Today, we have Ally Lester on a visit, and as the crazy chicken lady I’ve become these last few years, I grew a little teary reading this post. And since we’re talking Orpington Buff, I can inform you that I’ve promised my oldest daughter we’ll get some and have been talking to a man in the village who has a few, and he’s promised me eggs I can hatch. I’ll give it a month or two until it’s a bit warmer outside.

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Hello everyone! Thank you so much, Ofelia, for having me to visit today. I’ve come to remind everyone about my short gay Valentine’s-ish day story, Playing Chicken. But Ally! Why is it Valentine’s-ish? I hear you ask, dear reader!

Well.

That’s the thing!

It’s actually a retelling of the old Welsh myth about St Dwynwen, who’s saint-day is 25th January. She’s often called ‘the Welsh St Valentine’—she had an unhappy romance with a chap who got turned into a block of ice and needed unfreezing. She ended up taking holy orders and has a small chapel associated with her in north Wales, with a well full of eels. I wrote about the myth itself at Nell Iris’s blog back in January if you want the background to the story; or like all my Celtic Myth stories there’s a bit about the legend in the book after the story.

Instead of repeating myself here, I thought I’d actually talk about how the chickens ended up in a myth retelling. Anyone who follows Ofelia knows that she is a Chicken Person; and I am too. We drive poor Nell a bit bonkers with our chicken-chat in our early-morning writing sessions in our online office.

I grew up on a smallholding. My parents owned a seven acre plant nursery where we grew flowers and vegetables and also kept sheep and chickens. I first earned my pocket money by having a hundred ex-battery hens and selling their eggs on a Saturday in the local market. From there I moved on to breeding rare breeds of hens. My father was interested and it was something we did together. His first job in about 1930 had been on a chicken farm in Leicestershire, where they sent eggs and meat down to London. He was paid by the work he produced and could still pluck a chicken in six minutes at the end of his long life.

I left home for college when I was nineteen and did various non-agricultural jobs for quite a while—secretary, computer programmer, teaching IT, working with Mr AL doing lighting and technical services for theatre and conferences. After we had the children though, those things became difficult and I went back to chicken breeding. Originally my plan was to supply us with eggs and meat and sell a few hatching eggs and young birds to cover our costs—free food, essentially, which is my favourite kind.

However, things expanded quite rapidly and I ended up running a stall at the local market selling eggs and keeping a couple of hundred laying hens and a dozen breeding pens of rare chickens, and ducks and quail. Oh, and running courses teaching people how to keep them and raise them.

I like poultry, okay? I find them interesting!

So. The children in the village started calling me The Chicken Lady and the people at the market called me The Egg Lady. The various friends I’d made over the years teased me mercilessly about my poultry obsession.

And Playing Chicken kind of fell out of that. These days I have a handful of birds to give us eggs and look pretty in the garden. I don’t teach or do the market or breed. It’s all too complicated with the other things we have going on. But I still get teased by anyone who knows me and when I wrote the story last year to cheer myself up, it seemed very natural to put chickens in it.

They’re Buff Orpingtons if you really want to know!

 

🐓 Playing Chicken 🐓

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 the Welsh St Valentine’s Day, St Dwynwen’s Day, the 25th of January. With chickens.

 

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Excerpt from Playing Chicken – Rudimentary First Aid

His first aid kit was rudimentary but covered the basics. Antiseptics, dressings, butterfly strips. It should do the job. He hauled it out from under the driver’s seat, eyeing the squeezed-in boxes disfavourably. That was going to be today’s job, he supposed.

He was so taken up with his mission that he forgot there should have been a chicken in the porch until he turned back toward the house. He blinked in disbelief. She had a friend. Two friends. They were sat in a row on the back of the garden bench underneath the parlour window. As he watched, they jumped down, one by one and stood in a line, as if waiting for him. The two new ones were very clearly the same breed as Chicken Number One. Big, fluffy, orange. One had more exciting headgear than the other two and was a bit bigger, so he guessed that was a boy-chicken. Cockerel. Cock. He sniggered quietly and then stopped himself as the first chicken…he could tell it was the original one because it had a bit of black in its tail and the others didn’t…looked at him disapprovingly.

Obviously cock jokes were out. The telepathic chicken didn’t like it.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was just getting the first aid kit for Mal. I’ll stop.”

He performed a shuffling dance around them to get back indoors. “You’re like the Midwich Cuckoos,” he told them. “You are not coming into my house. Stay outside. It’s bad enough having a porch full of chicken shit.”

Mal was on his feet looking at him in alarm when he stepped through the parlour door, and the dog was standing beside him, hackles up.

