We sat down with Adrian Harley, author of Many Drops Make a Stream, their debut sapphic fantasy novel (pre-orders are open now!), so we could learn about five of their favorite things in five categories!
Read on to learn some more about Adrian—who knows, maybe you share some favorites!
Five favorite queer books
- The Locked Tomb series, by Tamsyn Muir
- Rust in the Root, by Justina Ireland
- Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir, by Akwaeke Emezi
- Delilah Green Doesn’t Care, by Ashley Herring Blake
- The Teixcalaan Series, by Arkady Martine
Five places you love to write
Here’s where I admit that I am very boring and write in one of two places:
- My favorite chair inside the house
- Out on my porch
But someday I’ll change that! To round out the list, three places I plan to write:
- The cafe attached to the bookstore downtown
- Overlooks on the Blue Ridge Parkway
- The forest park near my house
Five writerly goals you have
- I’d love to write an epic high fantasy someday—one of those sprawling epics that goes for 500,000 words at least.
- I want to publish more books in the same universe as the Droplet series. I have a few drafted and many, many more plotted.
- I would like my readers to be inspired to write fanfic. If my fiction ever gets requested at Yuletide, I’ll know I’ve made it. If my fiction ever gets too big for Yuletide, I don’t even know what I’ll do.
- I’d like to write faster! Ideally, I’d like more hours in the day, but given the impossibility of time travel, I’ll settle for more words per fixed 24-hour day.
- I would like to always incorporate weird animal facts in some way.
Five works that inspired you to write Many Drops Make a Stream
- The Animorphs series, by K. A. Applegate
- Leverage (TV series)
- The original Abhorsen trilogy, by Garth Nix
- Thief of Shadows, by Elizabeth Hoyt, was the most direct inspiration. The romance channel in my slack group kept calling this book Regency Batman, and we’d discuss shifter romances, so the logical mashup of Shifter Batman popped into my head.
- Following on that, I think my fifth spot has to be the entire shifter romance genre, for making me go, “but why would you have them turn into just one animal?? You could have every animal! Why limit yourself?” This is before I realized I was nonbinary.
Five ideas you have for future books starring Droplet
- One of the first things in my notes for Book 2 was “BABY HEIST.” I’ll let you all guess what that means.
- Azera starts [Many Drops Make a Stream] having been jilted by her rich fiancée. At some point, that rich fiancée is going to need Azera’s help…
- Droplet’s old organization has been scattered across the world, but many of them are still working to take down the rich and powerful. An old friend will show back up in future books.
- There will be at least one murder mystery.
- Business people will learn more about shapeshifterkind, and nobody will be happy about this.