Blog Archives

The future is a midsummer night’s dream: J.L. Peridot

PLEASE WELCOME LYNDI’S ADVENTUROUS FRIEND J.L. PERIDOT!!!

I didn’t mean to write this book. A couple years ago, I said yes to a writing challenge I didn’t think was serious. But it was serious — serious enough to show up in my inbox hours later and honour-bind me to comply. Did you really mean it when you said you’d write a book? Well, I’m not about to make myself a bloody liar, am I?

Desperate for a story, I reached into the recesses of my mind and pulled out the first thing my clammy fingers grasped — a Shakespearean sci-fi. Somehow, the idea was just there, waiting for me. It had waited for years.

When I was twelve, my family embarked on a life-changing adventure. We sold our home, bundled our lives into a shipping container, said goodbye to family and friends, and migrated to a remote mining colony built on a sandbar. Most people know it as Perth (Boorloo), Western Australia.

Adjusting to a new life, new climate, and new high school wasn’t easy. I never understood why my skin would dry out so easily (we have hard water here) or just what was so funny about the jokes my cliquey friends would make (nerdy new kid meets culture shock). My new home felt like home, but I was always half a step off-beat, a little alien, a stranger in a strange land.

Then along comes William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a hot mess of a play I’d never heard of until my Year 9 English teacher dropped a copy on everyone’s desk. We discussed the foibles of love, the class stratification, analysed the themes, even went to see a local production under the stars on a midsummer night … and I still didn’t get it. The words made sense, but my adolescent immigrant mind couldn’t grasp the meaning. I faked my essays well enough to pass the assignments, but now, decades later, my teenage lies haunt me still.

So what do you do when you’ve committed the next however-many months of your life to a project you barely understand? You hold your nose, dive in with both feet, and do everything you can not to sink. And maybe everything will be okay.

Yet We Sleep, We Dream is a love letter to my past as well as to the future of our lonely planet. It encompasses my feelings about desire and heartbreak and forgiveness and friendship, and also my fears around what happens if we don’t learn to love ourselves and the world we live in. I dream of better outcomes for humanity, the sweetest dreams of our better natures holding fast against selfishness and violence.

I just hope those dreams persist when I wake up.

Yet We Sleep, We Dream by JL Peridot

Love triangles get bent out of shape when restless gods come out to play.

Relationships are complicated enough when only humans are involved — something the crew of the starship Athenia know plenty about. These children of a changing climate are no strangers to conflicts of the heart. And it seems there’s a lot of conflict going on, even out in space.

When an alien dust finds its way on board, the veil between realms begins to fray. Old gods of a long dead planet resume their own romantic bickering while ancient magic wreaks havoc across the ship. Grudges resurface, friends turn to enemies, unrequited love turns to passion — or does it? It’s kinda hard to tell with everyone at each other’s throats.

Gentles, perchance you wonder at this show; but wonder on, till truth make all things plain. Yet We Sleep, We Dream is a romantic space-fantasy inspired by Shakespeare’s endearing hot mess, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.”
— Bottom, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Genre(s): Science fiction romance, science fantasy romance, space fantasy, new adult, Australian romance, futuristic romance
Heat level: 3 (#RomanceClass standards)

Content advisory: Strong language. Drug use. On-page sexual encounters. References to harassment and infertility. Depictions of perilous situations. Depictions of marital disharmony. Awkward social situations. Technical language.

✨ Get this book ✨

Excerpt

Dust is a danger to starships. Pounding against the hull, particles merely microns thin can wear away shielding, eating protective layers down to nothing. Inside a ship, it creeps into everything, clogging mechanisms, messing with instruments, grinding the soft joints of spacesuits—the last line of defence between organic skin and cold, eternal nothingness.

But worst of all, it’s just plain annoying.

The heiress Mia Tan wipes her clammy hands on her coverall pants. An attractive face moves on a screen in her periphery, but she ignores it, turning instead to the video feed of the Atrium. Of the twenty-four other screens embedded in the bug-eyed wall, this is the only one she cares to see at this time of day. But there’s no one there, just plants and maintenance drones.

