New Episode - A POWER UNBOUND with Freya Marske and Guest Host Jo Riccioni

On Making Magic in the Queer Fantasy Romance Space

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Episode notes

Join us as we unravel the creative process behind author Freya Marske’s queer historical fantasy series, The Last Binding in this wide-ranging chat with guest host, Jo Riccioni. Freya guides us through her unique magic system, based on the concept of 'cradling', inspired by an activity she loved as a child. She further explores the underlying inequalities and social assumptions embedded in her magic system and gives us a peek behind the curtains on how she developed her characters Edwin and Robin, and the intricacies of their magical romance.

Freya address the pressures of meeting publisher deadlines and the industry's expectation of fantasy and romance writers to produce multiple books annually. She offers an insightful glimpse into her own experiences, sharing how she maintained her schedule for her trilogy and the sense of wish-fulfillment she discovered during the pandemic.

Finally, we discuss the evolving publishing industry and the recent market trends. The episode looks into the trend of genre mashing and its implications for authors trying to make a mark. We also touch upon the challenges of deciding between writing a romance or fantasy series and how to market oneself as an author. Also, tune in to our conversation about the impact of self-published books on traditional publishing. Lastly, we chat about the inspiration behind transforming a standalone book into a series and the books and authors that have influenced Freya's writing journey. Don't miss this enriching conversation with one of the most exciting voices in fantasy literature today.

Episode Chapters

0:00:00 - Historical Fantasy and Writing a Series

0:06:21 - Plotting a Romance Fantasy Series

0:19:38 - Writing a Book Series

0:30:44 - Navigating Genre and Market Trends

0:41:09 - Influences and Writing Approach

0:53:26 - Science Fiction, Horror, and Fairy Tales

Transcript

0:00:00 - Jo Riccioni

Freya, welcome to the Writes4Women podcast. I'm so excited to have you on board,Freya. I met you at Supernova, so I'm like we've had chats and we've got to know each other a little bit. But I actually read your book before I met you at Supernova, so I was already a massive fan. I already knew in the back of my mind I desperately wanted you to come on Writes4Women. And then I read your second book, which I've just finished. But first, let me just give a bit of an introduction. 

Freya, you are the author of what’s described as a queer historical fantasy series called THE LAST BINDING, set in Edwardian England, which is full of magic, contracts and conspiracies. A  MARVELOUS LIGHT came out in October 2021 and was an international bestseller and won the Romantic Novel Award for Fantasy. So well done for that. That's amazing. And then A RESTLESS TRUTH came out in November, so a full year later. And then another full year later you are just about to release A POWER UNBOUND, which is going to be published on the 14th of November this year. Is that the completed trilogy now for that series? Freya? 

0:01:05 - Freya Marske

Yes, that's it. So the plan was always that it was gonna be three books published a year apart. 

0:01:13 - Jo Riccioni

And I'm very thankful you've managed to keep the schedule. That's good. We'll talk about schedules and deadlines and some of the pressures that come with writing a series. I do wanna talk quite a bit about writing a series because that's what I've pitched the episode, as.

We'll talk about lots of other things because I just love the books anyway, and I wanna talk to you about it. Tell us first of all about what you're not necessarily the pitch for the books, but the unique selling point of your world, because I think it is quite unique. You wanna tell us a little bit about that, the magic world and the system that you've created. 

0:01:42 - Freya Marske

Yeah, so this is a very clearly historical fantasy and we'll probably talk about this more as we talk about writing series. But I always knew that this was gonna be historical fantasy because in my head it was a trilogy, linked historical romances, and then I knew I wanted to have a magical fantasy plot that was through all three books.

So structurally it was a fantasy trilogy and it's a historical romance series and when I was coming up with the world, part of it was choosing the time setting for it, because parts of it could have taken place at many different parts in the history of England and I knew I wanted to write it set in England. But I had to make a decision as to exactly where I was going to set it and that obviously had been an influence on how I wrote the later books.

Once I'd made that decision for book one and I knew I wanted to write a hidden, magical world. So not a historical fantasy where everyone knows about magic it's practised out in the open but something that, as far as the protagonist of the first book is concerned, he is living in a normal historical novel and then he discovers in the first chapter that it's actually he's living in a historical fantasy novel because he discovers the existence of magic, which made some of the research fun. On one hand it was quite easy because all of the trappings of it are the trappings of historical fiction. But then I was inventing this whole other magical world existing underneath. And what were the rules of that? And in what ways was the society the same as the society of unmagical people in this world? 

And the concept that I came up with about how magic is practised in Britain at this time is a thing called cradling, which is based on cat's cradle string activity which I was obsessed with for, I think, probably a very intense summer in my youth. I remember we had a book of string tricks and it showed you how to do a cat's cradle with another person, and I think my poor younger brother probably got sick of that after the first day. But the rest of the book were string tricks you could do on your own. Once you had the string, you could create this bridge or this tower or this magic carpet and I love that. 

So I got very obsessed with learning how to do all of those and some time ago, when I was writing a short story, I came up with the idea of a gesture based magic that was very precise, and the way it was precise was it was a sort of mimicking the precise moments you would have to make for your fingers to create a cat's cradle, and so I used the verb cradling for magic without really explaining it. 

I just threw into this story and thought to myself I had the idea, but the story wasn't really about that. But then it stuck in my head as an interesting idea, and when it came time to build the magic system for A MARVELLOUS LIGHT, I thought what if? That's how you learn the magic? Gestures relate to this string based pattern, but that's how you learn it as a child, or that's how you keep your magic very precise. And that was what led to the creation of Edwin as a character. 

Okay, if you were a magician in this world who didn't actually have a lot of magic or power? You're not a chosen one. You're not even particularly powerful. Everyone else in your family has more magic than you. You're looked down upon for that reason. What if the way that you made your magic work, if you didn't have much of it, was you stuck with the string? And so that was how I came up with this idea of Edwin as somebody who still uses string to do magic. And he's this frustrated genius, in a way, because he has a very creative, analytical mind when it comes to the use of magic and he's had to develop that because he doesn't have much power. And so you have this image. I had this image of him using the string and everybody else around him looking down on him, because that's what children and underpowered people yeah. 

