We’re back with another roundtable-style interview for Women in SFF – this week we’re chatting with Solaris debut authors!

Let’s dive straight in and meet them – you can find biographies about each other and links to their books at the end

Welcome to the Fantasy Hive and our Women in SFF feature! 

We’re thrilled you could join us for an interview about your debut novels.

To begin with, can you briefly describe your story in three sentences or less? 

Meredith Mooring (MM) – Redsight

Redsight is a gothic space opera about a blind witch who controls spacetime. It includes sapphic romance, religious cults, and galactic politics.

Lindy Ryan (LR) – Bless Your Heart

Bless Your Heart, the first in a new horror-mystery series currently in development for television, ​is a late-90s Southern horror/mystery about four generations of women ​who run a funeral parlor–and the lengths they’ll go through when they discover that one of the monsters preying on their small town may be one of their own.

Rebecca Fraimow (RF) – Lady Eve’s Last Con

Lady Eve’s Last Con is a retrofuture rom-com in space, about a small-time con artist who sets out to get revenge on a clueless billionaire, only to find herself increasingly entangled with his debonair older sister and the interstellar gang syndicate that have their hooks in her. Femme fatale meets femme fatale, hijinks ensue. 

O.O. Sangoyomi (OS) –  Masquerade

Masquerade is an alternate history novel in which a young Yorùbá woman is determined to climb the ranks of power in a Medieval West African warrior society.

Can you tell us a bit about your main character? What kind of personality do they possess?

MM: Korinna is a devoted blind witch raised in a religious order. Despite her difficult upbringing, she becomes a Redseer, a magical navigator on an imperial ship. She’s highly determined and hard-working, but unaware of how dangerous the rest of the galaxy is.

LR: Bless Your Heart is a multi-pov tale, told through the perspective of the four Evans women–Ducey, age 80; Lenore, in her mid-50s, Grace, in her 30s, and Luna, age 15. Each character has their own voice and their own motivations–and, of course, their own secrets!

RF: Ruth Johnson has been hopping from satellite to satellite with her younger sister since she was a teenager, pulling various scams and keeping both of them one step ahead of the consequences. She’s capable, confident, and fully convinced of the correctness of her own judgment. This absolutely will not backfire on her in any way. 

OS: Òdódó is an outcasted blacksmith who, up until she is whisked away to be the bride of the warrior king, is focused only on surviving her days of hard labor. Due to a sheltered upbringing, she is initially a naïve person, but she is also a fast learner, and she quickly learns how to feed her growing appetite for power.

How well do you think you’d fare in your fictional world?

MM: I would not survive in this story! The characters in Redsight are much braver than me.

LR: I’d like to think I’d do okay in this world–so long as the Evans women let me into their brood!

RF: Like a lot of societies with deep income inequality, how well anybody does in the world of Lady Eve’s Last Con often depends on the cards in their starting hand. I definitely wouldn’t have the chutzpah to make the leaps that Ruthi does! 

OS: The medieval period in West Africa was an incredibly rich era of history. I would love to go back in time to see it for myself.

Did you create mood boards to help set the atmosphere of your story? If so, what did your mood board consist of? 

MM: Definitely. Since the book is called Redsight, I used a lot of moody aesthetic photos with red lighting, pictures of eyes, and galaxy photos. 

LR: I’m not much of a mood-boarder, but definitely use visuals for inspiration while writing. For Bless Your Heart, I commissioned two custom art pieces from incredible artists in the UK and US–one is a map of the town in which the story is set, and the other is a family portrait of the Evans women. Together, these two pieces of art kept me firmly planted in the Evanses’ world.

RF: Alas, no! To be honest, I’m not a very visual writer – my second readers are constantly having to remind me that people might want to know what my characters actually look like. I did spend a lot of time looking up fashion shows to get ideas for what people might wear to future high-society parties, though. 

OS: I did not create a mood board to help me write the story, but I made one for fun after the story had been written. The atmosphere of Masquerade is one of dark opulence, so its mood board consists of black and gold images of jewelry, weapons, and people.

The path to publication can be such a varying one for everyone – how was yours?

MM: Overall, it went much faster than I expected. It’s pretty common to query agents with several manuscripts for a few years so that’s what I thought I’d have to do. Redsight is the first manuscript I ever shared with another person, and somehow I found an agent in less than a year. We did some revision and went on submission, where it got acquired after a few months.

