First of all: If it looks like I’m misspelling a character’s name, that’s explained in the book. Go read it first. 😉
Unmarked spoilers throughout.
What a long road this one has taken.
The first few chapters of The Strangers’ Sanctuary – not the current first few, but those originally intended to open the book – were written somewhere between 2014 and 2016, I think. Placida reaches the as-yet-unnamed small town; Lundren visits home and has dinner with his terrible parents and brother (but not his sister, who hadn’t been written in yet); Lundren reaches the town. That’s it. Shelved. Didn’t know where to take it or what to do with it.
The narrators had half a personality each; they disliked one another much more actively and more quickly in the first draft, carrying over grudges from the Academy. Lundren originally had a crush on Placida at the Academy, too, but that didn’t accomplish anything in the story (it didn’t really even raise the tension). I had some of Lundren’s backstory as it stands in the finished version, minus Tufara’s existence. I had Placida’s backstory at the Academy, but not her backstory at home, her critical parents, or her insecurity. I had a concept, but not a story.
Healers 2 and 3 happened. Several novellas’ worth of my other series happened. I added bits and pieces to Strangers every now and then – Tufara was an important addition, adding a little light to the beginning of the story – but it still stalled out as soon as Lundren reached the still-unnamed town.
In early 2024, I had a good old-fashioned existential crisis, whipping myself up into a froth over what I’d done wrong and why everyone around me was succeeding at this cozy fantasy thing while I could never seem to get it right. I consulted a community of experts and got the advice to ditch the antiquated Healers series and the even more off-market Therapist series and write something that new readers could get on board with. And I ought to hit all the right plot beats and tropes for cozy fantasy, if I knew what was good for me. (Which is, to be clear, solid advice. If you want to succeed, do that instead.)
I tried, but I couldn’t get a good grasp on those plot beats and tropes. I could name some, but I couldn’t form them into a story. That’s a whole other skill, and one where I fell short. Besides, none of them seemed to dovetail onto this story specifically, and this was the one my gut was telling me I needed to tell next. Ultimately, I could only take one little piece of that advice: this book is intended to be accessible to new readers.
I think I needed that, although some part of me still wants to return to Healers sometime. I needed to show myself that this world was bigger than what I’d already covered. I needed to show myself that I’d learned some things in the ~15 years since I started writing The Healers’ Road. (If nothing else, this did not take as long to write and edit.)
And here we are: a story about two damaged characters who learn how to be better people. I’ll admit that I have a lane.
The original concept for this story, beyond “two Academy classmates who have always hated one another and are forced to work together,” was to explore the gap between people’s inner selves and how they’re viewed. The early version of Placida was not so much insecure as mean inside her head, but outgoing and friendly to others. The early version of Lundren was much less accepted by the townsfolk, due to his closed-off demeanor.
I also had half a mind to explore an idea that I’ve never really seen explored (it’s probably out there, I just haven’t seen it): a character who had a bad time growing up, but who doesn’t find an accepting community of people just like them as soon as they walk out their parents’ door. Where the rest of the world doesn’t like them any more than their family did.
Aside from one meme about how it’s OK to abandon “a kid with a bad vibe”, people just don’t talk about that. It’s frustrating, because I don’t see myself reflected in fiction much. And when it is, usually it’s painted as though we’re doing it on purpose, which is not the case with me. The usual trope is more comfortable for normal people, I suspect.
Eventually I realized that the way I was writing Lundren made him come off as neurodivergent, and the townsfolk’s reaction just made them look like assholes. The original point was not coming across, so I scrapped it.
Placida was harder to shape, in that I wanted her to be “unlikeable” – difficult, complicated, misguided – but not so much that all the readers quit the book. So she got layers of insecurity under that façade: not just studying other people’s flaws but projecting her own fears onto them. (I’m perfectly aware that Placida will put some people off. That’s fine. I love her even when she’s being infuriating.)
I did as much research as I could stand about narcissistic family systems as well. Now, “narcissism” is a term that gets thrown around VERY lightly on the internet, and I don’t mean to contribute to that. The point is that I read about these dynamics and used them to inform the story. I’m not armchair-diagnosing any real people, or even fictional ones. All I’ll say about the Friesos is that they suck, and Lundren and Tufara’s mom would be a supervillain if this were a different kind of story. The Venthis, well. I think we all know some Venthi types.
Is this based on my own experience, well, that’s complicated, and I don’t need anyone coming after me. Yes and no. There are traces of my own experiences in Lun and Tufara’s father and in Placida’s Mama Carina in particular (and those were the same person, because real people are complicated). But I don’t base whole characters on real people. What I will say is that I’ve felt a lot of the ways that Lundren and Placida feel.
