Liz Silverton is autistic. And a triceratops shifter. She lives a quiet if slightly isolated life in a small village in the Yorkshire Dales. When a vague conviction that she needs to ‘get out more’ leads her into a more chaotic situation than she ever expected, will she crumble under pressure? Or will she come through the fire?
Reader advisory: This book contains a scene involving an autistic meltdown from the autistic person’s perspective, as well as a scene of physical assault and a scene of assault which in context can look like animal abuse. Read on with caution if this is likely to upset you.
Also contains a sympathetic, rounded portrayal of an autistic character, which might be upsetting to ableists.
So why did I write this little novella in the first place? And how did I get the idea?
Well, the idea first came to me roughly this time last year. I was taking a break from work — the manuscript I had in at the time happened to be about shifters — looking at the Wikipedia page for ‘triceratops’ on a whim, and a fully formed image just landed in my head —Â a female, autistic triceratops shifter in a nightclub, having a massive overload-induced meltdown/panic attack from the noise and crowds, bursting out onto the street while involuntarily shifting from the fear, charging around damaging stuff, then passing out and waking up some time later in a shady government facility.
The idea wouldn’t go away, and my brain kept screaming at me to write it, so I started planning. I quickly realised that sticking with the scenario I’d originally thought up would just end up producing a naff rip-off of Marvel-style stories, and also that the ‘nightclub’ element was rather implausible (nightclubs = sensory overload hell-on-biscuits, and the situation would have required my protagonist to be bullied into going there by the sort of people she would never actually interact with, let alone befriend), so I had to think up something that would actually work and be writeable without making me want to brutalise my laptop screen out of sympathetic/vicarious stress.
Luckily for me, I get a lot of shifter-themed works in my day job as a proofreader, and a few of them involve the concept of a ‘shifter park’, where shifters can, well, shift and run around as they wish, so that idea had precedent and provided some useful inspiration. I got the idea to set things in the Yorkshire Dales from watching Last Of The Summer Wine, which is actually set in and around Holmfirth and the Holme Valley (some way south of the Dales), but which did provide a lot of inspiration for the scenery 🙂
I eventually worked out that having the set-piece meltdown scene in the shifter park would make things much too compressed, so I moved it to the next chapter and used the park sequence to set things up. This particular sequence was interesting to write, for two reasons: firstly, because I was able to write in a good few points of ‘fridge logic’ about the operation of such spaces that tend to occur to me when they appear in something I’m reading for work, and secondly, because I ended up writing the more antagonistic characters there with a basis in my memories (admittedly somewhat exaggerated/caricaturish) of the people who bullied me in secondary school over a decade ago, mixed with some of the more dreadful customers I’ve read about on Not Always Right and similar sites. It was rather cathartic!
One element that changed slightly less between the ‘government lab’ scenario and the final story is the doctor who’s present when Liz, my protagonist wakes up after the meltdown. In the earlier scenario, they were a doctor working at the lab who was having moral qualms about the whole operation and helped Liz escape. In the final manuscript, they’re still a doctor, but of a much more benign and mundane sort, working in an actual hospital (Hippocratic oath and all). Their most consistent characteristic across the various versions was their being a Jewish kakapo shifter, as a nod to a friend of mine who’s been very encouraging throughout the course of this project. (Kakapo are the critically endangered flightless parrots of New Zealand, with only 144 extant individuals at time of writing — if you want to help, head to Kakapo Recovery for information on the conservation efforts and how to support them)
So, what were my motivations for undertaking this project, apart from getting my brain to shut up about it? Mostly the dire lack of really good, accurate autistic representation in media, especially stuff from actually autistic content creators (who, after all, have first-person lived experience of autism all their lives, so they know more about it than any neurotypical person). This lack of representation is a fairly significant factor, I find, in the widespread lack of understanding of autistic experiences, behaviours and so on, which in turn feeds the massive amounts of ableist prejudice against us. I thought that if I could counteract that, even a little, it would be something I could be really proud of. Meltdowns and overload happen to be one of the more misunderstood aspects of autism, so it was handy that my plot ideas centred around them anyway!
Apart from the above, my writing process involved a lot of really interesting research — other autistic people’s experiences of meltdowns (I haven’t had one since Year Ten, about thirteen years ago, so my own recollections needed bolstering), Jewish foods and festivals, the precise definitions of assault, battery and self-defence under UK law, procedures for giving witness testimony… The Crown Prosecution Service website is a fascinating rabbit hole in its own right!
Well, I hope you all found that interesting, and that it’s helped you get even more excited for the release of Triceratops Trials on the 18th of June!
Susan Albinson 