#oh! and winter’s orbit was an original fiction work that was first published on ao3 and it’s also excellent

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Is It Better to Reinvent Fantasy Tropes or Pay Homage to Them?

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In August, we brought you the first part of this roundtable conversation between three of speculative fiction’s most exciting up-and-coming authors: Emily Tesh (Silver in the Wood and its sequel Drowned Country), A.K. Larkwood (The Unspoken Name), and Everina Maxwell. In honor of today’s publication of Maxwell’s queer space opera Winter’s Orbit, we’re publishing the second part of their conversation. In it, the writers and IRL friends have a funny and insightful conversation about elves and the value of a homage, the difficulties of writing sequels, and how to name a book.

Q: EVERINA MAXWELL: Fantasy as a genre is constantly reinventing elements it’s had since forever. Both The Unspoken Name and Drowned Country contain elves, for example, or at least something that looks like elves if you squint at them sideways. What inspires you to take a familiar concept and put a new spin on it?

EMILY TESH: Oh thank you, you know I love to talk about elves. For me part of the joy of creating genre fiction is working with the constraints and expectations of that genre, whether you’re running with them or pushing against them–borrowing from what Kass said earlier about reusing characters, it’s helpful to have a paintbox rather than mixing your paint from scratch! I especially love having a starting point for what your readers think is going on; in many ways writing a book is an exercise in mind control–what is your reader imagining right now? What have they guessed? What do they know that the characters don’t? What elements of the story are holding their attention? Sometimes one feels a bit of pressure to subvert, to do an original take that no one has done before. But I don’t think that’s always necessary or even interesting. A boring subversion (you thought… X! But actually… the opposite of that!) can’t carry a story by itself, while the familiar tracks of reader expectation can lead you to interesting places. It’s also the case that having your expectations fulfilled can be a satisfying experience as a reader; personally I love to guess the murderer, to solve the lore mystery, to watch characters who are clearly perfect for each other realise they’re in love. 

Anyway my point is: I find it impossible to talk elves in the fantastic without finding myself in conversation with Tolkien, who just wrote so much elf bullshit. I say this from a place of deep love, as a person who has read all of it multiple times including the obscure stuff that didn’t even make it into the Silmarillion. And while “this isn’t like Tolkien!” is something I’ve heard often as a shorthand for “this fantasy is new and fun and subverts those old familiar tropes you know!,” I knew when I started writing Drowned Country that I wanted to do the opposite of that: I wanted to lean right into Tolkienesque elves–immortals who have outlived their own apocalypse, remnants of a civilization unimaginably older than the human world, and also the cool thing where as they get older and older they start to turn invisible. I think there’s a lot to be said for the homage, the anti-subversion. What is a genre without the echoes and reimaginings, the game of expectations, the mutual understanding between author and reader that what we are reading now is built–for better or worse–on what we’ve read before?

Also elves are cool and great and that’s just facts.

A.K. LARKWOOD: I can’t believe everyone spotted the elves in my book, I thought I hid them so well. Anyway my excuse is because I just think it’s cute to give people pointy ears.

TESH: This is also valid.

Q: TESH: Speaking of sources for fantasy tropes: can someone just like… explain Dungeons and Dragons to me? From a writing perspective, I mean. I know that for some people roleplay can be a hugely productive story-generating engine and I am curious about how that goes because it has never worked for me!

LARKWOOD: D&D as I have played it is good for telling exactly one story, which is “some people who are good at fighting explore a mysterious location.” At its best this is really all you need! God knows I have got multiple huge chunks of book out of this very mechanism! But I don’t think it’s good for generating plot so much as it encourages you to think about character. The role of DM and player are not the same as the roles of author and reader, the axis of authority over what happens to this fictional person is very different, so it gives you a different perspective on… what is it that endears you to a character so much that you get very sad when they are eaten by bugs in a random encounter? What makes it fun to spend time in a certain persona, until they are eaten by bugs in a random encounter? Why do some character deaths feel important and meaningful and others feel frustrating and pointless, such as, when you are eaten by bugs in a random encounter? (This was in 2014. I will neither forgive nor forget.)

Fun fact: many years ago I DMed a game which featured some of the locations in The Unspoken Name as playable dungeons. In this game my future wife played a professional wrestler named Roxanne, which honestly makes me think the whole book would have been better if she’d been at the wheel throughout.

Q: MAXWELL: Both The Unspoken Name and Silver in the Wood have sequels. How did you find the process of writing the second book? How does your approach to character and plot change when you know the reader has probably already met them?

TESH: It’s both great fun and the absolute worst! Fun because you already have a world to play in and some character dynamics to play with, and you don’t have to do nearly as much work establishing things either for the readers or for yourself. The worst for almost exactly the same reasons. Writing Silver in the Wood took me a long time for how short it is, because I was figuring out the mysteries along with the characters. Drowned Country, conversely, was written fairly quickly, but it was much harder. This despite knowing up front almost everything I needed to know (beach episode, goffic ruins, sad vampire, mysterious young lady, elves!)–having to tell a story within an established character framework threw me, because it limited my options for what those characters would plausibly do and feel. The two-year timeskip that I ended up building into the book is mostly there to give me breathing room and shake up the character dynamics a bit–my original concept for it followed hard on the heels of the first book’s plot, and I wrote about six thousand words of that before realizing it was hurtling towards being a sad story about a couple having a bad breakup, which I didn’t want to write! I think it was Kass who suggested “just set it two years later” and it worked like a charm.

