Fantasy author Rebecca Thorne opens up about her new book, her wife – and giant magical smut trees

When it comes to queer cosy fantasy books, Rebecca Thorne delivers. Her series Tomes and Tea has captured imaginations all around the world, delivering low-stakes fun in a queer-normative world that features great representation.

We spoke to her to find out more about her latest book in the series, Tea You At The Altar, and where she sees LGBTQ+ literature going in the future. 

It’s fair to say that Tomes and Tea is the cosiest of fantasies. What was it that drew you to cosy fantasy specifically as a genre?

Rebecca Thorne: I self-published Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea in 2022, which was before the cozy fantasy trend really took off. Travis Baldree put out Legends and Lattes self-published in February of that year, then by March, Tor [Publishing] had gotten involved and wanted to buy it, I found the book right before [the self-published version] was pulled off the shelves in a Barnes & Noble. I found this self-published book on their shelf and was like, “Wait a minute. Somebody lied to me somewhere.”

So that was really kind of like this moment where I was like, “wait. The thing that I’ve been doing is not really working.”  So, I left my literary agent at the time and I decided to self-publish a book and the natural thing for me to try was a cozy fantasy because I looked at how fast Tor bought Legends and Lattes and I was just like, if I get in there, I might be the Divergent to his Hunger Games, if I’m one of the first people out the gate, I might be able to grab some [attention].

I wrote the book over the summer, self-published it in September and lucky me, I actually really like the cosy fantasy genre. I wanted to try it because I felt like it was something new and fresh that was adjacent to what I was already doing. And now that I’ve done it, I’m like that’s kind of where my writing, I think, has always been leaning towards. So it was a very natural shift for me.

Now that you’ve had your series traditionally published, what’s it been like to see it being enjoyed by a wider audience than it might have been with indie publishing?

Rebecca Thorne: I’ve been doing this since I was 22 years old, so I’ve been in the industry for a really long time. I amassed 300 rejections from agents. I got an agent. Three of my other books died on submission. One of them sold to that small press for barely any money. I did the rat race and I was like, this is not for me. And then the minute I left it and was like, f**k this noise. I’m going to go do my own thing and I might as well at least keep creative control. 

And then it was just like this book came out the gate and I just don’t think that I realised how big of a response it would garner. It was a really kind of wild road.

This is where it’s hard for me to talk about this experience because a lot of people see what’s happening to me now and they’re just like, “my gosh, it’s like the magic lightning strike,” and they’re right. I wish that they’d seen the eight years before that point though, I wish that they’d seen all of the rejection. 

So, what’s been happening to me has been lovely. I have no complaints. It’s one of those things where I wake up and I kind of pinch myself every morning. I didn’t really expect it, after five years or eight years of being beaten down, I was like, “it’s just not going to happen for me. I might as well see what else I can grab.” Then it just all happened in a big way. And I’m glad it happened that way because I feel like I was able to actually make smart business decisions along the way that helped me basically take advantage of that lightning strike.

You said that cosy fantasy is reasonably new, but I’m finding that specifically queer cosy fantasy is becoming really popular. Why do you think that more LGBTQ+ readers and authors are gravitating towards this genre?

Rebecca Thorne: I can wax poetic for days about Travis Baldree and about how he opened up that space for queer people. I’ve listened to interviews that he’s done where he has talked about his choice for doing a queer couple in Legends and Lattes and how it was a very conscious decision from him because he knew that he was a white man married to a woman, and he was kind of like, I have the ability to take up the space that I’ve always taken up or I have the ability to open up the eyes of the people who would be reading my normal thing and introduce them to something new in a very healthy, productive manner. 

That was just very interesting to me because I do feel like because Legends and Lattes, the template of the genre was queer, it basically allowed people like me to come in and be like, wait a minute, I can write a queer and it’s going to be just as popular because the original audience for Legends and Lattes is the audience that picked up my book. And if they were okay with that and they’re looking for more, it’s already kind of passed the test. 

And I was very nervous when I picked up that book but it was just the most delightful representation on page. They were just their own characters. It wasn’t that they were queer. It’s just that they just happened to be queer. They were just doing their own thing as women. And I feel like that’s all I try to embody in my books, too. 