The movement again catches her eye—the loading bay screen. Damian Chandrasekhar leans towards the camera, checking his reflection in a nearby surface. He rakes a hand through his thick, styled hair and gives it a zhuzh to the left. What a peacock.

He brings his wristlet to his pouty lips and raises a manicured eyebrow at the lens. “Tick, tick, tick, Tan. The drones are on their way.”

“I said I’m coming, Chandy.” Mia buns her hair with a purple scrunchie and spits her stale gum in the bin. She wipes her hands again and fans her face. The subpar sanitation would bother her less if it wasn’t always so warm in the Bug Room. And if she wasn’t in a rush.

“Like, anytime soon?”

“Like if Nick’s arse-faced robot would stop touching my stuff, I’d be there already.”

He smirks. “Want me to head over? Maybe if I touch your stuff, it’d help you come a bit quicker.”

Read the rest …

About JL Peridot

JL Peridot writes love letters to the future on devices from the past. She’s a qualified computer scientist, former website maker, amateur horticulturist, and sometimes illustrator. But most of the time, she an author of romantic science fiction. She lives with her partner and fur-family in Boorloo/Perth, Australia, on Whadjuk Noongar country. Visit her website at jlperidot.com for the full catalogue of her work.

Posted in book, fiction, guest author, science fiction, science fiction romance, space, Uncategorized, writing

2 Comments

Tags: adventure, author, book, love triangle, Lyndi Alexander, Midsummer Night's Dream, robots, science fiction, science fiction romance, Shakespeare, writer, writing

A great cast in a wild place…what could go wrong?

May 16

Posted by Babs Mountjoy

PLEASE WELCOME LYNDI’S ADVENTUROUS FRIEND ARLENE CULINER!!!!!

Thanks, Lyndi! I love writing about people who are different. Some are forced to adapt to new circumstances in order to survive, others are originals, folks who have never really fit into mainstream society. But no one is humdrum, and all have dreams.

So what do an embittered mail-order bride, an adventurer, a brothel madam, a silver baron/artist, a war refugee, a pacifist, a playboy veterinarian, and a woman who protects spiders all have in common? They get another chance to find love. And what better setting for romance than a semi-ghost town in Nevada?

A Room in Blake’s Folly begins in 1889 with the romance between Sookie Lacey, former prostitute now saloon dance girl, and Westley Cranston, adventurer. But love rarely follows a straight path. Times change, life goes on, new relationships form. By 2022, Blake’s Folly, once notorious for its saloons, brothels, speakeasies, and divorce ranches, has become a semi-ghost town of abandoned shacks and weedy dirt roads. But the old stories are still very present, and they have the power to influence the 53 remaining inhabitants.

A Room in Blake’s Folly

If only the walls could speak…

In one hundred and fifty years, Blake’s Folly, a silver boomtown notorious for its brothels, scarlet ladies, silver barons, speakeasies, and divorce ranches, has become a semi-ghost town. Although the old Mizpah Saloon is still in business, its upper floor is sheathed in dust. But in a room at a long corridor’s end, an adventurer, a beautiful dance girl, and a rejected wife were once caught in a love triangle, and their secret has touched three generations.

Bio

Writer, storyteller, photographer, and social critical artist, J. Arlene Culiner, was born in New York and raised in Toronto. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, has lived in a Hungarian mud house, a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, on a Dutch canal, and in a haunted house on the English moors. She now resides in a 400-year-old former inn in a French village of no interest and, much to local dismay, protects all creatures, especially spiders and snakes. She particularly enjoys incorporating into short stories, mysteries, narrative non-fiction, and romances, her experiences in out-of-the-way communities, and her conversations with strange characters.

Excerpt

“You a widow?”

“No.” She could hear the tightness in her voice and feel the tension in her shoulders.

