Talking of Tales — Interview with Olivie Blake, Author of ‘The Atlas Six’ ♡

Dear reader,
I interviewed Olivie Blake. For my first blog post. What a dream.

First of all, welcome to my blog! Introducing Talk of Tales, a personal book blog that I have (finally) launched for the large purpose of supporting tales by BIPOC authors and with BIPOC characters by simply doing what I can: talk about them.

It’s a pleasure to take off this journey and launch this humble blog by interviewing one of my favorite authors and an inspiration to many: Olivie Blake, which is the pseudonym of Alexene Farol Follmuth, a writer based out of Los Angeles, CA. She is the author of multiple novels, anthologies, graphic novels, and film scripts. In this interview, we chat about The Atlas Six, possible (major) hints for The Atlas Paradox (the sequel), the sorcery and witchcraft behind creating such a story and characters (/j), exciting upcoming works and more!

As Olivie, she has been published as the featured fiction contributor for Witch Way Magazine, as well as the writer for the self-published graphic series Alpha and a variety of other books. As Alexene, her debut YA novel, My Mechanical Romance, is coming summer 2022 from Holiday House.

— Learn more about the author and all her books here and follow her on social media platforms.

YouTube | Twitter: @oliviblake / @afarolfollmuth | Instagram: @olivieblake / @afarolfollmuth | Tumblr

One of Olivie’s most prominent works and one that has stolen so many readers’ hearts with its character work and incredible setting and the one that this blog’s discussion and interview is centered around is: The Atlas Six.

THE ATLAS SIX is a powerful SFF novel with the intricate blend of science and magic, that is also an adult exploration of morality, greed, ambition, and the dark side of knowledge, making dark academia a sub-genre with a hint of dystopian fiction. (Yes, you’ll never get it unless you read the book.)

“Five, they are told, will be initiated. One will be eliminated. The six potential initiates will fight to survive the next year of their lives, and if they can prove themselves to be the best among their rivals, most of them will. Most of them.”

Read the full synopsis here.
Buy in ebook or paperback.

If you didn’t know, Olivie has also published The Atlas Six: Deleted Scenes and The Atlas Paradox: Sequel Preview, both of which you should certainly read after reading this first book and wait patiently until the next installment(s) in the series are released (more on that in the interview).

Now, this interview was more a fan-author video chat with me trying my best to be professional but I will spare you the awkward fill-ins and only give you the goods in a Q&A format. I tried to include queries that weren’t ventured deeply into before, as Olivie is pretty active on social media and frequently answers questions on all her platforms but you can especially check out her Tumblr where she has listed FAQ as well as explore The Atlas Six tag questions there.

Beware that there are lot of spoilers for the first book here. I have tried to mark spoilers so they can be avoided if you’re looking for spoiler-free content, but almost every single question/answer is spoiler-y. It’s safe to safe that if you don’t want to be spoiled, go read The Atlas Six first and then come back to read this interview. You have been warned! Proceed with caution (and excitement).

THE INTERVIEW

QUESTION #1:
What exactly does the word “Atlas” refer to in the title? Is it Atlas the character “Atlas Bakely” or is it something that has to do with the six characters being from all around the world?

Answer: It’s definitely supposed to shift its meaning when we find out about Ezra and how he’s connected to Atlas. So, initially it is supposed to be The Atlas Six as in when you first open the book and then there’s this guy named Atlas and he’s picked six people, and it’s supposed to be, oh, so that’s what it means. But then when Ezra reveals who the actual six are—or who Atlas intended the six to be—it’s supposed to shift a little bit. It is sort of intended to be perfectly clear until it isn’t anymore. But it does revolve around, not him as a character but as a concept.

QUESTION #2:
How were the bones of the story initially created? Did you end up with what you set out to write?

Answer: I wouldn’t say that when I started writing I had a clear idea of what the theme was going to be. I knew that what I wanted to explore was this idea of six extremely powerful people that all had really rare gifts and their powers. The way you interpret power—does it come from talent, from skill, from knowledge? It’s just sort of this question that was floating around in my head: What if we take six extremely gifted individuals—like once-in-a-lifetime, never going to come across this talent any other way—and what drives them?

