Tessa Gratton returns with an all-new companion and standalone novel to her 2018 adult fantasy, The Queens of Innis Lear. Set in the same world, give or take a century, Lady Hotspur is a detailed, Shakespearean story about three powerful women fighting for one kingdom. Any Game of Thrones fans should add this to their TBR right away!
We had the pleasure of chatting with Tessa about Lady Hotspur, tips to combat writers block, where her inspiration for the story all began, and more!
Hi Tessa! Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
Hi! I’ve been publishing novels for ten years now, both adult and YA, but always fantasy of some kind. I’ve lived all over the world, thanks to a dad in the Navy, and love to travel when I can, but my home is on the edges of the prairie in Kansas with my wife.
Your next novel, Lady Hotspur, is set to release January 7th 2020!! Can you tell us about it?
It’s an adaptation of my favorite Shakespeare play, Henry IV, part i, which I read for the first time in 2000 when I was a freshman in college. I’ve been obsessed with Prince Hal and Hotspur ever since. My version centers queer narratives, and is about the trauma of rebellions, betrayal, love, politics, the rebirth of magic, and of course murder.
Lady Hotspur is a gender bent tale on a Shakespearean story. How difficult was it to create that spin? Did you find it offered a better perspective for the story?
Changing the gender of all the characters was extremely fun. While plenty of the writing and revising process was very difficult—it’s a sprawling, complicated story—making the book about women and their relationships with each other and with power wasn’t the hard part. I do think shifting the gender opens up new perspectives on the original story, but I don’t think I’d say better—that would be ambitious, to try to be better than Shakespeare himself! I will say I think my version can offer new insight into the play and the structures of power and family and duty it describes.
I’ve read that your other novel, The Queens of Innis Lear, while in the same world isn’t necessary to understand the story in Lady Hotspur. Do readers need to read that one to enjoy Lady Hotspur? What do you recommend readers do?
The books take place 100 years apart, so their plots aren’t directly connected, though the events of Queens are the history of Lady Hotspur, so in that way, it matters greatly, since history informs our lives and choices whether we acknowledge it or not, and that holds true in the books. I do think Lady Hotspur can be enjoyed without reading Queens first, but reading them together, in any order really, should enhance the experience, if I’ve done my job right!
You did an excellent job with description. How many hours did you spend researching King Henry IV and all the history and customs that came with the era? Did you have a method to all the madness so to speak?
Thank you! As I mentioned, I’ve loved Henry IV for nearly twenty years, so in a way I’ve been researching this book half of my life! I did some specific reading, though, both criticism of Shakespeare and the Henriad plays, and watched several versions of all four plays in the cycle. I studied a few different kings and queens around the world, reading up on their reigns and how they came into power, as well as the international politics of the early Middle Ages, and war technology and strategy of the historical Henry’s time. Lots of varied articles and books on castles, farming, trade, politics—everything that I needed to understand to build a real world with cohesive internal foundations.
What did you enjoy writing the most? What had you struggling?
I love writing kissing and magic, so when there are scenes in this book with both kissing and magic, you can pretty much assume I enjoyed writing them. Add some murder or strange earth saints, and I loved it even more. I loved every scene with Hal, Hotspur, and Banna Mora, though they were complicated to write, but the three women react so passionately to each other I was never bored. And there is a certain nameless wizard I missed quite a bit who I was delighted to give some more time on the page, helping him figure out if redemption is even worth looking for.
I struggled with the structure, but fortunately my amazing editor helped me figure out how to structure the book so that it served not only the story, but rising tension. and to be honest, I struggled with my adaptation of Falstaff. Falstaff is an incredible character in Shakespeare, and one of the most well-known, but also well-loved and well-despised. He’s a drunk, a whoremonger, he’s fat and makes fun of himself, he’s a self-professed coward, but also wise, funny, and genuinely loves Prince Hal. In my adaptation, Falstaff becomes Lady Ianta Oldcastle, a fallen Lady Knight, who is not only still a drunk, she’s a fat lesbian. There are so many stereotypes associated with Falstaff, and when you make the character a queer woman, it opens up even more room for being shallow or offensive. I went in again and again trying to make Ianta complicated and real, but still a drunk, still self-loathing, still hilarious and generous and a true friend to Hal. She was hard, and I love her so much because of how hard she made me work. I hope I succeeded in doing the character proud.
This book is broken down into multiple perspectives, which I loved! Was one easier to write than others? Hardest to write?
I over-identify with Hal, and share her anxiety issues so in many ways her perspective was easy. The nameless wizard was easier, because of the creepy distance from the narrative he has, and I also loved writing Rowan because he is so single minded and almost fanatical about Innis Lear it made his perspective rich.
