Some firsts of 2023 and plans for 2024

The new year is coming and it’s a traditional time to reflect on how the previous year has been and look forward to the next one. It’s been a busy year, so as highlights I’ve picked out a few things I did for the first time in 2023. I’d also like to share some news about what’s coming in 2024.

Firsts of 2023

In the summer of 2023, I recorded Pause for Thought for BBC Radio 2 for the first time – I did a set of four in June, and they liked me enough to invite me back for another four in November and December. (You can still listen on BBC Sounds.) This has been a great opportunity to learn some new skills, like writing scripts which keep to the topic, the time, and fit a faith-themed insight in somehow, as well as a chance to share Quaker perspectives more widely. It’s also a challenge, both to come up with the material, and because the recordings are made after my bedtime to go out early in the morning! 

In the autumn of 2023, I used Woodbrooke’s Quaker library in its new home for the first time. The move from the old Woodbrooke Centre to the University of Birmingham Cadbury Research Library is only one of lots of changes for Woodbrooke staff as the organisation moves away from the building and towards being a flexible, online and travelling Learning and Research team – you can read about other changes on Woodbrooke’s website. Most of the other changes in my work are in quantity not type, though. I always did travel around Britain to visit different Quaker meetings, and although I’ve done more in 2023, it doesn’t feel like a first. Similarly, running online courses is a lot of fun but it isn’t new any more. On the other hand, I knew there was a special collections library at the University of Birmingham, but I didn’t have a reason to use it until Woodbrooke’s collection moved there this year. It is different: calling up material from a catalogue rather than hunting on the shelves myself, and working in a dedicated reading room rather than borrowing books. It has advantages, though: I can email in advance and have something waiting for me, rather than searching and perhaps not finding, and the dedicated space pushes me to set aside dedicated time for research rather than trying to fit it in around other things. If you’d like to try this yourself, the Cadbury Research library is open to the public. 

Also this autumn, I self-published a book start to finish for the first time. I’d done some of this before when I published Between Boat & Shore – it had previously been with Manifold Press, which closed, and I put it out myself. However, there was still a lot I hadn’t done: for Carving a New Shape, I also produced a paperback version, tried to announce the new publication in all the right places, and did some experiments with marketing, including joining in with group sales by sapphic authors (like the I Heart Sapphfic end of year 99p sale which will run from December 23rd to 28th 2023) and starting a TikTok account just for my sapphic prehistoric novels. It was fun, but it also became clear that I have more to learn! (Especially from people like Jae who have much more experience.) I’ve got an idea for the next novel and hope to self-publish again in due course – but 2024 will be more about nonfiction, I think.

Another less than completely successful project was displaying Angela’s archery medals. Having never been a Sport person, this was an entirely new thing for me. I managed some of it okay – put up a small shelf for trophies – but I chose a rail which glued to the wall for the medals, thinking, perhaps foolishly, that they aren’t that heavy and something designed for towels would be good enough. However, Angela went on to have a very successful season (see her archery Instagram for details) and the rail fell down one night! A goal for early 2024, once our Christmas decorations have come down, is to get a new rail with a stronger attachment and make sure we’re ready to celebrate any successes next season.

2024 news

A big change for me in 2024 is that right from the beginning of January, my work with Woodbrooke will increase from three days a week to four and a half days a week. We’re rearranging who does what a bit and there are some exciting new projects in the works. If you want to know what I’m teaching in the next few months, have a look at my Woodbrooke profile page.

I’m also expecting to have two Quaker books come out in 2024 – I’ll have more details over the next few months, but here’s a little taster. One is a Pendle Hill Pamphlet based on a lecture I gave in 2023, which talks about radical welcome and whether Quaker communities are ready to include people who will change us. The other is another Quaker Quick, with the working title Speaking in Quaker Meeting for Worship. It draws on my work on afterwords and vocal ministry to explore the current understanding of this practice in unprogrammed worship and try to answer common questions (which are often about when and how it goes wrong!). 

This will also be a year of changes for Angela, too, as she finishes her PhD with all the challenges that involves – paperwork, the submission process, the viva, and the uncertainty that goes with that. 

I plan to go on blogging sometimes in 2024, but if there are fewer posts, hopefully this helps explain why!

Pause for Thought; assumptions in ecumenical work; multiple religious belonging

I’m starting a new set of four Pause for Thought broadcasts on Radio 2. You can hear the first one on BBC Sounds now – two and a half minutes about ‘an attitude of gratitude’.

