Author Interview: Elisa A. Bonnin

I’m sure Elisa A. Bonnin’s debut, out in 2022, is one that’s high on all of our radars (and, if it’s not, why not??). A Filipino-inspired fantasy, with a sapphic romance? The book of our dreams, I’m sure.

Since we, very sadly, can’t have this book right now (it’s out on 19th July 2022), but we do have Elisa here today to give us some crumbs to make us even more excited.

Let’s start at the beginning. How did you first get into writing?

I’ve always been interested in writing. I got into books at a very early age, and when I was younger, I remember ripping out blank pages from notebooks so that I could try to write my own story. I never got very far, though, barely ever writing more than one page. When I was eight years old, I finally managed to write a completed story, from start to finish. 

It was called The Little Princess, and it was a story about a fairy princess that had been cursed by a witch to get trapped in the human world. It was about ten or twenty pages long, made up of both text and drawings, and bound together with yarn and tape. It featured a talking baby monkey and a human girl that helped the fairy get home, and it made me decide that I wanted to be a writer. 

Since writing The Little Princess, becoming a published author became my dream. I spent a lot of my free time writing, from age eight up, and by the time I was twelve, I’d written my first novel-length story. I took every opportunity to write, and I was around sixteen or seventeen when I first started sending my work out to agents.With typical teenage confidence, I thought it would only be a couple of years until someone picked up one of my books, but I finally sold my first novel in 2020, a full twenty years after I first started writing. 

It’s been a long journey, and I hope that I get to share more books with you after Dauntless comes out.

What are your favourite genres to read and write, and are there any genres or tropes you wouldn’t write?

I love fantasy! Fantasy has been my first love, both to read and write, although I do try to branch out in my reading and read other genres. While I do read mostly fantasy and science-fiction, I will read just about anything if it comes highly recommended. And I’ll read just about any genre of SFF.

My writing has been a little narrower than my reading. I mostly write high fantasy set in original worlds. I think this is just where my imagination tends to go. But I have been branching out a little. I’ve started writing an urban fantasy, and I would love to write a story set in space one day. 

I don’t like saying that I’ll never write something because I’ve surprised myself so much over the years, but I think it’s probably fair to say that I’m not going to write anything purely mystery or purely romance anytime soon. And I’m fairly sure you’re not going to see me writing erotica, because I would be terrible at it.

How do you get inspiration for your books and what’s your writing process? At what point do you let other people read your drafts and who are they?

Inspiration comes from a lot of different sources. Sometimes, I have a topic or theme that I’d be interested in exploring, or a certain type of character that I want to write. I first had the idea for Dauntless this way. It started out as a book about Eshai. I wanted to write about exploration, and I wanted to write a book about a woman who becomes a famous hero. As I was planning it, though, I realized that it would be more interesting to have Eshai as a mentor character and focus on someone who wasn’t so established, which is how Seri became the protagonist instead. 

Sometimes, though, I get inspired by something I see around me, especially while travelling. I might hear a song I like and want to write something that matches that song. Or I might see an interesting plot point or character dynamic in a piece of media and think that I really want to write something like that. Sometimes I might be enjoying a book but also wanting something just a little bit different (“This would be really good if…”). 

I also spent most of my childhood writing and role-playing, so I have a lot of characters that I’ve already developed. I joke that these characters are waiting around in “the green room” for their turn in a story. Every once in a while I’ll go back to one of those characters and think about the type of story that would make them shine. Recent green room escapees include the four narrators of Kingfisher and Crow, and the protagonist of my latest work in progress. 

I don’t really write detailed outlines, because I prefer discovering the story for myself while I write. But in practice, I usually get about halfway through a draft before realizing that I need to start tying up loose ends and making a rough outline for the remaining half of the story. Because of this, my first drafts tend to be pretty messy, and I don’t let people read them until after I’ve done some editing on my own. Once I’m happy with it, I might send it out to critique partners or to sensitivity readers.

Which three authors would you say influenced your writing the most?

It’s really hard for me to pick just three. I think that my favorite authors shift by the day, and I’m influenced by so many things that it’s hard to keep track. But if I look at my writing journey, I think that there’s definitely two points that stand out. 

When I started writing, I thought that fantasy had to be white, straight, and European, because those were all the books that were available to me. At this time, one of the authors that I read a lot was Brandon Sanderson. I started listening to Writing Excuses, a podcast that he’s involved in, and reading his website which had a lot of information for how to write a cohesive magic system in fantasy. Since I love writing high fantasy, this really helped me broaden the scope of my worldbuilding and consider how to make my magic systems make sense. 

I still enjoy Sanderson’s books for their worldbuilding and epic plots, but I think my writing really opened up when I discovered N.K. Jemisin’s work. It seems obvious now, but it was when I was reading her Hundred Thousand Kingdoms that I realized that fantasy didn’t need to be all one thing, that I could put some of myself and my own culture into my fantasy. And that was when I started experimenting with Filipino-influences in my stories, and began exploring queer relationships between my characters. As someone with a doctorate degree in oceanography, her Broken Earth trilogy really makes me wonder if I can incorporate my science into my work somehow! Since reading 100K, I’ve made it a point to broaden my reading and read fantasy novels from all over the world, which has really helped my writing break out of the very narrow confines I had put it in. 

The third author is Erin Morgenstern, because I thoroughly loved both The Night Circus and The Starless Sea and desperately want to write something like that someday, where the fantasy is focused not so much on the plot but on a sense of wonder that makes people want to live in the world I describe. I haven’t figured out how to do this yet, but it’s always in the back of my mind!