There is power in the sense of institutional power, which is what they’re offered when they’re initially invited to the Society. They are told that they can have money, they can have political clout, the options are open to them to do whatever they want as long as they feed into this system of taking care of the Library itself and the knowledge it contains. But then there’s also power in terms of how they relate to each other and who drives their individual backstories—and some of those are still sort of open. Like, we don’t really know a whole lot about Reina and Callum—which is kind of intentional. They really only reveal parts of their backstory when absolutely necessary. Reina doesn’t even reveal her own, Callum reveals it.

So, initially, I thought, who do I think would be six very interesting people? Obviously the book deals with academia and a lot of structural inequities, which is why a lot of the characters in the book come from a position of power or money, like Nico and Callum come from inherited wealth, and that had to be part of it. Because, how do you get this far in academia? Is this kind of power just born to anyone? Or does it come because you’re positioned in this way with all these resources? So, yeah, there were just all of these questions and I thought: I’m going to imagine the six most interesting people I can think of and see what would happen if you put them all in a room and told them that they all have the same goal, and how each of them are going to deal with the concept of power differently.

You have Libby, who I’m not going to say not privileged—but she doesn’t come from wealth the same way the other characters do, and she’s sort of the most concerned with morality and seems to be the most aware of “what right do we have to this?” So you have her who’s worrying about it, you have Tristan who’s worrying about it, and then you have the other characters who are just accustomed to having it, who are just like, “this is what it is.”

QUESTION #3:
The Atlas Six straddles a fine line between science and magic, showing how it’s really research-intensive to build. How did this process go, especially since you had to teach yourself Physics (!!!) and the stuff of magic?

Answer: I was initially looking into time as a theory. When I was writing my book Alone With You in the Ether, which was released after The Atlas Six but I started working on it before that, and I had this theory: There are lots of people who think of time is non-linear, that time is circular, and I was like, what if time was hexagonal? Because in math and in nature, hexagons occur a lot naturally but perfect circles don’t. So, from this sort of outlandish, completely unscientific idea, I started looking into quantum groups and quantum theory, Carlo Rovelli is someone I read a lot of, I’ve also read Richard P. Feynman, Einstein‘s Relativity theory. My husband is a Physics teacher, so we do have a lot of “science” in the house, and he sort of heard me postulating my time idea, and he was like, “that wouldn’t work unless you’re talking about this,” and so I was looking at Einstein‘s light cone and…. People ask me what I research and I don’t know how to answer that, because I just read a lot. A lot in the area of Theoretical Physics specifically because I was trying to understand space and time, and there’s a lot of overlap there.

When people start wondering about the universe, the first thing they think about is space and time. So, if I’ve got these geniuses, they’re researching something, what’s the first thing they’re going to try to do? They’re going to try to understand the mysteries of the universe—blackholes, wormholes… how does time work? The way that magic works is essentially Quantum Theory, as opposed to string theory. I felt like there’s something magical about it; if you’re already breaking things down into quanta, what’s the difference between that and magic? If you’re already doing something so theoretical that it can’t be proven, why not just call it magic and say it’s real?

So that was what I had for this book, and I also had to read a lot of different subjects for other things. I’ve read some Evolutionary Biology, really old creation myths, like pre-organized religion—which is very interesting. I mean, all religious creation myths have a lot in common, especially if there are generations; there’s the Old Gods and the New Gods, so that’s an interesting concept. Of course, I’ve also read Psychology… Carl Jung is very important; the idea of the collective mind is very important in certain aspects of how the team is built.

I think it would be very interesting after everything is written to explain where every magical concept came from, because I think, essentially, I’m rooting everything magical in something scientific and more philosophical. Philosophy was a bit easier [to include in the book] because I studied Philosophy more. When I was in high school, I had to do all the philosophical underpinnings of the American constitution, so I read a lot of ‘On Freedom,’ ‘On Liberty,’ ‘On the Republic,’ and so a lot of the ideas of “who should have power” come from that.

