I was on a long car drive with my husband, who’s a video game designer, so we have all these marvelous, geeky, creative conversations together. We were talking about fantasy world building, and he said something about how if random people actually were born with powerful magic, there was no realistic way they wouldn’t wind up being the ones in power. I was like, “Yeah, unless the government identified them as children and controlled their power somehow.” And then I got the idea for the Falconer system, and started wondering what the relationship between a Falcon/Falconer pair might be like, and the story was off and running.

What, if any, research did you have to do in preparation for writing this book?

In early drafts, The Tethered Mage took place in a (very) alternate Venice. So I did a bunch of research on the Venetian Republic, and also some on the late 1600s, when it was loosely set. The world wound up diverging from history pretty thoroughly, and then became an original setting instead, but there are some remnants. For instance, Amalia’s last name is in honor of Elena Cornaro Piscopia, the first woman to receive a doctorate degree from a university. Even after I moved the story to an original universe, I still looked up certain things when I wanted to get a period flavor, or would do an image search for the type of landscape, fashion, or architecture I wanted to describe, for inspiration. I got so, so hungry researching historical and regional Italian food.

Fire magic is such a cool ability. What made you chose this specific power as your hero’s foremost strength/weapon?

I wanted unleashing Zaira’s magic to always be kind of an “Oh shit” moment—both devastatingly effective and also really unsafe for anyone around her. Fire seemed like the perfect match for something that’s instinctively alarming, yet fascinating and powerful, and can spread out of control easily.

The idea of freedom versus protection is a major theme in The Tethered Mage—what drew you to focus on this?

Once I came up with the idea for the Falcon/Falconer bond, it arose naturally from there. I wanted the individual characters and the world as a whole to be struggling with the issue of how to handle mages, and I didn’t want there to be an easy answer that would solve all the potential problems. Freedom versus protection is a trade-off we face all the time in real life, in everything from parenting to legislation, so I think it’s something we can all identify with.

Being a Strong Female Character sometimes seems to translate to being a gun-wielding, ass-kicking heroine, but The Tethered Mage has a wide range of female characters, all of whom are strong in their own unique ways. What were your inspirations for these characters?