Photo Credit: @luislostinbooks (Instagram) (once again I was terrible at remembering to take pictures so had to scour the Internet!).
Hi everyone! This post is incredibly late as I went to this event at the end of October, and it’s now almost the end of December, so it’s been almost two months and I have just had no time recently to sit down and get this done but on the upside, this event was livestreamed by Waterstones so I don’t have to rely on my memory to get this recap done. Thank you Waterstones!
This was my second VE Schwab event this year, back in March, she did a tour for the paperback release of Addie LaRue and then when Threads of Power (I’m sorry Fragile Threads is unwieldy so I will probably forever refer to it as Threads!) was released this September, she did another UK and US tour to celebrate its release, so we got twice the VE Schwab live event content this year which was of course a gift to us all.
It was a Monday night event, so I went home after work to have dinner and then headed back out for the event, which started at 7pm. I walked down to Clapham Junction to get the train to Victoria, and then from Victoria, got the Victoria Line to Kings Cross, as the event was taking place at St Pancras Church, which is just down the road from Kings Cross station, near Euston. I made it there slightly later than I expected as the tube took a bit longer & it was a further walk than I was anticipating and it was raining, which wasn’t the most pleasant. I did get there by about 6.45, but I was really hoping to be there a little earlier than that as by the time I got there, most of the best seats were taken and I ended up on a side aisle where my view was slightly obscured. I really never learn that I should get to book events earlier if I want to get the best seat!
It was fairly prompt starting as far as I remember, which is unusual for a book event as they’re usually at least five or ten minutes delayed in starting, but it’s always much appreciated when they do start on time. One of the Waterstones booksellers came out to go over some of the housekeeping for the event, reminding us that V wouldn’t be doing a signing after the event but that there were signed copies of her books for sale and introducing V and Juno Dawson who was moderating for the evening, who then came out onto the stage.
It was as always, a fabulous event. V is a fantastic speaker and hearing her speak about craft is always so insightful and whilst I was slightly worried about Juno as a moderator for the event as I’d been to an event where she moderated before and I wasn’t sure she was the best interviewer, I enjoyed her a lot more here, she and V bounced off each other well, she asked some really interesting questions and it was a lot of fun.
Juno started with a quick introduction of both herself and V, and then we dove straight into the conversation pretty much, with a quick detour into how much V was missing her pets whilst on tour and that she had taken to approaching strangers to ask them to say hello to their dogs, which aside from the being on a book tour thing, hard relate, I can never resist saying hello to cute dogs.
We started off as these events always tend to, with a bit of a summary of the series, Juno asked V to explain the whole background of the world in the Shades of Magic, which she did acknowledge that most people probably wouldn’t need but as The Fragile Threads of Power is intended to be a new “jumping on point” for the series (and Juno said she had actually started with the latest book), it probably wasn’t a terrible idea to have that summary of the world in case there were some people who had come to the event planning to start with the new book having not read the original trilogy. So V briefly went over the conception of the world, explaining she wanted to write a portal fantasy because she loves the idea of magic being able to get into our world but that she doesn’t like maps, they feel like homework you have to do before the book begins. So to get around that problem, she decided on the concept that she used for Shades: the one world, multiple different ways idea and that the divergent point between these worlds would be their relationship to magic and that’s how we ended up with Grey, Red, White and Black London, all with their differing relationships to magic (I won’t explain that in detail here as this is just a recap and I’m sure a lot of you have read the books!). She then did a quick introduction to Kell and Lila and the basic set up of A Darker Shade of Magic.
V then explained the set up for The Fragile Threads of Power, that it is set seven years after the end of A Conjuring of Light, that it features all of the (still alive) faves from the Shades of Magic series, as well as a new cast of characters, the next generation if you like. Her idea was that she wanted the new book to act as a jumping on point for new readers to the series, and that hopefully eventually when all the books are out, readers will be able to choose if they want to start with Threads of Power and treat Shades of Magic as a prequel or start with Shades of Magic and treat Threads of Power as a sequel. I have to admit, I’m never entirely sure when people say “you can jump into this sequel series like a fresh start” but as I mentioned before, Juno said she’d started with the latest book and she had been nervous to do so but wanted to as she really wanted to do the event (and wouldn’t do it without having read the book, very good!) and that she didn’t feel lost reading the book, so maybe there is something to it. I don’t know, I will never be able to judge how good it is as an entry point for new readers because obviously I did read Shades of Magic first!