And so that was really fun, because it did allow me to build these inequalities and social assumptions into the magic system from day one, which was really fun. 

0:05:39 - Jo Riccioni

I love Edwin's character as well, because of course, he relies on books and his knowledge. He's an incredibly intelligent character as well, and then he's a nice counterplate to Robin, who is the more active, adventurous one.

0:05:57 - Freya Marske

Oh yeah, it was. Edwin is my kind of character and I think a lot of people who write are also bookish people and so I write a lot of characters like Edwin who are very intelligent, bookish and maybe with a weird kid at school. And so writing Robin as my point of view character was a bit of an exercise in forcing myself to write the kind of character that I always enjoy when I come across them, but I've never done a lot of writing on before. 

That was really really analytical. He's quite credulous. He gets into magic instead of asking questions and doubting and going no, there must be some other explanation here. So oh, that was clearly magic. He’s, someone who's not unintelligent but has never valued or been valued for intelligence and doesn't really get any enjoyment out of being analytical. It was a very obvious foil to put him up against this sort of librarian bookish character, especially when I knew I was building a romance. 

0:06:56 - Jo Riccioni

Yeah. 

0:06:58 - Freya Marske

A good contrast to build the romance on because they would assume the worst of each other, because they remind one another of people they've disliked in the past. 

0:07:06 - Jo Riccioni

Yeah, because they're not exactly enemies to lovers. But they are prickly, aren't they? They start off on a prickly kind of thing. Yeah, I describe it as enmity. 

0:07:16 - Freya Marske

Enmity, enmity yeah, they get off on the wrong foot and then things happen in the first half of the book that produce further wrong feet. But of course you have to have them also linked together by this shared quest and shared need to find things out, and that's how you get them to draw together and recognize one another's good qualities across the book. 

0:07:37 - Jo Riccioni

Yeah, and then, of course, when you've come across the romance, it's all the sweeter because of the differences and the kind of friction they've had between each other. Now there's a lot going on in both of your books so let's just explain to readers and listeners that your second book in the series doesn't follow Edwin and Robin, but it follows Robin's sister. Had you all always planned that it was going to be a kind of series that stays in the world? You have the overarching plot of the magic system and the quest for this ultimate, the ultimate quest of the. It's a bit of a magical MacGuffin. 

0:08:18 - Jo Riccioni

Yeah, and the baddies who want to grow the world of magic, and then your protagonists who are trying to stop them. So you've got that overarching plot through the three books, but did you always know you were going to go with different characters? 

0:08:31 - Freya Marske

Yes, I did and I knew that was a risk in fantasy because it is much more usual for a fantasy series to follow, if not the same character, the same group of characters, and some fantasy series might expand the core group of characters until you end up with the Georgian art and levels of core cast, but you don't tend to drop points of view. But because I was sneakily author-fighting a romance series, I knew in the first book we would have this core romance. They would reach a happy finale for now, yes, we're in love, we're agreeing to be together by the end of the first book. But we would also have met one of the protagonists of the second book. And I knew when I first conceptualised the series, Book 2 had a different set of main characters because it was an idea I had that was almost a standalone. 

It was the idea of a murder mystery on an ocean line and it was also a ghost story. But then I looked at the series and my attitude was perfect, that can be Book 2. And all I had to do was change one of the two main characters to be Maude, Robin's sister. 

0:09:38 - Jo Riccioni

So was Book 1 always going to be a series or was it going to be a standalone? 

0:09:43 - Freya Marske

In my head it was always a series. It had to stand alone as a book to a certain extent, so I knew the romance would stand alone. But I also knew that I was pitching a trilogy in terms of the fantasy plot and we were quite lucky that we did actually get a contract for a full trilogy so I could publish Book 1 knowing I was going to be able to write books 2 and 3 and so I didn't have to suddenly swerve and wrap up the plot in Book 2,. I didn't think you can get turned into a duology. It was always going to be a trilogy, which was really good. 

The fact that there are different narrators for each one was definitely a risk for fantasy, because people are much more used to fantasy following either the same narrative characters or the same characters and then adding more and more as you move through a series. It's quite rare, I think, to completely abandon the point of view characters that people have that you've introduced. You put all this work into making people fall in love with them and then you move on to someone new. But for me, because I always knew who I was writing a romance series, this is exactly what happens, especially in historical romance. But anybody who reads a romance series is quite familiar with you. Read Book 1 and a long cut on the page comes someone who smells like sepal bait, and it's quite often a best friend or it's a family member. 

And so I knew when I was writing A MARVELLOUS LIGHT, book 1 had to include one of the protagonists of Book 2, and that turned out to be Maud. And so then I built the love interest for Book 2 around what would be a good love interest for Maud while also serving the higher plot. Book 3, A POWER UNBOUND, I always knew was going to be Lord Hawthorne's book, and if you are at all familiar with historical romance, then if you have an asshole aristocrat with a hint of secret pain in his past, if he appears on page, there is almost certainly going to be a book about him. So anybody with romance instincts who reads A MARVELLOUS LIGHT goes tell me more about Lord Hawthorne. Yes, and that's exactly what. 

I do. I know he's a complete dickhead when he's on page, but I like him and yeah, that's quite a sense, if you know that character archetype and so I then had to put him on page quite more in Book 2, because when you meet him in Book 1 he's not in a place where he's ready for his love story. 

0:12:02 - Jo Riccioni

No, he's actually got quite a bad rap in Book 1. Oh yeah, he's horrible. 

0:12:07 - Freya Marske

He really does a really nasty thing to Edwin in Book 1, and you're so much on Edwin's side in Book 1 that you can walk away from A MARVELLOUS LIGHT going. Well, he seems intriguing, but god, I hate him. And so I have to drag him unwillingly towards both the plot and being involved in the plot and being in a place where he is ready for his own love story. And so I changed my mind a little bit about who his love interest was going to be. And then I realised, once I knew who his love interest was going to be, they had to also appear in Book 2, because I didn't have space in Book 3 to go through the full effort of introducing someone who didn't know what was going on, because I can. 

