At I Heart Lesfic, we believe the world could use a bit more kindness after one of the hardest and longest of years. Many authors have signed up to help IHL spread kindness in the world.

Today, the wonderful Monique S is here to share a story. Also, Monique is giving away 3 copies The Princess of Lights. Below the guest post, you’ll find more details about the giveaway.

Take it away, Monique.

From Strangers to Friends

In 1999 my partner and I went to France to look at properties with our freshly kitted out Traffic and her two daughters, who were on school holiday and thus with her after her divorce, as she had moved to the UK to be with me and the court had ruled against her in the trial. We were heading towards the Bordeaux region, when the car broke down with gear box problems in the middle of nowhere. I was lucky as I was walking down the road to look for a house to ask for being allowed to use the phone, as at the next crossroads there was a car approaching and I stopped the lady driving it. As I tried to explain what our problem was with my little bit of French she smiled and said I should go down the road she had come from to the next farm on the left to find her husband, who’d speak perfect English.

So, I walked there and was looking around the farm yard not seeing anyone, when I heard someone trying to start a motor and not succeeding. I followed the noise and met Jean-Yves, the lady’s husband, who had problems starting his tractor. He was surprised to see me and we both laughed, when I explained that my car wasn’t working and he showed me that his tractor didn’t start.

“Can you repair your car yourself?” he asked then and I replied, that yes, I could, if I got access to the spares.

“Right,” he said “Can you get my tractor going? If so, I’ll tow you here and you can repair your car in our yard. Monique goes into town every day as she is a teacher, so you can go and return with her to get your parts or you can wait till I go to sell our goats cheese in the market on Saturday and come with me.”

Half an hour later I had got his tractor running to his surprise and we went to get our camper towed to his farm. He laughed out loud when he saw my partners daughters, as they were almost exactly the same age as his and Monique’s (his wife’s) son and daughter and said it would be nice if we stayed a couple of days. It was October and the weather down there was still very nice, so it sounded like fun. We towed the traffic into his yard and placed it on a part of the yard level enough for me so safely jack up the car and get underneath to remove the gearbox to find out, why the motor was running fine but the clutch not connecting the motor to the gearbox.

While I was under the car Monique came back with her two children and they hit it off with ours instantly, inviting them to sleep with them in their bedrooms. Since the son was not quite ten and thus the age of her younger daughter and the older one, a teen, was roughly the same age as Monique and Jean-Yves’, we saw no problem in that. That evening Jean-Yves and Monique invited us to sleep on the lounge in our sleeping bags, but I had insulated our van very well when we kitted it out and just put logs down to block the wheels once I had lowered the car again and we slept in the luxury of our own bed, even though, just like they had warned us, it got below freezing that night.

We actually spent a week there on their invitation, as we had instantly hit it off with one another and I went into town with Monique to get the needed spare, a spigot shaft, from the local Renault place. In fact, after we had explained the reason for our trip, Jean-Yves and Monique helped us make sense of the offers we had collected from various Notaires in Brittany and finished advising us to go back and buy any of them, as from his point of view they were all a gift. He also took a lot of time to talk to my Partner about her ideas for our garden and what to plant and in what soil it grew best and we found out, that Brittany was the ideal place for her goals in terms of climate and soil.

Before we left, we made plans for spending Christmas together in a cottage in Brittany, sharing Christmas dishes and customs over the holiday together for our and the children’s benefit. That would also give Jean-Yves a possibility to look at the properties we would have found we preferred. That holiday, though, is more than enough for another story.

Without Jean-Yves’ and Monique’s kindness and advice, though, we would not have decided on the farm house, that we finally restored to new glory.

GIVEAWAY

THE PRINCESS OF LIGHTS

by Monique S

Available in Kindle Unlimited

Magna is almost desperate, a disastrous legal dispute with his ex-partners has left him more or less broke, unemployed and unable to find work.

The offer from London to interview for the position of technical director seems like a god-sent. He quickly contacts his long term friend Sandra for a place to sleep and spends most of his last money on the plane ticket to Heathrow.

Sandra is overjoyed to see him again and appalled at the story of the betrayal by his former partners, of whom he had thought of as friends. Magna on the other hand learns that Sandra has found out that she is definitely bi if not lesbian and now is in a relationship with a lesbian partner, May, who has a rather unusual profession, she is a wardrobe mistress.

The two women joke about him having a make-over by May and then going out as three girls, but none of them knows yet, how much May’s experience will be needed very soon, as the job interview reveals, that What Else Productions looks for a high class female lighting technician as technical director for an all female musical production.

Well and truly in need of a break and money Magna decides to copy a page from Sandra’s book and to do something rather crazy, he offers to work the length of the contract pretending to be a woman…

MEET THE AUTHOR

Monique in her “other life” was born a boy and transgender. S/he served the obligatory service as a conscientious objector with the Red Cross in Hamburg, adding another year to the required 18 months being paid peanuts to get a full training as a paramedic. After the service s/he travelled Europe on a 750cc BMW motorbike and ended up running out of money in London, where she, still as a boy, worked first as a live in bar person at a pub in Holland park, then as bar-cellar person at the Victory Coach Terminal in 1975.

Returned to Germany after a couple of month in France, where s/he wanted to learn French and find work but didn’t, s/he returned to Hamburg, where s/he ran into some people starting a music company looking for someone with able hands for crafts and became a roadie to get an idea about the stuff she was supposed to built. By 1978 s/he had become a qualified electrician and also a carpenter  and the managing director of a new company: Amptown Cases. Her 1980 design of a “flying” PA system she later adapted for the Scorpions first American tour already while she was transitioning to be a woman.

Her sexual orientation never changed with the HRT and the rest, as they say, is history. Today, retired, she writes cis- /trans-woman lesbian romances, fantasy- and crime stories, all with lesbian trans-woman heroines.

Thanks so much for stopping by today!

Miranda & TB