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Penn Cole on Glow of the Everflame
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A gap on the shelf and a slow burn overdueBefore she drafted a single scene, Cole had identified a specific absence in the books she had grown up loving. Her ambition for the series was not to subvert romantasy convention but to fill what she saw as a real shortage of stories that took fierce women and epic adventure seriously alongside the love story.
I grew up reading romantasy and craving books about fierce women going on epic adventures while also having these beautiful love stories, so I knew I wanted to write something similar that really centered women and the many ways and places they find their strength.
The romantic architecture she wanted was also precise. She was not after a general enemies-to-lovers arc but a particular sustained tension: the charged pause before any feeling is admitted. Of the four books in the series, Glow is the volume where that suspended pull is most fully in force.
As part of a generation of women raised on Matthew Macfadyen’s hand flex in Pride & Prejudice, I really wanted to write a slow (slowww!) burn, enemies-to-lovers romance focused on that amazing period when the love interests are inexplicably drawn together but refuse to give into it. I adore a longing glance across a room, the not-so-accidental brush of a hand, all those moments that have us giggling and kicking our feet.
The political stakes she built into the world were not decorative. Cole has described being genuinely moved by questions of systemic injustice and colonial legacy, and her goal was to embed those questions in a fantasy setting that would lower a reader’s defenses rather than raise them.
I was also very moved by real-world issues such as censorship of literature, the generational effects of colonialism and systemic injustice, the role that violence plays in a fight for equality, and what obligation those of us born with a lot of privilege have to dismantle the systems that unfairly benefit us.
How she wrote it
Sixty thousand words scrapped, one book becomes twoThe book that became Glow of the Everflame was not planned as book two. Cole was nearly 60,000 words into what she thought would open the series when she recognized that readers needed to witness the world her protagonist came from before they could care about her reasons for leaving it. The decision cost her a completed draft and required building an entirely new opening book from scratch.
So, nearly 60,000 words in, I decided to reset. What I had written became book two, and I added a new book one exploring Diem’s life in her village and all the reasons she and her people are ready for war.
Cole’s move from Texas to Paris left a visible mark on the book’s geography. The nine realms of Emarion, each with its own government, architecture, and value system, are Glow‘s most conspicuous expansion over its predecessor, and their design came directly from observing how quickly European borders can separate entirely different ways of organizing a society.
As an American living in Europe, I was really inspired by how different each country here is, and how a short drive over a border can expose you to entirely new languages, architecture, forms of government, cultural values, and uses of wealth. I wanted to replicate that in the nine realms of Emarion, with each one having its own very distinct culture shaped by its history and values.
She pre-wrote all three books before publishing the first and released them in rapid succession across 2023. But the decision to release Glow at all was not easy: the warmth readers had given the first book had become its own kind of pressure, and she came close to pulling the manuscript entirely before it went live.
I actually almost deleted the book just before I published it, because I was so afraid that it would fall flat and disappoint readers after my first book had been so warmly received. I put a lot of pressure on myself to get better with every book I write, and although that can be a great motivator to always be learning and improving my craft, it also requires having faith in myself to do big, scary things!
Her drafting method runs counter to the advice most writing guides give about keeping momentum by pushing forward. For Cole, a sentence that feels wrong in the previous chapter makes the next chapter impossible to begin, so she has built that backward pressure into her daily routine rather than trying to override it.
I’m really big on editing as I draft. I know some people discourage this, but it’s super helpful for me because I struggle to focus on a new section if I think the previous section isn’t right. I always start my drafting days by re-reading the previous chapter and making edits as needed before moving on to draft the next chapter.
The personal thread
The character she loves writing mostTaran, who makes his first appearance in Glow, is the character Cole has spoken about with the most evident affection. He arrives as comic relief, but she built a specific kind of concealed damage underneath that surface energy, a pattern she clearly finds worth returning to across the series.
I really love writing Taran, who is a character we get to know beginning in Glow of the Everflame. I like to describe him as a himbo golden retriever—not the brightest bulb in the box, but a heart of gold and the most loyal friend you could ever want! He is always laughing, always grinning, and absolutely always cracking inappropriate jokes, but as with many people who always put on a happy face, there’s a lot of hurt and brokenness buried beneath the surface.
That pairing of relentless warmth and buried pain is exactly the kind of character design that makes the shift from comedy to consequence land hard when the series eventually calls for it.
On what’s at stake
When the right thing refuses to be obviousDiem, the series protagonist, is placed at the collision point between two groups whose moral claims on the reader are deliberately kept in tension. Cole has described this as the ethical core of Glow, a situation where neither side maps cleanly onto hero or villain and where easy verdicts are exactly what the book resists.
It would be easy to look at that and declare who are the heroes and villains, but as Diem learns, life is never that simple, and ‘doing the right thing’ is often a lot more complicated than it looks.
Cole’s case for fantasy as a vehicle for this kind of moral difficulty rests on the idea that the genre lowers the defenses readers automatically bring to real-world debates. A reader who would shut down a political argument in the real world can sit inside the same question when it arrives dressed in magic and dragons.
I think Fantasy in general, but especially romance-heavy fantasy, is really uniquely situated to help people work through difficult moral and social questions without the baggage we bring in from ‘the real world.’
What she wants us to sit with
Clearer eyes when you look up from the pageCole’s stated hope for the series is not that readers arrive at any particular political conclusion but that the act of reading shifts how they perceive the world waiting outside the book. She has held to this formulation consistently, and it is worth reading as both an artistic goal and a claim about what fantasy can do that other genres cannot.
I hope that when they turn the final page, they look up at their world and see it with clearer eyes and a more inclusive heart.