This week I’ve cracked open the champagne because – drumroll – I’ve signed with a publisher for my first academic book. ‘Roman Military Households of Auxiliary Commanders in Western Europe and North Africa: Latin inscriptions, Vindolanda letters and praetorium archaeology.’ A bit of a mouthful that tells a reader what they’re going to get.

It feels huge to be signed with BAR, whose publications have supported me since I was a just-starting out-in-classics mature student right through to my PhD, and because they issue relatively quickly (in academic publishing terms) my research will be on library shelves before too long. The enthusiastic responses I’m getting to my new-book related thread,* well that’s just put extra bubbles in the fizz.   

But signing has also added to the fluttering anxieties I have about the fact that I write in different genres and am looking for a literary agent. The advice I’ve received for writers seeking agents is don’t be a butterfly, pick a genre and stick to it. Or use pen names. That certainly works for many writers – I don’t need to name the massive names you can reel off the top of your head who write in the same genre year after year. I’m also hyperaware that agents are busy people who want to immediately grasp what is in the tin you’re asking them to sell.

To me this is simple: I’m an archaeologist. Material girl writing a material world. Whether I’m writing for children or adults, fiction or non-fiction, or academic writing, these genres are only different ways of writing the stories I have to tell. The kind of stories that right now people have been liking and sharing on Twitter and giving their approval via peer review.  The only genre I won’t write in is a genre that I don’t read – and I read voraciously across genres, always have. I read as an archaeologist too.

Books that appeal to me are, for example, Pip Williams ‘The Dictionary of Lost Words,’ where the paper slips on which new dictionary entries are written almost become a character in the book. Their vulnerability – to theft, to loss, to censorship – is a major theme and part of the book’s success:

“He held the bundles towards me. There were several tied with string, and each slip and top-slip was numbered in case the order was disturbed. I grasped them in my funny fingers, but Dr Murray did not let go. He looked over his spectacles.

‘Until these are set in type, Esme, these are the only copies,’ he said. ‘Every one of them is precious’.

Kate Atkinson too, in ‘Shrines of Gaiety’, tells of the “variety of intricately patterned cardigans and sweaters and three piece outfits with pleated skirts and Shetland tammies,” the paper patterns for hand-knitted garments that can only belong to the “dispiriting church halls, and mostly to an audience of women still worn out and raw from the bereavements of war. Her books are inextricable from their time and place, as is archaeology.

Even more precisely dated is Katherine Brigg’s Hobberdy Dick**which is set in 1652 and could not belong to any other year. Her accuracy in the material world of her novel is in large part why it is so convincing:

“This was the oldest part of the stable, which had been added to in Elizabeth’s reign. George Batchford’s loft was above the newer part, but this was unceiled, and a ray of sunlight came down from a small, unglazed window.”

Yes, she is absolutely right. I went to an amazing online lecture day about medieval buildings recently*** and an Elizabethan outbuilding would not have had a ceiling in it, but an addition nearer to 1652 quite probably would have. When her characters discover a treasure-hoard she doesn’t get quite right how the coins could be used to date it. She gets the principle of using coins to date spot on, and the arguments that could be made against the dating have been developed since 1955, when she wrote the book.

None of these three women write only in one genre. Pip Williams is a travel writer and historical novelist. Kate Atkinson writes alternate history and crime and ‘literary fiction’. Katherine Briggs is best known as a folklorist. Me, I’m an archaeologist and writer. My children’s adventure story is set in London 2018 and in Pompeii in AD 79, and I’m writing a historical fantasy set in an alternate 1688. If you want baked beans, I’m not that tin.

*On Melon Husk’s hellsite. It’s about the British Museum’s new Roman legions exhibition reportedly being almost only about the soldiers.

**Yes, I know, that title doesn’t wear well does it? Book does though: https://www.isegoria.net/2012/02/hobberdy-dick

*** By James Wright at Triskele. Highly recommended. https://triskeleheritage.triskelepublishing.com/2023/11/21/one-man-conference-understanding-ancient-buildings