Zen Cho and Freya Marske on Romance, Romantasy, and Communication

Tor Books, in partnership with Literary Hub, presents Voyage Into Genre! Every other Wednesday, join host Drew Broussard for conversations with Tor authors discussing their new books, the future, and the future of genre. Oh, and maybe there’ll be some surprises along the way…

Ah, there’s nothing like a little mid-season break to refresh everybody, get a drink of water, pick up some new reads, travel the world if you want to! Anyway, welcome back and just in time: it’s fall and it’s, as one of my colleagues at Literary Hub put it this morning, cuffing season, which is, as we all know, the most romantic of seasons!

It’s perfect because it does dovetail with spooky season and we’ll be getting into spooky season quite robustly later on this season. But for the time being, we’re gonna dive into the wonderful magical world of romance. In fact, we’re celebrating a birthday, sort of a little bit belated, but it is Bramble’s first birthday.

It is kind of shocking to me that it has only been a year that Tor has had a romance-dedicated imprint, that only really in the last year, maybe the last two, have we seen this huge boom in romance. It is shocking to me that it has only been in the last couple of years that I’ve started reading romance! Longtime listeners of the show will know that there’s an episode that we did in 2022 with Alexandra Rowland and Foz Meadows and that really was, with the exception of reading Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate, books when I was in college, my introduction to reading romance. Since then I have thrown myself as have a great many of you into the full depths of the genre. I had the pleasure to talk to two writers who in various ways have you could argue, been working in the romance genre, but who have watched the ground around them move as they have been writing, and suddenly what they were writing on the side or what they were tempering in order to fit into certain other molds became the thing that everybody wanted to read.

Those two writers are Zen Cho and Freya Marske, with their new books The Friend Zone Experiment and Swordcrossed.

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Read the full episode transcript here.

FROM THE EPISODE:

Zen Cho: I think Freya, you’ve always been kind of more romance forward with your kind of published fiction avenue. In the days when we used to make the distinction, instead of calling everything romantasy, I definitely thought of it when I read A Marvelous Light as fantasy romance rather than romantic fantasy.

Freya Marske: Yeah, I think we’ve gone a little bit backwards in terms of the order of things because I wrote Swordcrossed before I wrote the Last Binding Trilogy, and when I exactly, as you point out when I was writing it romantasy as a concept didn’t really exist, and I just wrote exactly the story that I wanted to write without thinking about who is gonna publish this, where does it fit in the market?

It was my proof of concept novel to say, can I finish an original novel? and so I was full steam ahead for all the romance tropes that I wanted to throw into it. But I wanted to give it this fantasy setting, and I had an amazing time writing it. Got to the end and thought, well, it’s quite a good book. let’s see what we can do with this.

And everyone who read it said, well, that’s quite a good book. It’s not a real genre though. Because it’s not, it’s not romantic fantasy because the romance is so prominent in it and there’s no magic and there’s no dragons. and it’s not really what was thought of at the time as Fantasy romance, which again, was a romance novel that had certain agreed upon fantasy trappings, that were quite different to what I would classify this as.

I think Swordcrossed is a fantasy of manners, where most of the world building is social, it’s cultural, it’s religious. when I was writing it, I wasn’t thinking about that balance of how much of it is romance, how much of it is not, and at the time, that’s why it didn’t sell, because it was not calibrated towards a particular genre.

And so when I was writing the Last Binding Trilogy, I was much more calibrating myself towards writing fantasy books with very strong romances in them. and now that the market has changed so much in the last four years, when it came time to think, well, what are we gonna bring out next? We could pull sword cross out of the drawer and say, well, now there’s a place for this in the market.

Because cozy fantasy is a bigger thing, lowest stakes in terms of world building and, and magic is a bigger thing now, and romantasy is a word.

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Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre is a co-production with Lit Hub Radio. Hosted by Drew Broussard. Studio engineering + production by Stardust House Creative. Music by Dani Lencioni of Evelyn.