in conversation with heather guerre

in which I get to discuss romance, power, justice, and intimacy with one of my favorite writers

I’m gonna keep this intro short because the conversation is… lengthy. This particular newsletter was sparked by a few things (1) I frequently feel like romance authors aren’t asked interesting, rigorous questions about their work and, in particular, it seems like the opportunities for indie/self-pub writers to get thoughtful exploration of their work are… limited. (2) Heather Guerre is one of my favorite romance writers working today. I get disgustingly fawn-y and engage in some serious stan behavior in this interview so you’ll see more as you read, but she’s been deeply influential in shaping how I think about and experience romance. I’ve talked about her on TikTok often, but the short video format isn’t quite able to accomplish everything I want when it comes to meaningfully discussing her work.

At the nexus of those two thoughts was the idea to, possibly, serve a niche that wasn’t being served– to try to present an interview that I would want to read: sprawling, fun, exploratory, but also specific and attentive to the work romance novelists are putting into their art. I can’t thank Heather enough for agreeing to do this, for offering her incredible mind and time and energy to the task. She is, as you will see, the absolute coolest.

If you’re new to Heather’s work, I’d recommend giving Preferential Treatment (billionaire romance) or Cold Hearted (paranormal romance) a go first. You can follow most of this interview without having read everything, but we do make specific references, and spoilers abound for the Tooth and Claw series and Preferential Treatment in particular.

**A note about form: this interview happened over email, between September and December of this year. You’ll see a bit of back and forth between us, then a series of reactions from me. This is because I start with a few questions at a time and build accordingly in subsequent emails to offer a more conversational shape. Content has been edited ever so slightly for clarity, but this is pretty unvarnished altogether**

Merry Christmas, Reni and Mal. This one’s for you, my fellow fan club members. I hope this was a fun surprise for you <3

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Content warnings for brief mentions of sexual violence and rape

S: Okay, to start off, I'd love to get a sense of your journey as a romance reader and writer: When and how did you start reading romance? What books were influential in developing your taste as a reader? As a writer?

H: I started reading romance at a fairly young age. Books like Gail Caron Levine's Ella Enchanted, Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness quartet, and all of Donna Jo Napoli's fairytale and mythology retellings introduced me to romance and romantic storylines, but I think I was twelve or thirteen when I read my first adult romance. I'd been curious about the bodice rippers my mom and aunties all had since I was a little kid, but I was forbidden from reading them. When our local library got a self-checkout machine, I sneakily borrowed Johanna Lindsey's Prisoner of My Desire, which is possibly the most bodice-ripping of all bodice rippers to cut your teeth on, but I was absolutely enthralled. From there, I read basically the library's entire collection of historical romances. For years, my only exposure to the romance genre was through historicals, and I read a lot of them. I eventually branched into contemporaries via Nora Roberts, whose book Northern Lights had a big impact on me as both reader and writer. And then, through Roberts's witchy romances, I discovered other paranormal romances, where Nalini Singh's Psy-Changeling series and Meljean Brook's Guardian series were hugely influential for me.

The books I loved reading are the same books that have had a big influence on me as a writer. If I had to name a specific book, I really can't discount the influence of that first adult romance I read, Prisoner of My Desire. The content is shocking--both the heroine and the hero, at different points in the story, abduct the other, hold the other captive, and rape the other. Repeatedly. But that shocking premise doesn't come out of a vacuum. In a genre where the heroine's "surrender" to the hero's sexual conquest had been a staple, straight-up captivity and rape are not an absurd leap. Instead of being shocked, I think most readers who were familiar with (and fans of) the genre were probably kind of titillated that an author actually took it all the way there. On top of that, you get this total inversion of the genre's previously established norms, in that the heroine is the one who first abducts and rapes the hero. His doing likewise to her is retaliatory, rather than the character's natural male virility or whatever.

In the present, I wouldn't say that Prisoner of My Desire is one of my favorite books. I haven't read it in years. Possibly in decades. But the fact that Lindsey took the implications of the bodice rippers' premise and made them so unapologetically explicit, while simultaneously upending genre conventions, has stuck with me for a long time. On that first read, I had no context for how it compared to the rest of the genre, but I've since read hundreds of romances, and not many have impacted my understanding of the genre that strongly.

S: Thinking about taste, again - were there other pieces of romance media (music, TV, non romance-novels with romance plots, scenes in film) that stand out to you as particularly influential in how you think about romance?

