WORLD BOOK DAY Q&A

Hello, and happy Sunday, Dear Readers. I thought that some of you might not have seen this Q&A on the World Book Day website, which is a shame because the questions are particularly thoughtful. So here it is, reproduced in its entirety. I hope you enjoy it.

World Book Day: April 2019

1.     Your beautifully rich new book, The Hand, The Eye & The Heart, is a fantastical adventure about courage, love and gender identity. Can you tell us a bit more about where the inspiration for it came from? 

Thank you! The initial spark that gave the story life arrived around five years ago, when I was watching Disney’s Mulan with my young nieces. I hadn’t seen the film since I was a child myself and when the song ‘Reflection’ started I felt a chill of realisation sneak down my spine. I suddenly saw it as a song about the experience of a trans or non-binary person, and felt that Mulan was crying out for someone to see who they were inside – a person who did not identify with the narrow role given to them by society, or the gender label imposed on them at birth - and begging for the ability to let that identity breathe. But that never actually happens in the film, which left me unsatisfied and cross, and immediately made me want to write my own version. At the same time, taking on such a legendary story seemed like a huge challenge, and I was a bit intimidated.

I went onto social media and began asking if anyone else felt this was a story that needed to be written. Secretly I was hoping that someone might say ‘No!’ Instead, on Tumblr and Twitter, I was met with an avalanche of readers and writers, young and old, who told me ‘Yes!’. The response was overwhelming. So then I had no choice but to roll up my sleeves and get started.

2.     Zhilan, the main character who has a gift for illusionary magic, is an incredibly courageous and determined person. What are the three qualities that you most admire about them? 

Firstly, their moral courage. I don’t mean physical courage, but spiritual bravery. Zhi – which is the name the main character chooses – has an instinctive grasp of what is truly right, of the essence of good and evil, no matter how much the mores of their particular society may contradict them and tell them certain things are wrong or shameful or incorrect. Of course they’re human, so they sometimes falter or doubt, but ultimately they always take the right path, and that kind of courage is immensely rare and precious.

Secondly, their kindness. Zhi lives in a harsh world where it is easier and safer to be distant, or callous, even cruel. But Zhi is deeply kind, and helps others wherever they can, even when it causes them difficulty, pain or inconvenience.

Finally, I admire Zhi’s resourcefulness! Faced with difficult situations, I think most of us tend to panic and list all the things we think are impossible, focusing on what we can’t do. Zhi looks at what they have, what they need, and what they can do, and then makes things happen. They’re like the McGyver of the story!

3.     Your story is set in an imaginary place called The Land of Dragons/ Red Empire that is reminiscent of historical China. How did you research this setting to ensure that your depiction was respectful and accomplished? 

Reading. Lots and lots of reading. I’m an immersive researcher – I act as if I know nothing of value going in, and my assumptions about what I need to learn will therefore be worthless. So I try to read everything I can get my hands on, cover to cover, to give myself a strong background, before I actually begin to pick and chose details to focus on. I spend nearly a year doing very little actual writing, just reading books about Chinese history, natural history, philosophy, culture, food, wildlife, music… I tried to get my hands on works in translation where I could, so that I was reading Chinese people’s perspective on their own culture. I watched lots of historical films from China and several TV serials recommended by a Chinese friend. I listened to a lot of music and read poetry. I looked into multiple different versions of the Mulan story, from the original ballad to the Chinese opera to the recent feature film. The story is deeply informed by everything I learned, and I’m very grateful that I had time to do this. Huge thanks to Arts Council England for their Grant for the Arts, which gave me the space and resources to do the kind of research the story needed.

I also put out a call to readers who were Chinese or of Chinese heritage on my blog and social media to ask them what they would like to see in a book like this, what would bring them joy and what they would prefer not to see ever again. I was lucky enough that several people were willing to offer me that kind of insight, and that had a strong impact on the book, too.

4.     Your book explores gender identity andhas characters with a variety of sexual orientations. Why is it important for books to have diverse characters and for young people to have LGBTQ+ fiction to read? 

Because diversity is reality. I’m stunned by the amount of grown-ups I come into contact with who seem constantly baffled by or resentful of the fact that the world isn’t full of people just like them. That loads of different kinds of people exist, and take up space, and to go about their own day to day lives in a way that isn’t the ‘normal’ represented by mass media – that is to say, a ‘normal’ where 99% of people are straight, white, cis, able-bodied etc. And this – the simple reality of the real world - makes these grown-ups so frightened and angry that they act as if people who are different to them merely existing is some kind of attack on them and their lives. They strike out, and they cause hurt and suffering to others who’ve never harmed them at all, and then call it a victory for ‘common sense’ or ‘family values’ or ‘decency’ when really it’s only a victory for fear and spite.

All children, whether they’re LGBTQA+ or not, need to see diverse portrayals in the media they consume. They need to learn that empathy is not only for people just like them, but for all humanity – that all perspectives have value, that all stories are valid and important.

On a very personal note, growing up I read zero portrayals of people like me – asexual aromantics – in the books I loved. I had no idea that anyone else like me even existed. The closest thing I ever saw to that were characters who heartlessly or spinelessly ‘rejected’ love and were either miserable or villainous. As a result, I struggled so hard to feel the things that other people seemed to feel, and make central to my life the things that the whole of society taught me were vital and important. It didn’t work. It wasn’t me. It caused me a great deal of unhappiness, and it was not until my late twenties that I had a label for myself and was able to begin the ongoing process of accepting who I am. I pray passionatelythat others don’t have to go through this, but I know they probably are, even as I type these words. As a writer, the only thing I can do to help is to try to write the most diverse books I can, and hope they find their way into the hands of the young people who desperately need to read them.

5.     When civil war breaks out, Zhilan takes their disabled father’s place to save them from the battlefield. Without giving any spoilers, in what ways is this a positive character-building experience for them? 

I think being thrown into a new world – even one that is so frightening and at times cruel and unfair – gives Zhi the chance to understand their own strength. Their own potential, and their gifts, and how truly special they are when they stop holding back and simply do what feels right to them. They’ve been loved and valued by their family, certainly - but only if they conformed to what their family believed they should be, and walked within the confines of a very narrow role. Going out into the world allows Zhi to see that while the life they led before had beauty and safety – and yes, value - they also have so many other things to offer, which they would never even have discovered within themselves, let alone been allowed to use, if they hadn’t been forced to by change and danger.

6.     A point that stood out for me is how fairy-tales can also be used to pigeon-hole people and take away their independence, such as Zhilan being compared to Dou Xianniang. Is the place of idealised stories in society something that you specifically wanted to explore? 

Very much so. Perhaps not so much with fairytales these days, since a lot of very talented writers have done a wonderful job of reclaiming those and putting diverse, Feminist spins on them. But for women, and for marginalised people in society, there’s often such a dearth of depictions that we become hemmed in by One Story (as author Chimamanda Ngozi puts it). We’re told there’s one way to be A Good Woman, that we must behave a certain way and conform to certain traits or else we’re bad and wrong. For instance, for a long time girls were told: “To be good is to be nice. Smile. Care for animals and small children. Take pride in looking a certain way so that others find pleasure in looking at you – but do not show off, or be bossy or attention-seeking. Give others a chance to talk before you. Make way. Make room.”

And then we were given the Strong Female Character, who was loud and often angry, and apparently didn’t care how she looked, and instead of making room for people, shot them with arrows or stabbed them with swords. Suddenly the people who’d been struggling to fulfil that first stereotype of Goodness were told - "You’re wrong! You’re passive! You’re boring and shallow! You’re not A Strong Female! This is what it means to be A Good Woman now!"

