H.M. Wolfe’s “Daggermouth” is a dystopian romance full of female rage—and we’re here for it

Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.

Patty Rivera: Hi, listeners. This is Audible Editor Patty, and I'm beyond excited to be talking to H.M. Wolfe about her latest and the first in The Heart Duology, Daggermouth. Set in the surveillance state of New Found Haven, we follow Shadera, a mercenary from the Boundary, and Greyson, the president's son and executioner, whose lives collide after a failed assassination attempt ends up with them being forced into marriage. It's a story filled with political intrigue, unforgettable characters, and twists I genuinely never saw coming. H.M., thank you so much for being here today.

H.M. Wolfe: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited.

I am so excited to talk to you. I have not been able to stop talking about this book since the moment it ended.

That makes me so happy to hear. Thank you. It's one of those endings that's kind of like, "What?"

We'll talk about the ending later. I promise we'll talk about the ending, but we have to jump right in because there's so much happening in Daggermouth. Like I mentioned: political intrigue, rebellion, family dynamics, social commentary—and just a dash of romance.

A dash.

Just a dash, right? When you sat down to write this story, what was the inspiration for Daggermouth, and what was the experience you wanted listeners to have?

I wrote this book out of rage, honestly. I didn't really expect this book to go anywhere. In my head, as I was writing it, it was kind of my quote, unquote, "throwaway book." It was my palate cleanser between a fantasy series that I'm currently writing, and I just had a lot of repressed anger inside of me about the current workings of the world, everything going on in society right now. I needed an outlet for that, and so I sat down and all of that became Daggermouth. It wasn't necessarily inspired by anything specific, just the collective building of emotion and rage and sadness and shame for what was going on in society.

So, that's kind of where it came from, but then I did pull inspiration from some of my favorite dystopian novels in general. V for Vendetta was one of my favorite comics. I love the arc of revenge turned into rebellion, in a sense. I loved the idea of masks that they have in V for Vendetta, and I kind of put my own twist on it for how the 1 percent of society hides behind masks of corporations, of LLCs, of things like that, and money. I kind of pulled that into our Heart, which is the elite class in this book, to kind of show that symbolism. But then the stratified city, I love the stratification of The Hunger Games, and so in this book, the way that it's set up is it’s stratified rings around The Heart. For me, it was very much like The Heart is the wound that kind of festers and bleeds out onto the rings around it.

I wanted that symbolism of that stratification and what it looks like. And then, of course, with the misogyny and all of the deep-seated resentment and hatred towards women, kind of pulled from The Handmaid's Tale in that aspect. So, I kind of pulled inspiration from my favorite dystopian novels and then also just sat down and wrote out my rage onto paper.

I have to say, I'm a little shocked by you saying, "This is my throwaway book." I can't get over that right now. I don't think I'll get over it probably for the rest of today, this year, ever.

Well, I think the reason why that surprises people is because I wrote this book for myself. I had no expectation. I had no pressure of making it commercial. I had no pressure of the outside voices of what it should be, and so I fully wrote it with no outside influence on what I wanted it to be and just hoped that somebody would relate and somebody would find it—I don't know if inspirational is the right word, but somewhat of a call to action in a sense, like it was for me. For me, it was like, "It's so angry. It's so political that I don't know if it's the right climate to be putting this out." But when I did, it kind of just caught fire.

It sure did. I will say, from the first chapter, I was like, "Oh." Then I came into work the next day and I was sitting there playing passages for the team, like, "Guys, you have to hear this. This is so full of rage. I haven't listened to something this rage-y since SenLinYu's Alchemised. You have to listen to this."

Oh, that makes me so happy.

I'm like a one-woman Daggermouth fan club here at Audible lately.

Well, thank you.

I'm hoping the rest of the editors join in.

And the way that they did the audio just embodied that. The narrators did an incredible job embodying that, especially Angel [Pean] with the female rage that she put into it. I could not have asked for a better narrator for her.

Seriously. When I tell you they put their foot in it, that's the only way I can describe it. They put their foot in it. It was tension-filled. I'm shaking talking to you about it now. I'm gonna shift gears a little bit. We'll be back to the narration once I stop shaking, I promise. One of the first laws of New Found Haven that we learn is that loving outside of your ring is punishable by death. Why did you choose to write love itself as an act of rebellion?

