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Tamsyn Muir Oxford Speaker Event

hello locked tomblr! i was at the tamsyn muir event in oxford - here are my notes i've tried to group them thematically rather than chronologically, and to point out spoilers when i can. there are some parts that i missed/didn't hear correctly - i would appreciate it if others at the event correct me :D

Key takeaways

Alecto is still being written! Muir was reluctant to say a year, so it will probably be more than that

Alecto won’t be written in a Biblical style, and there will be multiple POVs. It will mostly be told from Harrow’s POV (I hope I heard that right)

Muir loves the idea of a TLT videogame

Muir’s not yet done with Floralinda

Q&A: Alecto when?

(putting this first because I know you want to know!)

Alecto is not yet finished

Reason why:

Muir was already slated to write another book before Alecto (Floralinda, I think)

Floralinda took longer than expected

Muir also suffered from health issues

Muir was about to say Alecto would come out in a year, but was reluctant. It will be soon. It will be before she dies.

Once Alecto gets to the editor, it will be fast-tracked. There will be few advance reader copies

And Alecto will not be 2 books, do not fret!

Publishing journey for the Locked Tomb Series

TL;DR – Muir got published because she had good contacts

George R. R. Martin was Tamsyn Muir’s mentor at Clarion

Muir took what she described as the ‘traditional route’ into publishing

She spent around 3 years publishing short stories

Then she got contacted by an agent for a novel

Muir acknowledges that routes into publishing are not like that now

Sometimes, fanfiction writers are approached – Muir doesn’t approve as that ruins the hobby, it adds a financial incentive and makes people do it for a career rather than for fun.

Muir wouldn’t do anything differently

We joked a bit about an agent who remarked on the ‘sisterly relationship’ between characters in Muir’s manuscript

Advice for aspiring authors

Send stuff to an agent regardless of where you are

Work in the industry

There was a bit of discussion on self-publishing – it doesn’t suit Muir personally, but it’s a good route for someone with the energy to be their own editor, advertiser, etc.

Q&A: something about being a successful writer (sorry I forgot)

Basically, getting successful requires having good connections

Videogame Influence on Locked Tomb Series

Muir is a big fan of the emergent narrative that videogames afford

Muir worked for Disney and wrote videogame scripts before GtN. There’s an insane House of Mouse script archived somewhere, which Muir wrote.

Novel writing is very different from videogame writing.

In a videogame, you have to fully flesh out the in-game universe and provide enough choices and points of interest for players

This taught Muir to be in-depth when writing her novel universes…

…which particularly influenced her to write tonnes of AUs for the Locked Tomb series

There are two versions of Nona, for example: one which is what’s really happening, and one which is Nona’s POV

Q&A: did the videogame influence help Muir to write so confusingly in the Locked Tomb series?

Muir strongly cites Umineko as a key influence

This is a perfect example of a slow reveal, like in the Locked Tomb books

Muir doesn’t strictly plan her reveals (e.g., on the second reread, the reader finds this out), but she does love a slow reveal and works hard to make close reading rewarding for the reader

Tamsyn Muir would love for the Locked Tomb series to be adapted into a videogame!!

A funny story was told where Muir got approached by a gacha game company… which didn’t come to anything

POV voice shifts in the Locked Tomb series

A key reason for the books being so different is that Muir didn’t want to write the same thing again – she gets ‘easily bored’

She focussed on the sentence links of each character – Gideon’s sentence links are very different from Harrow’s

Vocabulary also played a key role (again, compare Gideon and Harrow)

The second person narrative in HtN was planned for a while, the tricky thing was convincing publishers to accept it

Muir has an HtN draft somewhere, 50% written, that’s in third person

POV in Alecto the Ninth: It will not be written in a biblical style

There will be different POVs

Q&A: Book inspiration for writing in the second person?

Muir notes that she didn’t write in perfect second person – it was actually first person

She will always turn to On a Winter’s Night a Traveller

And this is another videogame inspiration

She mentioned Homestuck then said don’t mention Homestuck so…

The theme of memory in the Locked Tomb series

Memory as a result of love, and memories which are a source of pain

This is a key theme in HtN – note how memory affected Harrow throughout the book

It’s also going to be a key theme in Alecto

Muir is using memory as horror

The horror of not being able to trust yourself and to know what is real

She’s drawing on her own experiences of being schizophrenic

Magic systems in the Locked Tomb series

Muir wasn’t actually a big fan of necromancy before writing TLT

She found it too passive in Dungeons & Dragons

She wanted an active magic system, something unintuitive that required hard work and study to learn

She also wanted a magic system to be gross!

