Notes from the Shelf

Today’s Featured Author: Kristina M Barbee

I met Kris at Printer’s Row Lit Fest last fall, and with how busy the holidays were, we didn’t get the chance to connect until now. I’ve been loving the political fantasy world they’ve created so far; the intricate history and layered storytelling really stand out. I’m so excited to share more about their writing process with you. Enjoy the interview below!

Meet Kris

Kristina M Barbee (she/they) is an author and avid reader of stories rich in fantasy and intricate world-building. Their works feature dynamic, diverse characters with complex backgrounds, driven by compelling, contradictory motives that move their plots forward. 

Kristina has been writing stories, poems, and novels ever since she was first able to form sentences and spell most words correctly. Throughout their life, their nose has always been stuck in a book, and her mind has constantly wandered and created fictitious tales that helped her escape. Kristina lives in Illinois with a meticulously organized library room filled with books and their furry kids—Benjamin and Hermione. 

Additionally, Kristina supports a Free Palestine, Congo, Sudan, and all occupied territories.

In their spare time, they work with The Phoenix Center of Illinois, which funds transitional housing programs for unhoused LGBTQIA+ individuals, offers free therapy and counseling for the LGBTQIA+ community, and provides public health resources (such as free STI testing, Narcan distribution, and more) along with legal support (such as rights advocacy, resources for those transitioning, and more).

She is queer, AuDHD, a multi-suicide attempt survivor, has C-PTSD and GAD. They work every day to create works and take actions that positively influence the world while decolonizing their own mind and biases.

Please note, Kristina writes under their pen name (and legal name) of Kristina, but prefers to be addressed as Kris when in conversation.

Q&A

What inspired you to start writing in general?

I’ve always been a writer. I actually still have a collection of little short stories stapled together from when I first learned how to write. My grandma has one of them in her house because she said when her granddaughter’s on The New York Times bestseller list, she’s going to show it off to everybody. 

So I’ve always written, and it’s been such a form of escape for me as well as reading. I didn’t have a very safe childhood, so writing and reading were a form of controlling my life and my safety. 

As far as professionally writing with pursuing an author career, that happened around the pandemic. I realized you never know what’s going to happen in life through changes in my own life that happened previously to the pandemic and also during the pandemic. I saw wishing to be an author someday isn’t going to get me there, and I just needed to do it. 

What inspires you to continue writing?

I think my overactive imagination that I’ve had since I was a child has definitely kept me motivated, because there’s always some sort of story in my head, whether I want it to be happening or not. 

I’m always coming up with these different ideas. Now with the political fantasy series I have out, I built so much lore and so much history before even putting pen to paper to write the story that there’s so many stories to tell. There’s 700+ years of history I wrote to create this entire kingdom and the war that started it all that there’s just so much in there that keeps me motivated to keep writing. 

My series The Psalms of Fire & Fury will be five books in total, but the first two books are out now. I just re-released the first one with extended additional content in a more mature voice, since I’ve been studying and learning a lot more to apply to my writing.

When did you know you wanted to publish a book?

That kind of just happened. I knew I when I was writing the first book The Fallout of Fallacy, I had something there that was more than what I just wanted to share with myself and my friends. At that time, I did not have the confidence I do now to try to go traditional, and so I just said, well, I’ll just self-publish and post a little bit about it online and see what happens.

Now with this prequel duology I’m working on, I fully have the confidence to try to actually query that and publish it traditionally, knowing I can fall back on the independent pipeline if I need to. 

What was the process like to self-publish?

The process was easier than I thought, but also harder than I thought. You have to have your hand in every bucket, and I’m not a marketer. I am not good at social media.

Things like Printer’s Row is my bread-and-butter for talking to readers. I’d rather just talk to people like that, but you have to be a marketer, too. 

So that’s a lot harder for me, as well as being more in control of the design process. Even though I do hire designers, it would be nice to be able to hand more stuff off to others.

However, it was easier in the sense of accessibility. There are so many free resources out there to get published, and there are many people to learn from who have done it.

So you had to do social media to promote it, or how did you get it out there?

Yeah, so I have somehow magically twice figured out how the Instagram algorithm works by pure dumb luck and became viral. Unfortunately, it was two posts that had nothing to do with my books, they were for other people’s books. 

But I am on social media a lot, and I’ve decided I’m just going to post when I have something to say instead of doing all the tips that people say, like posting three times a day at these peak times. I mostly focus on making connections with other people in the industry to get into events and form relationships that will get the book out there. 

What is your writing routine?

My writing routine is not so much a routine, it’s just when I have the time and energy. I have a full-time job and am a disabled author with one of my disabilities being long COVID, so I have constant fatigue from that.

Unfortunately, on the days where maybe I’m not working my day job or I have a little bit of extra time between meetings, I might not be able to write because I’m so exhausted.

However, when I am able to write, my writing routine is very focused. I have the correct snacks, and the three drinks, so I don’t have to get up for anything. I also have very specific music I listen to that really gets me in the mood and gets me focused. Also, having the pomodoro timers really help. I know I only have to focus for 45 minutes, and then I can have 10 minutes of reward time.

So that’s my routine, but sometimes I wake up at midnight, grab the phone and just write it down in my Notes app. Whenever that mood strikes me I have to take advantage.

How do you develop an idea from initial spark to finished manuscript?

The super short version is that I had a dream one night that involved these rebels, so that was the original idea. The book has changed so much from that dream, so I’m actually now saving the original idea for another book series, but that’s what kicked it off.