In Book 2, A MARVELLOUS LIGHT. It's very introductory. More knows magic Robin doesn't. We have this point of view character introducing us to the world and we get the ball rolling on the major plot by the time we hit Book 2, more knows about magic. She knows about the plot, violates her love interest, knows about magic and just has to be introduced to the plot. 

Hawthorne already knows what's going on and he just has to be enmeshed in the story, and so by the time you hit Book 3, you've met both of the protagonists of Book 3, I've done the first couple of romance beats. So the meet cute and the initial enemies stage has already happened and you don't see the inside of their heads, you don't know what they think about it, but we've seen the potential that these characters had. So by the time we get to Book 3, a power unbound. You know these characters, both know what's happening with the plot and they know each other. And that was what I needed to be able to hit the ground running in Book 3, because I was also returning to Edwin and Robin and drawing in more than Violet from Book 2 and returning to some of the other supporting characters. 

So Book 3 is very much. You have to read Books 1 and 2 because we've got an ensemble cast doing a leverage style heist and really everything takes off in terms of the plot momentum and I'm featuring all of your favourite characters from the first two books and I'm doing the romance between Hawthorne and Ross. So it's a busy book. It's a bit longer than the others and pulling off that balancing act was a challenge for me. 

0:14:24 - Jo Riccioni

Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit, because I am interested in your talk, the way you talk about it and the structure and what you're doing. You're like a magician in your own right as a writer because you are in it's the first series you've done right. So once you knew, you signed for three books and you didn't have to end that first book. You could keep it open and go back to the world. Were you plotting it all out from the beginning or how do you extend it? 

0:14:54 - Freya Marske

I will be absolutely honest, the magical plot is not the most complicated magical plot in the world. There's some magical MacGuffins. We're trying to get hold of them. The other guys are trying to get hold of them. Whoever gets hold of them has potential to use magic power for evil or for their own gains. So yeah, nothing hugely complicated, and I knew that I didn't want to be doing a very complicated plot at the same time as trying to do these romances. 

But the nature of the plot and the way it thematically played out changed as I was writing the second book, I think. I think I had to finish the second book with a very clear idea of what was going to happen in book three, because I had to make sure I laid out all the pieces that I would need. So at the end of writing book one, I had a vague idea of where I knew where we would end book two, but I wasn't quite sure how I would get us there. And then I made a decision during the writing of book two about how I was going to play with narration in book three, which was a little bit of a risk, and I'm really interested to see reader feedback as to how it pays off the people who read it so far. So I'd say that it worked, which was good. 

But there are things that have surprised me about you reach a certain point of adding in details, even though I am a very structural plotter at the beginning, when I don't start writing a book until I have a scene by scene outline. Okay, things happen within the writing of a scene that can surprise you and make you take a step back and go. Okay, that could actually change how I write the next book or how I write the second half of this book, because I've given myself some new pieces to play with. And book three is very much. When I sat down to plan it in great detail, I looked back at book one and book two and all of the magic worldbuilding that I've done a lot of, which was quite incidental. So the magic worldbuilding I decided I was just going to do on the fly as I went. 

0:16:52 - Jo Riccioni

That's what makes it so good, though, because it's not overwhelming. It's like it doesn't get in the way of the characters, and that's you are a character writer, you're a dialogue writer, an intricate scene setter, which is beautiful. So, yeah, I think that you did that really well with the magic.

0:17:11 - Freya Marske

Because most of that happened accidentally. When I got to the point in book three which was just like foil bad guys here, I had to say, okay, what tools have I given myself in the writing of book one and the writing of book two? And I looked back at some characters that I introduced and some concepts that had been thrown away, or even like there was a line in book one that was just a throw away line when I wrote it. And then, when I was planning book three, I was rereading book one and I accidentally set up a Chekhov’s gun here. Yeah, it was something that was just a figure of speech and I thought wouldn't it be fun if I actually made that happen in book three? And that became my midpoint event. 

0:17:52 - Jo Riccioni

I'm so glad you said that because I thought because I've just finished book two mine's a duology and it's completed now but I thought you were such an amateur Jo, you were just picking out these things that you've laid as possible like you say, Chekhov’s gun, possible little things that you might develop later on, but it's actually now hinging the entire plot on them. 

0:18:13 - Freya Marske

Yeah, exactly, and I think for me that's the fun of the balance of planning and pantsing is that I plan the structure of the book. But I got to a point where I was quite comfortable saying, okay, in this scene, what happens is they follow the bad guys or they manage to get their hands on this, but I don't know how yet. But how they do it doesn't quite matter. What matters is where they start the scene and where they end the scene. What's the status quo heading into the climax of the book? And as long as I know what those major points are, I can then improvise quite a lot in how the characters get from one of those points to the other. 

And that's where I did a lot of looking back at the magic and the world building and the characters and saying who can I use here? And so it makes it look very deliberate, even though what you've done is essentially just create a whole lot of tools and bells and whistles and fun things and then turn around and go, which of these do I need? Yeah, create the thing that I'm doing here. And because none of them were like actual smoking guns, none of them were like here is a very clear plot thread. It was just okay. Here's something fun that I just came up with off the cuff. What if I took that to its most extreme conclusion? Or what if I introduced this person and then told you something different about them? 

0:19:26 - Jo Riccioni

Yeah, and I think that is the skill in it, because if it is a smoking gun you've got to use it right. That's the rule of Chekhov's gun. But these are more like little things that could just be thematic or could become major. Yeah, one of the things I want to talk to you because I think it will really interest listeners is when you so when you're approaching publishers say I know there's a lot of people out there who would like to write a series, but they know that publishers and agents are gonna say and this happened to me they're gonna say I can't sell a series book at the moment. I need it to be a standalone, but the way you described it earlier was, with potential to revisit the world. Do you think that still stands? Or once you've written your trilogy and got signed for it, then that's okay, you can continue writing the series. 

