Alexandra Rowland’s Epic Fantasy Romance is a Love Letter to Fandom

Alexandra Rowland’s A Taste of Gold and Iron required a joyful writing course of. They began over six instances, throughout six years. But Rowland by no means received discouraged; this e-book was one thing that they knew was going to take time to get proper as a result of they had been engaged on one thing that embodied lots of the tropes, pleasure, romance, and fantasy that they liked greatest in all of the world. “It takes a long kind of journey to gain that kind of self-knowledge,” they stated in an interview with io9 earlier this 12 months. “Finding that core, that burning heart of what I love.”

When Rowland describes this course of, the start-over-from-page-one drafting, time and again and over, they’re intense and direct, however excited. They have thought of this e-book for years, and developed it over time, over and over. They know precisely what they did, and the way they did it. With A Taste of Gold and Iron, they finally wrote a e-book that grew to become a fruits of all of their favourite components of fiction… and fandom.

This e-book is centered round their favourite trope of all time—what Rowland described because the “king of all tropes”–the romance between a benevolent Lord and his loyal vassal. This form of plot may be traced again to a number of French folktales of courtly love and chivalry; the trope is, primarily, the concept of loyalty as romance. Red, White, and Royal Blue took full benefit of this trope. Anyone alive who reads fandom with any diploma of regularity can in all probability pull not less than a dozen fics with this sort of loyalty at its core; it’s what retains Supernatural’s Dean/Castiel fic writers alive, even now. The depth of Simon and Alisha from Misfits, loving one another throughout timelines. Any variety of Merlin fics. You get it.

So what’s A Taste of Gold and Iron? Set in a second-world fantasy nation named Arasht, the drama takes place in a capital port metropolis that teeters getting ready to an financial disaster. Prince Kadou has by chance fallen out of favor together with his sister, the queen, and in an try to regain her belief and assist his nation, he undertakes an investigation right into a report of counterfeit gold. Evemer, the prince’s bodyguard, goes together with it if solely to be sure that Kadou doesn’t strive something too silly on his personal. It has an Ottoman aesthetic, a Venetian shipyard, and was impressed by French romance, Arthurian fealty, and the historic people heroes of the Japanese Heike. “You can recognize some of the individual pieces if you know what you’re looking for,” Rowland defined. In between political intrigue and investigating legal exercise, A Taste of Gold and Iron interweaves the Romance style construction with epic fantasy storytelling.

In between the steamy romance, Rowland developed an extremely poignant story of psychological well being all through A Taste of Gold and Iron. “Kadou’s anxiety is modeled on my own experience with anxiety,” Rowland defined. “His anxiety is dialed up for the book, he doesn’t have the coping mechanisms I do, but the patterns and frequency and the way his brain cycles around itself, eating itself alive, that was very much my experience.” Kadou’s anxiousness is fixed. It’s not on each single web page, it doesn’t have an effect on him each single second of the day, however it’s there. It does have an effect on him. He does take into account it. It is a part of who he’s, however it isn’t all of who he’s.

There was one draft (the second draft) the place Kadou was going to be a prophet, receiving messages from a goddess. He was going to expertise dizziness, vertigo, and bodily results from this magical intervention. “But I realized that wasn’t what made me happy. This isn’t the story I want to tell.” Rowland stored these moments of bodily debilitation, however realized “this is anxiety.”

Rowland additionally described that there’s a barrier with language for anxiousness. In the e-book, Kadou makes use of phrases like cowardice to elucidate how he feels, and even this ties again to responsibility, fealty, and the concept that he isn’t measuring as much as a super. Rowland’s created an extremely deep character that on each stage feels very deeply, about who he’s and his place on this planet. It’s framed as a fear-creature, prowling, ready, and ever-present. “It was important to me that at the end of the book his anxiety isn’t healed,” Rowland stated, apologizing for the spoiler, however mentioning that that is perhaps vital to learn about their e-book. “He has better skills to deal with it, but it’s still something he has, that he will have to continue to work through. I didn’t want him to get better, I wanted him to get better at treating himself.”

