How did “Real Magic” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

You might be able to tell that Granny Weatherwax from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is a big inspiration for this story. They were probably my introduction to the “grumpy but helpful witch” archetype and I really wanted to work with that type of character. The idea of “twisting your wishes” is also an old one; I wanted to give my own spin to it. So this is sort of a story in which I play with older forms.

But I obviously wanted to make it a bit more gay. Because why not.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

I was incredibly proud to have written two drafts (starting with conceptualization) of this story in like five days.

Somehow, there was one week early 2021 where I woke up at six a.m. each morning, plonked myself onto my red sofa beside the living room window (framed by my ex-husband’s plants, which I’m pleasantly surprised to have managed to keep alive. Mostly.) And just cranked out a thousand words.

I have never written fiction so fast in my life!

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

The narrator’s voice in this story is different from stuff I’ve published before, so that was a little tricky to perfect.

I was also very concerned about the structure. I played around with the order of the storylets a lot, trying to find the best narrative flow. This was especially important because of the tone shift between the storylets; you may notice how one of them is significantly darker than the others.

My friend Eugenia Triantafyllou’s comments were super helpful in smoothing out those sorts of hiccups in this story.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

I attended a recent SFWA meeting about romance and speculative fiction, and it was really interesting. I started getting into reading romance during pandemic-isolation, and I’m excited to see more exciting stuff at the intersection of the two genres.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’m editing an exciting new anthology that I can’t quite talk about yet, as well as my first novella, about the self-confidence issues that come from having a hot superhero boyfriend. My teaching load Spring 2023 is a little lighter, so I hope to get back to some of my game-design work (which took a little pause this last semester). I do have some upcoming stuff in a few other magazines (Baffling, more in Lightspeed, and hopefully a few others, fingers crossed!), as well as a few other tabletop roleplaying games.