H: When I was young, my mom, my grandma, and my summer babysitter were soap opera fans, and so I was constantly watching them too. My mom and grandma watched Days of our Lives, and my babysitter watched pretty much all of them. I don't know that I'd advise exposing young kids to the unhinged drama of daytime soaps, but it can definitely serve as an accelerated course in narrative structure, character archetypes, tropes, and relationship dynamics as a driver of conflict and plot. I think a big part of why soaps have succeeded for continuous decades, is because of how fundamentally they are grounded in character. They can take the most off-the-rails plot lines, and viewers will follow along, no matter how absurd, because they are deeply invested in the characters. To be fair, the absurdity is a part of the appeal, but it only works when the characters work. If viewers don't care about a character, then they'll hate when that character's storyline eats up airtime, no matter how crazy the story.

As I got older, I tended towards fantasy and speculative media with romance elements. I absolutely loved (and still love) films like Labyrinth and The Princess Bride. I loved paranormal shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed. In all of these, there's an adversarial element to the romantic relationships that heightens the stakes of them. It ranges in intensity, but in each case it's there, and it has significant impact on the plot. In the case of Labyrinth, the adversarial element is the primary driver of the plot. In the Princess Bride, it's the initial catalyst for the plot as well as the midpoint "turn." Meanwhile, in Buffy and Charmed, you frequently have "good" protagonists in relationships with "bad" antagonist characters. That tension creates so much momentum in the relationships, and entwines both the romance and the plot so that they propel each other.

Anime and animated series had a big impact on shaping my preferences, too. I loved Inuyasha, Escaflowne, and the Disney show Gargoyles. The influence there, for me, was the fascination with an otherworldly hero paired with a pragmatic heroine who gradually discovers her power over the course of the story. Similarly, I was obsessed with the video game Final Fantasy X (yet another portal fantasy) and its romantic subplot between Tidus, who takes the role of transported, out-of-their-element ingenue, and Yuna a powerful and respected summoner in the world Tidus is transported to. In all of these, there's also an element of loners or outsiders finding community and belonging when forced into a new world, which isn't technically romance, but echoes a lot of the emotional beats that romance fans find gratifying.

S: When did you start thinking that you could be a romance writer? When did you actually start putting pen to paper?

H: I've been writing basically since I could write. Since preschool, probably? Kindergarten? I remember writing tiny little stories, maybe three or four sentences, for my classmates on pieces of construction paper. I knew I wanted to be a writer from a pretty young age, but for a long time it was sort of an aspirational wish rather than something I believed was a realistic career goal. I grew up in a working class family in a very working class town where just about every adult I knew worked at a paper mill or a metal fabrication plant. Culturally, the idea of becoming a professional author was about as whimsical as wanting to be a circus performer. Obviously people do those things, but the support and modeling for how to pursue them just wasn't there—until the internet became ubiquitous.

I wrote with the secret hope of publishing throughout my childhood, teens, and early adulthood, but my courage kept failing me when it came time to actually let other people read what I had written. I'd always written some degree of romance into my stories, and I think that was a large part of the embarrassment for me. Somewhere in my late-twenties, I finally decided to self-publish something I'd written (Star Crossed) since self-publishing would allow me to be relatively anonymous. The reception was better than I'd expected, which gave me the courage to publish another. And then another. Each book I released was like exposure therapy, and now, instead of wanting to cringe out of my own skin, I'm actually excited to show people my writing and talk about it.

S: A lot of folks in romance seem to get their start in fandom and fanfiction writing-- was that your experience, at all?

H: Absolutely. I wrote fanfic in my teenage years, before AO3's existence, on livejournal.com and fanfiction.net. At different points in time, I was a very small fish in the Labyrinth, Gargoyles, and Inuyasha fandoms. Fanfiction wasn't a direct line to publication for me—none of my fics ever got me "discovered" and I haven't repurposed any of them into original works—but the anonymity of it allowed me to be brave enough to actually put my writing in front of an audience. And the experience of writing for an audience, plus writing for regular deadlines, and playing around with pre-existing characters and worlds was all helpful in the long run.

S: There’s so much here that I’ve been thinking about— I love how far-ranging your romance influences are (TV, film, anime, video games, and romance classics). A friend of mine, a librarian and part-time romance scholar (her incredibly good substack linked here), has a theory about how some of the most interesting perspectives in romance academia come from people who come to romance from other disciplines and bring those disciplinary influences to the niche of romance scholarship. For me, that’s especially evident in your work, which I find to be so referential in this really vast but specific way. For this next set of questions, I’d love to draw on some of the ways I think your influences show up in your writing.

