Interview with Vaela & Micah, authors of MOONLIGHT LOVE AND WITCHCRAFT

 

Today's interviewees are Vaela Denarr and Micah Iannandrea. I am so very, very excited to be interviewing these two authors. I haven't been able to read one of their books...yet, but I absolutely obsess over their books and characters on social media. They seem like some of the most fun people.

In today's interview we talked a bit about how they got started with writing, what made them decide to write together, and what are some of their favorite parts of writing. As always, links to their social media accounts as well as links to purchase their books will be included at the bottom.

This interview will be formatted slightly differently than usual because I was interviewing two people. Vaela and Micah's answers will be labeled with their names so you can tell who is who. Vaela's answers will also be italicized.

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How did you both first get started with writing?

Micah: I think we got into writing when we did Ryann’s character and Vaela was all “I wanna write that.”
Vaela: Yeah, that was after I quit my job. I was in a financially… not great situation. I’d just gotten my first job and learned the lesson “if they hire you immediately, that’s a red flag” the hard way. So I was physically in too much pain to work, and Micah was supporting me. We’d planned to get into writing for a while, and with no skills and no prospects and no finances, I think I said, “what if we just try writing full time?”
Micah: And Vaela was like “We’re gonna write Ryann’s story,” and I went “that’s fine with me.”
Vaela: The plan was to write a short story, see how that works out selling it, and then decide if that’s a sustainable business plan for us.
Micah: That didn’t… exactly work out the way we planned. But we got the book out, and it works pretty well now?
Vaela: I may have forgotten to look up what word counts are. Rookie mistake. So our first book is 350k words long.
Micah: We were at 200k and Vaela said “Oh, it’s normal for books to be a bit over 100k! We’ll cut stuff.”
Vaela: We didn’t cut stuff. We tried.

That's one hell of a start to your writing career. I'm glad you guys chose to do that though! And I love that you tried and just...didn't cut anything. 350k is the perfect length for a book.
How did the two of you meet?

Vaela: It was 2019. I was in college, studying a subject I hated for a job I had no interest in to appease parents who’ve never given a shit about me in their lives. Anyway, by a wild set of circumstances, I had started watching DnD podcasts and streams. I thought “Well, since writing fiction is never going to make me enough money to live (both of those a far-off dream at the time), I might as well start a DnD game! It’s not gonna be great, I’ve never done this before, but I’m sure I’ll have fun bringing a world based on my dreams to life.”
So I started a game, and just… played. With a bunch of people online. At one point, one of the players, literally one of the first people to respond to the call in… I think a discord server(?) said “Hey, I have this friend. They’d really enjoy this game. Could they come on?” And I said yes, obviously.
Micah: My best friend and I sometimes talk about our separate campaigns. And he really likes to just rant about stuff. So when he was in this one for a while, he’d come to me and go “I just had the most ridiculous game” and I was really interested in everything he talked about. He then said he’d ask the DM if I could join, and when they said yes, I was like “Let’s go,” because he’d mentioned that it was very gay. I was very interested.
Vaela: I had no conscious concept of queer people existing at the time. So that was a fun awakening. Anyway, Micah joined the game, I had several crises of identity, came out to myself, came out to them…
Micah: We started talking about my character and what she’d do, and we just got really into talking even outside RPing.
Vaela: That’s how we met. As to how we got together, I firmly hold to the story that we fake dated.
Micah: Yup.

I would also be immediately interested in a DnD game that was said to be very gay. I'm also starting to think I should play in a DnD game now. I will be honest and say I'm very curious about the fake dating part now.
What made you two want to write books together?

Vaela: Was it that the game went on hiatus, or was it before that?
Micah: Well, after you (Vaela) told me you wanted to write, I said “You know, you’re allowed to do that. You’re a free person now.”
Vaela: Me, free? Wild concept.
Micah: I don’t fully remember how it happened, but what really got it going was that you had a story about a vampire eating monsters, and I went “Why not Ryann?” and you fell in love. It was a totally different story back then.
Vaela: I think I’ve wanted to write for most of my life. Just the environment I’d grown up in was hostile to any form of art that is not highly sanitized, “intellectual” and mostly enjoyed by white people over 70. So I never got to it until I met someone who actually supported me, even just by telling me that I could.
Micah: I’ve kind of always wanted to write or help write stories. I had a friend that wrote, and I loved it and always wanted to make characters for their stories. So this is great.
Vaela: Also… I wanted to create something with Micah. Because they gave me my whole world.
Micah: I wanted to also create something with Vaela. And having a character that we sort of made together was great for that. We didn’t technically make Ryann together, but developed her together and learned about her together.

