Jessica Mary Best is the author of Stars, Hide Your Fires. Stars, Hide Your Fires follows Cass who is an expert thief from a minor moon. The novel explores secrets, space, and adventure. YEM was able to speak with Jessica about where the inspiration for her book came from, writing a sci-fi book, and writing a book set in space.
Young Entrainment Mag: When did you first know that you wanted to be a writer?
Jessica Mary Best: I’ve been making up stories for about as long as I’ve known that was an option. I definitely think the realization that I could write for a living had crystallized by the time I was in fourth or fifth grade, and I didn’t really waver from there. In high school and college, I thought I wanted to write creative nonfiction—funny little essays, that kind of thing. Then I started writing fanfiction, which somehow became scripting and producing an original audio fiction series called The Strange Case of Starship Iris. From there, I’ve gotten pretty serious about writing fully voiced audio dramas.
YEM: What made you decide to finally write your debut novel Stars, Hide Your Fires?
Jessica: I wanted to see if I could do it! I’d written a novel manuscript before but that story had started out as this other project, which was 185,000 words (a standard YA novel is closer to 75,000) so the process there mostly involved shortening and cutting stuff. This was the first time I actually sat down and typed out a completed, novel-length story.
YEM: Where did the inspiration for your book come from?
Jessica: This may be a copout, but from all over the place! I had written a mystery before, in that the first season of my fiction podcast The Strange Case of Starship Iris features characters trying to get to the bottom of an opaque and complicated situation. (It was even a mystery in space!) So that sort of genre mashup felt very comfortable. As far as specific inspirations, there’s a scene at the ball where a character talks about how her dress is made from spider silk; my mom weaves and sews and I’m pretty sure she was the one who had—probably years ago—shared with me an article about this pretty wild collaboration in 2009 where they actually did make an 11-foot by 4-foot pieces of cloth woven from spider silk.
YEM: What did you learn about yourself during the process of writing Stars, Hide Your Fires?
Jessica: I learned that when I’m writing on a deadline, I have a tendency, if I don’t know what I’m doing, to veer into making jokes, even in scenes where that isn’t the way to hit that narrative beat. My editor really rescued the ending of the book from being a farce. I also learned that I could, in fact, sit down and write a novel, which was exciting.
YEM: What is your writing process like?
Jessica: When I’m working on a prose writing project, I try to sit down every day and write until I hit about a thousand words. With Stars, Hide Your Fires, I would read what I’d written every night to my parents (I moved in with them during the worst of Covid) and then sometimes tweak it according to their feedback. I find it hard to keep momentum if I don’t share a work in progress with someone, and I’m never confident in a section until I’ve run it by at least one trusted person.
YEM: What drew you to wanting to write a sci-fi book?
Jessica: I think writing sci-fi gives you a lot of fun space to do worldbuilding; you get to decide what elements of life now persist in your world and where you can let your imagination roam. That sense of possibility is really exciting to me. The world of Stars, Hide Your Fires is by no means a utopia, but I really enjoyed creating a society where it is always perfectly safe and accepted to have a wide variety of sexual/romantic orientations and gender expression.
YEM: Has space been something you always wanted to set something you wrote in?
Jessica: Like I said, my audio drama The Strange Case of Starship Iris is also set in space. Making up planets is a good time and I also appreciate space as a metaphor—what do you do with the profound emptiness out there between places where any life can exist?
YEM: What do you hope your readers can take away from Stars, Hide Your Fires?
Jessica: I hope they enjoy the characters and the adventure, and if it helps someone to take in a story where being queer is 100% accepted, or if they get something from reading a story that has some criticism for the ruling class, that is also very cool.
YEM: Do you have any advice for someone who might want to be a writer one day?
Jessica: My main advice is: write! Especially when you’re still refining your style, the most important thing you can do is to find concepts that can sustain your enthusiasm, and then buckle down and keep at it. When I was a teenager, and even in college, I felt a lot of shame about wanting to write fluffy queer romance and genre fiction, so I mostly didn’t do that. I could’ve spent that whole time working on ideas that actually interested me, and then I would’ve had all this additional practice. The only way you can learn to write is by doing it, and the only way you can learn how to end a story is by writing all the way until the end.
YEM: What is your favorite part of writing for a young adult audience?
Jessica: I think people don’t give young folks nearly enough credit for what they understand and how deeply they care about the world. It’s tremendously fun to try to write the kind of book I wish I’d had access to when I actually was a teen.
YEM: Is there a scene or quote from Stars, Hide Your Fires that is your favorite?
Jessica: Yes, but it’s a spoiler! Apart from that, I really enjoyed writing the scene where Cass and Amaris dance together at the ball. They’re doing this traditionally romantic activity while hiding things from each other and then they have kind of a little verbal spar. It felt a little cinematic to me, which almost never happens; I’m not a very visual thinker.
YEM: Do you have plans to write more books in your future?
Jessica: Absolutely! I’m actually working on a new sci-fi YA idea right now.
