To me, stories aren’t fun because of a plot, or even to some degree the cool world building, what really captures us is – usually but there are exceptions – the characters. We have to care about them and find them relatable or interesting in some way. – Natalie Kelda
If you’ve been involved at all with the indie and self-published community in SFF, then you’ve probably run into Natalie Kelda. Natalie is both a welcoming person to new writers and a popular author of science fantasy. She’s known for stories that deftly blend queernorm, inclusive settings, and digging deep when it comes to themes of trauma and other challenging topics. It was a pleasure to interview Natalie for
INTERVIEW
Could you introduce yourself for the benefit of readers who may be new to you or your work?
I’m Natalie, I primarily write character-driven dark fantasy, space (sci)fantasy and Viking age historical fiction although I dabble in literary short pieces, historical fantasy, sci-fi and occasionally horror-adjacent stories.
I’m Danish by birth but switched to write solely in English around 7 years ago – around the same time I moved to the UK to study Wildlife Biology. For most of those 7 years I fought to conform to a more “standard” native English speaker style but in the past year or two I’ve been leaning into my Scandinavian roots more and allowing my Danish-ness to bleed into my stories.
It’s become increasingly important to me that I don’t throw away the culture and writing style of my childhood and youth simply to copy the style of native English speakers – while I adore a lot English speaking authors we do have rather a lot of them and I think the book world would benefit from more diverse voices in general.
One aspect of your writing that’s consistently impressed me is that English isn’t your first language. Based on conversations we’ve had, my impression is that this gives you not only a unique perspective in terms of your craft, but that it’s made you a strong writer on a technical level. I was wondering if you could speak to your experiences on this front?
First up a caveat: I started learning English 20(!) years ago at the age of 12. I’m extremely fortunate that the Danish school system has always been very proactive in teaching kids truly valuable skills – be it multiple languages, STEM subjects or the importance of perspective taking and forming your own opinions on difficult subjects. As such, I was already close to fluent by the time I left public “primary school” at aged 16. This is all to say I’m aware I grew up with the immense privilege of living in a country where access to good (free) education is available for all.
With that aside, I do think ESL(English as a Second Language) writers have a very unique way of approaching writing stories in English. Because our first default language is different, we start out by having to scrutinise every word and sentence down to a detail level native speakers don’t remember having had to do.
If we’re ever around native speakers, we also get used to being corrected constantly. Mostly it’s meant well but it does leave you anxious not only to speak but to write correctly.
I suspect a lot of ESL writers compensate for their non-nativeness by spending more time learning new words and reading up on grammar than native speakers generally do and this accumulates over time not exactly giving us an advantage but definitely enough of an edge it’s not the technical parts of writing that makes us stand out. We’re also often more used to being corrected/receiving feedback than native speakers and as most writers know, being able to take and apply feedback is a vital part of improving your skills.
One thing ESL writers tend to be very good at, often accidentally, is coming up with unique descriptions and turns of phrase. Sometimes this might be because we directly translate a saying or proverb from one of our other languages but it’s often also because we haven’t encountered the “usual” way of describing a specific thing. This is a happy accident when you write other worlds as your prose will – to native English speakers – have a slightly “foreign” feel to it which can really aid the immersion and sense of exploring a completely different and unique world.
Using foreign or unusual turns of phrase is one of the areas I’m allowing myself to explore more these days both because it used to be what beta readers praised in my descriptions before I started stripping away my Danisms to “fit in” better but also because it allows me to consciously play more with English and its influences by Danish/Old Norse. It’s also just a whole lot of fun to not constantly be restricting myself in order to conform to any of the “regular” styles and patterns used in storytelling.
Overall I believe ESL writers have so much to offer the book industry. Our perspectives are unique and our approach towards storytelling and language tend to be innovative simply because our cultural background is on a sliding scale from slightly to very different from the English-speaking world.
And of course, you can be assured we’re all wildly passionate about writing – in most cases we have had to spend endless hours to get to a fluency-level where we can not only read but also write convincingly.
