This morning I was caught in a storm. The radar had convinced me I had about 45 minutes to go for a walk before the band of rain rolled in. That’s plenty of time, for my short walk at least.

Well, about 7 minutes from home, I saw this:

PERHAPS I should have turned around right then, especially once I saw lighting. But I was on the walk because it had been so gorgeous a mere hour before, blue skies, birds singing and fighting over suet, and I wanted some mind-opening walking meditation, slash, time to get my shit together to write this newsletter.

Instead I thought, it’s The Shape of Monsters day! What would Iriset do?

Instantly I laughed at myself because doing what Iriset would do is never the right call. What about Lyric, though? He’s more level-headed…but in his current state-of-mind he would probably walk directly into the storm and hope to get struck by lightning.

Like a checklist I worked my way through the various MCs and secondary characters in The Shape of Monsters and realized that no, actually, considering what each of them would do was entertaining me but certainly not useful.

(River, a new character in the book, might work, and definitely reliable personal guard and friend-of-griffins Garnet, but that’s it!)

I distracted myself so well making fun of my own characters in my head that I neglected to go home, and when I was about 1.3 miles away, the skies opened up. Accompanied by thunder!

I stood there, blinking rainwater out of my eyes, laughing a little, but also thinking it really suited the whole process of The Shape of Monsters. Thematically, even! Iriset is a natural disaster, a calamity one might say, and though she doesn’t like to admit it, everything that goes wrong in this book is kind of her fault. Sometimes simply because she refuses to just go home.

So I got rained on. Poured on, really. It wasn’t cold, it was soothing, except for the thunder. This is the last week of spring, and my favorite time of year in Kansas because of the wild weather, the prairie flowers, the big, big sky.

I wouldn’t call it an especially auspicious start to launch day, but it’s certainly fitting.

Last year, for The Mercy Makers launch, I was in San Fransisco. I didn’t do anything to celebrate, no launch, because I was on an airplane and then at a bookstore for somebody else’s book launch (I mean, it was the final book of The High Republic series, Trials of the Jedi by Charles Soule, and in some ways it was also a night for all of us.)

I knew I needed to mark this occasion (and was bullied into it on multiple fronts), but ya’ll, middle books are hard. And weird.

Not only the writing of them, but the promoting of them. I’m super excited about The Shape of Monsters, what I tried to do with it, but it absolutely should not be read without reading The Mercy Makers. On one hand, duh, but on the other hand…The Shape of Monsters is very different from TMM. There are different aspects to promote or use to convince a reader to pick the whole trilogy up. Book One is about mercy and justice and brutality and imperialism (and a criminal prodigy digging herself deeper into danger, political intrigue, and sex/love). It’s about identity and desperation, wanting to save lives, and being obsessed with really cool magic.

Book Two is about some of those things, still: obsession (mine) with really cool magic, identity and desperation, and Iriset continues to dig-dig-dig. But Two is less about mercy and justice and more about consent and choice. It’s about different kinds of power people have over one another, when there’s no obviously powerful villain (like an emperor). It’s about finding out who you are when your power, identity, family, faith is all stripped away. (It’s about inventing sex magic and getting a slow, sexy divorce when nobody actually wants to get divorced.)

It’s about monsters in love.

Here are some of my favorite lines of dialogue (about love) from The Shape of Monsters:

• “I was in love once,” the Moon-Eater murmurs. “It did not make me want to destroy anything but myself.”

• “How can I let myself be vulnerable enough to touch, to love, to hate, to—to feel anything, when the vehicle of my devastation is looking at me the way you look at me?”

• “When I thought Singix loved me, it made me feel like I deserved to be loved.”

• “What is the point of a better world if the beloved is not part of it?”

And that’s just from the first half!

The real reason The Shape of Monsters is so different from The Mercy Makers is because I made what I like to think of as a very bold choice about its setting. About which kind of mess I’d get myself (and Iriset) into. It is definitely what Iriset would have done.

When it boils down to it, the reason I made this choice is because in 2019 I wrote a short story called “The Beginning of Monsters” for the We Need Diverse Books anthology A Universe of Wishes, edited by Dhonielle Clayton.

The story is about Eliri, a young woman who, like Iriset, is a prodigy at human design—but unlike Iriset, she’s a chimera. Her parents used a fetal mesh and architecture to reform her in the womb and turn her bones to quartz. (that’s oversimplifying a little bit.) The point is that she doesn’t need some of the design tools most architects need: she can use her claws to touch the four forces.

For her graduation from design school, she’s given a special assignment: create a gender aesthetic redesign for the small king of Rivermouth precinct. But instead of a mere aesthetic, Eliri is ordered to weave in a thread of poison to assassinate the small king. It goes very well—except Eliri falls in love with the gorgeous, seemingly-lazy, but remarkably clever heir to the small king.

If you’d like to read the short story, which takes place during the Apostate Age, some 400 years before The Mercy Makers, but a mere 13 or so before The Shape of Monsters (*blinks innocently*), it’s up on my website for free!

As a reminder, here’s the official description of the book:

A talented heretic and the emperor she both loathes and loves will learn what monsters are really made of in the second installment of the Moon Heresies trilogy by New York Times bestselling author Tessa Gratton.
 
Iriset —prodigy, outlaw, now sunderer— has broken the Moon-Eater god’s prison at the heart of the empire. But the consequences of her actions land her in a city of monsters where the heretical magic of human architecture is freely practiced, and the only person she knows—and can trust—is Lyric, the emperor she’s lied to and loved in equal measure. As scheming kings and capricious gods drive them towards different extremes, they soon realize that to find their way home, they must remake the world…at the risk of breaking it forever.

Yesssss capricious gods are what everybody is here for, I’m aware. But also the sexy, messy divorce.

Speaking of middle books, I took over The Raven’s newsletter and blog to talk about how I feel about middle books both as a reader (exited, comforted) and as a writer (intimidated, challenged), as well as to recommend some of my all-time favorite middle-books-of-trilogies!

Check it out on their blog!

And if you’re in the area, I’d love to see you at the launch party for The Shape of Monsters at The Raven in Lawrence, KS. 7pm June 17th! I’ll be joined by USA Today Bestselling local and hilarious and smart author Megan Bannen!

OH and because I know some of you were concerned, remember that giant sinkhole in my neighborhood?

Thanks for reading!

Tessa