Juno then asked V to do a quick recap on where the original Shades of Magic characters were at the end of the first trilogy and where we would find them at the beginning of Threads of Power. Basically Kell and Lila had sailed off together (though not as V made clear happily into the sunset never to be seen again) with Kell’s magic having been impacted by ACOL, and Rhy was crowned King at the end of Conjuring, with Alucard as his consort. Seven years later at the beginning of Threads, Rhy and Alucard are still together and have a four year old daughter, and their Queen, Nadia. V spoke a little about the hate she had received since mentioning Nadia originally on Instagram and that people had assumed that the existence of Nadia meant that Rhy and Alucard were no longer together but she affirmed that was in fact not the case, and that she had wanted to showcase a different kind of family: Rhy and Alucard are together and Nadia is the surrogate mother to their daughter, a woman who wanted to be a mother but not a wife. Rhy is also having to deal with an uprising in Red London by a group called The Hand who are claiming magic is beginning to fail and the reason for that is because Rhy doesn’t have magic but it’s not clear whether this is actually true or if The Hand even really believe it or if this is just a convenient excuse from people who want Rhy removed from the throne for other reasons. Meanwhile Kell and Lila start Threads where they finished ACOL, sailing the seas with a motley found family crew.
That then led onto a question about the new characters in the book, Tes and Kosika who are the new main characters in the book and Juno asked V to introduce them to the audience and explain a little about where they came from. V explained that Shades of Magic had been miscategorised for years as YA and spoke a little about the misogyny of where that comes from, that it tends to be female or femme presenting authors that get miscategorised in this way and it was something that always annoyed V because Shades of Magic, whilst it has crossover appeal, it isn’t YA. However in the new series, which she described as “even more adult” than Shades of Magic, the two new leads are teenage girls and she wanted to make the point that an adult book can have child leads, and children’s book can have adult characters, that YA deals with a particular moment/time in a person’s life and that it is the nature of the ordeal a character faces that makes a book YA.
She then went on to explain that her reasoning behind choosing to start Tes and Kosika as teenagers is because she want to explore the origin story of a hero/villain and in order to best do that she wanted to start with them as children and grow them from there. Tes, she explained is a 15 year old runaway who has set up a repair shop in Red London, and has the unique ability to not just see the threads of magic but to also be able to touch and manipulate them. She also has a pet dead owl called Vares who V said is basically a Red London furby. She also had an actual bird skeleton model with her! Tes is naturally trying to stay under the radar because her power would be much coveted and manipulated if it was known about. Essentially, the set up for Threads of Power is much the same as the initial premise for Shades of Magic: in Shades of Magic, Kell comes into possession of a piece of magic he shouldn’t have and everything goes to hell. In turn in The Fragile Threads of Power, Tes is asked to fix a broken object by a man who comes into the shop, not knowing what the object is. This object turns out to be something stolen from Maris Patrol’s ship, which then ties in to the favour that Lila owes to Maris as Maris calls this in, getting Lila to go and retrieve the object that has been stolen from her as it is very dangerous, even in its damaged state.
Kosika meanwhile is the Queen of White London, having taken up the mantle seven years prior (at age only seven herself) on the day that ACOL ended. The intention behind this decision is so people in power are able to control her as a puppet queen, but whilst Kosika agrees to be Queen, she will not be a puppet and rebels against the people pulling the strings at age 12, having held the throne through her own power and will ever since. Kosika is an Antari, the youngest ever known Antari. Essentially Tes and Kosika, whilst they both come from different worlds and different levels of society are united by their resistance of being used for their powers by others.
Juno then asked V about her decision to come back to the Shades of Magic world as she had said previously that as she was writing ACOL, she knew that she had more to explore in this world and why she decided to return to the series now. V explained that she writes all her books backwards, she always knows the ending first and she always starts writing her books knowing pretty much every beat that is going to happen as she sits with her ideas for a long time before she starts to write them (she said anywhere from six months to six years) and kind of tests them out in her head to see if they will work. She only decided to come back to the Shades of Magic world when she hit on the plot point with Lila and Maris and the favour Maris calls in. She realised she would either have to wrap it up too quickly and it would be a waste, or she could leave it as a door to go through later on, so she decided to leave it as an open ended way back into the Shades of Magic world and by 2018/19, she knew that Threads would be a thing as she had all the characters, ending and many of the plot pieces already in place.
She was very conscious of not wanting to write the same thing twice, and needed to be sure that she could live up to the goals that she sets herself when writing before she started but even then, she had to put off starting Threads because she had got to a point with Addie LaRue that if she didn’t write it then, she never would because she was clinging too hard to the perfection of the idea and not wanting to write it because the execution of an idea makes the idea become imperfect. She then also had multiple other books to write, so by the time she got around to sitting down to write Threads, but she thought this worked quite well because of the time that passes between ACOL and Threads, Threads is set seven years after ACOL, which was a purposeful choice by V because she enjoys symbolism and she almost got it bang on, it was almost seven years from the time she finished Conjuring of Light to the time she started Threads. She said she didn’t want to feel like she was writing fanfiction of herself and that books become like time capsules of the people the authors are when writing them, she was 28 when she finished ACOL and is now 36, and she didn’t want to imitate 28 year old V, so she was glad that it had taken the extra time because it had allowed both her and her characters to grow and change and lessened the expectation that her writing would be exactly the same as it was for the Shades of Magic series.
