writerslife – Page 3 – A. L. Lester

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!

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.

Publishing Delays

wood desk laptop office — Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

As those of you who follow my newsletter know, the last couple of weeks have been a real nightmare here at Lester Towers.

Littlest had an accident at school and broke her nose, which has caused all the fuss you’d expect, plus worry that she’d have to have it re-broken and re-set to ensure it’s still possible to naso-gastric tube her in the future if necessary. This has, thankfully, turned out not to be the case, but it’s taken ages for ENT to decide. I’ve had a visit to hospital for a minor procedure which was more tedious than worrying, Talking Child has been stressed about school and her sister and me. And finally Mr AL has put his back out lifting Littlest, which has caused our whole family raft to list alarmingly to one side.

So, we’re struggling, basically. Writing itself and my somewhat intermittent early morning writing sprints with my Office Colleagues, Ofelia Grand, Nell Iris and J. M. Snyder have been what’s keeping me going.

The cherry on the top of the disaster-Bakewell tart however, has been that my dear friend and editor has been hospitalised with covid. She is home and recovering now, which is an enormous relief, but as everyone knows, it’s a long haul.

The result of all this non-writing stress is that we are pushing the release of The Fog of War back until 16th August. I’m very sorry about it, but there it is, people are more important than stories when it comes down to it. The Starling story (which still doesn’t have a name, this is clearly my brand) is puttering along but again it’s all a bit up in the air.

School breaks up for summer in the last week of July, so I have no idea what my writing schedule will be over the weeks after that–last year I did quite well getting up before everyone else and getting on with it. The plan is to release the Sylvia trilogy three months apart, and I’m still hoping that will work, although I’m starting to wonder whether I’ve over-faced myself. Time will tell!

Anyway, that’s it. We’re all okay, but it’s been a tough few weeks. I hope you’re all doing all right too in these uncertain times.

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.