I don’t actually focus all that much on “fixing” or fighting for a better world. My characters tend to be so deep into their own mental struggles they often don’t care or don’t have the capacity to think about saving the world.
Your work tends to straddle a lot of genre lines (especially science fiction and fantasy lines). How do you interweave these genres in your work and why do you think it works so well?
To me sci-fi and fantasy are intricately connected if not two sides of the same coin. Both genres tend to share themes especially when it comes to society, governmental structures and the individuals living in – often oppressive or restrictive – political environments.
To me, it therefore feels like a natural choice to blend the genres although I never purposely set out to do so(Inner Universe series all started from a dream I wanted to write a short story for – famous last words, it’s currently a 10 book series).
As it turns out, it works even better in practise than I had expected. While I’m a STEM undergrad I studied biology and the physics and engineering side of sci-fi isn’t my strong suit or interest so I easily slipped into having alchemy and more wishy-washy details around technology while having a strong biological/evolutionary focus in certain other areas.
I think this mixture of plausibility and magic is important both in straight up fantasy and sci-fi but especially if the genres are blended together. A certain level of realism goes a long way in creating a more immersive world which readers can imagine themselves journeying through.
An author that does this well is Laurey Janey in her debut “The Crossing”. Unlike me, she leans a bit more into the sci-fi side of things – or so it seems at least but it’s definitely a perfect blending of genres and with brilliant neurodivergent and ace rep on top!
Another thing I like about genre blending is it gives us freedom to invent crazy new things but with harder restrictions than in pure fantasy as it has to have a stronger connection to plausibility than going “it’s magic”. It’s like a puzzle and I enjoy challenges which is why I set myself hard rules so I can’t magic/deus ex machina away the problems I write myself into.
Yes, there is alchemy and (very ditsy) space dragons in my Inner Universe series but anything that occasionally is used as an aid will 100% later on be used to make the characters’ problems way worse than they ever were.
Take the portal powder, the most magical element in my world. We see it take the MC, Merlon, from his home to his ship in the blink of an eye – neat right? Well, by chapter 3 and 4 the very same portal brings trouble and actually explodes in Merlon’s face so he suffers permanent, vision impairment! Portal powder is also the catalyst for the trouble in quite a few later books, it sometimes helps but mostly it’s dangerous, unstable and isn’t something any (human) character wants much to do with once they’ve been burned by it – literally sometimes.
Finally, blending genres is great for the kind of stories I like to tell. I know there’s a big focus on action and fast paced stories these days – at least in the English-speaking world – but my focus is always on the character journey first, plot second.
Circling back to the struggles I mentioned earlier of individuals in harsh political climates, I don’t actually focus all that much on “fixing” or fighting for a better world. My characters tend to be so deep into their own mental struggles they often don’t care or don’t have the capacity to think about saving the world. And let’s be real, how many of us real life people wouldn’t let the world burn in order to save our own loved ones? There’s hardly anything I wouldn’t do to keep my nephews safe and healthy!
I also particularly like to show that no matter the technological levels or type of society humans live in, there will still be people who fight depression and anxiety, autistics and other neurodivergent folk will likely still be disproportionately affected by mental health issues because the human condition is universal. Neither magic nor technology will be able to “fix” these society-level problems and individual’s struggles.
Mental health struggles aren’t just going to vanish if we either went back to a pre-electricity world nor if we get even further with our technological advances – we still need therapists, and compassion for one another. We need to keep talking about mental health struggles and stop treating them as a taboo. If we don’t talk about it, it’s not going to ever get better but even if we do talk about it, there will still always, sadly, be people who struggle and need the kindness of the people around them.
The more I understand, the more I realise how passed by asexual and aromantic people’s experiences are in mainstream media. Romantic love and sexual relationships are almost always touted as the end all and more important than platonic love . . . Even in the indie book scene no-romance fantasy stories (that aren’t military fantasy) are a tough sell. If you look at books with an ace MC, the majority still have a romance subplot and I can’t even think of any books with an aromantic MC.