That's a very cute reason. It sounds like your books and characters were born out of a lot of care and passion.
How do you come up with ideas for your books?

Micah: DnD, obviously.
Vaela: Where do those ideas come from, hm?
Micah: Um… Being queer. And wanting to escape into a fantasy world.
Vaela: One where bigots get punched in the face and trans people are celebrated, and where dragons eat your homophobic parents.
Micah: Well, at least when we made it from DnD stuff… But the first two books were definitely not that kind of story.
Vaela: Mostly, I think the stories come from the characters.
Micah: We make the characters first, build stories about that, choose scenes, and then… build that story. Like, do you want monsters? We want monsters. And also a bunch of werewolves.
Vaela: Every character has something that defines them. And from that you can create a story. Ryann’s story was about finding community, finding family, dealing with her anger or letting it out, finding the people who fit her, which she’d never had before.
Kay, Logan and Nemo’s story, at least the one we’ve written, was about love and happiness. They were all content in their perfect lives. But they wanted to share that love with each other even more, and everything they do is about loving each other and making each other comfortable.
Calia, Rhi and Laura’s story is about being able to love and overcoming trauma, to no longer be afraid to share that love with each other.
Micah: It’s a bit of a rough story because they don’t have the smoothest relationship, but… yeah.
Vaela: These traits don’t come out of nowhere. They come from us, our experience of queerness and in some cases the associated marginalization. Our desires. Our hopes. Like being strong. Being able to protect the people you love. Being able to love them at all, in all the ways they deserve. Overcoming your scars. Dealing with rage. Dealing with doubt. Most of these are mine. Micah is much better adjusted than I am. But there is a catharsis in writing it out on the page.
… and sometimes we just want people to cuddle. Or be hot. Fighting.

I love the way you worded that. "There is catharsis in writing it out on the page". I think that motivates a lot of people to create art. Your stories sound absolutely amazing and I look forward to being able to read them one day. And I love the idea of DnD stories coming from being gay and wanting to escape to a fantasy world. That's what I use reading for most of the time.
Do you have a writing schedule when working on your books?

Micah: Not really. We write as much as we can. And most of the time it’s every day. … It’s pretty much every day. … Vaela, do you have anything to say?
Vaela: Wake up. Have anxiety (good start)... Well, actually, what Micah says is right. We write pretty much every day, because we still need to get enough books out to get financially stable.
(Everybody and their grandma tells you “Don’t write for money, you’ll never get any!” but they also follow it up with “Why don’t you monetize your hobbies??”)
Micah: When it’s your passion and your only skill and you need money, it’s kinda hard not to do it with that in mind.
Vaela: That doesn’t mean we expect unreasonable love for our books.
Micah: Whatever love we get is hopefully from honest enjoyment. And to be honest, we didn’t expect to do nearly as well as we did.
Vaela: We put in work. We do our best with every sentence to get better at the skill. We work hard on making the covers as good as they can be, with the aid of our wonderful artists…
(Micah: We go a liiiiittle overboard, but y’know…)
Vaela: … and as we said, we work every day. I think I’ve taken one vacation, which Micah forced me to take before getting burned out.
Micah: I said, “If you’re gonna relax for this time, you’re not gonna write. At all.”
Vaela: Nobody should take away from this that it’s a good thing to write the content of 6 books in 11 months. It’s not sustainable.
Micah: Someday we hope to just be able to relax for a bit before writing.
Vaela: And during. Just… rest a bit. Do an hour a day instead of 12.

I really hope the two of you can become financially stable off your books and be able to relax before writing. I'm stunned by how much you've been able to write, but I do think it'd be better if you didn't have to do that.
Do you have a favorite scene that you’ve written?

Micah: Honestly, my favourite is the end of Gift of Blood where Kathleen shows up. Just the way we write Kathleen is great.
Vaela: Bisexual knife-wielding werewolf family head in her 50s? What’s not to love?
Micah: But really there isn’t any one scene that fully stands above the rest. There are lines we’ve written and soft moments, and they make my heart go ughh.
Vaela: I feel like if we really like a scene, we write more like it. Personally though, if I had to pick… The first scene I ever wrote of Kay, fighting in the rain. Or the one where Ryann fights a bunch of vampires, and she just feels the impact through her bones. I have written many scenes impactful like those two. But those scenes are actually some of the first scenes I ever wrote that made me go “I can do this. I can be good at this!”
Micah: Aw. That’s cute, I love that.
Vaela: Shush. You read them and said you really liked them.
Micah: Yup! Well, you know I love everything you write.

