Manacled Asks

I'm excited to announce that I have signed a book deal with Del Rey at Penguin Random House in the US and Michael Joseph in the UK for my debut novel, Alchemised, a standalone dark fantasy set in a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy, in which a healer with amnesia is taken as a prisoner of war and must fight to protect her lost memories and the secrets hidden among them. It will grapple with themes of trauma and survival, legacy, and the way that love can drive one to extreme darkness, and it is, as you may be able to tell, a reimagined version of Manacled.

Yes, I will be privating it at the new year for at least the immediate future.

Manacled's fundamental plot is what's being maintained, but all the IP of HP and Handmaid's Tale is omitted, which honestly the overt Handmaid's Tale references were always a red (lol) herring that I leaned into overmuch because I was worried about my ability to write a mystery story.

HP was more difficult because of the world building, but the thing about Manacled was that HP was fundamentally a bit of a vehicle to write a story about war that I was thematically interested in telling, and so while there were many very HP specific elements to the story, there were also some rather childish elements to canon that I had to try to work around (like the Order of the Phoenix's no kill policy based on the first war, etc) and those always felt a bit crazy to try to have the characters maintaining. So not that it was intended to ever be reworked when I was writing it, but there are aspects of the story that are inherently more conducive to explore in an original work than the ways they have to be altered with fit into a fanwork.

That is not to say that the process was in any way pleasant or something I will EVER do again. I would rather be shot. I have described the process to my family as taking two 5k piece jigsaw puzzles and having to use both to build a new puzzle that somehow makes sense. Do not recommend.

Will alchemised be similar to manacled in the sense there are two reading orders? I’m assuming probably not bc it’ll be more of an original work than a fanfic, but I was curious enough to ask.

Thank you for the masterpiece that is manacled. I can’t wait to read it a second time, this time chronologically and have my heart ripped out. 💚

For himself, no. I think if he saw it as a means to an end, he’d do almost anything. He was willing to be as monstrous as he needed to be.

I feel like it was a bit of a push and pull process for them. They’re both survivors and the thing about people who push things down in order to survive is that it can reach a point where they struggle to ever deal with it.

I think Draco was the one who needed it more because for him the trauma was linear, he always remembered their relationship, whereas for Hermione, because of the disconnect she had due to her memory loss period, she was more capable and inclined to just suppress the period of her imprisonment in the manor because that Hermione was a different person who operated under a different context.

You can see that difference in the way they both approached having sex after her memories come back. For Draco having sex with her again is like a form of redemption that he doesn’t think he deserves. Whereas for Hermione, it’s a reversion and a reclamation of something she regards as having been lost/taken that she’s determined to have back.

The thing about their resuming their sexual relationship so quickly (much too quickly) is that in a way it was necessary for them in order to have the degree of intimacy and trust needed for the escape, but on a strictly relationship level perspective, it would have been much better for them to have reconciled more gradually and intentionally. The fact that they did rapidly revert back to their wartime sexual emotional codependency made it harder for them to actually start dealing with what happened once they were safe on the island.

I have always wondered, what was Malfoy thinking in this moment?

Did they end up finding closure, were they honoured?

Reading about how the other surrogates were treated hurt me so bad.

To be honest, I did not plot out what happened to the other surrogates in very much detail because the plot was so complicated, I didn’t want to bring in a lot of extra threads that weren’t going tie in in multiple places. In order to give myself some flexibility in the process of writing, I left certain threads loose in case I realized I needed them later, but ultimately because the story is so limited by the POV, there was a lot of information that never had a natural place to come up.