First, Johanna Lindsay. I haven’t read Prisoner of My Desire myself (my bodice ripper reading is, unfortunately, sorely lacking but I’m on a quest to fix that), but I think the way you summarize the power exchange in the novel is really fascinating because power-play also feels so essential to your own writing. I don’t mean that rape is essential to your writing at all, I mean that in Preferential Treatment, there’s the financial power vs. sexual power dynamic between the MCs; in your Tooth & Claw trilogy, the element of the “hunt, capture, release,” is so central to the way the intimacy unfolds between the MCs; in Demon Lover, there’s the dynamic of a succubus extracting from a human— except he’s the subjugated party, really? I could go on and on. My point is, really, that I think power-play is a thing you are so incredibly skilled at. There’s such an awareness of how power is located in these macro structures but then converges in such an intimate way so as to shape these micro-interactions between two parties. My question is this— how do you think about exploring power between your MCs without having scales shift too far in one direction or another? Is that a calculation that you consciously make when you write? When so much of sex can feel contingent upon there being a power differential in order for desire to spark (is that an idea you even agree with— I don’t mean to speak for both of us!) [H: I do think this idea is very, very entrenched in the genre--especially in heterosexual pairings. It's not universal, but it is very prevalent.], how do you still make it feel safe and equitable and earnestly loving at the end of the day?

H: I think it's primarily subconscious, driven by my own personal preferences. As a reader, I really dislike romances in which male dominance and female submission are treated as the default, as if it's just an inherent truth of the nature of opposite-sex attraction. It's not something I'm actively on alert for, it's just a vibe that gives me the ick. Likewise, as a writer, I'm not super-consciously assessing my characters or my plots for the power balance--the character dynamics that I'm drawn to writing just naturally find a balance that suits my personal preferences.

Real-life power disparities (like wealth, social status, institutional authority, even physical stature) are a personal deterrent for me and so, quite often when I include them in my stories, they exist as barriers to the romance. In Preferential Treatment, Kate is put off by Mikhail's extreme wealth and the fact that he's her boss. In Hot Blooded, Tessa is likewise leery of the financial disparity between her and Amos and in one scene, she assumes an act of generosity on Amos's part is intended as manipulation. (It's not, Amos would never!) In both cases, it's the less "powerful" aspects of the male characters that end up endearing them to their romantic match. Mikhail's submissiveness as well as his very unglamorous childhood make him accessible and relatable and likable to Kate. Amos's introverted nerdiness makes Tessa trust him enough to open up with him, get to know him. Similarly, in Once Bitten, Jules is initially intimidated by Max's physical presence, to the extent that Max makes a conscious effort to be as physically constrained around her as he can--and it's only once she realizes that he's kind of nervous around her that she feels safe enough to engage more intentionally with him.

But none of those things were intentionally planned around the question of power balance. I think those elements just naturally emerge from my own inclinations. If there's an overt power disparity along the lines of wealth, status, etc., then in order to feel comfortable, I need it to be offset by the interpersonal dynamic. Whether that's actual, explicit submission from the more powerful character, or just shy nervousness, I need something that shows that the powerful character doesn't hold all the cards.

When it comes to sexual submission and dominance, and even non-sexual power imbalances, a crucial part of making everything feel equitable and loving comes down to establishing the personal agency of the submissive/weaker characters and acknowledging the vulnerabilities of the dominant/powerful characters. Just because a character likes to cede control during sex doesn't mean their characterization in every other aspect has to be shaped by that. Likewise, just because a character likes to take control during sexual encounters doesn't mean they're invulnerable, unselfconscious pillars of stoic perfection. Likewise, a character with more structural/institutional power isn't necessarily more emotionally/intellectually powerful than a character with less.

I also intentionally write characters who are aware of the implications of their power dynamic expanded to a macro level (with the exception of Mikhail, who has the emotional intelligence of a potted plant). I don't insert that awareness explicitly into the text in the form of dialogue or an internal monologue, but it does shape their choices and desires. My characters (generally) have a clear understanding of enthusiastic consent, are attentive to their partner's enjoyment, and the sexually dominant characters enjoy that dominance without desiring emotional control or psychological control over their partners in regular life.

