Immortal Consequences: A Guest Post by I.V. Marie

Welcome to Blackwood Academy. In this enthralling fantasy, six students compete to alter their destiny at a legendary boarding school located on the fringes of the afterlife. Who will win and who will fail? In this game, some fates are worse than death. Read on for an exclusive essay from I.V. Marie on writing Immortal Consequences. 

I was a fangirl before I was a writer. I’m talking head-over-heels obsessed, fan fic–writing, all-consuming fangirl. Growing up, book fandoms were as indispensable to my well-being as oxygen. It wasn’t just the magical stories that brought me a sense of comfort and solace but the fandom communities themselves—connecting with other readers who held the same proclivity to lose themselves in worlds that only existed in the pages of a book.

When I first began writing Immortal Consequences, I knew I wanted the book to encapsulate that same all-consuming, sweeping feeling I had when reading my favorite fantasy books growing up. And the best way to do that was to simply write the book that I would have wanted to read myself. A magical school set in the afterlife? Check. A cast of morally complex, yet strangely endearing characters? Check. Dangerous magical trials and the simmering secrets and hidden corruption of dark academia? Check. Romance brimming with yearning, longing and pining? Check, check, check. With each page I wrote, I felt my childhood self rising to the surface, guiding me in creating the world she would have happily fallen into, spending hours upon hours reading late into the night.

But as much as Immortal Consequences is about magic, heart-pounding action, and swoony romances, it’s also very much a love letter to those of us drowning under the unrelenting waves of grief, desperate to find our way to the surface.

I began writing this book about two years after my father unexpectedly passed away. At first, I didn’t think my grief had influenced my decision in setting the book in the afterlife, but it quickly became clear that grief hadn’t just been a passing influence on the book, it had been the beating heart of it.

When you lose someone, you don’t just grieve the person you lost. You grieve the version of your life that included them, the life you could have had, and the person you once were when they were still around. I realized then that these characters were mirroring this grief. Thrust into the afterlife without warning and forced to compete in a dangerous competition for the chance to change their eternal fate, our six main characters grapple with immeasurable loss as they fight tooth and nail to regain control of their existence.

Now that it’s been a year since Immortal Consequences first came out and we are weeks away from the sequel, Ruinous Ends, hitting shelves, I count myself eternally lucky that this book found the community of readers I had so hoped it would. Meeting readers and getting to hear how deeply the characters resonated with them, and how much comfort they found in the halls of Blackwood Academy is not only my greatest honor as an author, but also as a fangirl.

I hope you enjoy Immortal Consequences. And remember . . . eternity is only the beginning.