LARKWOOD: I had heard all about The Difficult Second Novel and had blithely been like “but I would simply have no problems with this,” and I was extremely wrong! I wrote The Unspoken Name over several years with infinite latitude to rethink and rewrite, and no expectation that anyone was ever going to read it. “Do the same thing again, but different and better, in approximately a quarter of the time, with more people watching” is always a bit of a daunting prospect. My top tip is: don’t be in your final year of law school, or if you must, try to ensure that a global health crisis doesn’t also happen at the same time. That said, I think it was a productive struggle, and knowing that some people are already invested in the characters does mean you can skip straight to being very nasty to them.

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Q: TESH: How do you come up with a good title for a book? (Yes this question is here to torment you.)

MAXWELL: YOU HAVE TO ANSWER THIS AS WELL

LARKWOOD: HA HA HA. The Unspoken Name was my working title! I made a list of about 30 alternative options and thought very hard about it for several weeks and – of course – reverted to the original. (but the title of the sequel I got right away – you win some you lose some)

MAXWELL: You title your first draft five minutes before you post it on the internet, then you discover the title you picked has been used by several other books, then you go through dozens and dozens of titles until words no longer have any meaning, then someone else (hi, Ali!) suggests something thoughtful based on some imagery and you’re like yes! That one! Please never make me title a book again.

TESH: Since I HAVE to answer–I don’t see what the problem is, guys! You just say literally what the book is about: e.g. Silver in the Wood is about a guy named Silver who goes into a wood, and Drowned Country is about some country which is underwater. Simple!

MAXWELL: Petition to retitle both Emily’s books Some Trees And A Sad Man.

TESH: Some Trees And A Sad Man and its sequel Same Trees, Different Sad Man.

LARKWOOD: I can’t believe we’ve solved the title problem for all time! Really looking forward to Ev’s upcoming masterwork, Two Boys In Space (Who Kiss), and mine, Too Many God Damn Things Happen In This Book.

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TESH: I think our publicists will shout at us if we do not end with: that’s Drowned Country by Emily Tesh for gay disaster folklore and gothic seasides, out August 2020; Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell for space princes stuck in an arranged marriage, coming February 2021, and The Unspoken Name + 2021’s upcoming highly mysterious sequel by A.K. Larkwood for haunted snake goddesses and orcs with dating problems. If you have enjoyed our conversation, you may also enjoy our books!

Winter’s Orbit, Drowned Country, and The Unspoken Name are available wherever books are sold. The paperback edition of The Unspoken Name is also now out!

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How Winter’s Orbit Went From AO3 to Published Space Opera

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There have been some very public examples of works that began life as fanfiction (i.e. not-for-profit stories written in the already existing fictional worlds or pop culture, often by and for writers from communities underrepresented in commercial storytelling) only to later become published books— the most famous examples probably being E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey, Cassandra Clare’s City of Bones, or Anna Todd’s After. But not all works published on fanfiction websites are fanfiction. Fanfiction platforms, such as Archive of Our Own or Wattpad, also play host to “original” (not based on an existing canon) non-commercial fiction. While these original works are, by and large, less common than fic, they often have much in common with their transformative fandom neighbors.

Winter’s Orbit, a healing and action-packed queer romance space opera that hits bookshelves next week, began life as an original work on Archive of Our Own (AO3), where it gained an enthusiastic following. Now, British author Everina Maxwell, is hoping to find a broader, commercial audience for her story about two space princes in an arranged marriage on which the political stability of their solar system rests. The story of Winter’s Orbit path from original work on AO3 to published book is a fascinating one, and one that is emblematic of the increasingly candid impact the world of transformative fandom is having on the book industry and other spheres of the commercial entertainment world. We talked to Maxwell about her debut novel, what it was like to bring Winter’s Orbit from AO3 to Tor Books, and how the transformative fannish experience has impacted her writing.

Den of Geek: Where did the kernel for the story of Winter’s Orbit begin? Was it a character? A relationship? A setting? A theme?

Everina Maxwell: It all grew out of the first scenes: a good-natured prince is told to marry the widower of his cousin. It’s a political emergency. But his cousin and this diplomat had the perfect marriage, while the prince himself is a talkative disaster; how can he ever match up to the previous marriage? Was it as perfect as it looked? So I guess that’s a character, a relationship and a setting! I like to start from something that has an inbuilt tension. It means I’m anticipating scenes before I even properly plot them out.

Winter’s Orbit is told through the dual perspectives of the two main characters. Did you find it easier to write from Jainan or Kiem’s point-of-view?

