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Today I had an amazing interview with Jonathan Fuller and Kristina Kelly, authors of Trials of the Innermost, a captivating fantasy adventure that will transport you to a world of magic, danger, and self-discovery.
Though she also lived in sunny Florida for a time, Kristina is an Indiana native and lives with her husband, two children, and a black lab named Poe. She loves to spend time in nature and writing nature into her tales (look for the influence of hummingbirds in a Trials of the Innermost creature). Every day is full of new adventures with her family, and she writes whenever and wherever she can. Her day job as Business Analyst at a financial firm involves technical writing.
Jonathan also hails from the crossroads of America but now resides in Austin. He takes full advantage of living in the live music capital of the world and attends concerts and festivals year-round. When he’s not writing or at a show, he’s likely playing flag football in the local LGBTQIA+ league. Jonathan also travels frequently for his work in higher education.
Trials of the Innermost is a debut novel for both Jonathan and Kristina. It releases May 26, 2023 from Hansen House Books.
What is Trials of the Innermost about?
In a world that stopped spinning, six young people embark on a quest to preserve peace between their homelands and fulfill a prophecy that says they will save their world from being devoured. Fans of the blending of sci-fi and fantasy in the vein of Horizon Zero Dawn and The Hunger Games will enjoy Trials of the Innermost.
We both have loved stories and storytelling since childhood. Specifically for TOTI, we were inspired by the SFF shows, movies, and video games we play. And we wanted to blend the elements of sci-fi and fantasy that we love into one.
How did you guys meet each other, and decide to become authors together?
We met at our day jobs, actually. Kristina had some sci-fi and fantasy memorabilia on her desk which Jonathan recognized, and we got to talking. We quickly learned we both liked Star Wars and had read (what was at the time) the Expanded Universe books, that we played video games (we love story-driven games like Final Fantasy), and discovered we were writers.
One of our first friend hangouts was sharing sci-fi poetry. Somewhere between sharing our writing and talking about our backlog of ideas we came up with the idea of proposing an open world video game in the vein of Skyrim. As we worked through the worldbuilding, we quickly discovered we wanted to write the story as a novel series instead.
At first, it was just a project of fun but soon we asked ourselves if we wanted to make this a book for everyone to read and the answer was a resounding yes. We love everything SFF: movies, shows, video games, books. And anytime one of us finds something new, we share it.
Our latest mutual adventure was reading The Starless Sea, and Kristina is about to catch up on the new Dragon Age show so Jonathan can talk to her without spoiling anything.
Describe a typical writing day.
We don’t live together but we are best friends! For a time, Jonathan did live in the same apartment complex which made writing sessions incredibly easy.
In our early endeavors of planning the Etherea Cycle, we would meet at our local library and coffee/tea shops, taking a short walk along the nature trails when the weather was nice. Often this was the same day of the week every week. This is where we did the worldbuilding, character development, and major plotting.
Even when we lived in the same area, we utilized document sharing tools like DropBox that we could access anytime from anywhere. We’d work on creating parts on our own and then discuss together. Character bio sheets, inspirational images, and the equivalent of wiki entries of everything from religions to flora and fauna filled our joint folder.
We took an approach of dividing the work and ended up where Kristina mainly wrote from Idrilia, Kilahym, and Vayriel’s perspectives while Jonathan wrote from Kalis, Zinvar, and Kharnek’s perspectives. We’d write in the other perspectives at times but dividing it like this allowed us to write chapters simultaneously instead of having to wait until the other person finished.
These days we live in different states but with technology we are able to write nearly as seamlessly, especially since we built a foundation of sharing those documents digitally already. Instead of in person café visits, we sip our caffeinated beverages over Skype and Zoom.
We’ll leave comments in our Word docs for each other for little things we don’t need to have dialog on, and then we’ll meet as needed to discuss more complex topics. Kristina often writes on breaks at her day job and at night or when her kids are sleeping.
We’ve worked together for almost ten years now so we feel pretty comfortable working on our own tasks throughout the week between our meeting times. And we text or send video messages through Marco Polo a lot.
What do you like to do when you’re not writing?
Kristina is a mom of two and loves spending time with them at the library, museums, and parks. When she’s not working (as mom, BA, or writer) she gardens in her flower garden, takes nature photography, reads/watches SFF and plays videos games.
She’s currently (and finally) working her way through playing Mass Effect. She also plays trumpet and dabbles in other instruments like ocarina and dulcimer (just like Kilahym in TOTI).
Jonathan devotes much of his non-writing time to his friends, flag football, music, and gaming. Currently, he’s catching up on Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order before its sequel releases. He also recently started a book club with a group of friends and finished the first selection: Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid.
What was the most challenging thing about writing this book?
The editing phase. We went through two quite substantial structural edits to get our book to where it is now, and those were a crucible for us as writers. The silver lining from those dramatic changes is that we learned a lot and strengthened the finished product on a number of levels.
Which part of the book is your favorite?
Kristina: There’s this really powerful scene that’s both a battle and a heart wrencher – I can’t say more without major spoilers but I love the weight of that scene. Otherwise, it’s all the times that our characters show their true selves, where they aren’t afraid to challenge what others want them to do and instead choose to do what they feel is right. And the times our characters grow – those light-bulb moments where a character realizes maybe their energy could be used to make the world better.
