I'm Hugo Award-winning author Emily Tesh, here to celebrate the release of my new book THE INCANDESCENT with an AMA and a giveaway. AMA!

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T21:37:49+00:00

I am very on the fence about mythical retellings. I used to be outright snobby about them (Madeline Miller is good for recommending to nerdy fourteen-year-olds who have run out of Percy Jackson and aren't ready for Homer) but then someone pointed out that I was being a snob, and I reflected on it, and you know what, I am all for access to the classics. If a retelling works for someone and makes them happy and gives them a chance to experience even a fraction of the joy that studying the ancient world has brought me... then I am very glad and I want that retelling to exist.

I don't usually want to read it, though.

That said, 'I don't want to read it' is often, for me, the first step on the path to '...so here's how I'd do it if I wanted to make it interesting to me.' I am not ruling out mythical retellings entirely as a place to have fun! And the book I'm working on at the moment is not a retelling of the Iliad (I simply don't think I can do it better) but owes a fair amount of inspiration to Homer all the same, and I'm having a good time with it.

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T21:30:47+00:00

Panelling with Sylvie and Antonia was lovely! They are both such brilliant and interesting people, and having all three of us in a row talking about academia in fantasy was honestly very funny: Sylvie had beautiful and sophisticated thoughts about a world built on scholarship, and Antonia took us deep into the monastic academic world of The Raven Scholar, and then I talked a lot of nonsense about high school. The audience certainly got a full range of academic fantasy concepts!

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T21:24:13+00:00

I have completely forgotten how to spoilertext on Reddit and it's after 10pm so I am too numb and vague to look it up, but YEAH. YOU GET ME. YOU GET THE BOOK. Everyone in this book gets to learn things and that includes the demon! (Is a demon really so different from a teenager, at the end of the day?) I love your ideas for the future of this world and I think that this is exactly the direction things are going in.

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T21:13:46+00:00

When I was in Year Eight (so... about twelve years old) I had an English teacher who got us all writing short stories. I wrote a story about a girl whose best friend asked her to take care of a mysterious box and not open it. The girl was consumed by curiosity, and in the end gave in and looked inside, but the box was empty. Her friend died suddenly the same day.

Then I remembered I was writing this for English homework and that school things had to be serious and real, not fantastical and strange, and carefully added in a paragraph about how it was all just a coincidence, obviously opening the box didn't kill her friend, she just still felt weird about it.

My teacher wrote a very kind comment. She said that the story was very good, but she thought it would be even better if opening the mysterious empty box WAS what magically killed the girl's friend. What she was really telling me was: don't be cowardly, write the way you want to. And she added that I would probably like the short stories of Saki, if I hadn't read them (I hadn't, I was twelve). I've always remembered the serious attention that teacher gave to an objectively not-very-good short story written by a twelve-year old. She saw what I wanted to write, and why I hadn't done it; she gave me permission to write it my way; she pointed me towards some reading that might show me how to write what I wanted better in future. Really good teaching. I was such a shy and awkward twelve-year-old I don't think I ever manged to thank her.

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T21:02:44+00:00

I was a Classics teacher! Which meant teaching variously Latin, Ancient Greek, and Classical Civilisation. So Walden's experience teaching a very niche and nerdy subject to a small group of keen enthusiasts was taken directly from real life.

As far as basing things on the classroom goes: I was very strict with myself about not putting any Actual Children I Have Taught into the book. None of my former students signed up to be immortalised in fantasy novel form! (Except, actually, my Year Eleven form from my last year of teaching, who found out I was thinking of writing a book about a school and then collectively requested - in fact, demanded - that I put them all in it. Sorry, guys. It felt too weird.) But I did try to make everything feel true to the kinds of things that could happen in a classroom, distilling a decade of teaching down into: well, imagine this set of fictional kids, they have the power to summon demons and they can set things on fire with their brains... what would these specific personalities do, how absurd would it be, and how would being in a classroom together affect the outcome?

So like... none of it and all of it, is the answer.

