Amy Rae Durreson's Blog, page 5

Rainbow snippets (12th March)

And here is this week’s snippet, continuing the vague theme of introducing the supporting cast of Recovery. Here’s the one who keeps trying to steal the book (and my protagonist’s virtue). Here’s Prince Kastrian of the Ala Isles…

Then the doors to the council chamber swung open and a beautiful pirate strode in.

He was so very obviously cut from the same cloth as the thugs on the street that Raif gaped at him for a moment. Of course, what looked garish on the street thugs looked, well, no less garish on this man, but it suited him. His shirt was scarlet, his boots were knee-high black leather, over loose trousers; he wore a brass-studded leather baldric which supported both a long cutlass and a dagger. His shoulders, Raif couldn’t help noticing, were very broad, and his black hair was caught back in a long queue of curls.

“So nice of you to join us promptly, Kastrian,” Isla called.

Rainbow Snippets is a wonderful little Facebook group in which writers gather every weekend to post a six-sentence peek at one of their works. All genres are included but the snippets must be from books with a LGBTQIA+ protagonist.

Rainbow Snippets (5th March)

A little bit more from Recovery this week. Raif has now made it to the lagoon city of Aliann, the main setting of the book. Now employed as a secretary to one of the ruling council, here he gets introduced to a new idea which is starting to change the world.

Oskan said, “Fuck off.”

“Can I quote that too?” the young man shouted after them, but Oskan was already stomping up the steps.

He muttered, “Journalism, he calls it. Gossip mongering.”

“What’s journalism?” Raif asked.

“Hah. A waste of money and an invasion of privacy.”

 

Rainbow Snippets is a wonderful little Facebook group in which writers gather every weekend to post a six-sentence peek at one of their works. All genres are included but the snippets must be from books with a LGBTQIA+ protagonist.

Rainbow Snippets (27th February)

This week, have a little more of my WIP, Recovery, showing a couple of the supporting cast as well (those who’ve read Reawakening may well recognise one of these names ^_^)

Then Arden was moving, running forwards past Raif, past Tama, past Esen, to leap from the edge of the cliff, his back arching in a perfect dive.

Tama screamed, but this time it was Esen who laughed, throwing her head back. She shouted, “He rises!” and Arden did just that, soaring up again in a burst of golden flame, his human body blurring into nothing as he spread out burning wings towards the grey sky and became the dragon.

Raif still couldn’t breathe properly. It had been so long since he saw Arden in this form that he had forgotten how vast and terrifying the dragon was, how this was Arden’s truth: wings and fire and scarlet scales, the beat of wings that sent Tama stumbling backwards and grabbing at Raif for balance, the way his long tail whipped out over the rooftops as he turned in the air to swoop towards his brothers.

Tama seemed as shaken as he was, her breath as uneven, and they clung to each other to stay upright. Then Esen turned and saw them and said, rolling her eyes, “Breathe, you fools, even if he isn’t.”

Sssh, yes, I know that was seven sentences, but I felt it needed the first one to establish what was happening.

Rainbow Snippets is a wonderful little Facebook group in which writers gather every weekend to post a six-sentence peek at one of their works. All genres are included but the snippets must be from books with a LGBTQIA+ protagonist.

And all the world is grey…

In complete contrast to my previous walk through the blues and browns of the muddy North Downs, Saturday found us back in North Kent. We paused our coastal walk at Gravesend back at the end of August, having reached the first inland crossing of the Thames, the Gravesend to Tilbury ferry. For any other river, that would have been our cue to pick up the path back towards the sea, but we decided to make a special exception for the Thames, with all its history and significance. We will be walking the south bank of the Thames as far as central London, and then resuming our coastal walk from Tilbury.

This particular stretch of the Thames is very industrial, and will remain so for the next few ‘coastal’ walks we do. For the most part, we have left the lonely stretch of the marshes behind us, and Saturday’s walk was more grey than anything else. We were expecting it to be bleak, but were pleasantly surprised by the little scraps of history that kept emerging from the massed warehouses and wastelands.

 

We began here in the centre of Gravesend, where a memorial stone to Pocohontas, who died here long before the modern town was born, stands forlornly in the church yard.