V spoke a little more about Addie, and why it took her so long to write it, she said the reason it finally got written once she’d reached thirty was because the book is so much about the arbitrary line of adulthood and the feeling that you get as you reach 30, when you feel like so much of your life has happened already without you noticing and that she doesn’t think she could have written the same book at 23 when she first got the idea for it because of the themes being so strongly about the societal expectation to have moved to a certain threshold in your life and feeling worried that you’re not there (to be fair, I’m 27 now and I definitely feel this!). She spoke a little further on this, explaining this wasn’t a strict piece of advice to writers to wait to write a book, that stories can be ready to be told at many different stages of your life and that her advice was to find the stories you are ready to tell right now but also to understand when some stories might need to wait a little longer in order to be the best versions they can be. She said she always advises writers to resist the urgency because a good story will stay and will only get richer and deeper as you spend more time with it, she doesn’t believe in writing the story as soon as she has the idea because some stories just need longer.
Juno then asked about Lila and Kell and how they and their relationship have matured in the years since Shades of Magic ended. V spoke a little bit about the different ways Lila and Kell show their love, that Lila prefers actions and Kell prefers words (what she actually said was Lila’s love language is violence, which yeah, very accurate!) and that this initially caused friction in Shades of Magic, and what V really loved in Threads of Power is that this has matured into Lila, if not wanting to die for Kell, certainly being willing to kill for him, and how Lila’s initial resistance to being with Kell has transformed into two people who are unable to sleep without the other there and that Lila will go anywhere, even places she doesn’t like just to be with Kell, so I thought that was quite sweet.
They then moved on to talking about Alucard, and Juno was thirsting over him quite a lot which was very funny. It sounds like Threads Of Power is going to be quite a stressful book for Alucard as he tries to keep his family alive and safe, avoid Kell (who if you haven’t read Shades of Magic, HATES him), keep the city from imploding, stop Rhy from his instincts towards self-sacrifice, he’s the head of the Guard, co-Spymaster, basically, he’s got a lot going on! Juno asked who V thought would play Alucard in the film (Shades of Magic is still apparently going to be a film, or hopefully film series one day but it’s just as ever taking a while to get there). V says she’s not very good at picturing faces (which is a mood for me) and everyone that she thinks might work for the role naturally ages out of the part because Hollywood moves very slowly. Apparently she had initially envisioned Mads Mikkelsen playing Holland but it is now Cillian Murphy. It does make me feel better that V says she has a very difficult time picturing her characters faces and that’s why she tends to focus on small details rather than the whole picture because I am also terrible at picturing my own characters’ faces. She also said that when it comes to the adaptation of Shades of Magic, she’d rather be surprised by the casting because it’s great when you find someone unexpected who just completely embodies the character.
Juno then asked V if there were any characters she fancied in either her books or other writers’. She said she’s always going to find Lila sexy because Lila is who she wishes she was, she wishes she was able to deal with fear in the same way that Lila does and because of that she finds Kaz Brekker (who she described as her male fantasy counterpart) very sexy, and said though many people compare Lila to Inej, she thinks Lila and Inej would be an item rather than Lila being Inej. She described herself as shipping a dynamic between characters, the way the two characters interact.
Then they moved on to talking writing process. Juno was talking about finishing her first fantasy trilogy and how difficult it is to end a series, and just how difficult the writing process in general is. Juno said she’d planned it all out in 2019, but now she actually has to finish it and V asked if she was dreading it being done or the work that she had to do to get there, to which Juno said both. V said she always gets very daunted by the scale of writing novels as she originally came from a poetry background, and tried short writing and screenwriting and everything else she could do except novels because the scale of the task was so intimidating. She explained that she still finds the scale of the task daunting which is why she takes the approach of breaking her books down into the smallest possible chunks as that’s the only way to make it seem less daunting and this is why all her books are broken into parts because she physically breaks it down in the process of writing.
Juno then asked V about her planning process and V said she plans everything in her books out totally but she explained her approach to worldbuilding using one of her regular house metaphors (you can tell I’ve been to a lot of her events). She described looking at the world as if it’s a house: she doesn’t want to tell you where the walls are because that limits the amount of space she has to play with. Instead she looks at her world like designing the centre of one room, she starts in the middle and then grows the world outwards from there, so that in each book she can add new details to the world that weren’t there before, instead of being limited by boundaries she has self-imposed.