Because it is. I think love, in so many facets, whether it's platonic or romantic, we see it in our world right now with queer love. That is an act of rebellion. We've seen through history that it can get you killed. Interracial love can get you separated, can get you killed. We've seen through our history that loving in and of itself is a rebellion, and loving deeply and loving despite what the world is standing against you, says so much. That applies, again, to anything platonic or romantic. And that was the basis of diminishing hope, is taking love. Stripping people of their ability to love who they want to love, I think, dehumanizes everybody at the same exact time. So, that was one of the main things that I wanted to do was, we have a stratified city showing that we're sectioning not only you off into different categories, but then we're also taking away your ability to love from outside of your ring. It was just the ultimate dehumanization of who you are and your autonomy as a person.

You really do see that on display almost immediately when the story starts, because we start with Greyson going about the dailies of his job. I find Greyson to be such an interesting character because he benefits from the system he was born into, but he's also very much trapped by it, and it's something that we learn as the story goes on. What interested you most about writing a character caught between privilege and powerlessness?

There's a complexity to it. I think one of the main questions that I wanted to come about in this book is, where is the line between good and evil? And if there is a line, what makes a person complicit inside of a system? I think there's no right answer. It's just a question that I wanted to pose to get people thinking and talking. But Greyson is very much the duality of: Is your life more important? Or is trying to stay alive and upholding that system while also working against it and trying to decide, does the risk outweigh the privilege that I'm getting and the things that I have to do? Because at the same time, if he falls, somebody else is gonna take his place.

"I just had a lot of repressed anger inside of me about the current workings of the world, everything going on in society right now. I needed an outlet for that, and so I sat down and all of that became 'Daggermouth'."

So, at that point, it's very much, “At least if I'm doing this, I can do it from a place of awareness,” but at the same time, it does not make him right. He's doing atrocious things. There is no hero in this story, and so I wanted to make him complex. I didn't want to make him neat and easy to digest. I wanted to make him messy, with a lot of flaws, and to have these characters have that moral dilemma constantly of, “I know what I'm doing is wrong, but how do I get out of the system? How do I break a generational cycle?" And for him, it's very much a generational cycle of, "I don't have a choice," but then it poses the question of, "Do you?" I think that's really important to ask: At what point do we really not have choices? For me, I want someone that's complex. I want someone that you're going to question, that's not going to be easily likable, but also that you come to understand.

I love that you gave that answer because that first scene where he flinches—sorry, slight spoiler there—but he flinches as he's about to commit that act. And he flinches because he has that moment and he's so self-aware. At one point he tells Shadera, "I'm aware of what I am, but I couldn't do what I'm doing from a grave." I had seen that turmoil live within him, but that really showed me the extent of, "Hey, I know that I'm morally gray. I know that I am out there doing good to counterbalance the bad, and to an extent, I know that what I'm doing is not enough." I love that as soon as Shadera gets into the picture, it becomes the forefront of his thoughts, like, "Hey, here's this woman. She is challenging me."

Yes, that's very much so.

"I better step my game up now."

Right? It's so crazy, too, because you see the way that they talk to each other and the way that they communicate. He's aware of how bad it is already, what the city is doing. He knows it, but he didn't understand this devastation, how deep it ran, because there are little things that he assumes that they have, like regular places to cook. And she has no idea how to cook because they don't have those things where she comes from. So, there's awareness that is built, where he knows that it's bad, but there's an understanding that “I can never imagine just how brutal and bad it is.” So, she forces him to understand that he will never understand it, and no matter what, no matter how bad it gets for him, that he still has a privilege of suffering with food. He has a privilege of suffering with warm water, with clean water, and that though he knows that, I don't think he ever understands the extent of how deep that trauma and that survival runs. He's forced to accept that and then say, "What am I gonna do with this information?"

One of the scenes that really shows the extent of it's a prison, but it's a gold prison, is when he asks her, "Oh, don't you know how to cook?" First of all, that scene was hilarious, because she’s like, "I tried to kill you. You're interested in knowing if I know how to cook?" I couldn't stop laughing. Her response was just really compelling, yes, but it was also like, "I don't have to know how to cook to survive."

