The fantasist’s Six Wild Crowns transports readers to a supernatural analog of Tudor England where King Henry VIII is married to all six of his wives at once.
Why the Tudors?
Growing up, it was the era of history that I was absolutely obsessed with. So when I set out to write something that was just for me,vall of that old childhood-to-teenage Tudor obsession came flooding back and I was like, But what if I add dragons? Even better! I think there’s this enduring appeal of the Tudors. It’s like an elitist version of Love Island or The Bachelor. It’s royalty and it’s history, so it’s a bit more socially acceptable as an interest, but it’s got all of the same ingredients: the backstabbing, the glamour. It’s got love and sex and falling into and out of favor. There’s something incredibly alluring about that level of drama.
How did you approach blending real history with your own worldbuilding?
I hope that if you have even a surface knowledge of the Tudors, you’ll be like, “Oh, I recognize that name, I know that person,” but, because I’m a big Tudor geek, there’s also a lot that people maybe won’t know from school. Portraying Henry VIII as a dashing romantic might make someone go, Oh, that wasn’t what he was like—but it absolutely was what he was like in his youth. I think it would be fair to call him a narcissist, maybe even a sociopath, but he didn’t like marrying people for pure politics. He liked the idea of being in love. That kind of digging through history really informed the characterization. In terms of the rest of the worldbuilding, I wanted to put a modern twist on the Tudor world. Hence why it’s a queer norm world. That felt appropriate, because, for one thing, I didn’t want to tell a story of oppression outside of the form of oppression that I know as a cis white woman. But also, if you have a king who engages in polyamory, then it stands to reason that his nobles would as well. It’s a status symbol: you can afford to support multiple wives and husbands.
You mentioned the dragons. How do they come into play?
I was looking at the kinds of pets people had and how they were treated. It was all about having them, again, as status symbols. A lot of the Tudor queens had lap dogs. Well, what if they had lap dragons instead? Hunting dogs? Hunting dragons. It was an easy parallel to make.
What inspired the fraught relationship between heroines Boleyn and Seymour?
There’s this exciting duality between the two. Boleyn is overtly powerful, but inside she’s just a little bit soft. Like Henry, she’s a romantic. She’s had a very positive and in some ways cosseted upbringing. Seymour is the opposite. On the outside she’s really mousy, but inside she’s got this core of steel that’s come from the opposite kind of upbringing, where she’s been put down repeatedly. It was fun to throw them into situations where they had to recognize each other’s strengths and weaknesses and the love growing between them.