She said she starts her worldbuilding and magic very simple and then grows it outwards from there: with Shades, she started with the idea that magic was this innate thing, that magic was the elements operating together with each other and that becomes nature which is why the priests in the book grow things. So the base idea is the core four elements which everyone is familiar with and then she was able to build from there, that there would be strong and weak magicians across each spectrum of the elements (eg someone who uses fire could only light a candle, someone else could burn a building down) and then further onto that she could add the idea that some people could use more than one element and what magic looks like in its smallest and largest forms.
Then when it came to spells, spells she describes as simply an instruction to nature. Then once she knew what regular magic looked like, she was able to build out what unusual magic looked like (i.e. the Antaris) and with each book she was able to build more onto what magic could do, for instance, Alucard in Book 2 being able to see the threads of magic. This wasn’t something she initially introduced in Book 1 but it works because it fits with the magic she had already created in the world, as opposed to something like dragons which would not at all fit within the world she has already introduced us to. She gave the example of Tes in the new book, Tes can both see and touch the threads of magic, which is something that is a natural progression: Alucard can see the threads of magic, it makes sense that there would be someone who could go a step further. She described this kind of building as moving further from the centre of her metaphorical house but never reaching the walls: i.e. there is always something more she can add to build upon what she already has.
She said she never knows everything about her worlds but she always has a loose parameter from which she can grow. I quite like this approach to world-building, it’s detailed enough that you get a good idea of what’s going on, but not so detailed that you feel overwhelmed and it’s very logical. I think it’s one of the main reasons why I’ve always got on so well with VE Schwab’s books!
V then spoke about growing up not really being a fantasy lover, she said as a kid she felt very offput and uninvited in fantasy worlds, she didn’t see herself in fantasy books so she didn’t feel like there was space for her or that these types of books were for her. She said she wants her books to be fantasy for people who think they don’t like fantasy, a gateway drug into the genre, so she said she tries to create fantasy that can trick you into thinking it exists because it’s close enough to reality that you can believe it.
Juno then asked V about her lengthy career and how she’s managed to remain in publishing for so long. V first jokingly said stubbornness and spite, but then followed it up with her more honest answer, which was that it’s her readers who have meant she has been able to keep publishing books. She said her first book, The Near Witch went out of print in 18 months after it was published in 2011 (and is now back in print) and her trilogy, The Archived was cancelled after two books and by the time she was 25, she was going to quit publishing because she was so exhausted by everything.
She then wrote Vicious, which she described as her weird little book that was “a giant screw-you to publishing” because she was told that she was unsellable, that her books were too quiet, not romance-focused enough, she wasn’t mainstream enough and that her books would never be commercially successful in her first five years in publishing. Vicious she said was to act as her swan-song to publishing. She said her agent thought she wouldn’t be able to sell it and her publisher didn’t think anyone would buy it but were curious to see what she did next. She said for the first ten years of her career, the only people who believed in her books and kept her work going were her readers. She compared her career to being like a teacup, something that had started shallow but filled with more and more liquid over time until it had grown into something larger and more sustainable and said her secret is stubborn hope paired with relentlessly keeping on writing because no matter if your book does well or badly, you are always going to need another one in order to keep going. She made the point that Vicious did not change her life overnight, it simply allowed her to keep going a little bit longer.
After The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue came out, she said there were a lot of overnight success stories that came out about her, despite that book being her 20th published novel. She didn’t get a bestseller until A Gathering of Shadows, which was her 9th published book. But she made the point that every single one of her books has earned back its advance, and the only one that didn’t was The Near Witch, simply because it was taken out of print before it was able to. She said this happened because of small initial publisher investment but also the growth of her audience over time meaning that each book sold a little better.
She said after the success of Addie LaRue that she swore she would only ever turn success into ambition, and that’s why she wrote Gallant after Addie because it’s a book she never previously would have been allowed to publish earlier in her career because of the way it defies categorisation but she wanted to write it because she had seen how broad her audience was at that point and knew she didn’t want to just exist in one space. She added she doesn’t take her success for granted and that she’s very grateful to still be writing and that she has been able to do it her way without having to make her stories more mainstream or change who she was because her readers proved that there was an audience for the books she was writing. Ultimately her success was down to her own stubborness and spite, but even moreso, readers believing in her work before the publishers did.
V explained that there’s a paradox that exists in publishing were writers think they need to be general to have universal appeal and she said that she thinks it’s the exact opposite: that you need to be specific to be universal and the more specific a story, the more that the passion comes through and the more the audience will pick up the book and feel like it is for them as well and she says that she has found this with her books: the more specific her stories are, the more they seem to appeal to a wider audience.
