Celia Lake's Blog, page 7

Four Walls and a Heart is out!

Four Walls and a Heart brings us back to 1884, and Gil and Magni’s romance.

They appear, some years later (in 1906) as secondary characters in Pastiche, where they’re able to help Richard improve his life in a number of ways. I’m delighted to have the chance to go back in their history, to when they fell in love – and more importantly, admitted it.

It’s also a book about figuring out what choices you have when your life has changed dramatically. It’s full of loving books and reading, and baked goods. (You might want a snack while you read, from what my early readers have said…) And it involves some fun at the seaside, in Brighton.

All in all, it’s a lighthearted cosy read, just the right treat for a break in your day.

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Happily ever after, no kids

One of my romance spaces was talking about romances that don’t presume a child is necessary for the happily-ever-after of the romance. If you’ve read my work, obviously I’ve got a mix in here. I thought it might be interesting to talk about the variations. 

(I obviously think people can find happiness in a whole bunch of different configurations and life choices. My characters make a wide range of choices, both in the immediate aftermath of a book and further down the road.)

A note, to start

Obviously, some of my romantic pairings have kids. While it’s possible to pass the land magic connections without having a bloodline connection, it’s a bit trickier and less certain. (It would likely be easier for an adopted child who’s grown up on the land than a distant relative who hasn’t, though.) That does mean that several families do have a certain amount of “We should try to have some kids” as part of their planning. 

For purposes of this post being a reasonable length, I’m just focusing here on those couples who don’t have kids and who aren’t in a parental role to anyone. (Alexander, for example, does not have kids of his own, but he’s in a semi-parental role to several in the 1930s and through the 1940s.) I’m also leaving out our teenage protagonists of The Magic of Four because they’re all fourteen in my head right now. I have no idea what their specific futures look like.

Life without kids

Since I don’t know what books you have or haven’t read, I’m listing the couples (alphabetical by first name) below and the book using spoiler codes. Click on the plus signs below to read the specifics for each couple and book.

Adam and Thalia : Mistress of Birds
Details
Both Thalia and Adam are living with PTSD, more than a decade after the Great War. Both of them have trouble with sudden noises or shifts, and both of them have some physical symptoms that make taking care of small babies particularly challenging. They make the decision not to have children, but turn their home into a place where artists, writers, and others can get away for a bit and figure out their lives.
Anna and Una : A Dog’s Chance

Anna and Una are lesbian protagonists in a short story available through my newsletter extras. (Click on the link for more info on how to get it, or if you’re already getting my newsletter, links to all of the extras are at the top and bottom of every email since June 2022.) They have a small menagerie, a lot of artistic friends, and a very large dog.

Beatrice and Robin : Fool’s Gold
Details
Beatrice has a generational curse on her, and she’s not sure how that’d interact with Robin’s nature as a Cousin. They’re unlikely to have children.

Robin might be a reasonably redeemed sort these days, but he does get into fits of ignoring the world due to painting, and that’s not great for childrearing.

Benton and Cassie : On The Bias
Details
Both Benton and Cassie are committed to professional choices that make it difficult to raise children. They both also care about mentoring others in their respective fields, and prefer to do that with adults. (Though Benton, in particular, is also a respected adult for many of the kids growing up at Ytene.)
Cadmus and Vivian : Seven Sisters
Details
Cadmus has been guardian for his nephew since Farran was about 10. By the time Vivian meets Farran, he’s more or less a grown up. Both Cadmus and Vivian have their own lives and they are not living together routinely (instead, for a week or two at a time, then on their own again, depending on the needs of the moment).

And Vivian’s a Cousin, so it’s harder to be certain, but she’s probably past childbearing age. (Honestly, with these two, I’m not sure what degree of sex or intimacy they actually settle on, beyond being in bed reading together. Which is a very fine form, don’t get me wrong.)

Cyrus and Mabyn : The Hare and the Oak
Details
Cyrus’s wife Tanith died in childbirth with their daughter Gemma, and that had a huge impact on both Cyrus’s and Gemma’s life and choices.

Mabyn had one son with her late husband. By the time she and Cyrus become involved, she’s well past childbearing age, but also she wouldn’t want to try again if she could.

Gil and Magni : Four Walls and a Heart
Details
I’m writing this as I get Four Walls and a Heart ready for publication. Honestly, neither Gil nor Magni particularly thinks about kids, though they very much like being uncles once Gabe and Charlotte are old enough for conversation.
Laura and Martin : In The Cards
Details
Laura and Martin make a deliberate choice not to have children. It was possible to have children after extended care for tuberculosis, but there was a chance of pregnancy activating it again (and in Laura’s case, she had surgery with some scarring that would make shifts in the ribcage and torso more painful.)

They also both have work and commitments that take them away from home for a week or three at a time, much easier to juggle when it’s just the two of them.

Mason and Rosemary : Complementary
Details
Elizabeth Mason and Rosemary Ditson are another lesbian couple, and don’t seek out options for that. Mason is committed to her work (and a lot of the magical work of a Penelope is a bad fit during pregnancy, due to the risks of unknown magic).

Rosemary is a midwife, but she likes the part where she can give the baby back to the loving parents and go put her feet up when things are settled.

Both of them do enjoy being chosen aunts to Gabe and Charlotte Edgarton, and later to their respective children. Again, when they get to give them back after a pleasant afternoon.

And a couple of secondary couples

(Several of these couples were dealing with difficulties around fertility and miscarriage, additional details in the spoilered notes).

Agatha Witt is not in a romantic (or sexual) relationship, saving her energy for her professional partnership with Elizabeth Mason.

Lapidoth Manse has spent his adult life in MI6, which doesn’t leave a lot of time for parenting. Or much else, honestly.

Livia and Garin Fortier

Details
As noted in With All Due Speed , an extra for Thesan and Isembard’s courtship after Eclipse , Livia miscarried three times, and they have no children. This increased the pressure on Isembard to have children who could inherit the title and land magic.

Margot and Reynold Williams (Bound for Perdition and an upcoming title)

Details
As noted in the upcoming Three Graces Reynold comes from the sort of family that breeds for magic. However, he and Margot have no children, for reasons unspecified.

