Book Tour Q&A: Starlight Jewel by E.L. Lyons

Today we're taking part in the book tour organized by Escapist Book Company for Starlight Jewel by E.L. Lyons! Continue reading for the book blurb and a Q&A with the author.

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About the book

Axly, the Starlight Company's premier seductress-thief and assassin, will do whatever it takes to keep her human brother hidden. The secrets of his origin could tear their world apart, and keeping them has driven her to lies and murder. Her people, the sprygan-human hybrids that live under the city of Minalav, aren't keen on allowing their most skilled asset to roam free. A job with a human offers a chance to get her brother out of danger, but it comes at a price. Divided loyalties, duty, romance, and the twisted hands of fate intertwine in this epic fantasy adventure.

Gifts of the Auldtree is a world of mythology, glamor, mud, blood, civilizations in conflict, and hints of distant powers. In the center of this is the mysterious Starlight Jewel of Minalav.

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On to the interview...!

Thank you so much for joining us for this Q&A! We’ll start off with one of our standard podcast opening questions–tell us something great that’s happened recently.

Entering Starlight Jewel into SPFBO9 and getting to join this very neat community has been the highlight of my year! That my judge chose Starlight Jewel’s cover to move forward to the finalists, even if it didn’t make the final cut, was also an awesome moment for me. I adore what my cover artist and cover designer did, and love to see that get recognized.

What are you currently reading or what’s up next on your TBR? What made you pick up this book?

Currently I’m reading An Ocean of Others by Joshua Scott Edwards and Daughter of the Beast by E.C. Graves. I picked both books by doing a first chapter culling of the SPFBO9 contestants. Both their first chapters solidly dropped them into the dark adult fantasy genre, which is primarily what I read. Both have been amazing so far!

If you could collaborate with any one author, who would it be and why?

Collaboration has definitely been on my mind lately, and though I don’t know how it would work really, I would love to try. I wouldn’t say no if Mark Terribile, Ilana Germaine, Steven William Hannah, E.C. Greaves, or H.C. Newell asked me to collab. All of them have writing styles and ideas that mesh well with my own and I think it could be fun!

What are your favorite types of stories? Of characters?

My favorite types of stories are those with gritty dark worlds, characters who are a bit unhinged or feral, and generally stories that speak to that baser struggle between morality and nature. I like stories that are dark but upbeat the most. A well-written villain is my favorite treat in a book.

Is this your first book? If so, what lessons have you learned from writing it? If not, what lessons did you learn from writing earlier books that you brought into this one?

This is my first published book, but I’ve been writing stories since I first learned to write. I’ve always been a daydreamer. However, I was a closet hobby writer, and far too embarrassed about my writing to get any feedback on it. After a small mental meltdown, a friend told me that if it was going to affect me so badly, I should take the hobby seriously and actually get serious about improving.

That was after the first draft of Starlight Jewel (draft being a rough word, there were probably ten scrapped and incomplete drafts).

Two years later, I was hitting publish. I honestly didn’t expect to be able to get this book into publishable shape, as it was a burning dumpster fire, but I found an amazing writing mentor who helped me through all the editing and revisions and the final draft.

That process did teach me quite a lot about the difference between the world/story I’m writing and the readers’ experiences of that world. I think my next book won’t be so needlessly complex and will focus more on atmosphere than convoluted familial relations and twisting plots and turns. I love what I managed to make of this book, but I think I could deliver a better experience, a better story really, if there were fewer moving parts to work with. I’d also like to just write a shorter book/series, as this chonk has been a bit pricey.

They say to never judge a book by its cover, but a cover is still a marketing tool that helps sell books. Can you tell us about the idea behind the cover of your book?

In retrospect, I probably should have gone with a darker cover, because the book does get mistaken for YA and romantasy. I learned a lot of lessons publishing this book, two big ones: people will assume woman author = YA, and if there are two people on the cover, people will assume romance, even if the guy is a tree monster.

The tree monster is actually the woman’s dad. That’s Roarik the Auldtree, king of the sprygans. The woman is Axly, the hybrid FMC of Starlight Jewel.

Despite that, I adore my cover! I had a lot of ideas for the book cover, and I’m glad my artist/best friend didn’t listen to most of them and went with something simple. She’s visually inclined and she managed to put together a beautiful piece of art.

The cover designer, my day job boss, was supposed to just “take the purple out of the trees and put a title on it.” My artist was quite busy with a small child and another on the way when she finished my art, so I didn’t want to bother her about the purple in the trees. I knew my day job boss could do it as he’s always working in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

So when I looked over his shoulder to see just silhouettes with smoke and flames… I wanted to be mad but it actually looked really neat. They were on a cerulean background and he asked me what color background I wanted. I said “anything but white.” Of course, he put it on a white background and it looked… awesome.

We went through tons of fonts, hated all of them, submitted to Cover Critics and some kind soul suggested Brilon, which turned out perfect.

That’s how I got a cover that was better than anything I’d hoped for—if slightly misgenred cause none of us really understood that it would give YA romantasy vibes.