But then there was a backlash against the Strong Female too. She was unrealistic, she was aggressive, she was a Mary-Sue. She was being sexist against men!

The problem isn’t in the idea of kindness and gentleness, of course, or of standing up for yourself and being angry and loud. It was that society was, and is, still telling people what to be. Trying to write the stories for them and force them to follow along. We need to empower people to inhabit their own stories, and give them the confidence to be unique, fully realised individuals, and not penalise them for failing to conform.

7.     At the heart of your book is a warm message about being true to yourself and fighting for what you believe in. What do you hope readers take away from the book? 

I think Zhi says it right at the beginning of the story: no one is what they seem, not even ourselves. I want readers to learn to know themselves. To face who they are, honestly and with respect – to love themselves despite what they may see as weaknesses, and to embrace the best parts of who they are. Don’t take yourself, or others, for granted. None of us really know what we’re capable of. We all have the capacity to be much stronger, braver, more beautiful and more compassionate than we can imagine. But we also have the capacity to be selfish, cruel, oblivious and ungenerous. Life is a process of learning about the world, about ourselves and other people that we meet. We should all be prepared to undergo that journey of learning with joy, and an open heart. 

And finally, as part of our Share A Story campaign, we celebrate the magic of sharing stories. For readers who would like to read another story like The Hand, The Eye & The Heart, do you have any favourites to share?  

I heartily recommend Girls of Paper and Fire by Natasha Ngan – an extraordinary, beautifully written diverse fantasy set in an Asian-inspired world – although this is an adult novel and therefore has some warnings for sensitive content. In books specifically for young adults, I love Megan Whalen Turner’s on-going The Thief series. This is set in a world inspired by ancient Greece and is tragic and hilarious and very much deals with the topic of multiple identities and ways of perceiving people.

I’m a big fan of short stories, and Leigh Bardugo’s dark fairytale anthology The Language of Thorns and Laini Taylor’s Lips Touch: Three Times are favourites of mine.

Updated to add: I'm also currently reading Descendent of the Crane by Joan He, and absolutely loving it.

THE LAST LEAVES FALLING BY SARAH BENWELL

Hello, oh double-chocolate muffins! Today I'm on the Authors Allsorts interviewing debut author Sarah Benwell about her amazing debut novel THE LAST LEAVES FALLING and offering up a mini-review. Head over there to check it out.

InCreWriJul: The Final Check In

Hello, hello, hello my ducky darlings! The month of July is drawing to a close, and with it our International Creative Writing challenge. Welcome to the final InCreWriJul check in!

Before we get onto that, however, a massive thank you to Dear Reader Rachel who sent this photo of The Night Itself in the wild:

This was in the Kingston branch of Waterstones, and got Rachel excited because she hardly ever sees my books in Waterstones. I hardly ever see them in Waterstones either (or any physical bookshops, really) so it's exciting for me, too. Let's hope someone adopted my hot-pink darling and took her home very shortly after this picture was taken. Sadly over the weekend The Night Itself dropped down from its all-time high ranking of No. 45 in the Waterstone's Not Just For Teens list to the rather less exciting No. 356. But never mind - I'll always have my screencaps. However, if anyone was wanting to cheer me up a bit, and they had any thinky thoughts about TNI to share, you could nip along to Waterstones website, or Amazon, and leave a review for the book, even if it's just a couple of lines.

Also over the weekend, this lovely feature interview with me went up on Dear Reader Maya's blog. The questions were really fun to answer, so check it out.

Now, on to to InCreWriJul!

I've had a frustrating week since we caught up on writing progress last. To illustrate it, here's a picture of the calendar in my Writing Cave, which I wrote my weekly and total targets on at the beginning of July:

Sunday and Monday of last week went brilliantly. On Tuesday I realised that the scene I had been intending to write next just wouldn't work, which caused my progress to screech to a halt as I stomped around my house bad-temperedly, snarling at the walls and flinging scrunched up bits of paper around. Eventually I did come up with a solution, though - the next day, as you can see, I was delighted to produce seventage pages of handwritten notes.

But sadly that's where it all went wrong. Because after my morning writing sprint (during which I'd been so caught up that I didn't really notice my hand hurting a bit more than normal) my hand stopped working. This is not an exaggeration. Within about an hour of putting my pen down and going to make some lunch I could no longer pick up a pen at all. My hand, wrist and elbow were throbbing, and my shoulder wasn't happy either.

Bewildered and a bit frightened, I worried that I'd done myself some kind of repetitive strain injury, although in the past I've written far more than seventeen pages in one sitting without having problems (the only time I'd had pain in my hand that bad was after my legendary 9k in one day writing sprint, during which the entire ending of TNI was written, and even then, it was only my hand and forearm that hurt, not the whole arm). It had come on very suddenly, too. I borrowed a wrist brace, took some anti-inflammatories and applied heat and then cold to my hand and wrist, hoping desperately that I wasn't going to join the ranks of unfortunate writers who have to type everything. I've tried doing that before, after all, and it was a disaster.

I tried some typing the next day, but had to give up very shortly because as soon as I hit my normal typing speed (about 98 words a minute) the pain was unbearable. Also during that day my other hand and both feet developed similar symptoms, though not as badly as my right hand and arm. They felt as if someone had folded them up tightly and now the creases wouldn't come out. And this is what eventually made the lightbulb go off. I'd had this problem once before - after an insect bite. I'm incredibly allergic to insect bites. At the very least they cause a swollen welt the size of about half a tennis ball, and often they also give me flu-like symptoms. But on one occasion, several years in the past, I'd reacted to a bite with just such pain and stiffness in my joints, although that time the bite was on my leg and my feet were far more affected than my hands.

Guess what? I'd found a bite on the back of my right arm on Wednesday.

So I've basically been babying my arm and hand along since then, scared of causing any permanent damage to the tendons or ligaments by forcing myself to use them too much. I've got the mobility in the hand back, but there's still quite a lot of pain in my thumb joints and little finger, and these are causing shooting pains down to my wrist and even elbow. I have no idea how long it's going to take for the symptoms to go away, but in the meantime typing is harder than normal (although I can do it, providing I do it slowly and carefully) and handwriting is out of the question.

I'm really sad about this, because if it hadn't happened I'm sure I'd have hit my 50K target for InCreWriJul. Actually, looking back on July, something seems to have attacked me every single week - whether it was a horrible headache, a nasty bug, or a real bug that chowed down on my arm. I've also had insane amounts of personal issues, mostly to do with my father and his condition, going off like bombs around me the whole time. But I'm so so so glad that I decided to run InCreWriJul, because without it I have no doubt all these set-backs would have caused me to lose far more days out of my month, and be far less productive overall. I might have given up on July completely - but knowing that everyone else was writing with me and that we were all doing it together gave me that little extra push that kept me going.

I'd estimate that once all my hand written notes are typed up I'll probably have something in the region of 47,500 - 48,000 words, which is not to be sniffed at. I hit and passed the 50% mark of the manuscript and got a really good handle on my people, which I know is going to stand me in good stead when my edits for Darkness Hidden come back (probably this afternoon!). So for me, despite the universe apparently deciding to throw a whole bunch of sneaky, underhand tricks my way, InCreWriJul has been a fantastic success. I want to thank everyone who came on the journey with me.

So now's the time for everyone else to share an account of their month in the comments. Did you hit your target? Did you change your target and if so, why? Did you struggle or fly? Share all! And remember that everyone who has commented on each check in, including this one, will be entered into a prize draw. I'll pick the winner and announce the prize next Tuesday.

