With Blessed Monsters, the final book in her Something Dark and Holy trilogy, Emily A. Duncan is closing out this dark and bloody series with style. We recently got the chance to talk to Emily about what she is feeling with the end of the series now here, the best lesson she learned during the writing process, and what she is working on in the future!
Hello Emily! Thank you for taking some time to answer a few questions for The Nerd Daily. Let’s start with you telling us a bit about yourself.
Hello! Thanks for having me! Well, during the day I work as a youth services librarian, and at night I play too many video games and have somehow managed to be involved in three active Dungeons and Dragons campaigns at once. I play so much Dungeons and Dragons. All my characters are tiefling.
What can readers expect in Blessed Monsters, the final book of the Something Dark and Holy trilogy?
500+ pages of Malachiasz being sad! More weird magic! Cannibalism! Swamp zombies! More weird gods! Sibling bonding under duress!
How does it feel to be completing your first book series?
Highly surreal! Very weird! I’ve been with these characters since 2015 so it’s been a long road and writing Blessed Monsters was an emotionally fraught time because I simply didn’t want it to be over.
Out of all three books, which was your favorite to write?
Ruthless Gods! It’s the most cerebral of the three, simple in plot but complicated in character machinations and I love it most dearly. It was also easily my most harrowing of writing experiences. While I think Blessed Monsters ended up being the most challenging to write, there’s nothing quite like the time I had with Ruthless Gods where I wrote an 100k word draft, decided it was all wrong, and pitched it all and started over three months before my deadline.
Do you have any specific habits or rituals that help put you in writing headspace?
I actually don’t! I work a full-time day job so writing happens whenever I can fit it in. I do listen to a lot of metal and I think that helps with the atmosphere of my books, but at any given time my resting brain is thinking about my books so it doesn’t take much effort to start writing when I finally sit down to it.
What kind of research did you do to create the world in Something Dark and Holy? And what was the most interesting thing you learned during the research?
I read every Russian and Polish folklore book I could get my hands on. A lot of poetry. I researched for about a year before I wrote the book and my favorite discovery was that in Polish folklore just about everything could be blamed on vampires. If you are a Polish peasant and you have a problem, well, it’s probably vampires.
Who was your favorite character to write and why?
Oh, absolutely Malachiasz. He’s the heart of the series and even though he’s horrible and conniving, there’s an earnestness to him that makes him a joy to write. He was never supposed to be a main character. He was supposed to be a throwaway character that showed up in Wicked Saints to nudge Nadya into the plot because she and Serefin both have a tendency to avoid plot at all costs. But basically the minute I wrote him onto the page I realized that he was the piece missing from the book. I didn’t expect him to end up as the heart of it all, but I’m glad he did.
He’s doing his best! Just very very badly.
What is one of the best writing lessons you’ve learned during the course of writing the Something Dark and Holy trilogy?
That I have to trust my writing process, as obnoxious as I find it. I can’t outline and I spend a lot of time writing thousands upon thousands of words only to throw them away, but its worked the exact same way three times now and I expect any future book I write will be similar. Better to acknowledge that this is just how I write books than to try to fight against it and make myself miserable! I tried to outline a book recently and it turned out badly, so I will continue to create in chaos.
How do you decompress after writing sessions?
I have a really hard time doing anything else after writing, so I tend to write up until when I go to bed. If I write early in the day I always just end up rereading it for the rest of the day, or being unable to actually stop, so it’s better to just work up until the moment of complete unconsciousness for me.
If you could recommend one book to our readers from 2020 or 2021, what would it be?
What We Devour by Linsey Miller! It comes out on July 6th and it’s about an ace mortician who gets wrapped up in a horrible royal’s schemes. It’s about magic and ethics and has an absolutely terrible boy, one of the worst I’ve read in a recent YA book and I love him with my whole entire heart.
Lastly, can you tell us what you are working on in the future?
It’s still a secret but I can give hints! It’s a Gothic inspired by my profound love of horror video games and the protagonist is the worst boy in the whole entire world.