Right. And it's one of those questions, because he's asking her, "Do you know how to cook?" And then in the same breath, he's also asking her if she knows how to get past certain surveillance, and she says to him, in her head, "I don't think you realize how dumb of a question that is." Because what is survival in the Boundary—learning how to survive past surveillance—is very different. That is how we survive there, not cooking nice meals. It is very much like military packets. It's canned food. It just shows how out of touch he is. Like, "How do you not know how to use a stove?" Like, "Bro, we don't have a stove."

It was so compelling because you see her kind of drop her guard, and Shadera, she's so badass. The way she goes in there, the assassination attempt. I am not trying to ruin anything for anyone because you have to listen to this greatness that is Daggermouth, but she's amazing. And yes, I know that she’s propelled by other things, but she carries so much. Yes, it's female rage, but it's not one-dimensional. It's grief. It's injustice. It's love and being separated from love, or the people that mean something to her. How did you approach writing such a layered expression of female rage? Because Shadera's not just mad about the injustices. She is mad about a slew of things, and I feel like it just propels her to be great.

One thing I wanted was a woman that doesn't have to be quiet in their anger, quiet in their rage, because women in general are conditioned to be graceful about how they show their rage. To be quiet in it and let it fester, but not speak about it. And there was no way that I was going to let her be quiet about it. She is fully allowed to be loud, and she is gonna come in there and be as loud as she wants, and I loved that for her, because she takes nothing from anyone. For her, it's not just female rage, but it's also community rage. She takes on the rage of the entire community that she's from, and understands because of her position as a Daggermouth, because she is a mercenary and kills for credits, those credits still go back to feeding the Boundary.

So, while she's doing a vile thing, she's also helping her community, and so I think that she feels like a righteousness in what she does. She's had so many things happen to her, and watched it happen to everybody that she loves, and as barriered and walled up as she is, she is a deeply emotional human being. She just has been hurt so much and conditioned that emotion is weakness, so she doesn't show it, but she takes everybody's pain and carries it as her own. Anger is not linear. Grief is not linear, and the shame that comes with feeling those things, especially when you feel like you're not allowed to, and you mix all of those together and don't know how to talk or work through it, it is a melting pot that at some point is gonna explode.

I think that for her, the only way that she could relate was in her anger, and rightfully so. I think, too, one of the things that I love about her is that she does struggle with addiction. She struggles with alcohol addiction, and you see that. We don't blatantly say it, but you see it in the way that she drinks. You see it in the way that she copes with what she does and how she moves through life, that she does have that addiction. That is also a symbol of certain societies and in certain demographics inside those societies. When you live in poverty, alcohol is easier to get than eggs. It's easier to get than purified water. And she uses it to cope.

Her arc is a little bit backwards. Usually it's, "I don't know who I am, and I'm slowly finding myself." And her arc is very much like, "I am so sure about who I am. I'm so sure about what I know and what I know is right," to kind of learning, "Maybe I don't know it all." You see her anger shift. Where, before, it didn't have a point, a specific point of rage; it was just directed at everything. And her anger shifts where it becomes, "I know where I need to direct this now, and now I know how to move forward." I think that she was just kind of wild in her rage. And by the end of it, she had a goal when it came to her rage, and I love that about her.

I love that, too. I love that she didn't let her perception of The Heart get to her and completely shut her down. As the story goes on, she gets to know Greyson. She gets to know Callum. She gets to know Lira. They have that dinner scene, which is so—

Crazy.

Yeah. As she goes on, she's seeing the things around her, and she's being challenged on the fly, almost.

That's the crazy thing about her is that she is not afraid to challenge anyone. When her and Lira are talking at a certain point, she challenges Lira and Lira snaps back immediately. But they challenge each other, and I love the fact that the romance in this book does not take away from who she is. She does not suddenly get soft about The Heart. She does not get soft in who she is. If anything, she's saying, "Join me in my rage." Like, "Come with me." I think it makes her stronger and more grounded as an individual, because one thing I wanted to do, especially in a sensitive way where you don't want her to suddenly be like, "Oh, but we could fix it. We can fix the system,” just because a love interest came in. If anything, I think it shows her that I can, one, manipulate this into gaining whatever power I need to, and two, I think it just makes her stronger in the sense that we can come together. "There are people that can join me in my rage rather than I'm gonna get softer in it." Every character in this book is challenging somebody. They're always at a challenge and butting heads at some point, which I think makes each of them deeper in a sense.

I'm so glad you brought up the other characters because I have never—how could you do this to me? And you know what you did.

Yeah

I was rooting for every single side character.