Down by the river bank, we looked north across the water to Tilbury Docks. All day, we watched container ships slide glumly along the river, carrying their vast stacks of cargo. 

Here are the run down remnants of the west end of Gravesend, an area once called Rosherville. Built in the hollow of an old chalk pit in the 1830s by one Jeremiah Rosher, this was intended to be a high class attraction for the best type of visitor; the Rosherville Gardens hosted entertainments and such features as a lake, a maze, a view tower and a bear pit. Rosher also built a hotel and several elegant villas. He never managed to attract the high paying customers he wanted, but the Gardens became a popular tourist attraction. Long before the railways opened up the beaches further east in Kent, steamboats plied their way down the Thames from central London to deposit thousands of visitors in the Gardens. Sometimes 30000 visitors a day landed at the wooden pier on the bank of the Thames.

The pier is long gone, though a jetty remains, and the ghosts of the gardens by the river’s edge are buried below piles of gravel. In the early evening of September 3rd 1878, this riverside would have been crowded with smartly dressed Londoners pushing to get back on board the steamer to London Bridge: hundreds of them had paid two shillings a ticket for the round trip–a good deal for the time. The ship they boarded was called Princess Alice. With between 700-800 people on board, she was massively overcrowded and undercrewed, but it was a warm September day and no one cared. She was almost back to Woolwich pier when she approached the Newcastle bound collier, Bywell Castle. The steamer captain, following common practice among Thames watermen, turned the Princess Alice port across the path of the collier to seek out the slack water where it would be easier to move against the tide. The collier captain, assuming that the steamer was following the standard procedures for open sea which would have meant passing to starboard, realised too late that she was turning. He reversed his engines, but it was too late and and all 900 tons of the Bywell Castle drove into the overcrowded and much smaller excursion boat, cutting her in half. The Princess Alice  broke and sank below the collier’s bows and although the sailors aboard the collier desperately tried to rescue the passengers, it was to little avail. Over 650 people drowned in the sewage filled river. The Princess Alice disaster is the worst loss of life in any Thames shipping disaster (the Thames Police Museum has a very detailed account of the disaster).

These days the chalk pit is filled with industrial units, although the tower of the Catholic church above the quarry can be seen here. You can also glimpse the quarry walls. Also notable because an officious little man came out and told us off for taking photographs, thus massively exceeding his legal authority (there are very few restrictions on amateur photography in the UK and they all apply to military institutions not Lidl distribution centres).

Climbing slowly out of the old chalk pit, we glimpsed the river again across this patch of wasteland. There used to be a cement factory here, using the chalk from the pits, but only the scars remain.

On the edge of Northfleet, we came across this sad looking patch of water. This was once Northfleet Harbour. Now trapped behind a flood defence which cuts it off from the river (which is right there–see the passing ship!), it has been left to rot. A local group had covered the fence beside this landing slope with posters campaigning for the harbour to be opened to the river again. It can’t get any worse, so I say good luck to them.

And this is where old routemaster buses go–not to die but to be hired out for weddings :) 

Finally, we reached our only patch of open ground in this walk. This is Swanscombe Marshes, where a very new nature reserve has been tucked against the side of the factories and a rough trail leads across to Greenhithe.

And this is the approach to Greenhithe, showing the great QE2 bridge at Dartford, the first bridge across the river. We finished our walk at Greenhithe, just before the rain came down and, just because we could, got the bus under the Thames through the Dartford tunnel and then back over it again over the bridge: this bus, incidentally, connects two modern descendants of the Rotherville Gardens: the Bluewater and Lakeside shopping centres, both built in old chalk pits and drawing improbable numbers of visitors to spend their money.

 

Rainbow Snippets (20th February)

This week, for the Rainbow Snippets group, here are six sentences from my current WIP, Recovery, in which Raif learns why you should cover your ears when the nixies start to sing…

Raif moved, walking back across the bridge and into the steep alleyway that led between the buildings down to the water’s edge. He moved from shadows to moonlight, under the leaning eaves, the whole world seeming as flat and frail as a dry leaf as the singing still whispered in his ears, sighing promises.