LR: Luckily, I already had an agent from previous work. Once Bless Your Heart was complete, we queried a handful of editors and were lucky enough to see the novel (as a series starter) quickly acquired in a pre-empt from a US-based publishing house I’ve had on my Dream List since I started writing. From there, the UK rights were sold to another incredible publisher, and the Evans women are happily sharing their story around the world.

RF: Mine was pretty roundabout! It took me about a year to find an agent, just in time for the book to go on submission at the beginning of the pandemic when the whole industry slowed down. Over the next two years, while Lady Eve’s Last Con racked up rejections, I finished a novella, The Iron Children, which got acquired pretty quickly as part of the Solaris Satellites line-up. My editor on The Iron Children had never seen Lady Eve’s Last Con, so we decided we might as well send it to her before shelving it – and she ended up acquiring it.

OS: I queried agents for a few months before I found one willing to represent Masquerade. After a revision, we went on submission, where the novel was acquired by an editor a few months later. In hindsight, the process was smooth, though of course at the time it felt quite arduous.

Just for fun, how would you pitch your book as a 1-star review?

MM: This book has too much worldbuilding, too many plot twists, and too much romance. 1 star.

LR: Four generations of Southern women who run their own business and battle monsters? Sounds unrealistic. 1 star.

RF: The two leads make all their own problems, incredibly annoying how they keep getting distracted by hot single women in their area rather than actually committing to their schemes. 1 star.

OS: The author spends too much time painting a vivid picture of Medieval West Africa, and the protagonist grows into too harsh of a villain by the end. 1 star.

Without giving away too many spoilers, tell us about a scene you most enjoyed writing? 

MM: The first scene I came up with happens at the end of act two, when Korinna learns something horrible about a person she cares for. I built the entire story around that moment of betrayal.  

LR: A favorite scene in Bless Your Heart is one where the family matriarch, 80-year-old Ducey Evans, is forced out of bed late at night by an old flame with whom she has a sour history. It’s a scene bubbling over with tension and old grudges, but was one of my favorites to write because it could have been a scary moment for any woman alone–an angry man rushing onto your land in the middle of the night, spitting venom and ready to raise hell–and Ducey handles it with courage and grace (and more than a little venom-spitting of her own). 

RF: The most fun scenes for me are always bottle episode situations where my characters are forced to confront the tensions between them; in this book I trapped them on a luxury artificial beach in deep space and then sabotaged the gravity.

OS: One of my favorite scenes to write in Masquerade was one in which Òdódó, the main character, sits in on a heated meeting between Yorùbáland’s generals. It is a fast-paced scene inundated with information and movement. Òdódó is thrown into the deep end, into this world of war and politics, but she manages to hold her own, swimming rather than sinking.

Who are the most significant women in SFF who have shaped and influenced your work? 

MM: There are so many. Ursula Le Guin, N.K. Jemisin, Arkady Martine, Tamsyn Muir, and Amal El-Mohtar come to mind.

LR: So many, past and present, that it’d certainly be unfair to name only a few. Really, every woman working in SFF is an inspiration. 

RF: Hundreds and hundreds! This book in particular owes a deep debt to Lois McMaster Bujold, but my most formative influence overall is probably Diana Wynne Jones, who shaped my entire brain and writing style in ways I’ll never shake off. 

OS: I take inspiration from other works in so many ways that I feel as though I am a product of every single work I have ever consumed.

If you could visit any fictional coffee shop or restaurant or tavern (etc!), where would you visit and why?

Meredith Mooring: I’d love to visit the 24 hour bars on Elapidae Station that Korinna visits in Redsight. It’s one of the last charted areas of space before the characters enter the unknown.

Lindy Ryan: Everyone who knows me well knows I’m a huge fan of pubs, cafes, and diners. There are so many to choose from, but as we’re talking Bless Your Heart, I find myself in the mood for something a little warm, a little old, and with good ol’ home-cooked Southern fare–like the kind served up in Fannie Flagg’s Whistle Stop Cafe of Fried Green Tomatoes. (Just, you know, skip the BBQ.)

RF: For various reasons I am obliged to say the restaurant at the end of the universe in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 

OS: I would visit the restaurant from Ratatouille. The movie somehow made a dish of vegetables look delicious.