But every character, you never know who you can trust. But you have a deep hope that you can trust all of them, and then it's just one of those things where it's like, "Okay, wait, can I trust you? Or do I know?" You never truly know anyone's motives, which I think also puts you on the edge of your seat, because everybody's out for themselves while simultaneously being like, "I wanna save myself, but how can I do it while also maybe being slightly helpful.”

It's really one of those things where I'm like, "Who do you trust in this giant, weird…" It's like a found family, but not in a way. “We're family, but are we sure that we're not gonna kill each other at any given moment?”

Well, considering that two of our characters spend the first half of the book like—

They actively try.

"I’m gonna kill you, I can't wait to get my hands round your neck to kill you.” It was so tension-filled. I love it, and I love that once they're thrown into this situation, I love that the trust doesn't come easily between Greyson and Shadera, and neither of them abandons their beliefs overnight. You touched on this a little bit, but why was it important that they earn every step of trusting each other?

They're on completely opposite sides of systematic oppression. That comes with deep-rooted trauma, and that's also not just one generation. That is generational, systematic trauma. With him being who he is as the president's son and her being from the lowest point of poverty in the rings, it's not honest to show that they would immediately jump into that and trust each other. I wanted it to ring as honest as possible, and the only time that she begins to trust him is as she sees that it's not all luxury. There are choices. No matter where you are in the system, power is stripped from you. And even then, she was still like, "Okay, but you still have power that others don't have."

"I wanted the stakes to be incredibly high. I wanted there to be a consequence for every single action. There's a domino effect."

I think it took her to the very, very end of the book to really be like, “We are all in the same place, just at different places." I don't know if that makes sense, but “We are all kind of honed from the same cruelty. Our situations, it looks different on each of us.” But I think that she's not a very trusting person just because of how she grew up. They continuously do things that are like, "Okay, but can I trust you?" She gets put in a moment where she could be given trust. He locks her in a room, and that shows distrust. There's constant push and pull. Every time they take a step forward, their circumstances pull them backwards. I think even though it's like enemies to lovers and there is that romance aspect and that tension, I needed it to be honest. You're not going to build full trust immediately when you meet somebody, no matter how hot they are.

You can be hot. I fully believe that: You can hate somebody and be like, "I hate a really hot person." I know a lot of people are very much like, "I don't like it when there's immediate attraction to someone." But the amount of people that I've been attracted to that I absolutely loathe. I can hate someone and be like, "It sucks that they're so hot because I hate them." She is so aware. I think she says at one point, "It's a pity that I have to kill someone that's this good-looking. Like, what a shame, but I'm gonna kill him." It's one of those things where I'm like, "There's the acknowledgement there that, yeah, I can find you attractive while also still not wanting you to exist."

I love that. I could really just go on a tangent right now. I'm not going to, listeners, I promise. But there's a bunch of scenes where you just see Shadera at her most “I don't give a damn.”

She's our chaotic queen.

She's like an agent of chaos, and in a good way.

Truly. It's like an agent of chaos in the sense of, though she seems out of control, she always somehow gains control back very quickly and gets the upper hand in a situation. It's kind of funny that it may seem like she is out of control, but at the end of the day, that girl has never slipped. She might get hurt, she might get wounded, but she knows how to get herself back on top. She is scrappy. She's willing to do whatever it takes, and I love that about her—that it does not matter, she'll make sure that she comes out on top.

I love how our girl is just so good under pressure. She's trying to break into his room, and he comes in, and he's like, "What's up?" And she's like, "I'm looking for something to kill you." Like, "I'm not nervous. I'm not anything."

"It is what it is."

“I'm trying to kill you.” Like, we know what's happening here.

She's so blunt about it. Every time she gets caught in the middle of something, she's like, "Why do you think I wasn't gonna do this? Kind of dumb on you to think that I wasn't about to—like, you leave me alone here, and you think I'm not gonna snoop?" She keeps saying, constantly, "These people are so dumb. The Heart is so dumb." She was always like, "I don't think that they understand."

Can I talk to you about how the bravest moment in the book for me is Shadera at the dinner table going, "Oh, the weapons are sharp, the people not so much," or something like that. Girl, do you know where you're at saying this?