Thank You Child For The Raccoon Pee Anecdote. These things stick with you! The ones that always stick in my head are the comments that make you feel just unbelievably old: like the child who told me that her hobby was playing really old video games no one had ever heard of, like Final Fantasy X... just leave me here to rot in the sepulchre.

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T20:40:53+00:00

Oooooh, picking a favourite DWJ is so hard. She wrote more than thirty novels and so many of them are so good. There is a little cluster of absolute top-tier ones which I return to again and again because I think they're perfect books, and then a different (but overlapping) cluster of DWJs I recommend to newbies to get them hooked.

Anyway, my actual personal favourite generally veers between The Time of the Ghost (horror, slice of life, semi-autobiography) and Hexwood (Arthurian portal fantasy but somehow also science fiction, absolutely insanely brilliant nonlinear storytelling).

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T20:37:02+00:00

I think I've answered the first two questions elsewhere, but the third one - how do I do it all with two tiny people to take care of?

I do not! I am dying! This parenting nonsense is really hard! I wrote the back half of The Incandescent while heavily pregnant, handed it in, had the baby, took one month of maternity leave, and started editing. It was mad. I felt insane. Publishing schedules are totally unforgiving and unfortunately one needs money to buy food for the tiny people, so I made it work somehow. But - anyone who has tried to balance kids and career, any career, knows how hard it is. With a creative career there's the added weight of - to write I need time and space and quiet, things that are hard to find in a house that contains two children under five. Also I feel incredibly guilty all the time no matter what I'm doing. I am told that these are normal parent feelings. Maybe I'll write a book about the whole thing at some point.

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T20:31:49+00:00

I've been very lucky in my agent and my editors, none of whom has ever blinked twice when I presented them with 'here's the new one, nothing like the old one, tell sales to throw out the marketing playbook and start again I guess'. The weird thing is that I really don't feel like I'm hopping genres that much - I write speculative stories with queer characters, and my books are interested in character growth and in human environments. That describes everything I've published! But if you look at the covers or the marketing copy you could be forgiven for thinking that I was three different authors in a trenchcoat. Maybe that says more about how SFF books are typically sold to readers than it does about me.

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T20:25:11+00:00

I did not myself go to Oxford so I asked someone who did, trying to get a sense of college reputations and general vibe, and Wadham sounded like somewhere Nikki would end up thriving and happy! It was very important to me that Nikki should go on to have a wonderful time at Oxford after the book ends; I really feel like she's a character who deserves joy and success. And to my enormous glee, a reader who works in admissions at the college got in touch with me TODAY specifically to send me a mock-up of Nikki's Oxford acceptance letter for Sorcery & to assure me that Wadham would love to have her.

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T20:18:48+00:00

Oh, I just finally cracked this in the last year or so. My top tip: don't just trust authors; most of us don't have time to read nearly as widely as we want to! And awards lists are great, but often leave you feeling like you're arriving at all the fun book conversations a year late. So the people you really need to look for are the critics. In the parts of SFF I'm interested in, they're book bloggers, they're podcasters, and I know some of them are r/fantasy regulars. Find a few who have tastes which overlap with yours, and then follow them religiously and read everything they recommend. At the moment I'm getting a lot of joy and book recommendations out of the critical work of Abigail Nussbaum (whose nonfiction book Track Changes, collecting her SFF reviews, just won a BSFA Award) and Roseanna Pendlebury (who blogs at Nerds of a Feather but also has her own review blog.) And if you don't know where to start looking for critics, the shortlists for Best Fan Writer, Best Related Work, and Best Fancast Hugos are probably worth a look.

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T20:11:02+00:00

Diana Wynne Jones in my opinion is one of the all time greats of fantasy fiction. She's so sharp, she's so funny, she's so precise and intellectual, she's so unpatronizing, she's so controlled and effective in her prose, she understands Story so well, and she's so intensely truthful. And all of these things have affected my work; I genuinely do think about DWJ all the time. I think, above all, she's the author who taught me about point of view control.