As a romance between a Prince and a bodyguard, there’s an intricate dialog about energy, management, and consent that has to occur to ensure that the connection to really feel romantic and never merely coercive. It’s principally an employer/worker relationship. “I made sure that the characters, as well as the reader, were aware of who had power in any situation,” Rowland stated. “And I wrote out explicit conversations about the ways in which you have to be careful about power differentials in this kind of relationship.”

The characters do typically act on impulse, within the warmth of the second, however at the back of their minds, very like actual life, there’s all the time a battle with who is actually in management. The writing on this e-book demonstrates an unbelievable balancing act that Rowland pulls off in a approach that’s horny, enjoyable, and nonetheless deeply investigates what energy means in a relationship. The dynamics of energy, and easy methods to ethically deal with energy is a large a part of A Taste of Gold and Iron. Beyond simply Kadou and Evermer, there’s a fixed balancing act between royalty, topics, their nation, and the higher world past Arasht.

“I think it’s interesting to look more deeply at those potential power problems and face them directly,” Rowland stated. “Power dynamics aren’t sexy unless there is mutual awareness of care. We need to be careful of treating each other well.” Ultimately, Rowland needed to examine why they liked this trope a lot. What is it concerning the Lord and Vassal romance that pulls them in? Why does that energy differential really feel so interesting?

An reply, Rowland stated, could relate again to their expertise with fandom. The romance, these characters, had been all the time the scaffolding for Rowland’s six drafts. They had variations the place Kadou ran away, the place he was exiled, the place he was at college. But all through all these totally different editions of A Taste of Gold and Iron, Kadou and Evemer remained the true north of their writing. This is remarkably much like fanfiction, the place authors frequently reinvent the plot of their favourite tales as a way to uplift the romance, to deal with the pairing that brings them pleasure, to discover all sides of this intimate affection that they drew out of a narrative. “I have a long history with fandom,” Rowland defined, “which very much informed this book and how I wrote it. So yeah, a lot of this was like writing AU’s [Alternate Universes] for these characters.” They additionally point out that there might be a dedication on this e-book to the fan writers who, Rowland stated, taught them all the things they learn about writing.

Rowland additionally instructed me that they wrote a fanfic for A Taste of Gold and Iron. An official unofficial story. It received’t be canon, they stated, it’ll simply be for enjoyable. A private present that they can provide again to fandom. They’re planning to launch it on the Archive of our Own after publication, and it’ll have a disclaimer on the high that reads “A/N: I do own these characters.” Fandom will get it.

A Taste of Gold and Iron goes on sale August thirtieth. Preorder here. And if you wish to learn extra, Rowland is very happy to share some suggestions: “These are some of my favorite fics, but I’ve also chosen ones that share themes of one sort or another with A Taste of Gold and Iron!”

Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model of Trauma: An Integrative Approach – Nnm – Good Omens. Explorations of psychological well being, DEEP character work, unreliable narrators, the therapeutic energy of remedy — probably the very best fic I’ve ever learn, palms down, and a type of fics that would ONLY be fanfic, resulting from how a lot it depends on the viewers’s data of canon.

Dangerous If Unbound – astolat – Person of Interest. Sexy, horny fealty. Sort of. Definitely horny, sort-of fealty. Nobody understands horny fealty like Astolat does. She GETS IT.

Undiscovered Country – shysweetthing – Yuri!!! on Ice. A unbelievable fic about anxiousness, navigating a brand new romance, and doing the onerous work on your self so to be open and susceptible to a different individual. Y’know, The Mortifying Ordeal Of Being Known and so forth.

The World That You Need – Dira Sudis (dsudis) – Vorkosigan Saga. Absolutely splendid depiction of the negotiations round energy differentials, and the distinction between a personal relationship versus a secret one. Also, please image me slamming into Dira’s DMs a number of years in the past like, “Holy shit, you made the same joke about a character’s name that I did in this book I’m writing, let’s be friends.” So after all this one holds a particular place in my coronary heart.

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