“Who were you talking to?” he asked in a panicked voice. “Is someone out there?”

Marc shook his head. “Chickens,” he said. “I seem to have chickens living in the porch. It’s fine. He narrowed his eyes. “What makes you think there might be someone out there? Who hurt you?”

Mal sat down on the edge of the chair and ran his hands over his cheeks, pulling a face. The dog sat beside him and put her chin on his knee, staring up at him, and he absently began to pet her ears. Marc knelt beside him and opened the first-aid box.

“My ex’s dad,” he said, quietly, after a moment or two. We’d split up anyway. Ages ago. But he saw me in Welshpool a couple of days ago and wanted to drive the point home.’ He shivered. “I’d only gone down into town to pick up some food and bits.” He winced as Marc turned his face toward the light and began to wipe the cut against his hairline with antiseptic. “I’d left Anghared up here, else he wouldn’t have got near me.”

The dog gave a small woof as she heard her name.

“Would he, girl? Stupid man.”

“So how did you end up in my barn?” Marc said, gently fixing butterfly strips over the cut. It had come open again and was bleeding a bit, but it looked like it would be fine. “Come on, let’s look at your ribs too, while I’m at it.”

“They’re fine, honestly. Only bruised.” Mal pulled away and Marc just looked at him. Mal sighed. “All right, all right.” He began to unzip the big hoodie he was swamped in and winced again. Marc raised an eyebrow, silently asking for permission and then reached out to help when Mal nodded. There were a lot of layers to get through and it took a while to gently extract him. The cold was still coming off him in waves and he was shivering badly as he said, “I’ve been staying up in the woods. But I felt too bad to get home. Anghared found me, didn’t you girl? And we needed somewhere out of the cold. I’m freezing, still.”

He was shuddering, which was probably a good thing in retrospect, Marc thought. He hadn’t been shivering at all when he’d first come inside. Incipient hypothermia. He had a quick look and a gentle feel of the ribs. They were badly bruised but he couldn’t feel anything shifting around, so he’d call that good. Mal’s skin was icy cold under Marc’s fingers.

“Bath?” he said. “Or body-heat?”

“Ugh,” he screwed his face up. “Do I have to?”

“Yes,” said Marc firmly. “I don’t want you to die on my first day home for two and a half years. If that’s all right.”

Buy from Amazon : Buy Everywhere Else

About A. L. Lester

Ally Lester writes queer, paranormal, historical, romantic suspense and lives in the South West of England with Mr AL, two children, a terrifying cat, three guineapigs, some hens and the duckettes.

She likes permaculture gardening but doesn’t really have time or energy these days. Not musical, doesn’t much like telly, likes to read. Non-binary. Chronically disabled. Has fibromyalgia and tedious fits.

Join my newsletter, for a free copy of the novella An Irregular Arrangement or find me on social media via my link-tree.

Nell is back, yay! Welcome, Nell

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Hello again, it’s me. Nell. I’m back here at the lovely Ofelia’s place to talk to you about my latest release, Secrets on a Train. It’s a short, sugary (as in literal sugar, not overly sweet) story about two strangers meeting on a train, flirting and sharing secrets. But before I dive into that, let me just blow a cyber-kiss Ofelia’s way to thank her for being so generous and inviting me over. ❤️

When a story is ready for submission, we authors have to fill out a cover and a blurb form. In the cover form, we let our publisher know our wants and wishes for the cover. The blurb form is for the blurb (of course), but also for an excerpt, and for categorizing the story. And in the blurb form, we also must add keywords that describe the story.

Sometimes coming up with keywords is as difficult as writing the blurb (which every author knows is the most difficult thing of the whole writing process), especially when the story is really short. And even though I never have trouble making up new keywords (“fountain pens and flirting on a train” crossed my mind) they have to be searchable by readers trying to find something they’re in the mood for, so they have to be known. Common. Like hurt/comfort or friends-to-lovers. That kind of thing.

I was grumbling about the keywords one morning in the writing office, and I asked my lovely hostess “Can I call it an epistolary story if there’s no letter writing, only written, in-person conversations taking place in a notebook or the notes app on the phone?”

“Sure,” Ofelia said. (she’s very supportive and understanding!) “It’s a modern epistolary tale. You can write a blog post about it.”

I love epistolary novels. The first one I remember reading was Dracula; I fell so hard for that story, and I’ve read and re-read it many, many times. After Dracula, I’ve been devouring them wherever I’ve found them, and one of my most used search tags on AO3 is “epistolary.” And while I love the idea of letter-writing, I love the modern take on them, too. Texts, DMs, or emails, any kind of modern communication methods we have at our disposal.

