An Interview with Rose Griffin

The author of Daughters of Luxana discusses her pen name, worldbuilding process, creative technology, and the women at the heart of her seven-novel fantasy series.

Why do you write under the name Rose Griffin?

I write under the name Rose Griffin because it gives me the freedom to be fully myself both on and off the page. Under that name, I create adult fantasy centred on complex women, dangerous secrets, and worlds where the truth is rarely as simple as good versus evil. It allows me to explore darker and more intimate ideas, disappear into the worlds I create, and let the stories stand on their own while protecting the life beyond them.

How did Daughters of Luxana begin?

Daughters of Luxana began with a world rather than a manuscript. Long before I put pen to paper, I was imagining kingdoms, landscapes, histories, and fragments of lives, and somewhere in that process the world began telling me a story.

Many of its details grew from places I had travelled and experiences that stayed with me after I returned home—coastlines, cities, mountains, forests, architecture, weather, and atmosphere all found new lives within Luxana. From the beginning, though, building that world was never confined to words.

How did you first bring Luxana to life?

Luxana's first breath of life was from exploring with Inkarnate. I could define its borders, coastlines, mountains, kingdoms, and forgotten places. I used maps and visual references to give Luxana a physical form beyond what existed in my imagination.

At the same time Pinterest boards helped me develop the architecture, landscapes, clothing, interiors, colour palettes, and smaller details that shaped the atmosphere of each region.

For years, those fragments existed in a notebook as sketches and notes alongside the world inside my head, helping me understand not only how Luxana looked, but how it felt.

What role has artificial intelligence played in your creative process?

As artificial intelligence evolved, it gave me a new way to see and interrogate the world I had already begun creating. Places that had existed only in descriptions could be explored visually, and characters, palaces, coastlines, forests, temples, and forgotten cities could be questioned and refined until they more closely resembled what had lived in my imagination for years.

AI did not give me Luxana; the stories, characters, mythology, and world had begun forming long before those tools existed. It simply gave me another creative medium through which to develop them. As the series grew and the amount of connected information increased, that technology also became a practical way to keep the expanding world coherent.

How did you manage the complexity of a seven-novel series?

Managing seven novels meant keeping track of seven central characters, multiple kingdoms, generations of history, bloodlines, relationships, magic systems, prophecies, timelines, locations, religions, political histories, and hundreds of details that all needed to remain connected. Initially I had One Note files, word docs and my Pinterest board and it was getting harder and harder to keep track of everything.

When AI took off I took the opportunity to work in a way that suited the scale of the series. I created my own AI-assisted writing and worldbuilding application.

It became part archive, part editorial assistant, and part creative workspace: a single place for my worldbuilding, character histories, lore, research, ideas, and manuscripts. More importantly, it allowed me to interrogate my own work by testing continuity across novels, revisiting character histories, comparing new ideas with established lore, identifying contradictions, and checking whether a storyline still made sense several books later.

In many ways, it became the digital equivalent of covering an entire room with maps, notebooks, manuscripts, photographs, timelines, and pieces of string, then giving that room the ability to search itself. That process became an unexpected extension of the worldbuilding because it allowed me to see connections across the series while refining how each story was told.

Did the application also influence your prose?

Yes, although the story, characters, and creative decisions always remained mine. I used the application to challenge sentences, question scenes, flag repetition, examine pacing, and surface details I had written hundreds of pages earlier. It helped me polish the prose without replacing my judgement or voice.

I ended up creating an AI editor within the application that was built around my framework as to the type of novels I wanted to produce and gave in the guadrails to review and provide editorial reports to help me improve my writing and also perform editorial checks for things like formatting, spelling, grammar etc.

How long has the series been taking shape?

The series has been taking shape for around two and a half years so far, evolving from scattered ideas and notes into a fully realised world. What began as worldbuilding gradually became history; that history produced characters, and eventually those characters began demanding stories of their own.

It grew from my love of immersive fantasy—the kind in which ancient histories matter, magic carries consequences, relationships can alter the course of kingdoms, and a character’s choices matter as much as the powers they possess.

That vision became the foundation of Daughters of Luxana and provide a wealth of room for the world to expand in several directions.

Who are the Daughters of Luxana?

At the heart of the series are seven women whose lives have been shaped by a history they do not fully understand. Each has a different connection to the ancient magic of their world and faces her own journey through identity, loss, love, power, and sacrifice. As their stories unfold, their individual choices reveal a much larger truth about the forces that have spent generations rewriting Luxana’s history.

They were inspired by women close to me—strong, independent, and quietly extraordinary in the way they move through the world. They balance everything life asks of them, keep going when things become heavy, love fiercely and imperfectly, and remind me that sometimes the family we need most at different points in our life is the one we find for ourselves.

I wanted the women at the centre of these stories to be more than chosen heroes. They are assassins, scholars, healers, survivors, warriors, queens, and women still trying to understand who they want to become. They make mistakes, love people they perhaps should not, carry grief badly, question the histories they have inherited, and sometimes just let loose.

What did you want readers to feel when they entered this world?

I wanted Luxana to feel lived in rather than simply imagined—a place readers could experience through its salt air, biting cold, deep silences, and the sense of something ancient moving beneath the forests and rootways. Each kingdom needed its own history, atmosphere, and scars, so that each felt distinct yet connected by the larger world unfolding around them.

Just as importantly, I wanted the relationships and consequences to feel real. Romance had to develop slowly enough to matter, through glances, restraint, arguments, loyalty, and the things left unsaid, while friendship and found family carried equal weight. Violence needed to leave scars and choices needed to have consequences, but the quieter moments; a conversation beside the sea, a hand held a moment too long, laughter when everything else felt impossible, or a truth finally spoken, had to matter as much as battles, magic, and prophecy.

Above all, I wanted the characters to remain human, even when the world began asking them to become legends.