I also wrote a blog post for Woodbrooke about some of my experiences of interfaith and ecumenical work, and especially the assumptions which can be made about Quakers (and the assumptions I make about other people).

At the beginning of month, I had an article published in Friends Journal about my experience of multiple religious belonging, Confidence in Complexity. Scroll down to the bottom of the article to watch a short video in which I chat to editor Martin Kelley, too.

Diverse reading challenge: nearing the end of the year

Early in the year, I wrote about the diverse reading challenge I set for myself for 2023. Now, with just under two months to go before the end of the year, I’m starting to look at how I got on and thinking about what I might want to keep or change in setting myself another challenge for next year.

Overall, I’ve had a bit of a slow year for reading. I set my Goodreads goal at 150 books for the year – not as a challenge, but as a number which in previous years I’ve passed easily. This year it is proving a challenge, and although I might make it I’ve got some serious reading to do in November and December (three books a week). That’s okay, though – it wasn’t meant to be a challenge and I’ll just ignore it if I don’t reach it. I’ve done other things, some of which I didn’t know about at the beginning of the year, and some of which (like marking A-level exam papers, examining a PhD thesis, or doing archive research) involve large amounts of non-book reading. For the same reasons, the spreadsheet on which I’m tracking my diverse reading challenge has some gaps. Under the particular rules I set myself, I have to choose which category to file a book under, and I’d have filled more spaces if I let a single book count for more than one category. (For example, a lot of sapphic romances are written by authors who are themselves lesbian, bi, or otherwise sapphic, and would also count for my LGBTQIA+ authors category – but my personal rule for the year has been that six categories need six books and I don’t count them in more than one space.)

Image: some of the spreadsheet in which I have tracked my reading. Months are listed down the left-hand column, and categories across the top. Most boxes contain the author and title of a book, often with a note about how they fit that category. For details about these and all the books I read, I recommend looking at my Goodreads profile.

The categories in which I’ve been most consistently successful (so far – there are still two months in which I could fail to find books in these categories!) are authors of colour and authors working outside the UK/USA. When I designed this pair of categories, I was trying to think of ways to make my reading genuinely diverse: to hear from people whose experiences are different to mine. As a white reader, I benefit from hearing the voices of authors of colour, but I noticed that what I picked up when I browsed in a bookshop or a library here was often authors who were, despite our differences, also quite similar to me: it’s been really good to read books by, for example, a British Pakistani author who grew up in England in the 1990s… but also, we could have been at school together. To keep that but also add other kinds of diversity, I added the category about working outside the UK/USA, because I wanted to look beyond the mainstream of publishing and find other voices. 

It’s been interesting to see what I found in that category – often looking through lists of books I wanted to read anyway, or noticing what I was given which might count. Some places weren’t very far away: the Republic of Ireland and Germany aren’t far away from me geographically, and Australia and Canada have strong cultural connections to the UK and USA. Some of the things I enjoyed most in this category were also in translation, and I might use that as a category for next year’s challenge – the books I read in translation were especially helpful, I think, in approaching the goal of engaging with writing from a range of very different cultures. 

Although they had some gaps, other categories worked fairly well. LGBTQIA+ authors seem to end up on my reading list without much effort, partly because of overlaps of recommending and content interests. (I had a couple of months where I didn’t specifically list any books in this category; but looking around the rest of my spreadsheet, there are at least eight and probably more books which were included in other categories or other months and also have LGBTQIA+ authors – it’s more about my uneven reading patterns than a lack of material.) Having checked that this is the case, I might let this go as a category next year in favour of something more specific, like looking at sapphic romances – which is as much about knowing the market in which I’m selling my own novels as anything else. 

My two academic categories, one about Quaker history specifically and the other for my academic fields more generally, were also helpful – not because they made me find more material (I have plenty!) but because they helped me pace my reading in these areas. Spreading it out, and aiming to read one book a month, rather than saving it all up for a rushed burst when a project is due or waiting for some (potentially imaginary) time in the future when I’ll be able to do academic reading ‘properly’ is a more balanced way to approach this. I might change the specific category to reflect the work I’m hoping to do next year, or make these categories more flexible in some way, but I think I’d want to keep something similar.

I’m also aware of the categories I haven’t included. I haven’t had a category for poetry, for example, and have hardly read any this year – that’s time and whim as well as the challenge, but there’s probably some connection.