Medea and Wallington Aylett

Details
Alchemy labs are not particularly encouraging to pregnancy, especially when you’re doing highly experimental work. Both Medea and Wallington were spending a lot of their lives at that, until his death.

Temple and Delphina Carillon

Details
It’s very likely that Temple and Delphina were dealing with infertility issues before the Great War, but Temple’s experiences during the war certainly didn’t help matters at all. More details forthcoming in Three Graces about what he was up to.
People I’m not sure about (yet)

There are also some couples where I’m not entirely sure about what they’re up to, or don’t have all the details yet.

Lydia and Galen (Point by Point) might have kids. They might not. Both of them have active projects of their own, of the sort that don’t lead to being home reliably. And both of them definitely need some time to figure out how to be partners before they’re parents.

Hippolyta FitzRanulf, well, I’m not clear if she’s married, partnered, or what. She does take an interest in her half-siblings and their children, but she’s deeply dubious of the concept of marrying for familial legacy reasons.

When Illusion of a Boar (coming in November 2023) opens, our four point of view characters are all in their thirties, and two of them married in the 1930s. Orion Sisley has two young children who have barely seen him since the start of the Second World War. Claudio Warren has a son in tutoring school and a younger daughter. (And the same problem with being posted away from them for year.) Cammie Gates and Hypatia Ward are unmarried and without children.

I have thoughts about what happens after the end of the book, and some of that will probably come out down the road.

Questions about any of this, please let me know! I’m glad to do a deeper dive into specific situations on request.

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Idea to Book: Sailor’s Jewel

Welcome to the “Idea to Book” post for Sailor’s Jewel. Sailor’s Jewel is set on an ocean liner in 1901. Really, that’s a lot of what you need to know about it. 

Ocean liners

I’d been saying for a while that I feel like there’s an obligation to uphold. Namely, if you’re writing a series in the era of the great ocean liners, you should probably set a book on one.

Also, it meant I got to putter around in some absolutely delightful research about what a magical liner might have, how that changed things, and what sort of ocean life I wanted to include. Part of the fun of a book like this is also that you’ve got a limited setting and set of characters. I love my books with big open spaces and whole cities to explore, but I also turn out to like a book that’s got more constraints and limitations.

The people

First, we have our significant characters. Besides Rhoe and Cyrus here, we have also have Hugh, whose family owns the shipping line, and who therefore not only has a different perspective on some of it, but who can do things like a behind the scenes tour. He’s also got some interesting problems needing solutions. 

And then we have a number of other passengers. Some of them are a fair bit more enjoyable than others. Several definitely have their own goals for the trip, and don’t care a lot about what that means for anyone else. 

The liner

I spent a lot of time while researching this one rummaging through the GG Archives site which has an absolutely treasure trove of everything from menus to entertainment listings to details on specific lines. It’s also got passages from books from the period, such the rather wry (and exceedingly opinionated) “Who’s Who On Board.” It comes from The Great Wet Way by Alan Dale in 1910.

The site was tremendously helpful when I was trying to figure out how quickly the Moonstone might cross the Atlantic, the route they took, and what else I should be thinking about in terms of events on board.

Ocean liners. Great fun. 

Rhoe and Cyrus’s sibling relationship

Another thing I wanted to do was spend some time with Rhoe and Cyrus. I’d written Carry On by this point. In that book, Rhoe is a secondary character, and Cyrus appears briefly without any explanation of his context. (Except that it’s clear to Elen that other people in the room clearly view him as important.) 

I love the way they are with each other in this book, even though they’ve obviously both been very busy independently in the months leading up to their travel. Despite that – or because of it – within the first chapters, they’re clear on what they’re doing. They’re also clear on their different roles in Albion’s society, and the way people pay much more attention to Cyrus’s than Rhoe’s. 

The two of them appear in other books, of course, but usually focused more on one of them than the other, for the obvious reasons. You can find Cyrus’s late-in-life romance, much further on in 1926, in The Hare and the Oak. He also appears briefly in Bound for Perdition and in a number of the Land Mysteries books as an ongoing character. 

(I also love Rhoe’s deliberate choices of clothing here, and I wist for rather a lot of her aesthetic dress choices, especially some of the fabrics.)

Sea monsters

You can’t have an ocean journey without a sea monster or two, right? My original tag line for this book when I was talking about it with friends was “Taking a magical jewel across the Atlantic. Alas, leviathan!” That’s not quite where it went, but the core of the idea is still there, lurking under the surface. 

(No liners are actually harmed in the course of the book. Though as mentioned, there is in fact a prayer in the Church of England Book of Common Prayer of the period that is basically “the sea monsters didn’t get us, that’s great.” It’s the second of the collects of Thanksgiving here. It’s a very big and mystifying ocean out there.)

The thing that gets me about sea monsters is the range of them. Figuring out what kind might apply – and where in the Atlantic they lived – was a fun dive into both lore and what people thought about it circa 1900. Sorting out what the magical community thought (as distinct from the non-magical) is also an interesting challenge. 

(Without spoiling the details, there’s a fair bit of ocean life. One of my friends and early readers was a particular help with this book in that regard. It’s all reasonably plausible ocean life, once you allow for magic in the first place.) 

And of course, jewels

Like an awful lot of people, I find a lot of the lore about the magical properties of jewels and gemstones absolutely fascinating. As I write this, I’m working on the research for the next book in my writing stack (starting in November 2023), which is Griffin’s romance and which is going to involve Whitby jet. Probably along with other stones, because why not.

Because of that, I’m rereading Victoria Finlay’s excellent book Jewels: A Secret History. She does a thorough dive into both some of the places the stones come from, and the lore and history of finding and mining them. She doesn’t talk about aquamarines – the stone Cyrus is transporting – directly, but it helped me figure out where to look for other appropriate stories. 

Curious?

Check out Sailor’s Jewel for all the ocean liner goodness you might like.

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Idea to Book: Complementary

Complementary is a f/f novella in 1910, and it’s full of art, forced proximity, and a dash of folklore. 