Apologies. I just choked on how gay I am for Kathleen. (Have I read this book yet? No. My point stands though.) Those scenes sound amazing though, even with the limited way that you've described them here. I also love how much you two love your scenes and writing, that's so important.
The two of you live in different countries. What does the brainstorming and writing process look like for you?

Micah: Sitting around in a call.
Vaela: Yeah, that’s usually true. When we get up we get on call. And that’s how we primarily talk at all these days. 24/7. Figuratively. But let’s start with brainstorming. Usually, I get an idea, and I’ll go “Hey Micah, what about this?” and then I gage their reaction to see how excited they are for it and adjust accordingly. Also at 4am I will just write them random thoughts and ideas I had.
But we talk about stuff, Micah brings in their own ideas, we write it down and usually let it sit for a while. Not everything gets used because we gotta make our books a readable size these days, but a lot of the themes carry over. And then sometimes there’ll be changes in the middle of the writing process where Micah points out something that would work better or make more sense, and then I adjust accordingly. It’s mostly a collaborative effort of getting excited and doing whatever we want.
Micah: And, you know, we’re not usually very organized in our brainstorming. When there’s something we talk about, you just usually write it down in our google doc of stuff.
Vaela: What doc do you mean, Micah?
Micah: We used to have the one with all our stories–
Vaela: Right, before I had to separate the polyamorous dragon stuff because google docs couldn’t handle more than 1 million characters… I mean, it’s fine. We only have close to 1000 pages of notes…
Micah: … We get another doc for the writing. We try to figure out (at least recently) what we want in each chapter and each act before writing.
Vaela: When it actually comes to writing, I do the typing. I try my best, and every other minute I get Micah’s input as my alpha reader. Sometimes we play out conversations between each other to see if they would work. We put on music and just… write.

That sounds like a really effective way of communication. And it sounds like it's been working really well for the two of you.
How much world-building usually goes into your books? Do you keep a document of notes for any world-building that you do?

Vaela: I feel like we’ve covered the second part of this question. But we don’t have a dedicated document for worldbuilding stuff…
Micah: Vaela has a totally different view on worldbuilding than I do. Apparently not a lot, other than how dragons work, where they came from, their cultural idiosyncrasies (Micah has no idea what this word means but I’m helping them rant about my personal peculiarities – Vae), how magic affects people, the different types of vampires, how the fey and other interdimensional creatures interact with humans, normalized polyamory unless they’re part of a weird religious cult that values oppression and devalues autonomy and consent…
Vaela: Okay, fine, maybe we’re doing more worldbuilding than I thought. I guess, looking at it like this, every single thing in our books is worldbuilding because it reflects how the world has affected them. I suppose this wouldn’t matter if we wrote a cishet-normative world, seeing as we live in one. But seeing as how our worlds are predominantly queer, everything is touched and affected by it.
Micah: Removing the stigma of polyamory, queerness, gender identity specifically, disabilities and (to the best extent that we’re able) being “not white” as well as removing capitalism entirely is worldbuilding. We have enough of that in real life, we don’t want that in our stories.
Vaela: I just sometimes forget people actually buy into that crap.

Sounds like a lot of worldbuilding, whether it was consciously done or not. Also, I totally would rather live in your world than the real one.
I’ve seen your covers and the art that you’ve got. I adore the look of your characters. How do you come up with the design for your characters?

Micah: Well… Usually I make my characters as gay as possible. They either need tattoos, piercings, or coloured hair. Undercuts, most of the time. And just… the gayest outfits.
Vaela: Muscles.
Micah: Yeah, muscles. Bigger, buffer. Hot. You know, those things. And it’s sometimes stuff like “This partner is big, buff and beautiful. They need a partner who is smaller, can kick your ass, and is cute.”
Vaela: I guess that’s how Nemo and Logan happened, huh? (We do also have some buff with buff, which we’re gonna get to because hellooo.) One thing about our characters is that very few of them are white. Our world, our societies, try to teach us apprehension towards diversity, and they try to teach us to whitewash our perception of the world. That’s not reality. The real world is colourful and full of diverse people in both ethnicity and personality. Not making our characters white was not a conscious decision, it was a natural one.
Of course we don’t try to tell stories that aren’t ours, but we do our best to do the bare minimum to acknowledge the existence of people whose skin isn’t pasty white.
My personal process of creating characters is a bit different from Micah’s. Muscles, great. Queer as hell? Yes please. Gorgeous outfits? Don’t mind if I do. Tattoos? … I don’t have the creativity to make tattoos. Micah is way better at that. I can’t even decide what I want on MY body.
Many of my characters I’ve had in my head for a long time. Calia and Laura since I was about 9. Rhi a bit later. I just wanted to make them how I would want to look if I was any of them. Kind. Strong. A little bit intimidating. … maybe a bit cute in private sometimes. But I also really like dark colours and stars and that’s how Calia happened.
Micah: I feel like when I make characters, I just put them in clothes I want. Like leather jackets and nice pants. You can choose whatever you want and experiment.
Vaela: In short, we both want to look like our characters. Most of them, anyway, because we made them as gay as we could.