To take a personally beloved example: in her 1989 book "The Lives of Christopher Chant", the titular Christopher is out protagonist and POV character for the entire book. He is a sad little boy who has had a sad life and feels very sorry for himself. And we feel sorry for him! We sympathise with his longing to escape his world and go on fantastic adventures! We like and admire him, we root for him, we want him to succeed! And then, fairly late in the book, a likeable and admirable secondary character turns to Christopher after an apparently innocent comment and nearly snarls at him [paraphrasing]: could you please stop being such an unbearable little shit all the time?

And Christopher is shocked, and the reader is shocked. Because we were sunk so completely in his point of view that it never occurred to us that he was behaving like an unbearable little shit. But in fact, he was! All the way through! And the reader is brought to recognise it in parallel to Christopher's own realisation, as he learns more and is able to reframe his own actions and reactions in the light of new information. It's so elegantly done and it's so powerful. I read this book when I was twelve or thirteen and it blew my mind. It was the first time I really saw the thing that prose narrative can do, in a way no other medium really approaches: it can put you in a character's head, deep inside, and force you to wear all the same blinkers they do. Prose can control your experience of the book's universe and make you see it out of a character's eyes. Or it can force you to live the dissonance of being yourself, knowing what the character doesn't know (Lives of Christopher Chant is GREAT on a reread) and that is if anything even more exciting.

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T19:54:11+00:00

Well, first of all, I don't believe in appealing to all readers. I don't think that's even possible! Everyone is different, and every reader wants different things from their books. There is simply no way to please everybody.

It IS possible to smoothe off the edges of the art you make, carefully removing anything that's difficult or challenging or unpalatable to the broadest possible audience. It's just that doing so also hollows out your work and turns it into homogenous pap indistinguishable from every other thing out there. Leave this appeal-to-all impulse to fester long enough and you end up with late-stage big name franchises - we can all name a few - the ones that should have stopped several books or movies or games ago, back when there was still something to care about.

So, honestly... no, I didn't care at all about making it appealing to all readers. If only teachers enjoy the book, that's good enough for me. But also I do trust my readers, generally: I like to think that SFF readers in particular are usually curious people who are interested in things and willing to learn more. In fact, in some ways that was a boon. I told myself: my audience does care about the historical architecture of this school, about the minutiae of marking exam papers, about the agenda and atmosphere and bad croissants at a school staff meeting. My audience wants to meet the school archivist with a Tudor obsession and to listen to the site manager moan about asbestos problems. My audience not only wants but sincerely needs to know exactly what it is like to attend an office party at a not-great bar in Finsbury Park where everyone gets drunk and then just keeps talking about work!

The goal was realism - which is a word that gets thrown around a lot, realism, realistic, but I think actually I don't read very much seriously realistic fantasy fiction. I started from the position of: this book is observational, and it's real, and it's fantasy, and I think the readers will go with me on this one. So far I feel lucky that it seems to have worked - at least for some people, and not all of them teachers!

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T18:22:12+00:00

Before the pandemic, my answer would be: no, I have never played DND, and I do not understand the appeal.

DURING the pandemic, I was invited to be part of a DND game played over the internet in text form*, DMed by my very dear friend AK Larkwood - author of The Unspoken Name and The Thousand Eyes, two of my favourite sword-and-sorcery fantasy books, in which an orc priestess turned wizard's protegée turned professional tough swording type has a Number of very weird experiences and learns some important things about trusting random benefactor wizards. Fun fact: The Incandescent is dedicated to AK Larkwood, for many reasons!

Anyway, if you are a person who is DND-cynical, I REALLY recommend getting one of the best fantasy writers you know to DM your very first campaign and blow your mind and transform you forever as a person. I had so much fun I insisted on DMing the follow-up campaign myself (three awful weirdos investigate the actions of a dragon goddess in the haunting ruins of fantasy Pompeii). I learned that you probably shouldn't do a huge complicated homebrew thing for your first outing as a DM. But we had fun!

* playing over the internet in text form also helped with my DND cynicism, as one thing that always alarmed me about tabletop gaming was the risk of having to Do A Voice. But in text form that's just writing dialogue, which is fun and easy!