I found Connley and Banna Mora the hardest main POVs to write, partly because I wasn’t sure for a very long time what I needed—what the story needed—from Connley, and Banna Mora is so very angry. It infuses everything she is. I have lived like that, and found a lot of power in anger, but in the last two years my default emotion shifted from anger to grief and that was a rough transition for me personally, so when I had to get into Mora it was like dragging myself back into a person I couldn’t be anymore.
Lady Hotspur starts with a bloody battle and a change in regime which is an unusual way to start a story. Was there a particular reason why you chose to go this route? Did you find it beneficial to the plot?
The regime change was always the initial inciting incident for the story, though in various drafts it was not the first scene of the novel! I ended up landing there for chapter one for two reasons: It is the moment that Hal meets Hotspur, which coincides with the biggest change in her life, ie going from a regular knight to the crown prince, so for her falling in love and becoming a prince are intrinsically linked and I wanted to center Hal’s choosing love again and again; and the rebellion and murder of the former king is what throws the whole world into chaos. The king is dead, and with him history and former power structures. The book is about rebuilding power in a way that centers—or at least allows—queer lives to thrive, and so maybe it had to begin with the moment of violent destruction of the last regime.
With so many different kingdoms and cultures, how did you manage to keep them all unique?
Lots and lots and lots of notes. I have a dedicated notebook for all my projects, and used what I’d mapped out for The Queens of Innis Lear as a jumping off point to begin creating a wider world of characters and cultures.
Having so many Shakespearean tales for inspiration, why this one? Will we see more from this world?
Henry IV, part i is my favorite of all Shakespeare’s plays, which is weird, I know! But! It has everything: romance, war, tragedy, comedy, family, betrayal, loyalty, etc. I have been obsessed with Hal and Hotspur in particular and their relationship for a long time. They are foils in the play, two sides of the same coin of princely masculinity, and are compared over and over again, but they never appear on stage together until the very last scene, when they face each other on a battlefield. That kind of character and narrative tension is incredible. And if you see a good staged version, it’s the funniest of all the plays: Hal and Falstaff are ridiculous and so very funny, and I love their relationship that is full of real humor and real differences of opinion.
If I write another Shakespeare adaptation someday I’d probably pick Measure for Measure, which is bananas. I also find it uncomfortably sexy, and I like to write about things that make me uncomfortable so I can figure them out. Or Twelfth Night, which is complicated, funny, and already so queer.
What’s next for you? Any upcoming projects you can tell us about?
I have a YA fantasy coming out Fall 2020 that I can’t talk about except to say it’s like a dark, queer Howl’s Moving Castle. And sometime next year I have a short story that I love coming out in an all-vampire anthology called Vampires Never Get Old.
How do you combat writer’s block?
I think writer’s block is usually caused by two things for me: either I’m exhausted and need to take a break to read something amazing, watch a great show, or otherwise remind myself what creation is, what great stories are and why I love pushing forward even when writing is hard, OR I’ve taken a wrong turn in my story, so the block is my unconscious telling me I screwed something up. In the case of the former, I try to stop at least for an afternoon and read or watch a movie I love, to give my imagination a break. In the latter case, I delete everything back to the last place I know I was right, where I was loving the work and the story felt good in my gut. Sometimes that’s a thousand words, sometimes it’s ten thousand.
If I’m still stuck, I run through some exercises—both physical and creative—to jar my thinking. I like downward dog because it strengthens my shoulders and neck, and also gravity drags the ideas down to my brain. Or I take my dog for a long walk and listen to brainstorming music to free up my imagination. As for creative, I make relationship charts for my main characters, or fill out nine-box diagrams to make sure there’s a character-plot connection with good tension and rising action, or I write from an antagonist’s perspective and try to figure out how they can make things worse. Worse is always better.
What advice would you give aspiring writers?
Read widely, and by people from other countries, authors who write in other languages, read outside your genre and personal identity, give your imagination a variety of fuel. And when you can, have adventures. Whether that means going to Japan for a year or the town down the road, meet new people and pay attention to who they are, to how their environment makes them—and analyze yourself, too. What made you who you are, what taught you to think the way you do? Where do you fit in your culture and the power structures of your home? Through communication and reading you can learn a lot about people and our world, and from there write about your own characters and create compelling other worlds.
And lastly, do you have any book or author recommendations for us?
My favorite book of the last several years is The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord, an incredible SF about trauma, found families, and interplanetary diaspora, and recently I’ve loved Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland and Incendiary by Zoraida Córdova.