There’s also the way magic in the book has sweat—as in, there are physiological consequences and costs to using it, which was partially inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin‘s anthropological approach in The Left Hand of Darkness. In that book, the cultural practices of the society she built revolve around the extreme cold—they have to have smaller meals more frequently, their building materials and clothing are related to insulation for survival, all their collective behaviors are impacted by the climate and setting. Doing the same thing with how magic would feel for the characters to use was a way of making the world feel more real in The Atlas Six.

I will say, this book was a long time in the making; it was completely different before, it was much more fantasy—a portal fantasy, basically. All the characters were kind of doing what Ezra does, they would open a door and all that—and I didn’t like it. There was a Big Bad, you know? There was a “villain” they were “fighting” and I was like, you know what, this just doesn’t appeal to me, this isn’t interesting enough. So I just completely scraped that manuscript and reworked the characters, changed who the perspective characters were. I was really working on this book—passively—for around three years before I sat down to write it. So all the inspiration that went into it were all the things I thought about for three years.

QUESTION #4:
I don’t know of anyone who has read The Atlas Six and actually understood every single thing that went through that book. Was it intentional (from you or the characters) to “out-smart” the reader?

Answer: It was a little bit my concern when I released it, how many people are going to be interested in this? I was never trying to “out-smart” people, I was never trying to make the book sort of “talk down at you,” I don’t like when books do that. But it is really high-level. It really shocks me when people call it YA… In what way is this Young Adult? Even if you remove the explicit content, because there are many YA books that have that in them, still… they [the characters] are just older. And the things they’re thinking about are not what I expect a high school student to be thinking about. And it’s not that young readers are not capable of understanding it, it’s that I’m surprised they care about it when, in my head, the staples of YA is really rapid pacing and you get a lot of motion, a lot of action in the first few pages, and The Atlas Six is not that. It’s not an action-oriented book. But if it appeals, then it appeals!

QUESTION #5:
Addressing racism, sexism, imperialism, classism, colonization, westernization, etc. How did that come about, choosing what/whose story to tell when it came to portrayals of marginalized people and BIPOC? Does each of the characters’ races and ethnicities play a part in their characterization for you? How so?

Answer: Well, part of it is my experience. I’m first generation immigrant born in the United States. And a woman. It was getting very frustrating to me… There’s just so many white male authors in Science Fiction and Fantasy, and now there is also a rise in white female authors—which is great, we’re getting there, you know? We’re getting another point of view. But, they don’t really seem willing to engage with privilege. My family came to the United States worth considerably less, my mom gets comments like, “why don’t you get back on a boat and go back to where you came from?” So the fact that she was one of the first women to attend her University in Manilla, and people treat her like she has no value… it’s an experience that I know that I have. I observe people not really being aware of what they have, and not that I necessarily want to attack them for it or anything, but if we’re going to talk about academia and elitism and classism, we’re going to talk about who has that power and who doesn’t. And I think that even the characters in the book who do have it are aware that they have it because they’re too smart not to know.

So about their ethnicities… OK, so, you’re me, you’re trying to create where the world would choose to put its Society. It’s obviously going to be either England or the United States—as annoying as that is, it’s going to be one of those two places. They’re going to draw from certain universities; like, of course there’s going to be a New York University, there’s going to be one in Paris, there’s going to be one in Tokyo… And so, when I was building it, I was like, OK, say this is a real thing, where are these people actually going to come from? And then I just thought it would be interesting with Callum and Tristan to make sort of The Black Britain and the White South African and bringing them together. Tristan’s got this huge chip on his shoulder that comes from a lack of privilege in a lot of ways and his attempt to resemble privilege, like he really did a lot to erase his background. That versus Callum who’s like, I’m here, this is who I am, what do you want me to do, apologize for it?

But I didn’t necessarily believe that it would be six Western white people, I just did believe they would come from the same approximate places. It doesn’t really matter how they ended up there, what matters is that they do.

QUESTION #6:
You mentioned before that Tristan was the one character who changed the most from draft to draft. How different would you say he is now from his many other versions?

