Welcome to my weekly Author Spotlight. I’ve asked a bunch of my author friends to answer a set of interview questions, and to share their latest work.
Today: K.L. Noone teaches college students about superheroes and Shakespeare by day, and writes queer romance – frequently paranormal or with fantasy elements – when not grading papers or researching medieval outlaw life. They have been a Rainbow Award winner, a Queer Indie Book Award winner, and a Good Sex Awards runner-up. They also like cats, craft beer, and the sound of ocean waves.
Thanks so much, K.L., for joining me!
J. Scott Coatsworth: How long have you been writing?
K.L. Noone: Pretty much as long as I can remember! I wrote a five-page short story in kindergarten—it was about a unicorn. And the words just never really went away, and still haven’t, decades later.
JSC: Are you a plotter or a pantser?
KN: Oh, dear, somewhere in the middle? I don’t write linearly (unless it’s a very short story) and I tend to start somewhere in the middle: with a significant scene, realization, conversation, or argument! That important scene tells me who my characters are: what they want, what’s in the way of that, what they’re willing to do or not do, what emotions they feel strongly. And then I work outward: okay, how’d they get there, to that point? And what changes as a result of this moment? I usually write a couple of other big scenes before and after, and then I do a quick outline of story beats, both character and plot, so I’ve got a sense of what absolutely needs to be in there, and then I work on the next bit that’s being loud in my head at the moment1.
“Hexes of Bronze” is unusual in that I started with the opening scene—but then I went all the way ahead and wrote the ending, and then went back to fill in bits! With Magician, for an extreme example, of the two scenes I wrote first, one’s about halfway through the book, and one’s essentially the last scene in the book, before the epilogue. The third bit I wrote was the whole opening sequence—and I think I did a quick outline after that, finally!
JSC: How did you choose the topic for Hexes of Bronze?
KN: This particular installment is the fourth story for Aric and Emrys, my swordsman and half-fae heroes! Overall, with this series, I’ve been trying to do a sort of homage to classic pulp sword-and-sorcery duos, which I do love—some influences might be Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, or Mercedes Lackey’s Tarma and Kethry, or Barbara Hambly’s Sun Wolf and Starhawk, and probably some Robert Howard’s Conan in there too—but more overtly queer and also having some fun with medieval trivia, like the giant snails in the first one!
This specific story is the fourth one, and it’s deliberately a little quieter—it’s about family, and hoping your family accepts you, even if you’re pretty sure they do, but…wanting to be sure. Of course it’s also got hexes and magic and city construction to deal with!
JSC: Tell us something we don’t know about your heroes. What makes them tick?
KN: Okay, one serious thing, and one funny thing, for each of them! Serious things first: Aric feels a fair amount of guilt about not being a good enough protector for his younger brother after their parents died—he was the one making money while Berd was injured and also younger, and he actually was very good at it, but taking jobs as a sword-for-hire meant he was gone a lot, and he to this day wishes he’d been there more, so they could’ve grown up together more. (Berd would say this is ridiculous and Aric was great at keeping their little family together!) (This is also partly why he tries to save as many people as possible.) Em, as far as serious things…they haven’t really said this even to Aric (though they might, in an upcoming story), but they genuinely hate their fairy-father. Not so much on their own behalf, but because they saw how their mother was seduced, abandoned, and left elf-touched and wandering and not entirely rational anymore, and Emrys has a lot of feelings about someone who can do that to another person with no remorse.
On the more funny side, Em is honestly a terrible cook, despite being able to make fire and tell poisons at a glance—they just never learned even the basics. Aric does the cooking, mostly. He’s also the one who, as the son of merchant traders, knows things like the prices of fabrics and the cost of feed for the horses and the price of small portable books. Em would just pay whatever the asking price is, without bargaining, or else throw a handful of gold at someone and be done with it. This has occasionally resulted in Aric going to have an unsubtle word with innkeepers about overcharging his partner, later.
JSC: What secondary character would you like to explore more? Tell me about them.
KN: I’ve batted around the idea of a spin-off story from Aric’s brother’s point of view, because it’s so interesting to be the Great Swordsman Hero’s younger brother…and Berd has done pretty well for himself; he’s the King’s favorite architect, but it’s complicated. As of course it would be. I did give him his love interest in Roger, the Officer of the King’s Works, in this story, though!
JSC: What pets are currently on your keyboard, and what are their names? Pictures?
KN: Miss Merlyn the Magnificent is still here and grumpy! She’s actually a little less grumpy; she let my nephew pet her over Christmas. She’s still a fiend for cheese and, inexplicably, popcorn.
JSC: We know what you like to write, but what do you like to read in your free time, and why?
KN: All sorts of things—I’m an omnivore! Lots of romance, especially queer romance; fantasy, especially fantasy with intriguing world-building and characters; biographies and memoirs—I was just reading Patrick Stewart’s memoir, for instance, and I’ve got biographies of Lou Reed, Julia Child, Laura Ingalls Wilder…I like history (and research is part of my day job) so I’m usually also reading something historical and scholarly, whether it’s about Arthurian romance or nineteenth-century sailing ships.
JSC: Star Trek or Star Wars? Why?
KN: Both! Depends on whether you’re in the mood for fantastical space opera or frontier voyage narratives. I grew up in a happy geek family who devotedly watched both. I have co-edited an academic collection of essays on Star Trek tie-in novels, though…but then I’ve also published an essay on a Barbara Hambly Star Wars tie-in novel and the Gothic, so, I suppose I’ve done both sides!
