Interview Transcript: Introducing the Author
Lyndall Clipstone writes about monsters and the girls who like to kiss them. A former youth librarian who grew up running wild in the Barossa Ranges of South Australia, she currently lives in Adelaide, where she tends her own indoor secret garden. She has a Bachelors in Creative Writing and a Graduate Diploma in Library and Information Management.
Her debut novel, LAKESEDGE, will be published by Henry Holt, Titan UK and Pan Macmillan Australia in Fall 2021 with a sequel, FORESTFALL, to publish in Fall 2022.
She is represented by Jill Grinberg at Jill Grinberg Literary Management.
You can find her on Goodreads, her website, Twitter, and Instagram.
LAKESEDGE
Content warnings for LAKESEDGE
- Emotional and physical abuse by a parent
- Body horror
- Gore and blood (including description of wounds)
- Emesis
- Discussions of death and grief (no on-page deaths)
- Descriptions of drowning and deep water
- Drowning-related imagery
- Self-injury (in the context of a curse that requires regular physical sacrifices)
- Suicidal ideation
A lush gothic fantasy about monsters and magic, set on the banks of a cursed lake. Perfect for fans of Naomi Novik and Brigid Kemmerer.
There are monsters in the world.
When Violeta Graceling arrives at haunted Lakesedge estate, she expects to find a monster. She knows the terrifying rumors about Rowan Sylvanan, who drowned his entire family when he was a boy. But neither the estate nor the monster are what they seem.
There are monsters in the woods.
As Leta falls for Rowan, she discovers he is bound to the Lord Under, the sinister death god lurking in the black waters of the lake. A creature to whom Leta is inexplicably drawn…
There’s a monster in the shadows, and now it knows my name.
Now, to save Rowan—and herself—Leta must confront the darkness in her past, including unraveling the mystery of her connection to the Lord Under.
Author Interview: Introduction
CMR: Hello, welcome to the next episode of Eldritch Girl! I’ve got Lyndall Clipstone with me today to do the author interview. Lyndall, hi.
LC: Hi! It’s really great to be here, I was just saying this is my first time on a podcast so it’s very exciting!
CMR: Would you like to introduce yourself to everyone?
LC: My name is Lyndall Clipstone, I write young adult Gothic fantasy, and my debut is Lakesedge, which is the first in a duology and that will be out this year in Fall. It’s coming out in September in America with Henry Holt, which is an imprint of Macmillan, and in Australia with Pan Macmillan. And in October in the UK with Titan Books.
CMR: Lovely, congratulations. And you’ve got an extract from it that you’re allowed to read.
LC: So this is from the fourth chapter in the book and it’s one of the recent scenes that I added. When I started working with my editor she suggested that it needed kind of a scene that felt a little bit like the wolf attack scene in Beauty and the Beast [1991 animation] where the monster character does something to endear himself to the main character that, like, gives her reason to stay with him. And it ended up being like one of the funnest scenes to write him, and so this is actually like a little bit from the aftermath of that, because I felt like the wolf attack was a little bit spoilery, so. The context is that she and her younger brother have been taken away by the monster of Lakesedge and they are ostensibly on the way to his estate where apparently he murdered his entire family in like the lake behind his house. So they stop overnight to stay in a kind of, like, a wayside cottage, and then, when everybody goes to sleep, she and her brother sneak out and try to run away, but they get into trouble in the woods. Which is kind of like the wolf attacks seen in Beauty and the Beast but with, like, a bit of a weird magical twist so.
CMR: ooh!
LC: Yeah and then he manages, just, like – so Rowan, the monster, manages to save them, and they decided to go back with him, so this is just a little bit from the end of that scene, where they sort of speak to each other, before they go back into the cottage to stay with him for the rest of the night.
CMR: Ooh, great.
LC: Okay.
Extract from Lakesedge
Wordlessly, we go back through the forest. The monster ahead, Arien and I close behind. Florence meets us partway with a lantern. Her eyes widen at the sight of the monster with his bloodied face and bandages on his arm and hand.
~ Lyndall Clipstone
“What happened?” She reaches out but he pushes her away.
“Never mind that. There’s a blighted grove.” He points to indicate the direction, then takes her lantern, giving her the torch in its place. “Go back and burn the trees. You’ll need to watch the fire so it doesn’t catch the whole forest.”
Florence hesitates, her hand still stretched towards him. “Are you sure you’re alright?”
He glares at her. “Yes.”
She turns with a sigh and vanishes into the trees.
