Writing & Love: A Guest Post by Sasha Peyton Smith
As soon as girls come of age under faerie Queen Moryen, they must make a bargain with her — one that always comes with a cost. Read on for Sasha Peyton Smith’s exclusive essay on what led her to write The Rose Bargain.
Paperback $15.99
The Rose Bargain
The Rose Bargain
In Stock Online
Paperback $15.99
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Witch Haven comes atale that will leave readers eager to bargain for a sequel.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Witch Haven comes atale that will leave readers eager to bargain for a sequel.
Failure is a funny thing– it feels so permanent at the time. In the fall of 2022, I’d fallen spectacularly on my face. I was fresh off a book tour for my New York Times best-selling debut series and from the outside, it must have looked like I was on top of the world. But the truth is, I was completely floundering. I was facing the biggest failure of my career, and I had no idea how to emotionally handle it. I cried. I watched too much tv. I ate gummy worms for dinner. During that long, dark, autumn, I believed my writing career would amount to being a brief footnote in the story of my life, something I’d perhaps, one day, tell my grandkids about, but nothing more.
It was in the midst of this months-long pity party that the idea for The Rose Bargain struck me. I was home for the holidays, spending most of my time dodging questions from my family about how writing was going. I was sitting at the dinner table, when the thought what if the Queen of England was a fairy fell into my lap. It was such a silly idea, I nearly dismissed it, but then I went upstairs to bed and looked at the bookshelf in my childhood room. It was bowed with time, and stuffed to the brim with books that I’d stayed up to read long after I’d told my mom I’d gone to sleep, books that I’d made my sister read just so I’d have someone to talk about them with– books that shaped me.
I thought of my fifteen-year-old self, who loved these books in the bone-deep, all-consuming sort of way you only can in adolescence, and resolved to write something, one final project, just for her. So, I took that nugget of an idea what if the queen was a fairy and added all of my favorite, most self-indulgent tropes (princes and rainy inns and marriage competitions, oh my!) If my career was already over, then I figured might as well have some fun.
Writing this book taught me that the only way to fail was to stop (and trust me, I wanted to stop. All of those gummy worm dinners made me pretty sluggish) and it also reminded me that success doesn’t always look the way you imagined it would. I was delighted to learn that it often looks even better.
In so many ways, the Rose Bargain brought me back to life. It reminded me that books could be sources of joy. Honestly, it felt a lot like falling in love.
The Rose Bargain is a romantasy, and so I can promise a big, beating heart at the core of a story about trickster faeries and court politics. One of the things I love most about romantasy, as a genre, is the enduring theme that love, above all things, is worth fighting for. I think that was something my fifteen-year-old self already knew and something my adult-self rediscovered through the course of writing this book.
The greatest thing about writing and love are the same—the best bits take you by surprise.