So here are some categories I might set myself as challenges for next year:

* in translation
* author of colour
* sapphic romance
* new poetry (published since 2000)
* academic

What’s the best thing you’ve read this year? Did you set yourself any challenges, or do you think you’ll set any for next year? What other categories might work as interesting challenges?

Fiction recommendations

I thought I’d highlight a few things I’ve been reading recently. Here are a handful of excellent novels I’ve read so far this year – nonfiction may or may not follow in another post!

Firekeeper’s Daughter, Angeline Boulley

A young woman tries to understand her community and her family, and gets involved in an undercover police operation as part of that process. This is a great story with some really interesting and nuanced reflections on what it means to be part of a community, or more than one community, and what options you have when tragedy seems to be endemic. I found the violence genuinely upsetting – an important feature of this sort of writing, even if I can’t really call it ‘enjoyable’ – and also appreciated the way in which teenaged characters are able to share with the reader their growing insights into the structures, often unjust structures, which shape their world.

Set in Stone, Stela Brinzeanu

A different set of questions about how far you would go to challenge society and build your own life. Where the main character in Firekeeper’s Daughter moves towards her community to try and understand it, the characters here end up moving away from their communities, but not before a good deal of struggle with the assumptions people make. I enjoyed the way the two main characters come to rely on each other, and – although I don’t want to give away spoilers – the ending.

Acts of Love and War, Maggie Brooks 

Lucy goes out to Spain during the Civil War, intending both to help the Quaker relief efforts there and to bring home two young men she grew up with. The effort to persuade them not to see non-partisan views of the situation or to change their minds is mostly futile, but their letters provide a lot of the contextual information about the war; if anything, Lucy changes her perspective as she sees more of the situation. She discovers the satisfactions as well as the challenges of supporting refugees and orphans, and becomes much less dependent on her relationships with men. For fans of historical fiction, this is closely based on academic research, and accurate as well as engaging.

The Garden of Evening Mists, Tan Twan Eng

This story is both beautiful and heartbreaking. It explores how a traumatic experience (being in a prisoner of war camp) changed the whole shape of a woman’s life, including directing her to a particular career and to a fascination with gardens. Having been imprisoned by Japanese soldiers, but wanting to learn to create Japanese gardens, Yun Ling has a deeply complex relationship with Japanese culture, and hence with the Japanese gardener with whom she studies. I don’t have very much patience left for fiction which explores the legacy of the Second World War, especially if it’s clumsy, so believe me when I say that this is the very opposite: beautifully and thoughtfully shaped, like the gardens it describes, with a real focus on the effects on the victims of war. 

Ember of a New World, Ishtar Watson 

Ember has only just come of age when she is suddenly given a mission to travel as far through her world – Mesolithic or just pre-Neolithic Europe – as she can. She sets off alone to explore, and along the way introduces the reader to different hunting and farming methods, cultures and languages, and dangers (some natural, but mostly human). Ishtar includes non-fiction sections at the beginning of each chapter so that you can see how each section is based on research, which adds depth, and although this isn’t a romance story, there’s also a charming plot line in which Ember begins to fall in love. 

Have you read any of these? What have you been reading?

Exciting news: launch, sale, and podcast

I’ve got three exciting pieces of news today. 

Launch day!

Today is the official launch day for Carving a New Shape. It’s a sweet love story about a young woman who goes on her first trading voyage and ends up with more than she bargained for! It’s also about making a space for yourself and your loved ones even when you don’t fit in, and about learning about relationships and communication when your assumptions are put to the test. You can order it in paperback or ebook from any Amazon store.

Queer Your Bookshelf sale

If you’re looking for a bargain, you might want to look at today’s Queer Your Bookshelf sale. More than 260 books, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and other queer characters are all 99p (or $0.99 or equivalent) on September 4th only. It includes my previous novel, Between Boat & Shore, and you can find all the books listed on the website. 

A promo graphic for Queer Your Bookshelf, showing a stack of multicoloured books on the left, and text reading: Queer Your Bookshelf. Hundreds of LGBTQ+ books just $0.99c each. 4 Sept only.

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast interview

Heather Rose Jones, who reviewed Between Boat & Shore when it first came out, interviewed me about both novels for the Lesbian Historic Motif podcast. We talked about how and why I set my stories in the Neolithic, the connection between the books and Quakerism, and how these novels fit into the wider field of lesbian historical fiction. Her website includes the audio and lots of links to the books we talked about.

