AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Laura R. Samotin Talks The Sins On Their Bones

Thanks for visiting Track of Words, where today I’m delighted to present this exclusive interview with author Laura R. Samotin, discussing her debut novel The Sins On Their Bones (which is out now from Random House Canada)! I jumped at the chance to read this book and chat to Laura, after Genoveva Dimova included it in her ‘12 Debuts To Look Forward To In 2024’ post last December, and I’m so glad I did – it’s a fantastic read, set in a fascinating fantasy world full of dark magic and complex, wounded characters. There’s so much to talk about with this book, so keep reading to find out more about the characters, the magic, Laura’s writing process, and loads more.

Here’s a quick synopsis to start us off, then let’s get straight into the interview!

Dimitri Alexeyev used to be the Tzar of Novo-Svitsevo. Now, he is merely a broken man, languishing in exile after losing a devastating civil war instigated by his estranged husband, Alexey Balakin. In hiding with what remains of his court, Dimitri and his spymaster, Vasily Sokolov, engineer a dangerous ruse. Vasily will sneak into Alexey’s court under a false identity to gather information, paving the way for the usurper’s downfall, while Dimitri finds a way to kill him for good.

Track of Words: To start things off, could you tell us a bit about The Sins On Their Bones and what readers can expect from it?

Laura R. Samotin: The Sins on Their Bones is an adult dark fantasy which pits two estranged husbands and a daring spymaster on opposite sides of a civil war. It’s set in a Jewish folklore-inspired reimagining of 19th century Eastern Europe, and if you’re a fan of Six of Crows and Captive Prince, hopefully it will give you the same vibes.

ToW: What can you tell us about the world in which this story is set, and the influences you drew upon in your world building?

LRS: I modeled the world of the book on Eastern Europe in the late 1800s, which is when my family was living in what was then Russia but which is now Lithuania and Poland. As Jews, they were driven from their homes because of antisemitic violence and forced conscription into the Russian imperial army around the turn of the century. I wanted to envision a world like the one my great-grandparents lived in, but without the antisemitism which kept them in poverty, on the outskirts of society, and in very real physical danger. The beauty of fantasy is that you can do just that – I kept the traditions, the architecture, the superstitions, and even some street names, but was able to think about how my family would have inhabited that world if they didn’t have to think about how their identities put them at risk.

ToW: You’ve got three viewpoint characters in this book, but it felt to me like a real ensemble story with a fully fleshed-out supporting cast. Could you talk a bit about creating that supporting cast, and bringing characters like Annika, Mischa and Ladushka to life?

LRS: This was one of the hardest parts of writing the book! It’s difficult to fully realize side characters in a novel, especially when there are so many of them – five is a relatively large ensemble cast. There’s just not a ton of room to give everyone their own unique roles. I’ve written about this elsewhere and it was a challenge as a writer but working through making the Court unique really helped me grow both technically and as a storyteller.

Laura’s post on Fantasy Book Cafe for Women in SF&F Month is well worth a read!

In earlier drafts, it was hard to give the characters separate identities and they all just felt like “friends.” The trick was thinking about each of them as their own people, with hopes, dreams, a past, fears, and unique habits and ways of thinking about the world. I also had to think about how Dimitri and Vasily would relate to their friends – everyone has the one friend who will give you the tough advice that you don’t want to hear (but need to), the one friend who will bring you food when you’re sick or sad, the one friend who will listen to you vent for hours and listen with a compassionate and non-judgmental ear. You go to different people for different things, and seek comfort from different people in different moments. That was what truly helped me to differentiate the characters from one another – thinking about how Dimitri and Vasily related to them as whole people who they’d known for years.

ToW: Could you tell us about the origin of this story – what sparked it off, and how you developed it from an idea into a plot?

LRS: This is a great question that I don’t honestly know the answer to! I get asked this all the time, and the best answer I have is that I wanted to write something really, really Jewish but which wasn’t about antisemitism or trauma, and something historical-feeling (but not exactly, given the whole Jewish angle). I remember talking to my cherished agent Hannah Ausbury about it and she gave me the go-ahead, and that’s when I started mulling over the idea. Dimitri came to me first, and the rest of the story cascaded from there.

ToW: There’s an intriguing and remarkably dark magic system at play in this book, which I understand is based on Jewish mythology and mysticism. How did you find the process of distilling these elements into a system that worked in the context of a novel?

LRS: It’s all based on Jewish myth, mysticism, and folklore, down to the talking head (iykyk). It was incredibly fun and also personally meaningful for me to do the research into what Ashkenazi Jews in pre-Reformation Judaism would have thought and believed – magic spells, amulets, and the like were much more common before Judaism shed a lot of pagan elements to be more acceptable to mainstream Christians in an attempt to deflect antisemitism. I read a lot of textbooks about folktales and magic spells, and took the elements that I loved the most and wove them into a magic system. Given that this was stuff that my ancestors actually did and believed, it wasn’t that hard to piece it back together in a way that’s (hopefully) coherent.

ToW: I found this to be a particularly emotional story, with essentially every character broken or damaged in some way, whether physically or otherwise. What is it that draws you to writing about this sort of character?

