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.
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.
Over the end of April and beginning of May I read Christopher Booker’s huge analysis of stories and why we tell them, The Seven Basic Plots. I remember seeing it on bookshop tables when it was new, and being intrigued but also daunted. It came out during my undergraduate degree, when I’d ‘given up’ studying English literature in favour of philosophy and theology and keeping creative writing strictly as a hobby, and I chose not to read it then. Having finally decided that I did actually want to read it and borrowed a library copy, I was determined, but there are many ways in which it didn’t live up to the promise it gave or what I’d imagined for it.
The seven basic plots are covered in the first half, maybe even the first third of the book, and there’s an argument that he should have stopped writing there (or I should have stopped reading) – I knew before I started that I didn’t agree with him about some political questions and by the time I was two-thirds of the way through I was clear that I don’t agree with him about gender roles, war, or history. He uses Jungian ideas about the ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’, mapping genders onto human virtues like courage and care, and matching those to characters in stories. He’s incredibly ready to judge stories which don’t fit his seven plots, without considering that they could be evidence for, err, there being more than seven plots. (He does concede that creation and detective stories don’t fit his structure anyway.) He’s much more interested in men’s writing than women’s, and isn’t impressed when female characters in stories have ‘masculine’ roles. I should probably be glad, considering what I guess he would have said about it, that the romance genre is never mentioned.
I kept reading partly because it’s good sometimes to engage fully with someone you disagree with. At least now I can give details about how and why! I also kept reading because even though I disagreed with his conclusions, it was an interesting prompt to think about some questions which are key for an author. Why do we tell stories? More specifically, why do I want to tell these stories? Booker died in 2019 and I’m sure he wouldn’t have had any time for modern ideas of ‘representation’, although seeing the diversity of real people represented in fiction is important to me.
For Booker, the purpose of stories is to provide a psychological road map in which the lead character goes through various stages of development in order to become a whole, well-rounded person. (By the way, he claims he couldn’t find alternatives to the words ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’, but ‘lead character’, ‘main character’, and ‘protagonist’ all seem useful to me.) If we sit very lightly to the gendered Jungian stuff he adds to that, it’s similar to what Gwen Hayes calls “the journey from hole-hearted to whole-hearted” (in her book Romancing the Beat). The emotional journey of a story is often to explore how someone can move from incomplete (whether that’s immature, lonely, or in some other form) to complete (mature, loved, or in traditional fairy tales, often monarch). Tragedy is a key exception, although I think Booker doesn’t give enough credit to stories where the final ‘complete’ stage is a happy ending but is also shown to be incomplete in some ways – he tends to assume this is a failure on the part of the author, while I would tend to see it as a deliberate choice to echo life’s real complexities and reject plot devices like miracle healings and overengineered coincidences which can move an otherwise realistic story into the realm of the implausible.
In terms of his seven basic plots, I think my novels Between Boat & Shore and Carving a New Shape (forthcoming) both have two main characters – pretty standard for romance genre books – and each of them has a ‘Rags to Riches’ story, specifically one in which they move from unloved or disconnected to being loved and fully connected. This looks slightly different for each one, and they tend to start with at least some connections but not the ones they really want. Trebbi, for example, has a strong connection to her friend Dru, but her community are struggling after the murder of their leader and her character arc includes growing into a leadership role as well as falling in love with Aleuks. I think it does make sense in some ways to see these narratives as metaphors for psychological integration or becoming a whole self. I’d differ from Booker on the details, but that core part of his argument does fit for some kinds of art and stories.
He misses out, however, a whole other set of motivations for reading and telling stories which are to do with empathy and imagination. At the very beginning he reports that lots of people told him that stories were about ‘escape’, and he rejects that as too simple, which is fair in some ways. But he never returns to this theme. I think more recent research on the effects of reading fiction, which show that it increases empathy and improves social cognition might hold some of the answers. In Booker’s model, when we imagine a character we are creating a reflection of our own inner world. In the research, it seems that when we engage with a fictional character we are developing our theory of mind – that is, working to understand other people’s minds, rather than our own. That gives fiction a powerful educational role. We are escaping our limitations and able to visit places we can never go in reality – sometimes the ancient past or outer space or a private palace, but above all other people’s perspectives.