DARKNESS HIDDEN EDITS: DONE!

Hello, hello, hello my duckies! Welcome to Tuesday and a veritable banquet (buffet style) of lovely things.

So, as the blog title kind of spoils... I finished the edits on DARKNESS HIDDEN!

WHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!

I'd given myself a deadline to try and send the edited manuscript out to both Super Agent and Wonder Editor before the end of the day on Friday, which was really tough because I was also looking after my father that day. But I worked like a crazed little beaver chipping away at a log, and managed to press 'Send' on the email before four o'clock. Only to get Out of Office autoreplies from both editor and agent. *Sigh*

This is an inevitable result of self-imposed deadlines, my muffins. It happens every time. Make a note for your future careers. EVERY. TIME.

However, I feel very positive about this latest set of revisions. The book actually has a new ending now - well, the same one, but vastly extended because the original version was really abrupt. I was so emotional when I wrote the ending initially that I honestly couldn't see what to do but to just end it there. Anything else was going to feel like anti-climax to me at that point. But luckily, that is what revisions are for, and because I know people have complained in the past that my endings are abrupt, I was really determined to keep thinking about it until something occurred to me - which it did, while I was on a train journey the other week. Good old trains. They're great for my creativity, even if they do regularly get cancelled on me, buried under landslides, delayed because of snow drifts... Anyway! During these revisions I cut over 10,000 words, but the manuscript eventually ended up about 7,000 words longer overall, which I like because usually when I start adding length during a revision, that's a sign I'm on the right track.

Of course, finishing the revisions on DH and getting that ending right, finally - we hope - filled me with enthusiasm for starting work on book #3 of the trilogy (I nearly gave the game away by typing the title there! Phew). I've tried to begin the third book several times but I kept getting stuck because I couldn't get a clear picture in my head of where Mio, the main character, would be emotionally after the events that finish DH. The new ending really helped me get there, and I wrote some rough notes on Saturday which translated into eleven pages of new stuff this morning. Hurrah!

Now onto other lovely things! First, an exciting announcement. I'm going to be in anthology. Here's the announcement in Publisher's Weekly. For those who don't want to click away, a screencap:

My very first! I'm really psyched to have been asked. There's a lot of exciting authors in there! Although the deal has been made, I'm waiting to get more details from the editor - Ann Angel - about what sort of content will be allowed before I can know for certain what short story I will write. However, at this point I'm leaning very heavily toward one that I know many of you will like: it concerns a character from Shadows on the Moon that a lot of people have asked to know more about :)

Next! Last week Luna of Luna's Little Library wrote the most lovely review of The Night Itself and gave it a Sunshine Star rating. Which was already extremely wonderful - but then she made this fanart:

Jack and Hikaru! So adorable, I did a little dance. My babies! My messed up, emotionally-constipated babies!

Finally, here's a mini-interview that I did with the lovely author Kate Ormand (one of my fellow Author Allsorts) for her SNEAK PEAK feature. There's some inside information on the book AND a brand-new snippet for you. What more could you want?

That's all for today, so I'll see you on Thursday, when I will be talking about (drumroll please) InCreWriJul!

A PLETHORA OF PRETTIES

Hello, my dearest ducky darlings! Welcome back to the blog after my week-and-a-bit's-hiatus. Today I have for you a veritable FEAST of linkity and updates, so hold onto your hats.

First of all! It is now less than a month until the UK release of The Night Itself, and Lovely Lass' secret project (and all her plotting and planning) has finally come to fruition in the book trailer! Which isn't actually a traditional book trailer at all - it's a reading of an extract of the book, in which many, many charming blogger pals took part (and Lovely Lass too!) Here it is:


Mushy kisses and snuggles for everyone who donated their time and their performances to this. What do you think, guys? Does it whet your appetite? Likes and comments on the YouTube page are very much appreciated.

If that's not enough to get you exited, perhaps THIS will be!

 

Yes. Yes, that is the very first, hot off the presses, FINISHED COPY of The Night Itself. Thank you for asking. Guys, guys, you guys, I cannot express how beautimous this is in real life. It is exquisite. The pink absolutely GLOWS. My camera makes it look sort of purple-ish here, but this is true hot-pink and it's gorgeous. It's so gorgeous that Wonder Editor and Delightful Designer knocked this up for the Walker Books Inkslingers blog:

These people are hilarous. Best. Publisher. Ever.

The cover is SUEDE feel, all soft and buttery. I must confess to borderline inappropriate stroking. There are so many wonderful details. Like the praise for page: 

Never had one of these before! Look at all the pretty authors!

The spine! The spine! *Swoons*

Title page! Look at all the books I've written. Holy cr*p!

Chapter One - with added badass katana

The stunning back cover, with quote from L.A. Weatherly!

Which brings me to the next point: within this finished copy of The Night Itself, the name of book #2 of the trilogy is revealed. I think I've mentioned before that book #2 and #3 already have titles - the titles were actually one of the first things that I knew about all three books. I've just been keeping them secret because it's more fun for me that way. But since the title of the second book will soon be out there, I've decided to reveal it myself... on Thursday. I feel that the reveal deserves a post all of it's own (especially since I'm completely immersed in edits for this very book at the moment and it all feels like life-or-death to me). So stay tuned for that.

Other stuff!

If you'd like to check out some early reviews and read an exclusive extract of The Night Itself for yourself, you can find both on LoveReading4Kids. You do have to register with them to get access to the extract (which I know is annoying) but the Walker Books entry for TNI, where there would normally be an extract that you could access without registering, seems to be broken at the moment, so this is the best I can do. Plus, the teen reviews are glorious.

Next, here is a link to a really different interview that I did for The Madeleine Project. The questions are based on psychology and make for a fascinating result.

Finally, a result that popped up in my Google Alerts showed me an amazing unofficial redesign of the Shadows on the Moon cover by a very talented artist. I only wish that I could have this cover for real. Purple! Lightning! Knives! Shoji-screen silhouettes

Read you on Thursday, awesome nerds.

FABULOUS AUTHORS: KATY MORAN

Hello, and happy Thursday my ducky darlings. Today I'm introducing you to a fabulous author - Katy Moran - who has the same publisher as me and is the author of several wonderful fantasy novels and a dark contemporary romance.

I was lucky enough a few months ago to get my hands on an ARC of her new book, Hidden Among Us, which came out on the 7th of March. After reading it I immediately started badgering Katy to come on the blog and do an interview. I also managed to get three finished copies of Hidden Among Us from Walker Books and will be hosting a giveaway for them, along with bookplates signed by Katy, next week when I do my official book review.

Onto the interview!

Zolah: First of all - welcome to The Zoë-Trope, Katy! I absolutely LOVED Hidden Among Us. It's just the most wonderful, unique, bittersweet story, jammed full of lovely British and Celtic folklore and mythology. It reminds me most of books by British authors like Diana Wynne Jones, where the reader is offered no easy solutions and nothing is predictable.

Can you remember the initial spark of inspiration that started Hidden Among Us growing in your brain? What was it and how did it come to you?

Katy: Our creepy and mysterious folklore traditions have been lurking in the back of my mind since I was a child, but I think the actual spark of inspiration for Hidden Among Us came from two different places at two different times. 

