Book 1 of the No Boundaries Trilogy
Fantasy
Date Published: July 24
Publisher: Blue Fortune Enterprises LLC, Lavender Press
In 2400 BCE Crete, 18-year-old Mave keeps the old spirituality alive,
primarily through her clay chips and the symbolic images she paints on them,
the original runes. She falls in love with Tear, a semi-divine being born
both male and female, and finds an ally in Inna, a former holy prostitute
kicked out of her communal home. The Gigante from the northern tribes marry
the holy prostitutes then replace the Goddess of the temple with a Sun God
who loves order and lighting bolts. Girls and women, formerly revered
stand-ins for the Goddess and her creator, the cave-dwelling Ssha, either go
underground with their beliefs or find a way to fit in the new culture. As
it turns out the old ways of the Goddess had its flaws, and this creates the
opportunity for the Gigante and their sun God to move in.
Interview with Karen Cavalli
For those
interested in exploring the subject or theme of your book, where
should they start?
- Read or listen to
- When God Was a Woman by Merlin Stone. The book has been around for a while—it first came out in 1976. Reading it had a huge impact on me. The author was a sculptor and art historian.
- Visions and Longings: Medieval Women Mystics by Monica Furlong
- Renegade Mystic by Sean McNamara
- Anything by author Gail Godwin. She writes beautifully and tells wonderful stories, often featuring a quiet, solitary woman who can be both entwined with a lover and yet retain her essential sense of self.
- James Beacham, a particle physicist currently at CERN, speaks a lot about particle physics and quantum mechanics in a way lay people such as me can understand. Check out videos of his talks on https://jbbeacham.com/videos. I’m sure he’s on YouTube too. Citations of his professional papers and other work are available in his CV on https://jbbeacham.com/info.
- Check out
- Sean McNamara’s free psychic development courses on mindpossible.com. He offers an accessible approach to what we call psychic skills but what contemporary science is telling us may just be the true nature of reality. We aren’t quite as material as we thought!
- Tom Campbell, physicist and consciousness researcher. Formerly a working scientist with the Army, he has developed a theory of consciousness which posits that our reality is simulated. My fav of his offerings is the YouTube recording of a six-part session he offered at The Monroe Institute. Here’s part 1 - Tom Campbell The Monroe Institute 11/2015 Part 1 of 6
- I’d been wondering for a long time what daily life would have looked like if we really had made the transition from a belief in a Goddess to a God. Merlin Stone makes a convincing case for it in her book When God Was a Woman, and I loved pondering how such a change would affect the everyday facts of lives. Somewhere during that time of mulling an other-worldly being appeared in a dream and instructed me, “Get to know the lizard men of revelations; we need more of their kind.” Hm, okay, I thought, is that lower or upper case “r?” Not one to quibble, I let the conjured images swirl around in my head, mixing with my other musings about how a huge cultural shift would change the lives of everyday folk, especially introverts, and then I just started writing.
How did you become
involved with the subject or theme of your book?
- To get the plot rhythm right. I had to unlearn some of the habits from my formal education in creative writing in regard to plot; most of what I wrote tended to have “literary” endings. I ran across mention of Save the Cat by Blake Snyder in a blog by an editor of romance novels. I immediately read it and loved it instantly. I highly recommend it. The subtitle is The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need but the principles apply just as well to novels.
- To write of a love between a young woman and a half-and-half, a being who is physically both sexes and, in this novel and at this time, considered a semi-divine being. And, beyond that, write of a young, introverted woman’s experience of being in love and sexually involved for the first time.
What were your
goals and intentions in this book, and how well do you feel you
achieved them?
- I would love to hear from you! I appreciate your delving into my work. Email me at kcgoodguide@gmail.com or use the Contact form on KarenCavalli.
Anything you would like to say to
your readers and fans?
- Sinking into this world I’d created. I felt like I was tuning into my fav Netflix series each time I sat down to write during the drafting stages. It wasn’t quite so dreamy once I got into editing, but I felt I’d created a character, Mave, who had gone on to develop her life without me, and maybe I could drop in on her sometime and see how she’s going. I missed her terribly when the publisher and I deemed the book complete.
What did you enjoy most about
writing this book?
- Undercover Goddess is book 1 in the trilogy No Boundaries. My next book due to be published is book 2, tentatively titled Down, currently in the hands of the publisher Blue Fortune Enterprises. My writing time each day is spent on completing the first working draft of book 3, currently untitled, in the No Boundaries trilogy.
Can you tell us a little bit about
your next books or what you have planned for the future?
- Since I was twenty-one years old; that’s when my desire to write professionally really kicked into gear. I wrote before that, starting when I was 10, but I consider 21 the age when I began thinking like an adult about the act and profession of writing.
How long have you been writing?
Can you tell us a
little bit about the characters in Undercover Goddess?