0:20:10 - Freya Marske

Or I have no idea about the current state of acquisitions in terms of series versus stand-alones, because the next few things that I'm selling are stand-alones. I'm not sure yet. I think I was quite lucky that my agent managed to sell a book very clear that this is the start of a three book series. And I think it was because it was quite obvious that it was actually a romance trilogy and only book one didn't do very well. I could have just bought book one and said, okay, we'll get the others if we want to, but my editor managed to acquire three books. So, yeah, we're buying this as a trilogy and I was, on one hand, quite lucky. I think everybody would get that. 

0:19:26 - Jo Riccioni

It would just depend on the niche you were filling the editor who's acquiring what else was on that publishing house's plate in the next few years that they had to guarantee a slot three years in a row? Yeah, that's hard for them, isn't it as well? 

0:20:10 - Freya Marske

They don't necessarily know what else is on. You don't know what else is on a publishing house's plate when they acquire you, and some imprints are acquired very far in advance. And then the timing was another thing. If they were saying, okay, we're gonna buy this trilogy, but you are committing to delivering the next two books with these deadlines. Yes, and as a debut author without a great deal of existing clout, there's a lot of pressure to meet those deadlines. If I had not met them, if I had been the kind of fantasy author who writes the first two books and then just disappears and never writes the third, it would be very unlikely that I would get any further contracts. 

But because I met my deadlines and have produced them, I think now, on the one hand, it probably is easier for me to sell a series, number one because I have an existing readership, but number two because my publishing house and my editor know that I can write a book a year. Yeah, which is a big deal. And its genre fiction has this big expectation of how fast you can write and how many books you can write a year. Fantasy, seems if you can write a book a year, people will be happy with that. Romance seems ridiculous, especially self-published romance. There's like people writing three or four or five books a year and more power to them. I don't know how they do it. Yeah, it's just literary fiction, and someone like Donna Tartt writes one book every ten years and everyone's like oh, yes of course it takes that long to write a book. 

Yeah, I know, and fantasy just apparently throws dragons onto the page and I hope you didn't finish a draft. 

0:22:47 - Jo Riccioni

That's a good take. But from your books, though, because they are more like towards the literary side of they're beautifully written. You've got an amazing eye for imagery and turn a phrase and dialogue and, yeah, I think it can. There can be some assumptions there that just because fantasy or romance writers are throwing these books out once a year, they're badly written. They're not. A lot of them are not. I just came from the Romance Writers of Australia conference a few weeks ago and they were talking about burnout in the industry because of the pressure of writing these series, and that's among self-published and traditionally published authors. Did the pressure get to you on the three books or just because we do have a lot of listeners who are writers? How did you handle that? 

0:23:36 - Freya Marske

I have two other jobs, so I was doing 9 to 5 days by the time I sat down to write book two, which was the first one I was writing on contract to a deadline. By that stage I had already written three novels. So there was a novel that I wrote that got me my first ever novel, which got me my agent but didn't sell. And then there was A MARVELLOUS LIGHT with the second book I'd written, and I'd written a romance novel as well in between writing all the other ones. And so by that stage I knew I could finish a novel which made a big difference. And I also knew approximations. I knew that every book I'd written so far had taken me less than a year to write. 

0:24:19 - Jo Riccioni

That was good. 

0:24:21 - Freya Marske

Yeah. So about nine months for a fantasy novel, maybe six for a romance. And so I thought, okay, I know what my pace is, I know what's sustainable for me, I can agree to meet this deadline. And that was. And then the pandemic happened and I was very lucky in that I did not have a particularly. I didn't have the world come crashing down on me in a way that made me unproductive. 

So my, because I work in healthcare, I still had a job. I wasn't suddenly having to homeschool children, it was just me, and I was stuck at home a lot more than usual. And so I actually got book two written a little bit faster than I expected because I suddenly didn't have quite as much to do outside the house. And it was a book about seeking adventure and travelling and somebody who has always wanted a life and an adventure larger than what she's had before, and so writing it felt like wish fulfilment. You know why. I wanted to write something cheerful and escapist, a romp and adventure that involved travel, and so it was probably the best book that I could have been writing over that pen. 

The first pandemic year and then the second year of the pandemic, I did have a bit of a crash and couldn't write for about four or five months, and so I got quite worried about book three. Of course I ended up finishing it a little bit over time like I had to get a little bit of an extension, but again, it was a longer book so it did take me a little bit longer. I'm lucky in that I write quite clean first drafts. I and I submitted synopses like rough synopses of the books to my editor before I started writing to say, look, this is the shape of the book, what do you think? And I got her blessing before I actually started. And then, once I start writing, I actually am a pretty clean drafter. I didn't have to do any major structural edits on book two or book three yeah, that helps a lot book three.

Book two involves a little bit of rewriting of the early chapters, especially just to shift the tone a bit. But book three, even though it felt like a much harder draft to write because I was juggling so many characters and so many events and things, it actually came out very close to the finished product. So the fact that I didn't have to do many rounds of structural editing on it was really just rounds of changing a few things. The chapters and the events in the chapters stayed more or less the same. That helps. 

0:26:49 - Jo Riccioni

Do you feel a sense of grief now that the trilogy is completed, or do you feel like you've got a shiny new idea and I just don't wait to get on with it? 

0:27:01 - Freya Marske

I'm shifting at the moment. When you're writing something, you're very much in them. I wish I was writing the shiny new thing. I feel a little bit bittersweet about the fact that I was with those characters for a long time and I felt very comfortable in the world by the end of it writing book three, even though it was a challenging book in terms of fitting everything in by the time I hit it. I knew those characters so well, like I knew the point of view characters well. I knew the supporting characters well, I knew the world. I did the magic. I did a bit more research, but it was just research that was adding to my existing knowledge about that time period. So it didn't feel...it felt like I was finally walking downhill rather more than uphill. Yeah, now that I'm in the stage of writing something entirely new, it still feels very up here, very up there with these and familiarity. 

0:27:52 - Jo Riccioni

One of the things I was going to ask you about was there is a certain comfort, isn't there, in knowing that you, doing three books, you can at the end of it, you're looking at that body of work and you're going. I felt comforted in the fact that I know where I was going with each book. I knew my characters, I knew my world and you, my magic system. So there is that sometimes you get to the desk there and I'm sure you go. I just a little bit over this. 

