Interview
The Vibe of Writing Conflict
Interview with Maria Ingrande Mora, author of Fragile Remedy
By any measure, Maria Ingrande Mora has been successful at her chosen career. A graduate of the University of Florida, where she received her bachelor’s degree in English with a focus on creative writing, she’s built a solid reputation as a marketing consultant, helping clients across multiple industries while running her own firm, Mora Creative Strategy.
But when she’s not helping her customers with their brand identity and content strategy, or trying to avoid Florida’s two billion mosquitos while enjoying her brunch, she spends her time building intricate fictional worlds for her readers. Her debut young adult novel, Fragile Remedy (Flux), was released in March of 2021. The book tells the story of Nate, a sixteen-year old boy who is genetically engineered to serve as the cure for a pandemic ravaging the population of his city. After being smuggled out of the city, Nate finds a family with a group of his peers, including the boy he secretly loves, Reed. The story is full of complicated relationships, layered on the backdrop of a city rising from the ashes of its collapse, and centered around a young man trying to find trust in a world where such connections are rare and fraught with potential peril.
Jeff Reynolds talks with Maria about her book, the strangeness of publishing a post-pandemic novel after the world has experienced a real pandemic, and her experiences as a author.
Interstellar Flight Press: You’ve done a lot of professional writing in your career, but this marks a chance for you to change focus and work on fictional narratives. Was it this story in particularly that brought you back to fiction writing in your 30’s, or did you decide you were going to write a novel and later came up with the idea that became Fragile Remedy?
Maria Ingrande Mora: I had been writing short stories, so was starting to get into that vibe of writing fiction, instead of a lot of marketing copy and articles like I was doing at work. I was driving in the car and heard a song on the radio that got me thinking about characters and emotions. That’s typically how I start working on a project, getting a vibe about an emotion or a character. I went home and said, “Let’s noodle on this and see where it goes.” It probably took a few weeks before I thought, “This could be a novel length work, so I’m going to buckle down and actually focus on drafting because that takes a little more effort than noodling around while I’m driving.” I didn’t think about writing something science fiction with a dystopia setting. I did know I’d wanted to write YA. I knew that I wanted to write for teens. But there was zero planning.
IFP: The novel deals with a world rebuilding in the aftermath of a pandemic. How has it felt releasing the novel now after the year that the world has been through?
MIM: Not as bad as I thought it would be last year in terms of my concerns that it might be too much for readers. Outside of that it was really great that people could attend my launch who don’t live in Florida. A lot of my writing friends and book pals were able to attend that live all over the United States. That being said, not attending events like ALA, not doing a public signing, not having a party was still kind of a bummer. Those are those little carrots when you’re going through the lonely process of writing a book that’s like the light at the end of the tunnel. Still some bittersweet feelings around that.
IFP: One of the things that Fragile Remedies hinges on is Nate’s relationships. Each relationship is entirely unique in how the characters interact with Nate, but it’s his relationship with Alden that often feels like the center the novel swirls around, despite Nate’s romantic interest in Reed. They have so many messy and multilayered interactions, yet there’s a real heart to their friendship. Did that develop naturally as you wrote it, or did you approach the novel thinking “this type of complicated relationship is something I want to write about?”
MIM: It really snuck up on me. I’m sure you’ve heard people describe themselves as pantsers or plotters, plotting being “I did an outline;” pantsing being “I’m flying by the seat of my pants.” I knew this was going to have a romance at its core. I knew that Nate and Reed were kind of the main couple, the ship, in the story. Alden became a louder muse to me than I expected. I knew he was going to function as a bit of an antihero. Not quite a villain, but kind of as a foil for Nate to have a toxic friendship as a counter to his ideal that he believes is unattainable with Reed. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed writing their friendship, and it evolved as a natural side effect of me having a blast writing every single one of their scenes together. It evolved into this theme that I think teens can relate to of having a friend who you’re not sure of their motives, your not sure if their friendship is a good thing in your life or not, but it doesn’t stop you from wanting to be around them or from seeking what’s comfortable or familiar.
