Myth, the Universe, and Everything

Back in 2023, A Market of Dreams and Destiny welcomed readers into an alternate 19th-century London, where an indentured human in the goblin market manages to turn the world on its head, aiming for a brighter and better world for those who most deserve it. Shortlisted for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, this novel is Trip Galey’s stellar debut—but Trip is also a game designer (Faerie’s Bargain from Choice of Games) and an editor (I Want that Twink Obliterated! from Bona Books).

Now, Trip’s latest project, The Fall of the House of Valenziaga, is about to hit Kickstarter. I got a chance to chat with him about this new project, what he loves about SFF, and why he loves writing queer fiction (with queer creatives at all steps of the process!).

Alana: Badly describe your new novel in one sentence (then tell us what it's really about!).

Trip: A young man learns that if you want to tear down a house, you’re better off wearing a dress while doing it.

So, The Fall of the House of Valenziaga is about a guy called Virtus. He’s the heir to a Legendary House (similar to a noble house—but GAY) and his mother is… toxic, to put it mildly. Of course, the thing is, when you grow up with toxic parents you don’t always realise they’re toxic. You often don’t know any better or have another childhood to compare yours to, really. So the book is Virtus realising how terrible his mother is and then setting out to free himself—and the rest of the city—from her tyrannical dominance. Even if it means tearing down his own Legendary House to do it.

And it’s queer science fantasy, so envision a city beyond the edge of space and time that is made up of fragments of a thousand thousand lost and/or destroyed worlds, riddled with strange science and weird sorcery, and populated by unknowable beings that are all too human and humans that are occasionally unspeakably monstrous.

Plus QUEER. Metaphorically, literally, from a worldbuilding perspective, in terms of references and Easter eggs… in as many senses of the word as I could fit in.

Sometimes, more is more.

Alana: You've written about faeries and edited pulp fiction across all the speculative genres. Your newest title is science fantasy. Which genre is secretly your favorite (and why do you love all of them)?

Trip: Faeries, lol. It will always be faeries. There is something so primal about fairy tales, and I’ve always loved them and found them incredibly appealing. This was possibly helped a great deal by my not really fitting in with my family? My parents literally used to tell me to my face that they thought I might have been switched at birth. They meant hospital error, of course, but you can see why I’d identify so strongly with changelings at that point.

But I do quite honestly love all genres of fantasy and most of science fiction. I grew up in a very rural area. My family didn’t have television until I was sixteen16 and the internet came along even later. Books were my primary entertainment and escape and I was addicted. Also, I lived a three hour drive from the nearest bookstore, and this was before the Evil ’Zon arose. There simply were not enough titles out there to only love urban fantasy or only read epic or heroic fantasy. So I read them all!

I will always have a very soft spot for those books that show me something new, as well. Part of the appeal of genre fiction is seeing outside out everyday, lived experience, so books that depart from the norm, books that mash up genres and go on weird tangents? J’adore.

Alana: You are well-known for having references to other works sprinkled throughout your stories. Without spoilers, can you share a few titles that will grant in-joke access?

Trip: First, this question immediately started a particular scene from the film Evil Under the Sun, starring Peter Ustinov (and Dame Maggie Smith! And Dame Diana Rigg! It’s actually superb, you should all watch it sometime…) playing in my mind. But that’s a digression, so I’ll throw out a list and leave it at that.

Dynasty S03E16; The Courts of Chaos by Roger Zelazny; The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess by Chappell Roan; The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells; Mommie Dearest (1981); Diamonds and Toads by Charles Perrault; POSE (all series); The Complete Kake Comics by Tom of Finland; RuPaul’s Drag Race (any series, really, but All-Stars All-Winners would be my rec); The Last Herald-Mage Trilogy by Mercedes Lackey…

…I am going to say I stopped there, and not admit that there were actually several more before I got ahold of myself and hit the delete key to bring it down to something more reasonable in size for a paragraph…

Alana: You've published traditionally and independently--what brought you to Kickstarter for this project?

Trip: I try to never do a thing for only one reason if I can possibly help it. 😅 My reasoning behind bringing this project to Kickstarter stems from a couple of things.

Kickstarter is, relatively, quick. Traditional publishing is amazing, but turnaround on projects in trad pub is measured in years, plural, most of the time. I’m hoping that this book will see the light of day much sooner than it would if it came through the traditional publishing pipeline.