His eyes glinted. “A runaway wife.”

“Not that either.” Did she have to say more? She didn’t. But since people were bound to be asking that same question over and over, she might as well get used to it, even though the answer was only partially true. Even though it could never express what her life had been like up until now. “I left of my own accord, but with my husband’s full agreement. He’ll be looking into getting a divorce.”

“And your children?”

Ah, there it was. The big question, the one thing everyone would be curious about. “No children. I’ve never had any.”

He said nothing. Had he heard the note of anger in her voice? She’d done her best to sound neutral, but neutrality wasn’t an easy note to hit. How vividly she remembered the first time she’d caught sight of her future husband, Sam Graham, waiting with a little knot of men by a shanty train station in the middle of nowhere. He and the others had been eager to grab a sight of their brides-to-be, women lured west by the promise of marriage, land, and a home. How had the other women fared? Had they been as discouraged as she at the sight of the vast lonely wasteland, the emptiness, the bleached-out colors, and the coarse men who would be their lifetime partners? Men honed by the elements, a hard life. And rough alcohol.

Westley Cranston stood, walked in her direction—no, walk wasn’t the word she could use. He sauntered, a slow, elegant saunter. A man sure of himself, of his power to seduce. Yes, that was why she’d felt so wary yesterday. He stopped when he was standing beside her. Smiled. No, there was nothing seductive in his smile. She’d been wrong. What had she been imagining? That she was still the young attractive woman she’d been years ago? What a fool she was.

He touched the top of the piano with a gesture that was almost a caress. “Don’t worry. You’ll do well. The boys you’ll be playing with are good musicians, nice guys, too. They play at all the dances in town, and they’ll teach you the sort of pieces folks out here are used to hearing.”

“Thank you.”

His eyebrows rose. “For what?”

“For being so kind.”

“Kind?” He guffawed. “It’s not kindness. I’m fighting for survival. High time we got a good piano player in this place. Bob, before he let that stray bullet hit him, knew how to slap at the keys, all right, but he didn’t know the first thing about keeping time. I’ll bet pretty well all the customers were happy to see him taken out of the running.” Grinning, he moved away in that casual easy way of his, headed toward the front door. Then stopped, looked back, his eyes twinkling. “But they couldn’t do that, not legally, anyway. One of the rules here in town forbids shooting pistols in a barroom.”

She grinned back at him. “Sounds like a pretty good rule to me. And what are the other rules, if you don’t mind me asking. If there are any others, that is…”

“Sure there are. Need plenty of rules in boomtowns, especially after payday. The other ones are, you can’t insult a woman, you can’t ride a pony or horse on the wooden sidewalks, and you can’t ride them inside this establishment or any other business in town.” He was chuckling again when he turned the lock, stepped out into the street, and disappeared.

Hattie remained seated at the piano. Her anguish had totally vanished. Amazing, how he had put her at ease. He hadn’t judged her, hadn’t looked at her with disgust when she’d told him some of her story, hadn’t condemned her for feeling unsure about her piano playing. She wondered why she’d felt so mistrustful. He had behaved like a perfect gentleman—and a friend.

Then another thought struck her. What had he been doing here in the Mizpah so early in the morning? Had he slept here? Obviously he had. Hadn’t he just let himself out? And that meant he had probably spent the night with one of the ladies upstairs. That he was a client.

Disappointment washed over her. She couldn’t condemn him—men had needs, desires. Why was she so saddened by the thought?

Review of A Room in Blake’s Folly

Rich detail and scintillating dialogue transport the reader through the decades between 1889 and 2022 of this surprising saga. With flowing descriptive phrases (“… the walls had a yellowish hue that only time could bring,”) Culiner effectively intertwines the characters and descendants of Blake’s Folly. And although overhunting and pollution mean environmental change, the charm of this old world community remains intact. Cheers for this book!

Lisa McCombs for Readers’ Favorite

Purchase Links

https://books2read.com/BlakesFollyRomance

Trailer