Today, Writer Wednesday welcomes fantasy author Alma Alexander!
Alma Alexander's life so far has prepared her very well for her chosen career. She was born in a country which no longer exists on the maps, has lived and worked in seven countries on four continents (and in cyberspace!), has climbed mountains, dived in coral reefs, flown small planes, swum with dolphins, touched two-thousand-year-old tiles in a gate out of Babylon. She is a novelist, anthologist and short story writer who currently shares her life between the Pacific Northwest of the USA (where she lives with two obligatory writer's cats) and the wonderful fantasy worlds of her own imagination. You can find out more about Alma and her books on her website (www.AlmaAlexander.org), at her Amazon author page (https://amzn.to/2N6xE9u), on Bluesky (@almaalexander.bsky.social), on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/alma.alexander/) or at her Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/AlmaAlexander)
Hi Alma, thanks for joining me for this Writer Wednesday! Let’s start with the big news: you have a new novel coming out in November! What’s it about?
I have written a number of historical fantasies which form a loose alternate history parallel to our own. This book turns a new page, as it were – we are still in that alternate history world but this time I am going back to my own cultural roots and we are in 13th/14th century Balkans. The Neimanni Chronicles follows an arc – “The Shadow Before the Dawn” (out November 24, 2026) tells the story of a Prince whose life… was not easy. It lays the groundwork. The next book…
While this is the start of a new trilogy, it does tie into your previous historical fantasy work, correct?
…continues on from that (“The Sun In High Heaven”, projected for late 2027 or early 2028), and is the story of the son of that Prince, of Shadow, a king who became known under the sobriquet “the Great” and created a golden age, an empire, out of his inherited kingdom. But the curse that was placed on his father’s line, having skipped his son, lands squarely of the aftermath. The son of the king known as The Great also had a name – he became known to history as “The Weak”, and he lost everything that his father had built in only a handful of years. It was a bad time to do it, too, because another empire was rising in the east, on a collision course… and then came the reckoning. “Against the Fall of Night” is the third book, and it is the story of that reckoning (probably 2029).
And yes, these stories tie into the historical and geographical arc built by the previous works. The empire of Visant, as featured in the novel “Empress”, plays a big part in these new novels… but it is centuries since the events of “Empress”, and Visant is old, and starting to crumble.
I have a complicated geopolitical and cultural story on my hands, and my work is cut out for me to make these books extraordinary.
You’ve told me that you’ve mined your own cultural history for this book, which makes it intensely personal. Can you tell us about that thought process, how you choose which aspects of medieval Balkan history to use, embellish, and so on?
I seem to keep on answering your questions by preempting them. But here’s a bit more on the process.
You see, I started a novel along these lines more than six years ago, and I had some 20,000 words of it written… and then Life descended in a mudslide and I’ve been digging myself out from under that ever since. After six years of losses and of grieving in which I did very little writing at all I returned to those 20K words earlier this year and looked at them. And realized that what I thought was the “prequel” to the book which I really wanted to write, which was the “Against the Fall of Night” story, was actually the first part of a much larger story, and would really need to be two books. And so, there we were. A trilogy. I really did not intend this. But that’s what arose, and that is what I am going with.
There is so much raw material here that I am simplifying things and rearranging them quite a bit so that I can whack my way through the historical jungles in a way that is going to make sense to someone who is NOT as steeped in the material as I am. But there are aspects of this which I am not tweaking over much because they are intensely powerful in and of themselves and all I have to do is provide them with a proper outlet.
These are very important books to me. I don’t think I have ever written any book that was this close to my heart. I am going to do a lot of hard work to make sure that I convey what they mean to me, how important this story is for me to tell, and I hope that I am going to be able to carry the readers with me.
You grew up in Africa, and I would love to hear about how the varied cultures and traditions of the countries there influenced the way you both respond to stories and write them, and how those influences interact (or not) with the European tradition you’re mining for the new book.
Well, Africa has very little to do with this particular new novel because I am going back to a much earlier iteration of myself than the one that accreted the African overlay. But having been thrown into such a very different cultural and geographical milieu when I was so young and so impressionable has left its mark, of course. There are things about Africa that I will carry with me to my grave. And what it has taught me, and it’s something that does affect my storytelling in general, is how to be open to listening to the things that are important to people very different from myself, respecting those things, treating them with the reverence that is clearly due to them. A part of me will always be The Other, because I grew up as The Other in so many places and I understand that from the inside. And I understand the beauty of voices that are Other to me. Africa taught me that.
I know you’ve described your writing process as “chaotic.” But I’m going to ask you to describe it anyway, since that’s part of what Writer Wednesdays is all about. Does it change at all when you’re working on short fiction versus novels?
Mostly my writing is a question of sitting down, shutting up, and taking dictation. I’ve told people before that my Muse is not some ethereal maiden clad in diaphanous veils and being all coy about things – no, my Muse is a Sergeant Major screaming at me to drop down and give him twenty literary pushups RIGHT NOW. I get what I call my “attack stories” which sometimes turn up out of the clear blue and are often strong enough to derail works in actual progress until I detour in their direction and write them; one such recent thing wrapped itself into the shape of “The Wind’s Four Quarters” which was a grouped-together collection of four stories which I eventually ended up releasing as a slim volume in the fall of 2025 (look it up!) – that one just came up and smote me upside the head and would not let go until it was done – and it was persnickety because one of the stories that I had in mind was quite simply the Wrong Story and I had to come to terms with that and find a new one for that slot because it was clear that it wasn’t working as intended and required closer attention. But this arrived while I was at work on “Shadow Before the Dawn”, and I had to share the writing liminal spaces with both things until I could put the Wind stories to bed.
My current chaos is creating a decent timeline for the second book in the Neimanni Chronicles because I KEEP ON FINDING THINGS TO ADD TO THE ONE I HAVE and what it means is that I keep on having to re-do it because it gets too complicated and bescribbled to be useful so I have to start again. I am on my third timeline as we speak. I’ll get it right. The trouble is I can’t really move forward with the book UNTIL I get it right, so I just have to keep at this until I have properly channeled the river of time into a course that I want to follow…
Short fiction… is less of a native form for me than longer-form stuff, but I’ve sold a handful of short stories in the last couple of years (two published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, one in Abyss&Apex, at least one in a forthcoming anthology…) so it isn’t a foreign country, entirely. But my shorter fiction tends to marinate in my head in its first six drafts so when I write it down it is in its final form and ready to go somewhere to seek a home. I actually have another waiting in the wings for a market I am interested in to open to subs again, so we’ll see. But for now, it’s the novels that are holding my attention.
Where can people interested in the new book find you online for announcements about the release?
My website at www.AlmaALexander.org has info – if you go to my blog on that site right now you can actually find an announcement of the new book a few posts back and you can also find a way in which you can preorder the book, or even subscribe to the entire series. Go take a look and see if that is something you’d be interested in. And there is always my Patreon (where patrons can even expect early glimpses of new covers or excerpts of the WIP…) Other than that, I will make announcements on my socials (FaceBook, BlueSky), so keep an eye on those.
And my usual closing question: what is your favorite book (and why, if you feel like sharing)?
…I have THOUSANDS of books in my library. My favorites include those written by Tolkien, Guy Gavriel Kay, Ursula le Guin, Alix Harrow, Ada Palmer, Matt Ruff, Joanne Harris, Sharon Kay Penman, Marie Brennan, and oh SO MANY OTHERS. Yes, I re-read books. I will go back to an old love and it will be a sweet reunion every time. And my favorite book – in that moment – is the one I am holding.