And perhaps he also misses out the fact that it’s fun. Booker has a whole analysis of a plot structure he calls ‘comedy’ which, it turns out, doesn’t even have to be funny. For all the plot structures, though, and for all stories, enjoyment is a element of the appeal. Sometimes it’s enough that a story makes us laugh, or surprises us, even if it doesn’t draw us in to a traditional plot – a Monty Python sketch still turns on a very short story even if it finishes with a surprise visit from Flying Fox of the Yard rather than a true punchline. Reading or hearing a story can be a pleasure in itself even if it doesn’t follow the full arc of a traditional plot – things which we consume in episodes, whether that’s a book chapter at a time or a TV show, can be enjoyable as they are even if they leave us wanting to know what happens next.
Why set a novel in Neolithic Orkney? The majority of people writing women loving women romance stories set them in today’s world, and they have good reasons for that – contemporary novels are popular, writing about today’s world is useful and important, it’s easier to see how you research a place or job a character might have, and people associate queerness with modernity so there will be less reader surprise about lesbian, bi, or trans characters in a modern setting. But I didn’t set Between Boat & Shore in the modern world. I set it in Neolithic Orkney. Why?
The first thing to say is that if you’re going to set a novel in the Neolithic – the New Stone Age, about 4000 years ago in Northern Europe – Orkney is a good place to choose. In many places, people in that period built their homes in wood, which doesn’t survive. Some people on the Orkney Islands, in the north of Scotland, built their homes – and tombs and other things – from huge slabs of local stone, which means a lot more has been preserved. Orkney is far from the only place where we have good archaeological evidence about life in the Neolithic, but it has a particularly high concentration of dramatic and famous sites (which is why it’s on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites).
The Ring of Brodgar and the open landscape of Orkney today – my photo from 2018.
Beyond that, and a certain amount of pure whim, I think I had four main reasons to set my story in Neolithic Orkney – escapism, mystery, spaciousness, and sense of place. It’s not possible to separate them entirely, but they have different flavours.
Escapism is a traditional feature of stories, and many romance novels feature luxurious or ‘exotic’ settings – millionaires and dukes, tropical islands and huge mansions. (Plenty are setting in ordinary homes and workplaces too, of course.) To today’s reader, Orkney has a little of that. It’s a tourist destination and it can feel remote – far from big cities, difficult to reach because it requires a flight or a ferry crossing, a big open almost treeless landscape where the wind blows and the summer sun lasts very late. The Neolithic also has some of these features. We can imagine it but, pending the invention of time travel, not visit. We often have preconceptions about what life and people were like in ancient times – many of them stereotypes or misunderstandings because of the vast lengths of time involved, which means they are ripe to be overturned with the surprises which make engaging fiction. For example, although Orkney seems remote now, people in the Neolithic would have been used to travelling by sea. In the opening chapter, two of my main characters arrive in a skin boat, and when that’s your main means of transport, a sea-side village is easy to reach.
There are also mysteries to explore. The archaeological remains on Orkney, such as the Tomb of the Otters (which is one of the real places described in Between Boat & Shore), give us lots of information. They also leave lots of questions unanswered. People were buried here – but which people and how and why? Estimates of the population by some experts suggest that not everyone was buried in the tombs, and that their population didn’t grow as fast as might be expected statistically. Was there a lot of infant mortality, or abortion or infanticide, or contraception, or something else? Of course, there’s plenty of academic debate to be had here (and being lucky enough to have access to a university library, I enjoyed reading some of it while I was working on Between Boat & Shore), but also space for the novelist, whose interest is in what makes a good story as well as in facts which might ground it.