I used to do quite a bit of festival work – I'd started out volunteering at Glastonbury in 1999 and ended up working in my friends' cafe for pretty much the whole of summer 2007. It was a time of torrential rainfall (streams of water running through the kitchen), hysterical laughter and a sort of devil-may-care blitz spirit. After a very wet and muddy festival, my friend Annabel and I finally got away from the Glade at about 4 in the morning, pulling up at a nearby petrol station soon afterwards. There was a smart shiny red car at the pump ahead of us, and I remember watching in total fascination as two very tall, leggy and beautiful festival-goers climbed out, picking their way across the forecourt. They were out of this world. Annabel and I were still completely covered in mud, but these guys had taken the festival look to a whole other level, clad in very little but scraps of floaty leather and some feathers. They just looked totally otherworldy (and hilarious, out of context). I've often seen amazing-looking people lurking in the early hours at festivals or big outdoor parties, and thought how almost inhumanly gorgeous they were. 

So stumbling across unusual people like that was definitely one source of inspiration for the Hidden, but I'm also quite fascinated by the effect of rainy English sunlight glancing off bodies of water – puddles, rivers or lakes. When that weak rainy light turns the puddles on the lane silver, I think they look like doors to another world. See also the final question here about a certain song!

Zolah: While you were writing, who or what did you feel was at the core of the book: the element that you loved the most or which was most important for you to get down on the page?

Katy: I think that the most important aspect of the book is the family bonds between the brothers and sisters, and how love in its many forms can make us turn to the most unexpected and often even downright dangerous or damaging course of action.

Zolah: What is your writing process like? Are you a planner or a pantser? Do you write long-hand or type directly onto a computer? Where do you normally work?

Katy: I learned to touch-type when I left school, so I always type directly on to my laptop. That way I can write at the speed of thought – sometimes very fast, sometimes extremely slow! I usually start out with a character and a basic plot arc. I did a chapter by chapter plan for Hidden Among Us and its sequel, but I'm not really sure how helpful this was. With the sequel, I got bogged down in it a little bit and became stuck a few times – quite late on in the writing process I realised that in this case I would have been better off brainstorming my characters and their motivations. 

When I first set about writing Hidden Among Us, I didn't actually know one of the most important facts about Lissy, my main character. Without wanting to give this away, all I can say was that it came as a real flash of inspiration when I got a bit closer to Lissy as a character. I had a sudden realisation about her. I usually work with my laptop on the sofa, which is actually playing merry hell with my back! When we move in a few weeks, I'm going to have an outside office, and will start working at a desk again.

Zolah: Oooh, *speaking* of the sequel to Hidden Among Us... Can you tell us anything - any little detail - about the new book?

Katy: In the sequel to Hidden Among Us, we get to hear the Hidden's side of the story, and it all gets quite scary! There are also some new Hidden characters introduced, as well as the usual betrayals and counter-betrayals. 

Zolah: If you had to a song to listen to right now, what would it be and why?

Katy: Reynardine by the Fairport Convention, sung by Sandy Denny. She had such a wild and beautiful voice - perfect for a story about a mysterious and dangerous young man encountered one night. This song lit a spark of inspiration that smouldered for many years. 

Sounds right up my alley. Thanks so much for taking time out to satisfy my curiosity, Katy!

If you'd like to learn more about the book and about the process of getting it from idea to publication, check out the earlier stops on Katy's book tour, which you can see listed in the lovely banner to the right. And if this has whetted your appetite to read the book, remember to come back next Tuesday and enter for a chance to win one of THREE copies of Hidden Among Us, and signed bookplates too.

Read you later, guys!

THE NEXT BIG THING

Hello and Happy Tuesday my lovelies! Today I'm taking part in a meme (I know, right?! It might actually be my first, unless Roadtrip Wednesday counts) called The Next Big Thing, whereby writers tag each other to answer certain questions about whatever their newest project is - and then tag still more writers to take part.

I was tagged by the absolutely delightful Erin Bow, who talks about her Next Big Thing, Sorrow's Knot (which sounds so luciously creepy and beautiful I can't even stand it) right here.

I, in my turn, am tagging lovely writer friends R.J Anderson (author of KNIFE, SWIFT, ULTRAVIOLET and the upcoming QUICKSILVER) and Elizabeth May (the lady whose beautiful photograph and face are on the cover of FrostFire) whose first book THE FALCONER is coming out next year. These guys will be posting their own Next Big Things either this or next week, so check their blogs out.

NOTE: I would have tagged more writers for this if I could, but practically everyone I approached had either *already* taken part or *couldn't* take part for excellent reasons. As it is, R.J. has actually already been tagged by Erin in the same post that tagged me. We decided to let it slide, since I was about to break down and cry all over Twitter. 

What’s the working title for your book?

The fact that I can finally talk about this now makes me so happy and giggly. Yay! It's The Name of the Blade trilogy, and Book One is titled The Night Itself. 

A short synopsis?

When Mio steals the katana – her family's priceless sword – she only wants to liven up her fancy-dress costume. But the katana is more than some dusty heirloom, and her actions unleash an ancient and unspeakable evil. Soon the monsters of mythical Japan are stalking the streets of 21st century London, searching for her and the sword. Only the appearance of a mysterious warrior boy, Shinobu, saves Mio from death. Now Mio knows that if she cannot learn to control the katana's legendary powers, she will lose not only her own life ... but the love of a lifetime.

Where did the idea for this book come from?

The first spark of the idea was a gift from a friend who is in my writer's group. She posted the Robert Graves poem 'The Bedpost' to our online forum as part of a discussion we were all having. Now, the poem is about this legendary hero and warrior who is enchanted by an evil witch, and ends up trapped in a post of wood - the bedpost of a young girl's bed, in fact. His only chance to break the spell and gain his freedom is to whisper stories to the young woman and get her to fall in love with him. But she's only interested in bloodthirsty tales of battle and adventure, and so he remains trapped in the post.

Straight away I felt that someone needed to take this story on and give it a more satisfactory ending! But I thought that if my hero was going to be trapped in an inanimate object, it ought to be something a bit more interesting - and mobile - than a post of wood. Since he was a warrior, my brain immediately leapt to the idea of a shield or an axe or - a sword. A Japanese sword! And my hero would be a hero from ancient Japan, which would give me a chance to utilise all the wonderful mythology and folklore which I had read about during my research for Shadows on the Moon, but which I never used in that book.

I knew that with so much magic and so many mythical creatures flying about, I would need a realistic setting and a very down to earth, ordinary main character in order to keep the story feeling grounded and real, and the fantastical elements feeling strange and scary. And at that point my brain just seemed to explode with all these ideas and I began to realise that there was more story here than I could possibly tell in a single book, and that for the first time I was actually looking at a series. 

What genre does your book fall under?

It is dark urban fantasy for young adults. 

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

The actress who looks most like my idea of Mio Yamato, my heroine, is Horikita Maki. She's a Japanese actress who is more or less unknown here in the west:

For Shinobu, I would pick the actor Kaneshiro Takeshi, who is slightly better known internationally, having starred in The House of Flying Daggers and The Warlords:

Truth to tell, Kaneshiro-san is too old to play the role of teenage Shinobu now, but in my head, that is the face I see when I think of my character.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I am represented by Nancy Miles of the Miles Stott Children's Literary Agency, and the book will be commercially published in the UK by Walker Books in July of 2013. 

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

An astonishingly short time, for me - just under six months. That's the fastest I've ever written anything. The universe made me pay that time back in other ways, though! The first draft of the second book (which I've just finished and turned in) took over a year. 