Fundamentally, Complementary exists for two reasons. First, I wanted to spend a bit more time with Elizabeth Mason (who appears in several other books, notably Pastiche, The Fossil Door, and Old As The Hills.) Second, I knew people who were getting a collaborative project off the ground to feature f/f or sapphic romance, Kalikoi. 

Elizabeth Mason

Mason – as she is widely known – and Witt are both Penelopes, a relatively small community of specialists who figure out what magical chaos has happened now and fix it (or at least get it stable). They’re Albion’s forensic scientist specialists, but they’re also the people you call in when someone has done something troublesome in an alchemy lab or with one of those ritual methods that really, no one should mess with. 

They were apprentices at the same time, and have worked together closely ever since, in the manner of people who can and do finish each other’s sentences. 

They’re not the same, though. There’s a theory out there – first put forward by forward by Dahilia Lithwick in 2012 that divides people and characters into Order Muppets and Chaos Muppets. (I should note that the original article discusses Supreme Court justices in the US in ways that have aged unevenly, shall we say.) 

This also applies to Penelopes. Mason is the Chaos Muppet of the two, and Witt is definitely the Order Muppet. On average, the Penelopes alternate when they do apprenticeships, though not entirely. (Lucy Doyle, who was Witt’s favourite apprentice and Gabe’s apprentice mistress is definitely also an Order Muppet.) Gabe, of course, is also a Chaos Muppet. Neither he nor Mason are precisely out of control, but they do definitely have unconventional solutions to a number of problems. 

Anyway, I wanted to spend more time with Mason, and in her head. (Want more Witt? You can get a brief section from Witt’s point of view in the extra “Three Times Told“, that takes place after The Fossil Door. There are a few more bits from Witt’s POV coming in extras for Upon A Summer’s Day.) 

Mason is an artist who has a hobby of forging historical documents for fun and education. (How do you know how to detect them if you don’t try making them yourself? I might also have been thinking of a particular episode of Leverage in there.) Complementary gives her a chance to show off her art skills as well as her investigation skills. 

I also had mentioned her partner Rosemary a few times, and I wanted to know how they got together. Rosemary is a midwife by profession, so keeps irregular hours and is also reasonably tolerant of Mason’s habit of covering every flat surface with other objects. 

Artist colonies

During the 19th and early 20th century, there were a huge number of artist colonies dotting scenic bits of the British Isles. Like the one in Complementary, they weren’t always terribly well organised. Basically, you’d get a bunch of people together, some amount of shared resources to rent somewhere to live and manage some amount of food, and then everyone would go off and sketch and paint and whatever. It was usually the more portable arts, of course, especially if you were ending up somewhere more rural. 

One of the things that was appealing about writing about it is that you have a range of personalities thrown in together who might not otherwise have spent a ton of time with each other. Add a bit of a challenge to solve and it makes a great setting. 

Folklore

Finally, I wanted to have some fun with folklore. That area of England turned out to have some delightful bits of folklore. King Onna, the barrow, the Black Shuck, and the Devil beating on the church of the door are all part of the ongoing lore and conversation. If you do a search on any of these and throw in the word “Southwold” or “Norfolk”, you should dig up several versions.

(Though to be fair, it’s hard to come across spots that don’t have some sort of legend about large black dogs. They’re as common as healing wells, you can’t avoid coming across them regularly.) 

The Deadman’s Barrow is actually relatively close to Sutton Hoo, a famous Anglo-Saxon burial site of the 6th and 7th centuries that was first excavated in the 1930s. You may have seen the famous helmet or other items from the site.

If any of this intrigues, do check out Complementary, a novella of 35,000 words, just the right length for a pleasant treat. 

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Where to start

One of the questions that I hear fairly often these days is “Which of your books should I start with?” I now have an entire page on this website to help with your questions about reading order.

The short answer is: “Start anywhere you like with any book set before 1935.” (Though there are a couple where you might have more fun in a specific order.) Read on for a few more thoughts about that.

Where to start?

When people ask me which book to start with, I tend to suggest Pastiche. It has basically all of the elements of my books, and if you like the Edgartons, there are a lot more books to read that include them in varying ways.

But start where you like!

I write my books hoping people will start with whatever books intrigue them. I’m a librarian, a reader, and I’ve been part of various creative projects over the years. I learned a long time ago I’m lousy at predicting where someone wants to start most of the time. Some people have a particular character type they’re drawn to, or an element of setting, or a particular trope.

While many of my books include repeating characters, I make sure you can read almost all of them from anywhere you want to start.

As an example, let’s take Shoemaker’s Wife, my most recent book as I write this post. It includes three characters who are the centre of Casting Nasturtiums and another who appears in Point by Point. But you can easily read it without knowing anything about them. (And then, I hope, if you want more of them, you’ll maybe go check out those other books.)

I list the key information about that in the author’s notes for the book, on my authorial wiki, and in other useful places.

Sequencing

Some people care more about sequencing than others. I do suggest that people might like to read Ancient Trust (available through my newsletter for free), then Goblin Fruit, before On The Bias. You get an arc of how Carillon and Benton are with each other in a variety of ways.

But if you’re just here for the dressmaking – or the dangerous birds – then start with On The Bias, it’ll explain everything you need.

The same thing is true with two other books: Fool’s Gold is significantly about the aftermath of Seven Sisters. If you really want to avoid all plot spoilers for other books (and some people want to do that), then read Seven Sisters first.

Larger family arcs

Now, with characters appearing in multiple books – or members of the same family in multiple books – there are definitely some distinct arcs. Here’s the thing, though. It’s not like I write these books in chronological order.

I often know the outline of an event (Temple Carillon’s death in 1922, what happened with Alexander’s older brother and mother in 1889) without knowing all the details. As I write more and explore different parts of the timeline or different perspectives, I’ll circle back to the specifics in new books.

If you’d like to follow the complete arc of the Carillon family, the Edgarton family, or the Fortier and Landry families (who are closely interconnected), those links will take you to the page on my authorial wiki that puts them in chronological order with a bit more context. (Do let me know if more context would be helpful to you! I realise there are a number of different possible paths through my books.)