Queerness, particularly aro/ace identity, plays a significant part in your writing, and it’s especially tough for aro/ace authors to get their work out there and reach a wide audience. How does queerness inform your storytelling and characters?
This is something I’m still working on while I’m getting a better understanding of myself. It’s only been a couple of years since I learned about demi-sexuality and realised there was a reason I have felt so different from my friend groups especially in the teen years when most of them were rather prolific in the one-night-stand area and I couldn’t even stomach the thought of kissing someone I didn’t intimately know.
By accident rather than design, my debut MC, Merlon, is also demi-sexual. Although it’s never explicitly stated, I think it’s rather telling we only ever see him interested in one former girlfriend, his best friend(both sadly deceased) and his childhood sweetheart. I really think it was through writing him that I slowly began to understand myself enough I could recognise it when I learned and read more about the demi-sexual part of the ace spectrum.
The more I understand, the more I realise how passed by asexual and aromantic people’s experiences are in mainstream media. Romantic love and sexual relationships are almost always touted as the end all and more important than platonic love.
If in doubt, just check the regular tweets asking if anyone would actually read a book that doesn’t have some sort of romance in it. While I understand some people prefer reading books with a romance main or subplot, it’s rather disheartening so many won’t even consider reading one without – often implying something is “missing” from a story if it has no romance at all.
This can feed into the harmful beliefs that aro and ace people “just haven’t met the right person”, that we haven’t grown up or are “broken” in some way. As a woman in my thirties, especially the former is mentioned a lot alongside the assumption I’ll suddenly wake up wanting kids but let’s not go down that tangent!
Even in the indie book scene no-romance fantasy stories (that aren’t military fantasy) are a tough sell. If you look at books with an ace MC, the majority still have a romance subplot and I can’t even think of any books with an aromantic MC. I do have a couple of books with aromatic or aro-ace MC’s in my back catalogue which I hope to publish in the coming years.
As I’m exploring the book options currently available – and noticing the clear lack of representation in trad publishing with indie books being marginally better at representations – I’m slowly working my way towards being more blatant about my inclusions of queer people in general but increasingly the aro-ace people in my main character casts.
I don’t “create” characters with purpose or to check boxes, they sort of come to me fully formed, but I find that the more you know, read about and understand certain groups of people, the more they naturally show up in your stories.
Still, as somebody relatively new to the queer community who’s never felt like I fitted in – most queer spaces are very heavily over-sexualised and can be outright repulsive for aro-ace folk – I’m not always as confident in marketing my books as queer. This year I did take the leap during pride month and was a wee bit louder than I have been previously. Whether that was the right call or not remains to be determined.
I’m finding I can write truer to myself and the stories I most enjoy when I allow characters to be as queer as they are and this is particularly true for aro-ace characters who for one reason or another end up going down relationship routes that seem non-standard to many readers.
I didn’t realise quite how important this was until I read The Crossing which was the first time there was a main character I could actually identify with. I’ve never thought of identifying with a character in a physical “they look like me” kind of way (growing up all my favourite characters that I identified most with were non-human, which probably says a whole lot about my brand of neurodivergence) but Berro from The Crossing thought and felt in ways I’ve never seen expressed outside of my own head before. Part of that is him being neurodivergent as well but a big part was his ace-ness. I hope some of my stories and particularly my queer characters can hit home for a reader or two the way Berro did for me in The Crossing.
Historically, people with mental disabilities, be it severe depression, autism or something else, have been removed from society and kept hidden away so as not to upset the delicate sensibilities of the neurotypical people. So when I write about these characters who think differently, whether they be autistic, struggling with chronic depression, anxiety or something else, it’s because I want to include them where they rarely have been.
You’ve been vocal about disability rights and the importance of disabled voices in fiction. What’s something you hope readers take away from your books in terms of the role disability plays?
