#edbookfest

On Romance:

She is a fan of romance and all its structures, the way of telling that story is always different. So we have Cordelia and James where she has been in love with him all his life but he doesn’t know it, so that’s a romance structure she hadn’t tried before. There’s also second chance romance with Anna and Ariadne. They had a relationship that didn’t work and now they are brought back together so do they get a second chance?

There’s also a structure of a character that is not in a good relationship and there's another relationship available to them but they haven't seem the potential in it yet, haven’t seen this person in this way yet, so they have to be brought to that stage where they notice that possibility. ((I think she was talking about Alastair and Charles x Alastair and Thomas here but she didn’t mention names))

All relationships can't be high stakes for the world as a whole, but they have to be personally high, they have to be high stakes for the people involved. What makes each relationship different is the characters that are involved, you take 2 personality types and if you put them together, what kind of romance do you get? You get different results from the same romance tropes if the people are different.

On found families:

Holly mentioned the group of friends that are found family is a recurrent theme on her books and Cassie commented it’s about how people build communities. A lot of the themes of romance also work with relationships between family members or friends, betrayal, lost relationships, working things out, etc, so all the relationships can be complex and important.

On humour:

The books are very adventure mysteries but they have an underline of humour. There is a texture of real life, people make jokes around difficult situations, it's a way we cope, so seeing characters engaging in humour makes them more real, and humour is also important in a romance, it makes the relationship realistic and people see they are really in love.

On writing romance and humour:

There's an undervaluing of the difficulty of writing these things in books because every scene between two characters in a series has to have breadcrumbs of their relationship and convince people they are in love and their relationship is realistic and it’s hard to build this. For humour it is the same, every one has a type of humour, it’s very personal so what works to make Christopher say wouldn’t work for Thomas, and writing humour takes a mastery of words and how they work together

Pet peeve in romance: 

Show don't tell isn't always true, but for romance it's important that two characters said to be in love need to interact and show that they are in love. Also major timeskips that you miss all the development of the relationship.

On why London:

She lived there when she was young and it was a fundamental part of her growing up period, she was 8 to 10, and it was very different from LA and she really loved it exactly because it was all different and she was very interested in everything and the history of London and that cemented her love of the city, so she has been back many many times. She had the idea for TID in London walking through Blackfriars bridge and thought she would enjoy writing about the place.

 On reading as a kid (funny story about her dad):

Her parents believed she could read what she wanted. And she really liked “Clan of the cave bear”, because the girl invented lots of things, so she really wanted to read the second book “Valley of the horses” when it came out, but her dad told her all the horses die in the book so she wouldn’t read it, but when she got older and read it she found out no horses die but there are a lot of explicit sex scenes so she confronted her dad about it and he sad “of course I lied, I wasn’t going to let you read that, you were nine” xD

On Cassie’s on Adult novel, Sword Catcher:

The inspiration came from an episode of “Locked up abroad” which is a show where people go to other countries commit crimes and go to jail there. This episode was unusual, the man had been a soldier that looked a lot like the son of Saddam Hussein, so he got called to the palace one day and they asked him to be his double and do his public appearances so people wouldn’t assassinate him. And he didn’t want to but there wasn’t really an option and they were bound together by this circumstances and the guy kind of treated him like a friend and it was a really weird relationship dynamic that intrigued her, because she thought how does it work to have any sort of relationship with someone when one is faking everything and the other has power over them and she thought about how to transport this to a historical fantasy setting. 

That was the initial idea but all books are more than one idea. Sword Catcher also draws on jewish ideas of magic and mythology, because most fantasy books are very catholic or western centered and she wanted to bring her culture into a fantasy setting. 

It's a city that is very wealthy because of the trade of goods, run by powerful families that trade a particular good, there's a juggle of power and money and, on top of that, there's the royal family. It's her first time writing a fantasy setting that she completely made up so it's lots of fun.

All new things are a challenge, but Sword Catcher is a new audience, a new age of characters they have other priorities and experiences and you have to change from that mindset that you have when writing YA and you have to create the entire world so you don’t have all the answers. people think it’s easier to write your own world because you can create everything, but she had to like put what lamps they have in her story and she spent one hour researching because she didn’t know what lamps they could have. It can’t be anything you want, it has to be internally consistent and that's a specific kind of challenge.

Travel inspirations: 

She traveled a lot growing up and she gets her ideas and can refine her ideas through the act of travelling and learning new things about places. It puts her in creative overdrive. Being able to travel and see how different things are is immensely useful as creative fuel. She writes a lot in writing retreats in other countries, focusing only on the writing without sacrificing peace of mind and sanity, which happens when she's at home for some reason. She got addicted to writing retreats after her first experience with Holly in Mexico. She doesn’t know why it works but it does. Now with Covid she can’t travel abroad, but sh will go to cape cod and see if that works too.

On choosing character names:

 It's a mix of names of people she knows (Max and Isabelle were the names of her grandparents, for example), nomes she likes, and names that work for the characters in the TSC setting. She writes down names she likes for specific reasons, sonority, if they are interesting, etc, and keeps a list. She also says she has the grim habit to go to cemeteries and write down  cool names she finds interesting from gravestones (Crosskill was one of them).

Character she regrets killing: 

She doesn’t regret killing anyone. She says to Kelly and Holly: “Why do people think we regret killing characters?” You kill a character for the good of the story, you missing them doesn’t change that. The only character she wanted to be alive again and brought back was Ragnor but that was planned, it wasn’t because she regretted it. She gets sad but sad is different from being regretful.

What characters she wants to kill

Holly made a big deal out of asking this question so now I’m scared but anyway her answer was: “If i want to kill a character i will kill them, that's a spoiler, I cant say that!” And then they joked about people thinking they are character serial killers. xD

On a TID TV adaptation:

There have definitely been discussions about that, but due to Covid everything is on hold. Not that it was cancelled, but there hasn’t been any forward movement because of Covid.

On her process between going from first draft to edit and finding motivation:

People usually start writing because they like it, but when it becomes your job and you have deadlines you have to work either way and that's hard to do and you deal with that in  various way. She deals by microplotting. She has a very detailed outline and when she is stuck she has something she can fall back on and tap back how she felt when she initially wrote that. It also helps with you not knowing how to get from a place to the end, you might have to replot if something ends up not working, and it helps to have writing friends that are part of your writing team you can talk to and sort things out.

Holly added: You need to get used to the discomfort, stay in it and move through it and it stops being so uncomfortable with time.

And Kelly Added: Your first draft doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be done, you need to push on even when your feeling is that it's a bad draft with the idea that you can go back and make it better. Write a little bit every day, set small and achievable targets, start with 9 words then 18 and go up when you get comfortable,  they don’t have to be good, either, they just have to be written.

On the worst writing advice she has ever gotten:

 Absolutes are always bad. Sweeping generalisations are not good advice. People say “Don’t use adverbs, it’s bad” but sometimes they help, when an adverb contradicts the action, for example “happy birthday, he said angrily or flatly”, it can be very useful, and also having a whole part of speech you can’t use is dumb. Show don’t tell is also not great. Practical information that you need to center the characters or ambiances can and should be told, you don’t have to go crazy thinking of a way to show how a room is. But character relationships need to rely a lot on showing.