The alleyway came out at a little quay, where a rowing boat was pulled up on a rough slipway. As Raif walked across it, close enough to the river now that the sigh and lap of waves against the quay merged into the melancholy whisper of the river woman’s song, ripples spread across the water and she rose up again, opening her arms to him. He stepped forward, ready to fall into her embrace.

Behind him, the air crackled like fire, and a sweep of heat passed over him.

“Mine,” Arden growled, his voice so deep and fierce that every hair on the back of Raif’s neck rose.

A slither along the North Downs (Reigate Hill in February)

Earlier this week, I made it out for a day on the hills. I’d been craving a walk for a while and the weather and day job responsibilities had got in the way. I wanted to breathe in the sky and really, really needed to walk past the block I’ve had on my writing for a while. On a whim, I decided to do a bit of the North Downs Way, a section I hadn’t walked before from Merstham, near Reigate, back towards Dorking. The North Downs Way is usually one of the easier local walking trails, a clearly marked, much used trail along the top of the ridge.

Here, about a mile into the walk, you can see how lovely the day was. This early, the frost was still hard enough that the mud was the consistency of well-kneaded dough and barely sticky. Bad mud is always a risk when walking on chalk in winter, but usually once you’re up onto the exposed ridge it’s usually not too bad, especially on a cold day.

Despite the lovely misty hills, civilisation was not far away. In a cutting below the same hillside runs the M25, London’s orbital road, which is one of the busiest motorways in Europe.

Here, where the path rises into Gatton Park, is this circle of modern standing stones. Called the Millennium Stones, they were commissioned and created in 2000 as a touring art project, which found a permanent home here. Each stone is meant to represent 200 years of Christian history and has a quotation from a great thinker of that era inscribed on it in era-appropriate lettering–the earliest reads In the beginning was the word and the latest quotes T.S. Eliot.

A little further up the path, I stopped on a bench for a sip of water while I gazed down over Gatton Park, landscaped in the 1760s by Capability Brown. The trees here were deliberately planted on low rises to accentuate the natural curves of the land. You can see how the frost lingered in the shade.

Once I finally reached the top of the slope, I was finally on Reigate Hill. This is Reigate Fort, built in WW2 to be a marshalling point and artillery store in case of invasion. The North Downs are the last great natural defence to the south of London, and the plan was that defence forces would gather here and use the fort as a base to start constructing trenches along the top of the Downs. Even on a bright day, it’s still a bleak little place.

The fort isn’t the only reminder of the war on Reigate Hill. These two oak replicas of the wing tips of a B17G American bomber, which crashed here in March 1945. The distance between them shows the size of the bomber, and you can still see the gap in the trees created by the crash. There’s a board there with information about the crew, who were flying their thirteenth mission together. None of them survived the crash. Their average age was 21 (you can find out more about the crew and crash here)

Finally, I came out onto the ridge at this little folly. It’s called the Inglis memorial and was originally built in 1909 as a drinking fountains for horses on their way to Reigate in the valley below.

And this is the inside of its roof :)

Unfortunately, about a mile later, the walk went downhill. Literally. It was my own fault. I’d assumed it would be ridge-walking all the way, like the previous stretch of the walk from Guildford to Dorking. If I had checked more carefully, I would have seen that most of the walk was actually along the bottom of the ridge, just at the point where the escarpment ends and all the water draining off it hits the fields below.

That is, through mud. Chalk mud is the worst mud. Depending on how liquid it is, its consistency varies from grey soup to cement, and it’s slimy. It clings, it stains, it sends you to your knees and tries to eat your boots. After a mere half a mile, you start to think it’s actively malevolent.

And when the path is this narrow, it soon stops being fun.

This was where I gave up, when I almost lost my boots three times in four steps. The next bit of the walk was due to be a very steep uphill climb through this kind of mud, and since my story had come clear in my head again, I decided honour was satisfied and turned downhill to the nearest station.

The first few miles of the walk were fantastic and the second half I didn’t get to is supposed to be one of the best stretches of the trail, so I will try it again, but I’ll do it in summer, when the earth is bone dry.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to check my boots again and see if they’ve dried enough that I can start scraping off the inch of mud currently adorning them.

Rainbow Snippets (13th February)

Another week, another six sentences from one of my works. Do go over to Facebook and have a peek at all the other snippets being posted–it’s a tantalising feast every week.