I can respect any character development process that aims to make the characters as gay as possible! I am gay for...a lot of your characters from what I've seen. It's also awesome that you want to look like your characters, that's how I like to pay video games.
What is your favorite part of writing?

Vaela: When everything comes together. When things just flow and everything feels perfect, the pace is right, the emotion is right… and then suddenly things just click into place. Something I said 3 weeks ago and wrote down suddenly becomes this hint at a way deeper part of the story that I hadn’t considered was there until just now, and all I have to do is draw a tiny bit of attention to it, or maybe it spawns an entire new idea that makes future books even greater. Like we decided, as a throwaway to make Logan’s backstory work, that Logan was a different kind of Blood, and now it’s going to become relevant for all of our vampire books.
Micah: Yeah, I agree. The way we can just add little hints of something in our writing, in the first few chapters, to hint at something much bigger as we get into the story, is such a fun thing to do.
Vaela: There’s also different kinds of scenes we love. Fight scenes are great! I love them. What the characters are thinking, doing, feeling. Cathartic rage, protective fury, confusion, exhaustion, describing them feeling so alive… And every character is different. Ryann is a trained, talented fighter for whom every blow and every move makes sense is instinctive. Rhi is completely untrained and just wants to no longer be afraid.
The only thing I enjoy more than that are scenes where characters are soft or specifically talk about queerness and love in all its forms… affirming scenes, both for the individual and interpersonal. I like to think that maybe someone will read them and feel like they’re the one being talked to, how beautiful they are and how wonderful.
Micah: I think my favourite scenes and moments that we write are us making jokes, adding little things to characters. Like this character now has a cat named Satan, adding modern memes to our fantasy worlds before hinting at how they’re actually far in the future of the same universe because they’re interconnected. Little references to things in our world, stuff we joke about, stuff that defines us and makes us happy and just feels like it would make sense.
Vaela: There’s a canonical reason for dragons to know the word nerd, which is Micah’s favourite term of endearment for me.
Micah: Oh shush, you nerd.

I...I really need to know the canonical reason for dragons to know the word nerd now. I get that. Why that part (things just connecting) would be such an amazing part. The way you describe it makes me excited for you.
What about specifically writing with a partner?

Vaela: I don’t have to be good at keeping my shit straight. Micah helps with that. And also I have… Micah just made the “I can never keep anything ‘straight’,” joke and I want to strangle them. Lovingly. Romantically. Anyway, I like having someone there to tell me if the things I wrote are good or not. Because I know I can trust Micah’s honest opinion, and I am an insecure author. It’s the anxiety.
Micah: I feel like if I wasn’t with Vaela and was doing my own story I would not know how to do anything writing wise. So it’s great. I have my own stories, sure, but having someone there to actually help with the worldbuilding and knowing words stuff is really good. Like her fucking knowledge of stuff that can make things sound legit?
Vaela: You mean making them fit into the context of your world to recreate the feeling you want readers to have.
Micah: Yeah.
Vaela: I’m happy to help. There’s too much to say that’s great about having a partner. I have my biggest fan right here, and the reader I cherish most.
Micah: You think I’m your biggest fan?
Vaela: … You better be.
Micah: Look, I get to read all our books without buying them. I’m fine. (This is a joke, I have literally bought physical and digital copies of our book. The digital ones were by accident…)
Vaela: … So as I was saying, biggest fan, right here. Most of all, they help me avoid mistakes. I have a lot in my head, and not a lot of ways to make it all make sense. Zero restraint. Micah keeps me grounded and keeps me on task.
Micah: Yeah. You’re grounded.
Vaela: ………Fuck you. Platonically. Because I cannot write what I actually said. This is what I have to deal with.
Micah: Yeah you love me.
Vaela: …………………I was gonna say how they’re literally the most charming, most interesting, most clever person I have ever met and every time I hear their voice makes my heart feel lighter, but now I’m reconsidering that stance.

This is honestly the best response I could have gotten to this question. It's honest and sweet and just an amazing response. The two of you seem to make a great pair and I am so glad that you are able to write together!
What is your least favorite part?