LRS: As a reader, I’ve always been drawn to cathartic stories centered around healing – and in order to heal, first you need to be broken. I think that every person in the world is damaged in some way (although hopefully not in the “my ex-husband came back from the dead and then deposed me” way) and I’ve always connected the most with books and characters who remind me that there’s always hope in the darkness, and that it’s possible to mend. I want to offer readers catharsis, and hopefully remind them that whatever they’re struggling with, they’re not alone. Words can be powerful, and I hope that mine can offer some solace to the people who read The Sins On Their Bones, even a little.

I love this incredible papercraft art by Rosie Fowinkle (click the image to expand) – there’s more beautiful TSOTB-inspired art on Laura’s website

ToW: I thought it was interesting how important closeness was to these characters, in both an emotional and physical sense – there’s a physicality that comes through across multiple characters where they take comfort from each other’s presence, whether romantically or platonically. Was that something you intentionally wanted to include?

LRS: This was something that came naturally to me as I wrote the book! These characters just always wanted to cuddle, and I think there’s something very human about that impulse. Everything has been ripped from them – all they have left are each other. They literally cling to each other throughout the story. I also think it comes through in the novel because of my experience with the prevalence of platonic touch in queer communities, which I think is a beautiful expression of human connection.

ToW: I read in another interview that you wrote your first draft of this in 19 hours, which is some achievement! I’d love to know a bit more about your general writing process – is that your normal approach to writing, to (incredibly) quickly get a draft done and then revise over time? And how do you maintain that sort of creative concentration for long stretches?

LRS: Knowing what I know now about carpal tunnel syndrome, I definitely shouldn’t have done that! Do not advise!!

But on a more serious note, I wrote the first draft of The Sins On Their Bones while I was incredibly ill. I talk about this in my author’s note in the back of the book, but because of the pandemic and how sick I was, I was basically stuck at home, stewing in a lot of really bad feelings. Dimitri as a character came to me at the right time, and I worked out a lot of very complex emotions while writing his story.

19 hours is probably a record for me, but I do write quickly – stories come to me pretty fully realized, and I describe my process as basically watching the movie my mind plays for me and transcribing what I “see.” But this comes only after a ton of brainstorming, daydreaming, writing snippets, making Pinterest boards, listening to music, and other activities that help me get to know my characters, their world, and the story they want to tell me. Drafting is just about the last thing I do.

And as to how I maintain that sort of creative concentration for long stretches – I think it’s just that I really fall in love with my characters, and I feel compelled to get their story onto the page. But a lot of tea and some good ASMR also always helps!

ToW: Once you had your first draft, how did you find the process of redrafting, and pulling together the book’s themes over multiple iterations?

LRS: This is my favorite part! I’m Jewish, so of course I liken this to garlic. You have to crack the outer layer and then peel off the papery skins, and only then do you get to the actual good stuff inside. It’s a process, but a very worthwhile one. My editor at RHCA, Amanda Ferreria, is an absolute genius of an editor and truly has a superpower when it comes to seeing into the heart of a story. Every time we spoke and each time I revised the draft, I got a little bit closer to the actual story I was meant to tell, and it was exhilarating.

ToW: Looking back now that the book is finished, how do you feel knowing that your debut novel is about to hit the shelves?

LRS: Excited but also terrified! I think that for every author, publishing a book is a uniquely vulnerable experience – you spend so long in isolation creating this world, and now everyone else gets to live in it. The story then belongs to the readers, which is every author’s dream, but which also comes with its own anxieties about whether the story is good enough. But I’m already getting lovely messages from readers about staying up all night reading the book, and I can tell you that when I was eight years old and dreaming of being an author, I never thought that someone would be giving up sleep (the most important thing in the world) to read my worlds. It’s humbling and inspiring.

ToW: To finish off, what can you tell us about what you’re working on now, or what you’ve got coming out next?

LRS: The sequel to The Sins On Their Bones comes out in May 2025, so I’m hard at work editing that at the moment. I’m also lucky enough to be making my adult horror debut with Titan Books – my gay Jewish dark academia horror The Way It Haunted Him will be hitting shelves in 2026, with another standalone horror the following year. And I write light and fluffy stuff too! My adult romance debut with my best friend – the wildly talented Ben Alderson, whose Realm of Fey series is coming out from Angry Robot at the end of this year – is The Actor and His Secret, which comes out in July. I’m so lucky to have so many projects in the works (there are even more I can’t talk about yet!) and I can’t wait to reach even more readers across multiple genres.

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Laura R. Samotin has a PhD in international relations from Columbia University and enjoys using her academic background on military tactics, power politics, and leadership to enliven and inform her creative writing. Her YA and adult fiction is grounded in Jewish myth, mysticism, and her Eastern European Jewish heritage.

Find out more at Laura’s website.

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Thanks so much to Laura for taking the time to chat to me for this interview, and for such a great book! If this has piqued your interest at all (and I really hope it has), I really can’t recommend The Sins On Their Bones enough – I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

The Sins On Their Bones is out now – check out the links below to order* your copy: