I have been waiting with a reasonably good grace (I say, not at all self-congratulatorily) for the sequel to Tasha Suri’s wonderful Empire of Sand — which is about a woman called Mehr who has inherited an important power from her Amrithi mother and now must marry the servant of the very wicked Ambhan emperor. That sequel, Realm of Ash, is out tomorrow, and I absolutely cannot wait for it, knowing as I do that it’s about the younger sister of the protagonist of Empire of Sand. I love all kinds of sequels, but I particularly love the ones that are, like, companion novels.
Anyway, the arranged marriage in Empire of Sand immediately made me think “now here is an author who has been in fandom,” and thus we are back! Once again! Doing an Authors in Fandom interview with the inimitable Tasha Suri. Enjoy!
How did you get into reading/writing fic? What were your earliest fandoms, and what’s the newest one you’ve fallen for?
I got into fandom almost twenty years ago, but I remember exactly how I fell into reading and writing fanfic: I’d become totally obsessed with Sailor Moon and I was googling it when I stumbled on a fanfic and fell in love with it. I started writing my own stuff immediately and flinging it onto the web. I’m pretty sure the first thing I posted was a .txt file Neptune/Uranus fanfic to the long defunct A Sailor Moon Romance/moonromance.net. I was ten.
I feel really old now. Anyway.
Lately, I haven’t really had a fandom, which feels kind of weird, though I still go back and read old favourites. If someone wants to point me to some good Star Trek: Discover fanfic about Georgiou though, I wouldn’t say no.
How has fic (reading or writing it!) influenced your professional work? Are there things that you find fic generally does better than pro writing?
I don’t think my professional work would exist without fanfic. Fandom is an amazing place to learn how to write, because other fans are so hugely supportive. I wrote a lot of bad stuff and a lot of stuff that was better, and all the way through other fans cheered me on.
Fanfic does relationships really, really well. I’m not sure I want to say it does relationships better than pro fic, because I think pro fiction and fanfic have different audiences and purposes. But that edge-of-your-seat, breathless feeling good fanfic gives you? It’s special.
And if you’ve written fic in the past: What have you found to be different about writing fanfiction vs pro fiction?
Fanfic was 100% a labour of love for me: love of writing, of the source material/canon, and of fandom itself. The more you engage with fandom the more it gives you the energy to keep on writing. Pro fiction is a lot lonelier, at least at first. You don’t have that same community around you, unless you actively build one, and rejection is built into the process of publication. You have to churn all that love and excitement up in yourself without the impetus of a fandom. It was only when I decided to be a fandom of one for my own stuff that I was able to finish any pro fiction, honestly.
What makes you ship a set of characters together? Or what elements in canon make you want to read or write fic?
I love shipping characters who have conflict. I’m a sucker for it. I don’t necessarily mean hero/villain, but I like when there’s something thorny in the relationship between two people that fanfic has to unravel for a romance between Character A and Character B to work. Do two characters have animosity, a tragic history, conflicting missions or secrets? I’m there, cheering them on.
Do you have fanfics or fanfic authors that most influenced you, or that you often return to? (I remember you saying that some fics should be counted as modern classics – tell me some!)
I’m not sure how much they’ve directly influenced my own writing, but these are all fanfics I’ve read over and over again for years. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if they’re modern classics, though I do think at least some of them are!
Truth and Measure is an alternate universe The Devil Wears Prada fic that asks: what would have happened if Andy Sachs hadn’t quit her job and left Miranda Priestly in Paris? I started it reluctantly then fell deep in love with it. It’s a properly epic love story that takes canon and runs with it, winning you over like only the best fanfic can. The sequel The Parting Glass is also wonderful.
If you like your fic a little more meta, then Steve Rogers at 100: Celebrating Captain America on Film is hysterical. United States v. Barnes, 617 F. Supp. 2d 143 (D.D.C. 2015) is no comedy, but it tells a heartfelt story through constructed social media and news items.
I’m also a big fan of a bunch of DC and Superman-related fic and I could read Reconcilable Differences over and over again.
What are your favorite things about fic as a medium? Are there things about the fic world that you’d like to see changed or improved?
Honestly? My favourite thing about fanfic is that it looks at a piece of media and says ‘this is mine now, and I’m going to explore the bits of it that the author won’t’. It’s transgressive and transformative and both an act of love and rebellion. What’s better than that?
The one thing that always used to sadden me about the fic world was how easily fanfics could be lost. There are so many fics I’ve read that are gone forever, thanks to websites going down, fanfics being intentionally deleted by their authors, or sites being purged. But Archive of Our Own has fixed that issue by providing an archive for fanfic and also creating a system for orphaning works, and I’m so thankful for that.
Tell me your favorite tropes! What tropes are your catnip, and what tropes do you tend to steer clear of? (I admit I am not typically a fan of arranged marriage stories, but Empire of Sand made me love it, dammit.)
I love soul bond fics! Love ‘em. Also stories where characters have to fake a marriage or relationship. The arranged marriage trope is my absolute favourite, of course. Maybe that’s obvious in Empire of Sand, haha.
I’m one of the few people in the world that hates coffee shop AUs. I just don’t get it. Otherwise, I’ll read pretty much any trope, I’m a trope omnivore.
Tasha Suri was born in Harrow, North-West London. She studied English and Creative Writing at Warwick University, and now lives in London where she works as a librarian. To no one’s surprise, she owns a cat. A love of period Bollywood films, history and mythology led her to begin writing South Asian influenced fantasy.
Tasha hangs out on Twitter, Instagram and has a Newsletter.