The Land Mysteries books

Now, there is one series where reading them in order might be worth considering. The Land Mysteries book take place starting in 1935 (Best Foot Forward) and will run through 1947. The last three books are coming out between November and May 2024. (We are getting a key piece of the puzzle of Temple’s arc in Three Graces in December 2023.)

They deal with several different arcs – World War 2, of course, but also issues of the land magic. They also deal with some longer arcs in multiple characters’ lives. There’s plenty of reminders of what’s going on and why it matters, but the larger arc takes a while to play out.

Of course, pick up whatever order pleases you – but I do strongly suggest you read Old As The Hills before Upon A Summer’s Day. They form a tight internal duology together.

I hope all of that helps give you some ideas. And again, the reading order page has more suggestions. I’ll keep that updated as new books and new series come out.

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Shoemaker’s Wife is here!

Shoemaker’s Wife is about coming home from the Great War and trying to figure out your life now. It’s about the difference between falling in love and having a happy marriage. It’s about keeping a business running (and dealing with a difficult customer). It’s about finding work that will keep body and soul together for a bit longer. (And maybe something more.)

And it’s also got a theatre during panto season, a theatre ghost, and the art and craft of shoemaking.

And for those who loved Golshan, Seth, and Dilly (seen in Casting Nasturtiums, which ends about 8 months before Golshan appears in Shoemaker’s Wife), they all lend a hand.

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Fanfic and me

I’ve had a couple of questions recently about how I feel about fanfic – so time for a post where I can lay it all out.

Short version: I love and approve of fanfic, but please don’t send me any fanfic (or related text, like ideas you’ve had for it) or otherwise directly wave it in front of my eyes. Sharing fan art, craft projects, and other forms of fannish goodness are all wonderful.

Read on for more of an explanation (and why I’m putting it this way.) 

What is fanfic? 

There are a great many ways to engage with an author’s works that involve the reader’s own creativity.

One way is by writing stories – fanfic – set in a particular author’s world. Maybe these use the author’s characters. Those might be minor characters (the ones who are on stage for a few sentences at some key moment). Or perhaps they involve original characters the fanfic author creates. The stories can run a huge range, from original epic plots to missing scenes from a book via a different point of view. 

There are also all sorts of other kinds of fan art. These include making art (drawings, paintings, crafts) to cosplay (dressing up like a character) to making videos or playlists or writing songs. There are even things like making teas or perfumes or nailpolishes. Basically, if you can imagine an art form, someone’s probably done some type of fannish creation about it. 

My feelings about fanfic

I am entirely in favour of fanfic existing – and I’ve been known to write some of my own. (More on that in a second.) I’d be an absolutely hypocrite if I said I didn’t want it for my own work.

I also consider fanfic to be one of the highest compliments someone can pay. People wanting to be part of what I’ve written in that way is a wonderful thought! While some fanfic comes out of a desire to ‘fix’ a problem in the canon work, much more of it comes out of a desire to spend more time with these people (and this world). 

However, as an author, there are some complexities with my knowing anything about fanfic of my own work. There have been some messy situations in the past, with authors whose intended stories crossed over with fanworks. I absolutely don’t want to end up in a situation that might be legally complicated. But I even more don’t want anyone to feel hurt or misused (whether that’s one of my readers or me). 

I have a lot more stories I want to tell in Albion. While Albion is still an open and growing space, I want to make sure nothing’s going to get snarled in the process. (I am not a Penelope, I only play one in some novels…) 

Here’s my fanfic policies

Please write fanfic if you are so inclined! 

If you’d like to connect with others:

Someone on our Discord has kindly set up a Discord server just for discussion of fanfic of my Albion books. You can get the link in the #announcements channel of the server, or feel free to ask. (I’m also glad to share the link with you. But I am not on that server, cannot see any content, or have any other information about it beyond than the link. That is exactly how I want it.) 

If you want to set up fannish spaces anywhere else, I’m glad to share the links (or how to get involved) the same way. Just let me know how people can get in touch with whoever the admin is or where to find you. I’ll share the links in suitable places. (That means this post plus the Discord, plus any other locations added later.)

All other (non-text) fannish creative works 

Anything that isn’t text (fiction or otherwise) is welcome on the Albion’s Delight Discord server. Please feel free to share art, music, crafts, and whatever else, so long as it isn’t telling a story about characters. I’d also be delighted to share them with readers in my newsletter if you’re willing. (Drop me a note in the contact form if you’d like to do this.) 

Talking through bits of worldbuilding and details of the books is always fine on the Discord, in Patreon, in emails, or whatever else. If something veers a bit too much into “If X talked to Y, and Z happened” territory (i.e. a chain of events), I may ask to shift topics. 

One particular note about me and fanfic. I don’t write a lot, but the most reliable place has been via the Yuletide exchange for small fandoms that runs every year.

(I didn’t write for it in 2022, but I did most of the previous decade. Reliably, I do read a lot of stories posted in that exchange. For those not familiar, in an exchange you write a story for someone else based on certain things you match on like fandoms or characters. Someone else writes a story for you.)

This does mean that while I’d be delighted if Albion ended up in Yuletide, I will also be firmly ignoring its possible existence.

Want to know about a detail?

I have a lot of notes about things in the books, both that have already been published and those that are in drafts that aren’t out yet or part of later plans. I’m always glad to help with details. “Is there a portal near here?” “You haven’t specified the land magic for X place, is there anything about that?” “Have there been Council members with this background?” 

If I don’t have anything specified yet, I’ll tell you. If I do, I will (and how solid it is, in terms of info). When there’s a reference in a particular book, I can probably easily tell you the chapter. Just don’t share details of your plots about what you’re doing with that information, and we’re all good.  

Questions?

Feel free to drop me a note, and I’m glad to clarify. And again, I am delighted to share any fannish creation other than text-based fanfic with others, or share other locations where people interested can talk about it, create it, and have fun with it.

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What can you expect from this book?