We walk the rest of the way in silence. When we reach the treeline, the monster motions for Arien to go on ahead and pulls me aside.
He puts his gloved hands around the tops of my arms and leans close. My gaze goes from his dark eyes to his bloodied mouth, and I’m filled with a strange, hot feeling that isn’t quite fear. He slides his hands down my arms and holds my wrists loosely. He brushes his thumb against where my sleeve hides the bruises.
“Are you truly sorry I took you both from that cottage?” His eyes lower, and he goes on quietly. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
The rest of it echoes, unspoken, made clear by the touch of his fingers on my wrist. I won’t hurt you, not like that.
“And what about Arien? What do you have planned for him?”
He gives me a guarded look. “That’s none of your concern.”
“I don’t care if you hurt me.” My teeth clench at the thought of it, but I don’t pull away. After all I’ve faced from Mother to keep Arien safe, I know I could bear it if the monster was cruel to me. I could. “Just leave him alone.”
“You’ve heard enough about Lakesedge Estate to know I can’t promise you safety.”
He lets go of me and walks back to the wayside without turning to see if Arien or I will follow.
He doesn’t need to. He knows that we have nowhere else to go.
Author Interview: Transcript
CMR: Oh… That’s such a rich extract, I really like that, there’s such a lot going on.
LC: Yeah!
CMR: Can we start by talking about some of the influences that are visible in the extract?
I had a look at the annotations that you sent out in your newsletter about that one [Lyndall sent an annotated page of her manuscript to her newsletter subscribers, which was this extract with handwritten notes in the margins, as a .jpeg file] which is really interesting. So you’ve talked about how the story itself is based on a sort of a Gothic Secret Garden premise.
LC: Yeah so the kind of original – very original premise was kind of like, what if I took The Secret Garden and turned it into a classic Gothic romance. I think it definitely kept the heart of that. I grew up reading like this very beautiful illustrated version of The Secret Garden that my neighbour gave to me, and so we lived on the top of a hill in the country in, like, near the Adelaide hills in South Australia. And we had a kind of wealthy neighbour who lived down at the bottom of the hill that we lived on the top of, and she would often travel quite a lot. And we would go down to feed her pets while she was away, so I have really, like, fun memories of going to her beautiful big garden, and she had this very inky dark lake. Not like a lake, but a big dam of water next to her house that was black, and a beautiful bluestone house, so I think a lot of that has kind of stuck in my mind as like what Lakesedge kind of turned into a little bit, but she was actually the one who gave me the Secret Garden book. She used to give me lots of books as Christmas presents and things like that.
So I definitely I grew up reading this like illustrated version of it and then also watching like the 90s movie, I’m not sure if you ever saw it.
CMR: Yeah!
LC: But it’s got this beautiful aesthetic and there’s… just like some of the scenes have always just stayed really vivid to me, like where she’s going through the house and looking into all the locked-up rooms and then the scenes where she finds Collin in the middle of the night by hearing his cries, and he thinks she’s a ghost, and I don’t know, there was just something about it that kind of made me feel like it was such a romantic kind of setting and I really wanted to try transposing a young adult fantasy romance into that kind of setting and aesthetic, and the feeling of this beautiful wild environment and kind of isolated sentient-feeling house and things like that, so yeah.
CMR: I really love that and I think you said that you, you named the character Florence after Florence Welch from Florence + the Machine.
LC: Yeah so originally Florence was named Meadow and there was like a second character called Clover and my editor’s like, I can’t tell them apart, which was kind of worrying for me because… Florence is like, 40, and Clover was like, 16, and I’m just like wow I’m really not doing too good at writing these side characters. And she suggested that I changed their names to be a little bit different because, like the botanical names made them blend in with each other so. I thought Florence would be kind of a nice name, because, I’m like a big fan of her music and it’s definitely inspired a lot of my work as well, especially, I guess, like the Between Two Lungs sort of album. And I don’t know, just her whole sort of thing, like I really resonate a lot with her whole creative body of work, I guess.
I saw her live, a couple of years ago now, and she’s like this beautiful ethereal creature, she was like in these big, white flowing dresses on stage, and she does this amazing sort of like Kate Bush style interpretive dancing and it’s just like – she’s just so magical. So I thought it was kind of a nice way to kind of like pay homage to all of the ways I’ve been inspired by her.
CMR: That’s lovely. Yeah and then I think so, the last line of the extract, I’ve got nowhere else to go, that’s that’s a Nabokov reference, isn’t it?
