Today on the site I’m delighted to welcome Trip Galey and R.D. Pires, authors of the upcoming Science Fantasy The Fall of the House of Valenziaga and Epic Fantasy Before the Ghost Sea, respectively! With both books launching Kickstarters this month, the authors wanted to chat about their projects, so before we get started, here’s a little more on those!

Virtus is the handsome, golden-tongued heir to House Valenziaga. He has wealth, privilege, influence, as many lovers as he could want…and his life is a living hell. His mother, the ageless Vainglory Valenziaga, is a world-breaking tyrant and she holds Virtus’ very existence firmly in a razor-manicured fist.

Not all mothers love their children; not all rulers deserve their crown.

When an unexpected confrontation reveals to Virtus Valenziaga just how cruel and monstrous his mother truly is, he will do anything to escape her control and flee the Legendary House that has been his home and family for over twenty years.

But escape is something far easier said than done. Brutal magic, societal expectation, and his missing heart all bind him tightly to his mother Vainglory and to House Valenziaga. Virtus cannot simply walk away.

Can Virtus find and recover his heart, break the ties that bind him, and evade the machinations of his ambitious adopted sister, the temptations offered by an impeccably painted crime boss, and the petty rivalries of the scions of the rest of the Legendary Houses?

If he can’t, he’ll be trapped in his living hell forever—and even if he can, will House Valenziaga survive the betrayals it will take to secure his freedom?

The Fall of the House of Valenziaga is a high-stakes, science-fantasy family epic. If you love lushly imagined settings, strange magics and impossible sciences, and queer characters that are both smart and sexy, you’ll live for this latest tale from Trip Galey!

Check out the Kickstarter for The Fall of the House of Valenziaga here!

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A state of upheaval grips the realms.

Returning to her homeland, Queen Yiscel finds herself surrounded not by a triumphant celebration, but deadly disease. Amid a desperate search for a cure, a rising tide of discontent threatens her regime.

Meanwhile, harrowing circumstances on either side of the Endless Ocean vie for Emperor Kaori’s attention. An unforeseen shadow surfaces in Nokara, endangering his seat on the Golden Throne. Yet, leaving Faron without unraveling the symbols left behind by Fogosombre could have dire consequences for the known world.

Thus unfolds the most expansive entry in The Tides That Reign. Amid sweeping treks to snow-capped peaks and harrowing nights in the darkest of storms is a tale about sailing the surge of passion, surviving the tide of consequence, and wading through a sea of ghosts.

Check out the Kickstarter for The Tides that Reign series here!

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And now, Trip Galey and Robby “R.D.” Pires!

Robby: How shall we begin? With a pitch?

Trip: Yeah. Something clever. Or ridiculous. Maybe “describe your book badly”?

Robby: Oh! How about pitch your novel like you’re spilling the hottest tea? That’s always fun.

Trip: Yes! Let’s do that. Are you feeling it or do you want me to go first?

Robby: You are more theatrical.

Trip: Okay, let’s see here. Gurl, have you heard what is going on with Virtus?

Robby: I have not, mamas, spill.

Trip: Like oh my God, all of House Valenziaga? Literally going down, like as in collapsing. I mean literally slay the house down boots. Like Virtus’s mother, Vainglory? So, she girl-bitched too close to the sun—

Robby: *cackles*

Trip: —and Virtus just lost it and he is HELL. BENT. on taking her down. And the boy does not care if the whole bloody city goes with them.

Robby: I think “girl-bitched too close to the sun” needs to appear somewhere on the cover.

Trip: I think that’s the best I’ve got right now. Your turn.

Robby: Hang on. I gotta get into character. This is not my forte. We’re going to try though. *clears throat* Listen babes. You know the tyrant, King Fogosombre? Literal tea. I hear this fab group of rebels called Afonso’s Light are going to take him down.

Trip: Okurr! Take the bastard down!

Robby: Yes, honey. They are sailing across the Great Ocean, not the lesser oceans, the Great Ocean.

Trip: The lesser oceans are like a hop, skip, and a jump.

Robby: If you’re gonna do it, go all the way. They’re going to find someone who can take his ass to the cleaners, you hear. It’s going to be insurrection realness, hunty!

Trip: *snaps fingers*

Trip: Right. That was so stupid (complimentary)! *laughing* Should do a real one now?