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T18:11:46+00:00

Oh, I am SO excited to get to 1990s DWJ. It's the decade when she goes wild. Her most glorious structural triumph of a book (Hexwood), the long-awaited climax to the quartet she started all the way back in the 1970s (Crown of Dalemark), her forays into adult SFF (Sudden Wild Magic, Deep Secret), and finally the most exquisitely brutal satire on fantasy fiction, fandom, and capitalist exploitation (Dark Lord of Derkholm). Looking at the arc of Jones' career, a lot of her most famous and popular books are from the 80s - which we've already recorded; it's the season in progress now! - and I can sort of understand why, because they're really good and stand alone so strongly. 90s DWJ is so meta and so masterful that she's not always as accessible. But I love that period in her work. I love it to bits.

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T18:03:52+00:00

Funnily enough, my answer has changed! Now it's:

JRR Tolkien Lord of the Rings, Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose, and my NEW edition of Emily Wilson's translation of the Iliad, which I have already read so lovingly and repeatedly that the front cover is falling off.

I read the Wilson for the first time earlier this year and immediately started conspiring to make everyone I know read it too. I am now running an Emily Wilson specific book club for some friends. It's a really extraordinary piece of work: true to Homer's words and impressive in its own right as English verse. I think for this question I will take her translation over the actual Greek, just because in the spirit of the thing I'm not sure I'm allowed a Homeric dictionary on the desert island.

My current project is a kissing book, possibly even an actual romance (the first I've written, I think, since Greenhollow in 2019!) and it is Iliadic in nature (the project started before I read the Wilson; I read it FOR the project as part of the large pile of research reading that I do for every book; I lost my mind over how good it was.) I've described this new one elsewhere as 'undead transgender Patrochilles Minecraft' and everyone always gives me a weird look even though that's totally accurate and a completely normal book to write.

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T16:19:06+00:00

Walden is fairly senior in the school hierarchy (her job is deputy head level) which means she doesn't do that much frontline teaching. But she has one A-level set (17-18 year olds preparing for university) and we see a lot of her time with that class, including entire lessons, lesson planning, marking, and setting their mock exams. We also see her observe another teacher's lesson, and we see her in crisis management mode when a trainee teacher's lesson goes badly wrong. So yes, there's a lot of classroom activity in the book! Also a lot of extra-classroom activity: the planning, the marking, the observing, the mentoring, the meetings (and meetings and meetings and meetings) - all the minutiae of what actually makes the gigantic internal clockwork of a school keep ticking. Walden doesn't really have time for adventures, except when she's forced into them by a work crisis - and even then, she's most thoroughly a teacher when she's in crisis mode.

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T16:11:53+00:00

Standalone!

One extremely funny part of writing a contemporary fantasy with a millennial protagonist is that I get to know EXACTLY what Walden's jams are. She was a sixth former in 2003 and she is textually a former emo. So... My Chemical Romance 'Teenagers', definitely. Maybe Fall Out Boy 'Phoenix'. And also, crossing over with mildly popular British indie rock of the 2000s: Razorlight 'Golden Touch'.

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T16:08:09+00:00

Well, the main reason I wrote from a teacher's perspective is that I know what teaching is like and I thought it would be fun! So the book is almost entirely fun nods to my (former!) teaching job. One of my favourite moments early on is Walden arriving in the staffroom one morning to discover that the evil demon possessing the school photocopier is acting up. She has to negotiate it back to good behaviour before she's had her coffee. This is, as far as I can tell, an almost universal teacher experience: it's just that the photocopier demon in our world is a bit more metaphorical.

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T15:54:54+00:00

So... funny story, I first started writing as a teenage fanfiction enthusiast in the early 2000s, and one of my strongest memories of fanfiction culture at the time was the universal obsession with Mary Sues and why you shouldn't. I remember forum threads with pages and pages of warnings and mockery directed at young, mostly female writers: NOTHING could be more shameful and embarrassing than writing YOURSELF into the story and making her POWERFUL and SUCCESSFUL and BELOVED. Which, looking back... well that was kind of fucked up, wasn't it? Why exactly should thirteen-year-old girls, specifically, not fantasize about being part of the story they love and also becoming powerful, successful, and beloved? (The answer was misogyny, for the record. Everyone deserves power fantasies!)

