Writing Romantasy: How I Wrote My Novel The Ash Trials
I’m writing to you from RomantasyCon. Here, romantic fantasy authors sign books for crowds of loyal readers carting huge plastic rolling boxes filled to the brim with books and other bookish merch. On the second level, the romance bookstore The Ripped Bodice has set up shop. Guarding their wares is a cardboard cut-out of Edward Cullen, who is sporting a tie-dye Ripped Bodice bucket hat.
The vibes are good: everyone is friendly, kind, and anxious to chat about their latest “god-tier” reads. I’m quickly swept up into conversation about Fourth Wing, ACOTAR, and what I’m wearing to the masquerade ball on Saturday night.
Romantasy has taken over, and visiting the convention on the eve of finishing my debut romantasy novel — The Ash Trials — feels like a surreal and affirming experience.
But let’s rewind and start from the beginning, shall we?
Why I Decided to Write Romantasy Novels
In February of 2024, I picked up A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas before my flight to South Korea, the first stop on my whirlwind journey to circumnavigate the globe as a seasoned digital nomad. I didn’t know it when I boarded that flight, but my life was about to change.
Reading A Court of Thorns and Roses — or ACOTAR as it’s better known — felt very different than a lot of the masculine thrillers I had been reading in the years prior. ACOTAR was decidedly feminine: it follows a young huntress who kills what she thinks is a wolf, but is actually a shapeshifting faerie, and she’s whisked away to the faerie lands to face punishment for her crime. From there, the story explores what it means to love someone romantically, the cost of that love, and what we’ll do for those we care about.
ACOTAR felt different because it tackled themes that felt so new to me. I hadn’t really read themes that took women’s desire seriously. Not just desire, actually, but love. ACOTAR gave us a female character who loves as fiercely as she fights, and that felt new. Too often on-screen I’d been exposed to coldhearted female characters that presented in very masculine ways, shunning love and romance as “weak” and instead isolating themselves as lone wolves. Or, female characters were branded as “messy antiheroes” in the era of Weeds and Shameless where their love lives were decidedly careless and more carnal rather than made up of the stuff of true love.
Reading ACOTAR was like waking up to a side of myself that I had put away. It felt like closing the proverbial book on the #Girlboss era where women were expected to wear suits and present as masculine in order to fit in. Instead, it showed me an image of women as feminine — yet, in femininity and a desire to fight for love, there was strength.
After ACOTAR, I fell down the rabbit hole of romantasy reads (you can find my recommendations for my favorites that are also on Kindle Unlimited here) reading Throne of Glass (also by Sarah J. Maas), the Blood and Ash series by Jennifer L. Armentrout, and nearly 70+ other books within a year.
During this year of reading, I was introduced to other was of thinking of love, romance, feminity, and inner strength. These heroines helped me get through the struggles of gathering my courage to put out my short story collection The Nomad Detective: Volume I — and then, at last, writing my own debut romantasy novel: The Ash Trials.
I write romantasy because I love the themes these stories tackle. These books explore how little acts of kindness pay off (Throne of Glass), how true love won’t keep you trapped (ACOTAR), and how the depths of your power will be unknown to you until you dare to reach for it (the Blood and Ash series and prequels, and Fourth Wing.)
As someone in recovery from an autoimmune condition (I’m going on two years of being in remission!) these books hit especially hard as I know what it’s like to feel weak. I know what it’s like to find defiance in the face of hopelessness and say I will not be defeated with a smile even when it hurts.
The genres of romantasy/fantasy romance explores these themes in a way that more traditional fantasy just doesn’t — at least, none that I’ve read. Too often I find that traditional fantasy stories lack an understanding of the female experience (in part of the scarcity of female writers in this space) or they present an antihero or “edgy” female character just for shock value rather than exploring themes about morality in earnest.
Lord of the Rings is a good example of how men have many stories showing dudes going on long hikes to explore the depths of their courage, but women rarely do. There’s also a lot more leniency for male author’s plot mistakes than female authors. If you’ve ever criticized a plot hole in a rormantasy novel, may I present to you the fact that the fucking magical eagles in LOTR could have just flown Frodo to Mount Doom to toss the ring in the lava the whole time??? And nobody thought that, I don’t know, they could just skip the thousands of pages worth of trekking through every single land on the planet and just given these eagles something shiny to drop them off? I think we can give some of these romantasy novels a pass for not solving every plotting problem after Tolkien’s story sins, okay?