He's like, "Really?" Well, not only that, but he's also like, "I heard you killed this many of my military." And she's like, "Ah, that number's too low." The way that she is goading that man, and Greyson's sitting over there sweating like, "Please shut up. Please shut up. Please shut up." When he stabs her with that fork and she takes it out of her thigh and eats with it, I'm like, "This girl cannot be fazed."

You brought it up. You brought it up. You brought it up.

The fork!

I did not. I have to just say, number one, again, so badass. So badass, and then the second thing is all the fan art now has the fork.

The fork.

And now the fork is the main character.

Right? Literally, there's a fork fanfic out there somewhere. It's just one of those things that it took on a life of its own because it's so casually done, like, "Wait a second, she was just stabbed with that. Now she's eating with it." It just shows how unfazed she is by these people and also how she does not care if she dies in this moment. She's gonna go down kicking and screaming, like "I'm gonna die eventually. I'm gonna fight you the whole way." It's just so funny to see that. Who she's sitting next to that has power, that has actual power, are so afraid, and she's over here like, "Yeah, I've killed a ton of your people, and also, y'all are dumb. What? Say something."

10 out of 10.

God, she's fearless. I love her.

I know. We can talk Shadera all day.

All day.

One of the things I found fascinating about New Found Haven is that it never feels static. Even when Greyson and Shadera are in one place, you get the sense that life is happening all across the city. We have news spreading, plans unfolding, people making moves behind the scenes. How did you approach building a world that feels so alive?

One, I wanted the stakes to be incredibly high. I wanted there to be a consequence for every single action. There's a domino effect. Even if you don't see it for a little while, every single action that happened, there is a consequence from it, whether it's immediate or a couple chapters down the road. I think knowing that, having the stakes that high, kept you wondering what came next. Also, just the fact that the book happens in a very short amount of time, and so a lot of things have to happen in that amount of time, and this is kind of why I wanted so many different POVs and why I thought it was important, because a rebellion isn't done by one person.

Revenge in all of these systems was not built by one person, and in order to see how deeply nobody trusted each other, you had to see what was going on from every single perspective, because the secrets that were kept that nobody knew about. I think the constant movement—there was no just sitting and sitting and waiting. There was a moment in one character's storyline where it was like, okay, we're going into downtime. There's things happening at midnight over here that we gotta go see. We gotta jump back over here and see what's going on.

I wanted to make sure that the plot was always being moved forward, and I didn't want any character to feel like a plot device. I wanted the plot to stand alone on itself, and I thought that that was really important to make sure that everybody had a piece of it and everybody had a part in moving it forward. Also, I think just small details about the world. Small little things. When you talk about Lira looking out the window, of how the world is still moving, just in the way that people are moving along the streets. What the elites are doing on the daily lives, what people in the Boundary are doing.

"I want, by the end of this book, for you to be unsure if you should be crying, screaming, pumping your fists in the air, or what it is that you should be feeling."

In Shadera's first chapter, we talk about how she's just walking on the streets and she sees gangs. She sees spies. She sees people, this small activity that's constantly going. You're never just sitting there and being like, "Oh, what's going on in the outward sphere of things?" There's always a drone flying overhead. There is some kind of movement, even if it's just passing somebody on the street, and I think that that helps the world feel constantly in motion. But honestly, I don't think that the story would've felt that alive without all of these POVs and without each person moving the story forward.

It's so beautifully done because it connects the story, but you're never like, "Oh, I'm getting this POV.” It feels like one goes into another, and it's so beautifully done, in case I haven't already said that a thousand times.

Thank you. It's so crazy because you also know before the characters do, because it's written in third person, that X is about to happen, unbeknownst to them. They're about to go to this place, and you already know what's about to happen, and you're kind of like, "Oh, no, what is coming? They don't know. Somebody tell them." You have to sit there and be like, "What is about to come?" I love that feeling of dread that you get already knowing that something is unfolding that they don't know about. But none of us know the outcome yet, and so it's just like the dread that is added with knowing these machinations that are happening, but nobody else does.

You're seeing the story unfold in such an amazing way in front of you, and you're just like, "Oh, I hope you can connect the dots faster than I did, please."

Right? Please, somebody tell these people. But at the same time, it's also like, "Okay, we know that something's about to happen, but I wanna rip that out from under you. I want you to think whatever your mind goes to that you think is gonna happen from the setup, I wanna rip that out from under you." I think that helps add to the consequence of things, because everybody is planning and everybody has their own mindset of how these things are gonna go, and it's usually the people that aren't involved that are the ones that would've known it was going to happen that way. So, it blindsides the wrong people, which I think is so fascinating.

