Hi everyone!
I’m so thrilled to be bringing to you all this insightful and amazing interview I had the opportunity to do with Fiona Fenn, author the recently released post-apocalyptic fantasy/sci-fi novel.
A huge thank you to TBR Beyond Tours for fixing me this opportunity. All opinions are my own. I received the e-copy from NetGalley.
Don’t forget to check other incredible books in this tour, featuring topics such as Top 5 Reasons to Read This Book, and Favoirye Quotes from the Book.
SYNOPSIS
When the consequences get him exiled to the land he helped terrorize, can this evil wizard find redemption... and love?
Orpheus can't believe it's come to this. After helping his childhood friend conquer the realm by raising an army of hell-beasts, the befuddled dark sorcerer finds himself banished when the price of his magic endangers the palace. Isolated and betrayed, the feared spellcaster isn't exactly thrilled when his irritating and handsome rival keeps stepping between him and certain doom.
Ill at ease in the barren wasteland his powers created, Orpheus slowly warms to the charismatic ex-general's relentless overtures. But as his feelings grow more intense, the former villain struggles with an inconvenient calling towards heroism.
Will dabbling in good deeds get him killed or open the doors to happily ever after?
The Crack at the Heart of Everything is the charmingly swoon-worthy first book in an epic LGBTQ+ fantasy series. If you like character-driven stories, snarky humor, and well-earned redemption arcs, then you'll adore Fiona Fenn's unexpected hero's journey.
INTERVIEW
Q) What came first for you, the characters or the setting?
First, thank you so much for the wonderful questions! They are so thoughtful and I have had so much fun coming up with my answers :)
1000% the characters absolutely came to me first. Orpheus in particular was a fully fleshed-out mess before words ever hit paper (okay, a screen). That is very typical of my writing style, though. I start with the characters and the shape of the plot and the nuances of the world fall in place around their emotional journeys. I also adore writing villains and Orpheus is your classic high fantasy B-side villain who is working in service to the bigger bad. He’s very familiar to me as a general archetype and I have spent enough years of my life simping for these kinds of characters that, once it was my chance to write one, I knew exactly what to do.
To a lesser extent, Fenrir was the same. I knew I wanted him to be your typical hero archetype and in that he came to me fully realized, but positioning him on the “wrong” side of the conflict actually made for a lot of surprises during drafting. How would a person like that react to participating in the atrocities Lore led? What would trying to do some good within the limited power structure he has access to actually look like? Fenrir has a very stable moral compass that only ever wavers when it comes to Orpheus, and we’ll actually see a lot more of that in book 2. Fenrir is a great guy but, when push comes to shove, he is always the character that is least predictable.
Q) How did you manage to capture Orpheus’ character, with his complexity of resilience, grief and strength in him so well? Orpheus stood out to be because he’s lost so much, he gives up and still manages to find that piece inside himself that wants to keep on living?
That you describe him this way puts the biggest smile on my face! He really is all those things, isn’t he? I have a deep love for characters who have been forced to survive all their lives, and love to explore the ends they will go to or the lies they will tell to shape a reality they can accept. There’s a strength already in that, but when the result of that adaptation is taking part in some problematic stuff there’s a very real come-to moment that a character goes through if they have any moral compass left.
That’s why we get two sides of the same coin with Orpheus and Lore. Orpheus maintains his humanity while Lore is all too eager to give hers up in her quest for survival. They’re both carrying very similar trauma, but the way they internalize and process it is very different. I think a lot of Orpheus’ strength comes from his ability to escape into a fantasy world. That’s something I did myself as a child (and still do as an adult). Maladaptive daydreaming is a very real condition and in Orpheus’ case it escalated to the point that he is basically living in a reality of his own construction which Lore is all too happy to reinforce to keep him under her thumb. But the truth is, the insulation his imagination provided from his traumatic childhood saved him in a way Lore’s resentment and anger could not.