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

The books that most immediately spring to mind are The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare. Just like The Mortal Instruments, The Name of the Blade is urban fantasy with a really strong sense of setting (in TMI it's New York, in TNotB it's London). In both series there's a large cast of diverse characters, and a focus on fast paced adventure and thrill-ride fight scenes. I've also done my best to create a central love story which is as achingly romantic as the relationship of Jace and Clary in TMI, although Mio and Shinobu's connection can best be described as... unique. *Evil laughter* 

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I've already talked about the initial inspiration, which came from several different places. But I think the underlying motivation came from the books I was reading at the time. I had just finished a draft of FrostFire - it had taken me nearly sixteen months to get it to a publishable state, including masses of re-writes with my editor - and it had turned out to be the most dark and emotional of my high fantasy novels. Frankly, I needed a break. Some friends of mine - again, from my writer's group! - took me on a mega-book-buying spree. It was insane; they just kept shoving books at me and I just kept buying them. I had a job fitting all the bags on the train, let alone carrying them home from the station. Inevitably I ended up with lots and lots of urban fantasy simply because that was one of the most common things on the shelves of the bookshop. I'd read the plenty of urban fantasy fiction before that, but suddenly I had a massive collection of the most recent, cutting edge YA stuff right in my hands.

So I started reading. And some of this urban fantasy was just brilliant. It made my heart race and my brain light up and my soul sing. I loved it. But equally some of it was DIRE. So bad that I couldn't believe that anyone, let alone experienced publishing professionals, had thought this was worth the paper it was printed on. Now, as most writers will tell you, that point - the point where you're diving into a genre and you're starting to see all the patterns and all the tropes and all the cliches and all the overused ideas and under-exploited potential, where you've read the best of the best and the worst of the worst - that's the liminal space where your own imagination starts to light up. You start to ask yourself 'How would *I* have dealt with that plotline?' or think 'I would love to do my own take on a situation like that!' and finally 'Why hasn't anyone written THAT in a book yet? It would be brilliant!'

All those questions lie fallow in the back of your brain, just waiting for the right story to come along and bring them to life. So I was basically inspired to write an urban fantasy by reading urban fantasy. Which is often the way, I think.

What else about the book might pique a reader’s interest?

Well, if anyone else is as burned out as I am on books dealing with western mythos - angels and demons, werewolves and vampires, fairies, elves, mermaids, witches oh my! - but still wants breathless fight scenes, epic adventure and swoony romance, I think they will be interested in The Night Itself. And as a bonus, this will be my first published story where I get to exercise my sense of humour on the page - which I've enjoyed more than I can say - so if my blog or my Twitter have ever made anyone laugh, chances are these books will too (and possibly cry a bit as well, but who knows?).  *More evil laughter*

SHOULD 13YR OLDS READ 50 SHADES OF GREY?

Today's blog title is the name of the debate that I participated in on Monday on the Radio Four 'You and Yours' programme.

The BBC called Walker Books in the middle of last week, wanting to know if they had an author who would be willing to talk about the issue on air. The other participant in the discussion was to be Tara Benson from Harlequin Mills & Boon (who publish romances worldwide). The PR department at Walker thought of me - well-known as I am for liking to talk on pretty much every much subject - and with a bit of shuffling we managed to arrange everything.

So yesterday I got on a train and went to Lincoln, which was the closest town to me with a BBC studio available, and I was hooked up to a mic and broadcast throughout the country talking about YA novels and why I think that most people (young or old) would be better off readng pretty much anything than 50 Shades of Grey, because it's incredibly badly written, and tedious, and both the main characters are as wooden as the wall of a garden shed, AND it romanticizes a relationship which is extremely dangerous and unhealthy.

I think we had a really great discussion about it, with Tara Benson turning out to be a highly sensible and intelligent lady with lots of good stuff to say, and me managing to get my fifty-pence in as I had been determined I would. You can listen to the debate (and the whole show) through this link.

My bit starts about halfway through, if you want to zip ahead :) Let me know what you think in the comments!

YA FANTASY

Hello, Dear Readers! Happy friday and welcome to the penultimate stop on the FrostFire Blog Tour!

Today's post is YA FANTASY (in which I ramble about the recent evolution of the YA publishing industry) and is over at the blog of the marvelous PewterWolf, otherwise known as Andrew, who happened to give FrostFire a glowing review just this week.

Also! I did a guest post on the blog of the charming Norman Geras, who is married to YA and Ch's legend Adele Geras. It's about one of my favourite books ever, The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold, so go check that out too :)

See you all on Tuesday, my duckies!

INTERVIEW WITH CASSANDRA CLARE!

Hello and Happy Friday, Dear Readers! I have had The. Best. Week. Evah.

Well, you kind of already knew that after Tuesday's post. But things only got better after I boarded the train to Manchester to attend a Walker Books reception and meet Cassandra Clare.

Before I start to talk about Cassie, I want to give a shout out to all the wonderful booksellers who were there that night, especially the ones who kindly tweeted about my extremely fabulous and extremely uncomfortable shoes (bear in mind, Dear Readers, that I normally spend about 80% of my time walking about barefoot and the other 20% in flats, mostly walking boots. I was not prepared for my five inch heels. I had to apologise to everyone I saw for swaying and wobbling all over the place and promise them all that I was not drunk. But other than that, they were a hit!). Thanks also to the lovely, lovely Walker Books people who arranged everything so beautifully and looked after me so kindly.

Having braved the reception - slightly late due to inevitable train delays - at first I didn't actually dare to go anywhere near Cassandra Clare, who was standing at the back of the room surrounded by lots of enthusiastic people. But as the reception came to a close suddenly she breezed past me with a cheery smile and called out 'Come on Zoë! We're going to dinner!'

Holy Cr*p, she knows who I am!

And then I remembered that there was a picture of me on display at the reception (duh!) and also that we have talked online a few times before. So I got up and trotted after her to the hotel restaurant. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that dinner with Cassie (and her husband and some lovely Walker people) was a complete and total blast. This famous author is just *enchanting* in person. She is perhaps the only other human being I've ever met who talks as fast as I do - and it turns out that she likes to rant about all the same stuff I do as well! In addition, she's incredibly funny and real, and has that rare knack of putting people at their ease, which was extremely useful because a few minutes before I'd been so nervous I felt sick. After being coaxed into shaking my fist at imaginary people and scaring the other restaurant patrons with my emphatic (read: loud) opinionatedness, I was relaxed enough to happily snarfle down tremendous amounts of the lovely cuisine on offer (TREMENDOUS. AMOUNTS).

Also? Her husband is Simon from The Mortal Instruments. Only grown up. With, for some reason, a different name. And apparently he's not a vampire? I maaaay have squeeeeed over him a bit. Quite a bit. He took it with good grace, bless him. He's clearly used to his wife's embarrassing fangirls.

So the following day, having followed the City of Lost Souls cavalcade all the way to Cassie's next tour stop in Sheffield, and before the event began and the fans descended, I did my interview with her. I was really lucky because I was able to get in a LOT of questions, but I couldn't do every single one, (especially where some people asked three or four). So I beg your pardon if your question didn't make it in. Hopefully you'll like the interview anyway:

(Note: this interview was transcribed from the recording on my dictaphone)

Zolah: OK, I’m now recording you, so don’t say anything too…

Cassandra Clare: Racy?

Z: Right.

*Muffled sniggering, probably from me*

Z: So here’s the first question. Now that Jace is no longer possessed, what one moment from their European trip would Clary like to revisit with him?