There’s a lot of richness there that isn’t present in a first love, soft romance. There’s less conflict to that. The conflict is, “Do we trust each other, are we willing to be vulnerable with our feelings?” But I’m a big fan of just conflict, and Alden brought a lot of conflict to the story.
IFP: You took part in Pitch Wars and #pitmad. How was it going through those two experiences and what were your takeaways from them?
MIM: Pitch Wars is really a robust thing, and #PitMad is just one day you throw pitches on twitter. So, they felt and function in a very different way for me. Pitch Wars, there was a deadline, which really lit a fire under me. I had this manuscript; I couldn’t get past blocks. I was like, one last hurrah, I’m going to revise it again for Pitch Wars. If it gets into Pitch Wars, then I’ll keep working on it. If it doesn’t, I’m going to trunk it and work on another project. So, it gave me something to work towards. Then I got in, which was wild. It wasn’t as competitive as it is now, but it was still fairly competitive.
Even though I had worked professionally as a writer my whole career, the Pitch Wars process was a very different type of writing and a very different type of feedback. Fiction is very close to your heart. Lindsey put me through some pretty significant changes that really tightened up the book. That experience really gave me a lot of resilience, and a lot of skills around revisions especially and learning how to take feedback.
We did the agent showcase. Nothing really came out of that. So, it also kind of was a lesson in the rejection after rejection that the publishing industry gets you. Then I did #PitMad and Erica, my agent, did respond. We had a great call. She needed me to revise it and resubmit it. I spent a four-week period chopping thirty thousand words off the end of the novel. I was on a work trip to Arizona at the time. Both flights I worked on it, in the hotel room after work I worked on it. I added the thirty thousand words back in the span of about two and a half weeks and gave it back to her. She signed me pretty quickly after that. That book has gone through some major revisions.
I think both those experiences were a lot of fun, #PitMad especially. Any pitch contest, and there’s a lot now. They’re really good at helping you learn how to communicate the stakes concisely. If you can’t do that, you have a big structural problem. Now I write pitches when I have an idea, before I write anything.
IFP: You mentioned you started with short stories. Did you ever take that further beyond the writing stage, and try to submit them someplace?
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MIM: Not really. I had done some romance stuff under a pen name, and mostly just kept things to myself for fun. I did poetry in college and had submitted to some literary journals, but that’s a whole different animal as well. I really hadn’t spent too much time in the traditional publishing trenches with short stories.
IFP: The speculative underpinnings of the novel are fascinating, from the use of genetically modified humans as medical stock, to the interaction of the suburb and city, which both function as separate entities but rely and depend on each other for so much. What process do you use when you’re building intricate worlds such as Gathos City?
MIM: I knew right away that there was a dynamic of haves and have nots; I knew I was dealing with a kind of a walled area that people couldn’t leave. On the high level those concepts were there, and then I tend to write really descriptive first drafts. A lot of what I do is a lot of sense and place. World building comes naturally out of that. What I struggle with is taxonomies, it just kills me. I’ve evolved into a writer who throws “T.K.” into a draft a thousand times and comes back and fixes taxonomies later. The names within systems trips me up as a writer, but if you ask me how something smells or what it looks like, I’m like there and I can do it. So, world building is sometimes fun for me, and sometimes a little bit of a struggle.
That world was really influenced by so many types of media I’ve enjoyed in my life. There’s a very popular anime, Cowboy Beebop, which I feel like people compare Firefly to now. It did a great job of showing other worlds and really quickly immersing you into kind of a setting where the world building only had a few moments to bring you in there. But a lot of it was gritty, worlds that were maybe futuristic, but not really.
Gathos and the Withers are not futuristic settings necessarily, not even steampunk. I feel like it’s almost as if you stopped everything in the 1960’s and let it degrade. And that was really intentional. So, it’s kind of a pastiche I guess of a lot of different things where I didn’t want it to be cyperpunk at all, which gave me a lot of room to play with and handwave some of the technology. If you asked me to draw you a ticker and tell you how it functions I can’t, and I want that to be the case so that readers are superimposing whatever they think that technology is.