Q) If you could write another novel on a side character from this book, who would it be?
Oh my gosh…Red is the obvious answer! She has a very different relationship with the world than Orpheus (and even Fenrir). She’s really clawed her way to the top by virtue of her own genius, and now with Lore out of the picture there isn’t really anyone holding her back from making a bigger impact on the world. That said, Red is very driven by the “big picture” and has never carved out a space for romance, so I’d like to see what would happen when life settles down and the opportunity for it arises. I imagine it would take her completely off-guard and suddenly her and Orpheus would have a lot more in common than they already do :)
Q) I loved your writing style! We’re privy to the deepest feelings of the characters, and yet there’s so much to read between the lines. How do you manage that?
By writing a lot of fanfic?? Haha…honestly, thank you, that’s a huge compliment! I love close third-person POV because it allows for deep introspection while also giving the option to step back and build the world from a broader vantage. I’ve written a lot of one-shots/short stories that are around 30k and when you are working with that length of story you really have to make the most of every word. TCATHOE actually allowed me to be a little more free with my prose, so I’m glad it didn’t come off as too much :)
Q) Lore’s character brought a fascinating moral dilemma from the story. Was your intention going in to focus on this environmental themes or was it Orpheus’ journey?
Orpheus’ journey, for sure. Considering the current black and white divisiveness we’re subjected to online every day, I wanted to write a character-driven story where different kinds of “villains” are highlighted. There’s a sliding scale with Orpheus stuck in the middle between Lore (unforgivable, intolerable, psychopathic evil) and Fenrir (a good person within a bad system who realizes this for themselves and works to correct it). Orpheus is selfish and defensive and looking out for himself more than anything else, and he found safety in attaching himself to Lore and blindly following her in all she did. I have to ask the question if, had Fenrir not taken his hand at his lowest moment and shown him a different path, would Orpheus have ever clearly seen for himself the awful things he’d helped Lore achieve?
Of course, that’s not to say the environmental themes weren’t a big part of the narrative, however. I wanted to reflect Orpheus’ own healing journey with that of humanity’s at large and show a society returning to the systems that led them to where they are in the book, but from a different perspective. Systems that have been vilified by modern standards. The reality that things like oil and gasoline and electricity helped advance humanity to the point where we’ve become so comfortable with them that their use has turned abusive. The book doesn’t try to make a statement one way or another other than address humanity’s shared responsibility to be mindful of how we interface with these systems and intentional with how we use them.
Healing in general is a huge theme in TCATHOE, both Orpheus’ and the world’s, and I’m so glad you picked up on that!
Q) Could you tell us a little bit about the research and the process of creating the post-apocalyptic world of your book?
Oh my gosh. I wrote this book during the pandemic, so world-ending stakes were high on my mind despite needing a cozier character arc. This isn’t the first post-apoc fantasy world I’ve built and I am sure it won’t be the last, but I feel like that’s going to become more and more common in media due to the state of the world we live in. Climate-punk and Hope-punk are the terms I’m seeing emerge and I do feel like both apply to TCATHOE. Every day there seems to be some new possibly world-ending trauma event happening and the obvious way to deal (for me, haha) is to escape into a post-world where humanity has survived, if not thrived.
World-ending stakes feel so cataclysmic in the moment when you’re staring them down, but the reality is likely far more quiet. The breakdown of systems that we don’t even realize we rely on would likely be far more detrimental to survival than the actual “Incident” as it’s called in the book. Imagine having the tech of our more modern ancestors at our fingertips, but without the living knowledge of how to utilize it or repair it? That could happen very quickly, I think. And that’s the kind of world TCATHOE takes place within.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fiona Fenn is an author of fantasy novels that put complicated “heroes” front and center. A fan of villains, redemption arcs, and intense explorations of healing in all its forms, her debut novel, The Crack at the Heart of Everything, is a love letter to every villain who could have done better but never got the chance.
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