A lot of that boils down to, like you said, play (S: see next q for context). Both partners are playing a game together. Even sexual dynamics without an explicit power exchange can be combative in a playful, fun way. And that playfulness needs to carry into the rest of the relationship--not necessarily with the associated power dynamics, but to show that these people enjoy being together both sexually and non-sexually. Playfulness can be more intimate than sex, in the sense that it's possible to have sex that only requires physical vulnerability, but playfulness requires intellectual and emotional openness. Characters who play together are establishing an emotional and intellectual bond that goes beyond just sexual desire, and so no matter how extreme the power exchange is in sexual moments, it's built on a foundation of characters who enjoy and respect each other as human beings (or at least, eventually come to do so).

S: To your point about Buffy, Princess Bride, Charmed, and Labyrinth. The adversarial element of your work is one of the things I’m so drawn to for the reasons that you describe. For me, the inflection point (the “turn,” you mention) is often the moment when I realize that a romance is doing something really magical. In your work, there’s often an element of play that seems to facilitate that turn and, specifically, to change the way characters interpret the intentions of their adversaries. In Cold Hearted, I’m thinking of the yarn battles. In Preferential Treatment there is, of course, the chess. In your first Lake Lenora book there’s the sort of playful sex games embedded into the renovation plot, so on and so forth. How do you think about integrating play into your work? Why is it such a prominent part of your work?

H: It's not really something I intentionally plan, but rather something that develops intuitively. It feels very natural to write playful interactions between characters that build to an emotional/sexual crescendo. I think it's partly cultural--I grew up in a social environment that wasn't super big on talking about feelings or overt demonstrations of affection, but games and other types of play were an incredibly important part of socializing and maintaining connections. As a kid, my parents played cards pretty much every weekend with a varying group of family and friends, sometimes at our house, often at someone else's. While the adults played cards, the assorted ramble of kids played together as well--roughhousing, or playing pretend, or sports, or games like Hide and Seek. I also played several sports throughout school and my CCD classes (Catholic catechism) from first to twelfth grade spent half of the class time playing group games like Sharks and Minnows--so I have a pretty ingrained appreciation for physical play, too. My high school friend group continued to play our own mash-up of Sardines and Ghost in the Graveyard every time we all got together, well into our twenties. Even as a 30-something adult, games and playing are important for how I connect with my family and friends. To this day, a visit to my parents means at least a few rounds of Hearts or Polish poker.

From a narrative perspective, I think that the physicality of things like the hunt/chase games in the Tooth & Claw series, and the mental interaction that comes games like chess in Preferential Treatment, are excellent parallels for the kind of physical/mental intimacy that readers want from a good romance. But as for why it's a prominent part of my work, I think it's mostly because it's a significant part of how I connect with people in my own life, and so it naturally finds expression in stories about personal connection.

S: I’m thinking about your anime/manga/animated series influences and your point about outsiders finding community. Pardon my cynicism, but in the real world, it can often feel like romantic relationships (or like, the heterosexual matrix of coupling up and having kids and becoming a nuclear family unit, more specifically) are more accomplished at severing the ties between people and alienating them further from their fellow person than bringing them closer to a community. Romance, too, can sometimes draw on these ideas (“this person is the only person who understands you, this person is the only person who can make you feel seen, this person is the only person you should spend all of your time with,”). Your work, to me, is pointedly the opposite, and the way you write about lonely people becoming a part of something bigger is something I have so much fondness for. How do you navigate writing a romantic relationship that retains primacy in the romance novel without forgoing connection to a broader community?

H: Let me join you in your cynicism, because I absolutely 100% agree that the "nuclear family" as the fundamental social unit only serves to break down communities into socially alienated, emotionally dysfunctional islands. That perspective is probably why a lot of my couples' happily-ever-afters involve connection to a wider community. It's hard for me to imagine a romantic happily-ever-after being sustained in isolation.

As for my approach to navigating both, I tend to think of the protagonists' romantic arc as the plot, while the community that the protagonists belong to (or are trying to integrate into) as being a crucial component of the overall world-building. It's a huge part of the setting. It forms a lot of the rules and motivations that govern the world that the main characters have to navigate. So, while the plot is driven by the protagonists' romance, the community they're connected to is necessarily involved. It also just feels very true-to-life for me. I have never been in a romantic relationship that wasn't somehow integrated into our surrounding network of family and friends and neighbors. I can't really imagine how a relationship devoid of those other connections would even function. On a personal level it strikes me as very claustrophobic and from a writing perspective it feels like hollow world-building.