Writing an autistic character

I’ve hesitated over whether to talk about this in public. In particular, I spent a lot of time trying to work out what the rules are for this conversation. Am I hurting someone or taking space away from someone else if I discuss this in public? Self-diagnosis is valid but is my tentative self-diagnosis valid? What if I’m wrong? It’s good to be authentic, but will this be yet another case where people don’t believe me about my experience? In the end I’ve decide that because I want to talk about it in relation to my novel, I will – my blog, my rules – and readers can decide for themselves whether this perspective affects their view of the book.

In my new novel, Carving a New Shape, one of the characters is autistic. Perhaps I should say at least one of the characters, because readers might find signs of different presentations of autism in other places – but I knew when I was writing Bokka that I was crafting a character with a profile of autistic traits. She doesn’t have that language to describe her experience, and even today she might well not be diagnosed (a 2002 found that 80% of autistic women are undiagnosed at 18). She does struggle with communication and friendships, have distinctive sensory needs, and approach forming a relationship differently to other people.

When I create a character, I always draw on myself. Not every character reflects all of me, of course, but the larger the role a character has the more of my own experience they are likely to include, and when I was writing Bokka I was aware that I was choosing aspects of my experience which fit an autistic profile. Am I autistic? I don’t know for sure, and probably never will – formal diagnosis is and will probably stay out of reach – but I do have some of Bokka’s traits. It’s often difficult for me to recognise and express my emotions, for example, especially in what other people consider a timely way. (I get better with practice, but when something completely new happens it can be hours or even days before I know how I feel about it – and even longer if I don’t have some time alone.) I can get a very fixed idea of how things will be, and find it difficult when reality doesn’t match up – and, like Bokka, I do better when I’m in charge of my own circumstances rather than trying to fit in with other people’s expectations. That’s partly about being able to follow where my attention wants to go – as Bokka’s often goes to her stone carving project. Her experiences with her peer group, especially of being excluded and bullied, are also modelled on my experiences, especially at school, with some poetic license in the form of exaggerations for effect (but not that much exaggeration). 

After I wrote my first full draft, I found I wasn’t sure whether Bokka was ‘really’ autistic or not. In some ways, that also mirrors my experience and the place I’m in at the moment – going back and forth about whether I count as autistic, whether I’m too good at X to be really autistic, whether it’s only that I’m too anxious or a terrible person or if I just tried a bit harder… In the end, a friend read a polished draft and as well as making some suggestions, commented – without prompting or knowing what I’d intended – that the depiction of autism was welcome. So if readers can tell, it’s really in the book, whatever is or isn’t happening in my life! 

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Carving a New Shape will be published on 4th September 2023 and you can read it on kindle or in paperback.

I have found this report from the Autistic Girls Network, Autism, Girls, and Keeping It All Inside, useful in understanding more about internal and external presentations of autism. I’ve also learned a lot from people around me – for a little taster of that you can watch my wife’s TED talk about her experience of being autistic.

Fidget Toys Ancient and Modern

Carved stone balls, usually not perfectly round but formed into patterns of knobs and grooves, are Neolithic artefacts from all over Scotland, including from Orkney. This one found at Skara Brae is rougher and less evenly carved than some of the others. 

Carved stone ball with protruding knobs found at the Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae, Orkney. Image from Historic Environment Scotland.

Another of the balls found at Skara Brae – this time with more, smaller knobs, and more polished. Image from National Museum of Scotland.

We have a large collection of these prehistoric carved stone balls, but we don’t know what they were for. An academic overview of many possibilities shows that none of them are convincingly supported at the moment. Coming to this as an author rather than an archaeologist, I consider that an opportunity for some creative license – in line with some of the research, particularly the work on the sensory properties of these items, but with a good helping of wild and unfounded speculation.

Specifically, I was struck by their similarity to some modern fidget toys. This round one has a certain visual similarity but in terms of use I think it might be more like a tangle or a fidget cube. Many different fidget toys, purpose designed or accidental, help people to focus – especially, but not only, some people with autism and ADHD. At their best, they feel good, and that’s part of the point.

Comparing the modern fidget toys with the carved stone balls, the points of comparison start to emerge. A purpose built fidget toy is often, although not always, symmetrical or patterned; it often has surfaces with different textures; it fits in the hand easily but needs enough weight and size not to be fiddly or easily dropped; it’s somehow satisfying. A favourite fidget toy is personal, so there are many different designs and people find their own preferences. 

