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.
Download this free anthology and sample the scenes that make these authors the proudest. What a fantastic way to find your next sapphic read!
With almost two hundred extracts from a wide range of sapphic genres, this anthology will help you explore the whole world of sapphic stories. It includes several historical romances – my prehistoric book, Between Boat & Shore, is one of them – and fantasy, sci-fi, and all sorts of other genres as well. You can download it in several different ebook formats here: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/ck3pqiiavx
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.
A Door Into Ocean is a 1986 sci-fi novel by Quaker author Joan Slonczewski. It’s interested in nonviolence and the creation of a culture focussing on sharing and equality. One of the ways it explores these themes is through the invention of a society in which there are only women. I picked this up because it was recommended in a Quaker context, but as I was reading I soon realised that it’s relevant to another discussion I’ve been reading recently – the extensive discussions about gender plague/gendercide stories. I mostly read these conversations on Twitter, but I recommend Ana Mardoll’s blog if you need to catch up on the latest round. On Twitter, and I’m sorry I can’t find this again, someone said something to the effect that perhaps authors look for ways to kill off all the men in these stories because they want to create a matriarchy but they don’t know how to do that without murder.
I think that might be true about this book. And if it is, that would be deeply ironic for a story so concerned with nonviolence and the avoidance of death-hastening. Before I get into the details, I should say that this isn’t a discussion of the mechanic presented in the book for the creation of an all-women society or how it works: the sci-fi explanation offered is that in the distant past, the life-shapers in this ocean-dwelling society discovered how to create pregnancies by fusing ova, and the group evolved to no longer have men. (Exactly how this squares with their vague belief in a creating deity who set the entire ecosystem up in balance isn’t explored.) But it has an extremely similar vibe to Nicola Griffith’s book Ammonite, in which a virus kills all men who land on a particular planet, and it’s still very much the case that the author made these decisions.
Both books also have a kind of situational lesbianism, in which it feels like the author wanted to create lesbian relationships (which is great!) but didn’t believe women would really be attracted to other women if they had the choice of men. In particular, in A Door Into Ocean, although women in the all-women society take women as lovers, a man who goes to live in the all-women society easily finds a lover there, and the woman who crosses from another world into the all-women society retains her attachment to the men in her previous society. It imagines women loving women but always being attracted to men as well. In a somewhat similar way, A Door Into Ocean is aware of trans possibilities in a way I don’t recall in Ammonite, but it shies away from exploring them – there is just one scene in which a woman from the all-women society suggests to her lover, the man from the other world, that he could simply go to the local medic and be reshaped into what she regards as a normal female body. He immediately and emphatically rejects the idea and it is never mentioned again.
Joan Slonczewski has good reasons for wanting to create a society very different to her own. In fact, she creates two societies: one, associated with stone and metal, which seems to reflect real-world situations, with men mostly in charge (and some women in military roles), a strong military, lots of invasions, communities controlled by violence and fear, hunger and homelessness, etc. The other, represented by the world of water where everything is fluid and growing (a metaphor made literal which Slonczewski uses extremely well), is all women, nonviolent, governed by gatherings of people at which all adults can speak and a consensus is sought… in fact, funnily enough, the women of the ocean world make decisions in a very similar way to the characters in my novel Between Boat and Shore. This other Quaker author and I might be drawing on, err, Quaker discernment processes? All this is good in some ways. But what is the message given by the conclusion she apparently reached before writing, namely that such a society could not have, or would be much better off without, men?
I think it normalises the assumption that masculinity and violence go together. If it was a one-off, there wouldn’t necessarily be any harm in this creation in a sci-fi; but this book is part of a much larger pattern, in which it’s clear that the opposite – a society of all men, which is completely peaceful and loving and nonviolent – is not being imagined. (And if you are about to tell me that they couldn’t reproduce, remember that in these stories we’re talking about speculative fiction in which a wide range of currently impossible surgeries are made possible, and mpreg is already a genre, and also some trans men carry pregnancies…) It also tends to ignore trans experience, as already mentioned. And, to return to the idea from the first paragraph, it is interesting that authors trying to create societies where women lead need to do so through the nonexistence of men.
Whether men are killed by a virus or other plague, or die off when they become unnecessary, this creation of matriarchies through death undermines the nonviolent results Slonczewski wants it to have. It can imply a bio-essentialism, because it suggests that violence is inextricably entangled with the male body rather than being a social problem. Those results are so at odds with the other values expressed in A Door Into Ocean (such as the belief that every person can learn and grow, and the possibility of social change through nonviolent pressure) that it seems unlikely to Slonczewski intended them. Now they’ve been pointed out, hopefully future authors with similar social agendas (myself included) can avoid them.
I was about to say that lots of people ask me questions when they hear that I have studied queer theory, but it’s not quite true. Some people do. Other people just look at me for a minute and then change the subject.
People who do ask questions often begin with something like, “do they really call it that?” Well, yes, it’s genuinely in the title of courses and indeed my degree. It is a provocative name, and I know many people are uncomfortable with the use of the term ‘queer’. The thinking behind its use here has, I think, two main strands. Firstly, using an insult to refer to yourself takes the sting out of it; this process is called ‘reclaiming’. Pagans, especially women, who call themselves witches are doing some of this; religious groups, such as Quakers or Methodists, who take on originally offensive or sarcastic nicknames are also doing this. It turns the power of the word to your advantage – with the disadvantage that a lot of people are going to raise their eyebrows and say things like, “do they [whoever they are!] really call it that?”
The second strand is the need for a clear but not too specific term. ‘Gay’, although sometimes used for all homosexuals or even everyone who experiences same-sex attraction, is more often associated with men – as ‘lesbian’ is with women. Terms like ‘homosexual’ don’t make sense when you’ve noticed the existence of people outside the gender binary – what’s ‘same-sex’ if you’re intersex or third-gendered? Abbreviations – LGBTQIA… – build up into long lists and can never include everyone. ‘Queer’ – people whose sexualities are oppressed under the use of offensive terms like ‘queer’ – can include, as someone memorably put it in questioning me about my course, “gays and stuff”, with a very wide scope on ‘stuff’. Polyamory, kink, BDSM, asexuality, heteroqueer, and a whole array of gender identities can be included under the suggestive-but-not-definitive term ‘queer’.
What does queer theory do, then? Two main things: it theorises queerness and it offers queer readings. Queerness – whatever that is – has often been medicalised and sexuality and gender treated reductively (I refer you to whatever debate about ‘gay genes’ or the existence of ‘female sexual dysfunction’ is happening at the moment). Working from a perspective which takes the experiences of queer people seriously, queer theory can open up new ways of looking at these questions.
Similarly, queer readings of texts – literary works, TV shows, archaeological evidence, whatever – offers insights from contemporary and historical queer experience. Again, this can open up new perspectives on all kinds of questions: the relationships between characters in a novel, the burial of a body with ambiguous gender markers, the ways that gay marriage is depicted in advertising.
Lots of people ask me whether queer theory is really called that, and what it’s about. Sadly, I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me why I’d want to study queer theory or what makes it a useful subject – things I do get asked about theology and philosophy in particular. That’s sad because I’d have a lot to say about how enriching I found it as a discipline.
Rhiannon Grant 