How do you develop your plot and characters?
As we touched on in a earlier, we collaborated on the foundation of our world together. We built what we wanted the planet to look like (one that had stopped turning) and built from there. We then divided the creation between us based on what we were most interested in or had the most ideas spinning around for.
Kristina created some of the realms and characters and Jonathan created the others. We’d come back together to fine tune any of the items and make sure that we each agreed on the direction the other had taken. In the end, it was a blending of our ideas.
As we continued to write, we settled into a familiarity with certain characters and tended to write those character POVs. For example, there would be times where Kristina might leave a placeholder that would say “Jonathan, add some Kharnek dialog here” because she felt Jonathan wrote the best from Kharnek’s perspective. Or Jonathan would leave a note for Kristina to paint a visual picture of a city gate. Between us, we draw on each other’s strengths and the result is art that’s better than one of us could create on our own.
What do you think makes a good story?
Originality is a big component of making a good story. There are so many fledgling authors trying to spread their wings that it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Uniqueness, whether that’s from a magic system, the point of view, or some other facet makes good stories stand out.
A good story is also well-researched. If a book is set in a particular era or place, it should feel authentic and like the author knows that setting inside and out. And really good stories have messages that leave readers with something to ponder long after they finished reading.
How do you do research for your books?
Because Trials of the Innermost takes place on the fictional planet of Etherea, a world that stopped spinning, we dove into resources at the library and online including science blogs and NASA articles about topics like gravity, atmosphere, tides, and other things and how those would be impacted with a tidally locked planet.
When we create new creatures and plants, we use Earth life for inspiration. Kristina spent a lot of time listening to owl and hawk sounds in an online repository to decide how the othwit Wen (Idrilia’s animal companion) sounded.
Tell us more about the publishing process behind the book. Have you reached out to anyone?
We actually made an infographic about this!
We found our publisher, Hansen House, through Twitter. Hansen House specializes in publishing LGBTQ+ authors and LGBTQ+ stories, so it was a perfect home for Trials of the Innermost.
Indie publishing houses offer some of the same perks as larger publishing houses, as well as some differences (as in our case) such as author input on the cover design. Cover design, editing, formatting, advanced reader copies – all of that is handled by our publisher.
We’ve appeared on two podcasts so far, one which was in the form of a gameshow!
Our cover reveal was hosted by the blog Armed With a Book.
We are reaching out to online magazines and blogs as well as podcasts and local businesses to find other ways to talk about our book and how we coauthor.
Kristina and Jonathan are excited to be hosting her first signing for TOTI’s release at the first ever independent women’s history lending-library in America, Gal’s Guide Library.
What are some tools you used to write this book from start to end?
DropBox – file sharing where we uploaded everything from inspirational images to character bio documents and of course the full manuscript. The files could be grabbed and worked on from anywhere and just about any device Word – this was our document processer for writing the chapters and ultimately the manuscript, including tracking edits for the editing phase.
GoogleDocs – we used this to edit with our publisher’s editing team iPhone – Kristina uses her phone a lot to do everything. Everything from marketing on all of our social medias to even writing chapters.
Dictation within the Word for iPhone app has helped her be able to write chapters or write down ideas on the go with two children laptops – Jonathan uses a Mac and Kristina a Windows device.
The library! – We checked out a lot of books during our initial planning days, from titles about making our writing better to research on desert animals. And of course, scifi and fantasy books – have to keep reading within our genre, too! Later, we checked out books on publishing and querying agents.
TextSTAT– A desktop program Kristina used for its word frequency/density analysis and concordance, with easy output to Excel. She found words we used far too much and words we only used once. This was a big help in the editing phase.
What authors inspired you into becoming an author yourself, if any?
Jonathan: C.S. Lewis immediately springs to mind. The Chronicles of Narnia were a staple of my childhood reading. That series provided a springboard into Tolkien’s writing, which deepened my desire to build my own worlds. But it was reading R.A. Salvatore’s Legend of Drizzt series that really got me thinking: I want to do this, and I can do this.
Kristina: Is it boring to say, same? Honestly, though, these are the same influences! But also add in that I think it was Anne McCaffrey, specifically the Acorna series, that told me we (Jonathan and Kristina) can do this. The Acorna series is science fantasy (unicorn girl in space) and cowritten. Just like TOTI!
What are your future plans and where can our readers find you?
We both have solo projects we are working on, but we certainly plan to keep collaborating. The Etherea Cycle has at least two more books (Arthur C. Clarke said no trilogy has more than four books, so we won’t rule out the possibility).
We recently wrote a short story together that we hope to have published in an anthology, and we are working on another short story set in the world of Etherea. Jonathan is working on his own fantasy novel and Kristina just finished writing a fantasy novella.
To stay in touch with Jonathan and Kristina, be sure to follow them on their social media as well as their website! Furthermore, be sure to subscribe to Wrote a Book newsletter for future updates about their writing journey!
I hope you enjoyed this interview with Jonathan and Kristina. Happy reading! ❤️