When I created the world of Carving a New Shape, I used that connection to imagine that one of the main characters making her own fidget toy, which happens to be a carved stone ball. In fact, the making becomes part of the use, so that she is holding and feeling the toy as she works on shaping it – just as colouring in or moulding plasticine can be calming and help with focus, too. One of the academic studies mentioned that the carved stone balls are a bit large and heavy for children’s hands, but in my story this is a tool used by adults – and so, in modern society, perhaps replaced by something not even designed as a fidget toy but by the jewelry or pen someone plays with while they listen.

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Carving a New Shape is coming out on September 4th and can be ordered in ebook or paperback formats.

Five reasons to read Carving a New Shape

Why should you read my new novel, Carving a New Shape? Here are five possible reasons.

1. Lesbian and bisexual representation. One of the main reasons I started writing novels featuring women who fall in love with women is that those are the stories I wanted to read. I wanted to read novels where women took all the roles – loving and loved, desired and desiring, dashing and dramatic and scared and excited and maverick and everything else. That doesn’t mean that aren’t men and nonbinary people in the story (there definitely are) but that we see women front and centre, and centering other women in their lives.

The cover of Carving a New Shape, which shows a pebble beach and blue sky.

2. Happily ever after. If you prefer not to know the ending of a story, maybe you should skip this point – but perhaps romance genre books aren’t for you in the first place. One of the aims of the genre is to be uplifting and supporting; the interest is in how the ending is reached, rather than what the ending will be. The couple will get together. In this case, that also means that no women will be refrigerated. 

3. Explore ancient Orkney and prehistoric society. I once read in a writing manual that an ‘exotic setting’ was key to a romance novel, and although I don’t think that was good advice on the whole, there is a pleasure in exploring a very different setting. In Carving a New Shape we visit two very different villages – both actually based on the archaeology of Skara Brae and Barnhouse, places where prehistoric houses have survived because they were built with Orkney’s distinctive flagstone. 

4. Characters building a new lifestyle for themselves. In my previous novel, Between Boat & Shore, one of the main themes is finding your place in a community. In particular, Trebbi’s development takes her right to the centre of her community as she accepts and starts to grow into a leadership role. In Carving a New Shape, Laki and Bokka also need to find their place, but for them it isn’t about coming into the centre of the community. Instead, it’s about creating a role which didn’t exist before, dreaming up and then making real a new option. (And we get a little update about Trebbi and Aleuks, for readers of the previous book who are interested in that.)

5. It’s fun! This isn’t a book which exists to make a serious point. (I write nonfiction for that.) It’s there to entertain, and if it’s a bit silly in places and nothing more than a quick, light read, it’s done what it was meant to do. So if you’re looking for something to read for fun, something which is a little different in setting but nothing too serious, try Carving a New Shape. 

Carving a New Shape can be bought on Amazon as a paperback or ebook (and it’s also in Kindle Unlimited). If you review books and would like a free advance copy, or if you’d like to buy a signed paperback, comment or message me.

Sapphic Book News

I’m mentioned this week in Jae’s Sapphic Book Bingo, where the theme is new sapphic authors – that is, writers who only have one or two full-length novels in the sapphic genre (which includes women loving women, lesbian and bisexual characters, and nonbinary and trans femme people who identify as sapphic).

Careful readers of that list will spot that as well as Between Boat & Shore, it mentions my new book, Carving a New Shape, which I’m publishing this September. You can preorder the ebook from Amazon at that link, or I’m working on a paperback version which should be ready soon.

I’m also offering some free ebooks as advance reader copies for people who want to review it – this could be on your blog or social media, on Goodreads and other sites, or somewhere else. If you’re interested in that possibility, please fill in my ARC application form.

Being on the radio and in podcasts

I’m recording a Pause for Thought episode once a week this month for OJ Borg’s overnight show on Radio 2. It’s an interesting challenge – about three minutes to say something about Quakers and the week’s theme – and I’ve learned a lot from having my scripts edited by the team. You can listen to the first two on BBC Sounds: I am What I Am and The Men in My Life. The next two should go up on Thursday mornings, 22nd and 29th.

Screenshot of the BBC Sounds website showing my second Pause for Thought recording.

Edited to add: the other two, Where I Call Home and My Pilgrimage Destination, are now also online.

If you’d like to listen to me talking at more length, in the last few months I’ve also been on a few podcasts: Chris Deacy interviewed me on Nostalgia, I talked to Adrian on Journeys of Faith, and I made a brief appearance in the first episode of Thee Quaker Podcast, on Who are Modern Quakers?