“I think you can’t write the same book twice, and quite often, with the series demand, that is sort of what’s being asked of you: ‘Do it again, and make it the same, but different, and it needs to be just as good, and it needs to both say something new and not completely break everything that came before it.’ This is an impossible request. How does anyone do this?
“Some stories are simply too large to be contained within the spine of a commercially publishable book. I understand that you could not write, say, A Song of Ice and Fire in a single book. But A Game of Thrones, as a single standalone book, is one of my favorite fantasy books of all time, and I don’t feel that way about the series. There’s no reason why a single book should have to be a complete unit, in and of itself, except that I find it personally satisfying. And, obviously, my personal aesthetic tastes are what matter.
“I can clearly see the connections between the different things I do. It looks like I’m swerving wildly all over the genre shop, but all of them make perfect sense. Everything I write is exactly what I needed to write next. The Incandescent does, to me, follow neatly from Some Desperate Glory in that it is also a book about teenagers, about being a person who is an adult interacting with teenagers, interacting with your own teenage self, and their stupid mistakes that you are now stuck with forever.
— Emily Tesh, full interview at https://locusmag.com/feature/emily-tesh-breaking-free
The Adelaide Fan Review 