Ultimately, the more important factor in the story isn’t even the parents but the effects they have on Placida and Lundren. Some people who’ve been through this sort of situation call effects like this “fleas,” especially the sorts of things Placida does: lashing out or adopting dysfunctional behaviors herself as a survival mechanism. (Lundren’s reaction is more like internalizing. He believes everything his parents say about him, in the beginning. Whee, unreliable narrator time!)
It was also important to me to make the two families different, and to make their children’s eventual confrontations with them different. They have some things in common, but there are different ways of dealing with difficult people. And as we see in the story, not every approach works, and there are different definitions of “success” in a situation like that. It’s possible that, with enough boundaries in place, Placida could have a workable relationship with her parents. Lundren and Tufara, not so much.
To be clear, I have no judgment about real people and how they deal with their own family situations. Sometimes things play out like they do in the story (well, minus the swordfight). Sometimes they don’t. There is no one best way to deal with every situation.
Even knowing that this theme will limit this book’s audience, despite its small-town cottagecore onslaught of gardening and cooking, I left it all in. It was important to me to write a story about the main characters overcoming the ways they were raised. Even though I will never make the giant pile of money I could have made if I took that advice and wrote cozy fantasy. I’m very good at shooting myself in the foot.
Besides, I write what makes me happy, at the end of the day. Gardening and cooking and book clubs and slowly overcoming dysfunctional programming, that’s something I can throw my whole heart into. It’s fine if it’s not everyone’s cup of hugs-and-warm-cocoa.
Notes about specific aspects:
This is the first book I’ve written without chapter titles. I found too many chapters hard to title, and using character names would make Lundren’s spelling change look like a typo in the table of contents.
I resisted using “okay” in three Healers books and then gave up and used it in this one. “Okay” is more modern a word than people realize, is the thing. It was a hill I’d planned to die on. But then I realized that a) everyone else uses it constantly in fantasy and b) so much else about my dialogue style rings as “modern” that it was pretty silly to avoid that one term. I still try to avoid terms named after real-world people or places, as well as electrical or technological metaphors that the characters wouldn’t have access to. But no one cares about that kind of pedantry. I was giving myself more work for nothing.
Having goats mow the back field was inspired by a modern practice called goatscaping, which is itself a revival of an older practice. From what I’ve read it’s less useful for modern grass than for flowering weeds, so we might be stretching a bit, but then again, these are wild grasses / plants and not a modern monoculture lawn. They also don’t tend to have dogs herd the goats, as I understand. But I needed to have the dogs in there for Lun. Just had to.
While I’m on the topic of grass, I’ve long decided that ticks don’t exist in either of my worlds, right along with homophobia. (We see Berry climb right into an overgrown field in Therapist 7.) I have some concerns about the water channels in the rainy season harboring mosquitoes, so those might not exist either. Maybe this is a utopia after all…
I called upon all the gardening nerdery I could, though my experience isn’t in a Mediterranean climate (Curno is loosely based on Tuscany, of course). I had decided a while ago not to limit the cultivation of nightshades – we see Agna eating a caprese salad in Healers – so there are tomatoes. And no ticks.
There was originally one direct reference to Healers: in an earlier draft, when Placida is reminiscing about her last Midsummer party at the Academy, she mentioned “Rone’s bookish little friend Agna” coming up to say hello before scampering off. As much as I wanted to throw in a reference, it didn’t add much to the theme in that scene of Placida missing her friends. There is, however, a reference to The Wanderer, Agna’s childhood favorite book that she reads during The Healers’ Road, as well as The Marriage of Queen Gioconda, the opera about the polyamorous queens mentioned near the end of The Healers’ Purpose.
Healers was more direct about the language stuff, like alaste; it felt easier to explain when characters are speaking different languages and have to explain it to each other in-universe. In the hillside picnic scene in Strangers, Lundren originally says I like you to Ivo – ente as the key verb there – and corrects himself to I’m attracted to you, or amane. This could also be rendered as I’m in love with you, because Nessiny, like a lot of modern societies, conflates romantic love and sexual attraction all the friggin’ time. It’s a whole theme in Healers’ Purpose. Mind you, I don’t think that’s a good thing. I throw in a lot of stuff into the worldbuilding that I don’t personally cosign. That’s how fiction works, kids.
But Placida and Lundren exchanging alaste (I love you as one of my own / storge basically) was important enough to throw in there as raw conlang. Alasteni is new to this story, as an extension of alaste; “beloved”, noun, on a platonic level.
