writerslife – Page 2 – A. L. Lester

#AMA: The Nix List

This week’s question is another by Anabela (who gave me a wheelbarrow-load of really good ones!) Do you have subjects you think you could never write about?

Yes! Definitely! Is the short answer—I should think everyone does. And I should think everyone’s answer is very different and probably changes with time.

The first one that jumps to mind though is children. I’ve always been very disinclined to write about characters with children. Mine are in their early teens now and I was first published in 2017 when they were…thinks very hard…nine and ten. The absolutely last thing I wanted to do was revisit that in fiction. Likewise now, I can’t see myself writing in the parental romance genre any time soon. I had a rubbish time when they were tiny babies and it’s simply not something I want to explore, whether it would be a story that sells or not. I’m utterly baffled by epilogues in romance that show characters having children. I read them and they leave me cold, they’re not my thing at all. So I can’t ever envisage me writing one.

Having said that I do have a character in the Theatr Fach world who has a child; but that’s accidental—I wrote them as a side character in Out of Focus and threw in a kid they had to pick up from school as an excuse to leave Alex alone at the hospital; and I’d quite like to explore them further, so ta-da, they’re a parent. But generally speaking…writing about characters with children is a nix.

Also a nix is mpreg. Does that come under the ‘people with children’ caveat? It probably does, but it should also be a category on its own. I just…can’t. I think it might be my own dysphoria that makes me so revolted by it. Let me emphasise people should absolutely read and write what they want, this is my own personal reaction, not a judgment. I think, actually, giving it more thought whilst writing this, it’s not just mpreg, it’s an entire pregnancy thing. So let’s expand the nix to cover pregnancy. I cannot envisage ever writing a pregnant character. Even writing this paragraph has made me shudder. I did not enjoy being pregnant—I loathed it, every single minute of it. I had the two children very close together—sort of by design as I was nearly forty by the time the first one came along—but so close together that at one point I was pregnant and had post-natal depression. When Littlest was born, my lovely obstetrician wrote me a letter of congratulation expressing the wish never to see me in her clinic again. So a nix to pregnancy completely, please!

I don’t think there’s anything else I am conscious of definitely not wanting to write about. I’ve written about death and violence and assault, all sort of horrible things. I do find writing about sexytimes quite difficult sometimes. I don’t think that’s an inherent disinclination though, more that sex is inherently messy and funny and stupid and I find it hard to do right without slipping in to cliché. I’m always worried that readers will come across a sex-scene and it’ll throw them out of the story because I’ve done sexing in a way that no-one else will find acceptable/interesting/arousing/relevant to the narrative.

I’m sure there are other things and I don’t know it, simply because I haven’t come across them yet or I’ve buried them so deeply I don’t have a clue they’re there!

I’m really enjoying these posts…if you have an #AskMeAnything question, do drop me an email or pop in to Lester Towers to ask.

Read around the Rainbow: What’s your ideal Writing Shack?

Welcome to the first Read Around The Rainbow! A few of us have got together to write about the same topic once a month on the same day and I hope you’ll visit some more of the people in the webring—I’m including links to everyone else’s posts at the bottom of this one; and just click on the image to see who we are and for the links to our websites.

This month we’re all writing about our ideal writing shack.

I should confess before I begin that I do, actually, have a writing shack at the bottom of my garden. Here’s a picture! It’s got electric and wifi and in theory it means I can retreat away to commune with my muse. However, it’s also a long way from the kettle and the last two summers the garden has got away from me and I’d have needed a machete to get to it. Also…when the kids are home I need to be in the house and when the kids aren’t at home, I don’t need a writing shack! Perhaps this year I’ll manage to use it a bit more frequently in the summer when the family are out in the garden.

I’m very much a proponent of not wishing for things you can’t have…so my ideal writing shack is a bit nebulous and there’s a lot of crossover with my ideal place to live.

view through door in wooden cottage — Photo by Marina Leonova on Pexels.com

Ideally then… I’d like a small strawbale-built cottage, please. There would be a south-facing veranda, glassed in for the winter and with doors and windows that open wide in warm weather. It would be located in low rolling hills in a forest or wood, with wildish garden with a pond that I could sit and gaze at when I was thinking what to write. In spring there would be a riot of wild flowers in the surrounding woodland and I’d be able to walk to clear my head.

