Please tell us a little about yourself and your work.

I’m an English teacher by trade (as well as a closet sociolinguist) and avid reader by choice, though I’ve recently somehow found myself writing books as well. Reading (and writing) can be a solitary endeavor while simultaneously building community and friendship through the shared appreciation of storytelling, which I absolutely love and want to contribute to as much as possible. I self-published my debut novel, The Assays of Ata, the first book in an epic fantasy trilogy, in 2024, and then its prequel novella, The Separation of Briin, in 2025.

How did you construct the world within your novel?

In Assays, the world I envisioned is a historical replica of our own (though perhaps in an adjacent reality/universe because it’s familiar, but not too similar). One of my pet peeves as a reader is when I cannot suspend my disbelief because of apparent inconsistencies or incongruities in a book’s setting. I believe worldbuilding is key to the reading experience and is seated in grand-scale overviews as well as the apparent minutiae of the everyday, which can be balanced and crafted together in such a way as to engage readers with [the story’s] uniqueness while still appealing to their sense of order and logic.

Did you use other science fiction and fantasy novels to help frame or develop yours?

My favorite genre as a reader is fantasy—epic/high fantasy in particular. Thus, though I didn’t model my books on a particular author’s work, my favorites have inevitably informed and influenced my writing. These include Trudi Canavan’s Magician’s Apprentice, Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy, Mary E. Pearson’s Remnant Chronicles, Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness, and Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle.

What are you working on now?

I’m currently working on the sequel to Assays (The Trials of Ata), as well as an anthology of short stories about cats, and a murder mystery novella. Because I’ve decided to rerelease The Assays of Ata with She Writes Press at the end of 2027, I’m taking my time with Trials,as there’s no rush to publish it in the meantime.

What can readers expect that might be different from your previous body of work?

I have plotted the outline of three murder mystery novellas (they might become short novels, depending on how much self-control I can muster) and have completed the first draft of a collection of nine short stories. The latter I started writing in 2021 during Covid lockdowns, but I left them to rest while I wrote Assays. Now, because there isn’t as much pressure to finish Trials soon, I can return to these projects. Also, in a completely unrelated field, I’m very excited because I’ve co-authored a chapter on South African English in The New Cambridge History of the English Language with my masters supervisor, Professor Ian Bekker, and the particular volume our chapter appears in will be published later this year.

Portions of this Q&A were edited for clarity.