Robby: We should. I’m sure those are inscrutable.

Trip: The Fall of the House of Valenziaga is a story for all those kids with toxic parents—the ones who never had the power to fight back against the abuses of authority they had to suffer. At the core of it is a brokenhearted boy whose world is shattering around him, and it’s about what he does to fight—and possibly destroy—those abusive figures over him. But it’s also fun.

Robby: Who doesn’t love a little trauma?

Trip: It’s set in a post-apocalyptic science-fantasy world beyond the edge of space and time, and it is so inspired by queer culture that it’s more Easter egg than narrative at some points. There’s a location referencing Chappell Roan, and “noble” houses inspired by queer subcultures—it’s camp, it’s fun, it’s DRAMA. Good times.

Trip: Your turn!

Robby: The Tides That Reign is a gripping tale that is both a sprawling epic and an intricate character-driven fantasy. Eschewing the chosen-one trope in favor of a multi-pov ensemble cast of characters who all must participate in overthrowing a tyrannical king, readers are invited to hold on tight as they’re swept away on a voyage rife with grand battle sequences, seafaring adventure, political intrigue, and queer forbidden romance.

Trip: And it draws a lot on South Asian/Spanish mythology/history.

Robby: Yeah, the settings and mythology draw inspiration from South East and East Asia, as well as the Iberian Peninsula, which sets up some themes throughout the series about colonization and cultural blending.

Trip: Both of our books are going to be available very soon, Dear Reader. Possibly now, depending on when you are reading this.

Robby: We’re doing kickstarters that are launching within a day of one another near the beginning of March.

Trip: Speaking of—have you had this question? I’ve been asked this a couple times. I’ve been traditionally published; you’ve been traditionally published. The question is: why are you taking this book to Kickstarter instead of to your agent, or your publisher?

Robby: Oh, this is always a fun one. The answer to mine is that the original publisher of this series turned out to be fraudulent and dissolved, taking all the royalties they owed me with them. So, I decided—

Trip: Hang on, sorry, sorry. We have weekly conversations, face-to-face. You never actually told me that they full-on vanished!

Robby: It was a very quiet thing that just happened. The website disappeared. Now the publisher’s just gone. Their social media has all vanished, and that probably happened around the start of the year. The tea is actually scalding.

Trip: Holy fecking shiz. Sorry. I’ve interrupted. That’s wild. You were saying!

Robby: Right! I decided to do a Kickstarter to get this series back on track for what I had originally envisioned. I felt like the publisher—while they were still around—kind of took advantage of my willingness to do whatever they asked while not putting in any effort of their own. So after everything came out and I got my rights back, I thought, well, I already put in all that effort. I might as well try to recoup some of the costs–

Trip: Valid.

Robby: Yeah, it wasn’t great. But hopefully these editions will be! So how about you? I feel like you have an equally illustrious answer for why you’re choosing Kickstarter.

Trip: I mean, I really hate doing things for only one reason if I can help it at all—

Robby: Surprising no one.

Trip: Exactly. So, to begin with, on a sort of artistic and professional level, this book is incredibly queer, not just in terms of like the LGBTQ characters and storylines involved, and the worldbuilding and everything, but because science fantasy is a queer (as in odd) genre, right? It is a weird book. It is not the sort of thing that would easily fit on a themed table at the local bookstore.

Robby: Meaning it would be a harder sell to publishers or something?

Trip: Very much that. And people I trust in tradpub have said “Look, this is great, but it will be a harder sell.” And I can see why. It is multiple genres clashing. It’s queer beyond like, two guys kissing or a why-choose romance novel, right? It’s full-on messy queer polyamory and all kinds of different queer experiences and relationships. Plus drag. Plus multiple magic systems. And super-science. It’s more is more to the Nth degree.

Robby: You do love more is more!

Trip: I really do! And a lot of the advice that I received was, if you want to have a better chance at selling this, you’ll need to simplify. Just fantasy, not science-fantasy, etc. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted the full-on ridiculous, queer everything that is going on in this book.

Trip: And speaking of queer, I really wanted the chance to be fully queer with production, since the story is fundamentally queer on so many levels. To say—categorically—I’m going to have a queer cover designer, a queer editor, a queer copy editor and proofreader. Anyone who touches the production of this book is going to be queer. You cannot guarantee that with traditional publishing.