TLT magic system was described as “telekinesis with meat”

Worldbuilding in the Locked Tomb series

Q&A: what was Muir’s worldbuilding starting point/seed?

Muir struggled to find this out. There’s no magic formula

Creative writing can’t be taught, only practiced

For GtN, she wanted a story about duty, and duty vs freedom

She wanted the story to be about two young women

Gideon was originally a cop/fireman

For Muir, worldbuilding is there to serve the plot. She does not worldbuild for worldbuilding’s sake

Everything in Muir’s books is there to serve the plot

Would the TLT protagonists make a good DnD party?

Absolutely not!

Although Camilla and Palamedes would be fine

There was some joking around about how Muir and her friends tried to play as Gideon and Harrow in DnD and it didn’t work out

Genre merging in the Locked Tomb series

Muir identified her blend of comedy and horror as unique to Kiwi fiction

She used Peter Jackson’s early films before the Lord of the Rings as an example

For Muir, science fiction and fantasy are merged – it only really feels like science if you do hard sci-fi

Muir grew up with Star Wars, so it felt natural to set her fantasy world in space

The genre merging created publishing problems

Publishers want an easy comparison to other books to make it sell, but there was nothing like Gideon the Ninth

We joked a bit about TLT being compared with Dune

Q&A: now that TLT books are out, has Muir noticed any very similar books that GtN etc. are being compared to?

Not really.

Muir sees the most similarities with people who know her and have had similar influences

An example is A. K. Markwood

Another book that seemed very similar is ‘Dawn Hound by Necksy Strownack’ another New Zealand author (I did a quick google and I think this is the Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach?)

Comedy and Humour in the Locked Tomb series

Muir’s advice for aspiring writers is not to write humour to appeal to everyone, as you’ll please no one. Stay true to yourself.

Muir writes plenty of humour into her manuscripts, which are often cut away during editing

Q&A: memes that didn’t make it: (note: I struggled to catch what was being said under all the laughter and I am also woefully uncultured – many of these are me transcribing as best as I can. Do correct me if I’m wrong!)

Mr Bones’ Wild Ride

Emperish meme

Horse Plinko (this got referred to a lot!)

Harrow calling Ianthe the ‘God of Thot’ in HtN

And many more

Muir mused about whether she will dial back the humour in later work, or whether she will go full throttle as she doesn’t care anymore

Writing process for short stories vs books

Muir sees her short story days as mostly behind her, although she is getting one published soon (as we are aware!)

With short stories, you only have time for one thing, whilst with a novella, you have time for plot and subplot

Short stories are great to practise your technical writing skills

Muir personally would not turn her short stories into novels – she wants to do something new

Q&A: The planning process for the Locked Tomb series

Muir had already planned the whole story before writing GtN

GtN and HtN are the question arcs

NtN and AtN are the answering arcs

Muir really enjoyed writing a New Zealand story

Lesbians as epic heroes in the Locked Tomb series

Muir doesn’t see this as jarring – why can’t epics have lesbians in them?

All epics want you do to is die gloriously

You can do anything after that

Q&A: Epic influences on the Locked Tomb series

The Iliad. It all comes back to Homer, and the Iliad.

There was some insightful discussion on how the Locked Tomb world codifies its past. In a sense, it’s stuck in time. There’s no golden period to hark back to.

The discussion then turned to the idea of the hero, and what a hero should be.

This is heavily explored in Gideon the Ninth, which centres around Harrow failing to prevent Gideon from being the hero

Add lesbian to anything

Muir would love to see a lesbian Hunger Games

Floralinda vs Gideon and Harrow

“Floralinda blows” – Tamsyn Muir

Floralinda is a supervillain story about a ‘bad girl who gets worse’

Muir has written/is planning to write more on Floralinda

Q&A: Advice for writing characters who suck?

Just let them be shit, go hard first and don’t hold back

Take a sin, take a virtue

All of Muir’s characters, in some way, are a ‘fuck up’

Catholic imagery in the Locked Tomb series and Catholicism in general

Q&A: was it difficult to link lesbians with Catholicism in the Locked Tomb series?

It felt good for Muir, a lesbian Catholic

And also very fun!

Q&A: who’s the hottest saint?

In the TLT universe: Valancy!