Micah: Writing. Having to do the book and write the book and not it being out there already.
Vaela: Yeah same. Having to get up to write. Or exist to write. Or having a body.
Actually, the real worst is that it takes me between 2-3 months to write a book. And that means to write all the books I WANT to write, I’ll need like… 5 years minimum. And I hate that. I want to write them all now.
Micah: Oof, I understand that, actually… We have so many ideas, but we have to finish the other ideas before getting to those ideas, and then those ideas to get to the next ideas, and then the next ideas…
Vaela: I wish Crimson Tears was done already. I wanna write it SO BADLY.

The writing part is mainly why I haven't written a book before. I'm glad the two of you have so many ideas that you're excited to write (and that the two of you are finishing one project before moving on to the next one).
Do you do anything to celebrate finishing another book?

Micah: By starting another book, yes.
Vaela: Actually, we take a week break.
Micah: Just being able to sit down and finish a series or play a game for a bit before starting on another book.
Vaela: We plan to not have this tight of a schedule in the future, but… It’s still a ways off.

I look forward to the day where you don't have to have that tight of a schedule. For now though: I hope the two of you take advantage of your breaks to relax.
What do you like to do when you’re not writing?

Vaela: Listening to Micah. Just talking. It’s nice to hear their voice, even though they’re so far away and there’s a hundred barriers between us. It gets me up in the morning. It makes me look forward to the night, so I can be just a bit closer to them… Sorry, I spaced out for a moment.
Micah: … Yeah. That. And also just relaxing together. Just having fun talking about a game we just played, or watching letsplays or cartoons, something that’s fun to watch and we can shit-talk about. And someday we’ll just be able to cuddle and relax in a different way.
Vaela: I better get back to writing…

Sounds like a relaxing time.
What future books do you have in the works right now?

Vaela: Right now we’re working on She Who Earned Her Wings, the story of a young, transgender lesbian who falls in love with a dragon– only to realize that dragon’s friend was more than a friend and they all have issues, and she likes all of them, and they like her.
Micah: There’s a lot more than that going on in the story, but that’s pretty much it, yeah.
Vaela: There’s baby dragons. Druids.
Micah: Evil cults. A minor murder mystery. And just a cute happy girl learning the ways of dragons.
Vaela: Literally, she starts turning into one… There’s a whole hoard building thing in book 2… They steal treasure… After Wings, we’re going back to the Crimson Tears series. Quick recap: Kickboxing lesbian is turned into a vampire and has to go kill the people who did that to her. She finds a found family and starts to become a sort of protector of her community. This is explored more in the next book, The Thrill of the Hunt, and solidified in The Killer of Kings, which will be the immediate follow-up.
Relationships between characters are going to deepen, and Ryann’s slow-burn with her friend Rachel may move to the next stage… Hand holding. After 500k words. Maybe.
It’s going to explore Ryann’s relationships to her found family more, her adopted dad and sisters, her queerplatonic friend, and how they all try to help her heal from past traumas.
Micah: Though first… We’re going to fix up The Gift of Blood and make it ready for paperback! We’ve been hoping to do this for a while. So… Excited.
Vaela: Pro tip, two of them: One, don’t make your book 350k words. Two, don’t listen to KDP’s ebook cover proportion suggestion if you wanna use the same cover for the physical book. Either way, we’ll finally create this vampire-slaying masterpiece of a book. Vampire-slaying because it’s big. Why would you use it as a doorstop?
Micah: Yeah, you can just throw it at a vampire and it’ll die.
Vaela: Of the weight or of boredom?
Micah: Yeah.
(This is a joke, we actually super love The Gift of Blood and so do many others who say they just breezed right through it despite the size. Take that, trad-pub conventions.)

Baby dragons, you say? Sign me up. I need this! Sounds like the two of you have a lot lined up and ready to go. I wish you the best of luck in writing, and fixing up, your books.
This has probably been one of my absolute favorite interviews that I've conducted so far. You two have a great sense of humor and amazing answers to these questions. I could not have imagined a better way to kick off February. I am now so, so desperate to read one of your books...but I also kind of want to annotate the book so I'm going to need to buy a physical copy soon. Regardless, this was an amazing interview and I wish the two of you the absolute best in your future endeavors. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to participate in this interview. It was amazing!

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You can find Vaela and Micah on their website, TikTok, Vaela's Twitter, and Micah's Twitter. Any other links can be found in their LinkTree.

You can buy Vaela and Micah's books using links that they've provided for you. Use these links to buy The Gift of Blood, Moonlight Love and Witchcraft, She Who Brought the Storm, and preorder She Who Earned Her Wings.

If you can't buy their books but you still want to read them, consider requesting them to your local library or suggesting them on Overdrive!