Emily J. Taylor's Inspirations

Emily J. Taylor's Inspirations

This article relates to The Otherwhere Post

Emily J. Taylor's sophomore novel, The Otherwhere Post, is an academic young adult fantasy filled with haunting secrets, a fascinating magic system, and a sweet slow-burn romance. Taylor has shared that the idea for the story struck in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Between quarantining and the sleep deprivation that comes with having a newborn, Taylor says she felt like she was living on a planet apart from all her loved ones. A banal trip to the mailbox, however, sparked an idea: a magical post office that delivered letters to other worlds. But how do you make a story about a postal service, even a magical one, interesting?

You pair it with an intriguing lead. "An image formed in my mind," says Taylor, "of a lovely young woman clutching a letter that would ultimately change the course of her life." That young woman became Maeve Abenthy, the heroine of Post. Maeve is broken and lonely and afraid, but a mysterious letter from an anonymous sender does indeed change the course of her life. As Maeve hunts down the letter's sender, she meets Tristan, a courier for the Otherwhere Post (the aforementioned magical postal service), and while romance is not the main focus of the story, the relationship between Maeve and Tristan does develop into a slow-burn romance. This was part of the goal from the start; Taylor says she adores writing complicated relationships and knew she wanted part of Maeve's character growth to involve romance. So she created the "messy, nerdy, tortured Tristan" to be Maeve's foil.

There's also a dark academia thread woven into the novel. Taylor plays upon the subgenre's elements of mystery and love of knowledge by setting the story in the gloomy city of Gloam. Maeve describes the city as one of "…blackened stone university buildings tangled between steep roads that ran together like an ink spill." The description of Gloam was inspired by Taylor's trip to Edinburgh, where the cobblestones and tight alleyways gave the feel of a city out of time, and the dark sediment staining the gothic buildings reminded Taylor of ink stains. The feel of the city further inspired Taylor's idea for a magic system built upon the inherent magic of letters, which can seem like a piece of magic when we're isolated or separated from others. "I knew that I wanted these letters to be enchanted, and have the story be grounded in letters—what they mean to us and how they connect people." Taylor says she started by writing down all the magical plot points for the story and then building the rules from there, finally deciding the best way was "to create [a] magic system around the actual act of writing."

Taylor's development of Post's magic system is similar to her overall writing style in its ground-up approach. "I'm a layerer," Taylor admits. "My first drafts are pretty bare bones and…then I go through and ask, 'why?' quite a bit." The questioning continues through revisions until the world is fully developed, often aided by mood boards that help create the feel of the story. This makes sense based on Taylor's background in art direction and her need to visualize things to help get them done. Her work as an art director also pushed her to pursue her love of writing so that she could share her own stories rather than those dictated by her clients. Like other authors, Taylor has created her own rituals that help her with writing. Aside from mood boards, Post required a little cuckoo clock to time writing sprints, Moleskine unlined soft-cover notebooks, Post-its, Chopin's Nocturne No. 20, and gallons of iced coffee. These "little rituals…quite literally got me through revisions on The Otherwhere Post," Taylor shared on her social media. "They could all have easily been listed in my acknowledgements."

Taylor says that what makes a book an Emily J. Taylor book is "lush worldbuilding, intricate magic, second-world fantasy, and romance," and Post includes all these elements and more. The magic, mystery, and romance of The Otherwhere Post will pull readers in and make them forget that they're reading about a fictional postal system.

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This article relates to The Otherwhere Post. It first ran in the March 26, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.