Answer: Tristan’s growth is really important, and all the characters’ are at different points in the story. I think Tristan is underrated because he hasn’t come as far as people want him to. He’s always had the same backstory, but in previous versions he was less conflicted. He was like, I hate where I came from and I don’t have any conflicts of morality. And I think that actually Libby is a very important presence for him as she’s the one who has the most active moral stance all the time, she’s kind of always dragging him back a little bit. He’s drawn to power, he’s drawn to things that feel familiar to him—which is something Callum tells him all the time—but she [Libby] holds him back from that. She was the new element, basically. In previous drafts, they didn’t interact as much, and he just sort of had a little bit of a fascination with her, and then I was like, actually she makes his character more interesting; because he’s torn the whole time because she’s there. If she weren’t there and there was someone else—like there was another Parisa, then Tristan would be a very different character, which he was. So, it was really the element of… something has got to keep him on that side of the line. And we’ll see how it goes!

Official commissioned art illustrated by Little Chmura.

The main six characters in The Atlas Six with Callum in the lower center and Parisa at the top, Tristan and Libby on the left, and Reina and Nico on the right.

QUESTION #7:
We know that Gideon becomes a huge part of Book 2, The Atlas Paradox. Will we be introduced to other characters, main or not?

Answer: There is going to be one other character who is going to be introduced and who is very important to the plot. There are also characters who have been mentioned in the first book who will become significant, especially when we go out into the rest of the world. Once we leave the Society and we’re in The World, we have already-mentioned characters who are going to be kind of a bigger deal. So, yes, in the next book, there will be a bigger main character as well.

QUESTION #8:
Regarding the central theme of power and who wields it. Does the sequel explore that more or does it pick up the plot or a new side-theme, etc.?

Answer: I think the sequel is going to be a little more like a lot of sequels are, so more action. Not action like combat. But we’ve got multiple plots now at play and we don’t really know whose motivations are what. And we just got to see Ezra at the end of the first book! The important thing about Ezra’s POV is that he is the revelation that this whole book takes place not in the sort of an alternate, parallel version of this universe, but in the near future. So basically The Atlas Six is set in 2060 and Ezra is born right now. The middle book is getting out of just the Society bubble and figuring out what’s going on, and it kind of plays into the thematic arc. They’re going to be broken down into three books but it’s really just one story. The theme of power is just going to be continuously explored. And I say “three” books but I don’t know physically what that means. It is all designed to answer the question of: There is power, we know someone will take it, who should it be?

QUESTION #9:
We still don’t know if The Atlas Series is going to be a duology or a trilogy, so is there anything confirmed yet? What can we expect next?

Answer: Essentially, in my head, it’s three acts. But when I wrote this, I didn’t have an agent yet, I didn’t know what kind of manuscript was going to be traditionally published. I was like, you know what, I’m going to start writing this series. And it was my plan to release a book every year, but I can’t do that because I have obligations to the publisher, which this happened after The Atlas Six was published. Since I knew it was going to be 2-3 more years [from its original publication date of January 2020, meaning the sequel would be in 2022] until the next book comes out, I might try to condense the rest—or the second book might just be very long. I just don’t want to make people wait forever. So basically, it will be a “trilogy” in terms of plot, but it’s possible that for book 2 and 3 I will try to combine their release, or maybe I could write them at the same time so book 2 will come out and a few months later book 3 will come out, something like that.

QUESTION #10:
How is the story going to proceed in the sequel(s)?

Answer: I think in terms of the story as a whole, to be honest, I don’t know how the whole story ends. I plotted it basically as a trilogy, so in the first book you go into the Society, you’re introduced to only this very expansive magic system, but that’s all you see. You’re inside this little bubble and it’s like, let’s just look at power and knowledge, you know, like it’s a theoretical exercise. Let’s assume that all the power and all the knowledge is available to you, what’s to stop you from seeking it all out? And then the second book was going to be sort of a mix, because you have the five who are finishing the second year at the fellowship and the subjects that they will be studying will be more fantastical, I guess. If you could access all the knowledge—all the knowledge the world has ever had, what could you really do with it? Beyond just, you know, stuff that even academics are doing now? The first book is a lot of physics and time—and people are actually studying that, so “what would you study if you could study anything/everything?” is what those five will be doing.

