Ty Blackthorn, Sherlock Holmes, and Shakespeare

are you fucking blind???? because you can’t tell me that this boy, twirling his hair like a school girl and making excuses, didn’t have a crush

the amount of rizz in this scene alone…

HELLOOOOOO Mr. Making-Him-Flustered-In-Seconds

quoting his favorite author at him

initiating touch WHICH IS HIS LOVE LANGUAGE BASICALLY

and again

and these are just a few examples 😭

I wanna say something probably unpopular and possibly presumptuous. I was reading your last newsletter and that song choice was very, umm “Siri what do young people listen to these days?”. I mean, you also called Nine Inch Nails old. That’s *offensive*, is what it is.

So: Hi! I’m from the OG Shadowhunters generation. I was born in the late 80s, I’m a mother, and still have cassette tapes, CDs and Vinyls in my house. I would LOVE to know what your REAL tlkof playlist is. Like, the songs of your heart, those that you don’t need google for 😅

Also, I would do (small) crimes to get an arc. Please save me from a life of felony!

SORRY I WILL BE BACK, I LEFT MY CRANBERRIES CD IN THE QUAD.*

I am indeed Gen X, and I love the music of my generation (and the one before mine, you cannot take the Beatles from me) but I am pretty sure if you asked Siri what young people listen to these days the songs on the playlist, other than maybe Gracie Abrams and Taylor Swift, would not be on it! You'd get a lot more Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish, Tate McRae, K-pop and whatnot. While I think my playlists mostly feature singer-songwriters and confessional indie-pop, Matt Jaffe I think of as largely unknown (I could be wrong!) and Hey Violet as punk. It's more eclectic than popular, I think?

And while one could certainly search for "What the kids are listening to today", it would be hard to look for "what are the kids listening to these days in the way of music relevant to this unpublished book." I mean, I don't know what AI chatbots can do, I hate AI and avoid it, but that strikes me as beyond its capabilities.

I think the thing is that playlists for books are not just "songs I like and listen to a lot while writing" — it's songs I've culled out of that list that have lyrics that remind me of a character or dynamic or address a topic. If I do search for music, it's generally to find recommendation lists of "songs about second-chance love" or whatever, so that the topic is on my mind when I write. And I have to both think the song feels relevent and like it enough to listen to it a lot. In some cases, like the Jessia song, it's one of the only songs I can find about a specific topic or feeling, but I still have to enjoy it.

For this particular book I did look for "songs from queer artists or songs that are not specifically gendered" for my own internal process and character headspace, so about 25% of the artists onlist identity as queer, and looking was how I discovered LEW (also that song is a banger. I listened to a lot of other queer artists as well while writing but for instance, "Becky's So Hot" did not fit the storyline and "It's Not Like I'm In Love With You" did. Ani diFranco was one of my favorites in the 90's and I think I've put "Untouchable Face" on a playlist, but there wasn't anything that seemed to exactly go here.) I imagine most of those would indeed probably be more recent — as are most songs likely to turn up on rec lists — but I am always looking for new music so that would be cool as long as the song fits the book theme.

So sadly, I do not have a secret, cooler playlist. I have specific playlists for music from my teen and college years, which I would be happy to share, but they're not book playlists, because book playlists aren't just "I listen to this," they're "this applies to the characters or situation". I've always thought my playlist songs were weird and nerdy since they span genres from industrial to alt-pop to indie singer-songwriters to folk to whatever. Perhaps it is clear I do not rock that hard, I would not be surprised if so.

I looked back on some of my older playlists, like Chain of Thorns here — and you can find Gracie Abrams and Lord Huron on them, so if I have been pretending to like Gracie it has now been for almost four years, which is a long time. I also found a playlist Holly B. made for me if that makes sense in terms of what my friends think I would like? I don't know if that helps, but they're all weird mixes of various genres and time periods.

Looking up this stuff caused me to realize I have playlists going back to Clockwork Prince, so that's kind of insane. What I do not have is ARCs, and my publisher has yet to print more, alas, so I'm waiting on doing the giveaway. Also, while Nine Inch Nails IS old, I was too young for it when Pretty Hate Machine came out, and you would have been A TINY BABY so you are not nearly as ancient as me, or Trent Reznor for that matter.

I saw that the UK publisher has given quite a lot of arc copies out do you know if they will be giving more copies out in the future or if they have a limited amount of arcs, as I am eager to get my hands on one.(90 days is too long for me to wait)

Yes — Dru, unlike the rest of her family, knows Livvy is a ghost. Everyone else has moved on — not like they don't still grieve, but they've accepted. Ty and Dru are stuck in this similar place of not having moved through any stages of grief as we would know them.

Hm. I mean there is so much more Ty POV in Last Prince of Hell, it's hard for me to say whether people will find his thoughts in TLKOF surprising — and of course his thoughts are not only about Kit. But part of the reason I stayed out of Ty's POV in TLKOF is precisely because I didn't want readers to fully know how he felt about Kit outside of interpreting the way Ty speaks and responds to Kit, just like Kit has to do. He does think about the reason Kit provided the Herondale pendant to him and I don't know if that matches up with what people would expect?