CC: I think that if Clary could go back and do her whirlwind tour of Europe again with un-possessed Jace she would probably want to repeat their date night in Venice. Because it was actually quite romantic. You know - they went out to dinner, they walked along the canals…admittedly Jace stole a boat. But probably un-possessed Jace would have stolen the boat, that part really wasn’t that out of character for him. It was one of the first things they did and I wrote it to show her struggling with having kind of a good time and yet also feeling the disconnect: realizing that this is Jace, but at the same time not Jace, not the Jace she knows. Being able to do all that again with the real Jace is something she would definitely enjoy.

Z: Since Jace is now infused with heavenly fire, could Clary create a ‘fireproof’ rune to protect herself?

CC: Technically speaking Clary could create any rune! What she says in City of Glass is that she’s limited by the runes that come to her. She could sit there and think that she wants such-and-such a rune and maybe it would happen – or maybe it wouldn’t. That’s why she can’t just create a ‘Save the World’ rune or a ‘Blow Up All Evil’ rune. It would depend on whether a ‘fireproof’ rune came into her mind or not. She can’t really rely on runes to save her in any situation.

Z: When Jace is possessed, he seems to stop caring about his family. Why does he still feel so strongly about Clary? It is because Jonathan does, or is Clary special?

CC: I think that when Jace is possessed he doesn’t care about his family in the same way. He doesn’t care about them empathically in the sense that he isn’t concerned about their feelings of loss or grief or worry about him. It’s not the same as him not caring about them at all. If Alec or Isabelle were there, I’m sure possessed!Jace would be happy to see them and spend time with them, in the same way that he still seems to love Clary. But if you look at the reactions of possessed!Jace actually he’s not that interested or empathic about Clary’s feelings. He feels a desire for her and feels that she’s necessary to him, he feels that he loves her, but he doesn’t feel the way that you ideally feel about someone you love; that their happiness is more important than yours. Clearly he’s not capable of feeling that, whereas un-possessed Jace does feel that way.

Z: Like when *spoiler spoiler* and Clary’s covered in bruises and *spoiler spoiler* and Jace just says ‘Oh, I hope you worked it out’. Normally you’d expect Jace to want to slice someone’s head off in that situation!

CC: Yes, exactly. Jace would be asking ‘What happened to you? Who did this to you?’, he’d be freaking out. He’d say ‘I hope you punched their face in’. But here Clary comes up to Jace, covered in bruises and upset and he knows *spoiler spoiler* but he’s just not reacting empathically. He’s only concerned about her in so far as she feels necessary to him.

Z: Basically he’s reacting like Jonathan.

CC: It’s like Jonathan has taken the top level of Jace’s emotion’s away, the section of emotions that makes us our better selves. Isabelle says in City of Glass something along the lines of: There are some people who see others as just players on a stage. I believe that’s what Jonathan does. He just sees people as players on his stage. They don’t have their own reality, their own importance. They only matter in so far as they’re important to you. They matter only in so far as they fulfil your desires or thwart them. That’s what Jonathan/Sebastian does to Jace. He puts him in that state.

*At this point there’s some muffled excitement from me as I express how much I love this answer. Then I pull myself together and move on*

Z: Since Jace is now full of angel’s blood AND Heavenly Fire will he now change even more compared to other Shadowhunters? Is he more weapon than human?

CC: That makes me think of Darth Vader. You’re more machine than man!

*Muffled giggling noises, probably from both of us this time*

CC: No, Jace is still really human! And I think that actually the experiences that he’s been through in City of Fallen Angels and City of Lost Souls have peeled him open a little bit and made him a bit more open to humanity. He kind of needed to go through that. He had a lot of concerns – he’s always had a lot of concerns – about who he really was. Was he really a good person? And I think this is pretty incontrovertible proof for him that yes, he is, because he now knows what it is like to live as a not-good person, and that’s not who he is. So I think that while the Heavenly Fire is going to change him physically it’s not going to change him emotionally and spiritually.

Z: But it is going to change him physically?

CC: Well, he has this thing that’s potentially a dangerous weapon that resides inside him. Think about it as a bomb that can only go off once.

*Impressed sounds from me*

Z: Have the series and characters turned out as you expected them to – or has anything developed along the way that surprised you?

CC: Definitely some things have surprised me, mostly in terms of characters that I never expected to come to the forefront as much as they have. Magnus for example - he wasn’t originally designed to be that important of a character. I always knew that he was going to date Alec, or at least be instrumental in Alec’s coming out, but their relationship kind of evolved organically and he’s taken on a bigger role. Simon certainly has a much bigger role than I originally envisioned!

Z: So not changes in your plot then?

CC: There really have been no changes to plot, nothing’s happened to the story that astonished me. Everything that was supposed to happen in the first three books did, and then for the second series I always knew that Sebastian would be the villain, that he would come back. He’s an interesting character to write about. So I would say that basically the place you start out stays the same and the place you finish stays the same, but the way you move between them can change.

Z: That’s exactly how I think about it! This is really fun!

CC: *Laughs*

Z: *Suddenly remembers she’s supposed to be interviewing* Ahem. Are you worried about depicting the deepening intimacy in Jace and Clary’s relationship? Not just because it’s so important to the fans, but also because some authors have experienced backlash on this issue?

CC: Are you asking me if I’m worried about Jace and Clary having sex?

Z: Um…Yes?

CC: *More laughter*

Z: Well, they got quite close, didn’t they?

CC: They did get close! I’m not worried about depicting this so long as I feel they’re in the right place for it. I would like to present it as a positive thing. I’m interested in representing sex positivity in YA novels and I believe in depicting safe sex as a responsible decision between two responsible people, which is why I there are many mentions in the books of things like birth control and condoms. People [within the books] have straightforward conversations about it. They talk about ‘When are we going to have sex, where are we going to have sex, what does it mean if we have sex?’ I think all of that is important if you’re going to write about characters who will be having sex. Given that all of that stuff is in there, I don’t think anyone will be too astonished if Jace and Clary do have sex.

Z: When did Jace and Clary officially become boyfriend and girlfriend? Did one of them ask, or was it just assumed? I think it was just assumed!

CC: I think ever since the party in City of Glass, they’ve both assumed they were boyfriend and girlfriend. I don’t think there was ever a discussion about it. It was just ‘on’.

Z: Was Jace and Clary’s relationship inspired by any characters in classic literature? Like Lucie and Sydney in A Tale of Two Cities?

CC: Sydney and Lucie applies more to the couples in the Infernal Devices. The whole story is like a very loose, not-faithful retelling of what happens in A Tale of Two Cities. There are definitely aspects of famous fictional couples that have influenced things about Jace and Clary, things that I loved that informed the development of their relationship. Like Pride and Prejudice, and the sort of prickly early dealings when the guy is really annoying until he comes around and proves himself to be a better man than you initially thought he could be. That’s one of those great tropes that I think we all love. Jace is initially really prickly but eventually turns out to be, at heart, basically a really good person. I think having Clary be the one who recognizes that and helps bring it out of him is one of those things that I find very satisfying. So I’d probably say yes, Pride and Prejudice.

And at that point, our time was up! A few hugs all round, and everyone was off on their own business - me headed for home, Cassandra for a room filled to bursting with adoring readers. I'm SO glad that I got to meet her! Thank you again to everyone at Walker for trusting me enough to include me in the book tour!

A LETTER TO MY BOOK ON ITS U.S. BIRTHDAY

Whooooo! *Throws confetti* *Blows party trumpet* *Lights candles*

Happy Birthday!

