To celebrate the release of Midwinter Magic & Mayhem, a short story compilation with contributions from many fantasy authors, I’m excited to share my interview with the wonderful Ash Fitzsimmons. Author of almost twenty books, it is an honor to have her with us! Be sure to check out Midwinter Magic & Mayhem for only 99¢ and enjoy some comfy reading for a chilly night. Be sure to also check out Ash’s books , which are linked throughout the interview.
Please welcome Ash Fitzsimmons, a fellow fantasy author and contributor to our short story compilation, Midwinter Magic & Mayhem! Thanks for giving me the opportunity to interview you today. Can you introduce yourself and your books to my readers?
Thanks so much for inviting me, Tabitha!
I’m Ash Fitzsimmons, and I write contemporary fantasy, stories with magical elements set in the present moment. (I wouldn’t call it urban fantasy—mine tends to skew more suburban, let’s say, with long romps through the countryside.) To date, I’ve published one complete series, Stranger Magics, and I have a new one, Hall of Thorns, in progress.
You’ve written almost twenty books at this point—no small feat whatsoever! When did you start writing and publishing, and can you tell us a little bit about your process? How have you accomplished getting this many books out?
Oh, goodness…well, I wrote my first novel in 2003, during the summer after freshman year of college and a few months into the fall. I’d never written anything longer than a twenty-thousand-word novella, but I had a story I wanted to tell, and I was an English major, so I gave it a shot. The result was a little north of two hundred thousand words. My mentor, bless him, liked it well enough to pass it to his agent, who said that a doorstop like that from an unknown was unpublishable. That book now resides comfortably in the back of a dark, locked drawer.
I started writing in earnest a few years later, when I did a one-year Master’s degree in creative writing. While this hasn’t proven to be the most marketable of my degrees, what it did was give me time and space to just write—and coming directly out of the chaos of undergrad, this was an incredible gift. I’d say I treated my writing like a job in those days but for the fact that I had a poor grasp of work-life balance, and I may have been slightly obsessive: my personal rule was that I had to produce at least six thousand words per day. Before the end of the program, I’d written the first drafts of eight books, none of which have yet been published (though I do have plans for some of them…).
All good things come to an end, however, and I graduated and needed to find employment. A couple years later, I decided my career plans weren’t panning out, bit the bullet, and went to law school. While I was still writing during this time, my output shrank dramatically—I wrote three novels in five years, including one during a manic three-month sprint to finish before graduation and the bar exam.
It was the thirteenth book I wrote, the one I’d intended as a palate cleanser a few months after the bar, that turned into Stranger Magics. That was published in 2017.
My process now is a reflection of the demands on my schedule. I try to hit at least one thousand words per day. Sometimes, I can do this before work. Other days, my brain refuses to focus at dawn, and so I write until bedtime. Because I don’t have the luxury to just sit and churn for hours, I’ve become much more of a plotter, which greatly helps when the sun’s not up and I’m wondering what’s supposed to happen next.
My Siberian husky has been most accommodating, though she can’t seem to understand why I enjoy staring at the screen and muttering.
Your first series, Stranger Magics, has fifteen books. Wow! What has it been like writing a series that long? What have you learned along the way?
You know, Stranger Magics was intended to be a one-off. The previous seven books I’d worked on were a series that had taken me about six years to write, and I wanted to try something new. I had ideas for a story, it coalesced, and so I cranked that out, put a bow on it, and said, “The End”…
…but then I started getting ideas for a sequel. I’d left some loose threads in the first book, and I liked the sandbox I was playing in, so I started working on the next book, aiming toward a particular resolution that absolutely refused to happen. It wasn’t true to the characters.
Okay, I thought, one or two more books, just to tidy this up.
But by that point, the story had taken on a life of its own and was sprawling toward characters and places and events I’d never imagined when I wrote the first one. Long story short, I published the final volume of the series in February, almost nine years after I sat down to write that innocuous little one-off book.
My biggest takeaway from the experience is the importance of keeping notes. The first book was largely “pantsed,” if you will. The second had a five-thousand-word synopsis, plus several pages of character descriptions, a brief timeline, and notes about the subsequent books and the arc of the series. In 2020 or so, I discovered TiddlyWiki, which works well for me—it let me write a series wiki, which was such a great tool as the series grew and I needed refreshing. (What color are his eyes? When was she born? How are these characters related?)
I’ve taken those lessons into Hall of Thorns, which also has its own wiki and plenty of plot notes!
In Midwinter Magic & Mayhem, your story, “Daisy”, deals with magical creatures and a magical time of year—winter! What inspired your contribution to the book?
“Daisy” was so much fun to write because it’s a freestanding short story unconnected to either series. I wanted something for the anthology that could be enjoyed without knowing the first thing about my books, so starting from scratch with the characters and their world was a treat.
The story opens with a young woman who buys a house and hangs a birdfeeder on the deck. One day, she discovers that the feeder has been tossed and opened…and it’s not the squirrels at fault. Like my narrator, I bought a birdfeeder a couple years ago and hung it to see what I could get. (The answer to that is far too many birdfeeder pictures and the Merlin app, but I digress…) I came home a couple times to find that the feeder had been lifted off its nail and apparently dropped to the deck to open it. The wind wasn’t strong enough to do that, so something had to have pulled it loose and flung it. Personally, I’m chalking it up to the local squirrels, but as they left me with a story idea, I don’t begrudge them the sunflower seeds they stole.
Many readers of this blog are aspiring writers or creators of a fantasy world (such as conlangers and Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts). What advice do you have for those who are starting out with their ideas?
Two pieces of advice:
Keep good notes. Whatever works for you—Google Docs, Scriblr, index cards, strange sigils drawn on the wall in lipstick, whatever it takes to build a record of what you know about the worlds, characters, and languages you create.
The good news is that you usually don’t have to have produced a fully formed world by the time you write “Chapter One.” You need to have an idea of who your main characters are and how they operate in the scenario into which you’ve dropped them, but you don’t need to know, say, every detail of that nasty little civil war six hundred years ago in the country next door. But might that war become a plot point? Make notes about it. That way, two years from now, when that war has somehow become relevant to your story, you have a record on hand of what you know about it. Maybe those notes will refresh your memory about some important details you’ve forgotten, or maybe they’ll show you the places where you need to fill in the background gaps. Either way, it’s far easier than reading through all your work to that point, trying to figure out what you might have said on the subject.
Know when to put it aside. Sometimes, the story flows of its own accord. Sometimes, you end up scrolling Twitter for half an hour because you managed to write “the,” and that’s as far as your muse is willing to go. We all have bad writing days. If you can’t power through it, put the manuscript away and let your subconscious figure out where you want to go. You don’t win Writer Bonus Points by typing words you don’t like just for the sake of writing something.
When you’re stuck, what helps you get out of a writing/creativity rut?
Frankly, if I don’t know where the story goes next, I’ll step away—maybe take a walk, maybe sleep on it. The mind is a remarkable thing, and if you let it ruminate in the background, it’ll work out problems for you. The trick is not forcing it.
Do you have any upcoming releases or works-in-progress you’d like to tell us about?
Sure! I released the third Hall of Thorns book, Silent Siren, on October 4. The series is available on Kindle Unlimited, or you can find it in eBook or paperback on Amazon.
Any parting thoughts you’d like to share?
Let me close by saying that I’m thrilled to be in Midwinter Magic & Mayhem with you! This project has been such fun, and I’m excited to get the anthology out there.