She Who Commands: The Vision, the Fantasy Series, and Living Out Loud.

 Seven episodes in and the Layered Love Universe is just getting started. In this final episode of the launch series, Kendra Tamika talks about She Who Commands, her three-book fantasy series following protagonist Tamdra Bell, a woman carrying Siren, Airis, and Witch bloodlines in contemporary New York City. She also breaks down the August 2026 vision for Remember Her Publishing and what it looks like when a woman finally stops shrinking and starts living the full version of her life out loud. This is not the end. This is the beginning. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hi again. This is Kendra Tamika with Layered Love Universe. And we have made it to the end of our sprint. Episode seven. Seven episodes, seven days, seven pillars. And if you have been here since episode one, I want to say something to you directly before we go anywhere else. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Not in a generic way, obligatory, end of podcast way. Genuinely. You chose to spend time with me this week. You showed up before there was a big audience, before there were impressive numbers, before any of this was polished and even proven. That matters to me more than I know how to say properly in a podcast intro. You are the founding members of this universe. And I do not forget my founding members. I say this episode for last because it is the outermost edge of my creative universe. The thing that even I did not fully see coming. The thing I am still a little amazed by when I say it out loud, I wrote a fantasy series. And I feel like there's more to come. I know a pastry chef turned scrum master, turn memoir author, turn leadership consultant, turn fantasy writer. I contain multitudes, and so do you. We have established this comprehensively across six episodes. I have made my peace with it, and I genuinely hope you have too because you have to take this seriously because it is very serious and also very exciting. And the first book is already available on Amazon right now as we are having this conversation. Go look up She Who Commands, Where the Deep Begins by Kendra Tamika on Amazon. Go ahead and purchase it, get the book in the mail, grab a drink, sit down, and enjoy entering the world of She Who Commands. All right. Let me tell you something about She Who Commands properly, because this series deserves a real introduction, and I have been waiting all week to give it one. The series follows a protagonist named Tandra Bell. Tandra is 40 years old, Brooklyn-born, a project manager, living and working in contemporary New York City. She is smart and capable and navigating the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being excellent in a world that does not always make space for women who are as capable as she is. She is also carrying something that most people in her life do not know about. Tamra is what I call a tri-grid. That is a term I created for someone who carries bloodlines from three supernatural lineages simultaneously. Not to get it mistaken, with tribrid from the originals. This is tri-grid. In Tamdra's case, those lineages are siren, heiress, and witch. Each bloodline gives her something and cost her something. The siren lineage gives her a particular kind of presence and influence, a voice that draws people in whether she intends to or not. The cost is that it can be weaponized, used against her, turned into a vulnerability when she is not paying attention. The heiress lineage gives her a perception that goes beyond what most people can access, or awareness of the world at a frequency most humans cannot hear. That cost is that awareness is not always comfortable to carry. The witch lineage gives her power that is learned rather than instinctive. A craft that requires discipline and intention and constant cultivation. The cost is that it demands more than she sometimes has to give. The story of She Who Commands is the story of Tamdra learning to hold all three of those things at once, to stop managing her power in separate compartments and hiding part of herself in a different room, and hiding parts of herself in different rooms depending on who is in the room. To figure out who she is when having all of that, to figure out who she is when all of it is acknowledged and integrated and fully unapologetically hers. I want you to notice what this story is really about. Because in the same story I have been telling all week, it is the story of a layered woman learning to command all of her layers instead of apologizing for them. I just put it in a fantasy series because I love sci-fi, because apparently that was the container I needed. I needed to create a world where I can fully immerse myself in outside of just this normal world, you know, the mundane world, as some people would say. Same question I asked in the memoir, same questions at the center of the leadership work, same question this podcast is built around. What does it look like when a woman stops hiding the full scope of who she is and starts living as all of it? In Remember Her, the answer is a healing story. In Paul's Clear Lead, the answer is the framework. In the Layered Love Universe, the answer is a lifestyle and a philosophy. In She Who Commands, the answer