I’ve done a lot of the off-grid thing and I’m too old to be chopping wood for heating and cooking these days; so I’m afraid I’d need to be connected to the grid, although I’d have a woodburning stove I could also cook on in the winter. It would, I’m afraid, have very high-speed internet. But it would only be connected to the physical world by a long bumpy track only navigable carefully by people who really wanted to visit. My groceries would be delivered to the end of the track weekly and I’d go and wait for the delivery person with my donkey-cart. Did I mention I’d have a couple of donkeys? Or maybe elderly ponies.

cozy fireplace in light minimalist living room — Photo by Rachel Claire on Pexels.com

And it would have a desk on the veranda where I’d work. And also one in the living room by the fire for writing in the early morning or evening. It would have comfortable couches and a wing chair with a footstool for when I wanted to sit in comfort with my legs up and the laptop on my knee. I would write a couple of thousand words every day and I’d have time to meditate and do a bit of walking in my wonderful woods and sleep in the extra-comfortable bed I forgot to mention earlier!

Also, there would be a biscuit jar with an infinite supply of biscuits and a very large tea-pot.

I think reading this back, actually, my ideal writing shack is very much like where I live now…it’s just time, life-stressors and the lack of a magic biscuit jar that are an issue!

Introducing Read Around the Rainbow

Read Around the Rainbow, Writers and bloggers of LGBTQIA+ romance

So, here’s our New Thing! My Office Writing Buddies ™, Nell Iris and Ofelia Grand and I all run blogs and we like to drop in to each other’s places and make things collaborative. So we have set up a little group of like-minded people who write similar stories and we are all going to pick a topic once a month and write about it.

I have [please insert your drumroll here] set up a webring. Webrings are an ancient and venerable part of the internet and some of you might not even know what they are. My memories of them from the glorious nineties and noughties are…variable. There weren’t many easy options to find like-minded people on the world wide interweb, so bloggers and website hosts with similar interests got together in groups and directed one-another to our sites. You signed up, stuck a bit of code on your webpage that produced something like this and off you went:

Read around the RainbowVisit the rest of The Rainbow bloggers!

Previous Random Next

(Purely in hopes of admiration, I need to say at this point that I forked a repository on Github to make this happen—I regularly say my coding days are over and they definitely are, I found it tortuous!)

The result of all this is that a handful of us are going to pick a topic, write about it on the last Friday of the month and link to each other’s posts. Because we are all high-stress people, the plan is to be very easy going and not put pressure on ourselves…if we don’t fancy a topic one month, we just don’t do it.

Our first posts will be going up on the Friday 25th of March, so do keep an eye out! We hope to see you around!

Ofelia Gränd/Holly Day :: Nell Iris :: A.L. Lester :: Lillian Francis :: Fiona Glass :: Amy Spector :: K.L. Noone :: Ellie Thomas

The Week that Was: Mattresses and activism

This week, we bought a new mattress. My back’s been increasingly creasing me and we’ve progressed through putting a board under the mattress, adding a memory foam mattress topper and then, finally, adding a big duck-feather thing on top of that. Making the bed is a bit like an out-take from The Princess and the Pea. (Yes, this is a genuine picture of me and Mr AL, in our night attire. Enter our bedroom at your peril.)

The whole process has been massively stressful, largely because it’s such a first world problem. Firstly there’s the cost. And secondly there’s the number of choices. And thirdly there’s my sneaking and increasingly unpleasant feeling that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and I should care more about the fact other people don’t even have safe spaces to lie down rather than the number of poxy springs I can afford to sleep on.

Yes, this is a post about guilt. But it’s also a post about nurturing your spoons. This is a bit of a stupid example–I could simply donate the cost of a mattress to an organisation helping the homeless and stop flailing about on the internet about it. It’s an analogy that I’ve been pondering though…how much is enough? In a society so unequal, how much is enough? Do I have to put up with a bad back to enable other people to have somewhere safe? Or can I make myself comfortable and help others too? It’s a really simplistic analogy, but I guess I’ve needed simplistic this week, because it’s what’s finally straightened my head out.

I’ve been really upset these last few weeks by the cess pit that’s the public discourse over trans rights in the UK. I’m saddened and upset by the level of hatred and silencing directed at trans people and a few weeks ago I decided I’d try and be a bit more active amplifying trans voices, and share things people can do to help. This has involved following accounts that share trans news. And even in this short amount of time, it’s devastated me.