Within that space, there are some facts. Some of the reviews of my novel comment on how modern the characters feel despite living so long ago. That was a deliberate decision, because sometimes we assume that people long ago were not as clever or as advanced as us. Really, though, the differences between us are cultural. We have developed new technologies – but also lost some which would have been familiar to them. We don’t know exactly what language they spoke (it may have been a version of or a precursor to Proto-Indo-European and then again it might not; I wrote about the assumptions I used in the book in this earlier blog post [add link]), but we can safely assume they did speak a fully-fledged natural language because writing was already starting to emerge in some other cultures of the time. No grunting cave-people here! For me, that makes it easier to connect with them through imagination and work out possible ways to fill in the gaps – to choose language options which do all the things we know language can do today, to create religious possibilities which are true to my experience, and to explore gender and sexuality and culture and leadership styles in all their real diversity.
Finally, Neolithic Orkney was a place and time which had a strong feeling, almost a character in itself, which I felt I could conjure in fiction. I’ve visited Orkney. I’ve read extensively about the Neolithic period in Scotland and all over Britain and Europe. (Sometimes people ask me how long it look me to write the book, and the answer is somewhere between three months and thirty years – it didn’t take me long to type out a first draft, but I’ve been obsessed with stone circles and all things prehistoric since childhood.) Orkney was a very different place when Trebbi’s ancestors arrived and started farming: today it’s open with fields of sheep, but before people brought the sheep, it would have been mostly woodland. Trebbi and Aleuks live there at a time of transition, when woods are being cleared but before they have been entirely removed. The coastline, though, is still similar, and the tombs and other monuments provide some continuity.
Between Boat & Shore is ultimately set in Neolithic Orkney because that was a time and place where I wanted to spend time. I wanted to explore it. If you would like to join me, you can read it now – order the second edition ebook from Amazon or the first edition paperback from the Quaker Bookshop.
At long last, my novel Between Boat & Shore will be available again as an ebook on Amazon. It’s open for pre-order now and will be published on July 18th 2022.
The new cover of Between Boat & Shore
It’s a gentle story about a woman, Aleuks, who arrives in a new village looking for shelter from a storm and somewhere to trade. She finds those, but also much more: Trebbi, not a traveller or a trader, is a beautiful and compelling woman who is trying to support her community through a difficult times of change. Aleuks and Heln, her young nonbinary relative, find themselves adapting to their new surroundings and getting involved in the life of the village – making friends, helping to uncover a murderer, and realising that they might be going to settle down. The main plot is the romance between Aleuks and Trebbi, but we also explore Neolithic Orkney through other events in the life of the village.
What we know about people of the Neolithic comes from archaeology. They left behind amazing structures, such as stone circles, megalithic tombs, and houses, and more subtle signs which can be found in digs – piles of seashells, charred seeds, post holes, butchered bones. This gave me both a structure to work from and a space to play in: what we don’t know for sure about Neolithic people is anything about their social structure, language, or religion. (I wrote about some of the issues around language in a blog post the first time this book was published: Stone Age Speech.) To fill in the gaps, I drew on my understanding of community and faith from modern-day situations, including Quaker and Neo-Pagan possibilities.
At the moment, the ebook is only on Amazon. On the other hand, that means supporting Amazon, a huge company with ethical problems and a worrying dominance over the book market. On the other hand, that means having access to Amazon’s market, which is simply the biggest, especially for genre readers of ebooks. Many regular readers of romance books and other genres use Kindle Unlimited, which is great for authors because it means being found by lots of new readers who will take a chance on a book they might not buy under other circumstances. Being in Kindle Unlimited for a while, though, means being Amazon-only for that time. If you want to support me directly and not Amazon, you can get in touch (comment below, use the email on my About page, or any of the social media sites listed to the right) and I can sell you a physical copy of the first edition – I still have a box full! But if you buy from Amazon, including if you pre-order now, your purchase lifts the book up in the site’s rankings and helps to introduce it to other readers.