My main focus has been – and likely will continue to be – disabilities related to mental health and cognition. I’m autistic with the comorbidities of depression and anxiety and these things have taken up a LOT of space throughout my life from early childhood through to now where I also have to juggle physical disability via chronic illness.
The chronic illness journey is still new for me and I’ve only recently started writing more characters dealing with debilitating chronic pain, fatigue and brain fog but I suspect characters like that will also continue to show up throughout my future stories. Just because us sick people are stuck at home a lot doesn’t mean we can’t go on adventures, you know?
I focus heavily on mental health because it’s an important cause to me personally, but also because I think if we took better care of, and was kinder to the individuals, our world would improve in general. Everyone deserves kindness and respect and a part of that is to include them. Historically, people with mental disabilities, be it severe depression, autism or something else, have been removed from society and kept hidden away so as not to upset the delicate sensibilities of the neurotypical people.
So when I write about these characters who think differently, whether they be autistic, struggling with chronic depression, anxiety or something else, it’s because I want to include them where they rarely have been.
In storytelling, we tend to obsess over big wars and tragic events but very few books deal with the true aftermath of loss, grief and trauma. It’s as if the story can only ever be about the “big” things when for many people the “little” things like the loss of a best friend or life after traumatic events actually take up a lot more space.
I want to show that good stories can revolve around a single person’s journey towards healing and joy in life despite the hardships. Few of us have to survive being the chosen one, most of us have to keep on working and surviving despite crippling anxiety and having to cut off toxic family members.
While I do mostly focus on mental disabilities and neurodivergent characters, this all applies equally to physical disabilities. The worse my physical health gets, the more I notice the overlap in how abled people sees us – whether we are dealing with mental or physical disabilities there’s a distinct lack of compassion and understanding by those who are healthy.
Mental and physical pain can be equally debilitating, some days my joints are almost alright and I can get out of bed without grimacing and stumbling, but my head can still be plodding through darkness that won’t shift and vice versa.
I’m by no means the only one with these struggles and it’s important to me that any readers who can’t write their experiences, struggles, and thoughts into stories are still able to read and see themselves represented. I know from personal experience how much that representation means on a subconscious level, seeing your experiences portrayed honestly and with respect can boost your feeling of self-worth in a way no inspirational quote on a flowery background ever can.
Disabled people exist in real life and so there is no excuse to exclude us from fiction other than ableism and laziness when it comes to world building – if you write fantasy or sci-fi there is no excuse, you can literally just invent mechanical wings or special moss that work as noise-cancelling headphones.
That’s really what I hope abled/neutotypical readers take away from my stories but I also hope that for those who recognise a bit of themselves, it helps them feel seen and accept that they’re perfectly fine as they are. You don’t have to be happy and healthy to be allowed to exist in fiction nor in real life. We all deserve respect, kindness and to feel represented.
If you think about it, how many different “boxes” do you fit into? I fit into SO many different ones and no single box is more correct than the next and reducing me to only the easily definable boxes would mean that all the squishy, odd bits would vanish, and to me, those are exactly the parts that make us US and make us human.
One of the challenges I’ve seen you bring up, and that I think we’ve had some great exchanges about, is that your stories don’t easily fit any one mood. That is, they’re neither completely bleak, nor entirely hopeful. To me, this is the mark of a good story, but I recognize that the market is becoming quite hostile to work that genuinely portrays the wealth of human emotions on page. Why do you think these types of stories are important?
I think humans can get quite caught up in this or that. We love when something can be easily boxed up into neat little genres, moods, tropes. The thing is, humans are messy. We can’t be boxed up nor easily categorised.
If you think about it, how many different “boxes” do you fit into? I fit into SO many different ones and no single box is more correct than the next and reducing me to only the easily definable boxes would mean that all the squishy, odd bits would vanish, and to me, those are exactly the parts that make us US and make us human.