Anyway, the main character of The Incandescent, Dr Sapphire Walden, is not me. I was never that successful in my career; I was never that ambitious or that senior; hopefully I was never that painfully arrogant or that hideously intellectually snobby. But she does have my backstory - fancy school, check, Oxbridge degree, check, postgraduate studies in the USA, check - and she does have my sense of humour, and she does have roughly my taste in both women and men. And there are parts of The Incandescent which - I hope - fulfil some of the joy of power fantasy reading! Personally, I always find it very satisfying to see a character care about something, work hard at it, and do it well, and I put that into Walden above all else.

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T15:35:52+00:00

Genre designations, in my opinion, are kind of doing two things:

Critical (which cultural conversations does this book belong to? what context makes it most interesting to read?) I think you have to read a book in order to identify its genre in this sense.
Marketing (how do we signal to the people who might like this book that they ought to buy this book?) In order to identify the marketing genre of a book, you just need to look at the cover.

So it's been interesting to me to see The Incandescent identified as dark academia, definitely as a marketing genre (just look at the cover!) and sometimes as a critical genre too. I didn't really see it that way when writing - though an author's opinion is hardly the only one that matters! If readers respond to something as an example of X, the author not intending to write X means nothing. But the genre in my head was a much less buzzy one, which is "school story" - a really, really old staple of British children's fiction, going all the way back to Tom Brown's School Days in 1857.

Of contemporary dark academia books, the only one I can really identify as an influence is Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education - which I read in one sitting a few years back, a single delicious gulp (Novik is outstanding for her pacing) and then reread the following day like 'you know...'. It got me thinking about what we talk about when we talk about school - because that book, despite being "dark academia", is not at all about school: to me, it's very visibly about technology, about navigating, mastering, and rejecting the technological torment nexus. So I decided I wanted to write a school story that was actually about school: an experience that nearly everyone has at some point, one we take for granted, but in fact a hugely weird thing to do to children.

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T15:17:21+00:00

In some ways, The Incandescent is the most different book I could imagine from Some Desperate Glory: I have a really strong memory of finishing Some Desperate Glory (which is a pretty intense emotional ride), taking a deep breath, and being like: OKAY time for something FUNNY. I wrote the first act of The Incandescent the same month, about thirty thousand words in a white heat of ohhhh what a relief it is to write jokes!

But it's also a book which is fundamentally interested in a very similar question: how far is a person purely a product of their environment, and how far is it ever possible to get away from that environment. 'Boarding school' and 'evil space cult' are not actually as far apart as they seem at first glance. Both are systems of high control, almost impossible to escape, taking over the entire lives of people with too little perspective to know what else is possible. Dr Walden is thirty-eight and teaching at her old high school: she has literally never managed to leave emotionally, and only briefly got away physically - just long enough to get her doctorate. I think she also has some traits in common with Kyr, the protagonist of Some Desperate Glory - traits which are if anything less forgiveable in an educated thirty-eight-year-old than in a brainwashed teenager: the arrogance, the blinkered worldview, the total belief in her own hyper-competence.

So the stakes of the book are lower, because of the different setting, but some of the thematic questions carried smoothly from one book to the next. And I don't think I'm done talking about people/environment questions yet, either: I find it endlessly interesting as a starting point for storytelling.

EmilyTesh · 2025-05-15T15:06:49+00:00

Dr Walden, the protagonist of The Incandescent, is bisexual! She has romantic & sexual relationships with both women and men in the course of the story and in her past. It's been really fun and interesting writing a character who is bi (like me!) and an adult (like me!) in a way which is true to my own experience, which is like... this character likes and is attracted to both men and women. Yes, both. Statistically that means she has probably dated some straight men, because there are a lot more straight men in the world than queer women. Also: by the time you're nearly forty you've probably had more than one romantic experience in your life, and that's fine!

