About Mal Celeste
Mal Celeste writes MM fantasy romance about devotion, memory, identity, and the strange ways some souls keep finding each other across lifetimes.
Born in Spain and now living in Japan, Mal is a writer, teacher, and incurable daydreamer whose stories tend to begin with music, images, and far too much emotional attachment to fictional men.
Skybound grew from a love of winter skies, elemental magic, reincarnation, and relationships that refuse to stay simple. When not writing, Mal can usually be found with coffee nearby, collecting fragments of sky and turning ordinary moments into lore.
WHERE SKYBOUND BEGAN
Skybound began with an image: two men standing beneath snow, bound to one another long after memory should have disappeared.
From there came fire and frost, reincarnation, devotion, and the question that kept following them across lifetimes:
What does it mean to love someone without owning them?
Haneul and Seungho had existed in Mal’s imagination long before their story found its shape. But they truly came alive somewhere between countries, during the long flights across oceans that became an unexpected part of Skybound’s creation.
Around sixty percent of the story was written in the air—close to the sky, headphones on, music filling the space while scenes arrived like memories. Flashbacks, fragments of dialogue, battles, tenderness, grief. All of it unfolding on a tiny glowing screen while the world passed thousands of metres below.
There was something strangely fitting about writing a story obsessed with sky, distance, memory, and impossible return while suspended between places.
Haneul and Seungho crossed those oceans too.
Some stories are written at desks.
Skybound crossed oceans and skies first.