JA Andrews lives deep in the Rocky Mountains of Montana with her husband and three children. She is eternally grateful to CS Lewis for showing her the luminous world of Narnia. She wishes Jane Austen had lived 200 years later so they could be pen pals. She is furious at JK Rowling for introducing her to house elves, then not providing her a way to actually employ one. And she is constantly jealous of her future-self who, she is sure, has everything figured out.
Welcome back to the Hive, JA Andrews!
Congratulations on the upcoming release of your brand new novel Runelight ! Book one of a new trilogy, the Aenigma Lights: what can readers expect?
Hi! Thanks for having me back to the greatest book corner of the internet!
This trilogy, like all my books, takes place in the world of the Keepers (magic wielders/storytellers/historians). This one happens about twenty years after The Keeper Chronicles.
When Venn, a wounded, surly elf, shows up on the hidden doorstep of the Keepers’ Stronghold looking for Keeper Kate, she has nothing but the mysterious puzzle box Kate and her brother Bo have been searching for their whole lives—and news that Bo has disappeared.
Despite mutual distrust, Kate and Venn embark together on a journey to the distant lands that were once the Kalesh Empire—an empire that met a mysterious, violent end—in search of Bo and answers about the odd puzzle box that hums with magical powers.
Kate and Venn travel through dwarven realms, sneak into elven forests, cause upheaval among remote human settlements, and discover unexpected clues in ancient archeological sites as they figure out how to work together to solve an ever-growing set of mysteries and end up building a friendship for the ages.
As the search for Bo becomes increasingly dangerous, hints of a wider, more complicated plot emerges, woven through centuries of history, devastating both individual lives, and the entire vastness of an empire.
Half treasure hunt and half rescue, this is a tale of puzzles, mysteries, and the kinds of friendships that shape the soul.
Runelight is set twenty years on from your previous trilogy; what made you decide to tell Kate’s story?
Deciding which story to tell next is always difficult
The idea for this one came to me when I was reading Michael J. Sullivan’s Riyria books, and enjoying the friendship between Hadrian and Royce, as everyone who’s read those books has.
It occurred to me that I didn’t know any stories that had the same buddy cop feel, but had two women in the main roles. In fact, aside from a handful of movies and tv shows, most of which are decades old, I couldn’t think of any stories where the friendship between two women was the central relationship of the story.
Men even get a word for this. They get “bromance.”
I’ll tell you right now that there is no word for when it’s women – at least one that isn’t awful. I’ve been asking around. A lot. Wanna hear the terrible options? Of course you do.
I’ve even sorted them:
The bleh:
womance
sismance
sormance (from sorority)
femmance
sistership
the boring:
BFF
besties
gal pals
the super dreadful:
galentine
And the hilarious:
bra-mance
fempadres
chickmance
homance
she-migos
She-migos is my personal favorite.
Regardless, I’m stumped by the idea that there’s so little of this in stories, because in real life, women have a lot of close friendships. Friendships that shape their lives.
And so I had to try to write one.
Enter Kate, a Keeper who’s better at research than jumping into action, and Venn, a female elf who’s more than comfortable taking care of herself and anything else that gets in her way.
If I can do the friendship half as well as Sullivan did Royce and Hadrien, I’ll be very pleased.
And what challenges did you face setting this story twenty years on from your previous?
Very few! My last series I foolishly set 400 years in the past, and that gave me all sorts of trouble. It’s hard to make sure your Past World will actually work with the Current World. Setting this story in the future compared to any I’d written before made things much simpler.
Give us an insight into your characters, who else can we expect to meet? Do you have a favourite child?
Among my favorite side characters are a pair of dwarf twins, Tribal and Silas, who have a very loose idea of possession. In fact, they think if you put it down, it’s fair game. I had a ton of fun adding them into the mix.
Tell us a little something about your writing process – do you have a certain method? Do you find music helps? Give us a glimpse into your world!
Music messes with my brain. Listening to anything musical overrides all creative thought, lol. So I write either in silence, or with Brain.fm, which is a site that makes magic brain-focusing soundtracks. I have no idea how it works, but it is fantastic for helping me focus.
Speaking of worlds, what inspires your worldbuilding? Do you have a magic system/s? If so, can you tell us a bit about it?
In a past life, I got an engineering degree, so when I began to develop my magic system, I needed a nerdy system that I could wrap my brain around. So it’s based on energy, and my Keepers can tap into and manipulate that energy. Living things have energy, fires, the sun. etc.. Anywhere that Keepers can find energy, they can move it or direct it or affect it, although often in a limited way.
But like the real word, energy can’t be created or destroyed. So my characters are pretty much bound by the laws of physics, with a few exceptions made for cool stuff like mind reading.
If you were transported into your own fictional world, how do you think you would fare?
Probably okay. My world isn’t one of those with dangers around every turn. There are only a few magical people and only a few magical beasts. There are dragons occasionally, but most people just go about their lives like we do. Which is a really boring answer.
