one of my all time favourite books. Give me some nice post-apocalyptic drama and I’m happy – especially if there is romantic tension thrown in there. No walking plants or clacking noises, even now though, please.

The hardest thing about writing…

…is often idea of other people looking at it. I do realise this is absolutely counterintuitive for someone who publishes their work.

person in white shirt with brown wooden frame — Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

Self-confidence, though.

I write under a pseudonym. Quite a few people in my Real Life ™ know about Ally (waves to those of them reading this!); but in my head, the pseudonym is a thin veneer of paper protection between the me who is trying go to Parent-Teacher meetings more often and not visit the shop in her slippers; and the me that likes to don my house-trousers at two in the afternoon and settle on the sofa to read or write queer novels featuring werewolves.

When we lived on Merseyside, we lived on a side-street just off the river Mersey itself, on the opposite side of the water to Liverpool. I am not a City Person and it was a Sacrifice For Love that I made when I was young and foolish. Mr AL has more than made up for my sacrifice by now – he found moving to the country a lot more traumatic than I found city life. In a village, if you put your washing out on the line, every single person in the vicinity will know that you have bright red BEST DAD IN THE WORLD underpants. In the city, you can’t hang your laundry out because it will absorb city-shmutz and be dirtier afterward than before you washed it. In cliche, in a village, everyone knows your business, but in the town, everyone ignores you.

So there are alleged pros and cons. I’m not sure the city/village cliche is true, though. Our city house was three stories high, with an attic window that looked across the river to the Liver Buildings, those iconic symbols of the city. They watch the big ships and the little ships go out on their adventures and welcome the sailors safely home again. That was one of the pros. As was the collection of dear friends and close family that we had within a half hour walk. The downside for me was feeling like a rat shut in a trap. For me, being on a suburban terraced street, I felt watched all the time. When you go out of the house on a suburban street of terraces, someone sees you. When you come home, someone else sees you. In your postage-stamp back yard, your neighbours overlook your Sunday afternoons. Traditionally, living in a village is supposed to be like that; but here in our village, it is more spaced out and I feel I have room to breathe. In the city, I felt squashed.

Writing is a bit like that, for me. When a new book comes out it sometimes feels as if I’m in one of those dreams where you’re standing on the village green with no clothes on and everyone is watching you—or walking out of your house in the city and the neighbours’ curtains are all twitching to see where you’re going.

This can be good! People can go Ooooh! You’ve lost weight since the last time you had this dream, how good you look! Or Yay! You’ve got to the Parent-Teacher meeting and you’re not wearing your pyjamas! Or of course they can laugh at the fact that you don’t shave your legs or your pyjamas have little unicorns on them.

I think the trick as a writer is to let both those things flow over you. It’s lovely that people like what you write. But once it’s written and in the public domain, it’s a thing on its own and you can’t let how readers interact with it affect you too much, because that way lies madness. It’s the ultimate in looking for external validation and that’s not a great mental health place to be.

So…I guess the hardest thing about writing a book for me these days is letting it go. Pushing it out the door with its lunch in a paper sack, making sure it’s got a waterproof in case it rains, waving it off on the school bus and trusting that it’ll be okay out there on its own.

Img of woman giving lunch to a child who is about to on the school bus, with books in the background.

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!

#AmReading

This week, three gay romances. Dystopian sci-fi from Manna Francis, alt-historical magic from Jordan L. Hawk and a reworked fairytale by Kim Fielding.

Mind Fuck, The Administration #1 by Manna Francis

I’m so late to Manna Francis–they’ve been recommended to me time and time again and I’ve only just taken the plunge because I suspected that when I did I’d end up having to buy the lot. They’re definitely my bag… spy stuff, ethical dilemmas, a dystopian future that you can see has roots in how we are now. I love the world-building and I like the way the characters are grey, but still likeable. Thoroughly recommend, like the other two thousand plus people who’ve left reviews :).

Blind Tiger, The Pride #1 by Jordan L. Hawk

This is a new series set in the the Hexworld universe. You don’t need to have read any of those for this to make sense, although obviously if you have, you already have a handle on how the universe works. This is a slow-burn romance between two very different people who are both hurt and vulnerable, set against a background of an alt-1920s Chicago run through with shifter-magic. Shifter big cats running a speakeasy? Yes please, sign me up. Wounded heroes finding love that they had given up on? A tick in that box, too. A happy ending? Yep. And more books in the series to come… yay!

