A couple of weekends ago, I attended a virtual author event with Kristin Cashore and Malinda Lo, hosted by the San Diego bookstore Mysterious Galaxy (which did the bookselling all those times I went to YALLWEST). The Q & A was moderated by Tui Sutherland; Sutherland, Cashore, and Lo all live in the Boston area and belong to the same book club. I’ve long been a fan of Kristin Cashore. I’ve actually read all of her books, except for the one that just came out, and I love both the Graceling Realm books (Graceling, Fire, and Bitterblue) and Jane, Unlimited. I also saw her speak at the Boston Book Festival one October when I was in college (wow, that was a long time ago!). I’ve also long been a fan of Malinda Lo. I’ve read most of her books (and it’s been in the back of my mind to reread Huntress for a while), and I also admire her work with Cindy Pon on Diversity in YA, her research on LGBTQ+ YA By the Numbers, and her posts on craft.

Cashore and Lo were promoting their newest books, released in January. Cashore’s Winterkeep is the latest installment in the Graceling Realm series and features a deep sea creature and telepathic foxes. I believe it has strong environmental themes inspired by Cashore’s travels in the Arctic. Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club is about Lily Hu, a science-minded Chinese-American girl coming into her lesbian identity in 1950s San Francisco.

The event began with brief readings by each author. Cashore read a passage from Winterkeep featuring an amazing cat named Lovejoy (are not all literary cats amazing?). Lo read an excerpt from Last Night at the Telegraph Club in which Lily tells her friend Kath from math class about a pulp novel she read at the drugstore in which two women fell in love and asks Kath whether she’s ever heard of such a thing. Kath says yes!

Sutherland then asked both authors what the spark was for their respective books. Lo explained that her novel had grown out of the short story she’d written for the queer YA historical fiction anthology All Out (which I own). She’d been inspired by Rise of the Rocket Girls, a book about the women computers at the Jet Propulsion Lab (one was Chinese-American!), and another book about the queer history of San Francisco; the two books combined in her head. Cashore had also drawn two disparate things together: she’d wanted to write a dorm book, and she’d had an idea about a deep sea creature who wants to be left alone, who doesn’t want to engage or have responsibilities. She added that Winterkeep has five points of view, including those of the sea creature and a telepathic fox. Lo remarked that the creatures in Winterkeep seemed very themselves, which I took to mean convincingly non-human.

Next, Sutherland asked what felt different when approaching a new genre as an author. Lo has written books in many different genres, and Cashore wrote each section of Jane, Unlimited in a different genre. Lo explained that she reads widely across genres and wants to write all genres (her oeuvre certainly testifies to this!). The time had just come for historical fiction. She’d already been thinking about writing a historical novel before her agent suggested turning the short story in All Out into a book. She said that even within a genre, books differ in tone (she gave the example of her two fantasy novels, Ash and Huntress), and for her, genre is secondary to the specifics of the story. Cashore said she was always happy to be where she was in her writing. She agreed with Lo about the primacy of the specifics of the story. For Jane, Unlimited, where the choices of genre for each section were very deliberate, she had to really think about what made a story a mystery, a spy novel, etc. Each part of Jane, Unlimited felt challenging until she reached the fantasy section, which felt so easy, even though writing her fantasy novels isn’t easy! That made her realize that the experience of writing her previous fantasy novels had counted for something.

At this point, Sutherland commented that historical fiction was hard because of all the research necessary to write each sentence. Lo said that she loved research (she almost got a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology), but if you don’t love research, you probably shouldn’t write historical fiction. To her, historical fiction felt like writing fantasy because of all the worldbuilding involved, but in the case of historical fiction, you could just look stuff up instead of having to make it up. Cashore asked if there was a sense of pressure or anxiety about not getting it wrong, and Lo said there was always anxiety, that most of writing was getting through your anxiety. She didn’t know much about the 1950s when she started working on this book and was surprised by how interested in the era she became. She reached a point where she felt like she knew what was happening in San Francisco in September 1954. The world at one point in space and time came alive for her, like she could walk through 1954. She described it as a weird feeling. But also, she’s quickly forgetting all of it. Cashore said this happened with her research too: she has the information when she needs it and subsequently loses it, but the book holds onto it all.

The authors then talked about point of view. Cashore said that after writing Winterkeep from many POVs, a point came where she had to decide which viewpoints were the most important. The hardest POV to cut was Nev’s. Nev was another dorm character; she had all this veterinary training, as well as a terrible boyfriend from whom she had to recover. (To be clear, she’s still in the book; she’s just not a POV character.) Cashore said she hung on to the remaining five POVs even against some pushback. The book was complicated to plot, but coming off Jane, Unlimited, she knew she could do it. So while it was hard, she wasn’t worried about it. At this point, one of the attendees suggested in the chat that she use Nev in a later book, and Cashore admitted that was one of her little ideas. Lo said that Cashore could just send those extra scenes to her instead. As far as POV in Lo’s book, her editor, Andrew Karre, had suggested including a few scenes from the perspectives of adult characters. She wrote a bunch, some of which didn’t make it into the final book. The ones that remained come in between the six parts of the novel. She mentioned here that in order to figure out how Lily’s parents got together, she had to research World War II. Cashore said she’d loved seeing the perspectives of Lily’s mother and aunt.

