Kristin (she/her) is a queer fantasy writer who lives with her husband in northeastern Japan, where she works as a freelance Japanese-to-English translator when she’s not wordsmithing, working on nerdy cross-stitching, or cuddling her two cats. THE EXTRAVAGANZA ETERNIA is her debut novella from Ghost Orchid Press. You can find her on Bluesky @kristinosani.bsky.social, Instagram @Kristin.Osani, or her website kristinosani.com.
Hi Kristin, thanks for chatting. Your dark fantasy murder mystery novella, the gloriously named The Extravaganza Eternia, comes out on 23rd July from Ghost Orchid Press. Can you briefly tell us what it’s about, and why readers should, uh, buy a ticket to it? There’s a vastly superior pun on the circus there if you want to use your imagination.
Ha! Why mess with perfection?
As you’ve mentioned, the novella is set in a supernatural circus, the titular Extravaganza Eternia. Leathan, one of the bit performers, doesn’t let herself get close to anyone because she’s cursed to turn into a tumbleweed and be flung to the opposite ends of the earth whenever she forms a connection with someone—and the deeper the connection, the more it hurts when her curse rips it out of her heart.
But then the star of the circus is murdered, and the ringmaster tasks Leathan with faking friendships with the other troupers to find out which one of them is the killer.
It’s got gore and glitter galore and is an unabashedly queer as fuck love letter to Sailor Moon. I think anyone who loved The First Bright Thing by JR Dawson or the Circus of the Last Days in Baldur’s Gate 3 will enjoy their time at the Extravaganza as well!
Absolutely loving the Baldur’s Gate reference there…
From the evocative, frankly incredible, prose to the imaginative magic system to the strong voice, this reminded me of the first time I read VE Schwab’s Darker Shade of Magic… what author influences did you have for this story? You don’t have to say Schwab just because I did, my mind is full of bats.
That is the highest compliment anyone could give me. VE Schwab is one of my all-time favorite authors, and one of the major reasons I’m even here. I’ve wanted to be an author since I was old enough to hold a pencil, but that dream ended up cooling on a backburner until I wandered into my local indie bookstore in early 2016 and saw A Gathering of Shadows. I remember feeling physically pulled to it, and I devoured the first chapter without even realizing it was book two in the series. Schwab’s voice and style were exactly what I strove for in my own writing, and seeing there was a place for that on the shelves reignited my own drive to be a writer. I credit her with propping open the door into the publishing world for me, because her transparency on social media about what it was like to be a trad author was the first peek into the industry I’d ever gotten.
All that to say Schwab is a definite influence for all my stories, but a whole plethora of incredible creators make up my writerly DNA: CL Polk, Laini Taylor, Naoko Takeuchi, Yu Watase, and CLAMP are who immediately come to mind, but I’m sure there are even more who I’ll remember later and smack myself on the forehead for forgetting.
This story in particular, though, is most consciously influenced by Naoko Takeuchi and CL Polk.
The central idea at the heart of your main character is that she cannot afford to get close to anyone otherwise her curse will make her pay for it, which is such a brilliant way to explore intimacy and the willingness to make yourself vulnerable. What was the inspiration behind that concept, and why do you think magic is so good at allowing writers to explore these very human ideas?
Leathan’s curse was inspired by this idle thought I had of likening myself to a tumbleweed because I’d never lived in one place for longer than a handful of years my entire life, and so my roots never got the time to grow very deep. It started off as kind of this benignly tragi-comedic thing about how hard it is to make and keep friends, especially as an adult, but the more I developed the story and figured out Leathan’s arc, the more dangerous and gruesome it became.
I find I turn to metaphor and analogy a lot when I’m trying to make myself understood. Magic, I think, can help expand the scope of those comparisons, underscore and exaggerate certain details, or make otherwise vague concepts like “connection” literal and tangible. Maybe it’s just me, but it’s so much easier to interrogate and interact with something in practical terms rather than theoretical. You can do almost anything you want when you have magic in your toolkit, as long as it’s internally consistent with your established story logic.
There is some strong LGBTQ+ representation in this book and you do some really interesting things with identity and magic; for example one character’s non-binary nature is emphasised by the fact we only ever see them in a magical mask. Was this a happy but incidental part of your worldbuilding, or was there a message you were trying to explore here?
I think magic is my go-to lens—or metaphor or analogy, if you will—through which I view and explore a lot of things, identity included. It was actually writing a different fantasy story a few years ago that made me realize I was queer(/bi/pan) myself. I can’t say if it’s entirely intentional, but it is integral, by which I mean that everything I write is queer, and specifically queernorm—so of course every element, including the magic, is going to be influenced by and infused with that.
With that character specifically, there was no message or theme I was going for, at least not consciously; only that I thought a magical kitsune mask would look really freaking cool. I will say that it is intentional on my part that no one questions what the character “really” looks like underneath, or demands they remove it.
Obligatory stupid question that I demand you take seriously: If you were in the Extravaganza Eternia circus troupe, what would your circus role be and how would you appear as?
This is a fantastic question and one I’d never considered! In another life I might have been an illustrator if I’d kept up my drawing and painting practice past high school, so maybe my role would be to paint faces or do caricatures portraits of circusgoers in the fairgrounds. My costume would probably include loads of rainbow makeup and lace and frills and glitter, with sleeves tied back out of the way so as not to impede my work, and a smock spattered in paint.
