Then they called me afterward to say I didn’t get the job, but good luck in my career as a writer.Īfter college I moved to New York City without a job and eventually landed an editorial assistant position at Random House. One of these investment banking firms interviewed me. I even majored in economics at Wellesley and tried to become an investment banker. My parents wanted me to be able to support myself and I never thought being a writer would be a viable job opportunity and my parents drummed it into me that I must have a job! And even though I always wanted to write-I wrote my first novel at age 13 and then two others shortly afterward, all of them fantasy (they weren’t good but a load of fun to write)-in college the pressure to get a job thing was very powerful. When she came to the United States she had to work a lot of odd jobs she didn’t like but eventually she quit her job and became a piano teacher. My mother is a pianist-she was a professional musician in China. I grew up in Colorado but I came to this country from China when I was three-and-a-half. I always knew-it just took me a long, long time to get up the nerve to do it. During this process I realized that I really loved the romance in that book-at the beginning it’s actually very sweet, so the whole first part of the book is quite lovely in terms of building up a first romance. I re-read Waters’s Tipping the Velvet to analyze why the sexual tension in the story worked for me and then tried to apply this in a YA context. YA romances don’t work for me-they’re mostly straight. When I wanted to figure out sexual tension, I read adult books. I read Persuasion by Jane Austen, for example. I looked for books with understated romance to try and figure out why they worked for me.

I ended up reading a lot of romances that I loved to get a sense of how to do write one-the most unsappy romances I could find. That experience taught me a lot about writing romance. I need to write the whole book before I get to know the characters, their motivations, and how to build them. I’m not really a character–driven writer. I felt like I knew who Taisin was from the beginning but I didn’t really know Kaede at all. It starts off by telling you these two girls are going to be in love-sets an expectation for the reader-so you really need to make it feel real, and the two main characters didn’t come to me that easily. The romance in Huntress in particular I love a lot, but it was very hard to do. I ended up enjoying writing this aspect of the books. Though I really love books that have romance in them as an element and in YA, romance is really king. I just wrote Ash and then Huntress as a romance, and what’s funny to me about this is that I have never really enjoyed reading romances.

I’m not interested in heterosexual romances.

My books were always going to be between two girls-I didn’t make a radical choice to do this.

Huntress malinda lo