The Power to Change Your Fate: A Guest Post by Emily J. Taylor
Equal parts mystery, fantasy and romance, this is a wildly imaginative story of one girl, alone in the world, ready to make a difference. Emily J. Taylor has penned an exclusive essay for us on writing The Otherwhere Post.
Hardcover
$17.99
$20.99
The Otherwhere Post (A Good Morning America YA Book Club Pick)
The Otherwhere Post (A Good Morning America YA Book Club Pick)
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$17.99
$20.99
The New York Times bestselling author of Hotel Magnifique
returns with this stunning dark academic fantasy full of deadly magic and dangerous secrets, perfect for fans of Divine Rivals and A Study in Drowning.
The New York Times bestselling author of Hotel Magnifique
returns with this stunning dark academic fantasy full of deadly magic and dangerous secrets, perfect for fans of Divine Rivals and A Study in Drowning.
What if you received a letter from another world with the power to change your fate?
This question came to me on a mundane walk to the mailbox in early 2020, during the height of the pandemic. I had a newborn and my family was quarantining and not visiting anyone. I remember thinking: it feels like I’m trapped on another planet from everyone I love. As I stared at the mailbox (as one does when they’re sleep-deprived), the idea of a magical postal service took root—with couriers that delivered enchanted letters to different worlds. Then, an image formed in my mind of a lonely young woman clutching a letter to her heart that would ultimately change the course of her life.
Reader, meet Maeve Abenthy. She’s a determined young woman, running from her past, who can’t trust or get close to anyone out of fear. But to get anywhere, she’s forced to open herself up to others. I adore writing complicated relationships and I knew I wanted romance to be a central part of Maeve’s character growth, so I came up with my messy, nerdy, tortured Tristan to be her perfect counterpart, who sees Maeve’s heart even when she can’t.
I will admit that the idea of setting a book around a post office terrified me at first. YA fantasy is bursting with gorgeous, atmospheric worlds. For me to do this story justice, I knew I would have to make postal work aspirational and the setting itself somewhere that my readers would love exploring. It was a fun challenge that didn’t quite come together until a trip to Edinburgh, where I stood in a tight alleyway, enamored with the architecture—the gothic buildings had this amazing black sediment dripping down their sides that made them look ink-stained. It was then that my university city of Gloam took shape, filled with cobblestones, inksmithies that sold writing supplies, and a traumatized people that were desperate to communicate with their family across worlds.
I love taking mundane institutions and injecting magic, and that’s exactly what I did with The Otherwhere Post. I had so much fun coming up with Maeve’s ink-stained world and the dangerous magic system of scriptomancy that made it all tick—where a single sentence holds vast power and everything from linguistics to chirography to the writing tools themselves become matters of life and death.
Writing a fantasy with a dark academia thread brought me right me back to my college days of working in the library stacks and daydreaming about all the twisted, magical things that might be hiding along the edges. My memories from that time feel sepia-toned and stained with ink and coffee, and I tried to capture the romance of that feeling at every opportunity.
Maeve’s story was many years in the making. I can’t wait for readers to discover the dark magic of this world for themselves!