If you were to have your story adapted, what medium would you choose—anime, Netflix series or feature length film? Who would you cast for your main character? 

MM: I think Redsight should be a video game, but I could also imagine it as a Netflix series with Elle Fanning as Korinna.

LR: I’m delighted to share that Bless Your Heart is currently in development for television with an incredible team of producers and writers.

Editor: Congratulations!

RF: A film or tv show would be great! But the design of my heroine’s love interest owes a lot to the fabulous lead actors of the all-female Takarazuka Revue, so if we’re dreaming big I’d have to go for an over-the-top musical spectacle. 

OS: I could see Masquerade as a limited series, to keep the tension of the story intact. Anok Yai is not an actress, but I hope she would take up acting just for this series, because she looks exactly like Òdódó.

What will you be doing to celebrate your release? 

MM: I had dinner with my family and did a virtual event with an author I really enjoy. I had to go to guide dog training for a month right after my book came out, so those were the main things I could fit in around all of that.

LR: Bless Your Heart debuted in the US in April 2024, and it was a whirlwind of fun and celebratory butterscotch candy. I’ve just handed in the next book in the series, Another Fine Mess, and celebrated with a trip to the nursery where I brought home a beautiful pot of white roses, just like the ones Lenore Evans tends in the books.

RF: My wife and I had planned a fancy dinner to celebrate the release, but I actually mixed up the date! So I spent a very normal day and then we went out two days later. I also had a great launch event the week after at my local indie, the Brookline Booksmith, and bought all my local critique partners ice cream in thanks for reading So Many Drafts of this book. 

OS: Masquerade is releasing in the US on July 2nd. On that same day, I will be having a launch party that is being hosted by the lovely indie bookstore Brave + Kind Bookshop.

Finally, how do you hope your readers will feel after finishing your novel?

MM: I hope they enjoy learning more about living with vision loss. 

LR: I hope they feel empowered, ready to rise up against the restless dead!

RF: I hope they feel like they had as much fun reading it as I had writing it. 

OS: I hope my readers feel as though they just finished a great story.

Thank you so much for joining us for Women in SFF!

Meredith Mooring – Redsight – Available now

Meredith Mooring is a science fiction, fantasy, and horror writer based in North Carolina. Her work examines disability and sexual orientation through fiction. She loves writing “what if” scenarios that explore science and history.

Meredith Mooring | Add to Goodreads | Available now

Lindy Ryan  – Bless Your Heart – 18th July 2024

Lindy Ryan is a Bram Stoker Awards®-nominated and award-winning editor, author, director, and professor. Ryan served from 2020 to 2022 on the Board of Directors for the Independent Book Publishers Association and was named one of Publishers Weekly’s 2020 Star Watch Honorees. Currently, she is the co-chair of the Horror Writers Association Publishers Council. Ryan is a regular contributor at Rue Morgue, the world’s leading horror culture and entertainment brand, Booktrib, and LitReactor. Her articles and features have appeared on NPR, BBC Culture, Irish Times, Daily Mail, and more. She is an active member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA), the International Thriller Writers (ITW), and the Brothers Grimm Society of North America. In 2022, she was named one of horror’s most masterful anthology curators and has been declared a “champion for women’s voices in horror” by Shelf Awareness (2023).

Lindy Ryan | Add to Goodreads | Pre-order here

Rebecca Fraimow  – Lady Eve’s Last Con – Available Now

Rebecca Fraimow is an author and archivist living in Boston. Her short fiction has recently appeared in PodCastle, The Fantasist, and Consolation Songs: Optimistic Speculative Fiction for a Time of Pandemic, among other venues. Her short story in Consolation Songs, “This Is New Gehesran Calling,” appeared on the longlist for the 2021 Hugo Award.

Rebecca Fraimow | Add to Goodreads | Available now

O.O. Sangoyomi –  Masquerade – Available now

O.O. Sangoyomi is a Nigerian American author. During a childhood of constantly moving around, she found an anchored home in the fictional worlds of books. Sangoyomi is a recent graduate of Princeton University, where she studied literature. Her debut novel, Masquerade, will be published by Macmillan/Forge in July 2024.

O.O. Sangoyomi | Add to Goodreads | Available now