I don’t know how these people manage it. There’s so much bile directed at them. I just pop onto their twitter timelines, check out the day’s events and see if there’s anything practical I can do to help…sign and share something, amplify news about a protest, that sort of stuff. I belong to a couple of blocklists and often the blocked responses scroll down and down and down the page. But then I come across a few people I haven’t blocked and the responses are vile; so I block them too. They are often accounts with followers below a couple of dozen, some only one or two.

After only a few weeks I feel worn away, exhausted by the horribleness of it all. I am non-binary. I present as a short, round, middle-aged straight person, married with children; and as such, my level of privilege is huge. I don’t get spat on in the street, or threatened at school, or shouted at in public bathrooms. Even watching the courage of these people with high public profiles from my safe position behind a keyboard I am awed at their strength. It’s the least I can do to keep trying to amplify their voices.

But…I can’t do it to the exclusion of the rest of my life…the looking after the kids, all the adulting I have to do on the day to day. And that includes the caring for myself. That’s the balance that’s so hard to get. And I guess it loops back to the stupid first-world thing about the mattress…it’s okay to look after myself and it’s okay to not feel guilty about that. As we travel along, our capacity to hold the light for ourselves and for others changes, whatever activism we participate in.

Some days you can’t even hold the light for yourself. Some days you can hold it for the village. It’s really important to a) remember that and not beat yourself up about it…you’re not failing if you can’t do it, you’re doing self-care. And b) you can’t do everything. Even on a good day, you can’t do everything. You’re in it for the long haul and whatever activism you’re doing, that’s enough. One step at a time and hopefully we can change the world.

Christine Burns has a curated list of books about the trans experience here.
Here are some resources for trans people experiencing homelessness.

The wheel turns- the sounds of autumn

It’s all gone a bit mists and mellow fruitfulness here at Lester Towers over the last week or so.

The garden is having a last frantic burst of activity before everything starts to shut down for winter…there are two roses on the white rose bush outside the bedroom window that I have watched come into full bloom over the last few days; and the autumn cyclamen in the scrubby area where we took down the tree are blooming like mad. Every time we go out, Littlest and I collect leaves and ash-helicopters to add to our basket of Things To Sort–swan feathers and shells and interesting stones.

The most noticeable thing about the change of season though, is the way the soundscape has changed. I’m not sure whether it’s just because it’s getting dark earlier and I’m still awake when they wake up…but the Tawny Owls are busy in the hedgerow.

There’s a family of them and they work their way down the field border every evening having long conversations to-and-fro, getting closer and close, then fading away. And the little birds are back on the feeders in a steady sort of way–early in the year when they had babies to feed, the mealworm feeder needed refilling every couple of days. Then in the high and late summer they didn’t much fuss with it at all; and now I’m refilling it once a week or so. We still have goldfinches and siskins on the seeds as well as our usual varieties of tits and the robins. They’re quieter than they were in the spring and summer, more chatter than song.

The sound that really heralds autumn though, is the bellowing of the red deer.

There are a lot of them wild on the Quantocks and they come right down to the village edge here, and sleep against the edge of the woods in the parkland around the manor house. When we lived in the old gardener’s cottage up there they were literally in our back garden. It’s a haunting noise, very eerie when you hear it drifting across the hill as the dusk comes down. I associate it with being curled up on the sofa with a book, curtains pulled shut and the fire lit.

The time of year always makes me feel as if I need to lay in stocks for the winter. It’s a primal sort of response, I think, gathering in the last of the harvest to see us through the cold. These days I mostly confine myself to making gin or vodka or brandy with hedgerow fruit and Mr AL and Talking Child are collecting the windfalls apples and we’re eating a lot of crumble. In more enthusiastic times I’d be processing everything I could and freezing or drying it; and we used to make elderberry and rosehip syrup and all sorts of wine and chutney and jam. I’ve got spinach I need to plant out in the greenhouse and the perennial kale in the garden; but other than that, my gardening is sadly lacking these last few years.

Life turns as the wheel of the seasons does I suppose, and I’m doing other things now. I regret it…but I can’t worry about it. I just tell myself that the wheel will come round again and to enjoy what we have.

Category: writerslife