So in order to portray characters realistically, regardless of whether they fly around on a wooden spaceship, are a water nymph or a ditsy dragon, we need them to be complex enough to not fit into neat boxes. They have to hold some squishy, undefinable bits.
To me, stories aren’t fun because of a plot, or even to some degree the cool world building, what really captures us is – usually but there are exceptions – the characters. We have to care about them and find them relatable or interesting in some way. If they’re too neatly sectioned into little “they are this and that boxes” without squishy weird bits they’ll feel flat and boring in my opinion.
The reason I’m very passionate about the weird parts of people/characters is because as a neurodivergent and queer ESL writer, I’m mostly made up of unboxable things. I’m not unique in this way but I believe people that “don’t fit” deserve to see more representation of characters that in some little way could be or is like them. Be it that the characters are dealing with depression, prefer gender neutral pronouns or are autistic(this all also goes for BIPOC people especially BIPOC who are also one of the aforementioned).
This circles back to queerness and disability, the feeling of being “other”. We need everyone to feel included in society and by writing stories that aren’t neatly falling into specific genres and moods I can include the people who don’t fit into boxes that easily.
Another part of it is that I deal with some very heavy subjects. Trigger warnings Re: self-harm, suicide/ideation, child abuse(non-sexual) in this next bit.
Because I write characters that often are chronically and/or severely depressed and have been through some awful events in their lives they do often fall victim to themselves and it gets so dark and hopeless I feel I have to include some levity and positivity within the narrative.
My latest book(Under Far Galaxian Skies) is very close to my heart because of how dark it is, but without the little fun quips and in the next book in that trilogy, silly talking animals, I’m not sure anyone would get through the story without feeling utterly defeated and dejected and that’s not the goal at all.
Balfour(MC) had an abusive mother for the first 8 years of his life. She made him believe he was at fault for being a healthy carrier of a deadly illness, would scream at and hit him if he was ever “heard” or if he was too quiet. He was then abandoned on an island to die and despite gaining loving adoptive family, he blames himself for every minor mistake for the next eleven years of his life.
He screws up big time during a stressful moment of his life and is straight back on that island, harming himself, considering suicide as a “good” option to end the pain he believes he inflicts on others. Balfour is SO broken. He’s more broken than me, yet I share a lot of his thoughts and fight the same inner demons most days. I was luckier than him and “only” had an abusive step mum for 10 years but I know the damage the lies and hate of a parent figure can do.
I wrote his story during a difficult time of my life, when I wasn’t sure where I belonged, if anywhere. His story is incredibly dark at times and it would honestly be impossible to sit through if I didn’t add an easily offended talking stoat and little recurring jokes between the characters.
I wanted Balfour’s story to be one about finding your spark again. Your joy in life even if you’ve screwed up and think there’s no way to live through it, because there IS a way through no matter how bleak the world may seem when you’re in the deepest, loneliest cave.
So While Balfour’s story is dark and often depressing, it’s about hope, joy, belonging, and belief in yourself. It makes for a very difficult sell and the mood swings gives some readers whiplash but I hope just a handful of people who really need a story like this will read it and feel seen. Feel understood, represented and respected.
Is there a character of yours you get particularly excited about? What about them is important to you?
Since I’ve already spoken in length about Balfour, I feel it’s only fair I speak about my latest novel’s protagonist, Lilje Damselfly. As often happens to me, her story came to me in a dream. It’s very different from anything else I’ve written. Reflections of Lilje Damselfly is a whimsical, cosy historical fiction with a heavier dose of (queer of course!) romance than usual but Lilje’s story is dealing with a part of my life I’m still adjusting to.
Short background: I fell ill after having COVID in February 2022 and I have only been getting more ill as time has passed. I’m in the process of a proper diagnosis but the latest specialist appointments have been suggesting fibromyalgia. Keep this in mind.
In the dream, Lilje had suddenly fallen ill, her health was getting drastically worse over a six month period. Her father decides to send her to a human spa retreat. Lilje is a water nymph and as I wrote her, I realised not only did her fatigue and chronic pain reflect my own, she’s also neurodivergent in several ways.
