My guest today is Mia V. Moss, a science fiction and fantasy author, gardener, and runner from the Pacific Northwest. They are the creator of The Breakfast Serial, a monthly food & recipe blog written from the perspective of a human newly settled on the planet Ocasta, and the Radio Stardust Mixtapes, a monthly hour-long DJ set that they share with their newsletter subscribers. You can subscribe to one or both for free at https://stardustnews.magicrobotcarnival.com/.

Mia is publishing a fantasy series with Dark Matter Ink and it’s a pleasure to have them featured here!

Tell me more about The Heresy of Thieves and what made you write it.
The Heresy of Thieves is about a world where everyone is so certain of their place in it, and so settled in their knowledge of how the universe should work for them, and what happens when that certainty is stripped away. The characters all have to face the lies others have told them and the lies they've told about themselves, sometimes to themselves. A lot of daily life in the real world is built on all these layers of pageantry. Who 'deserves' to be wealthy, who has 'earned' a high position of power, who has the 'correct' birthright. What would happen if the truth of how these things came to be was suddenly there for everyone to perceive? Who would accept that bare truth, and who would insist that reality was a lie?

I began writing The Heresy of Thieves when I was about 19, over two decades ago! It started out focused on the city of Silver Bastion and Thealys Vorrine, and then quickly expanded to a whole world of characters. I kept putting the draft aside—putting writing in general aside—on the strong advice of my elders that I 'focus on a real career.'

But every time I stopped writing, I'd feel miserable. And whenever I picked my manuscript back up again, I felt so joyful. So I worked on it off and on for many years, until around 2018 when I decided I was going to finish it once and for all. When I finished this book, I felt so overjoyed at the journey to finally reach 'The End' that I had a little cry.

You're going to publish a series with Dark Matter. That is amazing! Tell me about The Spellfall Series and what we should expect in the future.
Spoiler: Book 1 does end in a to be continued! The story I wanted to tell with The Heresy of Thieves was much too big to fit into one book, so it's been split into the Spellfall trilogy. In the next books, we'll see a whole lot of consequences for the actions of the characters in book 1! And there will be more truths revealed. What actually happened to Lloryn is a big focus of book 2. The Heresy of Thieves takes place entirely in the lands of Yvaelen (aka the Witchlands), which is somewhat disconnected from the rest of the world due to its remote distance across a rather unpredictable sea. In book 2, that disconnect is taken away a little bit, and the gods of the broader world of Illia have a larger role to play.

What is a piece of fiction that you think didn’t get enough attention?
The Starmetal Symphony series by Alex White! Book one is called August Kitko and the Mechas From Space and it's about a jazz pianist that pilots a rebel mech to save Earth. Book two is called Ardent Violet and the Infinite Eye and it's just as incredible as book 1. If you like flashy glam scifi, pick up this series!

Which are some inspirations for The Heresy of Thieves and for you as a writer in general?
People, and all of the weird, dumb, wonderful, selfish, heartbreaking, inspiring, loving choices we make every second of every day. For The Heresy of Thieves specifically, it started out as me wanting to put a fantasy city I'd made for myself onto the page. Silver Bastion is a special place for me, and unfortunately a lot of the more city-focused chapters had to get cut in service to an actually coherent narrative as the story grew to much more epic proportions. But Silver Bastion is at the heart of the seed the story grew from, and I have many stories to tell about it yet.

The story that HoT evolved into is largely driven by my desire to explore how world-changing decisions are so often made for the smallest, pettiest reasons. And at any point, other humans could step in and say 'actually, let's maybe not go to war because you're irritated today,' and take the send-a-bunch-of-people-to-their-deaths button away, but usually that doesn't happen.

It's also about who gets to decide who they are and how they express themselves, vs. who gets told 'you have to be this way, for the comfort and good of everyone else around you.' Who gets to decide what reality is for everyone else.

I'd also love to know about your undersea SF novella, Mai Tais for the Lost. Tell me more about it!
Thank you! Mai Tais for the Lost takes place in a near-ish future Earth where climate change and corporate neglect have made the surface of the world extremely unstable and dangerous to inhabit. As one solution, a bunch of libertarian tech bros and their DJs built glamorous undersea cities called habitats, each one named after the yacht the sponsoring billionaire sunk to ritualistically claim that section of the seas.

Mai Tais follows Marrow Nightingale, the nepo baby adopted daughter of a very wealthy, powerful family in the Electric Blue Moon habitat just off the coast of former Los Angeles, California. Marrow works as the only licensed private detective on Electric Blue Moon (a license type her parents essentially bought for her from the hab governance council) and generally makes her money catching people cheating on each other or embezzling from their employers.

This all changes when Marrow's own brother, Rocket Nightingale, is found dead in his home. Marrow suddenly has to figure out how to be a real private detective in order to find out who killed Rocket and why.