0:28:19 - Freya Marske

Speaking of pressure, it was so much for book two. As I was writing it, the book one hadn't quite come out yet, but as it started to, I was seeing all this love that was coming out for the characters of Robin and Edward and I thought, “God, I'm just sorry everyone. I'm just about to take you on a completely different adventure with people who haven't met and they're not really gonna appear very much and I had to keep saying please hold on. They're gonna be in book three, I promise.” 

But at the same time I knew that everybody who is picking up book two, had enjoyed book one and by the time we got to book three, anybody who's still with you by book three of a series, you've got that buy-in. 

You know you have to work less hard to sell a reader that you know what you're doing and I own the characters. So I think part of the pressure that I'm feeling now writing my first book post series, is that, yes, I have a certain level of trust from my readership, but I have to sell them on the fact that I'm gonna introduce them to some brand new people and and a new world and a new sort of book, and veering away from the structure of something that has done well is a little bit scary. 

0:29:31 - Jo Riccioni

Yeah, but that's why I think you're a character writer, because you've managed to do it. You did it again in book two and I'm sure you're gonna introduce us to new characters, but they're just as good and I'm sure you're gonna do it again in book three. But what I want to talk to you a little bit about with the series is and your just opinion in general on writing is the fact that your books are what I would consider genre mash, and I love that. I remember reading CL Polk's THE MIDNIGHT BARGAIN. 

I don't know if you've read that and one of my first introductions to romance, with magic and a kind of feminist theme going through it as well, and I want you to speak to me a little bit about how you approach your ideas of is that a conscious thing you do? 

0:30:20 - Freya Marske

I write books that I want to read and that's the way I've approached it from the very first book that I ever wrote. And it turns out that what I want to read is books that usually have some kind of speculative element not always, but usually. They usually have some kind of romance and if there is a romance it has a lot of sex scenes in it. This is what I want to write, and then, as it goes on, my style, as you pointed out, is quite literary, for both romance and fantasy. But I can't change that. That's my voice. So you're just gonna get the story that I want to write and it's gonna be in my voice. 

And then I discovered through writing the trilogy, that I quite like not very structured murder mysteries like I'm not writing classic procedurals or classic golden age detective novels, but I quite like the central hook of a murder mystery or a mystery to pull you through a book. So if you look at something like A RESTLESS TRUTH is a murder mystery. It's, and it's got that little, that little genre nods to detective fiction. It is a romance and it's a high-heat romance. It's a fantasy book and it's the second book in a fantasy trilogy. The writing is quite literary and it's a historical novel set in a very specific time and place. 

But I had to decide where in the bookshop it was gonna go and it was gonna go on the fantasy show. Yeah, that's what you have to, I think from a very commercial perspective. When we were Shopping book one and failing because it was a very similar kind of genre mash my agent sat me down and just said look, I like this idea you have for this series, but you have to decide if it's a romance series or a fantasy series. And I said I want to be a fantasy writer, so it's gonna be a fantasy series. And so that did influence how I wrote, how I conceptualised book one. 

0:32:10 - Jo Riccioni

Yeah, it's interesting though, isn't it? I'm really fascinated with this, because sometimes I feel that readers don't have that distinction, that publishers and agents do actually put up the barriers of where, and it comes down to the bookshop when is it gonna be shelved? But nowadays, with so much promotion being online and not actually at the bookshop level, they're finding out about books before they go into the bookshop. Does it really matter, and is that gatekeeping a little bit over efficacious in a way, because if you're into a, a fan fiction or any, all of that is genre mash and a lot of it anyway, and I'm just wondering. I know we have to decide, we have to mark ourselves and brand ourselves, but it's something that I get very frustrated with. 

0:33:01 - Freya Marske

I think it can seem very frustrating if you're trying to break into an industry and you're saying but what I'm writing is like Nothing else it's out there. That is not and you think readers will want something. It's very different. But publishing is an industry and it is a risk averse industry and they do not want to hear it is unlike anything else out there. Say that what they hear is we have no idea if this will sell. They want to hear that it is quite, like two of them that have sold very well, but also its own thing. 

And you're a fresh new voice which is it sounds paradoxical and it sounds annoying, but if you are going through traditional publishing, that's what they want, and I think the industry, and the face of genre especially, has changed in the last five years since I sold the first book and there are some extremely big success stories that have come up through Indie and there have been a lot of people who have been self-published and then traditional publishing has turned around and gone. Oh, you seem to be doing quite well. Would you like us to repackage your book and sell it on to a wider market? And the good thing about that is that it has been a slightly organic way for markets to be proven. So, for example, legends and lattes yes, I travel the world tree was self-published, did very well and has now been republished, and now it is a comp title for heaps of things, because before it did very well, it wasn't obvious to publishing that there was a market for low fantasy, or rather very low stakes fantasy. 

Cozy fantasy and now you can't move without hitting cozy fantasy, because it's a big current thing and but it didn't really. Obviously it existed, but it was blown open as a market niche by a self-published novel that then did well enough that publishing was prepared to say, oh, now it's like this thing, that has a proven track record. 

And so I think you can't chase trends in publishing like you really can't predict If you sit down today and say I'm gonna write a book that's like this thing, that's big. Now it will take you a year to write the book. Who knows how long it will take you to sell it on submission, and then it will be two years later by the time it actually hits the shelves. So unless you are working in a very fast-paced, high production area of self-publishing which some people are some people can really write a erotica or romance or certain types of self-published sci-fi fantasy really can turn on a dime as far as trends go and be quite productive and make a lot of money. That way, traditional publishing you can't. You just have to write what you want to write and then either you'll hit the right point in the market cycle or you'll find an editor whose vision aligns with yours, who thinks, yes, I want to be behind this, I want to produce this as well. 

And things change, like they're like my first novel that didn't sell, yeah, we just put it in a drawer. Things are changing. I think the market is different. The conception of these genre mash sections is also different, so it's very hard to tell. I have no hard and fast advice for anybody who's trying to write a marketable or sellable to the public, to the traditional fantasy genre at the moment, because who knows what it's going to look like in three years' time? Yeah, the only way you get through is by loving the idea you have and the characters you have. That's the only thing that will sustain you through the process of writing, querying, being on submission and then all the ups and downs and angst of even being published. 