It was more like The Fellowship of the Ring style of adventure where there’s this kingdom that was built on lies. These ramshackle individuals were going to get together and start a rebellion to fix the kingdom.

From that idea and what I know from studying history, and also from what I was seeing happen across the world, I formulated this political fantasy that’s more like The Priory of the Orange Tree style of storytelling. 

Have you dealt with writer’s block and how do you handle it?

I have dealt with writers block a lot over the past many years. I’ve learned through the therapy that most of my writer’s block comes from either insecurity or from stress. My therapist has been amazing at helping me find tools to identify where that block is coming from.

There have been times where it’s feeling insecure and unsure about what I’m writing. A lot of it comes from comparison, which I’ve had to delete Tiktok and I don’t go on social media to look at other people’s stuff. I just go on to post and find people to form a relationship with and then get off.

When it comes to writer’s block because of stress, like say I’m stressed about bills or my day job, I’ve learned that I can’t push through that type of writer’s block. I know if I try to push through, it’s going to be had writing that I’ll delete anyway, so I find it a waste to push through. Instead, I just try to fix the root issue causing the stress before coming back to writing.

That’s good advice. Speaking of advice, what’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

I’ve received so many that I could talk for hours about it, but I think that the best writing advice that I’ve received was write the story you want to tell, not the story you think others want to read. That has very much changed how I write, and it was part of the reason why I rewrote The Fallout of Fallacy.

I when I was first writing The Fallout of Fallacy, booktok on Tiktok was huge, and everybody was getting these viral moments of their book. I kept thinking, “How am I going to get a viral moment out of what I’m writing?”

It was very lengthy with a lot of history, so you have to sit with the book for a second before you get to the wow moment. I was very stuck on that thought, and I ended up cutting a lot because I thought nobody’s going to want to sit through learning this much about a world.

That ended up being a lie I told myself, because all the feedback that I got from my initial reviews was, “I wish we sat more with the world as it was before we went into war and realized that the king is the bad guy.” All the feedback was like that, and I cut so many of those scenes thinking nobody wanted them. 

I went back and rewrote it as the book I wanted to read, and it’s a very thick book now, but I’m way more proud of this book than the original version.

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

I would definitely repeat that advice to any author. Also, I would say read Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. It’s a methodology that’s adapted from screenplay writing, and it’s really helpful for authors like me who are ADHD or just have such a complex story to tell that they’re struggling a little bit to fit all these pieces together. That book lays out the different points in a story you want to hit that helps it flow in the right way. It helped me restructure some things, especially when multiple points of view got messy. It helped me clean things up and tell a cohesive story. 

Which books or authors have most influenced your writing?

I would say Samantha Shannon definitely influenced my writing in the sense of how to eloquently tell stories from multiple POVs, especially stories that might not seem like they go together but do given the fact that she writes such heavy stories with Priory.

The kingdom that I’m writing about is the size of the United States and Canada, so it’s a big space to figure out how the characters all come together. She’s been a great influence.

I think John Gwynne is a really great writer. I love his stuff and I’m fascinated by his work. 

Isabelle Olmo is another feminist fantasy author I enjoy. She writes great fantasy, and her books really inspired me to tell that rough feminist inclusive, anti-colonialism type of story, too. 

What are you currently reading?

Right now, I’m reading Dawn of the Firebird by Sarah Mughal Rana. It’s a Pakistani fantasy about an emperor’s estranged daughter that he abandoned to her mother, and she finds out she has these magical powers and is trying to get revenge.

It’s very interesting. The world building is beautiful and pulls a lot of Pakistani culture from the real world, which I think is really great to do right now.

What’s something readers might be surprised to learn about you?

That’s a tough one. I would say they wouldn’t be surprised that I’m very neurodivergent, because you can tell that my book series was an ADHD hyperfixation moment with how detailed it is. 

I would say with how I present myself on social media and at events, I think people would be very surprised at how introverted I really am. At events, I come across as a very vibrant person, which I am, but if you were to run into me randomly in public, I would just be a little more toned down.

It’s because I’m always so much in my own world and that I’m just very much introverted. When I’m at an event, I know there’s probably like five questions I’ll be asked, so I can prepare those answers, but when I’m just going about my day, I’m not as prepared to interact with people.

What are you currently writing? Anything coming out soon?

I’ve been lightly working on book 3 for The Psalms of Fire & Fury series, but there is a side story that came from book 3 that has turned into a prequel duology set 700-800 years before the current series.

That duology came about from writing a scene for book 3 where people were referencing it historically, and with the ADHD, it was like a worm in my brain where I needed to write a little bit more about it, so now I’m just going to write a whole duology about it.

Without spoiling too much, people always ask me about dragons, and there are no dragons in the current series because they all died, but for the prequel, they’re alive and well. 

I’m actually working on final edits now for the first book of the duology, and I’m querying this one for traditional publishing, so I’m hoping it can come out by the end of the year, but that very much depends on what my editor says when I send it to them.

Connect with Kris

Follow along on Kristina’s writing journey through their website https://kristinambarbee.com/ or find them on Youtube, Bluesky and Instagram under Kristina M Barbee.

Wrapping Up

That you to Kris for taking the time to interview with me. I love that this huge world with multiple books all spiraled out from one dream. I’m looking forward to seeing how the series develops with the prequel duology added as well!

Check out The Psalms of Fire & Fury Series

You can find the first two books in the series (The Fallout of Fallacy and A Darker Path to Justice) anywhere books are sold, and they’re also available on all platforms for ebooks.

Consider buying them through my Bookshop.org affiliate link to help sustain this blog. If you shop through the link I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

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