S: I love that you mentioned Gargoyles. Selfishly, I have to ask— are you possibly interested in writing a monster romance of that variety in the future (gargoyles, dragons, krakens, etc.)? Or possibly making any forays into the omegaverse?

H: Yes to both! My roots are definitely in monster romance (if we can count aliens in the monster category) and I have many more ideas in that realm. No to krakens (I grew up on the Great Lakes, and as a freshwater kid, I find ocean creatures absolutely terrifying. Why must they look like that?? Why do they all come with built-in weaponry???) But I've been sitting on ideas for some other monster romances—including gargoyles. I've also been batting omegaverse ideas around for a couple years now. Nothing has grabbed me enough to flesh it out into a full story, but I dwell on it often enough that I think it's probably inevitable that I'll venture into the omegaverse in the future.

S: I loooove this so much. A couple of points I’m noodling on from this:

• Your point about how powerful or dominant or assertive characters make meaningful concessions and exercise restraint in such a way that it makes them more appealing - like maybe this is the appeal of the “cinnamon roll,” (Amos <3) or the “himbo,” (maybe? Mikhail? Or Max?) or any other permutation of “soft but dominant when it counts,” archetype that romance people seem to really love (myself included). It does often feel like people talk about power in ways that make it seem fundamentally and unavoidably unruly, poisonous, and frightening, but there’s something here about how there are a multiplicity of ways to be powerful and maybe something about how power is a tool that people can wield meaningfully-- especially when embedded in strong communities of people that keep you on your toes--, rather than being a thing that consumes indiscriminately.

• This bit, about play requiring a certain vulnerability, is a thing I think about allll the time, and I love how you talked about your upbringing being shaped by play. I feel a bit like play is one of those things that’s so essential to being human but gets lost so quickly in a late stage capitalist hellscape that doesn’t really prize non-profit-producing occupations. Being an adult who gets to play (somehow, some way, with someone) feels so rare and precious, and to see that restored (especially in a character like Grace from Cold Hearted, who is maybe relearning how to be a person again) in love is like, sublimely satisfying to read about.

• The distinction between romance as driving plot and community as driving worldbuilding is so good to me!!

• Very much agreed on the kraken front. I’ve read a couple, and they’ve been fine, but the idea of living underwater in a pretty bubble does fill me with dread and also, tentacles/suckers just don’t do a lot for me. I will say that the design for Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean was singularly persuasive, though. Very very excited for your future forays into other monsters and the omegaverse.

H: Oooh, yes, there is definitely a huge appeal in a character who has strength and/or power and therefore the capacity to abuse it, but chooses to be gentle and kind. I also think that some degree of power structure/delegation of authority is inherent to human society, and so communities that demand integrity from their people and hold them accountable for lapses in integrity are really crucial for fostering and preserving "good" power. (Good as in benevolent, not in regards to moral value.)

And oh gosh, yeah, Davy Jones stands as a *maybe* exception to my sea monster aversion, haha.

So your point about how power might shape a character’s choices and desires but isn’t necessarily a heavy feature of dialogue or an internal monologue is something that I think is particularly striking about your work-- I love that you’re often offering a vision of a better world (not devoid of harm, but one where life after harm-- a good life, even! exists) but it isn’t didactic or lecture-y. Like, a person doesn’t need to be reading work about abolition to understand that Jules’ third act frustration with Max in Once Bitten is a thing that isn’t motivated by punishment, but by a desire for the recognition of her feelings of pain and betrayal and and a desire for repair after rupture, but I think those moments can be really persuasive examples of restoration and abolitionist repair in action. (I lean on the T&C series heavily because I’ve got them basically memorized at this point, I’m also thinking about the small town romances, and Ashlyn’s character journey in particular). Could you speak a little about your own ideas of justice, harm, and repair and how they might shape your romance?