Welcome to the world, Shadows on the Moon (U.S. edition). Today is your release date, four years to the month since I began work on you back in 2008. It's been a very long wait, but you are worth it. You have a beautifully subtle, understated cover which does not conform to any of those #Racefail or Dead Girl Cover trends, and which hints wonderfully at the story within. You have dove-grey boards and shining red foiling and end papers. You have an audiobook version which I simply cannot wait to listen to. You have re-vamped haiku, a stunning internal design, and you already have some lovely blog reviews, a thumbs up from Kirkus (which neither of your older sisters managed, look you) and a Junior Library Guild Selection.

I've also just found out - with wonderment and delight - that you are to be included on the Summer 2012 Kids' Indie Next List as an "Inspired Recommendation for Kids from Indie Booksellers". I have often watched wistfully as other authors celebrated inclusion on this list in their Twitter feed. My congratulations and happiness for them were genuine, but I did wish that one day a book of mine might join them.

You have made that dream a reality, Shadows on the Moon (U.S. edition) and I will always be so grateful to you for that.

By lucky coincidence, it's Fairytale Fortnight again, and the lovely Misty has posted an interview in which she asks very interesting questions, and I talk about you Shadows on the Moon! And also fairytales in general, and my next project set in The Moonlit Lands/Tsuki no Hikari no Kuni (yes, there is one! You'll have a little sister one day). There's also a giveaway of a copy of you on her blog here.

Oh, and she reviewed you, as well, and said such lovely things. Are you blushing, Shadows on the Moon (U.S. edition)? You should be.

Listen, Shadows on the Moon (U.S edition). I'm your author, and like all authors I have many hopes for you as you venture out into the world on your own. I hope that you will do wonderful things, win prizes, make lots and lots (and lots!) of friends who will take you home from the bookshop or order you online. But my greatest hope for you - and for all my books, both the ones already written and the ones yet to come - is that people will see you. That they will percieve the beautiful, sincere heart beating away within you, and forgive your inevitable flaws. I want you to be seen and remembered. And if you achieve that, I will be content.

*   *   *

*Wipes away tear*

Ahem. Oh, good morning/afternoon/evening/night Dear Readers! Has everyone entered the Just Because April Giveaway? It's only open until midnight tomorrow, so if you want those fabulous prizes you'd better get a wriggle on! I'll be announcing the winners on Thursday.

Next week I've got an exciting new scheme that I want to talk about and get as many of you involved in as possible. I'll tell you that I'm calling it InCreWriMa (and if you can work out what that stands for you get a gold star) but all the rest will have to wait! It's a surprise!

In the meantime, let's have some music from The Legend of Korra, the new animated series which is a companion to Avatar: The Last Airbender (I wish I could link you to the official site, but the Nick website won't allow it - thanks a bunch Nickelodean) and which is currently BLOWING MY MIND BAYBEE.

This got me through writing a really spooky scene in Katana Book #2 over the weekend :) See you on Thursday, honey-buns.

WHAT DIVERSITY MEANS TO ME

Hello, hello, hello, Dear Readers! Today, I bring you, not a post, but a LINK to a post on another blog - the rather lovely Ellen Oh's blog, to be precise. Go there at once! Check out the many wonderful and informative articles on diversity by people who are not me, and also the interview on diversity by a person who is me (also known as me).

Sorry kids, that's all you get today. I have Revision Brain Syndrom. Oh, you haven't heard of RBS? Here's a video explaining it:

See? You would not believe the state of my hair right now.

Read you later, my loves!

BOOK MEMOIRS INTERVIEW!

Hello, Dear Readers - and Happy Monday! This weekend I realised that I had never posted the wonderful interview which Elle and Kate from The Book Memoirs did with me for their Writer's Workshop. I'm not even sure I posted a link, since I'd kind of forgotten about it (bad Zolah! No cookie!). 

And so, I present it now, for your consideration. Some great questions here, which I've never been asked in quite this way before.

Hej, Memoirites! Hvordan har du det? It feels appropriate to say hello and ask you how you are in Danish because today’s author is young-adult novelist Zoë Marriott! No, Zoë herself is not Danish but her wildly popular first book, The Swan Kingdom, is an ingenious retelling of the fairytale ‘The Wild Swans’ by Hans Christian Andersen… (See what I did there?) Zoë is also the author of the acclaimed fantasy novel Daughter of the Flames and the highly acclaimed Shadows on the Moon, currently available in a bookstore near you. We love Zo and we’re always delighted to have her on the site.

Elle: Hi, Zoë! Thanks so much for agreeing to be here. In prepping for the interview, I spent some time working through your treasure trove of a website and all of your tips for aspiring writers. If you had to pick one single piece of all-important advice to give to budding novelists, what do you think it would be?

Zoë: Thanks so much for inviting me, girls! Now, this first question… Oh, heck – where’s Yoda when you need him? The thing is, the One All-Important Piece of Advice probably changes from writer to writer, from day to day, even from minute to minute. It all depends where you are in your book, your life and your career. If I’m going for a one-size-fits-all type of thing I’ll probably plump for a reminder that the only difference between a published writer and an unpublished one is that the published one never gave up. So don’t ever give up. Persistence is three times as valuable as luck.

Kate: As a big fan of fairy tales and folk stories, I’m curious: what made you decide to use an Andersen story as the backbone for your novel? Was this a conscious decision at the get-go, or an evolution as you worked through ideas?

Zoë: I’ve always been fascinated by fairytales, and The Wild Swans was my favourite fairytale growing up. Looking back, I can see that what really captured my attention about the story – and all folkloric works – is the wide gaps left for the imagination within the narrative. Fairytales always tell you who did what and where, but somehow that essential WHY is never provided. Just why is the wicked stepmother so wicked? Why is the father or King always so willing to banish and forget his own children? How do the children themselves feel about it? What kind of courage does it take to go on when your fairytale world has fallen apart like this? I promised myself that I would explore these questions when I got older. And then I forgot about it. But when – several years later! – I realised that I wanted to write young adult novels, The Wild Swans immediately presented itself as a story that I needed to re-tell. It was as if it had been waiting patiently at the back of my mind all that time for me to grow up and notice it.

Elle: I’ve noticed that in my search for information, I haven’t seen anything which speaks to your writing process. Do you story-board? Are there lots of pieces of paper stuck haphazardly on your walls or do you have nice, neat index cards full of plans?
Zoë: Here’s where I bust out my camera! As you can see here, I’m a devotee of notebooks. Generally when I get a little spark of an idea I’ll pick out a notebook that seems right – I have nearly a hundred neatly stored in my Writing Cave – and I’ll start shoving Post-It notes into it with all my random thoughts. Later on, when the idea has matured or collided with another idea to make something that seems juicy enough for a book, I’ll get the notebook out again, pop a working title and a date in the front and start scribbling like mad – everything from fully formed scenes to one-line snatches of dialogue, to character sketches.

I do almost all of my rough drafting with a pencil in a notebook, which means that about 75% of my notebook is full of messy stuff which bears no resemblance to anything in the finished book at all. I’ve tried typing directly into a computer but I find it adds a lot of hard work to the revising later on – things look so official once you’ve got them in a Word Doc., it’s much harder to be flexible, play with ideas, change your mind. When I feel like I’ve rooted the story firmly in my brain I start trying to write a synopsis to contain all the craziness. Oy vey, synopses! I’m terrible at them! Plotting is definitely my week spot. I’ve developed all kinds of elaborate graphs and diagrams to try and keep control of my plots (as you can see!).

I’m not sure any of them really work – they’re more like a comfort blanket that I need in order to keep going when really I have no idea how things are going to fall out. For instance, after finishing the first draft of my current book I was forced to go back and change the gender OF EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER except two, and completely re-write it to make that work. I feel as if I’m a 50/50 mix between a planner and a pantser, and I hope one day to find a combination that works for me a bit more smoothly.