This also applies to authors getting paid, unfortunately. Advances are broken into increasingly smaller pieces, further apart, these days. My partner and I are coming to the end of our UK visas, and this project is one way we’re hoping to raise funds to stay in our British home (particularly given what is happening on the other side of the Atlantic right now). This project, if successful, will pay out months or years before a traditional publishing house would.

Doing things myself also gives me a bit more creative control. Trad pub is not nearly so restrictive as people imagine, but with Valenziaga, particularly, I want to guarantee that I have a queer editor, a queer cover artist, a queer proofreader, and, if at all possible, a queer person involved in production every step of the way. (Yes, this book is that queer.)

And speaking of queer, the reality is that I also had professionals in the publishing industry look at the concept, and the setting, and the story, and advise me to simplify things if I wanted to improve my chances of selling the book on the traditional market. Science fantasy is weird. It doesn’t fit into easy sales scripts as well. But I didn’t want to make it pure fantasy, and I didn’t want to decrease the polyamorous mess(es) tangled up in the plot. So I opted to do this project on a more personal level.

Alana: Which of your characters would you most like to hang out with, and what would you do?

Trip: Oh no! Not a “favourite” type question! That means I have to choose!? Painful. (And it’s different all the time anyway!)

But as of this moment, I’m currently feeling that it would be… Thom of House Lakhsonen (from The Fall of the House of Valenziaga). He’s fun, and sweet, and always smells of leather. Plus, I’m rather stressed with everything going on at the moment, and he’s the kind of person who knows the best way to take care of you, whether that is cuddling on the couch and watching a film or going out dancing.

Given how much I’ve been working on everything, we would definitely just have a night in, with popcorn, a light-and-fun film, and a couple of books, so just read companionably.

Alana: What "one neat trick" do you use in your life, writing or otherwise? What advice do you follow that has made a difference for you?

Trip: I have struggled with toxic levels of perfectionism my whole life, and the thing I’ve found that works best for me to combat that is telling myself (as I write) that I will “fix it in post.” It really helps me get past that paralytic over-analysis of dramatic choices or dislike of how certain lines are reading in my head, or whatever other mind vampire is trying to suck the life out of my creative momentum.

In terms of writing advice, a big one for me is to read widely and deeply in terms of the “how- to” sorts of books, like On Writing, or Wonderbook, or The Fantasy Fiction Formula, but know that not every piece of writing advice, even if it is good advice, is suitable to every writer. We all have different brains and different processes. Writing is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. (And even this piece of advice may not suit everyone!)

Alana: What do you love most about writing queer stories right now?

Trip: I love that it’s not just an option—it’s encouraged! At least by large sections of the SFF readership and reassuring chunks of the publishing industry. And though trad pub (and even platforms that distribute self-published works) might possibly be wavering a bit in terms of support, considering current events, there are still excellent options for reaching an audience and making a living as a writer of queer books.

I love that there are so many queer books to read! I love reading widely and deeply and I love that there is no longer just a single book with a lesbian protagonist in science fiction, or just one trilogy with a (tragic) gay man as the protagonist in fantasy. My TBR is truly life-threatening at this point.

The thing I love most, however, is the connection with queer readers, and the expressions of enthusiasm and joy when someone finds a bit of their experience in a story where they don’t usually expect to see such things. It’s… just the best. 💙

Trip Galey’s The Fall of the House of Valenziaga launches on Kickstarter March 3! Visit the site to sign up for notification on project launch!

Happy New Year! It's been some time since I posted; it was a busy year at Casa Abbott for non-writing reasons. We've welcomed baby Fish into our family, joining his sister Bug, Three-stripe, cats Jack and Tollers, and I as members of our household. But while I'm behind on many things, I've continued to read a lot! Since I posted last year and the year before about my reading goals, I wanted to post last year's results and this year's goals before 2015 progressed too far!

This year, I did not count all the picture books I read, but I did count all my review picture books individually. For the year, I totalled 163 books, which is up from last year's 129 (probably in part due to counting all the review books individually). There was a method to my madness, however: I wanted to see what percentage of titles were review books as compared to non-review books. Here's some of the interesting breakdown:

• 89 titles were review books


• 106 were children's or YA books


• Only 12 were graphic novels, which is rather low


• I read 7 romance, 69 SFF, and 2 nonfiction

I did reasonably well on my goals. The 2 nonfiction titles beat my goal to read just 1. I read 13 out of the 15 novels from my TBR pile I'd hoped to read, 4 titles by autobio writers, 6 rereads (out of a goal of 3), and read one non-genre novel.