One of the things I enjoyed about writing Between Boat and Shore was getting to imagine my way into a world which I had already almost visited. Many of the places described are real, and the others are based on buildings from the same period or reconstructions. Here’s a quick run-down with pictures and links for readers who might be interested (some minor spoilers but nothing major, so you should be safe to read this if you haven’t read/finished the book yet).
The island on which Trebbi lives is South Ronaldsay, and the nearest modern village is Burwick. Look round that Google map and you’ll find Liddel Loch, and just south of that, a small sheltered bay. Although sea levels have been fairly stable for the last 6000 years, there has been local change and I allowed a bit for erosion and gave myself some poetic license in the details of the shoreline. As far as I can tell there’s no evidence for a village on the site I described – but the people who built Banks Chambered Tomb, also known as the Tomb of the Otters, needed to live somewhere, so I invented Otter Village.
It seems that on at least some of the Orkney islands during the Neolithic, every community has its own tomb. On Rousay, so many of them survive that archaeologists have been able to guess where the boundaries between community areas might have been – in Hedges’ (very useful) book The Tomb of the Eagles he provides a possible map for this (p106). Studying an OS map of South Ronaldsay, I felt pretty close to drawing my own, each ‘slice’ of the island with a tomb, access to the sea, fresh water, and access to the higher land as well. (The small size of the island helps with working this out, but it also gave it an advantage for real neolithic people as well as authors – at just under 50 km², it’s too small to support a breeding community of large predators: even with plentiful food, that’s a home range for just one or two brown bears, i.e, not a breeding population.)
The tombs themselves are interesting. There are at least two distinct styles found on Orkney – some divided into chambers with upright stones, and others with chambers built into the walls. The Tomb of the Eagles is an example of the first kind, but the structure is easier to see in this picture of Midhowe tomb on Rousay.
Below a white gantry and wooden walkway in the top and right of the picture, a stone structure has a green floor, very thick side walls with a stone facing and rubble core, and thin, upright ‘flagstones’ sticking out in the central space, where the floor is mainly green.
The block walls of Maes Howe showing how the side chambers are built into the thick walls.
The houses in the novel are based on those at Barnhouse and Skara Brae, on the mainland of Orkney. In this picture, which I took at Skara Brae, you can see the dresser – Trebbi keeps her cooking pots on one of these – and the small stone-slab box on the floor, which may (as in the novel) have been used for keeping seafood alive until it was wanted.
A Neolithic house at Skara Brea, similar to those I describe in Otter Village. The hearth in the centre of the house is on the lower left; there’s a large dresser and at the base of it a box which may have been filled with seawater and used to keep seafood alive; and on the right, a box bed. The sea is just visible at the top of the picture.
Also mentioned in the book are the stone circles, the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness – plus a completely fictional location which is more like Seahenge, even though I know that’s later. Here’s a picture of mine showing the Stones of Stenness.
(some of) the Stones of Stenness – three huge uprights with sharply angled, ‘scalpel like’ tops, on a grassy area, with water and distant hills behind.
And it’s the Ring of Brodgar which appears on the cover of the book itself, picture by E. James and the cover design by Fiona Pickles at Manifold Press.
Paperback copies of Between Boat and Shore are now available – buy from Amazon (UK or US), or get in touch with me directly if you’d like a signed copy.
See more about ‘Between Boat and Shore’ from Manifold Press, buy it for Amazon Kindle, or read my previous blog post about it, Stone Age Speech. What other online book launch stuff should I do for it? Comment below!
My novel about Neolithic lesbians on Orkney, Between Boat and Shore, was published on Friday by Manifold Press – information and purchase links. In this post I want to explore one of the challenges of writing a novel set in the Neolithic period, about six or seven thousand years ago: namely, deciding what words to use. At times it felt more like writing fantasy or sci-fi – constructing a different, unknown world and working out how to translate it into our own – than writing something historical.