My cover designer has since read the book, and said that if he’d read it before, he’d have done something entirely different. Pretty much all my early readers are in agreement that me describing the book as a dark Cinderella retelling was… not accurate. Technically, that is how the book started, but I suppose it did get out of hand. The fairytale elements are minor and, in a way, inconsequential to the world, characters, and story.

At some point, I am hoping to have a second cover done, one that’s more fitting of the genre and doesn’t scream YA. Though for collectors and those who like their books to match, I’ll still make covers in the vein of the original for the next two books in the series.

How different is the final version of this book from the first draft?

Very different. Discounting all the “scrap drafts,” the first completed draft of Starlight Jewel was bad enough that I had a meltdown after reading it because it was so awful compared to the story I’d imagined.

The middle was very thin and boring and I had somehow not anticipated how impractical it would be for my characters to travel back and forth between two countries twice, for a total of four cross-continent trips that each span months. It drew the plot out over multiple years and made the transitions between big events… rough.

I had no idea what to do about the rough transitions, but some barely coherent as-I-was-falling-asleep inspiration hit me for the thin and boring middle. From my mental meltdown about the dumpster fire was born King Henry.

There was *a* King Henry in the book prior to that, but he was a boring, minor side character. Once the idea of the new King Henry entered my mind, he wove himself into the plot effortlessly.

My writing mentor helped me to sort of cushion the cross-continent travel portions through a few PoV switches and event changes. He also advised me to delete three chapters where the characters were simply traveling through the swamp and not doing anything related to the main plot, which, sad as I was about it, was the right call.

Two bigger side characters died at the end of the book in the first draft, but I decided that they hadn’t quite had their time to shine yet, so they get to live a little longer.

And those were just the biggest changes from the first to last drafts.

Can you tell us a little bit about your characters? What are your favorite kinds of characters to write?

I like to write characters who are a bit dry and low energy, which probably reflects the type of people I like to surround myself with. I also like to write characters who have internal struggles of some sort, two parts of their nature in opposition.

Grim is a dutiful soldier, but he craves small indulgences and wild passions. Axly is all hunting and survival instincts, but she craves a simple life where she could develop a stronger sense of self. Throughout the series there are breaking points for each of them, points where they have to either dig in their heels or remake themselves.

I also quite enjoy writing characters with a bit of madness. King Henry and (redacted name, we’ll call him Roger) are both examples of characters who are just a bit off their rockers. It may or may not be apparent upon reading Henry that he’s not entirely human, so a lot of what may appear as “madness” with him is simply his nature. Roger on the other hand has been through a traumatic experience that’s left him a bit detached from reality.

Neither of these characters is particularly upset or bothered by their madness, and they’re probably the happiest characters in the book—for the most part. I think that’s why I enjoy writing them so much.

In your opinion, what kind of reader would like this book?

Readers who like dark adult epic fantasy but don’t need heavy spice are the audience for Starlight Jewel. If you want to read a killer FMC who’s no nonsense, a unique world with fleshed out characters and cultures, then you might be the audience.

Do you have a favorite quote from your book that you can share with us? What about this quote in particular makes it your favorite?

“How is it that people can see a smile and connect it with happiness, but not see the pain in the eyes above it? Nor hear what secrets reside in the carefully chosen lies that follow it?” ~ King Henry

This is one of those quotes that’ll mean something when you get there in the book. My heart broke a little for Henry when writing it. It forms the crux of his motivations in this book and throughout the series—loneliness. Henry is too smart, too perceptive, living in a sea of people who don’t understand what’s right in front of them, what’s plain to him.

Is there anything you can tell us about any current projects you’re working on?

I’ve been laboring away at writing Starlight Jewel’s sequel, Austringer’s Wrath. AW will feature the whole cast of characters from SJ, and a few more introduced. Most of the book takes place in Remorra, though a good chunk is still in Norge/Minalav and there’s a snippet here and there from Tarth and Ifer. There’s a giant drider-like creature, basilisks (or in the words of Steven William Hannah, cool lizard dogs in sunglasses), and agents of the Church of the Stars. This sequel is very much the “origins” story for all the GotA characters and has a lot of how-the-world-came-to-be-as-it-is plot points. If you come out of SJ with questions, AW has most of those answers.

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer a few questions for us! Do you have any parting thoughts or comments you’d like to leave for our readers?

I would like to say that all reviews, feedback, and book-related questions/comments are welcome and appreciated. The “no DMs” on my social media pages are for creepy dudes, solicitors, and people who want to “just chat.” I appreciate criticism in all its forms, no matter how it’s worded. Thank you to anyone who gives Starlight Jewel a chance!

And finally, where can you be found on the internet if our readers want to hear more from you?

https://linktr.ee/lyonspen

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Where to buy the book:

Amazon (Paperback, KU, Ebook): https://a.co/d/6cV7fpG

Barnes & Noble (Hardcover w/ dust jacket, US only): https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/starlight-jewel-el-lyons/1142255152