These [characters], they’re just two people who are in love and are doing their own things with their own personalities. It’s not like making a statement about queer people. My marketing does, but the word lesbian is never used in my books because I don’t want to live in a world where the word lesbian is needed. I want to live in a world where queer couples are so generally accepted that it literally doesn’t even need a label at all, And that’s just pretty typical in all of the books that I write. 

How important was it to you to showcase queer joy?

Rebecca Thorne: It was definitely something that I was aiming for. I wouldn’t say that I started with the desire to showcase queer joy. I knew I wanted to identify an established relationship because I feel like I never got to see that and I also feel I was a late bloomer in my queer journey. Now I’m married to a woman, but I didn’t even know I was gay until I was 28, and then a lot of things started clicking and making a lot of sense for me

I wanted to show two women in an established relationship and I wanted to show them having fun. I kind of just wanted to show normal people being normal. They’re best friends, they’re getting engaged and they’re very excited to be around each other all the time. They can’t not think about each other all the time, what does that look like in fiction?

So it was less important for me to showcase joy and more important to show the nuance of how these relationships can come around to show that there is joy and there is sadness and there’s, happiness and there’s misery and it just kind of balances everybody out in these different types of relationships that I try to showcase in these stories.

I love the relationship between Kianthe and Reyna. I just think it’s so sweet and it is so real and it does get better and better as the stories go on. Was there anyone that was like your inspiration for them as a couple?

Rebecca Thorne: My wife. 

We weren’t dating at the time. We met on a fanfiction writing [site] writing She-Ra fanfiction and we were beta readers for each other. We both slid into each other’s comments and then finally connected on Tumblr and then we moved to Discord and just chatted all day every day for literally years over the pandemic. The pandemic just kind of drove us together. She was very Christian, conservative, not gay. And I met her in person the first time and was like, “that girl’s a lesbian.” 

So yeah, we weren’t dating when I started writing this series, but I was in a really low place in my life. I was living with my parents that summer that I wrote Treason. I found Legends and Lattes one week after I got back into town with my parents and it just felt everything kind of happens for a reason, I would not have been in that bookstore looking for that book if all this other stuff hadn’t happened.

So Kianthe is very ADHD coded, but how much of your own experience with ADHD did you put into her as a character?

Rebecca Thorne: So much I have to laugh because everybody always asks us between my wife and I which one of us is Kianthe and which one of us is Reyna and the answer is we both have qualities of both. 

So my wife is the inattentive ADHD. I’m the complex ADHD, so I have moments of inattentiveness and moments of hyperactivity and you never really know what you’re going to get day-to-day. I channeled that chaotic energy into Kianthe. So that part is definitely me and then my wife is very calm. She’s very easygoing. Nothing really phases her. That’s Reyna. She’s also a black belt in Taekwondo, so she’s actually a badass too.

I feel like I’m more like a planner and she’s more spontaneous, she doesn’t really think ahead. I plan out five years in the future, that’s more Reyna. I’m the plant person. She is the pun person, so she pulls the puns out. I take care of the plants. So, I think I took qualities of both of us and then kind of meshed them into these characters to see what they were going to be. They took a very beautiful form, which was great.

I really love how you show different relationships and different gender identities throughout Tomes and Tea. Just how important was that level of representation to you when you were writing?

Rebecca Thorne: So important. I’ve been very ingrained in including diversity in your writing spaces for a very long time. This book was kind of my moment to be like, I am now in the queer community, I was not before and I am very thrilled to be able to show people what I wish I’d seen when I was 15.I wish that I’d seen books where it was so casually treated because it might have helped me figure some things out when I was younger.

When it comes to the pronoun use and everything, it’s like I have so many friends that are non-binary and they do choose their own pronouns and it is a bit of a transition for that type of thing for people who are not used to using those pronouns. So even when I was writing [Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea], it was the first book that I ever wrote a non-binary character in with they/them pronouns. It took me a lot of editing and I know we missed one pronoun still. I’m pissed because we still missed one. Over time I’ve been able to learn how much easier it gets to incorporate [different pronouns] into daily speech when you are doing it intentionally. 