Sutherland’s next question was about the family backgrounds of Lily and of Lovisa (one of the POV characters in Winterkeep) and how they contributed to the characters’ complexity. She wondered if these characters had changed as Lo and Cashore had filled out their family backgrounds. Cashore replied that Lovisa had a pretty dysfunctional family and that she’d come to the book already feeling some of those scenes. That said, while she knew how different family members made Lovisa feel, she didn’t always necessarily know what motivated those family members. She described it as having the trunk and the roots and having to do some extra planning work to fill out the branches. She also mentioned that a fellow author had encouraged her to differentiate the emotional reactions of Lovisa’s brothers at the end instead of having them all be the same. She said that Lovisa’s three little brothers were her first time writing siblings! But not her last. In the chat, some attendees pointed out that she’d written Bitterblue and Hava. This made Cashore laugh and say something about the author being too close to the work.

The image of the tree and the roots resonated with Lo. She described having to develop things more in the book, especially when it came time to write the parent POV scenes. It took her a really long time to figure out how Lily’s father could have gotten U.S. citizenship (unlike Lily and Lily’s mother, he wasn’t born in the U.S.). It wasn’t until she’d gotten at least through the first draft that she realized he’d have to have enlisted in the army in order to gain citizenship. Apparently many Chinese men in the U.S. did this, as it was one of their only possible paths to becoming citizens.

Sutherland then switched to audience questions. The first came from a reader who asked Cashore and Lo what their days were like as authors and how they balanced writing and other activities while keeping motivation for both. Lo said that when drafting new material she writes in the morning. She just sits there. If you sit there long enough, you’ll get so bored you’ll write. She doesn’t go on Twitter on writing mornings. Often the words start flowing about 20 minutes before she’s freed for lunch, but there are good days that go faster than that. Sutherland asked her whether she came back to drafting after lunch, and Lo said that for a first draft, she has a daily word count goal of 500 or 1,000 words. If she hits it, she stops. I think the reasoning was that if she went beyond her goal she’d get depressed the next day if she didn’t achieve as much. Or alternatively if she exceeded her word count goal one day she’d let herself not meet it the next day? (Sutherland said that she cheats on her word count goals: 1,500 words yesterday means only 500 today!) For revising, on the other hand, Lo can work all day.

Cashore explained that she has an office outside the home. At the start of the pandemic, they decided to stop the internet service there. She also uses the Forest app, planting motivational trees (Isabelle and I did this while dissertating!). Moreover, she writes by hand. So all this means she has neither computer nor internet in her writing office. But even so, there are so many things you can find to do in a small office before you finally sit down. She keeps a post-it on her window that says The only thing that will make you feel better is having written. I actually remember reading about that post-it in a blog post of Cashore’s, some years ago, and it stayed with me (though I remember it saying having worked). It actually has helped me accomplish things sometimes.

One last note on distractions: Cashore is not really on Twitter, Lo is not on it when she’s seriously working on a book, and Sutherland is not on it at all.

The next question asked whether any of the authors were re-readers and what they reread. Cashore immediately answered Rebecca, and Lo said she was about to reread it. Sutherland said she didn’t reread except for events like this one. Lo brought up Anne of Green Gables, and Cashore agreed it was a good reread, and even Sutherland had read it multiple times.

A teacher in the audience asked about the last time they’d geeked out about a book. Cashore brought out her literal to-be-read pile to show us. Lo had just read Something to Talk About, which was “so fun.” A slow burn sapphic romance, it was like dessert. She also plugged Shelley Parker-Chan’s upcoming She Who Became the Sun, which she called “epic,” “amazing,” and “very queer.” Cashore talked about Elizabeth Lim’s upcoming Six Crimson Cranes, and Sutherland recommended Amari and the Night Brothers and Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries.

There was an audience-submitted question about the representation of marginalized characters and authors writing from the POV of such characters when they don’t share the given marginalization (I suspected this question was prompted by the fact that Cashore is white while Lovisa, one of her POV characters, depicted on the cover, is brown-skinned). This question got a lot of up votes from the audience. Sutherland noted this but remarked that she knew the authors had addressed it before, so she seemed to leave it up to them as to whether they wanted to answer it. Lo said she’d written a lot of blog posts on this subject before. But then they went ahead and took the question.

Lo said that no matter who an author is, they can write whatever they want. As a reader, she can then choose what she wants to read. Writing is an expression of art, so she wouldn’t want to limit anyone, but for instance as an Asian lesbian she’s not interested in reading Asian women written by white men. She thinks the writing and reading are separate. Cashore acknowledged that Lovisa was brown-skinned and wore her hair in twists, mentioning in passing that people had different interpretations of Bitterblue. She said the world of her books was not the real world and so had not been shaped by the same history. She felt that in a book with multiple POVs, it would also be wrong to privilege just the white humans as POV characters. She wasn’t sure she’d center a book on, say, Lovisa, but maybe now she would, now that Lovisa was part of the world. Cashore said these issues are a constant conversation and people come to different conclusions.

Sutherland briefly brought up the fact that both Lo and Cashore write craft posts. I’ve been reading both Cashore’s deep dives into specific books and their craft achievements and Lo’s newsletter, for which she wrote a craft series last fall. Sutherland was curious to know whether they’d ever turn their craft posts into books, but Lo said that was a lot of work, and Cashore said there were other things she wanted to write, namely, fiction.

Finally, Cashore and Lo shared what they were working on next. Cashore is in revisions on a book about Hava and currently writing a “magical contemporary thing.” She said it was going to be a short book. Everyone teases her when she says this, but she’s determined to show them she can write a short book! (This sounds like me saying I’m going to write an actually short short story.) Lo is working on a book that used to be a contemporary, but then the pandemic happened, so the book takes place before the pandemic. By the time it comes out, it will be a historical novel. Cashore said they’re going to have to give that historical period a name.