- Mave is 17, soon to turn 18, and on the cusp of womanhood when the novel opens. Her introversion guides her choices; because of her mother’s position she’s been able to evade her town’s nighttime rituals which would usher her into womanhood and provide deep knowledge of her people’s spirituality. She would rather paint strange images on her clay chips and have pretend conversations with the Ssha, the giant reptiles who live below in subterranean caves and are the source of Mave’s people’s spiritual beliefs. When the Gigante find a way to usurp the Goddess in Dia, the Ssha rely on introverted Mave to continue their ways using her clay chips with images painted on, the first runes. They cannot guide her as they once guided humans except through vibration, and so she stumbles her way through figuring out how to carry on the Ssha’s spiritual principles. She’s equally without guidance when it comes to her budding romantic and sexual relationship with Tear. However, she finds an ally in keeping the Ssha ways alive in Inna, a former holy woman.
- Tear is 19, about a year slightly older than Mave and is a semi-divine being born both male and female. She leaves her life in the Ssha’s upper caves to join Mave in the new world after the Gigante invade Dia. Tear takes on the physically demanding chores around their new home, in the burial caves across the plain from Dia: digging the latrine and providing a water source for her and Mave as well as the two sister mares who have accompanied them to their new home. She befriends the olive pickers a Gigante cart driver deposits at the foot of their small mountain each day. She learns of opportunities in Dia and takes a job at the docks outside the town, which causes her masculine side to emerge both physically and in her personality. She adapts quickly and easily to the new way of life in Dia, which Mave doesn’t like, but appreciates how Tear keeps them current on the new sun God religion the Gigante’s priests are orienting the people to.
- Inna is a former hieros house holy woman who lost her communal home in nearby Apollonoulous when one of her spiritual sisters married a Gigante, one of the original white giants who forged a trading alliance with that hieros house. Apollonoulous had an easier transition to the Gigante rule. They had a business connection, making things slightly more equal. Inna has partnered with a man and helps raise his young child. When she discovers who Mave is she becomes her ally. She has a secret, though, about her part in how the Gigante learned how to use naptha oil to create their explosions and fears anyone finding out, especially Mave.
- Audria is Mave’s mother and her total opposite—loud, demanding, bold. She knows how to get things done and is often unaware of how thoughtless she comes across. She loves Mave deeply but it takes Mave a long time to realize this. Audria’s immediate acceptance of the hard reality of what their lives have become post-Gigante invasion makes Mave feel even more distant from her.
- Turnip is a man who broke a rule enforced by the women of hieros house that kept Ssha knowledge sequestered for the hieros house women only. As punishment, they broke his ability to think. However, he figured out how to regain that ability but now uses his cover of someone with a child’s mind to learn important intelligence about the invading Gigante which he passes on to Mave and Tear. There are others like Turnip who believe in the Ssha and the Goddess but believe their ways and rituals should be more open to men. He too wants to help save their ways even if it means acting the part of the fool.
- Anta – a holy woman of Dia’s hieros house, Mave’s keeper since birth. She is too entrenched in the Ssha spirituality to believe there could possibly be a threat from the white Gigante. She is gentle in her care of Mave, and Mave’s only source of nurturing.
- Beatt is Mave’s uncle who is part Ssha. His Ssha blood manifests in a magnificent reptilian tale he must wear coiled around him and hidden under a cape. He lives in the upper Ssha caves and serves as liaison between the Ssha and the people of Dia. He introduces Mave to the Ssha but must depart before she descends to the lowest caves where the Ssha live.
- Anta. I have a lot of questions for her about the Ssha and their form of spirituality and how it manifests in her life and how living under Gigante rule affected that. She has a rough time in the transition but does not give in to victimhood; I’d like to know how she managed that. I would do a chore with her, like cutting vegetables for a simple meal, or repairing a torn tie on the trousers she makes for herself, Audria and Mave. I might ask her questions but I might not; I might just let these simple acts generate the energy of the moment and see what words naturally come out of our mouths.
If you could spend the day with one
of the characters from Undercover Goddess who
would it be? Please tell us why you chose this particular character,
where you would go and what you would do.
About the Author
Karen Cavalli, née Lound, writes fiction and non-fiction. Her work
has been published online and in books. Her work has won awards including
Outstanding Secondary Science Book. She is a graduate of Old Dominion
University where she earned a B.A., and The University of Alabama’s
MFA in Creative Writing Program where she studied with Margaret Atwood. She
has worked in technology for over 10 years. She taught a writing course on
the topic of psychological descent at the University of Minnesota and in
North Carolina. Her work in technology has taken her to India and China and
allowed her to work with individuals in Mexico, the United Kingdom,
Australia, New Zealand and the emirate of Dubai. She loves her local Savage
library and volunteers there. She can be contacted at
kcgoodguide@gmail.com
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Thank you for hosting!
Thank you for hosting this stop on my blog tour!
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