(This interview was originally posted on RoundRobinWrites.com and conducted by Elizabeth DiPietro on behalf of RRW)

She’s the bestselling author of the Shades of Magic Series, This Savage Song, and Vicious. We’re looking at a Shades of Magic TV adaption on the horizon so there’s no slowing down V.E. Schwab. Despite traveling all over the country/world and drowning in deadlines, Ms. Schwab still managed to take some time out to answer a few of our questions.

Q: A trademark of your books are strong, complicated female characters (Lila Bard, Kate Harper). When you’re working on these characters do you ever find it difficult to not let them blend together?

VS: I think the problem is we still don’t see enough strong female characters, so we don’t always realize that it’s a spectrum unto itself. I may have multiple strong female characters, but they all want different things–to be seen, to be remembered, to be valid, to be free. They have to be people first, and everything else second.

Q: In regards to This Savage Song, what inspired you to combine music and monsters?

VS: Honestly, the fact that I have no talent when it comes to music has always made the ability to play vaguely supernatural, so it was only a matter of time before it played a prime role in one of my books. And when I listen to instrumental music, I feel…elevated. Like part of my mind is coming free. So in designing my soul-eating Sunai, it made sense to me that music might serve as a way to bring those souls to surface. Continue reading →

If you aren’t sure who Emily Skrutskie is, we would like to point you toward our reviews of The Edge of the Abyss and The Abyss Surrounds Us. If you are looking for more information you can always visit her website and glimpse her bio. If you are looking for even more information, we have great news! Emily stopped by and answered a few questions for us about her writing, her reading, and some quirky questions about her process.

In both The Abyss Surrounds Us & The Edge of the Abyss, Cas has some world-shaking revelations, but she still tries to remain true to herself. What sort of difficulties did you run into when pitting Cas against the truths she once knew?

My biggest struggle—something I really had to lock down in revisions—was making sure that Cas’s journey was consistent from chapter to chapter. I actually had a document on the side where I wrote down exactly what Cas thought and believed in each chapter so that I could make sure the logic flowed naturally without any gaps.

The series deals with a lot of ecological and social issues, which definitely mirror our world today. Were there any specific events in the real world that inspired the world of The Edge of the Abyss and The Abyss Surrounds Us?

Nothing springs to mind immediately. The ecological themes in the book come less from any one inspiration and more from a logical projection of what we might be dealing with more than a century in the future, as well as the fallout of having MASSIVE super predators in the ocean. Continue reading →

0:15 Introductions
1:08 Pitches
6:00 What are some of your writing rituals?
9:28 What is the weirdest thing you’ve had to research in the name of writing?
14:45 Were there any scenes from your draft that you wish you could have kept?
20:16 What was the first scene you thought of for your novel? Continue reading →

Amanda Hocking

How did writing FREEKS differ from your writing your previous novels?

FREEKS was the first thing I had written in awhile that was started out just for me. For most of the past ten years, I have been writing my books with the intention of publishing them, with the audience and readers and trends in mind. I think I had gotten a little burnt out on trying to make everyone happy (mostly because it is impossible to please all readers all the time), and I just wanted to write something that for the sake of writing it.

And that turned out to be a gothic love story about a teenage girl travelling with a band of misfits in the 1980s. It was a very cathartic writing experience for me, and it reminded me of exactly why I loved writing in the first place – I love getting lost in the world, with the characters.

Tell us a little bit about FREEKS and where you got the inspiration to write it.

I was going through a rough patch, creatively speaking, and so I just sat back and tried to think of my favorite and what I loved most that I would want to write about.

When I was a kid, I used to get old books at garage sales all the time, and I distinctly remember getting Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King and a few old V. C. Andrews novels, which are pulpy Southern Gothic-esque novels. I also watched The Lost Boys and Pretty in Pink over and over again (I think I literally ruined the old VHS of The Lost Boys from watching it too much).

So I basically threw all those things together in a soup, and I picked apart the things I liked and wanted to explore more. That became a travelling sideshow in the 80s stopping Louisiana, where a supernatural monster is afoot, and a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who is smith with a local boy with secrets of his own. Continue reading →