Monica Robinson joins the blog this week to discuss her novel, To Rule the Desert

Author Name: Monica Robinson

Book Title: To Rule the Desert

Book Genre: speculative fiction

Release Date: May 18th, 2023

Publisher: Independent

Welcome, Monica! How would you describe To Rule the Desert?

Alternately, two queer women kick ass in a gothic, haunted landscape. They meet a few specters, chaos ensues, and reality wavers.

What sparked the idea for this book?

I feel a little bit ridiculous admitting it, but some of it was actually sparked by Fallout New Vegas. That’s my go-to “I need to veg out” game, and a lot of that has nothing to do with the main plot, but the fact that I can run around in a semi-abandoned desert wasteland and loot abandoned buildings, some of which contain hints to past inhabitants. Exploring abandoned structures has always been a love of mine, from the time I could ride my bike out of my little rural Indiana neighborhood and down to the remnants of the closed high school, the empty house with all of its furnishings still in place, the boarded-up single floor apartment building. So in that way, the setting was established first, a landscape I selfishly wanted to traverse. I’m also working with a press I volunteer with, Sword & Kettle, doing a series of chapbooks that revolve around the idea of “personal mythologies”, and this story is very much a personal mythology in many ways, from the characters to the setting to the original inspiration itself, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. I wanted to queer a myth that I was already deeply familiar with, and in doing so, really dove into creating my own folklore.

How long did it take for you to write the book? Did you do any research?

I started writing to rule the desert in 2021, and it actually began as a short story, though I quickly realized I felt that there was much more to tell than what I’d initially put on the page. I spent a good year and a half rewriting and reworking and adding to that original story until I had it where I felt it was meant to be, and then it took me a good seven months or so to lay everything out, edit it, and get all of those details arranged so that it would be publication ready. Multiple people read it in that timespan as well, and honestly the cover design took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to settle on. But in total, I’d say it took about two years from start to finish!

I actually tried to stay away from doing too much research as I was writing, so that it wouldn’t influence the work in overly obvious ways, but during the editing process I did end up doing a lot of research. I reread a few different versions of the original myth just to make sure I was paying homage to all of the elements that most spoke to me, and then I also read a few contemporary works with similar settings, vibes, readership, etc. I also had to do a lot of fact-checking, for instance, a friend of mine with a background in ecology pointed out that that description of the snake I was using didn’t line up with the kind of snake I mentioned. Little details like that required some research, because I tend to just write to get everything down, which means there are often things I go back to correct or check on that I ignored in the initial writing because I didn’t want to interrupt the flow.

If you were speaking to someone who hasn’t read your writing before, why should they want to read To Rule the Desert?

I keep joking that the vibes are immaculate, but they really are! I’m a poet first and foremost, so the atmosphere, the language, the details, etc, are all very near and dear to my heart. You will be entirely immersed in this bizarre and often disjointed little world I’ve created, and I think the story is all the better for it — a total break from reality that has you questioning what reality really means to you. This is basically “a novella written by a poet”, and I mean that in the best way possible!

What do you hope readers will take away from this story?

At the risk of being a little too personal, I very nervously sent this to my mom far before publication was even in the picture, and hoped that it might ease some of the tensions we’ve had about my own personal life as a queer woman and really help her understand how deeply I feel about my own relationship. As it turns out, that’s exactly what happened; I think we had somewhat of a breakthrough. She told me that she had a really emotional journey while reading this, which is the best feedback I could’ve gotten. I think my biggest hope is that the core relationship that I’m portraying here, the nature of Ava and Quinn as queer women who are strong and capable, and are also very tenderly in love with one another, will normalize a relationship that in some ways very heavily mirrors my own. This isn’t, obviously, a self-insert fiction or anything to that effect, but I find that I don’t always see sapphic characters or relationships portrayed in a way that speaks to my own experiences, and I really wanted to do that here, to create a queer story that was both familiar and also not focused on the “otherness” of being queer that sometimes appears in more mainstream fiction. I hope that there are young queer women that read this and feel like they can send it to their parents, families, etc, to say “this is what my love looks like” and pave the way for deeper conversations.

On a far more broad note, I really love writing gothics, and I hope that this is a gothic tale that hits all of the right notes for its readers. I hope that people read this with the same visceral experience that I had while writing it, that they can really immerse themselves in this tale and duck out of reality for a few spare moments, because truly, that’s so much of what I look for in books as a reader and so much of what I would be ecstatic to achieve as a writer.

Any words of wisdom you give your pre-published writer self (or to a new writer)?

I think my biggest piece of advice, to both myself and to new writers, is to really just ignore the advice you get from most of the general population. When you’re a writer, an artist, etc, it seems like your profession suddenly becomes far more open to conversation and criticism; everyone has an opinion. And as a people-pleaser with a personality disorder (what a phrase, haha), I’m even more prone to getting caught up in a myriad of often well-meaning advice, that really just serves to confuse me. A lot of people write, and a lot of people approach that process differently — how many stories are we retelling over and over again that are simply different because the writer of each story is bringing their own unique style to the table? But just because someone writes doesn’t mean that their advice will necessarily pertain to you, and I think it’s very easy to get caught up in taking that advice when you’re just starting out, because you feel like everyone has the jump on you and you need to catch up. Don’t. Figure out early on who you do look up to, and then work on finding your own voice so that you can perfect it, rather than trying to draw from a thousand different inspirations first.

My second piece of advice is just this: If you’re lacking confidence about any of your decisions, just remember that somewhere, a mediocre white man is writing his first short story and submitting it to The New Yorker, sans editing. And if he can have that audacity, so can you.

Are you working on a new project? Please tell us about it.

I’m actually working on a couple! I published an art and poetry chapbook last year called peeling the yellow wallpaper, inspired by The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I’m currently in the process of working on a sister chapbook to that called knitting the red blanket, which is similarly inspired by the concept of the red string of fate. I also have a full-length poetry manuscript that I’ve written over the past three years that I’m currently editing and pitching to indie publishers, and I just started my first full-length novel, but I won’t go into too much detail about that yet!

Where can readers find you?

My website is mrobinsonwrites.com<http://mrobinsonwrites.com>, I write book reviews on Hive<https://hive.blog/@mrobinsonwrites>, and I’m on Instagram<https://www.instagram.com/corvus.et.liber/>, Tiktok<https://www.tiktok.com/@mrobinsonwrites>, and lemon8<https://www.lemon8-app.com/mrobinsonwrites?region=us>. I don’t currently have any events coming up, but I do most of them through The Spiral Bookcase,<https://spiralbookcase.com/pages/events> where I also work during the day! Interested readers can stalk the event page for anything coming up in the future. My books are also all sold through Spiral on a consignment basis, so you can find those here<https://spiralbookcase.com/search?q=monica+robinson>!

Thank you, Monica! To Rule the Desert is out now.

To Rule the Desert

Explore the classic tale of Orpheus and Eurydice as reimagined through a queer lens in a desert gothic landscape from poet and writer Monica Robinson, as she weaves a world of desert haze, fever dreams, and literary impossibility.

Author bio:

Monica Robinson is a queer experimental poet and artist, mixing mediums to create fresh works of exploratory literature. She is eternally haunted by the rural Midwestern landscape in which she grew up, and she has been writing her brand of the weird and the wild ever since.