H: Broadly speaking, I believe very strongly in restorative justice over punitive or carceral systems (with the caveat that some individuals are beyond redemption, but that's a different conversation), and I apply that outlook to interpersonal relationships as well. Humans are imperfect and we all have acted out of carelessness, selfishness, or frustration, and have hurt others. That's an inevitable part of life. It's important that we are willing to make good faith efforts to right the wrongs we've done to others, but I also think that's dependent upon existing within a system that is able to balance holding offenders accountable with giving them the grace to repair the harm they've caused. When it comes to romance, I tend to include moments or even entire plots in which the couples have to navigate around hurt caused by one or both of them. For me, it shows that the characters are truly on each others' side. That when push comes to shove, they will choose to work together, to solve their problems together, to put aside ego in favor of understanding and empathy. The BIG one for this is Once Bitten, but I think it shows up throughout the Tooth & Claw series as well as in Preferential Treatment, and in smaller ways in my other books.

As you said, with regards to Once Bitten, Jules's anger with Max isn't driven by a desire for punishment. She doesn't want him to suffer. But she needs him to understand how she has suffered. He can't undo what's been done, but his sincere remorse and his determination to do better (and the actions he takes to do so) are what actually ameliorate the harm he's caused. His empathy and effort at amends is healing for her in ways that punishing him would never accomplish. And not only does he repair some of the harm he's done, he's also proving that she can trust him and be safe with him again.

I do think there are some wrongs that are unforgivable and unrecoverable, but that's up to the person or people who've been harmed, and everyone is going to have different thresholds for what they can forgive. Obviously, in a romance, when one character has grievously harmed another, the end goal is going to be forgiveness. But for that forgiveness to feel deserved, the offender has to be truly remorseful--not just because the other character is angry with them and they regret the rift that it's caused between them, but because they empathize with and understand the pain they've caused that character and truly wish they could undo the other character's suffering.

S: Kind of expanding on these worldbuilding questions - I sometimes feel like your writing is engaging with the dialectical method [for the uninitiated reader, I’m referring to the process by which opposing or contrasting viewpoints are considered and explored in pursuit of truth; in psychology, we use it to refer to talk about the contradiction and truth that one can want to accept themselves and pursue change]. You present a truth, that collectivism (in the form of a werewolf pack or a small town or an alien society) can be a powerful antidote to the loneliness inherent to being a human being. But you also explore the contradictions in that: that families and communities are messy and fraught and sometimes abusive. Your characters are frequently grappling with what it means to draw boundaries with loved ones, even as they crave closeness and the company of others (Tessa and her family in Hot Blooded, for example, or Kate and her sister in Preferential Treatment). It’s a really powerful thing because I feel like you don’t let us grow complacent as readers-- you often upend our expectations of what must essentially be true. Even in Once Bitten, I’m thinking about how you tee up the Cereus pack as this idyllic utopia but keep us on our toes-- is utopia at the cost of leaving your family-of-origin behind worth it? I’m waxing poetic about this because what I really want to ask you is this: How does your writing interact with your own views about pursuing intimacy in a weird, alienated world?

H: The increasing social disconnection of our world is something I think about a lot, and romance is a really, really great vehicle for exploring alternative worlds in which social connection is the primary consideration in our lives--in both good ways and bad. I'm not sure who to credit this to, but it's been suggested that the romance genre should be categorized under the speculative fiction umbrella alongside fantasy and sci-fi, and I don't totally disagree with that. I think a major part of the appeal of romance is that it offers a vision of what could be. We do live in a weird, alienated world, but we don't have to.

For me, the appeal of writing romance has always been about taking characters from a place of alienation and discontent to one of belonging, understanding, and connection. At different points in my life, I've felt trapped in a socially disconnected limbo, uncertain how to find or make meaningful connections, and reading romance always offered an escape from that. Now as a writer, I want to provide that same hope and respite in my stories. I think it's fair to say that most (or all?) of my characters begin their stories in a state of emotional isolation due to past trauma, or family dynamics, or neurodivergence, etc., but then go on to heal from the trauma, or find like-minded people, or escape whatever circumstances are keeping them in that state. That is pretty overtly what shapes my plots and character arcs when I'm planning out a story, in that moving characters from alienation/isolation to connection is the basic structural outline that I use. I think greater human connection is an important pursuit, I think it's necessary for our health and happiness as a society (and I say that as a deeply introverted person), and so that outlook inevitably has a big impact on the way I build characters and form stories.

S: I love the point you make about how ‘human connection is an important pursuit,’ in part because of the phrasing. ‘Pursuit,’ offers this element of incompleteness, like connection isn’t always possible, or it arrives under not-ideal circumstances, but it’s worth striving for anyway?

H: Absolutely! Life is motion, and I don't think there's a point with something like human connection where we can be like "We did it! All done! High five!" It's an ongoing action that is defined by its continued pursuit. Like, a river that doesn't flow isn't a river, it's a lake. (If that makes any sense?)