Robby: I know you. There’s probably at least one more reason, if not two or three.

Trip: Guilty! Yes. There’s a more personal one. My partner and I live in the UK, though we’re originally from the US. Our visa is nearly up and visa costs are insanely expensive. Kickstarter also pays faster than tradpub, and hopefully this one helps cover those costs.

Robby: Gotta get that money, honey!

Trip: Fingers crossed! So, really, it’s this conflation of factors. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to take The Fall of the House of Valenziaga and bring it to life with all the queer extravagance I possibly can, and hopefully at the same time allow me to stay in the UK.

Robby: I feel that’s really the beauty of independent publishing. You can do whatever you want, push the boundaries you want to push. And hopefully find that audience that doesn’t see what they want to see in their stories through traditional publishing. And I imagine that it’s really fun to tell a story like that. What were your favorite parts about writing this book?

Trip: I feel like I’ve been talking a lot. Let’s swing back around to that question after I ask you one. Because I want to ask you something music related, since you compose as part of your drafting. You create music as well as a book! So—if one of your main characters was a song, which song would they be?

Robby: That is a hard one because like you said, I do compose. So, there are themes that I already associate with these characters, but obviously no one’s gonna know if I’m like Jade Wings, they’re not gonna know what that means.

Trip: I mean, we will now.

Robby: Anyway, there’s a character who appears in the second book—her name is Midori, and she’s one of my favorites. And I feel like not necessarily title-wise, but emotion and composition wise, the song Snow White Queen by Evanescence is very entangled in her character.

Trip: Amazing.

Robby: Right! Now what was your favourite part about writing Valenziaga?

Trip: Continuing in the aural vein… I’m a very audible writer, for lack of a better term. The way things sound and the way words ebb and flow and build is incredibly important to me. And I like my big words. I like my grandiloquent sayings. And you don’t always get to let your vocabulary run absolutely, fecking rampant. But that’s something I’ve been able to do with this book.

Robby: Why with this book specifically?

Trip: Oh, because queer culture is so often extra. Think of drag. It’s a supremely visual art. Theatrical. Camp. Over-the-top. I’ve always felt that to properly represent drag in prose, it’s almost required to go purple. One needs to be slightly baroque in phrasing and description to make it lush and OTT. So that the text itself is reflective of the essence at the core of so much modern drag performance.

Robby: So there is some method to your grandiloquent madness.

Trip: A smidge. Anyway, that’s my favorite part—but I do rein myself in a bit. Or Chris—my editor—will. Purple-prose-wise, it’s not just a constant smack of aubergine in your face (as much as some of you might enjoy that sort of thing)—

Robby: *cackles*

Trip: —but there are moments when someone walks a ball or when something absolutely cataclysmic happens and I just… take the breaks off and I let myself be florid and grandiloquent. And obviously I try and carry through the emotional truth of the scene that I’m writing, but at the same time, it’s pretty and it’s extra.

Trip: What about The Tides That Reign? What’s been your favorite bit so far, as the fourth one’s still coming?

Robby: There will be a Kickstarter for that one too! There are so many fun parts about writing an epic series. The thing I have the most fun with is connecting the dots. The way I write a lot of stories, especially big stories like this, is that I just have a notebook full of constant ideas and images and stuff that I’m writing down, to use somewhere later.

Trip: Similar. Constantly taking notes of things.

Robby: And when I was putting together the foundational materials for these books, for this world, I had so much fun deciding, “oh, I can use that here, and this works really well with that storyline, and those themes will coalesce around this image or that place that I’ve created.” That’s been the best part about this whole process: letting all the pieces fall into place from years of random ideas floating about in the ether.

Trip: What was the original, core inspiration that started The Tides That Reign?

Robby:  Back in 2019, I started to put together some ideas for an epic fantasy, because I’ve always loved the genre, and I wanted to do my own story. I had this loose concept of this trio of siblings split apart by war as they try different means of finding help for their people. But I had a lot of doubts about my ability to write something so involved.

Robby: The inciting incident was actually watching the final series of Game of Thrones. Episode 5, “The Bells.” Being completely like what is happening right now!? Who greenlit this? But ultimately realizing, “I can’t complain if I’m not willing to take the dive. And that was on HBO. So why am I afraid of writing the story myself?”

Trip: Dive in! Do it!