Gavine’s older son Val was a semi-intentional reference to Riv/Val/Rivalo, the MC of my spouse’s first novel. When looking up random Italian names, “Valentino” came up, and the happenstance made me smile. (The boys’ full given names are Valentino and Giordano.)
If you’re wondering whether Gavine is AFAB or AMAB, the answer is “none of your (or my) business.” <3 The worldbuilding of this series has explanations for how people of various genders present themselves, get medical care if they want it, and have children (see also Placida’s family, and Nicoletta’s in Healers). The nuts and bolts of it are not important for the purposes of this story. “Gavine” can be a masculine name in Italian, but the nonbinary Nessinian we’ve seen previously, Alme in Healers’ Purpose, uses -e as a neutral name ending.
It is a tricky worldbuilding choice to have kids declare their genders at seven. It comes up in Healers, and I knew what I was doing then, but it came up again in this one. The thing is, I don’t create this world to be perfect. There are plenty of flaws in it. The system of the Academy exploiting recent graduates based on how much their parents could afford to pay in tuition? It’s pretty fucked. So is the fact that Tufara was signed to a nine-book contract as a sixteen-year-old. So is Keifon’s indenture contract in Healers that basically signs him over to the company/organization he works for. And having a naming/gender ceremony at 7 (or 10, in Yanwei) is not a perfect solution in every instance. There are bound to be kids who aren’t sure, although let’s remember that they have grown up in an environment that allows them to figure themselves out without pressure – so more of them would have a handle on it than they do in our society. Placida also mentions in this story that adults can easily change their names and gender markers, meaning that no one is “locked in” to their seven-year-old self’s decision.
Also, believe and support trans kids, adults and everyone in between, fuck you.
Relatedly, if you’re new to this setting, it’s not unreasonable that one small town would have multiple trans people and multiple queer people in it. In Healers an extra mentions that 1 out of 3 people in this setting are queer in some fashion; in this book Placida mentions that 1 out of 20 people, or 5%, are trans or nonbinary (which some people place under the trans umbrella and some don’t, don’t get me started, I’m not getting into that argument). No one has any reason to be in the closet, basically. Or hey, maybe it’s a chicken and the egg scenario, and the greater quantity of queer people is why the setting is queernorm. ~Who knows (or cares)! It doesn’t need a “reason”!~
There are a few particular tropes I wanted to avoid in this book – I’m not saying they’re evil; they just aren’t what I set out to do. First is the “romantic love fixes everything” attitude. Lun and Ivo’s relationship is meant to be a result of Lun’s growth, not a cause. Nor is Ivo a reward for Lun’s growth, as a love interest might be in some stories. (He’d laugh at the suggestion.) The goal is for Lun to be able to accept what he wants once he grows to a particular point.
Another trope is the “small town good, city bad / romance good, career bad” dichotomy that Hallmark movies thrive on. Of course, this setup speaks deeply to a lot of people. But that’s not what I meant to do here. Reguli/the capital is not a bad place. Being in Rolasari/a small town is not what fixes Lun and Placida’s lives. It’s being out on their own. It is a scenic backdrop, and there are themes of renewal and growth, of course. But fewer people does not automatically equal “everyone is perfect.” They also aren’t returning to their hometowns, which I feel is an important aspect of the Small Town Equals Moral stance. They are changing, striking out on their own, pushing against their own status quos. (Statuses quo… you know, never mind.)
Relatedly, Placida’s career is important, and she makes it her own. Tufara’s is important, too, and it is the means with which she takes control of her life.
Adelina della Sopra’s books really only exist to have the characters react to them and to indirectly convey Tufara’s character. But one note of trivia is that the “showdown between the POV character and her best friend who has turned evil” that Placida describes in the book club was inspired by the duel between Utena and Wakaba in episode 20 of Revolutionary Girl Utena. Though the way Placida describes her favorite character, Nerea, is more like Juri than anything. This influence is also echoed in the two fights that open and close the book, especially the final one. Working through your traumas while swordfighting? Fending off an avatar of toxic masculinity as an establishing moment? [CW: domestic violence] Yeah. That didn’t come from thin air. And in an early draft of that fight, Lundren fended off his dad with a wooden practice sword rather than the Hand of Darano.
One of the beta readers joked that the most fantastical element in the book was all the publicity della Sopra’s publisher does, and yeah, pretty much. Part of that was needing the plot machinations to work and partly some inspiration from the early Hollywood studio system, where actors were locked into exploitative contracts and publicized as personalities for the benefit of the studios. It’s not OK that she was hired that young, even leaving her own subterfuge aside. I hope to get back to Tufara’s employment situation in the next book, if only as a subplot.