And obviously we have the Ezra plot and the Libby plot, which are two different plots, and they’re going to allow us to zoom out a little bit—just a little bit, so we’re going to see the world as they do their thing. Specifically Libby, because, as we know, we left her in a very vulnerable position, and it’s pretty obvious Libby is going to be working on trying to find her way back, so that’s her plot. And then the third book was going to be, now that we’re out of the Society, what does the world look like? And what are they trying to make it look like? Once you have exited the Library’s resources, what do you do now that you literally have access to any information, any subject?

The kind of information that you can pull from the Library is not just limited to academic text, it’s also tracking information. It’s also something that I wanted to use with the idea of technology, the idea that right now there are algorithms predicting our behavior, and the Library is also doing that. So this Library is not just Past academics, it’s ongoing, so as everything in the world becomes smarter, the Library also becomes smarter. It is a little dystopian, it’s not dystopian in the sense of The Hunger Games, it’s dystopian as in, if there are no limits, if we can’t even see what’s going on but some people can, then what would that mean for the world? And if someone is going to have access to that power, then who should it be?

And that’s really the question that everyone in the book has a different opinion on. Essentially, they all think it should be them, or they think it should be no one. But they’re still grasping at the right to, who should control who knows what—they all have an idea on that. I do think, from a writing perspective, it helps for me to not know exactly how it ends, because it means that I’m engaging with everything that’s happening in the plot in a more active way. So instead of deciding before I sat down what it means to have power, it’s kind of like, I’m literally going to spend three books working through what it means to have power.

QUESTION #11:
Near the end of The Atlas Six, Dalton kept hinting at the possibility—or rather inevitability—of fate and destiny catching up to everyone. Will the sequel explore more of that concept or was that just to satisfy its existing point in the book?

Answer: No, I really wouldn’t expect any of the themes to close in the second book. I honestly don’t know how certain things are going to be resolved or if they’re going to be resolved. When it comes to the question of Fate, what am I going to do? Tell you whether or not fate exists? You know, I’m not writing these books to reinvent religion.

Everything that is going into these books, I hope it reinforces whatever anyone’s view of the world is, because there just is no answer. And so that does make it challenging, of course, to write a book where I want to give everybody all the answers, but really it’s just a matter of: These are the ideas of what we think, but how could we ever know? What can we prove as individuals? What can we prove as a collective? Nothing. So, yes, the plot will resolve, but I think the questions of who was right will remain.

QUESTION #12:
On the distinction between the audience’s interpretation and the author’s intent, would you say, with how widely your book has been perceived especially on Twitter, it’s what you intended to set out with this book being interpreted?

Answer: It was so shocking, it came out of nowhere! It’s funny because the first instinct for me was terror. I didn’t write this book for it to be popular, I didn’t even try to get an agent with this book. I just wrote it because I knew some people were going to like it, I knew people who are used to my writing were going to think it was, you know, pretty good. I had no idea it would appeal to as many people as it seemed to have appealed to! I mean, this has just exceeded my expectations so much, and I sort of had to brace myself for the fact there are going to be people who don’t get it, people who think it’s unsatisfying or doesn’t move fast enough. There’s people who say they can’t see outside of the society and I’m like, yeah, I know, that’s on purpose!

I don’t read “bad” reviews but every now and then I will come across one, so one time there was someone complaining the book didn’t have a satisfying ending, and I was like: I know! Why would you think that’s the end? Like I said, I try not to see much, but a lot of what I do see are people who get it, people who understand, so that’s exciting. People who understand what the point of all that was, and it’s great, it’s so validating!

QUESTION #13:
Are there any hidden messages no one was able to discover or point out, at least not yet? Questions you expected someone to ask but never got?

Answer: I can’t really know because I’m not actively looking through discourse, but especially because there are still things being written and I don’t want to clutter my mind by what people think might happen. But, I am surprised not that many people talk about Dalton. I thought there would be more Dalton theories. There are some things I left that were pretty big bright crumbs, I would say. There are places where people should see how things may be connected, and I haven’t seen people connect those dots yet. That doesn’t mean anything; because I haven’t heard very much, but Dalton is already a big character and he will continue to be so. I know there are some people suspicious of him, which is fair, but no one is really explaining why and I would love to know! Guys, what do you think Dalton is doing—or what is Dalton not doing?