One of the reasons I’m excited about my website (and authorial wiki) updates is that they’re making it easier to share more about what you can expect from a given book. Time for me to talk about your options here, depending on what information you’re interested in, and whether you want to avoid certain kinds of spoilers.

Before we get into that, though, a general word about what you will and won’t find in my books.

What you will find in my booksSlow burn: 

My romances are definitely on the slow burn side, where characters need to get to know each other to figure out they’re interested and to act on that interest. Most of my romances take place across at least a few months (with Eclipse at the longest so far, where the romance takes most of a school year). 

A few are much shorter: In The Cards and Sailor’s Jewel get from first meeting to romance in about a week or so. 

An emphasis on consent:

While a few characters do have concerns about sexual abuse or harassment, that is not something I’m interested in writing on page in any sort of detail. (Creepy behaviour is about as far as I’ll go – Shoemaker’s Wife has some of that.) A few characters have some experiences of the kind in their background in the various ways that manifests. (Mabyn, for example, touches on the nature of her marriage in The Hare and the Oak but is not at all specific about the details.)

Of course, people are not perfect about talking about consent. They certainly mess up in talking about other things sometimes! But my characters want to handle it well, and will come back and check on specifics as needed. 

Representation

About half my main characters live with some kind of ongoing disability, chronic health issue, or neurodiversity. (Sometimes more than one, because people are people.) I include information about this in various ways, so you can either find or avoid stories based on your needs and interests. 

What you won’t findNo cheating

I had an email from a reader a few weeks ago who’d put off reading Best Foot Forward because she was afraid there’d be cheating.

Let me promise you right now: no cheating in any of my books. I’ve made that a bit more clear in the content notes where relevant now, but please drop me a note if there are other ways I can help with this one. I’m not interested in writing it and I’m especially not interested in doing it to characters I love. 

(Characters may have experiences with cheating in their background – Lizzie, for example, during the Great War. But when it’s relevant, it’ll be in their past.) 

No third-act bleak moment

While I love them in some other people’s romances, I have no desire to write plots that hinge on a massive miscommunication that could be solved if the people involved talked to each other as the hinge of the plot.

At this point, the most I’ve done with this is that there’s a period in Goblin Fruit where Lizzie and Carillon have things they need to sort out, but they are not in a place (physically or then metaphysically) where they can fix things for a few chapters. They do recognise there’s a problem, and the one who caused it wants to fix it. 

Finding out more about a book

But my books might have all sorts of other things in them – some of which you might want to read about, and some you might not. We all have those things. Sometimes we’re just not in the mood for something. Other times, we might be – but right now a health issue is a big deal for us or a loved one, we’re tired of a topic, we just read (or watched or listened to) something in that same kind of story space. Or we want a break and something entirely different. 

To make that easier, I’ve got five different ways to get more details about the specific aspects of a book or character: 

The content notes pageContent notes on each book’s pageTags on my books“Books with context” on my authorial wikiCharacter pages on my authorial wiki

I use these tools to note things you might want to know about a book, either so you can find more books that have characters with those experiences, or so you can avoid that book. Each of them gives different amounts of content, depending on what you’re looking for.

Content notes

The content notes page and the content note for each book have the same information. Both talk about the key aspects of the book that readers might want to know about in advance. These include: 

Whether there are on-page sex scenes.Difficult circumstances in the book (like trauma, dealing with grief, addiction, etc.) Characters with disabilities, chronic health issues, or who are neurodiverse.Other characteristics of interest, like class, background (including ethnicity), and community affiliations.

You can find the content notes on their own page, or on the bottom of each book description. (Click where it says “Content” just below the description and above the tags and meta data.) 

Tags

One great new tool is that each book now has a number of different tags assigned to it. These cover a range of kinds of information, similar to the content notes. Found a book you liked, and want other books with similar aspects? Check out the tabs and click through to see other books that share those things.

Or you can check out the lists of books by different kinds of connections. These pages are built from the tags. The focus page covers things like solving a mystery, LGBTQIA+ romances, or focusing on a particular character. Character experiences share books with characters wtih diverse backgrounds, ongoing disabilities, or neurodiversity. And then there are tags for how something relates to Albion’s magic, or fits into a trope (like friends to lovers).

Got a tag you’d like to see or would find useful? Get in touch, and I’m glad to see what I can do.

Books with Context

The Books With Context page on my authorial wiki has another way to browse by this kind of information. Here I’ve got a long list of different categories. Click on the label (the white text on the brightly coloured spoiler box) to reveal the books.

It’s the same basic information as the content notes and tags, but there I can include some brief notes on the specifics, like which character is relevant or a detail or two.

Character pages

The last place to find additional details is to check out the pages for each character on the authorial wiki. Each character’s page has their overall background notes, as well as additional details for what’s relevant to their story. Anything beyond their initial introduction (at the earliest point in time of when they appear) is probably under a spoiler tag, so you can check out the page without getting spoiled for books you haven’t read (or haven’t read yet!)

Different information

Looking for something else to help with your reading experience? Again, please do let me know.

Adding new tags or other connecting tools does take some time on my part, and I want to make sure I’m not making things too confusing for other readers. But I also want to make sure I share plenty of options to help readers figure out if my books are what they’re interested in right now.

The post What can you expect from this book? appeared first on Celia Lake.

Alt-text and the author

Recently, a friend commented on how much she loved the alt-text on my images, and I promised I’d do a post talking about how I think about that. I’m aiming this at people talking about things like book covers – whether you’re a reader, a librarian, or an author – though I’ll be linking to some more general resources as well, some of which talk about describing more complex images. 

What is alt-text?

Briefly, alt-text is a text description of an online image that is attached to that image. You may have seen the option for it on social media sites or when you’re setting up an image on a blog post. Your goal is to give a description of not only what the image has in it, but why and how it’s relevant to what you’re talking about. 

We often talk about alt-text in the context of screen readers, for people who are blind or visually impaired. But alt-text is useful in a lot of other circumstances. Someone who’s avoiding looking at a screen due to a migraine might use a screen reader instead. Some people turn off image loading on sites or in their email to limit tracking images or save data plans or download time.  