Your career is as a freelance Japanese-to-English Translator, so instant respect at knowing another language that doesn’t share the same base language with English (I can take very few, some would say no, props for my conversational Italian). How did you get into that and what is the most challenging (and rewarding) parts of freelance translation?
I kind of fell into translation as a career. Funny thing is, I translated Japanese folktales into English for my undergrad thesis, and my conclusion after all that was, “Eh, translation’s not for me.” Fast forward a few years to spring 2015, and my partner (who got into video game translation half a year or so prior) and I are at a game localization jam in Tokyo, where a bunch of folks got together for a day to translate a small indie mobile game, and I’m on the editing team and really enjoying it. At the same event just happens to be a representative from a well-established translation agency, who gives me her card and tells me that they don’t hire freelance editors, but I should take their translation test anyway. So I do, even though I’m certain I’m going to fail it.
I pass.
There’s a lot I love about freelance translation, and a lot I don’t. I’ve gotten to work on some really cool projects, including some of my favorite games and IPs (yay), though I often can’t talk about those experiences because of NDAs (boo), and getting my name in the credits is a bonus, not a given (double boo, though most of my current clients are great about crediting their translators). It’s going to sound hokey, but the best part of this job hands down is the people I get to meet and befriend.
It also doesn’t hurt that I’ve managed to wrangle things so that now I’m mostly on the editing side rather than translating, which helps me balance my time and energy so I can maintain a regular writing schedule too. There are worse day jobs to have!
You’re US born but live in Japan – what is that like, and what is it about the Japanese lifestyle and culture that you fell in love with?
There are definitely challenges and frustrations that come with being an immigrant (albeit far fewer than if I weren’t white or didn’t speak Japanese). Everything gains a thin layer of additional stress when you have to do it in your second language, in a culture that you are only partially assimilated into. That said, of everywhere I’ve ever lived, Japan (specifically where I live now and plan to forevermore) is the place that feels the most like home. I love the fashion. I love the food. I love the scenery. I love my community. And I love the stories.
It’s cliché, but I was a huge anime fan growing up—starting with, surprise, Sailor Moon. The Dic dub aired on US television when I was 5 years old, likely before I even knew what Japan was, and I’d wake up at 6 am to watch it. As I got older, I kept consuming even more anime and manga and J-pop and dramas and games like Kingdom Hearts and the Final Fantasy series, and started studying Japanese when I was 16 because I desperately wanted to be able to experience these stories in their original language (and not have to wait for subs or dubs to come out). I learned to draw by referencing How to Draw Manga books and illustration collections by my favorite mangaka. Many of my first forays into fanfiction and original fiction both were based on or incorporated elements of Japanese media I was a fan of—and those media of course continue to influence me to this day.
Can you tell us about your publishing journey? What made you go for the small press route for this story as opposed to trad or self pub?
All the love and admiration to people who do self-pub, but I don’t think I have the stamina for it. There are just too many hats to wear, and I get easily overwhelmed by the business side of things. Trad pub was and still is, to a certain extent, my dream—I am still actively searching for an agent—but there are far more small press options for novellas. I’d been published by Ghost Orchid previously as part of Beyond the Veil: Supernatural Tales of Queer Love in 2022 and had a great experience, so when I saw their open call for novellas last fall, I pretty much tripped over myself to fill out the submission form.
I appreciate it is still early days as this is your small press debut and it has not been released yet, but what advantages (or disadvantages) do you feel a small press has for you as an author?
Not only is this my small press debut, but the first book-length work I’ve published period! I don’t have much point of reference for comparison myself, but I’ve got a few friends who are trad pubbed, and from what I’ve gleaned speaking to them about their experiences, going with a small press did give me certain advantages, notably the speed at which the book was scheduled for release (roughly 7 months from when I signed the contract), the amount of input I was allowed to have when it came to the cover design, the more generous royalty share, and ease and openness of communication.
What’s next for you as an author? You leave the reader, or at the very least the Ed Crocker, desperately wanting more of your wild world of circuses and curses and magic, will we be getting more stories in the same world?
Hopefully! I would love to write at least one sequel to The Extravaganza Eternia and do have a few early-stage scribbles jotted down in a fresh, shiny Scrivener project. It’s what I poke around with when I’ve hit my daily quota for my main WIP, which is a dark fantasy novel about a woman who starts seeing monsters that were supposed to have been eradicated from her city decades ago and decides to capture one to convince her powerful partners that they’re real and need to be stopped. A little bit of Final Fantasy 7 meets Arcane meets the Daevabad trilogy.
Deployed in the query trenches I’ve also got a YA fantasy about a girl who has to hunt down the thief that stole her words, and a middle-grade graphic novel script about cats and grief in a witchy cottage.
Whatever ends up coming next, it will be queer and absolutely lousy with quiet, heart-and-soul-destroying yearning. Just like me! *ba-dun-chhh*
Thanks for chatting Kristin!
The Extravaganza Eternia can be ordered direct from Ghost Orchid Press in paperback here and e-book here.
Also available on Amazon here.
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