I would just ask myself what the worst thing a person could do was and then amplify that by ten. The Kaiser is just evil in every facet of his personality, which was easy to write in a sense. What was your approach to writing the villain of Ash Princess? Will Theo face different kinds of antagonists as her story continues?

I had to dig deeper into her character and pry open the uglier parts of her in order to explore how a girl like her, growing up in the world she’s grown up in, would react to the events of the story. After the first draft, though, it got a lot tougher. Their friendship added a necessary layer to the story. I remember giving the prologue and first chapter to the twelve year old I was babysitting for at the time and she came back and said that Cress was her favorite, which took me by surprise. Even when I was writing the first draft, I saw her as sort of a throwaway character. How did Ash Princess change most between your first draft and finished novel?Ĭress’s character was probably the biggest change. Because so much of it was her manipulating him and showing him what he wanted to see, there were so many layers to it, and once the layers begin to blur-well, it was definitely a challenge, but a rewarding one. On the other hand, I really enjoyed writing Theo’s scenes with Søren, though maybe not for the obvious reasons. Traumas like the ones the Astreans have suffered are not ones that can be neatly healed, not by the end of the book or even the end of the series, and I wanted to address the raw messiness of that. There’s a moment toward the end where Theo says that she doesn’t think she’ll ever be alright and I think that’s important. I’ve always been a lover of history, but the tricky thing about history is that it’s often told from the perspective of the conqueror, so it was all about peeling back those layers and looking at the ugly parts of history that we often don’t talk about and how people would have been shaped by that on both sides. I knew that if I was writing about a captive queen, I was writing about a conquered country and I didn’t want to pull any punches there. With Ash Princess, I knew it couldn’t be a kind world.

I tend to start with character and then figure out the world that would have shaped them into who they are. Ash Princess uses fantasy to explore personal and national trauma - not easy subjects! How did you approach this, and how did you embody this struggle in your characters?

Ash princess series order