In the real world: Saint Barbara

This sparked some light-hearted banter

Q&A: Meaningful names in the Locked Tomb series

Muir loves writing meaningful names that hide things in plain sight

Muir does not browse ‘Behind the Name’ lol

She has a ‘laundry list’ of names she likes which she’s accumulated throughout her life

Homer and ancient Greek influences played a key role

Also Biblical names

Changing names are highly important in the books, e.g., Gideon to Kiriona

Muir doesn’t mind if people sus out a character’s plot after immediately reading their names

Umineko inspiration

Lolita and the Locked Tomb series

Q&A: the audience member read Lolita at the same time as NtN. They were wondering if the similarities between the two were deliberate.

Muir loves Lolita and thinks that Nabokov is an expert in writing misery

Muir was open about being a child sexual abuse survivor. The influence of this is pervasive in her work.

There is a strong focus on relationships with authority people

Particularly in NtN, which contains sexual threats. This was hard for Muir to write.

Another example is the relationship between John and Alecto.

They are not a one on one comparison between Humbert and Lolita, but the theme of a man fashioning a girl into the perfect partner is there

Whether there is a sexual element in this will be answered in Alecto the Ninth

Muir explicitly does not want to include overt sexual violence in her work

Misogyny in the Locked Tomb series

Q&A: In the worldbuilding of the Locked Tomb series, how do you balance the misogyny that still exists (which is particularly obvious when John talks to/about Mercymorn) and the outward appearance/initial impression people get of the houses having gender equality (e.g., Abigail as head of the fifth, Jeannemary as a knight)?

This question had Muir wriggling in delight

The answer to this is addressed in Alecto

Why is John fucking up in the creation of his utopia?

Muir encourages readers to question what you, the reader, perceive as misogyny, versus what the characters perceive as misogyny.

Q&A: Cannibalism in the Locked Tomb series

Cannibalism is a metaphor for toxic love

Cannibalism of the soul is much more severe than cannibalism of the flesh

Link to Lolita

It’s eating someone’s life and personhood. A central theme in TLT is exploring love as something taken violently

Can you love someone without taking something from them? This is one of Muir’s favourite ideas

And, it’s not necessarily negative

Example of Camilla and Palamedes (spoiler for NtN!!)

They had to eat each other

Grappling with the question: Is love weightless?

Q&A: How much of their old selves are preserved in the Lyctors?

HtN spoilers!!

John didn’t simply wipe and rewrite them – if not, why are they trying to kill him?

John wanted his friends, so he tried to bring his friends back

Interesting implications for the two people he didn’t know well and only saw as cowrokers

BUT then the Lyctors are changed by their immortality and John

Q&A: What was it like to write immortality?

Muir acknowledges that she doesn’t do a perfect job, and that it’s actually impossible to actually write immortality – it will be too alien for the reader

But this links back to the theme of memory – how much can the Lyctors retain?

The Lyctors are heavily weighed down by time, Mercymorn in particular

Q&A: How long would Muir last in the TLT universe?

0.5 seconds

Muir doesn’t see herself as a necromancer or cavalier

Nor is she particularly aligned with any House

Q&A: Books that Muir is reading right now that she would recommend

(again, my poor listening skills and lack of culture limit me here!)

Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran

‘Payback for Malory Towers’

A.K. Markwood’s new book, the Seventh Banisher

Muir has advance access. AK is her friend.

Q&A: Books and media that influenced Muir as a child

She was a highly prolific reader as a child!

Obviously Animorphs

Weird Kiwi fantasy stories

Margaret Margey

She read a lot of David Eddings as a teenager and got annoyed at the role of women in the books

Gormandust was a key inspiration for TLT (I googled this and ‘Gormandust’ doesn’t exist, hopefully someone more in the know can help to translate my poor transcription!)

Grimmbolts was another influence (again, I probably didn’t hear this correctly)

Q&A: Warhammer inspiration

Muir didn’t get into Warhammer until after HtN. She loves it.

She has been approached to write for the Black Library but she had to decline as she had too much work

Q&A: What’s Muir going to do next?

Muir does not want to keep going back to TLT, she is happy to release it to the fanfiction writers once it’s done!

There are a couple more things in the TLT universe she may add

For example, there’s a big Harrow AU…

Muir wants to go back to videogames

But in her history, the projects she works on tend to fold

Muir is trying to write her own videogames and is slowly learning Python

A very good question about deconstruction was asked, but I missed it because I was too excited

Everyone was really lovely at the event! Cambridge folk, you have a lot to look forward to :))

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