Juno asked V as a follow up to this if she’d rather have 10,000 readers who liked her book or 10 who adored it. V responded that she would always take the adoration, or even the loathing, that she just didn’t want the “meh” responses. She said she’s very happy to be in both the 1-star and the 5-star spaces, but that she fears mediocrity. She explained that the bad voice that lives in her head is always telling her “they will say your last book was better” and this is the only thing that pushes her forward, it’s not a specific goal with writing or a specific angle for a story, it is just the desire to make sure people don’t say she stopped trying and settled into a safe place. She explained that this is why each of her books is different, why she took a different approach to Threads of Power than she did for Shades of Magic, why she moved on from Shades of Magic to Addie LaRue instead of just continuing on in a space where she had previously been successful because she wants to keep growing as a writer and believes the only way to have her readership grow with her is to make sure they don’t expect the same thing from her every time because that leads to comparison. In another metaphor of the evening, she compared her books to fruit: rather than them all being apples, all of her books are fruit but they’re not all apples and people may like different ones but they will understand that they are all different and they just like some things better than others.
Juno then asked her final question, which was what we could expect next from V, asking if it would be the next Threads of Power or if it would be something else, mentioning the Blade Runner book that has been floating around for a while. V laughed at this and said it was something that kept showing up in her Wikipedia but was actually a while out. She said that she’s ornery and needs to write for herself first which meant that after finishing the first Threads of Power book which was large and daunting and she felt a lot of pressure coming back to the Shades of Magic world, so she needed a palate cleanser. She then went on to explain what was to come in the next few years: her next book is going to be a standalone, she described it as her “anti-Addie LaRue” and said that it does not undo Addie and isn’t in the same world, but if Addie is about immortality, stubborn hope and defiant joy, her next book is about immortality, hunger and queer rage. She explained that she lovingly calls the book “toxic, lesbian vampires” as it is about three toxic lesbian vampires over the course of 500 years, its nickname is Bones and the full title will come when she is allowed to share it. She said the rough outline for the next few years was Toxic Lesbian Vampire Book, Threads 2, Victorious, the last book in the Villains trilogy, then Threads 3 and that the Blade Runner book would probably come somewhere after that. She described the book as her sci-fi moment (arguably Villains kind of already scratched that spot) and it is coming but just not yet.
Juno then turned the rest of the evening over for audience questions: for context as this was an event without a signing, the in-conversation portion was a little over 45 minutes (which is about standard) but the audience Q&A portion was also about 45 minutes which is a fair bit longer than usual, audience Q&A’s are usually about 15-20 minutes at most.
The first audience member asked who the hardest character was for both V and Juno to write for across all of their books and series. Juno said for her it was Theo in Her Majesty’s Royal Coven, because she’s a fairly slippery person and she’s also a teenager, so the only character who is still developing (growth wise) across the series. She said the adult characters were a lot more clear to her and that Theo was deliberately a bit of a mystery and you’re not really meant to know, that like many teenage girls she could turn out either way and she said that’s where she was at in the third book at the moment, that she still wasn’t sure she trusted her and followed this by saying it’s fine for trans characters to be untrustworthy.
V followed on from this saying that part of the reason she calls Toxic Lesbian Vampires that is because she really wanted to write a lesbian villain and she said because there’s still a lack of queer characters in fiction and queer characters are expected to live on pedestal where they can’t do anything bad or run the risk of people conflating queerness with villainy, so she decided to make all three of the main characters in the book lesbians because then the hero was a lesbian too, so it wasn’t like the only lesbian in the book was the villain. This was a bit of a tangent, her actual response to the question asked was that Henry Strauss from The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue was the hardest character she’s ever written because he’s the only truly autobiographical character that she’s ever written. She said she doesn’t generally believe in writing autobiographical characters in fiction but she’d got to a point where she knew exactly who Addie and Luc were but she couldn’t figure out Henry, he was simply a plot point, she knew his function but not who he was. She said in an effort to understand him, she gave Henry some of her own traits but this wasn’t enough to understand him, so she just gave Henry more of herself until he was essentially a reflection of her. She described Henry as who she would have been if she hadn’t found writing at 19. She said that made him really hard to write because usually she would hide any pieces of herself behind layers of other characters and keep a distance from them but she feels fiercely protective of Henry because when people don’t like him, she said it feels like they don’t like her.
Juno then revised her answer and said that her 2024 book with Anne Boleyn was the hardest because it was so hard to figure out how to do Anne Boleyn justice, and she said the solution she eventually came to was viewing her through the eyes of others so the book centres on Anne Boleyn but you’re never actually in her head as that felt like the better thing to do.
