The necromancers are back in Harrow the Ninth, and they’re gayer than ever. But before we see Harrow out in the world, we had the chance to chat with award-winning and bestselling author Tamsyn Muir! We dove into the writing process of Harrow, snippets for the conclusion of The Locked Tomb Trilogy, writing while in quarantine, and more!
Hi Tamsyn! Tell us about yourself! How have you been these past months?
Pretty well hit for six, between COVID-19 and getting used to my first novel being out. There’s a lot of very helpful guides out there for debut novelists from older, more experienced authors, all of which I read diligently, but there is still so much stuff you have to get to grips with by yourself. You learn how much you can bear being in the public eye. At the end of the day I am not remotely in the public eye – my only claim to fame is that I have a Wikipedia page, with a photo mocked by all who love me for its look of intense despair barely masked by a sickly grin – but oh my God, I cannot stand it. There are days when I am existentially sick from anyone reading my book, talking about my book, discussing my book, and because I am woman-oriented discussing feature flaws of my presentation I had previously not worried about. I can’t imagine what it is like being a real celebrity. Who are all these rhino-skinned daredevils seeking fame on YouTube and where can I get some of their reckless confidence? I’ve had to block Twitter, Goodreads, Tumblr, Reddit, a whole bunch more I can’t even remember, and Google. The whole Internet drops when you block Google. I can only access Gmail on my phone now.
Anyway, I have also been fine. I tried to bake a three-layer chiffon cake at one point to challenge a friend. It came out heartbreakingly adequate. I’m still also trying to learn how to poach eggs, and I think the takeaway is to let other people poach eggs for you.
Harrow the Ninth is about to be released, what can readers and fans expect from it?
Just in case people thought the title was a blind, a LOT of Harrowhark Nonagesimus. If you’re not a fan of Harrow, I suggest buying my book but crossing out Harrow’s name and substituting it with your own or something. No big spoilers, but it’s a story about Harrowhark – Reverend Daughter of the House of the Ninth, notable dutyholic with a huge crush on bones – being left to fend utterly for herself after becoming a Lyctor. She’s got one inappropriate father figure (God), two mentors who have too much going on to be bothered about a broken teenage girl, one enigma, and one Ianthe (Ianthe). Any friends and allies and loved ones from Gideon the Ninth are not present, except in her memories, and her memories… may not represent what previous readers recall from the first book.
It is a book that really does reward readers who love mysteries, so I’m hoping everyone who covered Gideon in Post-Its returns with a fresh batch of Post-Its to this one. It is a book of clues and then you can turn to the end and see if you were right, just like in an Usborne Puzzle adventure! I’m really excited to see how many of my puzzles, big and small, people pick up on.
A great deal of the book is in the second person perspective. I believe many fans were surprised to know about this. Is this something known to you before you wrote it, did you plan it? Or did it hit you in the middle of writing?
No, I’ve been planning the voice changes in the novel for a while. I’ve always known the different perspectives for all three books, and although Gideon was close third, Harrow necessarily throws that to the wind. I really loved writing it: it was fun experimenting with the technicals.
What was your writing process like for Harrow? Is it any different from Gideon?
It is true what they say: writing a sequel is awful! You can’t help thinking about the reception of the previous book and you also can’t get the editor’s voice out of your head; you’re not simply writing for yourself, you’re writing already thinking about how people might react to a part. The lens is different. I wrote a lot of it back home in New Zealand, in the middle of still working, and then suddenly writing became a day job thing and the discipline changed. It’s very scary once it stops being the hobby you do on Sundays and starts being the thing you take weekends OFF from.
I love how you built up the plot twists and shocking moments all throughout the book. How did you go about writing these?
There are a lot of Shocking Twists throughout Harrow and I worked really hard to ensure that people got breathing room between them – just like in a horror movie, too many jump scares and you just get so scared you stop caring. I already knew that Harrow was going to be my gothic novel, and the gothic sensibility is high – the plot twists have to be layered in with a creeping sense of dread while everyone wanders around in their nightie with a lit candle. Balancing tension release AND shockin’ twist AND maintaining dread was my mission.