JSC: What’s in your fridge right now?
KN: Hmm…flavored sparkling waters, craft beer (mostly stouts), a lot of spinach, roasted pepper and onion relish, almond milk, various hot sauces, probably too much cheese…
JSC: What are you working on now, and what’s coming out next? Tell us about it!
KN: I’m working on several things, as usual! I’ve got a short (under 5k) story in the JMS Books charity anthology supporting the ACLU, out January 25 – my contribution’s called “Portraits” and it’s a bonus scene for Lorre and Gareth from Magician. Then there’s a completely new m/m romance novella called “A Valentine for Violet” in February for Valentine’s Day—no magic, but an alt-Victorian (same-sex marriage accepted!) English country village setting, and it’s full of paper-making and valentines and figuring out that sometimes it’s okay to take chances when there’s something you want very much.
And then there’re a couple of Things In Progress—the last two Aric & Em stories, of course! Plus an F/F fantasy in the Magician world, and the third and final book in the Spells and Sensibility Regency-with-magic trilogy that’s co-written with K.S. Murphy…and something else that I’ve been wanting to finish for a while, which is the surprise third story in the Kitten & Witch trilogy! (There were always meant to be three, but I switched publishers, or rather my first publisher closed, after the first two…those first two have since been rereleased with JMS Books!) I just pulled that one out to look over again and get back to, and it is in fact a paranormal murder mystery, of a sort, a genre which I have in fact never really written before, so it’ll be something new! The first lines, at the moment, are:
“The warlock had been murdered Tuesday night.
Colin Rue learned this news Wednesday morning, standing at a bookshop counter. For those first few seconds he could not think how to react, as if the words had nothing to do with him at all.”
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DRWQG9LL/?tag=quscfi-20And now for K.L. ‘s new book: Hexes of Bronze:
Swordsman Aric and his half-fairy partner Emrys need to lie low for a while. They’ve been attracting attention, and not just from very human kings and merchants — Em’s powerful fairy-lord father is looking for his lost heir. So Aric and Em have taken some time off from heroic adventures to visit Aric’s brother Berd, an architect who’s helping build the brand-new king’s city of Ambrosium.
But the construction seems cursed. Collapsing walls, accidents, spoiled provisions — there’s dark magic at work. And Aric and Emrys find themselves drawn into a tangle of family, politics, and hidden ancient hexes.
Publisher | Amazon
Excerpt
Aric wandered over to the low table. Swung a leg over the closest bench; Em perched beside him, with more economy of motion and somehow also more flair. “We’re not in your way, are we?”
“No.” Berd came back from the pantry with tea and bread, butter and honey, and sat down with them. He was almost Aric’s height — that Northern stature — but with the build, and the hands, of an architect rather than a swordsman. Outside the spring weather dripped damply, green and grey and wet in this new world of stone and record-keeping and carefully designed, presently half-finished, streets. “You’re always welcome, you know that. If you need someplace to stay between jobs, or you’ve angered a sorcerer, or made an enemy out of an army of ghosts, or whatever that ridiculous story is.”
“We’re all right.” More or less true. Hiding, in a sense. People who knew the Storm-Wielder and the Shadow, and who knew enough to know that Aric’s younger brother was one of King Alfred’s favorite well-paid architects, could find them. But those sorts of people were only human. Not the problem, at the moment. “And both Caris Ayling and Duke Arthur paid us more than enough, so if you could use the money — you did say it wasn’t the best time –”
“No, that’s fine.” A wave indicated that, yes, it was; Berd was doing well. He also stared at bread and honeyed butter with the expression of a man facing immense frustrations, presumably not related to the butter. “Stay as long as you’d like; I’ve got the space. I need to go out to Belin’s Gate tomorrow, though, even if it’s pouring like the ancestors dumping their wash-basins on us … that entire section of city wall collapsed, and it shouldn’t’ve done that, and I have no idea why it did. The anchor-stones were secure.”
This particular day happened to be one of the multitude of holy days belonging to the Church of the One-in-Three, hence the lack of work being done this precise second. Aric and Em, as, respectively, a Northern barbarian and a half-fairy shapeshifter, cheerfully refused to care about the day, and had decided it’d be a good moment to come and interrupt Aric’s brother at home. They’d been right, at least in terms of arrival.
“Do your walls collapse often?” Em inquired, and licked honey from a fingertip, cat-like. At the moment he wore the shape of the slender young man he generally put on when arriving in a town: short, petite, but with a quiet matter-of-fact competence that made pickpockets and troublemakers veer away. That wasn’t even magic, just Emrys. Most of the knives were even hidden, most of the time.
Berd scowled more at the defenseless butter. “No, they don’t. I’m good at my job. Our masons are good at theirs. The weather’s not great, but not more than we expected. I’ll try to find out tomorrow — maybe someone got a measurement wrong, maybe we hit an old underground barrow or vault from the old Winter Empire outpost … those should’ve been surveyed, though … and we’ve had six workmen come down with fevers, not to mention two with broken arms, and how that ladder broke when I looked at it only that morning, I don’t know.”
Em’s glance crossed Aric’s, over wild plum tea. His eyebrows had drawn together, thoughtful dark lines.
“We could come with you,” Aric said. “If you could use a hand.”