I feel like that representation was pretty important to me. Dreggs is a non-binary character in book two and is beginning to transition in book three. The next quartet that I have planned is going to be set in the southern seas where a young pirate is going to try and overthrow Dreggs’ empire. And Dreggs in that the next quartet is going to be she/her. I’m thrilled about it. I can’t wait.

Dreggs fast became my favorite character. Who was your inspiration for them?

Rebecca Thorne: I kind of think that Dreggs was a conglomeration of a lot of different ideas. I imagined this cutthroat pirate captain that rules with a ruthless fist, but because you have to scale that down, they can’t be a murderous captain, because it’s not very cosy. 

I do think that Dreggs was quite the murderer. I absolutely do think that Dreggs did what they needed to do to regain control of whatever bloody violent seas. They are the authority now. No one really challenges them and they basically restored order in an area that didn’t really have order before. But also I wanted more of the Jack Sparrow vibes, the competent, capable, but less, like, drunk.So I wanted them to be someone that when they came in the room, every other character will stop and stare. I wanted to infuse that type of personality in them.

Who do you just absolutely love out of the characters you’ve created for this series?

Rebecca Thorne: Feo is my favorite. They’re so arrogant and conceited and self-centered. but then they have that kind of side to them where they’re just “Don’t show anyone you care.”  I just love that personality trait to character. I feel like you can always count on them. And I love the sibling relationship [they have with] Kianthe just because they knew each other from behind before. Feo is just over-exasperated with Kianthe all the time. I just feel like that relationship really kind of snuck up on me, and Feo I just loved from the beginning.

I feel like Feo is so unique and interesting and I love the idea that they could go anywhere and they could literally do anything and they just are choosing to be in Tawnee. Feo is one of those characters that is like everything that they want to do they can do. And I can’t wait to watch it just spectacularly combust when they finally hit something that they can’t do. I feel like they’ve had so many successes in the first quartet. I can’t wait to dive into some failures in the second.

Tea You At The Altar is out in March. What three words would you use to describe this book?

Rebecca Thorne: Chaos, subterfuge and love. I tried to embody the chaos – I mean we just did wedding planning… [and it] was just chaos enough for us. And I wanted to channel all of that energy into [Tea You At The] Altar. 

You’ve mentioned Alchemy And a Cup Of Tea being the last book of this particular series. So what can we expect from it?

Rebecca Thorne: It’s my favorite book in the whole series. There’s a new creature character that comes in that you guys are going to absolutely adore. Kianthe and Reyna go to the Magicary and I love the scenes in the magicary.

There’s a library in there where every section is a tree, and so shelves are carved into the trees. There’s a romance tree in the very back that’s really big and everybody wants to be at that tree all the time because there’s just all this smut. It’s just one of those places where I just got to infuse magic and whimsy into every corner of that space and it didn’t matter if it made sense because it’s the Magicary, they’re just doing all kinds of stuff. 

What advice would you give to people that are wanting to write and share LGBTQ+ stories right now?

Rebecca Thorne: We need it now more than ever. I will say the publishers in New York will always fight book bans because they are out there to make money; it’s the capitalist nature of them. They will not allow books to be banned because that means that they’re not selling books and those are often some of their best sellers, the ones that would be banned.  

They have already started collecting to sue and fight. It makes sense and it’s one of the few areas where capitalism kind of works for us as queer people because they like to grab these queer stories because they make money off of them because people want them. So, as long as people keep buying them, [publishers will] keep buying them and they’ll keep fighting to keep them on shelves, which makes me actually very proud to be in this industry, if I’m being honest.

I think that right now when it comes to people writing queer stories, we need them more than ever. And it’s going to be a hard road.

What are you reading right now?

Rebecca Thorne: I’m reading Yellowface right now. I’m reading [The Invisible Life of] Addie LaRue. I also just started reading The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World. It’s a queer fantasy about a lighthouse at the edge of Chicago that heralds people over the lake into the afterlife. And they’re guided by dogs. The dogs are the best part of this. They’re like these ghost dogs that go out and find people who died, and then basically herd them back into this area, where they could go into a different world, right into the afterlife. 

It’s by by J.R. Dawson, and it is queer, which is lovely. It’s coming out in July. Highly recommend. I’m truly enjoying it.

Tea You At The Altar is available from 4 March in the US and 20 March in the UK.