What was the biggest challenge in writing Harrow? And what was the most exciting part of writing it? Was there a part or detail in the first draft that didn’t make it to the final one?
Again, I wrote Gideon for my own amusement outside my day job and it took a little under a year, and it only took that long because I was working long days teaching. Harrow was psychologically, well, harrowing. Delivering a book to a specific deadline is ghastly. I’ve been on deadline for various things now since 2018 and I no longer understand what it feels like to not be on deadline. So that was a whole different paradigm shift. Harrow was a very tight book and very little was left on the cutting room floor; a couple of jokes that didn’t make the landing, a few rewrites. There was one particular moment of absolutely brutal sincerity from one character that I had to go back and take out because I was like nah, not the time, you don’t get to say that yet.
I removed maybe two memes.
Did you have any trouble writing or editing while on a lockdown/quarantine? What did you do to keep being productive?
As we write I am still under lockdown/quarantine. I know a lot of authors have said that quarantine has killed their productivity and that they’ve spent long stretches of time not writing a word, or writing very little and paying in blood for it.
I will be very honest here because I know the conversation around mental illness only works if we are honest: I’ve got severe paranoia that often focuses on the medical establishment, so lockdown has been my brain’s bad theme park. I have got so little done and paid so much for that little. Seeing the numbers of people dying, nearly dying, suffering generally, creating special rules for supermarkets so we did not die or make other people die, flattened me. We had low access to food and medication for a while. I had to fall back on DBT techniques and ended up boohooing angrily in front of the sink while fondling ice cubes. It was not glamorous.
I think the takeaway is that lots of people feel like if they’re not productive it is their own fault for not being mindful enough or organising themselves enough. The whole wellness movement now means that if you feel not up to doing a thing, then that’s down to you not doing yoga at the right time or drinking enough water. The truth is that sometimes you’re not productive and you cannot game the system for reliable productivity. You try to do it if you can – you fail – occasionally you can’t even try. Struggling doesn’t always look like ‘Ah, I was able to write two hundred words today with the help of self-soothing and quinoa.’ Sometimes the only victory you have is telling yourself that things will get better; as an upside sometimes you even believe it.
Also, I should be in New Zealand right now but my country’s locked down and I couldn’t go home, and to add insult to injury my family’s now all basically out of quarantine and getting takeaway coffees and sending me pictures of the takeaway coffees.
It might be too early to ask, but I’ve read from your Tumblr page that you’ll have finished the last book, Alecto the Ninth, before Harrow is out. Can you tell us what awaits in Alecto?
Ha ha ha, that was written in a better and happier time. (Alecto isn’t quite done and currently the book and I are wrestling each other over the Reichenbach falls.)
But Alecto is me pulling back the curtains on pretty much everything, the whole universe and what’s going on with it. I can barely describe it because right from page one I want to show readers the shape of what I was getting at the whole time. Harrow dumps all the clues out its sack; Alecto gives you answers and sits back in a mess of its own implications. It is very much a story about identity and ways in which love is redemptive, but it is also a book where a bunch of queer idiots totally fail to get comeuppance for their VAST assortment of crimes.
One of my first readers, who has not yet gotten to read it, told me the other night that she dreamed she had the manuscript and it chiefly featured a figure called ‘the Bird King’. Understandably the book will now take longer as I have to rewrite it along these lines.
Lastly, do you have any recommendations for your readers? Any recent or upcoming releases you’re excited about?
This has not been a fantastic reading time for me and my to-read pile is massive, but I can say that I can’t wait for the sequel to Silver in the Wood coming out – Drowned Country by Emily Tesh, a novella I’m deeply impatient for. Apparently the English translation of Robert Kurvitz’s Sacred & Terrible Air will be out sometime this year too, so let’s see if that gets into my hot and waiting claws.
