So excited for this year of 2026 sequels! One I cannot wait for us This Blade of Ours the sequel to This Monster of Mine! It’s going to be so great and I’m pleased to publish this exclusive interview!
Summary
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Eighteen-year-old Sarai doesn’t know why someone tried to kill her four years ago, but she does know that her case was closed without justice. Hellbent on vengeance, she returns to the scene of the crime as a Petitor, a prosecutor who can magically detect lies, and is assigned to work with Tetrarch Kadra. Ice-cold and perennially sadistic, Kadra is the most vicious of the four judges who rule the land – and the prime suspect in a string of deaths identical to Sarai’s attempted murder.
Certain of his guilt, Sarai begins a double life: solving cases with Kadra by day and plotting his ruin by night. But Kadra is charming and there’s something alluring about the wrath he wields against the city’s corruption. So when the evidence she finds embroils her in a deadly political battle, Sarai must also fight against her attraction to Kadra – because despite his growing hold on her heart, his voice matches the only memory she has of her assailant…
Find This Monster of Mine on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Bookshop.org, & Blackwells.
Interview
Let’s just start by talking about the inspiration behind your book as well as the setting! I’ve seen it called Ancient Rome inspired in terms of setting, do you want to talk more about how the setting came about? Did your first image of this book come with the world or the character?
Figuring out the setting was one of the easier parts of writing This Monster of Mine. I write characters before plot, so my first image of the book was actually an image of Kadra! I’d been watching Ben Barnes in Netflix‘s Shadow & Bone series and just met my favourite K-drama of all time, The Devil Judge. Both those shows resulted in Kadra taking over my mind to the point that I dropped the WIP I was working on and wrote TMOM straight over 14 months.
I try to make setting both serve the plot and stymie it. So, once I had the characters and the ideas I wanted to examine in place, I searched for settings that general audiences would be able to relate to as well as ones that mirrored our world. Ancient Rome was like a dead ringer for both! TMOM is a very law and justice-centric novel, and modern legal systems owe so much to Ancient Rome. Plus the breadth of research on that long-lasting empire was a lovely rabbit hole!
One of my favorite themes in your book is justice. Can you talk about what drew you to this theme and the ways in which you navigate your main character’s quest for justice from the beginning?
I used to be a corporate lawyer, and like many people who enter the legal profession, I had these antiquated ideas about being able to do some good within the system. The disillusionment that sunk in after a few years fueled my examination of justice and morality (as dictated by modern corporate and legal frameworks) within this book.
I was loathe to have Sarai stand in for me throughout the story, so she starts off at a different point than I did and holds hope that the system can work, that it can contain a path to justice and reparations even in the very worst of cases. She undergoes a similar disillusionment, but her decisions are vastly different from mine. She has nothing to lose, and a fierce, tender heart, so it was a joy to take her character through a gruelling but ultimately (I think) healing journey.
Another of my favorite themes is monstrosity and what makes a ‘monster’ and under what circumstances. Did you always know you wanted to explore that or did this theme naturally come about? What excites you about this exploration?
Oooh, I love this question!! Primarily because I think it’s something I examine in everything I write (which is three books so far: TMOM, its sequel, and the prequel if my lovely publishers will have it). There’s so much to say about monstrosity that I doubt I’ll ever fully plumb the topic’s depths.
I’m neurodivergent (a couple conditions), was a fairly odd child and had a not-so great time in high school, all of which fuelled what might be a lifelong curiosity about the strange glee that society takes in othering people and painting them as monsters. Difference is monstrous in our world, whether due to physical characteristics, psychological conditions, circumstance, or moral outlook. More often than not, difference is penalized legally, and the parameters for what is acceptable are set by religious institutions that flout their own rules. There’s a curious hypocrisy to it all that I could write several theses on!
But seeing as TMOM was focused more on the bitter soup that is law, religion, and justice, I wanted to look specifically at violence as a weapon of the state (in whose hands it’s seen as perfectly legitimate) versus in the hands of the oppressed (in whose hands it is apparently evil and the use of which apparently makes them monstrous). I was excited to examine the way violence had been delegitimized by religious institutions so as to discourage people from advocating for themselves by marking it as monstrous, evil, or sinful. I hope I did these questions some justice (pun intended!) in the book!
This is going to be a series, can you give us any sneak peeks into book two? How has the process of drafting/editing been on that project as compared to your debut?