Brainstorming The Ash Trials in Krakow, Poland
Ice cream and park walks were a staple of my time in Krakow, Poland
I was in the fever dream of putting out my first collection of short stories in the world (The Nomad Detective: Volume I) in Krakow, Poland when I came up with the idea of The Ash Trials. In the afternoon following my idea, I had a rough first outline and was excitedly pitching it to my partner Kyle as we went to get great vegan food around the corner from our flat in Krakow. As we sat amongst the indoor-outdoor restaurant dotted with vibrant plants and high ceilings, I shared with Kyle my vision for a story with an opening image of a woman in a ruined wedding dress waking up in a prison cell — with no memory of who she is or how she got there.
Kyle encouraged me to keep going with it, and so The Ash Trials was born. However, I was still feeling pretty exhausted from just having published The Nomad Detective, and even as I was invigorated by the early positive reviews of that book, I was ready to take a break from creative writing and catch up on everything else I had placed on the back burner. So, we headed to London and then Madeira for the next stops on our digital nomad journey for the year, and I continued to simmer my ideas for this new fantasy romance as I continued to devour more books in the genre.
Researching and Starting the Draft of The Ash Trials in Madeira, Portugal
Living on the beach in Madeira was as dreamy as it sounds
If you haven’t been to the island of Madeira, you’re missing out. Often described as the “Hawaii of Europe,” Madeira is a Portuguese island with an insane number of micro climates. We stayed on the beach with a view of the ocean from our balcony, and spent our days swimming in the warm, clear sea. We rented a car and drove up to hike through the infamous foggy forest, where trees twisted like witches’ hands reach out to grasp you from the soupy fog that makes it hard to walk in any direction without getting lost and running into a mooing cow eating cud by one of the many spiderwebs of dirt trails. Madeira is wild.
If you’ve read The Ash Trials, you might already see how the island of Madeira served as a key source of inspiration for the book. How could it not be? With its stunning views and surreal hikes, I found a lot of peace, healing, and creative rejuvenation in this magical place. My partner Kyle and I stayed in Ponta do Sol, a small village with a weekly farmer’s market that we shopped at to restock our Kombucha and fruits and veggie supply as we cooked from home each week. The produce tasted truly of the earth, and I remember loving a special kind of banana that grows on the island that tastes of a vaguely lime flavor.
I started writing the early pages of the book on the island but was (happily!) interrupted by a new client work trip where I was whisked away to Vienna for another book project. I took another break from the book, only returning to it on my flight from Paris back to the U.S., where I finally drilled down and wrote a detailed chapter outline over 20+ pages detailing how the book would come together. I also set my release date: Valentine’s Day 2025, a very aggressive deadline considering it was only November when I really started digging into the draft.
Writing The Ash Trials in Chelsea, Manhattan
My four-year journey as a digital nomad was coming to a planned end — but that story is for another post. Because of this, I had decided to spend a full month in NYC to see if it would be a contender for where I would live after ending my travles.
As I touched down in NYC for a month in Manhattan, I spent a week with my partner Kyle before he flew back to the West Coast, leaving me alone to write the draft of The Ash Trials from a brownstone in the idyllic Chelsea neighborhood.
I lived a nearly monastic life in NYC for those three weeks as I churned out pages: I woke up with the sun, went on a pilgrimage to my local Brooklyn Bagels shop to get an everything bagel egg sandwich (my absolute favorite bagel in all of NYC) and a hot chocolate. Then, I’d spend the first four hours of my day writing The Ash Trials, ending my writing session with a quick survey of my inbox and planning for Zoom calls, client meetings, and client writing time blocks which I put on my calendar. Then, I’d go to a nearby Crunch Gym and do an hour-long workout — or sometimes would swap out my workout for a yoga session at the ethereal yoga studio Humming Puppy — and then walked twenty minutes to Sweetgreen to pick up a salad for lunch/dinner. On my walks in the city I re-listened to my favorite romantasy novels, trying to absorb everything I could about why books like ACOTAR had affected me so much.
At night, I went to hang out with writer friends in the city, and even attended a Substack Bestsellers Dinner which was featured in a NY Times writeup. I was part of the literary “scene” here, even as an interloper. I cemented this status by returning to my keyboard at 10 or 11pm at night, continuing to add to my wordcount.
This pattern repeated nearly every day of my stay: I’d add thousands and thousands of words to my book each day, exploring the city in pockets of time in between writing, but religiously staying devoted to writing and sending pages to Kyle, who was a faithful editor and creative partner in the process of bringing the book to life. He added depth to the male characters, and helped me massage some of the structure elements of the book. We’d talk for hours until 2am, laughing about romantasy tropes (he was reading Fourth Wing at the time) and breaking down what really worked in this genre.