IFP: Have you thought about revisiting this world at all? Or is it just going to be the one-off novel? It felt as if you left at a place where your world is facing massive changes with the way Gathos City and the Withers will be interacting in the near future.
MIM: You know, I never want to say never, but I have moved on to other projects to the extent that I think it would be hard to go back to that world. I did deliberately leave it open, not to leave room for a sequel, but because I developed as a writer and as a storyteller through being someone who wanted to take existing stories and see where they would go next. And I really wanted to leave a somewhat ambiguous ending so that young readers could write their own version of what’s going to happen next. I think that transformative works are really powerful. A best-case scenario to me is budding teen author thinks, “I’m gonna go on Archive of Our Own and write whatever happens next.” And that really was in the back of my mind truly, those creative fans. Take it and do whatever you want. It’s your story. I really believe that when a book is published, it doesn’t belong to the author anymore. Really no plans to revisit it, but I hope others do.
IFP: It’s great that you’re supportive of endeavors like AOW. There’s a lot of conversation around whether or not its beneficial for writers to be producing fan fiction. There are writers who say it’s terrible, and others who got their start there. Would you talk a little more about that?
MIM: Naomi Novik is one of the founders of the archive and such a renowned author. I’m very supportive of that. I mean, as a writer, we’re not supposed to read works that fans have produced around our stories. I wouldn’t engage in it. But knowing it was there would delight, knowing that people were watching the stories in the worlds that you’ve created.
IFP: Can you tell us what you are working on?
MIM: I’m working on another way project right now and I have one out on submission, but since that’s out on sub I’ll talk about my work in progress. It is set in a kind of alternate industrial revolution. It’s about a girl who graduates from a magic school boarding school where she’s lived her whole life and is placed in her first assignment, basically powering a power plant with her magic. Her magic is like electricity, so she’s essentially powering a rural power plant and bringing electricity to rural areas. She discovers that the magic that she believed to be her birthright may be toxic and causing a lot of problems with plants and the environment and people. So, it’s sort of the tale of this girl grappling with what she thought was good, might be bad, and her journey around that.
I’m a big fan of using speculative fiction to touch on things that are happening in our world. Not trying to be too heavy handed, although I think that there are people who do that really, really well. So, I didn’t want it to feel like an issue book. But I think that it’s still really relevant. The idea there are pristine, beautiful parts of our world that we are polluting and there’s the issue of the monopoly held on this technology and energy by the holders of the magic, and the idea that electricity should belong to the people. It shouldn’t be meted out by whoever’s in charge of it. I think it’s a lot more fun than Fragile Remedy, it’s kind of a rollicking road trip. There is a polyamorous relationship at the center of it, so it’s also got some romance and adventure and it was a lot of fun. I’m still in revisions. I actually need to buckle down and get it done so I can get it back over to my agent, but I’m, I’m enjoying the hell out of it.
IFP: What are you reading these days?
MIM: Right now I’m reading These Violent Delights (Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2020) by Chloe Gong. I adore Romeo and Juliet retellings and the historical setting is so vibrant and fascinating. I’ve had a really tough time focusing during my debut month and I’m looking forward to having more dedicated reading time soon.
About the Author
Maria Ingrande Mora is a graduate of the University of Florida, where she received her bachelor’s degree in English with a focus in creative writing. She is a marketing executive with over 18 years of experience building brand narratives, editorial strategies, and digital campaigns for clients across multiple industries.
She is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and is on the board of directors of Keep St. Pete Lit, a non-profit promoting literacy through art, education and events in Tampa Bay. A single mom, Ingrande Mora lives in St. Petersburg with her two middle schoolers and a small menagerie of rescue animals.
Fragile Remedy is her debut novel.
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” We use affiliate links and Patreon to pay our writers. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
