Author Spotlight: Celeste Harte
Celeste Harte (she/her) is out here making worlds and taking names.
She writes books, does professional illustrating under her alter ego, Becky Brown, and even makes video games.
Her favorite way to relax is with a good anime or manga, and her favorite games to play range from farming sims to RPG and action games.
Author Links:
Website: celesteharte.com
Instagram: @celeste_harte
Threads: @celeste_harte
Add To Goodreads Do you feel that your experiences of living in the US and then in Europe have influenced your writing and the themes you tend to focus on in your work? If so, how?
Absolutely. Having moved various times in my life at a young age, my sense of identity has shifted often. And going through so much change all of the time, I have often felt “other” in most spaces I occupied. My characters can sometimes reflect that feeling in different ways.
In the Dragon Bones trilogy, Jashi has lived in the same place her whole life, but she has a part of her she’s kept from even those closest to her, and that has made her feel isolated. Kahmel has never stayed in one place since becoming an adult, and now he’s used to having to stake claim on a space when he enters it. I think Jashi is more similar to me in that she keeps to herself when she doesn’t feel she belongs. Kahmel is the opposite of her and me. He embodies the boldness I could never have to welcome himself into a space, even if no one has made room for him. I may not go that far, but I do think I wish I had some of Kahmel’s confidence.
When I wrote for the Magic in the Melanin anthology, I do think I embraced more of that bold energy to make a space yours rather than waiting for someone to give you permission. It’s not reflected in the characters I wrote so much as in the approach to writing the story. I created a setting that reflected my interests at the time; I was watching a lot of anime with temples and shrines and I wanted to tell a story inspired by the sort of medium you might see in those animes. The only difference is this is my story, and my characters are all Black.
You have recently completed your Afrofuturist fantasy trilogy Dragon Bones : how does that feel, and can you share some of the highlights of your writing and publishing journey with us?
It feels good to have it finally be over! Interesting fact; the third book almost didn’t happen. I was really stuck for a good while because I got burnt out pretty bad in between rewrites of the first book and editing the second book at the same time (we ended up writing a second edition of the first book, which neither me or my publisher had ever done before!).
By the time I was supposed to write the third book of the trilogy, I had lost most of my motivation to finish. I can’t even articulate why I didn’t want to finish anymore at that point. I think when you work really hard at something and have too much time to think about why, you start wondering why anyone does anything in the first place. At least for me, thinking too long when I’m already not in a great headspace never makes for good decisions.
The thing is, because I was finishing up the trilogy, I wanted to tie up all of the loose ends in a nice and pretty way, so I was doing a lot of research to brush up on story structure, finishing plot arcs and such and so forth. But it wasn’t until I decided to scrap all of it that I really got my groove back.
I got myself in a better headspace and asked myself, what story am I trying to tell? What am I trying to communicate with the ending of this series? What do I want that valiant reader, who has read all of the books and came to the end of this journey with me, to understand about what I’ve told them over the course of three books? When I answered that question, the book flowed, and I actually finished about 60k words in two weeks after that. Writer’s block, soul quest– same thing, I guess.
What, for you, is the most interesting part of writing a fusion of Afro-futurism with both dystopian and high fantasy elements, and what was the starting point for your worldbuilding?
The funniest thing is that Dragon Bones from two concepts. First, I wanted fantasy story with an arranged marriage between two people with powers they didn’t understand until they met each other. That part of the story called to me for a while before I put pen to paper. However, the world that came with it showed up as a “what if” that came to mind after watching Jurassic park. What if the world was full of dragons instead of dinosaurs? What if they were ancient, as old as the world itself, and people just had to… figure out a way to deal with it? After that, my little story with an arranged marriage met the perfect world to encapsulate it.
One of the aspects I was having the most fun with while I was creating the idea was imagining how the world would evolve based upon dealing with the fact that dragons never went extinct like the dinosaurs did. They just had to live with it.
For that reason, I wanted to put my story at a time where humanity has been dealing with dragons for a while. But their solution was inhumane. Afro-futurism came instinctively, really. Anyone that has read the book can see the parallels to colonialism a mile away. It just felt really fun to make colonizers cyborgs and give my Black characters dragons and fire magic to free themselves.
If you can share without spoilers, what is your favourite thing about the characters’ arcs as they progress through the trilogy?
I love watching Jashi evolve with each book. It was an interesting feat, editing Rising while writing the second edition of Conquest. It was like writing two different characters when I wrote Jashi in each of them. That was one aspect that made editing the two books at the same time so jarring. When I finally found the voice of the story in Uproar, I really was amazed by how Jashi evolved again and became the heroine she needed for herself. Jashi’s arc will always be my favorite part of Dragon Bones.
Preorder Now You are involved in the release of the Black Fantasy anthology, Magic in the Melanin, which is coming soon (Feb 2025)! Can you tell us how this anthology got started as an idea, and the editorial team behind it?
Magic in the Melanin was conceptualized because we (the editing team) needed two things: to find magical Black books, and create them. Chelsea Lockhart, owner of the Melanin Library, resolved our first need with the Melanin Library, and we fulfill our second need every day as Black authors making stories for ourselves and others like us. But here’s the thing. The Melanin Library is an incredible place to find Black books in every genre by Black authors. But it needs funding to keep itself afloat. Therefore, in order to keep making it easy to find magical Black books, we decided to find even more magical Black authors to contribute to this love letter to all things fantastical and melanated.
With the aim of funding the Melanin Library and keeping this treasure trove available to everyone, the four of us, Chelsea Lockhart, La Purvis, and Tatiana Obey, decided to bring together fantasy stories written by Black authors that would carry none of the heavy trauma that makes some of us turn to fantasy books in the first place.
Magic in the Melanin will feature absolutely NO racial trama between its pages, and that’s one of my favorite things about it. We’re telling stories about what happens when we just talk about being ourselves with no one else in the room. It has been awesome seeing what people came up with when that concept was presented to them.
What are the main themes of the anthology, and can you tell us a bit more about the content and what we can expect?
As I mentioned, there is no racial trauma in Magic in the Melanin. In none of these stories will there be any race of people that we all know represent melanated folk being oppressed by some group of people we all know represent the melanin-challenged.
These stories will be lovely, they will be creepy, they will be sweet, they will be messy, but they will be ours.
Everyone that has worked on this project is Black, and everything within its contents is a love letter to them and others like them. I honestly can’t wait for everyone to feel the love coming from the pages when they get theirs.
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