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

Read Around the Rainbow

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.

Ally's 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!

Read more!

There are seven other writers blogging in the Read Around the Rainbow Webring this month…find their posts about their ideal writing shacks here! Nell Iris : Ofelia Grand/Holly Day : Ellie Thomas : Addison Albright : Amy Spector : Fiona Glass : K. L. Noone

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

Read Around the Rainbow

The Week that Was: Mattresses and activism

Cover, The Princess and the Pea

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.

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.

Autumn cyclamen

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.

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!