So if you like me love epistolary stories and don’t mind an alternative take on it—and if you like Valentin have a fountain pen fetish—I definitely recommend Secrets on a Train.

Blurb: 

It’s the fountain pens that capture Valentin’s attention on the morning commute, not the perfectly imperfect man who spends his train rides using them. Not his pinstriped suits, his chin-length hair, or his perpetually raised eyebrow. But one morning when the man strikes up a written conversation, Valentin gives up all pretense. It’s not just the pens. It’s the man. Runar.

The conversations continue, and the men get to know each other better, sharing secrets they’ve never told another soul. The connection is powerful, growing stronger with every encounter, every scribbled conversation, every scorching look. But can secrets shared on a train be enough to build a forever?

M/M Contemporary / 9889 words

Buy links: 

JMS Books :: Amazon :: Books2Read

About Nell

Nell Iris is a romantic at heart who believes everyone deserves a happy ending. She’s a bonafide bookworm (learned to read long before she started school), wouldn’t dream of going anywhere without something to read (not even the ladies room), loves music (and singing along at the top of her voice but she’s no Celine Dion), and is a real Star Trek nerd (Make it so). She loves words, bullet journals, poetry, wine, coffee-flavored kisses, and fika (a Swedish cultural thing involving coffee and pastry!)

Nell believes passionately in equality for all regardless of race, gender or sexuality, and wants to make the world a better, less hateful, place.

Nell is a bisexual Swedish woman married to the love of her life, a proud mama of a grown daughter, and is approaching 50 faster than she’d like. She lives in the south of Sweden where she spends her days thinking up stories about people falling in love. After dreaming about being a writer for most of her life, she finally was in a place where she could pursue her dream and released her first book in 2017.

Nell Iris writes gay romance, prefers sweet over angsty, short over long, and quirky characters over alpha males.

Find Nell on social media:

Newsletter :: Webpage/blog :: Twitter :: Instagram :: Facebook Page :: Facebook Profile :: Goodreads :: Bookbub

 

Excerpt: 

After settling in, I reach into the pocket of my coat and grab the sugar packets I stashed there at the café; I was late and didn’t have time to doctor my coffee properly when I bought it. I take off the lid, dump in two packets of sugar, and when I tear the third one open, the man stares at me with eyebrows disappearing into his hairline. 

He opens his mouth as if to speak, but I shake my head with a grin, mimic zipping my mouth shut, then point to the sign informing the passengers we’re in a silent car. He dips his chin once and turns his attention to his notebook, so I stir my sugared coffee with the wooden spoon and take a sip, hissing when the too-hot liquid scorches its way down my throat. 

As I put the lid back onto the cup, a tap on the table catches my attention. The man touches his pen to the paper, on something he’s written. He turns the notebook around, making it easier for me to read. 

THREE PACKETS OF SUGAR?!?!

He’s underlined his question three times, and it makes me snort. I nod and wiggle my fingers in a “gimme” motion. He hands over the pen, and I scribble my reply underneath his words. 

Coffee is disgusting and undrinkable without the right amount of sugar. 

The lines between his eyebrows deepen as he reads what I’ve written, and when I put down the pen, he snatches it up. I ease the lid open—I don’t like drinking through the little hole, because I can’t control when the liquid hits my mouth—and blow on the steaming coffee and read his reply as he writes it. 

Why drink it if you don’t like it?

When he’s done, he hands me the pen so I can reply.

Not a morning person. Can’t function without caffeine.

He nods and points to himself as if to say “yeah, me too, man,” and I add another line.

I bet you take it black. Black and bitter. In tiny cups.

I add a winky face to let him know I’m joking—mostly—and give him back his pen.

Ofc. The only real way to drink coffee.

When I look up at him, the curl of his lip is more pronounced and his eyes sparkle, making him even more irresistible. I take a sip of coffee to cover up the sudden dryness of my mouth. His gaze follows my movements, and when I can’t suppress a shudder caused by the bitterness cutting through all the sugar, his eyes crinkle and he presses his lips together as though he’s trying his hardest not to laugh at me. 

I pluck the pen from his grip, tempted to brush my fingertips against his hand, to feel his skin underneath my touch. 

Laugh all you want, but I stand by my choices. 

A small huff escapes him as he reads my words, as though he couldn’t contain his laughter. 

On an impulse, I add a question. What’s your name?

Runar, he replies. You?

Valentin.

His gaze flicks from my name in his notebook to his watch—I assume to check the date since today is February thirteen—and then back again. Do you have special plans for tomorrow then?