A well-described image can also offer additional information about the image. The archivists where I work have been improving the descriptions on our photos (for some reasons I’ll talk about later in this post), and better descriptions also give additional search options for your images. That can be very handy sometimes! 

A lot of people feel very intimdated by creating alt-text. There are a number of ways to make it easier for yourself, especially if you’re mostly working with the same kind of content (for example, as an author, I have a bunch of book covers). 

What’s my background?

In my day job, we care a lot about accessibility. I don’t write a lot of alt-text for work, but I help proofread descriptions for my colleagues in our campus archives regularly. I also check out descriptions they do in our online collections. As an author, I want to make sure my website and social media are accessible to as many people as I can, and creating useful alt-text for images is a big part of that. 

What makes alt-text good?

Good alt-text is based on context. You generally want to describe what would matter to someone looking at the image, in the context you’re writing in. An informal chatty blog post is going to want to have different information (and a different style) than a description of a device in a catalogue or a historical image from an archive or museum. 

Sometimes you don’t need alt-text: If an image is purely decorative (like a divider between sections of a page), that almost never needs alt-text. If you have a slide deck with a logo repeated on every page, you probably want the alt-text for the logo once or twice (maybe on the first and last slides), but you don’t need to repeat it on every single slide. How you do this depends a bit on your tool.

But if the image is conveying information to people, then you want to include it. 

What makes alt-text bad? 

Alt-text is bad if it doesn’t exist (on an image that should have it), if it doesn’t convey useful information about the image, or if it’s way too long and detailed for the context of the image and what’s in the image. Here are three basic tips: 

Don’t duplicate information in the text in the alt-text. (I’ll talk about this with screenshots and other images with large amounts of content below.) Don’t start “Image of” – the person using the alt-text will already know it’s an image thanks to their software. Don’t start with all the details. Start with a basic summary and then get more complicated. That way, if someone doesn’t care about the details, they can skip on to the next part easily. 

Some kinds of information may be more or less useful to specific people using your alt-text. Think about how much visual detail matters for the context of the image. 

Alt-text for authors

As an author, the images I’m sharing usually have to do with my book covers. Occasionally, they’re character images. Sometimes they have to do with my cat, or something on my various adventures. Most of the time, I’m not describing people (though I’ve got a few guidelines for that below, based on current best practices). 

Here’s how I construct alt-text when I’m talking about book covers, whether it’s the cover by itself or in a larger image. 

I generally aim for 2-3 sentence for the cover description (because there’s a lot going on on a cover). Ideally, your alt-text would be just a sentence, and you’d have a longer description field with more detail. But in reality, WordPress (and other website tools) and social media don’t make this easy. So I go with something of a manageable length, but more like a paragraph than a phrase. 

Pro tip: When I write the blurb and other marketing material for a book, I also write up the alt-text for the cover. That way I can just copy and paste it when I use an image of the cover, and I don’t have to create it new every time. 

In my examples here, I’m using two books, Old As The Hills and the upcoming Shoemaker’s Wife. If you’re reading this with a screen reader or the alt-text showing, you’ll spot that the alt-text is already on these images: I add it when I upload the file. I also rename the file to something slightly more descriptive rather than a long string of numbers.

1) Start with “Cover of Title of Book”

If someone just wants to know what the image is, this tells them the basic content in one short sentence. If this is the third time I’ve used this cover image in an email, they can just jump to the next text, without hearing the whole description again. If you’re talking about a particular kind of image (photograph, daggeurotype, etching, watercolour, etc.) than including that gives more information about the kind of image.

I don’t bother with my author name. The image is presumably already associated with me in some other way, like being on my website or social media. If I’m writing alt-text that’s going somewhere else, I’ll include “by Celia Lake” after the title. Saying it’s a cover signals the reader to understand the general format we’re talking about and to be aware there’s probably a title coming. (Screen readers might mangle the title, so the additional context cuing can be helpful.) 

2) Give a basic description of the image. 

This is the first impression, what a sighted viewer looking at the image gets as an initial ‘what’s going on here’. 

For example, my base description for Old As The Hills starts: “The cover of Old As The Hills has a man with a cane and a woman silhouetted on a green ground with a map.” 

Shoemaker’s Wife starts “The cover of Shoemaker’s Wife has a man and woman in silhouette on a vibrant background of green shading through blue to purple.”

Is this the most exciting prose ever? Nope. But it gets the general sense of the image across. 

3) What matters most in this image?

You don’t want the alt-text to go on forever. Next, give the key details. In a romance cover, I probably want to talk about who the people are on the cover and how they are relating to each other. 

The next sentence of Old As The Hills says: “She holds out her hand, he is putting something into it, forming a doorway between them.” That’s a detail that a sighted viewer might not consciously pay attention to.

Shoemaker’s Wife continues: “The woman is standing on one foot with one hand in the air, lifting the other and looking over her shoulder at the shoe while the man looks on.” In this case I’m focusing on her position, which is more interesting than his. 

I wanted to make sure that Gabe’s cane is mentioned in Old As The Hills, because that’s information a sighted person looking at the image will have about him.

You may want to think about the following kinds of information:
(More about describing people in a minute). 

What objects are in the image? Is a sense of scale or size, placement, or colour relevant? What is the environment? Indoors, outdoors, is there visible furniture? Are there people? How many, and how are they positioned? What are they wearing or what is their hair like? Does it indicate a particular time period or situation? Think about how to describe gender, ethnicity, skin tone, and disabilities or accessibility tools that are visible. 4) What other details might be relevant? 

The background of Old As The Hills is the last part of the description. Here, I say “An astrological chart behind them shows the symbols for Venus, the Sun, Jupiter, and Saturn highlighted behind a splash of glowing stars.” 

This gives the reader information about the overall layout (whether or not they know anything about astrology charts). I don’t bother to talk about the details of the map, because while it’s a specific map, the details aren’t very readable to a sighted viewer. (In this case, it’s a map of Kent, in England.) Even if the reader doesn’t know anything about astrology symbols, they might look them up, and I want to give the same basic information in the alt-text. 