The next audience member asked if the increasing mentions of threads in the Shades of Magic series was a coincidence or if V had always know that Threads of Power was going to be a thing. V said that it was more that her mental imagery of magic was codifying as she was writing, to the point that when she turned in the film script for A Darker Shade of Magic prior to the WGA strike, that she codified it in there as threads. Initially she said, the magic was kind of amorphous to her, but the more she wrote about it, the more she needed a way to visualise it, that although Shades of Magic is in many ways a love letter to Avatar: The Last Airbender and Full Metal Alchemist, she needed her own visual language for the magic and the idea of threads came about quite organically as she spent more time in Red London and the more she played with what magic looked like. She said in the beginning she was more like Lila Bard, that everything was new to her and she was kind of overwhelmed by it but as the series went on it became clearer. She said the title for Threads of Power came much later and the imagery of magic as threads long pre-dated that choice.
The next audience member asked if Nikolai from the Grishaverse had inspired Alucard in any way and the idea of a privateer. V answered that she didn’t know which of them was published first but that she hadn’t read Nikolai at the point when she wrote Alucard and that he was his own invention. She then once again said that she really didn’t realise his name was Dracula backwards when she gave it to him which has become a long running joke amongst fans and that the worst part was that she had taken the name from a vampire show that she liked at the time! She said she thinks it says something that these characters who have a purpose in society and have a slight moral compass and do want to do good things but just on their own terms, end up roles which allow for that.
Someone else in the audience asked if the diversity, in terms of all the different worlds she has created was intentional, or if it came about organically, giving the example of the Monsters of Verity being very different to Shades of Magic. This was covered quite well in one of Juno’s questions earlier, so V basically said a similar thing, that yes it is and that all of her worlds are very different on purpose and that the rule she sets for herself is that she has to make the rules herself. She gave the example of The Near Witch (her first book), and said she wasn’t modelling on any previously known types of witches, and for her upcoming vampire book, she wasn’t modelling on the popularly known images of vampires, that even though these types of characters are well known, her versions have to have their own rules and terms. She said all her worlds are generated from a “What if?” question, for Shades of Magic that was: “What if these worlds differed based on their relationship to magic?”, for Monsters of Verity that was : “What if violence began to make actual monsters?” and Addie LaRue was “What if a girl made a deal with the devil and was forgotten?”. She said everything starts as a what if which then spirals outward to shape the nature of the world she’s creating and that she finds it a wonderful question because it suggests reality is the starting point and that the what if is the point of departure from reality. That what if tends to precede the world and the characters for her and tends to define what the book will be like. She said she does want every single series to feel different, so the ones that are set in actual worlds like City of Ghosts, tend to be love letters to specific places, and that she learned from Addie LaRue to pay attention everywhere she was and to ask herself how she would convey the space in a short space of time. A lot of it for her comes down to the fact that she sees everything so clearly in her head, that her books play like a film in her head for her and she has to figure out how to convey that for the readers so they get the same film playing in their heads (sorry V, I picture nothing when I read so this will never happen for me!). She compared it to directing a film, each film has its own plot yes, but also its own visuals and colour palettes that create the atmosphere, for her books, she is still the “director” so they will have some commonalities and similar through-lines but she wants each one to feel like its own film. This I do get, because it’s one of the reasons I love her books so much, even though I can’t see the book playing like a film in my head, I do feel their different atmosphere and vibes and it’s one of the reasons I love V as an author so much.
I was really glad they actually touched on aphantasia a bit though (fancy term for when you can’t picture things in your head) because I feel like it’s a thing not a lot of authors talk about! V shared a story about hearing from a fellow author that he couldn’t see anything that he writes about and when asked on a film set for an adaptation of one of his books to describe what something looks like he wasn’t able to. V speculated that there might be a realistic fiction/fantasy divide for that, and that she’d be interested in hearing from a fantasy author how it worked for them. V said for her that she can’t write about something if she can’t see it, not that it has to be something real but she does need to be able to picture it in her own head.
The next audience member asked both Juno and V how their books were pushing the boundaries in terms of LGBTQ+ inclusion in fantasy books. Juno’s response was that you can get away with a lot more in the genre world anyway because the assumption is that their books are for a more niche audience of people. Juno said when she started out, she just went for it and made the majority of her characters queer in the hope the publishers would allow her to keep at least one, and they let her keep all of them. She said this is why she loves YA because it’s such a broad umbrella and she’s never found it to be a problem, though she did say she was never anticipating her books being put in things like supermarkets for a more general audience. She said she felt very comfortable having a very queer cast of characters in her most recent book because there was never any particular idea it would reach anything mainstream due to it being a fantasy novel and thereby the assumption being it’s for a more niche audience. She said genre fiction traditionally has always been a safe place for queer people.