So if you’re keeping track, my author bucket-list involves: 

• One atmospheric standalone novel like The Night Circus or The Starless Sea, centered around a magical location that I desperately wish existed in real life. 
• One standalone or series that somehow incorporates oceanography
• Several fantasy series exploring different magic systems and worlds, but also including LGBT+ relationships and other cultures, or: Sanderson but Filipino and/or queer. 

Basically, I just really want to write a lot of books, forever.

And for something that is also very important to us & what we put a lot of emphasis  on when blogging. What does ownvoices LGBT representation mean to you?

When I was a kid, for a lot of reasons, I didn’t have many friends. I was pretty miserable in elementary school, and turned to reading as an escape. I read a lot of fantasy novels, and I desperately wanted to be like the characters in my books. Brave, heroic, important. But I became frustrated because I realized that in a lot of the books I was reading, the protagonist wasn’t actually like me. They were, usually, white men and boys, not biracial Filipino girls. At the time, I still wasn’t fully aware of my own bisexuality. But I knew enough to know that I didn’t see myself in the books I was reading, and that frustrated me. 

I remember being a kid and hunting for scraps of representation in my books, something that I would continue to do until well past my teenage years. I remember absolutely devouring Tamora Pierce’s Protector of the Small series because it was about a girl who became a knight even when people told her that she couldn’t. A girl who became a hero. It got to the point where I decided that if my favorite authors and franchises wouldn’t write this for me, I would do it myself.

Ownvoices representation to me, gives readers the opportunity to see themselves in their books, written by authors who also share those experiences. It gives readers that extra assurance that there will be representation in this book, and it will be done by someone who understands what it means to be of that marginalization. That said, I do feel that there’s a very important conversation to be had these days about people who misuse LGBT ownvoices representation to force authors to come out before they’re ready, or to police the identities of bisexual and pansexual authors who might be in relationships that are perceived as heterosexual.  

As a bisexual woman in a relationship with a man, I already worry all the time that I’m not “LGBT enough” to write these stories. I worry that when I write stories that feature relationships that appear heterosexual, people are also going to say that my stories aren’t “LGBT enough”. But I’ve decided that these stories need to be told anyway, if only so that kids like me, who look at their books and don’t feel like they are “enough”, can see themselves as heroes.

What’s one piece of advice you would like to give your younger self?

Relax. All of those things that you worry about, all of those things that you’re working for, they will happen in their own time. Keep working, keep moving forward, but breathe and enjoy where you are right now. The things that you fear aren’t going to be as bad as you think they are, and the things that you dream of are going to be better than you can even imagine.

Summarise your most recent/next book in up to 5 words and a meme.

Dauntless: (Sapphic) Love at first contact

Kingfisher and Crow: Thieves + colonists = revolution!

If (when!) your books were to be made into movies, who would you like to direct them?

I don’t have a preference, since I’m horrible at remembering the names of directors and actors. It would depend on their past work. That said, since Dauntless is a Filipino story, I’d want it to be directed by a Filipino director, or at the very least, a director of Southeast Asian descent.

I would also love an animated adaptation of my books!

Which of your characters would you most want to fight a zombie apocalypse with?

From the cast of Dauntless: hands down, Eshai. Eshai would be the perfect person to have on my side in an apocalypse. She’s brave, strong, heroic, and she protects people, so I feel like I would be totally safe. 

From Kingfisher and Crow: Arian. She may be rough around the edges, but she’s loyal, and once she’s committed to something, she follows through. I’d be safe with her.

Is there a famous franchise or simply a movie/TV show you’d like to be able to write for?

I keep toying with the idea of writing for video games, especially RPGs. I really enjoy playing games and would love to write for one of them. Some of my favorite franchises are Final Fantasy, Persona, and Falcom’s Trails series, but since those are originally written in Japanese, I don’t think I’ll be able to write for one anytime soon. 

I also heard that the Avatar (The Last Airbender, not James Cameron) series is going to be expanded soon, and I would love to write for that.

Do you have any secret non canon ships in your books you wish people would write fics for?

I’ve done a lot of fanfic writing and shipping, so I’m interested to see what you all come up with! But I don’t have any specific non-canon ships in Dauntless. I do have a bisexual character in that book whose identity I never got to fully explore, and I would love to be able to do that in a sequel.

Rec us some great LGBT books you’ve read recently!

In Adult: The Unbroken by C. L. Clark! I loved this book! If you want a great LGBT book that also tackles colonialism and has a badass protagonist, you should read The Unbroken. (It also shares a name with Eshai Unbroken, so I’m a little bit biased). 

In YA: A Dark and Hollow Star by Ashley Shuttleworth. Fae and Greek mythology, politics and cool fight scenes! I’m a fan of fae stories and Greek myths, and this one definitely delivers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I’m an author, freelance writer, scientist, communicator, gamer and geek.

I grew up in the Philippines, and am very proud to be (almost exactly) half-Pinoy. As an author, I specialize in speculative fiction, particularly fantasy, for both adults and teens. I’ve been writing since the age of eight, and publishing my books has always been my dream, so I’m super-excited to announce that my first YA novel, Brave, is coming out in 2022! I’m still seeking representation, so if you know any literary agents that might be interested in my work, feel free to contact me.

As a scientist, I have a PhD in Oceanography from the University of Washington, and I’m a chemist by training (BS Chemistry, University of South Carolina). Right now, I work in a neurology department running a super cool instrument called a NanoSIMS, that can take images of the chemical composition of surfaces. I also do some freelance work making scientific discoveries accessible to a general audience, through Massive Science and Complexly, and I’m always looking for more writing opportunities.

Right now, I live in Germany, but I have a special place in my heart for the Pacific Northwest, where I spent six awesome years.

Follow on Goodreads | Preorder Dauntless