is a fantasy epic set in contemporary New York with a woman who carries three supernatural bloodlines and is finally done managing herself for everyone else's comfort. Tamra Bell shows up in my mind fully formed, her name, her age, her neighborhood, her career. What was she carrying and why was it heavy? And what was it going to take for her to finally stop running from it? I recognized her immediately. She is a version of a question I have been asking my whole life, and I could not put her down until I had written all three books. Let me tell you where the story stands right now, because this is the part that I am most excited to share. Book one, where the deep begins, is available right now on Amazon, today, as in you can go and buy it and start reading it before the episode is over. The book took everything I had to write, and I am genuinely proud of every page of it. Where the deep begins is the introduction of Tandra and her world. It is the book where she first begins to understand what she actually is and what that means for her life and the people around her. It is the book where the deep, all of it, where what she has been carrying, what she has been avoiding, what she is capable of begins. The title is not an accident. Nothing in this series is accidental. If you read one book from my catalog this year, I want it to be this one. Not because it is the most personal, though it carries a version of my most personal questions, but because Tamdra Bell is a character I believe in completely. She is going to mean something to the women who read her. I know it the way I know, remember her was going to mean something before anyone had read it. That feeling just hasn't been wrong yet. Book two, what she carries, is coming in August 2026. And it and if where the deep begins introduces you to Tamra in her world, what she carries is where the real weight of the story begins to land. The things she had been carrying across her whole life, not just the supernatural elements, but the human ones, the losses and the choices and the relationships and the compromises she made to survive it. All of it comes forward in book two. I am not going to tell you more than that because I don't want spoilers, and also because I want you to read the book one first. But I will say August cannot come fast enough. The book is something I am very proud of, and I cannot wait for the people who loved book one to get their hands on it. Book three, She Who Remains, is coming October 2026. That is a culmination where everything that has been built in across two books, every thread, every choice, every cost comes to rest, where Tamdra has to decide fully and finally who she is going to be with all of it integrated and all of it acknowledged and nowhere left to hide. Three books, book one available now, book two in August, and book three in October. All of 2026 belongs to She Who Commands, and I need you to be reading along. So go to rememberherpublishing.com or search She Who Commands Where the Deep Begins by Kendra Tamika on Amazon. Get book one in your hands and then come find me and tell me what you think because I genuinely want to know. I want to tell you where She Who Commands came from because I think the origin story of a creative work says something more important about the work itself. I was not looking for a fantasy series. I was not sitting at my desk thinking, what I need right now is to build an entire supernatural world with its own mythology and its own rules and three full books worth of a plot. I had plenty of other things I was working on: the memoir universe, the leadership content, the food brand rebuild, the podcast you're literally listening to right now. But Tandra showed up. That is the most accurate way I know how to describe a creative experience that I still find a little hard to explain rationally. She arrived in my just daydreaming in my imagination, fully formed in a way that most ideas do not. And she arrived with urgency. It was like this has to happen, like now. Like she had been waiting and she was done waiting. I have learned over the years of making things to pay attention that kind of urgency. When something shows up that insistently and that completely is, it is usually because it is carrying something real, something that needs to exist. And my job is not to decide whether the timing is convenience, my job is to show up and do the work. So I wrote the first book, and then I wrote the second, and then I wrote the third. And somewhere in the middle of the third book, I understood something about why this series needed to exist alongside everything else I made. Every other form I work in asked the question directly. The memoir acts it through personal narrative. The leadership worked, acts it through framework, the podcast acts it through conversation. Fantasy acts the question through metaphor and myth, and the particular kind of safety that fiction provides. It lets people encounter a truth at a slight remove. It lets you then see something in Tandra that they might not be ready to see in themselves yet. And sometimes that indirect path to a truth is one that actually gets there. I wrote three books, and if I'm honest with myself, I can already feel more stories in this space coming into this world. I do not know