Kate: As someone who’s fairly private with her own writing, I always wonder this about published authors: when do you share your writing with other people? Do you have a sounding board you bounce ideas off of from inception or do you wait until you have some or all of a first draft done?

Zoë: Oh, you’re not alone, Kate! Lately I’ve been feeling like a bit of an anomaly in this regard, because Twitter and other writers blogs show me that everyone – but everyone! – seems to have teams of alpha readers, beta readers and critique partners. But I don’t. I never have. The only people who even get to glimpse what I’m working on before I’ve completed the first draft are my agent and editor – and when I say ‘first draft’ I actually mean ‘third or fourth draft that I call a first draft because I don’t want to admit how awful the actual first draft was’.

When I was first writing this was because I couldn’t find any person in my real life who was a) interested enough to comb through a first draft on my behalf and b) capable of doing so in a meaningful or helpful way. Seriously, you can’t exactly ask your mother, can you? By the time I became aware of the huge online YA community and the critiquing boards on places like AW I found that I didn’t really want feedback from anyone who wasn’t going to be directly involved in getting the book published, because so often the comments I saw online were contradictory and unhelpful.

But even though I don’t have any beta readers, I do belong to an informal writing group which was founded by an online friend of mine several years ago. We call ourselves The Furtive Scribblers and you’ll find them mentioned in the acknowledgments of everything I write. We have enormous, no-pressure fun, brain-storming, bouncing ideas, testing plots for holes, and pushing each other through writer’s block. I adore them, and without them my books would be HALF as good, if that.

Elle: I’m really interested in your experience of planning a fantasy novel and the alternative rules of that world. For high-fantasy, everyone’s advice is to start with a map, urban-fantasy seems to carry the recommendation of working out the mythology first. What did you do first whilst plotting your brand of fantasy novel?

Zoë: Panic, normally. As soon as I start to get an idea of what my fantasy world is going to be, I freak out and become convinced I JUST DON’T KNOW ENOUGH OMG. I wear out my library card, spend all my cash on reference works, documentaries and world music CDs and Google until my fingers bleed. Because my fantasy worlds so far have all had a historical basis (Daughter of the Flames was a mixture of India, Africa and Tibet, Shadows on the Moon is Japan and a sprinkling of China) it would have been all too easy to get things wrong.

Which may sound crazy when I’m making up my own world – but if you’re creating a pre-industrial country with no mass production and you have your characters pull out a ‘tarp’ or carry water in a metal bucket, you’ve already messed up. If you’re going to create fairytale Japan you need to know about real Japan or instead of an homage you’ll create a stereotypical parody, and not only insult the real culture you’re using but embarrass yourself. I do not like to embarrass myself!

Only when I’ve stuffed my brain to bursting point with every real life fact I can find do I feel as if I have the right to start messing around and actually making stuff up. This is the fun part. I used to draw incredibly detailed maps, but my publisher doesn’t like them and won’t actually put them in the book, so now I mostly sketch out relative areas so that I don’t get mixed up later on. I have a mental check list of vital facts I must know before I start work in earnest, like – what is the primary religion or religion of this country or countries? How strongly does this affect the day-to-day lives of the people? What does the general populace look like? What is the climate like, what are the major geographical features and natural hazards? What are is the wildlife like? The list goes on for quite a long while. But once I’ve filled those boxes I’ll give myself freedom to make other things up as I go along and as the plot or characters require. Some of my favourite bits of world building have come from impulse invention – like the facial tattoos in DotF.

Kate: Do you have any writing “rituals”? Do you have to cut yourself off from the outside world? Do you start rereading what you last wrote? Is there anything that has to be done for the juices to get flowing?

Zoë: I try not to let myself get into too many rituals, because I have an addictive personality and I feel as if I would just end up strangling myself. So, generally, I try to be in my Writing Cave by 9:00, I usually have a large mug of tea or coffee with me, and I generally try to re-read and revise what I wrote the day before, and then go onto new material. But if I blocked the doorway of the Writing Cave with three baskets of un-ironed laundry and I have to write downstairs instead? I try to be OK with that. If the dog rolled in something awful and needs a bath and I can’t start until 10:00? Golly, I really, really try to be OK with that. I think the only things I absolutely must have are my notebook/pencil and my iPod. Music is one thing I can’t do without. I mean, I can write without it, but I find it so hard to get started, it’s just easier to give in.

Elle: You’ve mentioned in one of your Q&A answers on your website that the ending to The Swan Kingdom changed drastically halfway through as you got to know your characters. Do you tend to find you start a novel with a fully-formed character in mind, or do you often begin with a handful of details and surprise yourself as you go?

Zoë: Actually, the ending itself stayed exactly the same. What changed was where the ending took place, how it took place, and all the characters involved!

I always start with a character. Stories come to me through the filter of a character’s eyes. I get that little whispering voice in the back of my head, and their life begins to unreel itself before my eyes. And because of this I fool myself that I know who they are and what’s going to happen. But of course, I’m not actually receiving messages from an alternate reality – it’s all coming from the little Writer Plugin in my hindbrain. And so what seems to come to me as incontrovertible ‘fact’, like this character’s actions, or that character’s traits, are all negotiable.

It’s only when I actually put the characters in the world, set them against each other and and let them get to work, that I truly start to understand them, and see how their histories, personalities, and conflicting desires, work together to create what I hope are fully realised people. And as soon as this starts, the story – what it means to them and what it means to me, and hence what actually happens – begins to warp and change.

This is a good thing. Even if it does cause the occasional panic attack…

Kate: At what point do you abandon an idea – be it for a plot twist, a character, or part of your fantasy world – as unworkable? Is there some threshold that lets you know “this won’t work”?

Zoë: Nope. I’ve not yet figured out how to be well adjusted about this stuff. There’s things that I love, and things I don’t. The things I love stay no matter what, and the things I don’t go out the window in a constant stream. Then I send it to my editor and she cuts half the things I love, brings half the things I don’t love back from the flowerbed under the window, and tells me to make it work. And I groan and clutch my head, and try to sneak as many of the ‘love’ bits back in as I can, but it’s never as many as I wanted. If anyone else has any tips on how to handle this? I’d be extremely grateful!

Elle: I’ve taken great pleasure in putting this question to everyone else but I especially can’t wait to see what you say! Writers are often asked who their biggest influences are but I would instead like to know which novels most influenced you as an individual and as writer, barring the most obvious answer (cough, cough)!

Zoë: The Holy Trinity for me as a young person was – The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley, Lioness Rampant by Tamora Pierce, and Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith. If you’ve read these, you’ll sense a common theme – resourceful, brave, compassionate heroines, with bag-ass swords. These books taught me who I wanted to be and I like to think I’ve lived up to that, at least in a small way. Even though my sword is only a wooden one.

When it comes to writers who influence me and my work as an adult, though – writers that I’m still striving to emulate, writers whose books have expanded my horizons and continue to make me a better writer myself – the picture changes a little. Suddenly I’m looking at a new top three:

Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones, The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold and The Other Wind by Ursula Le Guin.

These books have a lot less in common on the surface, but each of them has a core of… something, some indefinable thing, that I’m constantly trying to breach and understand. I’ve re-read each of these so many times you’d think I’d know them by heart. Instead, I find myself reading a new book each time. THAT is greatness. I bow down before them.

Thanks again for having me Elle and Kate, and for coming up with such different, intriguing questions!