This is part of Alaska Authors, an occasional series about authors and other literary figures with ties to the 49th state.
“I always had an idea in the back of my head, ever since I was a kid, that I would write a five-book fantasy series,” said Eagle River author Kellie Doherty, who is now four books into her fantasy pentalogy “The Broken Chronicles.”
The standalone novels in the series each feature a lead character who embarks on dangerous travels through a complex world Doherty assembled from her imagination. In the now-in-progress final volume, however, the quartet will come together.
“I got to really explore the different races that I created, and different magic systems that I have,” Doherty said of the books published to date, explaining that each volume has one viewpoint. “In the fifth, it’s going to be a four-point-of-view story. And it is challenging.”
On her webpage, Doherty describes herself as “Queer author. Book nerd. Tea Drinker.” Over the past decade, she’s been making a name for herself in the LGBTQ+ fantasy and science fiction world with books that have attracted national attention and either won or been nominated for numerous awards.
Doherty said the urge to write in these genres dates back to a childhood spent watching Digimon and Pokemon.
“I wanted to continue being in that world, and I wanted to continue playing with those characters,” she explained. So, at around age 12, “I started writing fan fiction. That’s where I really started writing.”
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Doherty grew up in Anchorage and was homeschooled during her grade school and middle school years. “I had my whole childhood up here in Alaska, and it was just really lovely.”
She said she recognized at a young age that she was bisexual, and that her parents and friends were always supportive of her. However, while attending high school at Anchorage Christian Schools, now Mountain City Christian Academy, the conservative climate led her to keep her identity under wraps.
“I had a couple of friends who did come out, and they were unfortunately really shunned and treated not as well as they would have liked to be treated. So I ended up just not talking about it at all until I was 19 or 20.”
By that age she was in college. In 2011, Doherty received her undergraduate degree in English literature with a creative writing minor from the University of Alaska Anchorage. Then she went into freelance editing, something she still does. But what she really wanted was a job in publishing. “That’s why I decided to go to Portland State University.”
Doherty described that school’s highly regarded master’s program in book publishing as “absolutely amazing.” Students, she said, are taught marketing, editorial, administrative, sales and other aspects of the industry. “You also get to be involved in Ooligan Press,” she added. “You get to use all of the things that you learned in class as a publishing professional. But it’s all run by students.”
Doherty hoped her degree would lead to a publishing career in Portland, but after struggling in the city’s competitive professional environment, she returned to Alaska in 2017 and took a state job.
She kept applying with publishers, however, and eventually found a position as a marketing associate with BenBella Books. “I’m in a job where I actually get to use my degree,” she said, adding that she’s found marketing “much more fun than I ever could have imagined.”
Best of all for Doherty, who enjoys the outdoors, she’s able to work remotely. “I love Alaska,” she said, “I get to stay in Alaska, but I still get to do a job that I really love.”
Doherty kept writing all through school and beyond. While at UAA, she had joined a writing group, where she presented a short story titled “Silence.” The enjoyment she found creating the story and its setting left her wanting to “play in that world longer.” This led to “Finding Hekate” and “Losing Hold,” her first two novels, which make up “The Cicatrix Duology.”
The story centers around Mia Foley, the commander of a spaceship, who Doherty describes as a “morally gray” individual. “She’s not someone who you would normally root for,” she said. “She’s done a lot of bad things in her life in order to survive.”
Doherty initially intended to tell the story in just one book but ultimately expanded it to better explore the plot, in which Mia is pursued by beings known as Acedian hunters, and has to decide how to respond.
“I wanted to find a way to make (Mia) redeemable,” Doherty said. “And it is a redemption arc. The first book is her trying to run away, trying to escape, trying to protect her crew and make the right choices. And the second book is the ramifications of that and how her found family is now going to protect her.”
Both books drew nominations for nationwide awards, including the 2017 Golden Crown Literary Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Meanwhile, Doherty was plowing into her “Broken Chronicles” books, which have also garnered award nominations. The second volume, “Sunkissed Feathers & Severed Ties,” received the 2017 Rainbow Award in the Fantasy, Lesbian category.
“Each book has its own main characters and their separate storyline,” Doherty said. “I wanted to showcase each main character. Showcase their race, their magic ability, their crafting. I thought it would be fun to have a baseline and then expand on it, depending on which character you’re going to. And then each character also has their own type of adventure as well, which is really fun. And then for the fifth one, we’ll bring them all together.”
Accomplishing this, she added, has “proven a little bit more difficult just because I want to make sure I’m shining a light on each of the characters well enough. But it has been a really fun and interesting challenge to reset my mindset for each of the characters.”
The other major challenge, she added, was creating the series’ setting. “I had to start with the whole world and figuring out the people who lived in it, the continents, the social structures, the magic systems, the animals that lived in it. So I created the whole world before I even started writing the books.”
She added, however, that “world building is the most fun ever.”
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Although the books have plots far beyond their characters’ sexuality, Doherty does weave this aspect into their stories. “I write queer characters, because I am part of the queer community,” she said. “I want to celebrate our community. Especially now with how the political climate is. I just want to make sure that queer people know that it’s OK to be who we are. And so it’s really lovely to be recognized for that too.”
As she prepares to wrap up “Broken Chronicles,” Doherty is already developing new ideas for future works. “One of them has a science fantasy necromancer vibe,” she said, while the other “is more of a cozy fantasy soup-inspired one.”
After all her work on the “The Broken Chronicles,” she concluded, “it’s going to be so weird to not be in my fantasy world because I’ve been in it for so long.” But, she added, “I love being an author because you get to explore so many cool worlds and you get to create so many fun characters.”