I have so many strong women in my life. My mom is an unstoppable force, and I have amazing friends and family who are all different kinds of badass. But really, what it comes down to is that probably two-thirds of my characters just pop into my head as female. I used to feel kind of bad about it, like, “Oh no, I should make more of them boys, to be fair!” But then I looked around at how often you get these big teams of cool characters with just one or two token females, and I went, “You know what? Nah.” When you have a lot of primary characters who are female in the same story, you naturally get more variety in the types of strengths they show.

The Tethered Mage has a phenomenal cast of characters. If you had to pick one, who would you say is your favorite? Which character was the most difficult to write?

Oh, wow, it’s really hard to pick a favorite. I adore both Zaira and Amalia, of course, but I might have to go with La Contessa for both my favorite and the most difficult. She’s especially hard to write because she’s supposed to be so smart and such a skilled political player; every line of her dialogue needs a point and an edge. For both her and Zaira, in very different ways, I had to go back in revisions and make sure nothing they said was bland—I wanted to give them their own special flavors of extra punch.

What’s one thing about The Tethered Mage, either about the world or the characters, that you loved but couldn’t fit into the story?

I keep trying to write scenes that take place in a courier lamp room, because I have this strong atmospheric sense of what they look like, and what it feels like to be in there with important messages flashing back and forth. But so far I haven’t been able to keep any of those scenes, because no matter how cool the lamp chambers look in my mind, it’s still basically just people sitting around texting each other, which is hard to make dynamic and exciting.

The Tethered Mage is the first book of the Swords and Fire series. What’s in store for us in future books?

It’ll probably come as no surprise to anyone who’s read The Tethered Mage that we haven’t seen the last of Prince Ruven, and that Vaskandar will become more of a problem for the Serene Empire in general and Amalia and Zaira in particular. Amalia also has some hard choices in her future now that she’s stepping up and taking on more responsibility as her mother’s heir.

If you could spend an afternoon with one of your characters, who would it be and what would you do?