S: I also love the way you talk about remorse and reconnection because these ideas feel so crucial to the project of pursuing connection. Part of Max’s charm is that he just tries so hard. He’s persistent and steadfast with Jules in this very earnest way. The relationship that he and Jules have pre-transformation will never exist again, but there’s something new and special on the other end of their reconciliation that feels just as rich and satisfying.

I’m a fellow endorser of the romance-as-spec-fic thesis (in the hands of the right authors, such as yourself) in part because of your point about connection but also, I think (half-baked thought, still cooking) because sci-fi and other spec-fic can be quite dark and twisty and interested in the wayward paths that humans can take and build futures with– and romance is also very dextrous in this way. I wonder if this resonates for you, as someone who cut your teeth onbooks like Prisoner of My Desire. The speculative futures at work in romance are often optimistic because of the HEA but that optimism isn’t uncomplicated or simplistic or naive, and sometimes they aren’t optimistic at all. I think about this a bit with Preferential Treatment, where the relationship between Kate and Mikhail at the end is decidedly an HEA (and a very persuasive one), but there’s this little sliver of something else in their joy in the fact that Mikhail is still a billionaire, is still a member of the ruling class, is still someone who, structurally, wields so much power (which is a thing that bothers Kate!). The frictions inherent in that dynamic are really compelling for me as a recovering-cynic.

H: I like this a lot. I'm not sure how to articulate exactly the way it's making my synapses spark, but there's something really interesting there. I'm going to be ruminating on this for the foreseeable future.

S: What romance novels have you loved reading recently?

H: I've mostly been reading non-fiction lately--partly to research an idea that is still just a zygote, and partly because I read almost NOTHING BUT romance for the first three-quarters of the year, and I burnt myself out on it. But the romances I most recently read and loved included the Saint of Steel series by T. Kingfisher. I love T. Kingfisher's experienced, nuanced, emotionally rounded characters, and I'm always a sucker for well-developed fantasy worldbuilding. I also really enjoyed Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner, which was published in the 80s. It has been on my TBR for at least a decade, but I only just got around to reading it. It leans more on the "fantasy of manners" than the romance, but it is still a very fun, witty queer romance set in a world where bisexuality is basically the norm. I also did a comfort re-read of pretty much the entire Psy-Changeling series by Nalini Singh, which is just an all around excellent paranormal romance series.

S: What’s a romance novel you’ve been meaning to read but haven’t gotten to?

H: Oh man, there are so many. I've been mostly only buying physical copies of books for the last couple years, and so my TBR pile is literally a pile. It's a leaning tower (S: oh this is deeply relatable). Anyways, I think when the romance reading mood finally snatches me again (it's not far off--I feel it lurking), I'm going to read The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. I've been meaning to read it since it released, and I might finally get around to it before the year's out.

S: What’s the last non-romance novel you really liked/would recommend?

H: If I was trying to lure romance-only readers to another genre, I cannot recommend The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells highly enough. The main character is a genderless, asexual android, and is deeply traumatized (but in denial about it) and by necessity is very much a loner with social anxiety. But it develops really meaningful relationships with the other characters over the course of the series, and I think those emotional beats hit in exactly the same way that good romances do (S: consider me lured!!!). As for the non-romance novel that was my actual most recent love, The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez pulled me out of a big reading slump. I don't have a terribly coherent take on why I loved it. It's beautifully written, though it can be challenging to get into--it uses second-person POV and plays with structure in unconventional ways. But it's a really, really compelling story. I'm still picking at it mentally, months after reading it.

S: You’re releasing audiobooks!! What has that experience been like (both to produce an audiobook and to listen to someone else perform your work!)?

H: It's been really exciting! I have to admit, I am so, so fussy when it comes to narrator voices for audiobooks. I don't listen to audiobooks very often, mainly because of this fussiness. For my part, I mostly handed the reins over to Tantor, who produced the audiobooks. My primary involvement was in approving the casting of narrators, which allowed me to suggest narrators, but generally just required me to listen to audio samples and say yea or nay. Coming from self-pub, where you have to handle all the logistics of producing a book on your own, it was nice to hand most of that off for the audiobooks. At the end of all of that, hearing my books in audio was a bit surreal. My books exist so much in my head, and while I have paperback copies of all of them, I primarily interact with them as imaginings in my mind. So, having my own thoughts spoken back to me in another person's voice is kind of strange, but in a very, very cool way.

