By E.L. Deards
I wrote ‘The Lavender Blade’ for fun.
That shouldn’t feel like a confession, but it kind of does. I didn’t write it to make a grand point or unpack a personal trauma or decode the human condition—I wrote it because it made me laugh, because I loved the characters, and because I was having a good time.
It turns out that’s enough. More than enough, actually.
I’ve always used writing and humor to cope. I am autistic, and for as long as I can remember, jokes have been how I connect with people. They’re how I know someone’s having fun, how I know I’ve made them feel something good. Writing came a little later, but it quickly became the same kind of lifeline—my way of figuring people out, of trying to understand the world. It’s always been easier for me to connect with fictional characters than with real ones.
That doesn’t mean I hide in my writing. It means it’s the place where I can be clearest. Where I can play, explore, be messy, be smart, be weird—and have it all make sense. Humor has always been how I move through difficult things. Writing is how I survive them.
So when I say ‘The Lavender Blade’ was fun to write, I don’t mean it was light or silly or throwaway. I mean it felt like mine in a way that nothing else ever has.
It’s a strange little book. Satirical, emotional, chaotic. There’s a con-artist exorcist named Colton who scams rich people with salt and herbs, and a haunted nobleman named Lucian who hires him for a scheme that immediately spirals into something ridiculous and tender and doomed. There are spirits. There’s romance. There are costumes, lies, arguments in candlelit stairwells. It’s all deeply unnecessary and, somehow, very sincere.
Colton is, in many ways, me. He’s dark and broody on the outside, but actually quite kind, emotionally resilient, and sarcastic to a fault. Lucian is my other half, his opposite—polished, charming, utterly ridiculous—and yet just as damaged underneath it all. I adore them both, and writing their story gave me joy in a way that nothing else really had before. They feel real to me in the best, most unruly way.
They also let me play with genre in the way I’ve always wanted to. The Lavender Blade pokes fun at gothic drama, but it also loves it. It leans into theatricality, camp, and earnest emotion without shame. That felt radical to me—getting to write a story that’s not trying to prove anything. Just doing what it wants, because it can.
There’s a kind of pressure sometimes—spoken or not—for marginalized writers to write something important. To be educational, moving, correct. And those stories matter. I read them, I love them, I learn from them. But so do the messy, chaotic, joyful ones. So do the books that don’t ask permission to be weird or funny or romantic or genre-bending. I’m a somewhat gender non-conforming, neurodivergent, queer woman. That’s baked into how I see the world, and of course it shows up in my writing. But it doesn’t have to be the point.
Sometimes the point is that joy is enough.
I’m a veterinarian by day, which means long hours, hard conversations, and a lot of responsibility. Writing is the thing I come home to. It’s where I put the parts of myself that don’t fit neatly into a clinical setting. It’s the way I wind down, reset, reconnect. And this book—this joyful, chaotic, ridiculous book—was the most connected I’ve felt to my writing in years.
It’s also the first time I didn’t try to hide the funny parts. The first time I trusted myself to be all of it—wry, weird, sad, affectionate, dramatic, unfiltered—and let the story be shaped by that voice. The result is a novel that sounds like me, more than anything else I’ve written. I didn’t write it to impress anyone. I wrote it to delight myself.
But the beautiful thing is, that’s the book people seem to connect with most.
There’s something powerful about that. Not because it’s a lesson, or a revelation. But because it means I can do it again.
I can write books that make me happy, and know they might make other people happy too. I can stop sanding the edges off my voice to fit into a version of “literary” that was never really for me in the first place. I can write sharp, emotional, genre-warping nonsense and call it art—because it is.
And because I want to.
E.L. Deards is a UK-based veterinarian, novelist, and unapologetic lover of classical literature, dark humor, cats, and emotionally complex narratives. Her upcoming novel, ‘The Lavender Blade’ (July 2025), explores the strange and sublime world of con artist exorcists and the demons they conjure—both literal and metaphorical. She can often be found pretending to be a gay wizard on playstation, writing emotionally devastating dialogue, or talking about surgery. You can follow her on Instagram and X (Twitter).
ABOUT THE BOOK: What happens when a successful con becomes an unexpected reality? Colton and Lucian have a lot in common: both late-twenties, clever, have struggled with substance abuse, and find themselves penniless in Valencia. When Lucian discovers Colton’s fake exorcism con, he devises a scheme to turn that con into a business that can sustain them both. The work is successful, despite unsavory characters they meet along the way: from a woman who murdered her own staff member to a man who pretends to murder Lucian. They even manage to continue their professional relationship while venturing into more personal, romantic possibilities. But when a real, powerful demon possesses Lucian, will they have what it takes to vanquish it to save their relationship—and Lucian’s life?