LC: Yeah so I put that in the annotations – I feel kind of weird being like, Oh, I was so inspired by Nabokov while writing a young adult novel because I’m sort of like, please, don’t take it the wrong way. I read a lot of his work when I was a postgraduate at University, like Lolita was one of the books that I sort of looked at quite in-depth for my thesis and I was always just really entranced with his writing style and the way that he weaves so many intertextual references into his work, so I have like this very well-worn copy of the annotated Lolita which has all of the literary references and like, lines in other languages and things like that, that is kind of woven in throughout the book.
And I just love the complexity of it, and how multilayered it felt, like how he had all of these like pop culture and literary and all of these sort of references woven in, and I think it was something that I kind of endeavored to do in my work a little bit, so there’s definitely references to song lyrics and other books and different things, all woven in. Some of them [are] probably more obvious than others, but that’s sort of mine, like, even though it’s kind of funny because it’s such an odd [thing to reference] Nabokov, but it’s definitely not the same sentiment [in Lakesedge].
I felt that actual line in Lolita is so tragic, like it’s just… that’s one of the most heartbreaking moments of the book to me where he’s told her that her mother’s dead and she’s crying in the other room and then she comes into him, and he’s like, ‘we made it up very tenderly because she had nowhere else to go’, and it’s just so heartbreaking and horrible and like, just this perfectly crystallized moment of how monstrous and horrible he is, and how he’s just trapped her. That’s definitely not the sentiment that I was going for between Rowan and Leta, like they definitely don’t have that relationship at all, but there was just something about the poignancy of that line of feeling so powerless and bereft that I really wanted to capture that moment.
CMR: Yeah, I mean that’s a really key element of the Gothic anyway, the isolated protagonist and the entrapment and that sense of… not quite fatalism, but like that, you know, that sense that now you have to face something or you’re stuck in a particular situation or…
LC: Yeah, like there’s always like this very intense feeling of claustrophobia. I really… that’s something that I’ve always really enjoyed… I mean it’s kind of a funny thing to say ‘enjoyed’, about the Gothic, but I think I really like how the horror of the Gothic is so close to you, like it’s, you know, the things that are terrifying are familiar and the environment that you’re in is a closed-in familiar one you know, like, I mean in like such she’s in the house, which is a very sort of well-used Gothic setting, but you know, like a creepy house where you’re isolated and enclosed.
I don’t know, there’s just something about that whole, like, you’re kind of trapped in this tiny space with like the world closing in on you and all you’ve got to get out of it is your own wits. I don’t know, like there’s something about seeing what a character does when put in that situation that’s really interesting as a reader, and as a writer as well.
CMR: So would you say Lakesedge’s setting is an alternative European setting or alternative Australia?
LC: In my head canon it’s like a Southern Hemisphere world, very much based on where I grew up so, where I grew up is sort of just outside the Adelaide hills in South Australia and the climate there is kind of like fairly temperate, like it’s sort of like a bit cooler than the rest of everywhere else, and so it’s comparatively a lot more lush, there’s more sort of the European style, like there’s a lot of pine forest plantations around, and again, like my neighbour where I grew up, she had quite a lot of European plants as well, so I think I was always very entranced with like the European gardens and the Blackberry plants that grew, so they were like a weed, but I just found them so like enchanting. We had these really big Blackberry brambles that used to grow in the area near my house and I just kind of wanted to capture the feeling of what the environment is like here where it’s like this real mix of European – so it’s like European architecture, a European kind of landscaping, a lot of introduced European plant species, but in this environment that’s very arid and rugged.
Yeah, so I think it wasn’t so much that I wanted to write a setting that felt European, I wanted to try and… but I didn’t want to write something that felt like typically Australian either… it’s this kind of like in between sort of space, I guess.
CMR: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I’m excited to read it and I’m thinking about the idea of the whole sort of that monster boyfriend, that kind of monster romance element of it as well in this kind of really lush setting, and you’ve got so many really interesting elements.
So why do you think that sort of Gothic horror monster is such a romantic figure – what draws you to write about that sort of romantic dynamic?
LC: It is definitely a popular one. Everybody loves like a really good like Byronic Hero.
CMR: Yeah.
