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An Interview with Alli Temple

As Halloween approaches, we're ready to curl up with a cup of tea and an exciting fantasy — and Alli Temple has the perfect book for us! Read on to learn about her brand-new novel, Only Mostly Dead, including the slightly somber inspiration for Afterlife Incorporated, why she decided to portray a genderless grim reaper, and what might be next for the characters!


Only Mostly Dead is out now!


 

Hi, Alli! First of all, could you introduce yourself?


Hi! I live in Toronto, Canada. I’ve been publishing queer romance and fantasy since 2018. When I’m not writing, I spend time assembling a super cute team of rescue pets, watching Korean TV dramas, and traveling anywhere that has good food.



Tell us about your urban fantasy, Only Mostly Dead, and what inspired you to write it.


Only Mostly Dead is a story about Ember, a recently deceased life coach who discovers the business of dying isn’t as straightforward as she thought it would be. Stuck between the living world and the afterlife, her only ally is Kelly, an unemployed grim reaper who would rather play video games than help an annoying ghost find eternal peace.


The idea for Only Mostly Dead sprouted in the summer of 2021. I was on a writing weekend with friends when I got the news a family friend had passed away. The weekend took a bit of a sad turn after that, and late one night we got talking about how busy Death must have been these last few years, what with Covid and the general everything going on in the world. That lead to some jokes about dead people getting left behind by overworked grim reapers, and Only Mostly Dead was born.


The other piece that heavily influenced my original plan for Only Mostly Dead was my grandmother’s passing in 2018. She was one of the first people I knew who chose medical assistance in dying (or MAID), which had become legal in Canada in 2016. It was a difficult time for my family, as any loved one’s death would be, but the most surreal detail about MAID is that death becomes a scheduled thing. You can pencil it into your calendar, just like a dentist appointment. When people ask how your grandmother is doing, you can say “Okay. She’s going to die on Tuesday at 2 pm.” It’s really weird, but lends itself to the scheduling mix up that kicks off Only Mostly Dead’s plot.



What was the process behind building this strong urban fantasy setting and were there any challenges? Is this place inspired by any other worlds or stories, real or fictional?


A big part of Only Mostly Dead is set here in Toronto, where I live, which helped this unreal world feel more real. I used lots of landmarks and neighbourhoods I was familiar with to give Ember’s death some life. I think it also helps provide contrast when weird things start happening. Is it a riot started by overwrought sports fans, or are they being chased by evil wraiths? Did the fire start with a simple candle tipping over, or was there something more sinister taking place?


The challenge with writing urban fantasy…or any kind of fantasy…is that as the author anything is possible. Are reapers all powerful? Great! But if that’s the case, and they have no weaknesses, where’s the narrative tension? It’s fun to make the world feel bigger and more expansive than the one we live in, but at some point you have to commit to some limitations and nail down the details.



What drew you to themes of the afterlife and the well-known figure of the Grim Reaper in particular?


I think it’s pretty clear we’ve all been going through some stuff these last few years. Particularly in the pandemic times, it was easy to dwell on death and what happens next…if anything. 2021 was also the year Netflix released Mike Flanagan’s show Midnight Mass. There’s this beautiful scene in episode IV where Kate Siegel and Zach Gilford have a long talk about their beliefs around death and what it is. It’s so moving and says so much about how each sees the world.


Originally, Kelly was supposed to be a psychic, not a reaper. But then I was watching the Korean drama Tomorrow, which centres around a team of reapers who work for the afterlife suicide prevention team. It’s odd to think of reapers being responsible for preventing death rather than facilitating it, but in this case, the afterlife had an overcrowding issue and needed to prevent as many deaths as they could until they were able to sort out the space problem. I thought the idea of the afterlife as being a bureaucratic entity that struggles with the same things human businesses do was really funny and had a lot of potential for storytelling, and that was the genesis of Afterlife Incorporated.



Can you tell us a little bit about your characters? Which, if any, did you identify with most and why?


Ember definitely inherited my pragmatism. She’s chosen to die through MAID. My editor originally told me she was almost too practical and that I needed to show a little more of her sense of grief about the things and people she left behind in her life. Before she got sick, she was an online life coach and content creator, and even in death, she’s always trying to fix other people’s lives and situations.


Kelly is an old soul. Literally. They’re thousands of years old. They think they’ve seen it all and understand everything there is to know about humanity, even though they have no desire to participate in it. But also, they like human conveniences like smart phones and late night pizza.


I like writing ensemble casts, so the book also contains a pair of psychics, reapers with various degrees of job dissatisfaction, and big orange cat named Carrot Stick!