The most interesting statistic I kept last year was print vs. digital. I surprised myself by reading 91 books in paper and 72 digitally. I thought I skewed toward e-books, so it's interesting to me that I'm not even at 50% digital reading. Some of this is due to reading for the MFAs. I rely heavily on the library to provide me with MFA reading, and though some are available as e-books, most are more readily available in print.


Highlights of the year?

• Rereading Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead--and seeing it make the MFA finalists list--was great fun. It's been especially fun to read more of the Craft books, both post-publishing and in mss format, in combination with playing Max's Craftverse game Choice of the Deathless. Without the books being required for the game and vice versa, they work so well in conjunction!


• Finishing Devon Monk's "Allie Beckstrom" series was bittersweet, but starting the "House Immortal" books makes me confident there's more excellent reading to come.


• I had the fantastic opportunity to interview Gene Luen Yang for the autobio project, and I read The Shadow Hero and Boxers and Saints in preparation for that. They were both some of my favorite reading for the year, for very different reasons. I'd recommend The Shadow Hero to anyone, but especially readers who have a fondness for Golden Age superheroes. Boxers and Saints is a fabulous moral and ethical investigation of a historical period with a lot of magical realism thrown in, and I found it both enjoyable and tremendously moving.


• The biggest surprise read was probably Eleven by Tom Rogers. It's a book about 9/11, mostly from the perspective of a boy who's just turned 11, and it's fantastic both as an exploration of the event through fiction for middle graders and as a coming of age story. It was also pretty wild to realize that 9/11 happened before the middle grade age group was born--so it qualifies, on some level, as historical fiction.


• I'd also recommend without reservation the Super Lexi middle grade books by Emma Lesko. Lexi is neurologically and developmentally different from her peers, which makes her a fascinating POV character, and Lesko's commitment to neuro-diversity in children's books shows in how beautifully she captures Lexi and makes her so easy to empathize with.


• I loved finally finishing Shanna Swendson's "Enchanted, Inc." series, which for ages looked like it wouldn't get to continue beyond book four. (I'd still read more books in that world!)


• I'm also really eager to see where the "Kate Daniels" (Ilona Andrews) and "Safehold" (David Weber) books end up next!

There were, of course, a lot of other great books, but listing them all would be fodder for TLDR (if I haven't already hit that point).

I was pretty happy with this year's goals, so I'm planning to keep them the same. Here's to another year of good reading!

One of the cool things I get to do sometimes for the various periodicals I write for is interviewing authors. Back when I was writing for Literature Community News, I had the opportunity to chat with Shanna Swendson, Rick Riordan, and Keith Baker. I'm looking at doing some interviews here at MtU&E in the not too distant future. And quite happily, Editor Matt at Flames Rising has pointed me in the right direction as far as matching me with some great folks to interview. Most recently, I chatted with Dave Gross about his new Pathfinder novel, Master of Devils, which comes out this month.

I hadn't actually read a Pathfinder novel before interviewing Dave, but after chatting with him, I definitely want to -- especially his new release. Dave is a huge fan of kung fu movies, and he worked to integrate high fantasy, kung fu/wuxia storytelling, and roleplaying ties into one novel. I think it'll definitely be worth checking out!

A little while ago, dcopulsky, who was a student on the trips in both Ireland and Greece and Turkey, asked if I'd do an interview for his site Question Riot, where he posts new interviews on Thursdays. The interview is now up, and it gets into all of the different kinds of writing that I do, from my bread and butter freelance work to my fiction, RPG, and comics work. Dan asked questions covering the whole gamut, and I had fun answering.

Work has been pouring in lately, which is great in that it means pay checks, but does complicate those goals I submitted to Kaz's Summer Camp. I may have to revise my plans this Tuesday! I have gotten through all of the children's finalists for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards, and I turned in my votes this morning. I've got one more adult novel to finish before votes are due on Wednesday, and hopefully I'll finish it tomorrow so I can get back to my review books!