0:36:32 - Jo Riccioni

Yeah, I do know, and you're absolutely right when you're saying that it has to be marketed and it has to be put into a position with comp titles and all the rest of it Within that you still have this ability to. I think storytelling generally and series are branching out into so many other areas. If you look at a series like Deadlock I don't know whether you've been watching Deadlock. It's amazing. I am obsessed with Deadlock. It's fantastic. 

0:36:58 - Freya Marske

So it's true, it defies genre. 

0:37:00 - Jo Riccioni

I've been trying to sell it to people. 

0:37:01 - Freya Marske

They're like what is it like? I'm like, ok, you know all of those small town dark crime dramas, it's that, but it's actually a satire of that, but actually it is doing that also, and also it's the most lesbian thing I've ever seen and it's really funny. Hang on, what genre is this show? I'm like, yes, yes. 

0:37:19 - Jo Riccioni

Police procedural. It sounds like a good police procedural, but also many other things. 

0:37:23 - Freya Marske

No, it's a great example actually. Yeah, it really does defy categorization, and I think that's why it's people who love it Love it. 

0:37:31 - Jo Riccioni

Yeah, exactly, and in the romance writers of the Australia Conference we're talking about how romance is having a moment with fourth wing and we obviously already know that sex scenes within romance, sex scenes within fantasy, have always been there. Do you think readers are wanting that a bit more in their books? I know some readers don't. Some readers are really anti that and they're closed door romance, as they say, as they call it. Open doors a bit more spicy, if not downright erotic scenes within books. I was actually asked by my publisher to put a bit more in. I thought I was already quite spicy. 

0:38:12 - Freya Marske

I think everybody has a level of comfort with what they want to read and everyone has a level of comfort with what they want to write as well. My level of comfort is very high for both things. That's not for everybody. I don't think any, not every book needs to have a sex scene, as much I love sex scenes. 

0:38:28 - Jo Riccioni

It actually says Freya Marske spends her time reading stories full of magic blood and as much kissing as I can get away with. 

0:38:34 - Freya Marske

Yeah, and you can get away with different amounts depending on where you are. It's probably one of the reasons why I'm probably never going to be a young adult writer, because the amount of spice that you can get away with in YA in YA is much smaller. But I always find it really hard to answer questions like what do you think readers want, because I have no idea the reader out there. For me, obviously, the ideal reader of my books is somebody who wants to read the kind of books that I want to read, and so I think there are a lot of people out there who were not expecting this level of heat in a fantasy, fantasy book and picked it up and hit the sex scenes and were like, ok, this is not what I was expecting, and for some people that's a deal breaker and they'll put it down and go OK, this isn't what I was expecting and it's not for me. I've had some absolutely lovely reader emails from people who were not expecting it but were surprised by how much they enjoyed it. Or I really liked what it added to the characters. 

And, yeah, I think there is more acceptance when you talk about romance. I think it was the collision of two forces, and it was fantasy having more tolerance for sex scenes in it, and then fantasy romance surging up from being a huge indie thing, becoming much more mainstream, and they just met and became romantic, which, again, I think you can talk to five different people and nobody will agree whether romantic lives on the fantasy shelf or the romance shelf. We're just calling it romantic but there's still no romantic book shelf in your brick and mortar store. But it is having a definite moment and I don't know to what extent this is something that's just going to have a really strong phase and everyone's going to back off a little bit and everyone's going to retreat back to their romance section or their fantasy section. But I think it's just reflective of the fact that there's always been a desire to see strong characters and romantic plots in fantasy and there's always been a strong market for speculative elements in romance, and now we're just seeing both of those meeting and becoming something that a lot of people are very interested in. 

So I haven't yet been told to put more sex in a book, but I haven't yet been told to take any out either. Already, at the moment, I had to break it to my agent that I didn't think I could fit a sex scene in. There's just too much other stuff going on. And she was like oh, come on, I think you can. I don't know, because this one isn't a romance. This one's structured quite differently, so maybe I'll just have to write the sex scenes as little extras that I sent to my mailing list. Yes, definitely. 

0:41:09 - Jo Riccioni

I was going to ask you if this is a standalone new book that you're working on at the moment. And was there a reason you wanted to go standalone and not do a series again? 

0:41:19 - Freya Marske

It was just the nature of the idea, like it's a very standalone idea. I'm looking at it now. I suppose I could turn it into a series, but again, it would be a very odd shape of a series, like it's a very standalone story. 

0:41:32 - Jo Riccioni

It's still magical or sci-fi elements or fantasy. 

0:41:35 - Freya Marske

Yes, this one is a secondary world fantasy. 

0:41:38 - Jo Riccioni

OK, and what do you mean from listeners who don't know what secondary world is? What's that mean? 

0:41:42 - Freya Marske

It's a secondary world, so A MARVELLOUS LIGHT and that whole trilogy are set in our world. They're set in England in 1908, 1909. Secondary world is not set in our world at all. So it is a fantasy standalone book set in a world that is not our world. 

0:41:57 - Jo Riccioni

Oh, exciting, exciting stuff. Can you tell me a little bit about some of the influences that you've had in your writing? Becoming a writer, I'm always interested in who may or may not be a writer. 

0:42:12 - Freya Marske

I've never sat down and be like that is the moment at which I decided to become a writer. I think I read so voraciously as a child I've just read my entire life. I wrote. I thought in my sort of early teens that I wanted to be, wanted to write a book. I don't think I ever really thought I wanted to have the career of an author. I just wanted to have written a book, yeah. And then I discovered fan fiction in my mid teens and just wrote that for 15 years and then decided to start writing original fiction again. 