Leading along from the topic of Tufara, some notes on the cover: While I was happy with the 10th anniversary Healers covers, which have the sort of “fantasy object + cool title styling” style I had in mind originally (“sword, maybe with some vines??”), I still wished an illustrated, character-focused cover had been in the cards. I pivoted to a new plan once I saw a couple of other indie fantasy covers by author and artist May Barros on Bluesky. Luckily, I got into May’s commission queue, and I absolutely love the results.
Two easter eggs on the cover I wanted to note: first, more easily noticeable, Placida is carrying one of the wooden practice swords (and the side she has it on suggests she’d draw it left-handed, which is awesome); and way in the distance, you can see another figure that represents Tufara. <3
Placida’s struggle with Lundran philosophy was inspired by the memory that, even as a little kid, I couldn’t believe Mr. Rogers when he said everyone was special. I would just think, “but I’m not.” That show is sacrosanct where I grew up, since it was a local production, and so the memory stayed with me. Reckoning with the realization that your experience of the world is somehow different from everyone else’s is part of what animated this story.
Even though one might think it would be best to get the personal stories out of one’s system early, this book is more personal than Healers in a lot of ways. I often say that none of my characters are self-inserts, but many of them are partial self-inserts. That is, I draw on some aspects or experiences that I relate to, and build the rest of the character from there. I relate to Lundren’s communication issues, internalized messaging, inability to read people, and tendency to lock into bad brain mode; I relate to Placida’s class anxiety, feelings of inadequacy, career pressure from her family, tendency to project, and impostor syndrome. I don’t relate to their strengths, frankly. But those make them likeable to normal people. 😉
Finally, the last elements to come into place were Fennel, Ivo’s cat, and the showdown with Lundren and Tufara’s parents. I’d been advised to add a Sassy Talking Animal Sidekick to steer into cozy fantasy; I resisted, since talking animals were not established in Healers, and I stubbornly insisted on keeping this one in the same universe. (Yes, this is counterproductive.) However, I thought having a pet suited Ivo’s personality, and we get to see him being kind and cuddly right from the beginning. So Ivo gets a cat, Lun gets a dog.
As for the showdown, it went through several iterations: a couple versions of a purely verbal altercation, one where Lun fends off his father with a wooden practice sword (I’d considered a rolling pin at first, but decided it was too silly), one where Lun has a practice sword but misses the disarm and breaks his dad’s wrist after all, and then the final version. I still don’t know whether it lands as I intended – adding things after the beta reading stage is flying without a net, don’t do this at home – but I’ll take that chance.
Further Reading
This book touches on a lot of heavy stuff. I can’t guarantee that it’s all “correct” (though I’ve done my best). To dive more into these topics, here are some more in-depth treatments.
- Will I Ever Be Good Enough?: Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers by Dr. Karyl McBride, Ph.D. I read this a while ago and probably wouldn’t go back to it thanks to the gender essentialism, but some people would likely find it helpful.
- Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD. Especially in reference to Placida’s parents: a lot of this book is about scenarios that aren’t wildly horrible, but can still have deleterious effects on a kid.
- The “running about the breakup” scene was inspired by, but not exactly the same as, the concept of the stress cycle detailed in Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski, Ph.D. and Amelia Nagoski, DMA.
- Some of the tactics Placida and Lundren take at the end are also informed by the concept of grey rocking.
Playlist:
Overall:
“Strangers” by Langhorne Slim and the Law
(the line “things burn if you set ‘em on fire” strikes me as funny, though)
“Don’t Carry It All” by the Decemberists
Placida’s side:
“Paris” by Kate Nash
“God’s Gift” by Johnny Marr
Lundren’s side:
“Mad World” by Tears for Fears
“Today” by Smashing Pumpkins (look, I’m a former ‘90s teenager. Also, I have to keep highlighting what Lundren is like after the clouds start to lift. It’s important.)
Tufara’s side:
“The Mother We Share” by CHVRCHES (yeah I KNOW but)
“Cold War” by Janelle Monae
Actual writing music: The New Pornographers’ Challengers; School of Seven Bells’ Alpinisms; the Coffee Talk and Coffee Talk 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly soundtracks; Johnny Marr’s best-of, Spirit Power; the Hades soundtrack for the last few chapters; a lot of folky indie rock during the rewrites and editing; and the “Break Time” playlist on Nintendo Music.