On the cover of Shoemaker’s Wife, there’s an inset image that is a clue about some of what’s in the book. In this book, that’s not much of a surprise – it’s a 1920s shoe. I say: “A purple 1920s shoe with a big blue ribbon bow is inset in the top right corner.” 

You notice I haven’t described the shoe in detail – how high the heel is or any other details. Nor have I described the general proportions or shape of the figures on the cover. I will if there’s something notable about them, but generally I just say “A silhouette of a man and a woman” sometimes with something like “in 1920s formal dress”. 

5) Are there other things in the image? 

I use a service called BookBrush for my social media and other images beyond the cover, which allows you to insert your cover into all sorts of scenes. When I use one of these, I start the alt-text with “The cover of Book displayed on a tablet, in a [scene].” and then continue on into the description of the cover with “The cover has…” It gives the overall basics of the image without getting too bogged down. I’ve got an example of this in the section below about colour.

Common questionsShould you mention colour? 

People wonder if you should talk about colour. I generally do, for several reasons.

First, lots people who rely on alt-text are familiar with colour. Many people who are visually impaired have at least some vision and light perception, and many of those either have some colour perception or have had it at some point in their life. Including the colours if they’re relevant helps give them the same experience as someone looking at the image. 

If someone doesn’t have experience with colour, they’ll generally just skim right over that. 

Should you get incredibly precise about exactly which shade of blue? No. Not unless you’re talking about images in a work where you’re, say, discussing the different dye shades you can get with natural dyes, or colour matching a bit of pottery with something else. 

I also mention colour because that’s a striking feature of my covers, and it’s often a hint to other aspects of the book. The Fossil Door has the burgundy and mustard because of Rathna’s background. The Hare and the Oak has to do with land magic, and so it has the brown and green. Magician’s Hoard has a main character who is of Egyptian background, and he’s got a fondness for turquoise as a colour. I also often pick images for social media and my blog that put the cover in a particular scene or setting, and I tend to pick ones that highlight or resonate with the cover’s colours, so I may mention that. 

For example, in this image for Shoemaker’s Wife, I might add a sentence saying “The cover of Shoemaker’s Wife displayed on a tablet, sitting next to a hunk of amethyst that picks up on the purple of the cover.” 

What about describing people? 

My cover people are always silhouettes, which means I don’t need to describe skin or hair colour, but I do indicate their gender. (I will admit this makes my life easier sometimes.) 

The current best practices are to describe someone’s ethnicity and visual characteristics based on what is known about them. Since – as an author – I’m talking about characters whose identity is discussed in the book in question, I’d use the appropriate specifics. I might describe Rathna as a woman of Bengali background  with brown skin and dark hair wearing an emerald green 1930s dress, or Gabe as a white man in his early 40s with long dark blond hair and a wooden walking stick, wearing country tweeds. 

The Cooper Hewitt guidelines (also linked below) give some great approaches for this, at different levels of relevant nuance, and they give a number of examples. However, their writing is more aimed at museums and curators, so a different context than authors.

What about complicated images

For example, what if you’re including a complicated chart or family tree or screenshot?

In my particular context here – as an author – I generally put something like “Screenshot of Software showing a basic overview. Details described in the surrounding text.” That’s because I’m almost always talking about the details of what’s in the image in the text of the post, and there’s no need to duplicate. It’s fine to just point people back to the text so long as that text actually includes all the relevant details.

The only thing I put in the alt-text are any notes about colour or layout that I’m not talking about in the main text, for example spelling out the layout that I’ve numbered in the image. 

Is this always hard?

I’ve found creating alt-text to be like any other skill. The first times were hard (and the first times in a new context are hard), but the more I do it, the easier it gets.

As I do more alt-text writing, I’ve got a lot more comfortable with figuring out what needs to be described and what doesn’t. It takes me a bit longer to write a good alt-text description than a paragraph of that length, but only two or three times longer, not forever. And mostly that’s because I have to stop and make sure I didn’t leave something important out. 

Resources

For authors and people with similar creative kinds of content, there’s a great new book out called Essentials of Accessibility by Jeff Adams. An accessibility specialist in his day job, he’s also an author. There’s a great podcast interview with him on Smart Podcast, Trashy Books (which also provides full transcripts for their episodes). His book talks about accessibility for creatives, and he’s got a substantial section on images and alt-text as well as a number of other accessibility tools to consider. 

Looking for examples of different alt-text styles? This post from Denise, co-founder of Dreamwidth, is older (from nearly a decade ago), but has a great demonstration of writing alt-text for different contexts with examples using the same images in a different ways.

Cooper Hewitt has a fantastic guide to writing detailed descriptions for art, museums, or historical context. You don’t need to get this complicated, but if you’re trying to describe an image where the details matter, this has a lot of models to help, as well as guidance on best practices for describing people in an image. 

Are you describing a complicated diagram? Here’s guidance from the Diagram Center on how to do alt-text for complex images, charts, and so on. 

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All the information you might want

Hello, and welcome to my newly redesigned website! I wanted to take a moment to share some of what you can find now. I’ve also revamped and redesigned my authorial wiki, and this post also has more about what you can find there.

My goals

I’ve written an ever increasing number of books, and I have a lot more in mind. While you can absolutely still read almost all of them in any order you like, I wanted to make it easier to find the books you’re interested in.

Here’s what the website and wiki now make possible. Read on for more specifics and a lot of links.

A way to follow characters or larger arcs across multiple books. Are you curious about a particular character? The wiki will let you find out all the places they appear, and which books are significant. Curious about the full arc of the books about the Carillons or the Edgartons or the Council? You can find lists and brief notes about each book in one place.

A way to find the books you’re most interested in (or avoid the books that aren’t your thing, or not right now). To make this easier, I’ve created tags, content notes, and a list of books with context that let you browse for those things you want to read.

A way to put books in order in different ways. With books reaching from 1882 to 1940 right now (and expecting more Victorian-era books to come, as well as books up through 1947 or so), timelines and internal chronological order start becoming a lot more useful.