V had a slightly different take, she said for her because she came out as an adult, she’s never really needed “coming out” stories, rather she said she needs queer existence stories. She said what she’s most interested in is queer normalisation stories and she wants her characters to take up space in ways that have nothing to do with their identity being the plot of the story because she dislikes when identity is used as the only reason for a character’s inclusion in a book. She says she tries most of the time for her queer characters to just exist and be part of the story just because, that there are moments, like her upcoming toxic lesbian vampires book where the queerness is the point and what she is examining with the story but otherwise she gave the example of Addie and Henry from The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, that they are both queer and that they have their relationships and communities but it’s not the plot of that book. She said she was quite excited about that part of Addie because she said she felt like it was a genre book that was going to “cheat in” to being a book club book where genre fiction wouldn’t normally be and that people who wouldn’t normally read queer fiction might pick it up because it wasn’t obviously queer. She described it as being like the “broccoli in the mac and cheese”.
She said she thinks that the great thing about genre fiction is that it has always had space but the bad thing is that it often uses otherness in a weird way, and that otherness tends to come with a caveat (like the character is an alien or something) and that the strangeness of these characters is part of the point and she doesn’t want queerness to be seen as strange, she just wants it to be there and she’s going to keep making it just be there in her books. She made the point that Shades and Threads are both queer, the vast majority of the cast is queer but the plot is not about their identities. She added that she loves that there are stories where queerness is the point and that are specifically about queer joy rather than pain and trauma but for herself she just wants it to be normal and accepted because for her, she said her queerness does not define her, rather it informs her and she doesn’t want to be reduced to that one characteristic.
Juno responded to this talking about writing her book Clean and the trans character in that book having come out eight years ago, she said she didn’t realise whilst she was writing this why but after the book came out she said she realised it was because she needed to know that she’d still be around eight years later because she wrote the book in the first year of her transition. She said she didn’t need a coming out story that year, she needed to know that she’d still be around.
Someone asked V why she thought Addie LaRue had gone viral on TikTok. V said she didn’t think it would go viral on TikTok and that you can’t really control any aspect of TikTok and no one should try to. But, she did say that she did think it would have a broader appeal and that Addie LaRue opened doors for her in publishing, marketing and press that none of her previous books had ever been allowed through and she mentioned that this included Threads, that she watched all of the doors that had previously been opened close again for this current book.
She said she’s decided that her life’s mission is to break down what people think fantasy is because she found the percentage of people who love Addie LaRue and don’t think its a fantasy book quite astonishing. She said a lot of people say it’s literary and don’t think it’s fantasy even though it’s about a deal with the devil and that thing about Addie LaRue is that it hugs the line of reality so closely that people who think they don’t like fantasy, like that book because they find it more palatable but then those same people won’t read other fantasy. She said she asks those people why, and they say because they don’t like big F Fantasy.
She then went on to explain that she thinks society has trained us when we think of fantasy to just think of things like dragons, wizards, elves etc but in actuality, 90% of the media we consume is fantastical. She said she wants to teach everyone not to think of fantasy as this one thing and that it actually covers a whole range of different types of stories, like ghosts stories, folklore, family myths etc, that can be both close to reality and far from it and actually has many different forms. She also made the point that the vast majority of science fiction is also fantasy, using the example of Star Wars and that so many people have a mental block about what fantasy actually is. She said the reason she thinks Addie LaRue did so well is because it is fantasy masquerading as reality in specific ways and that all the talk shows welcomed her on with Addie LaRue because they saw it as a literary book but wouldn’t invite her on to talk about Threads because it is more “obviously” fantasy.
She also mentioned that when writers write novels they don’t think about the context in which they will be published because they can never predict it and that she didn’t write a book about loneliness, hope and stubborn joy and expect it to be released into a pandemic. But then obviously what happened is that Addie came out in a time when were locked in our homes, feeling very alone and forced to live in an eternal present because we didn’t know when things were going to change and in that way Addie LaRue did feel like a reality because she became a manifesto for living in the now and finding small joy amongst the hardships. She said that was the organic part of it becoming popular but also the fact that it wasn’t “seen” as fantasy had a lot to do with its success.
V said she’s written 23 books now and hasn’t put a different amount of work or love into any of them and that she put as much attention and love into The Dark Vault (the bind-up of The Archived and The Unbound, her uncompleted trilogy) as she did into Addie LaRue, Vicious and Shades of Magic which were more successful. She said as authors, they cannot control what happens to the books after they are published, that’s what the audience does, that they only control 50% of the equation, what is on the paper and the reader brings the other half. They don’t control what the publisher brings to the book or the moment that the book comes out in or the other books that come out at the same time. She said that if authors fight for anything, it’s so their books can stay on shelves long enough for the right people to find them and that stories don’t expire, but shelf space does and that the thing they have to work and hope for is that their backlist can be found when readers are ready to find it. She added that the strangest thing about Addie LaRue is that all her other books have taken 1-5 years to find their audience and that Addie LaRue found it overnight and that was the thing she didn’t predict, she thought Addie LaRue would find her readers but she didn’t think it would happen in the first year because none of her other books have.