S: A few process questions:

1. Are you a plotter or a pantser?

H: Definitely both. I tend to start out with a single grain of an idea and just write from there, seeing where it goes until I run out of momentum. Very occasionally, that carries me through an entire book. But usually, I'll get the first act written before I have to take a step back, analyze what I've got, and develop a more structured outline so I can figure out where I'm actually going with this story, what needs filling in, what other things need to happen, how it's actually going to end, and how to get to that ending. And then that outline guides me for the rest of the process.

2. Are you usually working on one thing at a time or juggling a few projects at once?

H: I will often jump between projects until one really grabs me. Once it does, I lock into that story until it's finished. After it's finished, if I don't have a solid plan in mind for my next book, I'll go back to bouncing between projects. But at that stage I'm mostly just trying to figure out what I actually want to be writing.

S: If you could adapt any of your backlist into TV or film, which would it be? And do you have dream castings?

H: Of all my books, I think the Tooth & Claw series would probably be best-suited to a film or TV adaptation. Preferential Treatment would be really great, but I don't think I'd trust a corporate interest to faithfully adapt it. As for casting, I never know who actors are except for the most insanely famous ones, so I'd be terrible at coming up with my own choices there. But if I had any creative control it'd be: 1. Don't age down my characters. 2. Don't white-wash my non-white characters. 3. Cast actors with real, human-looking faces.

S: Which book has been your favorite to write?

H: I don't think I have one particular book that was a favorite to write. Preferential Treatment was probably the easiest for me to write--it was one of the very few books where it just flowed from initial idea to The End and I only had to do minimal outlining because it was pretty much entirely formed in my head from the get go. At the same time, I feared I was setting myself up to be chased out of the subgenre with pitchforks, so I actually sat on it for a while after it was finished, debating as to whether I should make certain changes. In the end, I didn't make the changes, and I'm glad that I didn't. [S: cannot express how much I am also glad you didn’t make changes– I love that book exactly as it is!!]

S: Which characters do you feel closest to? Which ones have been most challenging?

H: Most of my main characters have some element of me in them. It's impossible not to. But, at the time in my life when I wrote Cold Hearted, Grace is probably the closest I've come to writing myself into a story. Tessa from Hot Blooded was a really personal character as well. The character I find most distinct from myself is probably Theyma from Heart Song. Her background is totally different from mine--she came up in extreme poverty, became insanely famous because of her talent, and had the beauty and charisma to attract the attention of an incredibly powerful man. And then, in absolutely horrible circumstances (her marriage/enslavement), she had the cunning and courage to maneuver her way out. In the same circumstances, I truly don't think I'd be smart enough or brave enough to do what she did. I don't think most people would. The challenge of writing Theyma was to create a character who had that epic backstory, and who would believably plan and execute such a dangerous escape, but who would still feel like a real, vulnerable, emotionally nuanced person.

S: Twice Shy! I have to ask! How are you feeling about it?

H: Optimistic! I was grappling with the idea that maybe I just had to throw in the towel and release the version I was unhappy with when I hit on a change that renewed my enthusiasm for the rewrites. In theory, it's not a massive change, but it impacts pretty much every scene, so it requires a full rewrite. It's like I've baked a cake with too many eggs. Once the cake is baked, I can't just fish the extra egg out. I've got to redo the batter from scratch to have less egg. The good news is, I've already made the cake once, so the second time around should go a lot faster.

S: I loved your serial-fantasy novel¹ in part for the content, but also because the format* was so delightful (waking up to a chapter of a romance novel is, in my book, a meditative practice). Any plans to do something like that again?

H: Yes, absolutely! I'm actually toying with the idea of serializing every book in that series. I loved sending out chapters and getting to sort of read along with my readers. I'm not 100% committed to another serial yet, but I know if I do it, it'll probably be on a different platform, rather than through my newsletter. I have to finish rewrites on Twice Shy, but once I'm done there, I'll be turning my attention to the next book in the Wild Magic series, and I'll figure out if and how I'm going to serialize it.

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Thanks for reading, y’all! And feel free to leave other qs for HG in the comments if you’d like— no guarantees on responses, but I’d love to pass them on to her if folks have them.

1. The novel is out in-full on KU, but you can subscribe to Heather’s newsletter, which is where it was first disseminated, here!