Hello Subscribers! Thank you for signing up to my newsletter! I hope you all got your link to some extra writing of mine (let me know if you didn’t).

This is my first official newsletter. I will try to send one of these once per month. I’ll update you on how things are going, writing-wise, and also what I’ve been reading lately. If you want to know about something in particular, you can reply to this email. I’m assuming some of you are here because you read and liked my book Death & Maia, so in this post I’ve written a bit about how I came up with the ideas for it.

Please note that in the following post, I talk a little bit about the death of a parent, so if you’d rather not read that you can finish here <3

How I wrote Death & Maia

Three significant things happened last year (2024) that inspired this story in different ways. My dad passed away, and a couple of days later I turned 40, and not long after that I watched the TV series Agatha All Along.

In my mind, I don’t lump these three events together flippantly. They are all important. I was spiralling and very exhausted. Bone tired, literally. I wanted to bury myself in something fun and absorbing. More than that, I wanted the thing in which I buried myself to feel important in the context of my life. I thought about death in general, and I thought about Death personified, and I thought maybe I wanted to write again after a year or so of lying fallow. I wanted it to be different, too, and new. Not just re-writes, which I’d been doing for a pretty much decade. I think, maybe, I was sick of myself and my old voice.

For those unfamiliar with Agatha All Along, it’s a Marvel tie-in series that features (amongst other things) a romance between a Lady Grim Reaper and the titular character, who is a powerful witch. To be fair now, the romance is by no means the main plot, but nevertheless I was bitterly disappointed with the lack of backstory concerning this hot pairing. So disappointed, in fact, I decided to write some fan fiction, which I had never written before, but with everything churning in my brain, this seemed like a time for firsts, you know? The thematic idea that occurred to me was a comedic one, focused around the idea, not of death, but of near death. I had this darkly humorous scene in my head, where someone is lying on what they think is their deathbed, and this ethereal being appears before them… only the vision dissipates into this disappointingly ordinary looking person, some girl in cords and a woolly jumper, who says, “Relax, mate. I’m not Death. I’m just Near Death.” I’m not sure how long this idea percolated in my mind, maybe it was a few days, but ultimately it morphed into something much more compelling, at least to me. The concept changed from comedy to romance, and in my scrappy, recently-created Word doc I wrote the line:

Side note, apparently the song “I Can’t Make You Love Me” (Bonnie Raitt, covered by Adele and probably others) was originally meant to be comedic. One of the writers read an article about a guy in divorce court who, as part of his testimony, said, “You just can’t make a woman love you if she don’t.” Inspired by this tragicomedy, the song he started writing was jaunty and up-tempo, but then somewhere amidst the creative process and by collaborating with his partner, the song became a ballad, and the central idea lost its humorous edge, and the piano started weeping, and the song found its true form (recommended listening/viewing, if you don’t already know it).

The original working title for the story was “Near Death,” and it was built around this romantic idea: What would Death be like (as I would imagine her), and who would she fall in love with? Thanks to Agatha All Along, I knew Death had to be a beautiful lesbian. This was my essential starting point.

What would Death be like?

This is how I imagine Death: Calm. Used to dealing with human bullshit. Magisterially beautiful. Ancient. I think she would be very kind, but also neutral by necessity, because she is a being with consciousness and intelligence in what is essentially a public service role, and to keep going despite all the nonsense and horror, to remain effective, she has to care for everyone equally. Time folds, for her, and every layer of that is spent dealing with people. She can walk amongst us in disguise, live whole lifetimes, even. But no-one can really care for her or celebrate her in her true form, except at the moment of their death, so I think she would be very lonely.

Who would Death fall in love with?

Above all, Death would fall in love with someone worthy of her. Not an asshole. Probably not someone rich or trying to make a deal for themselves. I sense this is the prevailing impulse, right, in fiction. The grim reaper falls in love with someone magical, or powerful in their own right (or connected to someone powerful, like the daughter of some rich man) who is trying to bargain with Death, or outsmart them. For me, there’s more mileage in the idea of the most powerful being in the universe falling in love with a woman who is, on the face of it, extremely ordinary and humble. Her gifts would be human gifts; generosity and resilience. She would expect nothing from Death, and ask for very little. She would be funny and perceptive, and revel in Death’s attention, as Death would revel in hers.

Maia and the world

Maia is who Death falls in love with and is the hero and central consciousness of the story. It only ever occurred for me to write from her perspective, since I thought (when I started writing) that it would be a short story, maybe 10000 words at most. As I figured out who Maia was, though, the footprint of the story grew because her character and the setting cross-pollinated each other.

Here’s some world-building in bullet points, not necessarily presented in the order in which things occurred in my brain:

• Death and Maia meet at the point of Maia’s death.
• Maia knows immediately who Death is and doesn’t question her identity or her presence…
• …so setting (time/place) needs to be conducive to this.
• Death offers Maia a favour (standard practice).
• Maia is gay AF, so asks for a kiss.
• On receiving Death’s favour, Maia fails to die, which makes her unique in the history of the universe.
• After the initial encounter, Maia needs to have multiple additional (accidental) run-ins with Death.
• Therefore, the setting needs to be reasonably death-stricken, e.g. war or epidemic…
• …or both. Hence: The Plague of Athens, 430 BC.
• Satisfies the need for Maia to easily accept Death’s identity and power because as part of the Greek world, she would be apt to believe in multiple gods and their various aspects.
• [research on the Plague of Athens and context thereof takes place]
• Agatha All Along inspo: Death as the “Ultimate Green Witch”
• Death is growth, and she has deep powers of creation.
• Wrote a line, eventually given to the character Thucydides: “… for she [Death] is the lone master of time and distance and the earth and the cosmos.”
• [research on Athenian society takes place. OMFG, how they hated women!]
• Maia is an independent sex worker, a freed slave, which means she is lowly in society but with a kind of freedom that richer and more respectable women did not have; namely, she is not confined to a man’s house, is free to move in public and transact business in her own right (below certain amounts).
• …but she is in a position to bear the brunt of poverty and violence, and the effects of a war (with Sparta) and a plague (which experts speculate may have been typhoid fever).
• So the story is now grounded in a real historical context, which means I have the urge to make everything kind of realistic, even the magic.
• The good news is that little is known about the lives of women at that time and in that society, so within certain parameters, I’m relatively free to make things up.
• Deep cosmological background (that never made it into the actual story): In my imaginary version of the world, there are three divine beings. These are Chaos, Death and Justice. The gods of Greek mythology are just various aspects of these beings. Athena in her strength, Gaia in her benevolence, Aphrodite in her beauty and Hekate in her power are all just Death in various disguises.
• I wrote a bunch of sex scenes first, and then spent three months putting words in between. LOL.
• In my mind, Death would be a mixture of arrogance and shyness. Maia would be a mixture of breathlessness and confidence.
• Ianthe started out as a bit part, but grew into probably my favourite character. The “bit” she was given initially, a scene where Maia is talking to her friend by the fountain, I ended up giving to Hedistē (another friend), who also burgeoned way beyond the limits of how I conceived her.
• The thing I like most about the story, besides the romance, is Maia’s awesome friends and her devotion to them.

This list is incomplete because I have forgotten things, and also I want to avoid too many spoilers. What I thought would be a short story became a novella, and honestly the best thing I have ever written, thus far. I felt that while I was working on it, you know. It was exhilarating. If you’ve read it, I hope you liked it too and that this information was interesting.

Thank you for so much for reading this!