Erin Cotter

Erin Cotter writes young adult fiction. Originally from Buffalo, New York, she currently calls Austin home. When not writing she spends time with her partner and pets, eating tacos, and searching for Golden-cheeked Warblers in the Texas Hill Country.

Cotter's new novel is A Dangerous Bargain.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

For my book, I want the title to both hint at the action to come and also serve as a bit of a metaphor for what the book explores thematically. At first, my book was titled The Angel’s Bargain, but I didn’t love that title because while the book is about bargaining with angels for magic, it’s also about the cost of such magic, and what someone is willing to give up for greatness. There’s a sense of unease to the divine magic in my story, a sense that this power, while relied on heavily by the Renaissance artists in their workshops, is a sinister, ticking bomb with an agenda of its own. A Dangerous Bargain obviously points to that theme much more effectively than The Angel’s Bargain.

What's in a name?

The protagonist is called Virgil, and in all the books I’ve written, I’ve never felt more strongly about a character’s name before. The name isn’t historically accurate to 1400s Florence so I had to create a backstory for why Virgil calls himself this. Virgil chooses this name because he likes the thought of being someone who can lead people through darkness—a direct nod to the fact that the famous Roman poet Virgil is Dante’s guide through hell in The Divine Comedy. A Dangerous Bargain explores some heavy topics such as forgiveness, guilt, and reckoning with the cost of bad decisions, so Virgil himself goes on a personal journey through his own darkness and emerges on the other side knowing he’s worthy of love and self-kindness.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage self wouldn’t be surprised by A Dangerous Bargain. This book is the most teenage me coded story I’ve written so far. I loved dark, historical leaning tales, and Sabriel by Garth Nix was and still is one of my favorite books. The lush Renaissance setting, the grounded, sinister magic, and the romance between pricky self-sabotaging Virgil and annoying, flirtatious Leonardo would’ve been cat nip to me at seventeen! The only aspect of this story that would surprise teenage me is the queer element. There were virtually zero queer YA books on shelves when I was a teen, and I wish so much that wasn’t the case.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Sticking the landing for this book was the hardest part of the entire writing process. I knew the exact final image I wanted to end on. Without spoiling anything, I wanted Virgil’s journey out of the darkness to symbolize something bigger than his own struggles but I must’ve rewritten the ending three times before I figure out what that bigger thing was and how to get there. I hope readers love the way everything ties together in the end—I know I do even though it took me a long time to get there!

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

My characters, especially, my protagonists, carry large parts of myself in them. I wrote A Dangerous Bargain during a time in my life when I struggling with a lot of personal guilt and regret, and I think Virgil is clearly a posterchild for that. When I sit down to create a new story, of course I want to create a story readers enjoy, but I also sit down to write to explore something that’s nagging me in my own life. Maybe it’s a form of therapy, I’m not sure!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Contemporary technology had a very large influence on A Dangerous Bargain: the magic was inspired by AI. I was sitting in the airport traveling to promote my second book when I learned from the Atlantic LibGen database that my book had already been pirated to train AI less than two weeks after its release. I was angry, but also heartbroken. What’s the point of writing a book without doing any of the labour of it? How could anyone call themselves an artist when they were skipping the creative process? I began to wonder if bygone artists would be as pissed about this as I was, and this turned into imagining what an age of AI would’ve looked like during the Italian Renaissance—one of my favourite time periods—and the magic of A Dangerous Bargain emerged.

Visit Erin Cotter's website.

Writers Read: Erin Cotter.

The Page 69 Test: A Dangerous Bargain.

My Book, The Movie: A Dangerous Bargain.

--Marshal Zeringue