She’s acutely aware of her surroundings, noticing sounds and smells humans (or at least neurotypical humans) wouldn’t. She hates the feeling of most fabric against her skin, there are many foods she can’t eat due to taste or texture and overall she’s exactly the sort of character I adore. She’s quirky and straightforward. She doesn’t understand what’s the fuss when she walks around naked amongst the easily flustered British Edwardians. She’s unapologetically herself even as she’s trying to manage her chronic health issues.
Writing her was a cathartic event and one I needed after a few years of constant decline of my own health. I used to be the most active person of every friend group so suddenly being housebound most of the time has been a difficult thing to adjust to.
I haven’t quite decided if Lilje’s story is one I’ll share with the world. I write quite a lot of things that I never publish because writing is my biggest passion (that I’m still able to do) and sometimes it’s good to have something for yourself.
On the other hand I know some people, few that they will be, would really resonate with Lilje and her struggle to adjust to and manage her new, restrictive life. But I can’t seem to write even a cosy fantasy without having some dark themes and Lilje almost drowns in the darkness and despair of her illness so despite the whimsical cosy nature of the story it’s not all rosy and quiet. Yet another story with a mood whiplash I suppose!
For now, I’m going to enjoy the story as it is, written for myself and my own catharsis and time will tell if I’m going to publish it or not.
I suspect a lot of ESL writers compensate for their non-nativeness by spending more time learning new words and reading up on grammar than native speakers generally do and this accumulates over time not exactly giving us an advantage but definitely enough of an edge it’s not the technical parts of writing that makes us stand out.
Can you share anything new you may be working on right now, or something you’re excited to start work on?
I’m currently working on getting the final 2 books and 1 novella of Balfour’s story ready for publishing. I’m a bit of a perfectionist so while I’m hardly doing more than moving commas around – which I know my proof editor will change anyway – I’m finding it difficult to let each book go.
I guess a part of me is sad to send Balfour off. Both because his story means so much to me on a personal level and I’m really going to miss working on it, but also because I know that story is too introspective overall to ever do “well” with the general readers. Regardless, Rubbles of Magrath – the sequel to Under Far Galaxian Skies – will be out in October and I’m sure my half-dozen wonderful readers will love it (and probably curse me because Balfour faces a lot of challenges and loss).
For drafting, there’s just 1 more full-length novel left to write in the interconnected Inner Universe series but I keep getting more ideas for stories set there. It’s a vast world so I imagine I’ll always be adding to it whether that’s via more short stories and novels or the Flora and Fauna compendium I’ve slowly started doing sketches for.
I do also have a strong idea for a spin-off to Reflections of Lilje Damselfly which I’d love to get written sometime in the next year. A prequel of sorts, it’s much darker and more horror adjacent than Lilje Damselfly. Just like Reflections of Lilje Damselfly, I’m not sure that story would ever get published, readers of one would get severe whiplash picking up the other simply because the moods and story themes will be vastly different.
So there are both releases and might-never-be-seen-in-public stories in my near future and that’s how I like it. Writing is important to me and I write for myself and my own enjoyment first and foremost although I hope new readers will discover me every so often, the goal has always been to write the stories and characters I feel we don’t see enough of.
Finally, I want to say a huge thank you to Steve for interviewing me and for coming up with such wonderful, personal and thoughtful questions!
You’re very welcome, Natalie! There were so many sharp, incisive, and illuminating comments in your responses that I had a hard time choosing between quotes to highlight!
Natalie has been an active Viking reenactor, advanced martial artist and avid horse rider. She loves to take on new challenges – especially if the activities build experiences that can help with writing the next story or the one after.
Storytelling and inventing new worlds has been a part of Natalie’s life since before she could read or write. Nowadays she mostly writes in English but you’ll often discover hints of her native Danish or some of the other languages she has picked up along the way.
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