LC: I think everybody’s probably got their own like thing that draws them to the monster crushes, so it’s kind of hard to make like a general statement about like this is why it’s appealing to everyone. I personally have just always always been drawn to the monster, you know, in like the romantic kind of way. I remember being a little kid and watching the Disney Beauty and the Beast (1991) and being terribly disappointed when he turned back into the Prince. The Prince was really ugly and the Beast was so cute. I was so disappointed. I was like, but he could have stayed as the Beast and she could have stayed with him, I was so disappointed, and being a five-year-old I didn’t get what that would mean, I just remember being disappointed.
And one of the extremely formative pieces of media that I watched as a young person was the Labyrinth film (1986) with David Bowie as the Goblin King [Jareth], and I don’t know, I mean like who doesn’t love David Bowie, but that was just something about it that I identified with. I mean watching it now as an adult it’s so funny because, like, Sarah, she’s so petulant and so angry about being asked by her parents to babysitter brother, but that kind of petty anger is so… I think I was very drawn to that as like a young person, especially [because] it’s very believable. I don’t know, I just liked the idea of this powerful, like a monstrous creature, who would offer you everything because he loved you so much. I just I found I was drawn to it so much, and I remember being, like, again, so disappointed that she went home, even though, like narratively it makes a little more sense that she didn’t stay with him.
Like you know you could just stay like it’s fine. Definitely there’s a lot of fan fiction where she goes back when she’s older and things like that, so clearly people have like there’s other people who felt the same.
CMR: There’s a lot of people who felt the same.
LC: Yeah there was that, and then, when I was older in University, one of the texts that I studied… So I did an English Bachelor of Arts and I did a lot of courses that were focused on like Gothic fiction and some of them were like I guess traditional kind of Gothic and then, some of them are modern Gothic, and for one of them, we did Silence of the Lambs.
CMR: Oooh, I love that book.
LC: And there’s just something about like Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter that just drew me in so much. I mean it’s like a canon monster romance too, because if you read the book accountable they actually do end up together in the end which is kind of fun. So it’s funny now that there’s like the Hannibal TV show yeah and there’s this whole other generation of people who are shipping him and Will and i’m just like, no, no, like it’s meant to end up with Starling, this is weird.
CMR: I think there’s room for everything, though.
LC: I really enjoyed the TV show it was really cool and I really loved like Gillian Anderson’s character as well, like, it was very interesting um but there’s just something about like the bit where she’s like I know he won’t come after me because, like he, like, he’d think it would be rude to eat me, or something like that, and there’s so much power in being the one that the monster won’t hurt.
I think it’s it’s kind of tricky because, obviously, like in real life, the monsters are actually monstrous, but I think in fiction you’ve got the scope to have this sort of like a monster who’s safe or palatable and can represent things in a way that makes it all right, I guess, like I know there’s been like a lot of different kind of discourses about writing villainous characters. I don’t know, like maybe you know, like if you start like doomscrolling and fall into like some like thread on Twitter of people arguing about Reylo or something, and it’s just like no that’s an hour of my life I won’t get back. “She can’t love him, he’s a bad guy!” but he’s also not real and also really cute. But you know, there’s a difference between like, falling in love with a real war criminal and falling in love with Kylo Ren who’s a dude in Star Wars.
CMR: Right, yeah.
LC: I do feel like I need to make that distinction clear because it’s tricky when I’m talking about you know, like, Oh, the girl who falls in love with the monster, it’s like my fictional monster that I’ve built who is actually good, not like a real monster who’s actually in real life and he’s Bad. So I don’t know, I think it’s just something about this, creating a character, where there’s this power in being… you’re facing something that’s like terrifying and that’s feared and has the capacity to do great harm, but to you, there’s something about you specifically that makes you special to them and perhaps even more powerful than them and you’re safe with them, so I don’t know.
I think I wanted to play with that a little bit, and I think I kind of doubly played with a because there’s Rowan, so he’s like the monster character in the excerpt that I read and he kind of became, like I guess, like the Beast who stays a Beast kind of character, but with the Lord Under as well, who’s the Lord of the Dead that Leta, the main character, can communicate with. That was very much playing around with the kind of Jareth (Labyrinth, 1986) sort of figure who’s you know, like powerful and everything, except somehow brought to their knees by this like human mortal girl, for whatever reason.
And I don’t know it’s just a lot of fun to play around with that and to like balance the power dynamics between all of them, and to try and make oh kind of you know, like giving Leta who realistically has very little power, trying to sort of give her this story of being strong and empowered and working her way through her relationships with these two kind of terrifying monstrous characters. I don’t know if that answered the question or not.