So I find it hard to look at any one book and say this is the book that made me want to become a writer. But I can look at authors who I have discovered along the way when I can turn around and say these are the people who, if I can make other people feel the way that these books make me feel, I would be happy. So I think some of the authors who may be feel that way were Diana Wynne-Jones, who actually discovered not in my childhood at all, because this is quite hard to find in Diana Wynne-Jones books in Australia, but I discovered her when I was at medical school and for some reason I did my fourth year of medical school in a country town and the library there had heaps of her books and so I would just go and get one and just spend an entire Saturday or Sunday reading a Diana Wynne-Jones book from cover to cover every weekend and work my way through her Uber. Terry Pratchett I was reading from a frightened early age and I think the Discworld books are just amazing on every level and very inspirational. 

I discovered Georgette Heyer when I was first getting into romance and just the bubbly champagne feeling of her books is something that I always want to capture when I'm writing romance. Since then, I think I think who else I consider influential. Connie Willis' book To Say Nothing of the Dog was quite influential on this, my trilogy in particular, in terms of it being like a romp, like a real, proper historical romp. I love Lois McMaster Bujold Space Opera series, the Vorkosi and Saga and all of her fantasy as well, and I think Megan Whalen Turner's books. Even though they're technically, I think, sold as Middle Grade to YA by the time you hit books 2 and 3, the characters are all grown up and I just think they are absolutely phenomenal works of political fantasy fiction told in a very approachable way. 

So, yeah, there's always direct influences on every individual book, but for me, as a writer, I can just turn back and say that these are the writers that I want to be when I grow up. 

0:44:38 - Jo Riccioni

Did you research that for the series and just your approach to research generally? Are you one of these people who I was going to Hilary Mantel in an interview saying she generally spends a year reading and then writes and then doesn't really refer so much? She's almost like she's got her notes in her head, she's made notes, she's made loads of notes. But she said that she has her notes and she's ready to write the story then and it doesn't get in the way. 

0:45:11 - Freya Marske

No, that's not me. Similar to my magical well-building. I did quite a bit of reading around the era to begin with, just read a couple of different books. OK, I think I've got the broad strokes here and then just started writing. And then I would hit something like what did the English civil service look like in 1908? What did the underground in London look like in 1908? Now pause and go and look that up. 

And once I had the answer, I went back to the book and kept writing Because I think for me the well-building and the historical setting was serving the story and serving the characters and so if I hit something I needed to know I would look it up. And it got richer as I got through the books. Because book two obviously being set on an ocean liner, there is so much information out there about the Titanic because of what happened to the Titanic. 

So that was actually very easy to get quite a lot of period detail and I could download the blueprints. Here is what the Titanic looked like on every deck. Here is a list of the amenities. Here is how much it costs to get into the gymnasium on the Titanic. Heaps and heaps of detail, which was great, because I just rolled around in that for a week and then, yep, cool, great, I've sold on all the fun stuff that I want. Now I'm going to build my own boat. 

0:46:17 - Jo Riccioni

I remember one of your menus seemed very specific and I'm like I'm sure I love food as a detail. 

0:46:23 - Freya Marske

I just every time I hit something ridiculous kidney omelettes or something I was like that's someone's having that for breakfast. So it's always fun. I think the fun of research is finding those little details that you can then throw in. But I don't over-research, and I think part of it is because I'm not writing historical novels like pure historical novels. I think probably there's a higher expectation of authenticity. But because I was writing fantasy even though I was writing fantasy that was typically overlaid on an existing time period I was allowing myself a certain level of leeway, because this isn't, I wasn't trying to exactly capture that world. I'm doing a version of it with magic. So if I hit a word that I really wanted to use, but maybe it wasn't going to be actually in parlance for another 10, 15 years, I'm really behind, or could just massage a little bit about the trains or things like. 

If I needed it to work to serve the story, I didn't bother too much about being 100% correct. 

0:47:23 - Jo Riccioni

Yeah, and so what else was I going to ask you? I was going to ask you to talk about yeah, you don't use a lot of sub plots in your books and you're quite disciplined. I've noticed you. Even the way you talk about your books is very organised, I think, in your brain, your mind, and that might be your medical training frame. 

But I noticed you're very controlled in that you deal with your two character voices and your sub plots are minimal. You don't go off on a tangent and start playing around. It's almost like when you're ready to do that, you give them another book, those characters, another book. So with this final book in the series you are obviously doing a little bit more than the two voices, are you? 

0:48:06 - Freya Marske

Nope, still two voices. Two voices. That was a bit of an organisational headache, but again, I'm quite organised. So I basically sat down and went okay, I've only got these two characters whose perspectives I can show you things through. But because I brought this whole gang together at this point all I have to do is have one of them hanging out with some of the other people who are doing something about the plot, and I could just show Hawthorne interacting with one of the other characters to do this part of the plot. And then we've got Ross hanging out with these characters to put through this part of the plot. And sometimes it's just them and sometimes it's one of them on their own doing something else. 

And that did constrain the way I could tell the story, but I think that was for the best. 

I'd hit a point where I had six point of view characters, a couple of other major supporting characters, and if I had allowed myself the leeway of being able to use anybody's point of view at any time, I think there would be too many options. 

So it was quite good to stick with those two and because the reason I don't have many subplots is because the romance is the subplot, like, basically I'm doing two A plots and that's it. I'm doing the fantasy plot and the romance plot in each book. They both have equal weight and equal importance. But because if you're writing a romance, everything that happens has to serve the relationship between those two characters but that's one of the rules of writing a romance and because I was writing a romance and a fantasy plot, everything that happened had to either serve the romance or to a certain extent I had a bit of leeway or it could develop the relationship between all of the main characters. I could do a little bit of self indulgence when it came to Robin and Edwin, or more than Violet, or the relationship between Ross and Hawthorne and those other characters, but knows every scene should be doing something on a character level and it should be advancing the fantasy plot. And the only scenes that weren't advancing the plot were the ones that were purely romance. 

Yeah so once I thought about it in that way. That's why I didn't really have scope for subplots. I already had two A plots and that's enough for any book I'm interested in just technically. 

0:50:15 - Jo Riccioni

You constrain your plots with the boat in book two is obviously constraining the world, which is quite handy because there's only certain places they can go and certain things that can happen in certain rooms. And in book one it's houses, isn't it? It's like the houses that they're in, and I even love these set scenes that you have. In book one you have this garden. Gardens are important in stately homes, but it's a garden that's lethal and has magical powers. I love that. And then in book two it's like the two. 

