Sometimes they’re Bible quotations, sometimes they’re lines from a YouTube Poop I watched back in 2003. I mean… no, I definitely didn’t sit down and think ‘in this book I will try to fit in as many weird references as possible.' The way it works basically is that as I write, my brain rummages through a huge pile of festering trash and brandishes bits of it at me. In many ways, writing a novel was like returning to familiar ground. I taught myself to write one-shots-short single-installment character pieces, kind of 4-5k-because there was a phase where they were by far the most popular flavor in fandom and everyone went nuts for them, but my natural habitat was long plotty multi-chapter stories. When I wrote fanfic I always wrote long by default. I came home and told a non-writer friend ‘I’m considering a novel about a boarding school, but everyone’s a necromancer, and it’s in space?’ and my friend was like ‘that doesn’t really sound very good but I’m here for you’ and then later I sent them Act One and they were like ‘oh okay, sorry, this makes more sense than when you tried to explain it.'Īs for short fiction, the transition was the other way round. I was on a plane, I thought ‘two girls at Goth boarding school… dislike each other intensely,' and that was that. It was absolutely not a long-cherished dream or something I’d been jotting in notebooks for years, romantic as that would be. Gideon had never entered my head until about a week before I started writing it.

We were thrilled to sit down and talk with Muir about the difficulty of maintaining the threads of a complex universe, writing about fierce women, and what would happen if she took her characters to a theme park. And now, with the September 13th release of Nona the Ninth, we'll meet Nona, just a girl who wants to have a birthday party-but the universe has other plans.

The mythology was stunning, the allegory delightful, and let’s not forget the memes.Ī year later, readers were thrown into the mind of Harrowhark Nonagesimus with Harrow the Ninth. With sentences sharp as the blades on the cover, readers were entranced by the complex world Muir created with the first book in the Locked Tomb series. And sure, those helped capture readers' curiosity, but it was Tamsyn Muir’s prose that quickly created devout acolytes swearing their allegiance to the Ninth House. Or the badass woman on the cover boldly wielding a sword while sporting a pair of sunglasses.

Maybe it was the irresistible tagline: lesbian necromancers in space. When Gideon the Ninth was released in September 2019, it took the book world by storm.

Harrow the ninth release date