You seriously did a job here with not only pulling the carpet out from under us, but you definitely took my breath away here. So, listeners, the next two questions will have some spoilers in them, so feel free to skip ahead if you haven't listened to Daggermouth yet.

It was so compelling. It speaks to the performance, because listening to Daggermouth is, again, it just felt immersive. It felt intense. I felt joy. I felt happiness in some of the parts that we were laughing, and I mean that in the best way. Whether it was the quieter moments between Shade and Greyson, the tension of that unforgettable dinner scene, or even the moments that made me laugh. Angel Pean and Teddy Hamilton, they put their A-game on display and then some. What made them the right voices for these characters?

I mean, Angel, have you heard her? The moment that I saw her, I was like, "That's my girl." The way that she embodied—there's a moment that I heard her play out, she's yelling at Greyson and saying, "I want out." And you can feel every ounce of emotion that she puts in there. I heard her voice—I had gone through a couple narrators before, listening to their previous works—I heard hers, I immediately requested her. She gave me two separate auditions and there was just something about the way that she's so calm. There's something eerie about the way that she speaks Shadera into existence, because it's so calm, but it almost feels like you're too calm. It's that rage. She's keeping herself together, and I just don't think that there could have been somebody better to voice her and bring her to life. I just heard it, and I was like, "That's my girl. That is Shade.”

And then Teddy, I mean, we love Teddy. Teddy is incredible. He does an emo voice so well, and Greyson, he's our emo daddy. We love him. I really liked the way that he did Greyson. It felt almost like he didn't have to act for Greyson. It just kind of felt like it came naturally to him, which I really liked. But the way that he pulled Greyson out, it was just super sad boy and conflicted. So, when I listened to their auditions, I listened to them back-to-back, and I immediately knew, because they sounded so good together. It flowed so perfectly, and the banter, hearing them back-to-back in the duet narration. You need voices that flow together, and Teddy's quicker pace and her calmer but sharp. I was like, immediately, “They have to. They just mesh so well."

And then when they're fighting. Ahh!

There are some scenes that when I got the audiobook, I immediately was like, "Skip to... I need to hear this."

I'm curious, which parts were those?

“Hi, baby.” I skipped to “Hi, baby.” I skipped to the kitchen scene after the Mr. and Mrs. Smith moment. I skipped to that part. I also skipped to the very end, when they're having their little moments of truth, of them kind of talking back and forth to each other. Then I skipped to their meet-cute, when she's like, "Let's send them in. I don't care. I only need seconds to kill you."

I love that. I absolutely love that. Did Angel or Teddy bring anything to their performances that surprised you or deepened your understanding of your characters?

It was so interesting, honestly, to see how they interpreted some scenes. I think, specifically, Angel and Shade, because there are passages that I wrote in my mind as more sad and kind of grief-filled and woe is me. But when Angel performed them, they were more rooted in anger, and I thought that was so interesting because she understood the character reading it in a way that I don't, as the author. This is another way that Shade would realistically react to this scenario. I thought it was so interesting, because where it's different than how I would've read it, it worked so perfectly. And when I read it, I was like, "Oh, I almost like this so much better than I was reading it in my head," because it just feels so much more honest to who Shade is.

I think it was really cool to see the way that she slowed down in some moments where I naturally kind of sped up, and sped up in some moments where I naturally kind of slowed down. Her take on Shade was cultivated to her understanding of her, which was incredible. If you listen to the audiobook, she did an incredible job, and it does her justice. I think it was very cool to see my work interpreted in another way that still felt so honest to who the characters are.

I absolutely love the job that both of them did on all the characters. Because that ending. Ms. H.M. Wolfe, please step to the front of the congregation. We gotta talk to you. We gotta talk to you about that ending, please. Did you always know that that was how Daggermouth would end? Or did that evolve as you were writing?

Okay, thank you, because I was going to say I'm accepting formal apologies for this heartache.

Yes. No, that's me. I always say you can send me your therapy bill. It's fine. I understand. I want, by the end of this book, for you to be unsure if you should be crying, screaming, pumping your fists in the air, or what it is that you should be feeling. I don't want you to be sure. I want you to feel all the things and be like, "Wait a second. What has happened?"