This week, in celebration of Valentine’s Day, I’m turning back the clock to post six sentences from my 2014 Valentine’s story, Aunt Adeline’s Bequest. Set in 1920, on the eve of Valentine’s Day, sweet shop owner Valentine and WW1 veteran Jasper try to puzzle out a mystery that links Jasper’s late great-aunt to Valentine’s shop.

Here they discuss the morality of chocolate….

“Ah, a man’s choice of chocolate is a private matter,” Valentine said, chuckling. “Chocolate is a very dangerous thing.”

“Perhaps if you place yourself between my sisters and an unopened box,” Jasper observed. “Otherwise, it seems like a harmless pleasure.”

“You’d think so,” Valentine said, leaning forward and lowering his voice for emphasis. “Everyone eats chocolate, but no one ever stops to consider how wicked it is.”

Rainbow Snippets (6th February)

For this week’s Rainbow Snippets, six sentences from my current WIP. This is Recovery, the third of the Reawakening series. Raif has woken the dragon Arden from his thousand year sleep and they are now walking back south as Arden adjusts to being back in human form and how the world has changed.

Raif originally had very high expectations of this noble dragon. Raif is foolish. Don’t be like Raif ;)

Arden’s habit of wandering around wreathed in nothing but flames until he felt like getting dressed in the morning was frustrating as well, but Raif knew perfectly well that not everyone found nudity as rude as the Tiallatai. Arden only occasionally talked in his sleep in the tent at night, and that and the snoring were, if Raif was being fair and considerate, involuntary physical actions.

The day he’d spent asking Raif the words for various body parts with an ever-widening smirk had been difficult, although thankfully not repeated. Flicking little flames at the end of Raif’s nose when he was taking a perfectly justified few moments of quiet was not all that reprehensible, given the flames always went out before they touched skin (the way he chortled every time Raif flinched, however, was less forgiveable).

Nonetheless, he did his share of camp chores, and walked at a good pace, and radiated enough heat at nights that camping on a frosty night wasn’t as unpleasant as it could have been. All in all, it wasn’t until they met up with other travellers that Raif began to find him unbearably irritating.

Rainbow Snippets (30th January)

Another week, another six sentence snippet for the wonderful Rainbow Snippets community on Facebook. Here’s one last snippet from A Frost of Cares, my winter ghost story which came out on Wednesday.

There were no more footsteps, and we managed to do the washing-up and convert the armchair in my room into something Jay could sleep in all night. I changed in the bathroom, and in case you’re wondering, I didn’t wear anything provocative or even forgo my shirt—firstly because we were trying not to piss off the ghost by having sex, and secondly because it was a seventeenth-century mansion in December, in a country that still regards efficient central heating as mildly immoral. I wore my fleece pj’s, two pairs of socks, and a sweater on top of that, just like I had the last three nights.

Jay took one look at me and broke into laughter. “All you’re missing is a bobble hat.”

Order on Amazon.com  Amazon.co.uk Barnes and Noble All Romance Apple Kobo

Rainbow Snippets 23rd January

It’s Saturday and time for Rainbow Snippets again :) This is becoming one of the highlights of my week. Writers post six sentences on their blog, link to it in the Facebook group and then bounce around to comment on everyone else’s. ^_^

My six sentences this week are again from my winter ghost story, A Frost of Cares which comes out on Wednesday. This week, a break from swearing and spooks–here, instead, is a first kiss…

I crossed the room and cupped his cheek, pulling his mouth down to mine.

It was just a kiss, just a soft, slightly uncertain press of lips to lips, just a brush of tongue, just a sigh. There was no reason for my whole body to feel lighter when our mouths finally parted, no reason for my breath to catch, no reason for my heart to tighten.

“Yeah, this is going to be worth waiting for,” I said a little stupidly, aware that Jay’s arms were still folded tightly around me.

“Damn it, Luke.” He kissed me again, and it was—you know when you’ve been outside so long that you don’t even realize how hot and tired you are, and then you buy a cold drink, and that first mouthful just makes the whole world better?

Pre order on Amazon.com  Amazon.co.uk Barnes and Noble All Romance Apple Kobo