It’s interesting because we have Parisa who keeps sort of digging into Dalton; she sees something in him, Reina sees something in him… Some of the characters’ backstories are more interrelated than The Atlas Six makes them seem. I’m thinking of two characters in particular that have to do with the two POV characters’ backstories… There are names that have been brought up that have not been speculated about. So I think there is room in the book to speculate about who might be important.

I honestly think this has been a big year for learning that plot twists aren’t that exciting when you can’t seem them coming at all. There’s a balance between surprising the reader and tricking the reader, and I’m not trying to trick anyone. I do think that there are hints to what’s coming, and if you follow that trajectory, like I won’t be mad if people can guess that certain things are going to happen, but I haven’t seen anyone on the right track yet.

QUESTION #14:
On the contrary, has anyone reached a conclusion or followed a trajectory that was so off-point, with no grounds and/or not intended?

Answer: Some ships… Some people are getting some things that I didn’t intend to put there. I don’t have any problem with that! It’s fine by me, people ship whoever they want to ship. I see what people are saying, I can see it, but at the same time… I don’t think every relationship is romantic.

Actually, going into this, I wanted to play with the idea of loyalty and this is also a part of the power discussion, too. What drives a person? And I think there is a very obvious answer for, say, Nico! There is a person in Nico’s life who drives every single one of his decisions. Between almost any of the characters, even between Callum and Libby, there’s obviously nothing romantic—not even close—but they drive each other, they’re always thinking about each other. And it’s the same with Parisa and Reina, Callum and Tristan, of course… There’s always this tension between them; some of those are romantic, and some of them are not.

That’s something I want to say as someone who values relationships that are platonic as well, I think that you can really be driven by someone’s importance in your life that isn’t necessarily romantic. With Libby, a lot of her insecurities are driven by her experience with not just class background but also with what happened with her sister, and her relationship with Ezra is driving a lot of what she sees and doesn’t see. For Atlas, we don’t really understand what’s driving him, we only know what Ezra thinks is driving Atlas. We really don’t know what Atlas is thinking; they suspect him of playing a villain role, but who knows if he is or not? Ezra clearly doesn’t see himself as a villain, but look at his actions… is he? So I don’t think anyone is concluding things incorrectly or coming to wrong conclusions, but I think there are more obvious answers and people are only choosing the ones that they like.

QUESTION #15:
Is there anything else you want to cover that you haven’t spoken about before?

Answer: I appreciate the opportunity to talk about—you know, how people say we don’t know who Reina is, who Callum is, and that’s true, I agree and I think it’s accurate. Or people who think Tristan isn’t developed enough, that’s true… because he’s got a longer road, he’s got so much further to go, so it feels like he hasn’t come as far as everyone else and that’s because he’s not done. It’s nice to talk about how all the characters are each in a different place.

I have also mentioned that it is not much of a spoiler that Libby’s character is going to change a lot as a result of this happening to her. And in a lot of ways, this kind of reinforces what Ezra says about how going into the distant future doesn’t tell you very much because, in Ezra’s magical specialization, he can only land in one possible outcome of these infinite outcomes. Same with Callum when he finds out about Libby’s statistics of who she could be, she’s got a 1:1 chance of being nothing or being something very powerful. Now that we know that this huge thing has happened to her, that’s obviously going to impact who she becomes from here. She was already on that trajectory, already on this path of “there’s a lot of power available to me, and I could have it if I wanted it,” and then to be sort of yanked out of the environment where she felt like she had control is going to do big things to her. So her development is basically disrupted. And also Callum, a huge thing has happened to him as well. Reina’s role is going to be less neutral. In Book 1, Parisa and Nico are big personalities, but there are six of them and they all have their moments.