0:50:46 - Freya Marske

Sometimes they are stereotypical scenes that you would imagine in that era, unlike the seance with the channelling the spirits. 

0:50:52 - Jo Riccioni

It's something that is a set piece in lots of books of the era, but you seem to spin it in this kind of original way. 

0:51:02 - Freya Marske

I'm a big believer in set pieces. I think they exist for a reason, and when I was thinking about book three I knew we're back to houses again. We're not on a boat anymore. There's a couple of, there's two new, very important houses in a power unbound, and almost all the second half of the book takes place in a new sort of country estate with house and grounds, and the house and the grounds are both important. But when I was thinking about it I was thinking about it in terms of set pieces. 

So there is again quite a lot of stuff that takes place in magical houses. There's a courtroom drama scene, there is a heist scene. I see there are two or three heist scenes and again they reach the outline and the outline would just say heist and I'd be like shit. But then there's the historical romance. It was like such and such visits, love interests, home and meeting the family. I think by arranging the plot in those things you're always excited to write a scene. You're like, oh, we've hit the courtroom scene, or oh, we've hit this somebody's visiting someone else's workplace scene, and so I knew what the little zing of excitement that I wanted the reader and myself to have for each one. 

0:52:14 - Jo Riccioni

Because you're playing around with reader expectation as well, because they already know the set piece and what it's supposed to deliver and then sometimes you can subvert that expectation a little bit. 

0:52:23 - Freya Marske

So yeah, I was really proud of what happens at the midpoint in A Power Untown, because it is one type of scene that turns into another type of scene and has some like big revelations in it, and I've had at least two or three people who have read it text me and show me that they have thrown the book across the room. Here is the book. It's lying on the floor over there or like just reaching about what happens at the midpoint, and for me that's always fun. I like to design a book where something happens halfway through that makes the reader go whoa hang? 

0:52:53 - Jo Riccioni

Yeah, brilliant. Okay, I'm so excited to read it. Just on a final note, Freya, thank you so much for all the technical questions that I personally want to ask. I'm sure there are other writers out there who are going to get a lot out of that. But just to finish up, what have you been reading recently that you might want to recommend? 

0:53:13 - Freya Marske

Okay, so I thought of a few different ones. Thank you for telling me that you were going to ask me this in advance so I could remember what I was reading. 

So I'll give you a fantasy, a sci-fi and a horror. Sci-fi wise. I read Aliette de Bodard's new book A FIREBORN EXILE and I'm not actually 100% sure if it's out yet, but this is a space opera, sapphic retelling of the Count of Monte Cristo, oh, wow. And so it's said in her Shui Yeh universe, which is Vietnamese space opera and with all these things to do with sentient ships and things like that. And this one follows that really traditional revenge drama of somebody whose family was betrayed and she's the only survivor and she has come back under an assumed identity to take a revenge on the people who wronged her family and herself. And all the allies that she makes and the romance that she starts and how those new connections are standing in the way of the absolute vengeance that she wants to wreak. 

And so it was a bit harder to get through than I thought, not because the writing was bad, it was so engaging. It really digs into these questions of morality and character. And how do you make the right choice when all the choices are either appealing or bad? And what does it mean to be a good person or a bad person? It's so good, like I love Elliot de Bedard's writing, but this one just had this really engaging, chewy revenge drama at the heart of it, but also set in space with sentient spaceships and things like that. So really so that's a fire born of exile. 

I just finished a horror novel called Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumpfett, and this is very horror. Like I've only become a horror reader in the last year and I'm just very voracious in that genre at the moment. The way I'm describing it is it's a haunted house story where the haunting is modern British fascism, yeah, and so it's about being trans in modern day Britain with all of the political and social and oppressive stuff that involves. But it's also an incredibly creepy haunted house story, like absolutely I flew through it. It's really disturbing but really wonderful. So if you're at all into horror or queer fiction, that, or horror about the experience of being queer, yeah. 

And lastly, I'm just about halfway through Kelly Link's new collection of short stories, which is called White Cat, Black Dog and it's. All of the short stories are versions of fairy tales. But because it's Kelly Link, they are very sideways versions of fairy tales that combine this absolutely straightforward narrative style that makes you think. Of course this is how the world works, even when everything that's happening is so wild or strange there's always but it always coming from this sense of fairy tale that just carries you through it. So I'm only halfway through that collection so far, but everyone I've read so far has been amazing and it resurrected an idea I had for a fairy tale or retelling novella, which I've now started writing concurrently with the novel that I'm meant to be writing. So yeah, if you're at all into fairy tales or just watching someone who's a master of the short story, just play her craft really. Well then. White Cat, black Dog by Kelly Link. 

0:56:46 - Jo Riccioni

Okay, great recommendations. Yeah, I haven't heard of any of those books, so if you're interested to go and research some more about them, what's on the cards for you in the next few months with your going overseas? Are you to promote? 

0:57:01 - Freya Marske

Yes. So I'm not quite sure when this will come out as an episode, but I will be overseas in the states to promote A POWER UNBOUND when it comes out. So I'll be there for the launch in the first couple of weeks of November and I think it comes out in Australia mid November, so I might be back in Australia by the time it launches here.

I have a newsletter and my website has an events page which I tend to update once I have a chunk of stuff to put on there. But I will definitely be updating my website and probably doing a newsletter burst as well, once I know all of the events that I'm going to be doing for promotion of book three. 

So that's what's on the cards, promotion-wise Again, because I don't know when this is coming out. I don't know how much I'm allowed to talk about my upcoming books yet, because there's been no announcements about any of the books that are coming out past this trilogy. So I'll just have to wave my vague jazz hands and say watch this space, because there will be more books from me. I just can't tell you much about them yet. 

0:58:15 - Jo Riccioni

All right, thanks for joining us and it's been great to chat and catch up again, and I think listeners will get some meaty tips out of writing. How do you go about writing a series in your version of that? What that looks like? And yeah, hope to meet you again soon.

0:58:31 - Freya Marske

Yes, so I always love talking about craft, so thank you for having me. Thanks Jo.