Freya Marske is a USA Today bestselling author and has been nominated for two Hugo Awards. Her books include Swordcrossed and A Marvellous Light, which was an international bestseller and won the Romantic Novel Award for Fantasy. She lives in Australia.

I had the opportunity to interview Freya, which you can read below.

First of all, welcome to Geeks OUT! Could you tell us a little about yourself?

One of my social media bios is ‘writer, ice skater, gin drinker’. I always feel I should be doing more of the first and would like to be doing more of the second, but good news! I am drinking exactly the right amount of gin.

I write fantasy and romance and all controversial portmanteaux thereof, and all of them are some flavour of queer.

What can you tell us about your most recent work, Cinder House? What was the inspiration for this?

I actually wrote the first sentence of Cinder House a long time ago as part of a meme on Writer Twitter (…R.I.P.), imagining what kind of story would go with a picture of an imposing Gothic house. The idea of ‘ghost Cinderella’ tickled me. I tucked it away for a while, and then pulled it out again when I was looking for a novella-length idea to write.

As with all my books, the initial inspiration was just the flame held to the fuse. When writing it, I played with the Cinderella story and its iconic imagery, I included some of my favourite elements of fairy tale logic, and I also semi-accidentally ended up writing a very personal story about disability and chronic illness, and how we try to make new meaning for ourselves when our bodies and our lives are changed irrevocably.

The specific flavour of queerness here is ‘horny bisexual ghost’ which I think the world could always use more of, honestly. 

Another story you’ve worked on recently is the novel, Swordcrossed. What prompted this project?

Hilariously, ‘worked on recently’ in this context is throwing us way back in time, because Swordcrossed was actually the first novel I ever wrote, largely to prove that I could. Because I was writing it for myself, without the pressure of publishing deadlines, it’s a fun and madcap jumble of the tropes and set pieces that I personally enjoy the most: arranged marriages, secret identities, sexy sword fighting, obedience kink, corporate espionage, and a grand showdown at a wedding.

As a writer, what drew you to the art of storytelling, particularly fantasy and romance?

I write what I want to read. I’ve been a fantasy reader my whole life, but didn’t identify myself as a romance reader until my mid-twenties, when I realised that was why I loved fanfiction so much, and hey! There was a whole other genre of original fiction doing some of the same stuff! I love the scope for wild creativity in fantasy, and I love getting to plunge my fingers into the nitty-gritty of human relationships: their weaknesses, mistakes, longings, complexities and connections.

And to be frank, I really like writing sex scenes. It’s half choreography, and half letting yourself deconstruct your own barriers in order to write straight towards the joy.

How would you describe your creative process?

My first instinct is to say ‘a mess’ in exasperated tones, but in truth I’m a very organised person constantly trying to inflict order and organisation on a naturally messy process. I don’t need to write in the same place, or light a candle, or sit down at a certain time of day. But I do need to outline extensively before I start drafting, so I feel comfortable charging forth with the security of a plan in hand. 

I’m not a fast drafter, but I’m a clean one; this is largely self-defence because I hate doing revisions, and prefer to gnash my teeth through the drafting process but end up with something respectable that only needs a few tweaks. (And a few thousand words deleted. So much deleting takes place in the editing process. My poor editor and agent have to say things like, Freya, you are only allowed two pieces of overwrought imagery on this page, and currently there are four.)

As an author, who or what would you say are some of your greatest creative influences and/or sources of inspiration in general?

It’s always a joy stumbling across a book or a writer who makes me want to put their book down, even if I’m otherwise totally engrossed in it, and go and work on something myself, out of a mixture of creative fervour and sheer professional envy. Some of my major influences are big hefty names: Terry Pratchett, Lois McMaster Bujold, Dorothy Dunnett. 

But I’m lucky enough to be writing at the same time as some incredible fantasy and romance authors, too—a small portion of the list of those who constantly impress and inspire me are K.J. Charles, Emily Tesh, Natasha Pulley, Naomi Novik, Everina Maxwell, Zen Cho, Alexis Hall and T. Kingfisher.

What’s a question you haven’t been asked yet but that you wish you were asked (as well as the answer to that question)?

I will tell you for free that an underrated activity for mulling over plot problems is baking. Everyone knows about going for a long walk or having a long shower (and as an Australian raised under the water restrictions of drought conditions, I will never feel able to do the latter). But there’s something about the soothing, semi-engaged brainwork of following a recipe, and the enforced pause of it being in the oven, that can help me when I’m stuck. Plus: you end up with cake, or muffins, or slice, or biscuits. Win-win.

What advice might you have to give for aspiring writers out there?

Go around vacuuming up every piece of advice like this from as many authors as you can find, try everything that sounds fun or useful, and then cheerfully discard everything that doesn’t work for you. I personally have no idea how anyone writes a book without a thorough and sturdy outline, but just sitting down and making it up as they go, trusting in the alchemy of discovery, works brilliantly for lots of people. The creative process is a different animal when it approaches each of us. Some of us do best if we sit quietly and wait for it to curl fastidiously up in our lap. Some of us have to roll up our sleeves, don thick boots, and wrestle the bugger to the ground.

The only things you must do are learn to start, learn to keep going through the self-doubt, and learn to finish. All of them are difficult in their own way. Good luck. If you get stuck, make a cake.

Are there any other projects you are working on and at liberty to speak about?

I’m almost finished revising the novel that will come out in 2026. It’s a standalone fantasy novel in a brand new world, with a central murder mystery; for the life of me I can’t seem to write a fantasy novel without killing someone off in the first chapter. It also has five narrators, and none of them are straight. All of them are absolute disasters in their own way. I can’t wait for my readers to meet them, love them, and rip their hair out over all the bad decisions they make.

Finally, what books/authors (LGBTQ+ or otherwise) would you recommend to the readers of Geeks OUT?

You could do a lot worse than simply going to the library and getting one book each by all of those in the ‘inspirations’ question, and working out which of them strikes your fancy, like a delicious storytelling buffet. 

But if you heard the words ‘horny bisexual’ and thought, oh, yes, I’ll have some more of that, please, then here are a handful of recs: The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (fantasy about teachers at a magical school), You Made A Fool of Death With Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi (a stunning romance about grief and mess, and also about food), and The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox (a slow build into an incredibly inventive genre-mash; I read it years ago and still think about it all the time).

I’m incredibly easy to talk into giving personalised recs, too. Come find me on BlueSky and tell me what you want.