Robby: After that point, I took about 4 months outlining and solidifying world details, putting together the character descriptions and the locations. Then I started drafting.

Robby: Valenziaga, and the Twixt universe itself, is something that’s been floating around in your written works and your mind for years. How did you decide that this was the story you wanted to do next, or for Kickstarter?

Trip: It’s the weird, super queer one that I wanted to do, but never got around to because I was doing “more responsible” writing. It deserves its time to shine! It’s one of those worlds, stories, characters, etc. that carves out a little niche, in your soul and doesn’t go away.

Trip: I remember when the core concept hit me. It was 2018, I was doing my PhD, and my partner and I were mainlining queer shows in between my intensely writing a thesis and a novel at the same time.

Robby: You? Going full Type A? Groundbreaking.

Trip: I know. Anyway, we were watching Drag Race, and American Horror Story and POSE and Paris Is Burning, and and and… and watching the last two it all came together, capturing that moment in queer history as our world completely ended. There was this intense, vibrant free world of queer expression, gay expression, and AIDS came along, and wiped out a generation. It ended that world that was.

Trip: Obviously you know, some people survived, groups move on, but that sort of concept of the end, right—because we always talk about, you know, the end of the world as like the whole globe. But really, people’s worlds end for them on a much more personal scale all the time. Break-ups, loss of friendships—that can end your world. Change life as you know it. You hear people say it all the time. “Oh, my world ended when so-and-so left me, when my partner died” or these sorts of things.

Trip: And that idea, that queer people have our worlds broken around us all the time and we survive, and we go on, and we rebuild with broken things and make beautiful our lives with what we can salvage from the wreckage.

Trip: And then it hit me—this vision of a city beyond the edge of space and time, just floating out in the abyss, where all of these pieces of broken worlds come together as this impossible city, because like broken glass, like a mosaic, all these little pieces can still make a beautiful vibrant whole in spite of being broken or shattered or traumatized—that was the idea of Twixt. It just resonated so strongly with, like, queer people being very familiar with the heartbreak of being rejected by family, or being fired from a job just because of who they are or who they choose to love—Twixt just coalesced out of that idea, that feeling.

Robby: I don’t think you’ve ever explained Twixt to me in those terms. That’s really beautiful. So, is it safe to say that Twixt came first and then the story of House of Valenziaga? Or did they coalesce simultaneously?

Trip: It’s all one and the same. I have plenty of gay trauma mixed up in there. *taps head* So how could it not be? And like the whole thing—The Fall of the House of Valenziaga also draws on that idea of “the king in the land” which you get in older mythology as well. When the Matron Mother of a Legendary House goes down and there’s no one to inherit, it’s not just a metaphorical end. The whole building literally falls through the city and ceases to exist when she ceases to exist. When the House ceases to exist.

Robby: As I was thinking about what we were going to talk about in this conversation, it had never occurred to me how much the concept of houses is both high fantasy and drag, right? Like, you have houses in drag. You also have houses in high fantasy, and that’s a very popular thing right now. And that’s perfect the way they mesh.

Trip: I was on a panel on Writing Mashups—because I love it and I literally did a PhD on tropes in fantasy—so genre and story are composed of tropes, right? And a trope is just a narrative pattern and an associated set of identifying markers—the really fun thing for me and what I think makes genre mashups work so well is it’s like a music mashup, right? You find the two chords that are the same and you overlap them. You know music. You get it.

Robby: I do!

Trip: It’s the same thing with tropes and literary mashups. You find the things that are the same and you overlap them. Drag house, noble house: they’re both opulent, they’re concerned with presentation and how you look; and they’re both like a group of related individuals. You can overlap the parts of these things that match and those things click. And because those things overlap, the other bits that are different settle into a kind of harmony.

Trip: There’s this book that I can’t remember right now, [It’s Wit’s End by James Geary] but it tries to dissect what makes things funny or witty, and the one thing I really remember from this book, my favorite concept, is something like “poems are when words rhyme. Puns are when ideas rhyme.”

Robby: Ooh, I really like that.

Trip: I think we probably need to (abruptly) end here. We’ve gone on so long already. We should probably wrap up now before the edits reach kaiju proportions. [Dear Reader, it was too late already…] I am notoriously bad at economy.

Robby: Right. That’s a wrap! Go check out our Kickstarters everyone! Byeee!