what shape just yet that will take or when that will arrive, but I have learned not to close doors on creative work that is still speaking to me. There is more in this universe than three books. I feel that. When the time is right, it will show itself. And for me, that gives me more joy than the completion of a project. I don't know if that makes sense, but it gives me so much more joy when I know that there's more to come. I just don't see it yet. I want to say something out loud that I believe completely and that I have not always said as plainly as I am about to say it. I want She Who Commands adapted for screen. I want Tam Dra Bell on television or film. I believe this series has that range. I believe that world I built is rich enough, and the character at the center of it is complex enough, and the questions it asks are universal enough that it belongs in a visual medium where the largest possible audience can encounter it. I have built the materials to make that case. The series Bible, the one-page pitch, the catalog of three completed books, the publishing house that exists to support and amplify this type of work. I am actively pursuing the conversation that can move this from page to screen. So stay tuned. I say this not to sound grandiose. I say it because I have learned that from the dreams you are embarrassed to say out loud are usually the ones that actually matter. And I'm done being embarrassed. 2026 is my I took embarrassment, set that sucker on fire, and left it in 2025. So I'm done being embarrassed about the size of what I believe this work is capable of. She who commands deserves a bigger vision than I can even fathom right now. Tamdra Bell deserves to be seen by the widest possible audience. So just watch out for this one. Watch it when it moves, because trust me, it's gonna move fast. Before I close this series, I want to name one more book because it has been sitting quietly in the background of every episode this week and it deserves its own moment. Live her out loud. Stop shrinking and start living the life she deserved. 12 chapters, three parts, why she stopped, the turn, living her out loud. It bridges directly from Remember Her. And it is the most direct invitation I have ever written for women who are done waiting and are ready to move. Once you remember her, now it's time to live her. If you have been nodding along to anything I said this week, this book is for you. The full Remember Her Publishing catalog is at RememberHerPublishing.com. The memoir, the leadership books, the picture books for the girls in your life, the planner, the curriculum, the empowerment books, and now she who commands where the deep begins. My fantasy series. Signed copies of everything are at KendraTamika.com. Links are in the show notes. Go look, you will find something for yourself and probably something for someone close to you that you love. As we close, this sprint this week was seven episode. The nurturer who feeds people from a full place, the healer who told the truth even when it was hard, the builder who lost something and built it back better, the leader who brought her whole self into every room, the teacher who refused to gatekeep knowledge, and the woman who wrote a fantasy series because apparently she was always going to, and that was just part of her universe. I can see the vision. That is it. That is who I am. That is the full picture. No edits, no apologies. And I am not at the end of anything. I am at the beginning. This podcast is seven episodes old. This channel is brand new. She Who Commands or the Deep Begins just launched on Amazon. Book two comes out in August. Book three comes out in October. And the biggest moments in this universe are still ahead. And you are here for the beginning of it. I don't know how much that makes me happy with joy that brings to my heart. Starting next Wednesday, new episodes will drop every week on here and on YouTube. We are going deeper into every pillar. We're going to go into the kitchen, do some bacon. We're going to go into the boardroom, aka my home office, and we're going to talk about homeschooling as well. We're going to talk about the publishing house. And we're going to talk about the world of she who commands. We're going to go into all of it because for me, none of it is separate. It is all considered under one universe, Layered Love Universe, built on one foundation. The belief that you were never meant to be just one thing. So please subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen. Subscribe to the Larry Love Universe on YouTube. Come find me at Kendritamika.com and at RememberHerPublishing.com. Grab a treat for you and more to share for any loved ones that you have in your life at layeredlovegourmet.com. And if this week gave you something real, share it. Share it with the women in your life who needs to hear it that her layers are not a problem to manage. They are the point. I am Kendra Tamika, pastry chef, author, agile leader, certified scrum master, homeschooling mom to a neurodivergent princess, entrepreneur, fantasy writer, woman who decided that the full version of herself was worth showing up as. This is Flayered Love Universe, and we are just getting started. I will see you Wednesday, and I am so excited. This is so exciting.