A site that fits the feel of my books – and highlights my gorgeous covers. I love my covers so much. Augusta does an amazing job on them. I’m delighted to have a site that puts them front and centre. You’ll notice other details like the header font matching my cover font.

Here on my website

I’ve moved a few things around, and you can now find a range of information resources under the “More information” menu item on every page of this site.

Want a place to start? I have a new page with reading order suggestions, including some great books to start with, a few notes about which books may be best in a particular order (and why), and links to the books that start each series. You can also find a range of links to the authorial wiki here in one place.

Have other questions? Check out the newly improved questions and answers page. It has answers to a number of questions people have asked me about where best to get my books, where to get more details, and a lot more.

Finding books

Some things are pretty consistent in my writing – kindness, competence, consent, making the world a better place, and a range of disability representation. But maybe you’re looking for something specific? You can now explore those in four different ways, with just a couple of clicks or taps.

Explore books by when they take place (sorted into eras). These are chronological, with the earliest book in the period listed first. Explore books by focus  (like solving a mystery, LGBTQIA+ romances, or focusing on a particular character),  character experiences  (diverse backgrounds, ongoing disabilities, or neurodiversity), by how they relate to  Albion’s magic , or by  trope  (like friends to lovers).You can check into details about specific books both in the content notes page (in the main site menu) or by opening the “Content” note on every book’s page following the book description and above the tags. Each book page also has a list of books that relate in some way. I choose these by hand, based on a theme in the book. You can explore the other relationships with the tags on the book page. (Books from the tag links are listed in alphabetical order.)

The wonderful thing about this for me is that these book grids will update automatically as I add new books. If you think I’ve missed a book from a group it should be part of, just drop me a note via my contact form or replying to my newsletter and let me know which one.

Exploring the blog

Finally, you can explore blog categories from the sidebar (the 3 bar ‘hamburger’ icon to the right of the top menu), as well as finding all the posts that mention a specific book with the tags cloud.

I do plan to go into my old blog posts and clean up some tags and formatting, but nothing will change there about the content.

Authorial wiki

Have you explored my authorial wiki recently? Did you know that I have one? It’s done using a service called WorldAnvil, designed for role-playing gamers, worldbuilders, and authors. Over the past couple of months, I’ve had someone create a theme that suits my books and he did some gorgeous work to make it bright and colourful.

Come check it out: start from the main page of the site. You can navigate to different sections using the menu in the left sidebar with the different icons (which will expand with a text label when you hover over them with a cursor). Or you can use the World Codex links at the bottom of every page to navigate. In the codex, icons (of anything but a single page) indicate that there are more pages underneath that – just click or tap to see more of the list.

Learn more about the site and get some navigation tips from the handy guide to my site.

I update the site right around the time a new book comes out, and you can check the last update date on every page (where it says “Last updated as of…” and the book title, month, and year.)

Some helpful tipsLinks are in red, underlined, or both. The oval coloured boxes with white text are spoiler boxes – click or tap to reveal the information. This is so you can decide what you want to know about particular books or spoilers. You can find these boxes on all the character pages (both about which books they’re in, and the family details), along with some other background details. There’s an example to try it out on the guide to the site . On pages that include smaller versions of the covers (like the pages about particular arcs), you can click on either the cover image or the title of the book to go to that book’s page and learn more. Let me know if there’s something else that would make navigation easier for you. What’s on the site?

From here, you can explore and find pages about people (here’s the index of all character pages right now), places (see below), books and series. Each person’s page shares the other places they appear as well as background information. Each book’s page summarises who’s in that book, and links to key locations and other information. If you haven’t looked at the site for a while, I’ve added some character pages for some ongoing secondary characters who keep appearing.

You can also explore how books connect through larger arcs, such as the Carillon family, the Edgarton family, the Fortier and Landry families, the Council, or the Penelopes and research.

The “Books with Context” page (listed with the other arcs and series) shares different aspects of books you might want to seek out or avoid. It’s another form of the infromation in the content notes and book page tags on this website, but I can include a brief summary there of what’s relevant.

Maps

One of the great tools WorldAnvil offers is the ability to share maps – and link pins on those maps to different pages. The Maps and Places page gives an overview of all the maps.

You can click on items in the map and then onto the linked page to learn more. If you click on the small link to the bottom right of the map that says “Full Size”, you can see the map at a larger resolution, and clicking on an item will open up information about it in a sidebar panel (depending on the size of your screen).

Because Albion is very long north-south, I’ve focused on southern England and Wales (where most of our events take place). You can click and drag the map to move the area that’s visible, or zoom in and out. The dots on the decorative map are so I can align where the pins are better – they’re a range of useful cities and locations.

Maps you can explore include:A map of Albion, showing the Five Schools, significant plot locations, and particularly notable demesne lands. This map has options to filter which items you see using the layer tool in the top right of the map that looks like a stack of paper. Demesne lands showing all the landed estates mentioned so far (including some that have only had a brief reference).The location of portals mentioned so far. These are colour coded by whether they are Fatae created, defunct, or more recent (and still active), and you can also view filter these by layers. There are also separate maps of Trellech and Schola . Timeline

Finally, WorldAnvil makes it easy to have a variety of timelines for different purposes. Thanks to a recent update on the site, events from these timelines now also appear on the pages of people or events they’re linked to. You can also click or tap to get more information by selecting the links or character images on each entry.

Three timelines to explore The main Albion timeline only includes published books (no extras, no character events) The Books and Extras timeline includes all the published books, but also has entries (at the appropriate point in the timeline) for each extra or section of an extra. Character events including births, deaths, marriages, Council challenges, some key educational or professional changes. I’ve included the birth of children for ongoing characters whose children are mentioned or are likely to be in future books. That’s a lot of information!

It is. Don’t feel overwhelmed – my hope is that you’ll dip in and out of these resources as you want to. I’m always happy to answer a question. Part of the reason these two sites have the information they do is so that I can very easily share an answer down the road.

If there’s other information you’d find helpful, please let me know. I’m glad to see what I can do!

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