Congratulations on releasing book two of The Endsong trilogy! How has it felt to see it out in the world?

It's been a long road for a book I worried was too weird, too ambitious, too angry to ever reach publication. It's still early days and hard to tell how the world feels about it, but what I have seen is overwhelmingly positive, and it's wonderful to know it's reaching its people.

There is amazing world-building in The Dawnhounds. I especially love the carnivorous mushroom houses. What is your favourite aspect of this world and what are you looking forward to readers seeing?

Book 2, and Book 3 (which is nearly done) go into a lot more detail about what it means for a ship to be biological, grown and alive, and I think when I'm exploring the (quite literal) bellies of these living ships that I'm having the most fun as a writer, and I really hope it's something readers vibe with as well.

Yat is such an interesting and complex character. Can you tell us more about what drove her creation?

In the very first drafts she's a pretty straightforward gender-swapped Captain Carrot expy, but while I was writing the books there were a series of clashes between the NZ Police and the queer community, which included the cops breaking a trans woman's arm at Pride. It became harder and harder to write a straightforward police procedural while the Police were treating the community like that, and it really tore the caul off my eyes. A common question at the time was "what about the queer cops?" and so I said, "okay, what about them?" and wrote one, a queer cop in a police force that was brutalising her community. There's an obvious cognitive dissonance there, so how does she work around? How does she justify it to herself and how does the world push back? In the end her journey is the same as mine, from accepting what she's been told about the police to seeing what's actually happening with clear eyes. This country imprisoned queer people for so much of its history and the police were the instrument of that, and we live in that legacy.

I love the inclusion of New Zealand slang throughout the novel. It sounds like it was a battle to keep it in the book, however. Can you tell us about that process?

I think I would've caved without Tamsyn Muir yelling at me tbh, there came a point when I was about to give in, and I told her so, and she sent me a rather brief all-caps message to the effect that this was important, that our voices matter, and that the Yanks can figure it out from context. It's funny what gets pushed back on and what doesn't, and I think Damon Reece had it right in The Uncanny Valley of Culture – if it's something VERY different from US culture they understand it's foreign but if it's something subtly different like humour then it gets read as wrong. Nobody ever pushed back on Kupu Māori (and in fact they encouraged me to put more of them in there) but it was the NZ English slang and cadence that they struggled with a lot.

How and when did you begin writing? What drives you?

I usually start with characters, and put them in spaces and have them explore those spaces. Oh they're eating? What are they eating? What does that say about the foods available, and the culture? etc and once you have enough little details they start knocking into each other. Oh they have fish but they're very far from the coast, that implies a trade network, what does that look like? Little questions lead to bigger and bigger ones and the world blossoms out from that. It's one of the real joys of worldbuilding for me, just feeling out the world and watching it grow on its own.

I think I just always wanted to tell stories. I'm not very good at the marketing or social media parts of being an author, I just grew up reading books about wizards and I wanted to write my own books about wizards and I did it. The books I grew up with meant a lot to me, and it's becoming clear that my books mean a lot to a lot of other people. Maybe somebody will read my books and want to write their own, and that's the highest compliment I think any artist can ever be paid. You made art, and that made more art, which can make more art.

How does identity influence your writing and characters?

I think it was Octavia Cade who talked about identity 'bubbling up' through fiction and that's the metaphor that stuck for me. I don't sit down and say "I'm going to write queer women", but I AM a queer woman, and that means I have a very different experience of the world from a lot of people, and that experience shapes the things I've seen, and the things that matter to me. Your identity will bubble up through the work, and I think as an artist I just...let it. Become a channel in the rock and let the water rise up.

How did your time in Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore influence the story?

I think KL in particular inculcated in me a double-edged love for big cities. There's so much life in cities, often pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, and as a girl who grew up in small-town Marlborough it was initially overwhelming, but I came to appreciate it, then when I came home the world felt empty in its absence. I think my time in Asia gave me a sense of scale that I never would've developed at home; the world is very big and we're all very small, and all we really have is each other.

What are your favourite books and what are you reading at the moment?

I've been doing a re-read of Book of the New Sun, after digging up the entire series for cheap at Pegasus in Wellington, replete with the old covers. I've also been on a bit of a spy novel bender while preparing for my next project, which pulls a lot of influence from Le Carré and Graham Greene. I wanted to create a tension, a sense of being watched and being able to trust nobody, so I sought out the masters.

Can you share a teaser of what you’re working on at the moment?

My partner got me into Deep Space 9 and I swear it's bleeding into everything I write. Elim Garak is a truly fascinating character, a spy who walks into a diplomatic summit wearing a shirt that says DEFINITELY NOT A SPY and everybody looks at him and goes "well a spy wouldn't be stupid enough to wear that" and ignores him. Is he the best or worst spy ever written? It's hard to say, though he certainly seems to achieve his goals more often than not.

And thinking about DS9 (the station) and Bajor and their very strange political situation, I got thinking about how it's basically the perfect setting for espionage, how it's this little outpost in amongst a sea of sweeping social change, surrounded and inhabited by people who are often angry and lost and also very well trained at sneaking around hallways at night. How it's this very enclosed system that nonetheless must be part of the unpredictable and often dangerous world around it. It's not subtle about Bajor being a sci-fi proxy of early-90s Berlin, complete with ex-Stasi around every corner.

But also I like flintlocks and historical fencing and also cramming as much of Aotearoa into everything I write as possible, so it's a little station floating magically above mountains that resemble very much the Southern Alps, in a fraught relationship with the cities below, where a politically-important girl goes missing, where opposing forces are playing a great game, in which are protagonists are pawns coming to resent the chessmaster's fingerprints. There will be regal ballrooms, pistoleers riding moa, knives in the dark, games of backgammon played by deadly enemies where every move has a double meaning, and a spy so obvious everybody forgets she's a spy.

It's the most fun I've had writing anything in years.

Is there anything else you want to add?

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