a surprise release: Playing Chicken

St Dwynwen, the Welsh St Valentine!

Since we’ve been locked down again, I’ve been going slowly bonkers…I’m sure many of you can relate! Instead of getting on with my planned out Dr Sylvia Marks 1920s paranormal trilogy, which involves thinking quite hard about timelines and chronology and brain-melting stuff, I distracted myself by writing a nine thousand word short story. It started off set at Christmas, but because I’ve joined the Cariad Chapter of the Romantic Novelist’s Association and we’ve been talking about ‘the Welsh St Valentine’, I ended up setting it at the end of January, on St Dwynwen’s Day.

For your delight, then, may I present…

Playing Chicken

Cover of Playing Chicken by A. L. Lester

Marc returns home from London to his isolated Welsh cottage for good, having found his ex boyfriend shagging someone else in their bed. Who’s the thin, freezing cold man with the bruised face he finds in his barn? Will the tenuous connection between them grow, or fade away?

A 9,000 word short story to mark St Dwynwen’s day, the 25th of January. With chickens!

Who is St Dwynwen?

St Dwynwen is sometimes called ‘the Welsh St Valentine’, which is a bit inaccurate, really. Her day is 25th January. There are various origin stories, but the one I like best has her as one of the twenty-four daughters of the fifth century King Brychan Brycheiniog, King of Brycheiniog or Brecknockshire/Breconshire.

Pencil drawing of two chickens.

Dwynwen fell in love with Maelon Dafodrill, but her father wanted her to marry someone else. She slept with Maelon, but when her father found out she was so scared of the potential consequences that she told him Maelon had raped her. She ran away to the woods, where she begged god to make her forget Maelon and when she fell asleep she was visited by an angel who gave her a potion to erase her memory of Maelon and turn him into a block of ice.

Somewhat generously, god also gave her three wishes:

  • Her first wish was that Maelon be thawed…which if she drank the potion to forget him seems a bit confusing.
  • Secondly she asked that god meet the hopes and dreams of true lovers.
  • And thirdly she wished that she would never marry.

All her wishes were granted and in thanks she devoted her life to god. She founded a church on the tiny island of Llanddwyn, off the coast of Anglesey. There is apparently also a well there dedicated to her, with sacred fish and eels. If the water boils whilst you’re visiting, then good luck and love will follow, although presumably not for the well’s inhabitants.

I have, obviously, taken extreme liberties with the legend, and any offence caused to St Dwynwen is mine alone to own.

Pencil drawing of two chickens.

Introducing #TheWeekThatWas

This is going to be a new post feature thing, hopefully, if I can keep my momentum going. I’m going to do an update on a Friday about what’s been going on at Lester Towers.

So this week:

I’M WRITING A CHICKEN STORY, OKAY?
Four chickens in a line staring accusingly at the photographer.
Photo by Engin Akyurt on Pexels.com

This is week has mostly be taken up with release promo for The Hunted and the Hind. I got really behind and half-organised some facbook and blog drop-ins in good time in late November and early December. And then family life got really, really complicated for a few weeks and my mental health plummeted, so I booked a launch tour with the lovely Lori at Indigo Marketing. That took quite a bit of the pressure off, but I’ve still had a list as long as my arm of things to do.

In the meantime I’ve been trying to get back on the Writing Horse and start the new trilogy I’ve roughed out centered around Dr Sylvia Marks, one of the side-characters in Inheritance of Shadows. I’m trotting along all right with that, but it’s complicated because there’s foreshadowing and short story arcs and long story arcs and generally having sit and think and stare into space a lot.

My usual writing style is throw about thirty thousand words about two characters at the page randomly and see what sticks, then fill in the bits that need filling in. So this is a completely different process for me. There’s lots of words and they’re on the page but I’m not quite sure where they fit together. It’s a bit like only having half a really large jigsaw and you’re waiting for the other half to arrive in the post.

In the meantime this week in the UK, we have had: Your kids must go back to school, it’s safe/oh, no strike that, don’t send them back, the pandemic is out of control; Brexit is fine, nothing to see here; and, oh, America is exploding.

My brain has clearly decided that it can’t cope with anything more complicated than short, fluffy stories, so this morning I’ve begun to write a meet-cute based around a lost chicken.

Do not judge me.