CMR: Sure! Yes, that answer’s great. But it’s interesting I think she’s getting a lot of her strength from battling against her mother as well, I think that’s part of the backstory that you get, from the sense that you get from the extract is that she’s-
LC: Yeah so I’m trying to think about what to say without giving too much away so… the basic premise is that she has a younger brother called Arien who is in possession of magic that’s not quite the same magic that, like, everyone else uses, so there’s something about his magic that seems to be like tainted or dark or wrong, and then they were orphaned, and so the woman who took them in who they refer to as their mother, she’s kind of afraid of Arien and trying to sort of fix him.
CMR: Ooh, okay.
LC: Leta’s been in this situation of, like, she wants to keep her brother safe, but it’s always this kind of, is it better to stay in the unsafe situation where you know the parameters, or go out into the wider world, where there’s the potential for more unknown risks. So that’s kind of the point she’s at, at the start of the book. She’s been putting herself in harm’s way to protect her brother from the like mother’s abuse, which is in the name of trying to help him, and justifying it to herself where she’s like at least here like I know the risks and I know how to protect him, because, like, I can step between them and take the hurt, versus leaving and going into like a wider world, where there’s so many unknown threats.
CMR: Mmm. That’s always powerful.
LC: Yeah, so it’s a lot about like, sibling bonding, and then this kind of idea of maybe she sort of feels like she’s done the right thing by doing this, but it gets to the point where she has to face the fact that, like, she needs to maybe let him face some risk in order to grow and perhaps it’s like actually been kind of hurtful for him to watch her being hurt to protect him if that makes sense.
CMR: Yeah.
LC: Without giving too much away of the story I don’t know, yeah it’s literally, it’s such a tightly woven, very small-scale story that it’s really hard to talk about the specifics, without spoiling it I guess. But yeah that’s where they’re at in this part of the story anyway.
CMR: Yeah it sounds like there’s so much in it. There’s a lot of very deeply Gothic themes it’s quite a dark – darker kind of book.
LC: I think so, yeah, I mean I don’t know, I’ve always just really like love dark aesthetic Gothic kind of thing, like I grew up you know loving like dark fairy tales and Labyrinth, and like that Addams Family movie from the 90s. I remember being very drawn to all of these sort of very dark aesthetics like Interview with the Vampire, like I read so much Anne Rice. I loved the movie Interview with the Vampire when it came out and I think I just like – it was just this big homage like the goth teenage girl that I was, so it’s kind of dark, but in I think an aesthetically lush kind of romantic, fun way, like I call it kind of … like an art school goth book. You know, it’s kind of like it is dark, but there’s like moments for humor like Leta the main character is quite witty, she’s got like this very dry kind of gallows humour. She defuses stuff by joking a lot. It was a very fun challenge as a writer, to try and infuse humour right into quite a serious book because there’s so many times where she would be a joke and my editor’s like, this is not landing, she should be afraid of him, why is she teasing him there, and I’m like I don’t know, I just wanted her to be funny and um. But that balance is hard.
I really love how authors like Leigh Bardugo do it, like her books are so funny and quite dark and I really loved like, especially in the original Grisha trilogy, like how Alina is so quippy a lot of the time and it’s just I don’t know I loved it and I wanted to try and see if I could infuse some of that into my book, because it’s like it’s really nice to read a book that’s dark and also funny.
CMR: Definitely, I think you can’t have dark books without humour if you’re… you know, if you’re trying to write something that’s … readable.
LC: Well, I mean. Even something like Game of Thrones which is like this completely… grim and dark, it has these real moments of humour with some of the characters who are kind of witty.
CMR: Yeah. Yeah, otherwise you just end up with, you know, 500 pages of despair. And all power to you if you like that, but.
LC: But, like, I think… I think I quite enjoy reading like a very serious grim book too, but I think to me, maybe, writing, I wanted the chance to be a little bit silly and funny as well, maybe.
CMR: I think, for me, as well if it’s… if it’s funnier I think some of the some of the tragedy lands better. I don’t know like I really like comedies that have genuine traumatic parts to them. You know, you’re laughing and then just, tears.
LC: Yeah! Like a real kind of Shakespearean kind of thing. I think like, I mean – for Leta, it kind of functions as a diffusing technique to say, like her brother will be trying to pin her down about something and she’s making jokes, and he’s just like this is not funny, stop it, you know, stop being silly about like whatever, but it’s a kind of a survival technique, I guess, that kind of way of laughing at stuff, like gallows humour I guess, but it’s yeah, I think, especially for young adult, it’s kind of fun to keep it not entirely serious.
