"In a way, it sucks that everyone gets to see me flail some as I learn a new thing."

Bestselling author Rachel Howzell Hall on switching genres, mastering world-building, and her buzzy romantasy novel, THE LAST ONE

Check out the collection of past Words With (Author) Friends, wherein I g-chat with an author and you get to read over my shoulder, and order Rachel’s new novel, available now.

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Me: Rachel, hello!

Rachel: Hey! I'm here!

Hiii thanks for chatting with me!

Happy New Year! And I'm so happy to chat!

Huge congrats on all the exciting things going on with THE LAST ONE. How's everything going?

I have such a weird existence - THE LAST ONE is going great, and I get to watch its incredible trajectory as I continue to work my day job, ha.

Hahaha

It was just selected by People magazine for Special Editions to Snag - it's a gorgeous book!

CONGRATS! And I want to know everything about your genre pivot and how the special edition came to be. But first—can you share what the book's about?

How's your writing life? I love your Substack!

Aw thank you! It's been so fun to connect with other writers here and have an outlet where I can write literally whatever I want. Writing life-wise, I can't complain; like every author out there, I'm juggling a million writing projects and taking it a day at a time.

THE LAST ONE kinda starts as most of my thrillers do. A woman wakes up in a strange place that's hostile to her being there. She doesn't know her name or why she's there but she slowly learns that she's supposed to save the world. On the way to Mount Devour, which is like Oz in a sense, she meets up with friends and villains,and sometimes, she can't tell one from the other.

I hadn't planned on writing a romantasy but I was offered the opportunity by the publisher of Entangled. She was launching a new imprint, Red Tower, and asked if I was interested in writing a series. I said "Hell yeah!"

I hadn't written a romance or a fantasy but I wanted to still do this - Liz Pelletier, the publisher, is a queen-maker and genius, and if she had confidence that I could do this, then...

Okay, this is blowing my mind a little bit! She was like, "You haven't done romantasy before but I know you're an awesome writer so I want you!"? I feel like so often, our team's kinda pushing us to pick a lane and stay in it!