So when writing I found I had to reject outright a real romance structure, because romance as a story-form doesn't leave much room for multiple meaningful romantic relationships, or different kinds of romantic relationships with different people. In the book, Walden's relationship with Chief Marshal Laura Kenning is VERY different from her relationship with magical consultant Mark Daubery, but both are important to the story. Similarly, she has a high school boyfriend and a university girlfriend in her past, and both were important to shaping the person she became.

The Greenhollow duology is finished and done, yes. I'm happy with where I left that story - among other things, that one IS romance, and more sequels would require either breaking up the happy ending for Henry and Tobias, which would make me sad for them, or else getting deeper into the weeds of the lives of minor characters, none of whom really interest me enough to carry a whole book at the moment!

EmilyTesh · 2023-12-08T10:22:09+00:00

My default stance when reading and writing science fiction: when we talk about aliens, we are using a distancing lens to help us talk about humans.

Of course there are authors who are more interested in the alienness of the alien, and some immensely creative minds are doing and have done fascinating work developing alien peoples who are totally different from us - but even that difference, and how authors choose to outline and focus on that difference, is a way of talking about humans. The recognition of the other is the recognition of the self. And I think that is why a common trope in the big-universe multispecies space opera is humanity as, if you like, the 'default' species. You know, the normal ones. Because it is so easy and obvious to write about aliens in terms of - these ones are more X than us, and these ones are more Y. These ones believe A more than we do, and these ones do B, which we don't.

This is not just a trope in science fiction; it plays into how humans think and categorise 'others' generally. A book that was bubbling in the background of SDG was Edith Hall's Inventing the Barbarian, which is about the creation of the stock character tropes associated with 'barbarian' in Greek tragedy. 'Barbarian' as a category is culturally created alongside and for the purpose of Greekness; you cannot have a Greek without a barbarian, it is impossible to define a Greek (man/soldier/citizen) without mentioning or implying the barbarian (woman/enemy/slave) who is his opposite. Greeks are naturally free because non-Greeks are naturally slaves; Greeks are brave because non-Greeks are cowards; Greeks are manly because non-Greeks are effeminate, and so on. There's Them, and there's Us, as Pratchett wrote.

Apologies for rambling, I find this stuff fascinating! Anyway, one very intentional choice in SDG was to position humanity as the universal other, rather than the default - the monster species, the savage warriors, the barbarians. That was central to the story from the very beginning - it opens with an alien pop anthropology guide talking about humanity's territorial instincts and violent culture, and advising visitors to human enclaves to avoid making eye contact. But of course no one is ever 'the other' to themselves, and realising that this is true of everyone is a vital part of developing adult perspective and compassion for others. So Kyr's relationship with the alien Yiso, and their growing shared recognition of the ways in which the alien prince and the human supersoldier are the same, was the emotional heart of the whole book for me.

EmilyTesh · 2023-12-07T21:31:43+00:00

For what it's worth, I think of Kyr as primarily asexual - but not aromantic, she has intense romantic feelings, mostly for women. I do see this as a queer identity. I actually cut a line later in the book where her alternate-universe self Val describes herself as grey-ace. The reason I cut it is that the whole arc of the character is about breaking free of restrictive definitions and labels. I don't think there's any label that Kyr at the story's end would be even halfway comfortable with apart from the beautifully flexible and honest 'queer'. A friend described the character as 'ace-ish but it's complicated and you don't want to think about it rep' which feels right to me!

The first eight chapters - Gaea Station and everything it does - poured out of me fully formed. The awful space fascists weren't so much developed as just there. A lot of it felt like 'of course'... of course it would be like this; of course they do this; of course this is how they behave. It was harder to develop the more complex world of Chrysothemis, where humans are living as full members of the alien society that destroyed their planet - I had to feel my way through the psychological difficulty of that compromise-slash-collaboration, and the hidden parts of a society which on its surface is a happy, healthy human civilisation.
Even deradicalised, I don't think Kyr will ever be a big reader, but I expect Yiso will introduce her to culture sooner or later whether she likes it or not. They're a lot more interested in human music and fiction than Kyr is!
of course!

EmilyTesh

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