The book features lots of queer representation, including lesbian and genderless characters. Why was it important to you to include these aspects?


I love writing queer characters in books like this where their queerness isn’t the point. Queer people exist. They live and die. They have jobs and partners and insecurities. So Ember being a lesbian doesn’t really inform the story any more than her having red hair does, but I still think that kind of normalized representation is important in fiction.


On the other hand, Kelly being genderless was always a key part of the story. The idea of reapers subscribing to a human gender binary seemed silly to me from the outset. At the same time, it was also important, that while some of the characters struggle with the right pronouns to use for someone who genuinely doesn’t care about pronouns, that none of them questioned Kelly’s right not to care, just like it’s important to accept an actual person’s pronouns rather than question them based on your own beliefs.



Did you find any challenges while writing this book and/or preparing for publication? How did you overcome them, if at all?


The thing I always struggle with in my books is knowing when to stop. I firmly believe this is a skill anyone who wants to publish and continue to publish needs to learn. You can tweak and tweak forever, or keep looking for ways to grow your worldbuilding, and it feels like progress, but at some point you have to accept that the book will never be perfect and there will always be things that could be changed or enhanced. Recognizing the point when a book is good enough without being perfect is really hard, especially in speculative fiction when there are always more options to choose from and choices to make. In the end though, I’m really happy with where Only Mostly Dead finished up and I’m excited to write more books in this world.



We’d love to know what you have planned for the next book in the Afterlife Incorporated series! Can we get any hints?


The next book is called Hate To Haunt You. I’m writing it now and it should be out by next summer. Ember and Kelly are off on new adventures, exploring the unknown parts of Afterlife and maybe…just maybe…dipping their toes in a sweetly awkward human/reaper love story.



Have any shows, movies, books, or games influenced your own work at all?


Lots! I mentioned Midnight Mass and Tomorrow above. The bureaucracy of Afterlife also reminds me of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where everything must be filled out in triplicate, lost, then filled out again. Ember’s coaching business definitely draws heavily from coaches you see on YouTube and Tiktok. And I think when you add Jupiter and X to the mix, it also starts to give Scooby Gang vibes a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer!



You are also the author of The Pirate & Her Princess series. Tell us a little about these books!


The Pirate & Her Princess was my first foray into queer fantasy. It started out as a joke on Twitter about how The Princess Bride (only the best movie ever) would have been much shorter if there had been more lesbians in it. Then the series took over my life, so maybe I was wrong about that part.


Princess Georgina lives in the oppressive country of Redmere. It’s authoritarian and very heteronormative. When she’s engaged against her will to wicked Prince Beverly, she thinks her life is over. But then things get even more complicated when she’s kidnapped by the legendary pirate captain Cinder, whose secrets include ties to Georgina’s own past.

I like to tell people The Pirate & Her Princess is a low-heat, high-adventure sapphic pirate fantasy. It’s got lesbian and non-binary rep, an epic love story, sword fights, and evil villains. You genuinely cannot go wrong with lesbian pirates.



If you could give any advice to authors set to make their debut, what would it be?


Publishing your debut novel is a huge achievement and is something new authors should feel incredibly proud of. But it also won’t make or break your career, so don’t put too much pressure on it. The key to career longevity is to keep publishing, so if your debut doesn’t sell as many books as you might have imagined or if Netflix isn’t breaking down your door offering you a production deal, it’s not a failure. Keep writing and keep learning. Talk to other authors in your niche, consume media of all kinds, go to bookish events, and start writing the next book.



Our podcast focuses on media we’re currently loving. Are there any books, shows, movies, or games you’re enjoying at the moment? Any recommendations for our audience? Bonus points if it includes sapphics!


A couple years ago, my brain decided we only want to watch TV in Korean now. Don’t ask. I’m just here for the dopamine. My favourite K-dramas include The Good-Bad Mother, Alchemy of Souls, and Mr. Queen. It’s hard to find good queer rep in mainstream K-dramas unfortunately because South Korea is a pretty socially conservative country, but Mr. Queen has some fun bisexual rep in a gender bending kind of way.


In English-language media, I love the game show Taskmaster. The original UK version makes pretty good efforts to diversify the contestant panels and regularly features queer women and non-binary contestants. For reading, my last few recommended reads were Madison Square Murders by CS Poe, Dread Nation by Justina Ireland, and The Hex Next Door by Lou Wilham.



About Alli


Allison lives in Toronto with her very patient husband and the world’s cutest team of rescue pets. She tries to split her time between writing, exploring Toronto’s parks, and traveling anywhere that has good wine. Tragically, this leaves no time to clean the house. Keep up with Alli on her website: allisontemple.com.





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