Gravemound by Kim Fielding

This is a reworked fairytale in a sci-fi, magical setting, which sounds odd until you read it. A space-crash survivor comes to terms with the loss of his partner and is welcomed by the low-tech society he finds himself marooned in. It’s a story of loss and renewal and finding your family and your place in the world after displacement. It’s a lovely little novella. I really liked the blending of high-tech and magical/paranormal elements. As is often the case with Kim Fielding, there’s a bittersweet coming-to-terms element to the happy ending.

That’s it for this time!

the week that was: The Year of Hell

I haven’t done one of these for a while so it seemed time for some personal stuff. It’s not really a #WeekThatWas, more a #YearThatWas. It was one of the formative years of my life, if not the formative year.

Mr AL and I have a year that we describe as The Year Of Hell. Partly because we are Star Trek Voyager fans. And partly because, well, it was.

We had Talking Child in autumn 2007. It was all rather unexpected. We’d just completed the rigorous two year adoption procedure and were about to be matched with potential children. When we discovered I was knocked up, we were delighted on the one hand and on the other a bit confused, because we had put all that work in to getting ready for a family in one way and now it was happening in another.

So, TC arrived and that was great. And because I was knocking on a bit, we thought it would be a good idea to try to ride that alleged post-pregnancy fertility and go for Littlest. To our surprise, this worked when Talking Child was three months old. Go me. Yay. At age thirty-seven, at the beginning of 2008, when I’d resigned myself to never having a tiny baby, there I was, not only with a tiny baby, but with another one on the way. I was exhausted, pitifully sick and with awful, awful post-natal depression. Retrospectively I have NO IDEA why any of it seemed like a good plan. But eh, hormones.

At the time, Mr AL and I were working together in the audio-visual industry, mostly doing work for conferences. It came as a genuine surprise to me that no-one would let me climb ladders whilst pregnant or with a baby strapped to me in a sling. Mr AL still trotted off to work for days at a time and left me in rural Wales with the baby, climbing the walls. He couldn’t understand why I was virtually bonkers each time he came home from a tour.

And then, because the post-natal depression was so debilitating, I didn’t keep track of who had paid us and who hadn’t. A big customer that we trusted screwed us over. They got us to do a second large job for them before they had paid us for a large job a few weeks earlier and then they went bankrupt. They knew it was coming and they hung us out to dry, owing us about thirty grand. They opened up under another name a few weeks later and we had no recourse. That left us with a small baby, me unable to work because of small baby/pregnancy/depression, and an enormous mortgage on our idyllic rural house.

And then there were the deaths. My Pa died. He was elderly and it was expected. I was still devastated. I nearly went in to labour in the Chapel of Rest when I went to say goodbye. Then the mother of a dear friend died. That was unexpected and terrible. And two friends in their forties died out of the blue, one from a brain aneurysm and one from a heart problem.

We lost the idyllic house in our own bankruptcy, three weeks before the second baby was due. We found somewhere to live, but it was a very near thing. Mr AL crashed the new-to-us car Ma had given us money to buy and wrote it off. In the autumn, Littlest was born with pneumonia and at eight weeks old was on a ventilator. We spent the winter going back and forth to hospital in ambulances, with her on oxygen. We fell out with Mr AL’s parents in a comprehensive and horribly damaging way.

Littlest, back from hunting, with her walking frame, rifle and camo face paint. — Littlest, May 2013, back from hunting, with her walking frame, rifle and camo face paint.

If I had to have a do-over for a year, it would probably be that one. But having said that, I don’t know exactly what I’d do differently. I feel very strongly that what happens to you forms you as a person. I love my life and my beautiful family as they are, despite the difficulties we face.

Plus, that was the year that did a great deal of the excavating of the inner me. I don’t take bullshit from people as easily these days and I am more cautious who I trust. If someone lies to me, I cut them out completely. I am more vocal and I stand up for my family more quickly and perhaps too aggressively. When you’re under that amount of stress, friends you thought were close turn out to not be so close. People you weren’t close to become closer.

I don’t think any of those things would have happened as they did or in the same way if The Year Of Hell hadn’t happened. So, 2008, you sucked. But good things came of you, so you can stay.

Category: #WritersLife