As a piece of writing advice, because people always ask me how to write ensemble casts, is not to have a favorite character. I don’t have a favorite; they’re all interesting to me and for different reasons. Being able to focus on what’s important to each of them to different degrees at different times, I think it’s stronger that way that I’m not itching to get to one character and leaving the others.

QUESTION #16:
While we’re waiting for more of the Atlas Series, what are your next Big Thing(s)? Could you tell us more about them?

Answer: So I started as a Fanfiction writer, which was great because it meant I never had to write the same genre twice! So I’ve written all sorts of stuff; every manuscript that I queried was different, my first one was Adult Literary, the second was Adult High Fantasy—which I actually do hope that I get the chance to publish because it’s a good one, I like it. It’s kind of like Game of Thrones but Moana setting, so I’m hoping to publish it later.

And then, because I think I was doing all the Physics stuff, I wrote this Contemporary Young-Adult Romance of these two high school students on a Robotics team. Because as I was doing all my Science research, I started hearing from a lot of my female readers who felt felt like they were kind of pushed out of Science. Also my experience with it is: people always told me I’m a “Literature and History person” so I might be good at Chemistry or Algebra but I wouldn’t be “great” at them so I was told that even if I find something interesting, I should stick with “what I’m good at”—which happened to be the female-dominated subjects! So it felt like I was being funneled into a very gendered path. As opposed to having a teacher tell me these aren’t “boy subjects” or certain things that only boys are good at. I think for some reason all my Maths and Science teachers were men, so if I struggled with something, they told me not to worry about it because this just wasn’t my thing, as opposed to “you can do this!” It was easy for me to advocate for myself in the subjects where people had already agreed I was good at.

So, I said, for fun, let’s just write a Romance about…basically this situation. This girl who is very very creative who doesn’t think that Math and Science are for her and she gets kind of forced into this situation where she has to join the Robotics team, and everyone presumes that she’s not that competent, they assume she’s going to struggle with it. But she ends up getting really invested, and she’s preternaturally good at Physics; she just understands how things should work and her designs reflect that. It’s also a little bit of a rivals-to-lovers with the kind of know-it-all captain of the team and there’s definitely tension there.

I’m just really happy to write about it because I do think that sometimes the STEM subjects are not made attractive to girls; you know, some people make it feel like it’s almost these subjects have a personality that seem anti-female. And so I really wanted to write a story where this girl—her creativity is part of what makes her really good at these things. She’s an artsy girl but she also knows how to put them into practice. So I thought it would be redemptive to write that for younger versions of myself and younger girls who have these interests and don’t really feel like they’re welcome in those spaces, so it was really an honor to write.

In contrast with The Atlas Six, this book—My Mechanical Romance—is very warm and really the opposite of what The Atlas Six was.

I’m also coming out with season 2 of Clara and the Devil on Webtoon—which, because it’s free, I can release it!

Coming out this summer (“probably June”) is SEASON 2 of Clara and the Devil, which you can read on Webtoon for free!

It’s a webcomic adaptation of the original story The Lovers Grim, written by Olivie Blake and illustrated by Little Chmura, who is also the illustrator of the art in The Atlas Six.

Catch up with Season 1 and join the hype train for when the next season comes out!

Aaaand as much as I was enjoying this delightful conversation and was having so much talking with Alexene, I had to let her go tackle her drafts! But I have to say, she gave us much to think about. From the writing and research process to The Atlas Paradox hints and reveals, so many good food! Cannot wait for Alexene’s upcoming books as both Olivie Blake and Alexene Farol Follmut

If you’re here and you’ve read all that, thank you and I hope you enjoyed! I would love to chat with you all about your theories (Alexene, look away!) after knowing what we know now! You can DM me on Twitter or comment below!

Many, many, warm thanks to Alexene for taking the time to sit with me for this interview and for being the sweetest author I’ve interacted with. Such a kind soul with a magical talent and I wish her all the best of luck and more recognition that she deserves!

You can subscribe to her YouTube channel and follow her on Tumblr and other social media:
Twitter: @oliviblake / @afarolfollmuth
Instagram: @olivieblake / @afarolfollmuth

Check out her website and other books!

Thank you!

with love,
ness ♡