If you enjoy brooding, dominant, obsessively possessive heroes, that's perfectly fine. Different readers want different things from fantasy romance. But those particular tropes are not what I'm interested in writing. In the Kingdoms, the man who insists that he knows what is best for a woman, ignores her boundaries, treats jealousy as proof of love, or confuses possession with devotion isn't the romantic hero. He's the villain. The Last Goblin Queen stories are deliberately built around a different idea of romance. My heroines are strong, independent women who don't need to be conquered, rescued, or controlled. They choose partners who respect their judgment, their boundaries, and their freedom. They argue. They challenge each other. They depend on each other. And they remain equals. Because I think healthy relationships are sexy. For me, the fantasy isn't finding a powerful man who can dominate you. It's finding someone powerful enough to stand beside you ...

I love fantasy, but I’ve always wanted to know what happens after the dragon is slain. What do people do when the tyrant falls? How do kingdoms rebuild? What happens when heroes have to raise children, preserve knowledge, repair broken institutions, or simply figure out how to live together? That is the kind of fantasy I want to write. In The Last Goblin Queen , Goblins are not monsters waiting in the darkness. They are scholars, merchants, priests, queens, knights, parents, and children. Heroes fight battles, but they also write books, challenge traditions, fall in love, raise families, and argue about what their society should become. I’m interested in love stories that continue after the wedding, in heroes who remain curious after they have won, and in characters who believe the world can be made better without pretending that doing so is easy. There are dragons, ancient mysteries, magic, and epic adventures here. But ultimately, I’m writing about people, and about the difficult, ho...

The Kingdoms are home to no shortage of creatures that might, at first glance, earn the label "monster." Look closer, though, and something more interesting emerges: not a single one of them is supernatural. They are, every last one, the product of ordinary evolution — shaped, as all living things are, by the pressures of their environment. In the Kingdoms, that environment simply includes six Elements: Fire, Stone, Water, Crystal, Metal, and Void. Bind an animal to one of these across enough generations, and nature does what nature always does. It adapts. Not all of these bound creatures are (necessarily) dangerous, and some have been domesticated. Elementally bound creatures in the Kingdoms  range from Rocktoads (Stonebound toads) to Embermanes (Flamebound horses), from Shadow-wings (Voidbound bats) to Coppercrawlers (Metalbound centipedes). What looks fantastical at first glance is, on closer inspection, just another animal doing what animals do — surviving, brilliantly.