I was also developing the book cover with my cover designer Ashley Munson, who was on a tight deadline to wrap up the book cover before going on maternity leave. I work with Ashley on all of my book covers, and for good reason: after several rounds of iterations, she designed my absolute dream cover for The Ash Trials, down to the hand-drawn font and illustrations.
On the rare days I wasn’t writing my novel or working on client assignments, I wandered the shelves at bookstores like The Strand, or enjoyed the unseasonably warm November weather. I met up with one of my freelance clients at a coffeeshop covered in plants, and she asked me to sign her copy of my book The Nomad Detective.
This month in NYC was dreamlike, and I’ll never forget it. I remember the moments of euphoria as the book came into focus or as a new twist emerged out of the ether, and I remember feeling the gut-twisting punch of writing a hard scene as I explored the themes that meant so much to me as I further pushed my characters to their limits.
By the time I boarded a plane for Arizona to visit family for the holidays, I had gone from 5,000 words to nearly 70,000 words. All of my training over the years as a professional writer had paid off, and the book was coming together.
Editing The Ash Trials in Arizona, Nevada, Canada, and California
I finished writing the first draft across cities and countries: I wrote it in airports coming back from a book assignment I was on in Canada, and in cities like Phoenix and Reno. As I finished the draft, rewrites began just as swiftly. I brought in beta readers to help add extra sets of eyes on the book and hired a proofreader.
I also hired a map designer to create the map for the island, and sent her this terrible sketch:
Which she turned into this work of art:
The book was completed at nearly 160,000 words in San Francisco, CA, just two weeks before I boarded a plane for RomantasyCon in Los Angeles. It was a victory that came with a high like no other — or so I thought.
The reviews and reader emails began pouring in.
Publishing The Ash Trials in San Francisco, CA
“They love the book,” I breathed as my phone was flooded with ARC reader emails and early reviews. Kyle stood across from me, a grin on his face.
“Of course they did. You did an amazing job.”
My heart swelled. Months of high-intensity writing, rewriting, and solitude were paying off right in front of my eyes. The Ash Trials outsold The Nomad Detective: Volume I in just under a week, and I continue to receive the warmest, kindest emails and messages from readers. Book influencers are posting about the book, and every time I get tagged in a video of someone recommending my book, I find myself wondering if this is a dream I’ll wake up from.
All my life, I’ve been a writer. I’ve carved a path in the freelance world as a memoir ghostwriter for other people’s books, and I’ve made a name for myself now as an author in my own right.
I write because I love telling stories and sharing them with you, my readers. I hope that you feel some of what I felt when I picked up ACOTAR for the first time and realized that women could be heroes of stories that weren’t just about them being messy or masculine, but could inhabit a spectrum of emotions and themes of much more range than ever before.
I hope you laugh, I hope you cry, and I hope you find the characters to be the kind of company you want to keep for 500 pages. I hope you put it down feeling changed in some way, however small.
Book Two of The Ash Trials and What’s Next for Me in the Fantasy Romance Space
To answer the question most frequently in my inbox these days — yes! There will be a second book in the Septerra Series. The sequel for The Ash Trials will be out when it’s ready. I’m aiming for the end of this year, but I don’t have an official release date for you yet.
I plan on writing in the fantasy romance genre for quite some time, and I’m actually working on another secret novel project I’m excited to share with you in this space. It’s a standalone, and that’s all I can say :)
If you want to stay in the know, I recommend subscribing to my newsletter, where I post author updates as well as my writing job board, where I connect writers and creatives to different weekly opportunities.
Overall, I’m so grateful to be on this journey with you. Being a novelist feels more like a calling than a career, and I’m excited to share more stories with you.
Get Your Copy of The Ash Trials on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited
This book is about… In the prison of Ashguard, Saffron Vale awakens in a ruined wedding dress with no memory of who she is. As the only powerless human competing against murderous shifters and spellcasters, she must survive the six otherworldly Ash Trials that turn villains into legends — all while choosing between a royal commander who claims to be her childhood friend and an assassin who hints that she may be the most dangerous competitor of them all.
Subgenre: medieval romantasy/deadly trials.
Spice level: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ 3/5
What I hope you’ll love about it: I’ve poured everything I love about the romantasy genre with this book! Deadly trials, a strong FMC, swords and sorcery, yearning, slow-ish burn, “who hurt you?”, “touch her and die!” — all that good stuff. I’ve also chosen a love triangle trope, which I haven’t read recently in romantasy and I think it’s time for it to make more of a comeback — with a twist.
The book is available for sale internationally on Amazon in hardcover, paperback, and e-book! It’s also a part of the Amazon “Kindle Unlimited” program where you can read ebooks for free with a monthly membership.