Oh my gosh, book 2 aka This Blade of Ours utterly took over my life from April 3rd to July 4th! It was the first thing I thought about when I woke and the last thing in my head before I fell asleep, no joke! What I can say is that it’s a deeply romantic sequel and heavier on the spice front. The two aren’t always the same thing, so I tried to ensure that the love and softness between Sarai and Kadra came through while they go through cosmic horror-related things. And of course, an established couple does get some time to get frisky and they’re no exception! There’s mystery, mayhem, a hefty amount of madness, and would it really be Kadra if someone didn’t get mutilated? I like to think it builds on what people loved about TMOM while going several steps further!
The process of drafting and editing the sequel was a whirlwind. I submitted one version of the book in December of 2024. The subsequent round of edits from my brilliant editors helped me see that it wasn’t working. I could have rewritten 70% of the book or rewritten the whole thing, and an idea slotted in my head during the process of completing outline after outline for the book’s new direction that I knew I had to see through. TMOM took 14 months to write from start to finish and still went through several rounds of editing that ended up altering 65% of its content. In contrast, this sequel was written in 6 weeks! Definitely a faster timeline, but I weirdly feel like it’s a more solid book! Maybe because I wasn’t stopping to doubt myself every 5 minutes while writing it!
I’m curious what you make of the Romantasy label on THIS MONSTER OF MINE and if you have thoughts on this subgenre as a whole?
My publishers actually rebranded This Monster of Mine as a fantasy romance because generic conventions dictated that the book should have more spice than what it does! I fully agree with both labels because fantasy and romance are twin ropes that braid through the whole story, so even I’m uncertain on which one’s a better fit!
That said, I grew up watching K-dramas, so genre has always been a rather fluid thing in my head. I get a little confused about the expectations for each genre in the book world, because it feels like it discourages experimentation and innovation. It feels like “epic fantasy” is a label used for the supposedly more ‘highbrow’ or ‘intellectual’ fantasy works, while romance-heavy stories are slapped with a romantasy label that sets readers up to expect more romance than plot. I’m a huge fan of how authors keep bringing new sub-subgenres (horromantasies!) to the table in what feels like it could soon be a saturated space, and I hope the romantasy label grows to encompass them too!
Can you talk us through your journey to this book in terms of the querying process and what that was like for you?
Oh I could yap about this forever! I wrote a different book in 2013 and attempted to query that for months and got my ego shredded! So, when I finished the manuscript in November of 2022, I immediately set about getting feedback from beta readers aka total strangers on the Internet (some of whom are now dear friends). This led to Version A of the manuscript. (I promise I’m going somewhere with this!)
So, I began querying in late Jan of 2023 with Version A and found myself hit by 118 rejections over the course of around 4 months. I quit as a lawyer during that time and got it in my head that Version A sucked. The querying trenches aren’t a pleasant place, and I couldn’t help constantly wondering what I was doing wrong. I felt like I had to do something (in the strange way that people who are stuck in situations that scare them are wont to), and the only thing that I could think of was to rework the whole book and my query package. I completed Version B of the book just as an incredible agent (my fantastic UK agent, Molly Jamieson!) made an offer that changed my life. Ah, but it was based on the version of the book that she had read: Version A.
Now, the procedure after what is affectionately known as “The Call” in the querying community is to inform all other agents you queried of the initial agent’s offer. So, off I go to happily email everyone. Then, another fantastic agent (my brilliant US agent, Ginger Clark!) requests the full manuscript, and, out of curiosity on whether the new version was any good (and confusion on which one I should go with), I send over Version B.
A few days later, both Molly and Ginger email to let me know that not only do they know each other, but they both loved the book and would love to co-represent me. The trouble? I’d sent them different versions of the same manuscript!!! (I pray that no one doubts themselves as endlessly as I do). I was sweating bricks when I told them the truth, but they were angels and simply asked me to go with the version I liked most (which ended up being Version B). I felt so at ease with them that I knew my career and books were safe in their hands!
In my experience, the hardest part of the querying trenches is the self-doubt, the waiting, and the inevitable rejections throughout each day of waiting. You have to be your own cheerleader and worst critic. I wouldn’t call it pleasant, but querying was a deeply formative experience, even if it did send me spiralling for a bit!
How was release and what were some unexpected highlights?
TMOM’s release remains such a pinch-me moment! My inner child celebrates every day that this dream came true! I’ve had a million unexpected highlights, but among my favs has to be my recently ended mini book tour in the UK, where I got to meet the incomparable @readinginthepeakers , @nabzrealbooktalk , @salimateez and @erii.bookish , both of whom created such incredible special editions of the book!!! Fully bawled after seeing those!
Find This Monster of Mine on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Bookshop.org, & Blackwells.