CMR: Yeah so what’s the age range that you’re aiming this book for?
LC: So it’s upper YA, 14-18 I think is what my publisher has categorized it as, so I think it’s probably like one of those books where it’s kind of like a crossover like you know, like older Young Adult or Adult, I mean, I still love reading Young Adult so it’s kind of hard to say. I think it would sort of work like, if you like, Naomi Novick’s Uprooted, all those sorts of things, like The Bear and the Nightingale… it might appeal to adult readers who enjoy that, but it’s definitely got a very Young Adult voice and kind of ‘first stepping out into the world’ kind of storyline, and because that’s one of the things that I really love writing about a lot, like this … being on the cusp of everything starting, I guess, it’s really fun.
CMR: Yeah, that’s great, and the second one, FORESTFALL, that’s coming out in 2022, so next year, is that right?
LC: I think at the moment it’s meant to be the end of 2022, Fall, American Fall, so, we’ll see. With publishing it’s kind of like… I just find [it’s better] not to really get to attached to anything until it’s definitely set in stone, but at the moment, I’m about to start should start working on edits, but within the next month will be getting kind of getting a bit more real. I’m really looking forward to it.
I didn’t write it as a duology, it was originally a standalone and I sold a two book deal and nobody kind of asked me what the second book was going to be. I remember, I had an email exchange with my editor fairly early on, and I said to her, did you want to see an outline my other book and she’s like, Oh well, depending on how well Lakesedge does, we might want to turn it into a series.
And so I was like oh okay well I’m gonna have to have some time to think about how to do that, so I was like yeah cool like let’s, let’s turn it into a series, I’ve got an idea of how I could stretch it out, because I think when I was in submission I had this sort of Okay, if anyone asks me when I’m on sub if, like, if I could make it into a series, what would I say, and so I had this very, very rough plan of how I could take like basically the last chapter of the book and stretch it out into like a whole new book, but that was like going from like okay so here’s like a one line premise, how do I turn that into a whole novel?
And then the pandemic happened, and so I was trying to draft this book in the middle of everything being completely chaotic and having my publication date moved ahead because of the pandemic, so originally like it was meant to debut in February this year, so it ended up being ahead which worked out really well for me, because that meant that I had like a lot more time to draft Forestfall, so it was kind of a silver lining in the end, but it was a very really stressful time to be trying to write a new book.
I really love I love, how it turned out, and I think it’s got a lot of the same set of themes that are in Lakesedge, but it’s like a different kind of like, a different newness to it as well. So yeah it feels really weird having like this whole second book finished before the first one even comes out. I’m really looking forward to, like, I guess, this time next year, when I get to talk about it a bit more.
CMR: Yes, I’m excited, but I have to, I have to read this one.
LC: Yeah it’s still so far away, everything in publishing is this slow, it’s so funny where you’re like oh my book comes out in like eight months, and you know that sounds like so far away but I’m starting to feel a oh no it’s already getting so close but yeah.
CMR: Do you have any ideas about what you’ll do after you’ve written those two?
LC: So I have been, like in between everything else, working on a new book, which is a standalone, another sort of Gothic kind of fantasy. So we’ll see where that goes. I haven’t really showing that to anyone, yeah I think my agent has seen like little tiny bits of it.
CMR: Will that be Adult?
LC: I’m hoping like yeah I think I think it will be, I think, in the future, I wouldn’t mind sort of … So when I was writing Lakesedge there wasn’t really much of a crossover adult fantasy market, it was all or nothing really – it was like YA or all like very, very adult, and Naomi Novick and Katherine Arden were probably the two exceptions, but with Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House and Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth, like those sort of crossover kind of adult science fiction fantasy books, that’s made me sort of feel like I think I’d really like to push myself to try and write, something that was adult, but we’ll see, because I also really do love writing YA kind of voice and YA situations so.
So I think the way the my new book is going it’s definitely shaping up to be another … Just in terms of like, the characters journey, it’s very much setting off from safety into the great unknown for the first time and finding yourself, and you know, like that kind of thing so. Fingers crossed that it will be able to find a home at a publisher and will turn into a real book someday.
CMR: Yay! Well, it’s been lovely to talk to you, so thank you ever so much for coming on the show, and reading the extract for us as well.
LC: Thank you for having me, it’s been really lovely.
CMR: That’s all we’ve got time for, thank you for listening, on Thursday we’ve got the next installment of The Crows to listen to, so stay tuned and don’t forget to subscribe, and see you Thursday. Bye now.