Warning: this post contains minor spoilers about the book, the setting and the characters, although not about any major events of the plot.
Some things were actually easier. I think if I were writing a novel set a hundred years ago, I might be tempted to spend ages consulting timelines of slang and other resources, and write at least some of the dialogue in the language of the time. For the early Neolithic, this just isn’t possible – not even because it would need translating, but because we have very little idea what language was spoken anywhere in the world at that time. In Europe, it was probably whatever language became Proto-Indo-European, a language we don’t have in full but linguists can reconstruct in parts from the commonalities between later languages. I used Proto-Indo-European and its wide geographic spread in two ways: firstly, as a justification for characters who had travelled some distance around the coast of Europe being able to basically understand those in the new community where they had arrived; secondly, as inspiration for the names of characters. I applied a liberal amount of poetic license to adjust for ease of pronunciation etc., but almost every character in the book has a name based on a word calculated to have existed in Proto-Indo-European. For example, Trebbi is named from the root treb-, dwelling or settlement, which survived in the Celtic languages and will be familiar to map-readers in Cornwall and Wales as the prefix Tre-.
A house at Barnhouse Neolithic Settlement on Orkney, one of the inspirations for the novel.
Apart from that, I used casual, modern British English, including a set of neopronouns. Of the many options available for nonbinary pronouns, I tried to choose a set which would suit my characters, be clear enough not to need explicit discussion in the text, and also not introduce confusion. With that in mind, I used ey/em/eir. The parallel with the sort-of patterns of he/him/his, she/her/hers, and they/them/theirs seems close enough that readers won’t need it explaining, or have to re-read sentences to clear up confusion about plural/singular, and the sounds work with the sounds of the names I used. (It doesn’t work with Proto-Indo-European, which apparently didn’t have third person pronouns at all… I briefly considered taking that on as a writing challenge, but couldn’t face ‘this one’ and ‘that one’ for a whole novel!)
I also gave some thought to the question of swearing – what does a Neolithic person say when they want to be rude? I found N. K. Jemison’s blog post on Fantastic Swearing very helpful here, and essentially ran with her observation that scatological language is crude almost everywhere. I also adopted her position that there was no reason for my characters to treat sexual language as swearing – and extended that to not included swear words in my sex scenes. The descriptions there use plain but specific language: ‘vulva’ rather than ‘cunt’. (The Proto-Indo-European word was something like pisda or pisdeh, by the way.)
Other choices about language followed in a similar vein. They talk about doctors rather than healers, for example, choosing modern terms rather than trying create a ‘primitive’ atmosphere. Some of the choices about language for religion were shaped by my Quaker sources of inspiration, although I tried to steer clear of technical terms. The village has a leader rather than a priest or a king, and alert readers will recognise the functions of clerk and elder in the decision-making meetings of this pre-literate society. They have ideas about the ancestors, something implied by the way people of that time and place built tombs (I invented this specific village, but their tomb is real and archaeologists do think megalithic tombs went with territory and communities). They also talk about Goddess; not the Goddess, as it would usually be put in modern English, but Goddess as a fact of life the way some people are able to talk about God.
Another question which didn’t appear until I’d finished writing the novel is how to describe the characters and their relationships. The main story line is about two women who start a romantic and sexual relationship, but is it really a lesbian romance when the story is set three thousand years before Sappho was born? On reflection I think it is. There are sensible arguments against putting modern labels on historical figures (e.g. if you call Alexander the Great bisexual, you might be describing some things about him but missing a lot about how he and his contemporaries understood sexuality). However, I don’t think those apply in the same way to fictional characters, who are at least as much a product of my culture and imagination as of the Neolithic, and probably more. My characters can be lesbians (or bisexual or nonbinary or whatever) if both I and my readers are happy to say so.
Rhiannon Grant 