My Heart is The Tempest Q&A Session 5

Details from my book My Heart is The Tempest

Would you define your book as a typical fantasy or as something else?

I’m not usually concerned much with genre when I write. I just try to stay true to my characters and their story. In my view, My Heart is The Tempest is a combination of different elements, ranging from horror, fantasy, dark, poetry and literary fiction. Choosing Sycorax as the main character of my story, with her absent figure haunting Shakespeare’s play constantly beating in my head, I knew the world I was creating would in a way be a reversal of what a typical fantasy-based trope would involve, that is the fight between light and darkness, with light always winning in the end. Besides, being influenced by Daoist theories on opposites as transitional phases, oscillations of energy turning into one another, I mainly wanted to create something where both light and darkness could be perceived as multilayered, thus going beyond simplistic categorizations. That is why Sycorax longs for darkness but also for the heat of the sun to unleash her full potential, and also why such creatures of bright as Rakō and Tliyel harbor destructive, potentially dark thoughts.