One of the other audience members brought up V’s trusty six burner stove metaphor and asked if there are any ideas she has abandoned or if she gives all her ideas a chance and just leaves them until she is happy enough with them to write. V then went on to explain the six burner stove metaphor, that she has one pot on the stove on high heat which is the book she is currently working on and she said she likes this metaphor because she gets asked a lot about where her ideas come from and she doesn’t think of her ideas as individual things, rather she thinks of them like ingredients she collects. The rest of the burners on the stove are ideas that she has in the background, simmering on low heat. She mentioned an Instagram trend that had happened at the time of the event (obviously I’m writing this much later) about the shape of authors careers, the books they had written and said that she doesn’t have a single book that she has started and not finished because she doesn’t start a book until she knows she has enough for it to be a book. She said part of this is her own anxiety, that she can’t move forward on a book till she has the confidence to know that she has enough to make it work and that she won’t quit. However, despite not having any books she’s abandoned, she has had books that have needed to wait before she wrote them. But even though she’s got about half a dozen or so books she’s not yet written, she doesn’t anticipate leaving any of them behind. She gave the example of the Blade Runner book that came up earlier in the talk, that it had been on the stove but she had taken it off because it wasn’t ready and she doesn’t consider that a trunked novel just because she hasn’t written it yet. She said she always cautions writers not to “kitchen sink it” and assume that just because they have ideas that all those ideas need to go into one pot and that though it’s hard not to just steam ahead when you have an idea that really excites you, you can overwhelm a book if you add too much.
She said usually what happens for her is that she has an idea but no “meal” for it so she’ll set it on the counter. She gave the example of Shades of Magic for this, that she had an image in her mind a few years before writing the book of a young man in a coat walking through a wall and colliding with a girl dressed as a boy but just the image, no story and so she shelved the idea for later. It wasn’t until she was later talking with a friend about wanting to write a portal fantasy that she realised the young man she had envisioned wasn’t walking through a wall between rooms but rather between worlds and this is why it is important to save your ingredients and not force them into something that doesn’t fit. She’s never given up on a story once she has started because by that point she does know it has all the pieces it needs to be a book.
She added that waiting is great for stories because if you couldn’t survive the wait then you wouldn’t be able to get through the actual writing of the book, for instance if you’re waiting on a idea for a month and you’re worried you’ll lose excitement for that idea in the month you’re not working on it then you would never get through the months/years of actually writing the idea. She said waiting is a good way to test if an idea has legs, and is worth holding onto because if the shine burns off quickly then there’s nothing to sustain you whilst you’re writing the idea because it only gets harder once you actually start writing. She added that’s why shiny new ideas exist, to tempt you away from what you’re writing with the idea that it’s boring when it’s simply just familiar and that she always makes ideas wait to make sure that they’re worth spending time with in the first place.
For the final question someone asked V how she would describe Edinburgh in a short sentence and Juno how she would describe Brighton. Juno said there is a glorious, glittery griminess to Brighton and that when she thinks of Brighton, she always thinks of the day after pride when there is glitter in the gutters. V said for her that Edinburgh was a combination of damp grey dusk and wind-burned cheeks.
Juno then ended the event and we all gave V and Juno a round of applause before they headed off. Then that was it, the event was over and everyone started to head home. I hadn’t managed to grab one of the notecards for V before the event, so I head to where all the books were on sale to have a look for them, and thankfully they were easier for me to find than last time and because we were in a church I was able to lean on a pew, so hopefully my handwriting was a little better than last time. Again, I won’t share what I wrote because it was a personal message, but I hope she enjoyed it! I put my note back into the bag they had collecting them on the way out and then I headed back to the station.
It was a really lovely evening, I always enjoy hearing V speak and she and Juno had a really great rapport which made it a really fun event. I actually really love this new format she’s been doing in the past couple of years, the extended Q&As mean you get more in-depth questions and I love the little personalised note cards, it means I can have a little bit more time to think about what I’m going to “say” to her in my messages and don’t just randomly blurt out the first thing that comes into my head at the front of the signing line. I also very much enjoy the her events tend to be on the shorter and earlier side now, I got the train back from Victoria around 8.45, and was back home by 9.30 which was brilliant!
Did anyone else go to one of VE Schwab’s UK or US events for The Fragile Threads of Power? Did you enjoy it? Let me know in the comments!
I know this was a mammoth post, so well done if you got to the end! This is what would happen if I had a livestream replay for every event, so I’m sure you’re probably grateful that I don’t. I don’t yet have any book events planned for 2024, but I’m sure there will be some and you guys will be the first to hear about them when I do.
Happy New Year everyone! Hope we all have a great 2024!
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