So, you answered my next question, which was, looking back now, what conversation do you hope listeners are still having after they finish Daggermouth?

Well, of course, I want them to have the fun conversation of, in general, just readers craving that emotional fulfillment of a book and a book that makes you feel things. I want that, but the truth, this book in my head when I wrote it, I want them to talk. I wanted to start conversations, hard conversations, because this book does not sugarcoat. It does not soften any of the dialogue of the political aspects of it, of the rights-for-women aspects. I want people to start talking. I don't care what you're talking about. I want it to just start an open dialogue, and I always say, for me, writing this book was a call to action, a call to action to get into your communities, to learn how you could help other people and also relearn empathy.

I don't necessarily think it's the general public's fault, but the world that we are moving into, we are so eager to protect ourselves from hurt that we kind of strip ourselves of empathy, and I hope that this book can be a reminder of how important it is to have empathy and to be more open to learning rather than judging, and then making a decision based off of what you've learned. Like, don't judge a book by its cover. Once you've learned, make your judgment. So, the biggest thing is just I want people to have a conversation.

I absolutely love that. That is so beautifully, beautifully stated.

Thank you.

Of course. Now, while we patiently, patiently wait on Python, do you have anything that you're listening to or reading that you would like to share with us?

Right at this current moment, I am not. When I'm in my writing cave, I don't usually read anything specific, just so I don't get my mind caught up and accidentally pull things, because I am such an imaginative person that if I'm reading something that I super love, I can be like, "Oh." And I'm like, "No, wrong story. I am not writing that story.” So, I keep my mind pretty closed off to my manuscripts.

"For me, writing this book was a call to action, a call to action to get into your communities, to learn how you could help other people and also relearn empathy."

But the last thing that I did read that I absolutely loved before I was diving back into Python was This Wretched Alchemy. I was lucky enough to be able to blurb for an author friend. It comes out at the end of this year, in November, I think. It's by Tina Mars. It was a beautiful story, and it had an Asian female lead character, which I think that representation is so important these days. It weaves Japanese and Roman culture all together. It's like The Gladiator vibes plus the Japanese culture, and the infusion of that was beautiful. She's a debut author. I was blown away. I would say the moment that it comes out, everybody, go read that book, because it's the last thing that I read I was truly like, "Oh, my God, this reminds me why I love reading so much."

Oh, thank you so much. I'm going to download. I have to listen to this, because you sold me.

Yeah, it's good. You need to.

So, what's next for you? What are you working on, if you can share?

I have a couple projects that are in the works. Python, obviously, is at front of mind. One thing with Python is I know people want it, but I am taking my time to make sure it does the story justice. That there is a lot of pressure when it comes with it, where there wasn't with Daggermouth, just because all eyes are kind of on it right now. So, I'm taking my time to make sure that I can give it the love and care that it deserves and give my readers the story that they deserve.

In addition to that, I have some other projects in the works that we will probably be hearing some things about soon. But I do have one that I can talk about. It's a gothic vampire romance. It's like Phantom of the Opera meets Penny Dreadful with Jack the Ripper's London. She's the vampire. He's the vampire slayer. A little bit of that. So, it kind of brings all my gothic. I'm a mood writer, so I write whatever genre I'm feeling. That's kind of my next bigger work probably outside of The Heart Duology that's coming.

Ooh. Yes, I'm so excited. That means we get more of you to love. I am so with it.

Well, I hope you love it.

I already have The Stories series downloaded, and I'm going to catch up on that, too. So, I'm just ready to dive into H.M. Wolfe.

Oh, thank you. That Stories Series, that was my debut. The Book of Cin, it's my baby. I hope you love it. That was my debut into any kind of publishing.

I have heard nothing but good things about the audio, so I'm like, "Okay, I get to talk to H.M. Wolfe, but then I get to stay in this world a little longer," and not just stay in Daggermouth world, but stay in H.M.'s world a little longer.

Oh, thank you. I hope you love it. And also on that one, too, once you get through it, come back and let me know what you think, because I get a lot of “how could you?” on that one.

So, you're volunteering to pay my therapy?

Yeah, you know what? At this point. She's like, "So, that's a free check right there? Please."

Oh, my goodness. It has been so much fun and an absolute pleasure talking with you today, H.M. Listeners, you can get Daggermouth on Audible now. Happy listening.