Jainan—the diplomat—makes more sense to me; he’s introverted, anxious, and his thought processes flow logically from his basic assumptions about the world. On the other hand Prince Kiem is an absolute delight to write. It’s just fun to be in the head of someone who’s happy by nature and genuinely delighted to talk to anyone who crosses his path.

Winter’s Orbit is such a comforting book, but it also deals with some heavy issues, including domestic abuse. How did you go about balancing the hurt and the comfort of this story?

When it comes to fiction, I think the dark and the light are two sides of the same coin. Healing is possible; danger and trouble can pass. Though Winter’s Orbit is a “light” book, it’s definitely true that it contains heavy topics. To me, it’s reassuring on a very deep level that it’s possible to find happiness and joy even if life hasn’t been easy.

I do believe in content warnings to let people know if it’s a story will deal with specific upsetting topics, and I encourage anyone who wants details to check out the content warnings page (https://everinamaxwell.com/content-warnings).

Do you think romance and science fiction make good bedfellows?

They always have! I grew up reading writers like Bujold, who built up a universe where love stories were essential to the action plots and vice versa. I strongly believe books in every genre benefit from two people having unreasonably strong feelings about each other, and romance is just one subset of that.

Winter’s Orbit began life as an original work on Archive of Our Own. When and why did you start considering publishing it commercially and what did that process look like?

It was very long and meandering, since when I was writing it I didn’t have a long-term plan. At first I was just trading Kiem and Jainan snippets with a friend; later I posted them for more people to read, then when I had a whole story to share I put it on AO3. I still don’t know if that was technically the right place to put it, but it was the only writing website I was familiar with, I knew my way around it, and I’d read origfic on there before. The first draft was online for a couple of years. People very kindly read it and told their friends. I still have no idea how Tamara (my now-agent) found it, but she contacted me out of the blue and rewrote it with me, and then Ali Fisher at Tor picked it up and really helped me with the final rewrite. I wrote it five years ago now—I don’t know if that seems too long or too short, but it certainly doesn’t seem accurate.

How different is The Course of Honour from Winter’s Orbit?

The Course of Honour was laser-focused on Kiem and Jainan’s relationship. And don’t get me wrong, Winter’s Orbit very much is too, but working with a professional editor encouraged me to consider the implications of worldbuilding and plot events, and to build them out into a bigger picture. I knew some of this stuff from the beginning—I remember answering a comment years ago with some of the galaxy link explanations—but it wasn’t until the third major draft that it became part of the plot.

How did the decision to change the title come about and how did you settle on Winter’s Orbit?

It turns out The Course of Honour is already the title of a book! I’m bad at titles and my editor was really helpful on this one. I liked how it made the winter imagery more central.

What role has fanfiction played in your life as a reader and a writer, if it has?

I’ve both read and written fanfiction but as a very small fish in a very large pond—if you’re reading this and wondering what my AO3 handle is, you’ve almost certainly never come across it! Casual writing and shared-world creation with friends have brought me huge amounts of joy over the years, whether connected to a canon or not.

Fanfiction is such a broad category, loosely defined as non-commercial works based on existing stories, but I am super interested in some of the common narrative and stylistic traits that much of fic shares. How would you define Winter’s Orbit’s narrative and prose style and interests, and how much of that, if any, comes from the world of transformative fandom?

Winter’s Orbit’s primary concern is its two main characters. Where there was a choice between a revealing conversation about the characters and an action scene, the character work often won out. I think one thing that fannish experience gave me was a strong appreciation for character arcs and permission to unabashedly put them at the centre of a story.

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Do you think there are story things the world of fanfiction (generally) does better than the world of commercially published fiction (generally)?

This is a complicated question, since “fandom” includes so many people who are interested in so many different things! I will say that my experience has been based around stories with a laser focus on character development (including relationships) above everything else, and this focus produces some amazing works—though my narrow description there leaves out worldbuilding fans and so many others. Ultimately it’s a rich and creative community that has both its own tropes and room to experiment.

Do you have any plans to continue writing in this world and with these characters? (I would read so many more!) Either way, can you tell us what you are working on next?

I’m not totally ruling out revisiting these characters, though they’ve earned a bit of a rest for now! I definitely plan to continue in the Resolution universe. I’m currently working on a book set on a planet outside the Iskat Empire, starring two even bigger disasters than Kiem and Jainan (and an expansion of Remnant powers). I’m very excited for that.

And, finally, what stories, of any kind, have been bringing you joy recently?

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There are so many good books coming up this year, which is lucky because generally it’s very hard to concentrate. On the queer SFF side, I’m very excited about The Unbroken by C. L. Clark, which is North African post-colonial fantasy, and She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan, which deals with the rise of a genderqueer emperor in fantasy China. I’ve read these two and they’re excellent. I’m waiting impatiently for Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard and The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri. Oh, and on the romance side, I really loved Division Bells, by Iona Datt Sharma, a beautiful queer workplace romance which is almost elegiac about public service. I’ll stop now—but it’s a good year for books!

Winter’s Orbit is available to buy and read on February 2nd. You can preorder here. Find out more about Everina Maxwell on Twitter or at her official website.

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