Contemporary Challenges and "Unlikeable" Protagonists - Alexene Farol Follmuth - Twelfth Knight

Marissa chats with Alexene Farol Follmuth about her latest contemporary coming-of-age YA romance, TWELFTH KNIGHT. Also discussed: some of the differences between self and traditional publishing and how the two can come together in a career, crafting the ‘unlikeable female character’, using Shakespeare for source material, structuring a romance differently than what’s expected, the challenge of writing technology and social media that could become quickly dated, and so much more!

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Transcript

[00:09] Marissa: Hello, and welcome to the Happy writer. This is a podcast that aims to bring readers more books to enjoy and to help authors find more joy in their writing. I am your host, Marissa Meyer. Thank you so much for joining me. What is making me happy this week is that my husband planned for us a very impromptu road trip. So we are taking off tomorrow morning. We're heading over to do some wine tasting in eastern Washington. Then we're going to go into Idaho. There's like a. An Appaloosa horse museum. So something for the kids because they're like, so into horses right now. What else? I think there's some hiking on the docket, something about a silver mine tour. I don't know. I'm not in charge of this one, which is unusual. I am usually the vacation planner, but my husband took over, and I am so looking forward to being gone for a week and doing some relaxing and honestly, just like, reading a lot of books, because that's all I ever want to do on vacation, is just read a lot of books. So I've got my stack to bring with me, and I am really looking forward to it. Speaking of lots of awesome books, I am also so happy to be talking to today's guest. She has penned a number of science fiction fantasy projects under the name Olivie Blake, including the Webtoon Clara and the Devil, and the internationally best selling the Atlas six series. Her Ya debut, my mechanical romance, came out last year, and her newest YA romance, 12th night, just came out this past week. Please welcome Alexine Farrell, Fulmouth.

[01:54] Alexene : Okay, now I'm here. Wonderful. Hi. Thank you so much for having me. That trip sounds amazing. I'm from northern California, and, uh, my family used to drive up to Canada, like, up to. So. Yes. Sounds wonderful. I think you're going to love it.

[02:11] Marissa: I love it. Would you, would you do like the coast Highway 101?

[02:15] Alexene : I couldn't tell you as I was driving. I was in my anarchist teen years, where I'm pretty sure I was, like, just listening to emo in my headphones. But definitely we would stop in a variety of places. This is how I got introduced to Portland and Seattle, although for many years I called Seattle worse, San Francisco.

[02:39] Marissa: I get to kind of see that, a San Francisco vibe, but kind of like, it's not quite as cool. Little sister.

[02:49] Alexene : I think that was rude of me at the time. I think I just wasn't in a place to really embrace the, you know, the fish market and the things that Seattle has to offer.

[02:58] Marissa: Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, everything's got its own. Its own quirks. And I love Seattle. I love Portland. I love San Francisco. We've got some really cool cities on this coast. But I love that you mentioned being in that angsty kind of teen years, because I remember when I was a teenager, my family did a road trip down the Oregon coast, and I had my walkman and my headphones. And to this day, whenever I hear anything off of Everclear's album that had come out that year. And I can't think of what the album title is, but there's a specific set of songs that every time I hear them, I'm right back in that car driving down the Oregon coast. Cause I just listened to it on repeat.

[03:40] Alexene : Absolutely. For me, it's Ocean Avenue by yellow card.

[03:43] Marissa: Yeah. Oh, gosh. Mary and Maurice. All right, Alexian, I'm so excited to talk to you today. Before we get into talking about your new book that came out, I want to hear your author origin story. Did you always know you wanted to be a writer? What were kind of the twists and turns that your life took to get you here?

[04:09] Alexene : I like to make the joke that, I don't know if anyone really decides to be a writer, it's more like writing just kind of comes for you in the night. And that was certainly my. That was my relationship to writing and something that I should preface. My mother is an immigrant. My mother came from Manila in the Philippines. And so, you know, anyone with immigrant parents will probably agree that, like, artistic careers are not really an option. It's just not on the table. I think it's a combination of immigrant parent and, like, being a millennial. It's just like the. The idea was, let's. Let's see what's the most practical thing we can do. And that, like, the answer is never going to be any creative career. Um, so for many years, writing was a hobby. Reading and writing were like, I'm such an indoor cat. I spent all my summers just reading as many books as I could. And I would write as well, but just for fun. And then it started. There started to be this pattern in my life where I began to realize that the things that I had chosen, my practical life of high achievement, was not contributing very much to my emotional or spiritual well being and everything.

[05:16] Marissa: Can I ask, what was the practical choice?

[05:20] Alexene : Well, so first, when I was 17, I decided I was going to major in urban planning. I really enjoyed. I'm a little bit power hungry, to be honest with you. And we in AP human geography, we did a lesson on Robert Moses and the city beautiful movement. And I was like, whoa, I want to do that. I want to make places beautiful. And then urban planning as a career was considered, like, it is considered very practical. It's a government job. You know, it's like a very, for the most part, government job, very stable work. It felt like a very safe, potentially interesting. And then within one year, all my professors were like, you're gonna be so bored if this is what you do. Like, this is not the kind of life that you want. And some of them tried to talk me into academia, and one particularly effective professor told me I should go to law school. She sat me down, and she's like, you can do way more as a lawyer. You'll have way more influence over things you care about when you operate from the scope of law. She was completely wrong. I will say that right now to anyone listening, whether they should be a lawyer.

[06:25] Marissa: Lawyers, well intentioned advice, maybe.

[06:27] Alexene : Yes, yes, definitely, definitely well intentioned. And I think it depends on how you view power, because I think that lawyers have a lot of clout, but in terms of the job, they operate within the constraints of the rules. Like, you can't ask a lawyer. You can't do anything except what the law says. And if it doesn't exist, you can't make one up. And so I. Which is all of which is to say, I studied urban planning. I got my master's in urban planning. I went to law school, and then I dropped out of law school. And basically, every time I hit a roadblock, I would pause and, like, write a book. And it would just be this sort of cathartic exercise of just, like, I just need to process what I'm going through. And so I guess I will do that in the form of a novel. And I had gone through a couple of different careers. I was. I did commercial real estate for a while, and then I did some freelance graphic design. And during this time, I discovered fanfiction. And I realized, like, whoa, you can just write novels on the Internet, and, like, there are people who will find them. I remember that the first time I wrote any fanfiction, there was already a comment within hours of posting it. And I could not believe it. Like, it was actually a super mean comment. It was, like, probably the meanest review I've ever gotten. And I remember just being nothing but overjoyed because I was like, someone read it. I wrote something down, and someone read it. Like, I exist. I am being perceived right now. Like, it was this crazy, amazing feeling of, like, I could keep doing this. And then, you know, the reviews actually were predominantly positive. We just started off on a. On a meeting.

[08:06] Marissa: Oh, my gosh. What a great perspective, though. Like, they didn't like it, but they read it.

[08:10] Alexene : Yes, I know, and that's huge. I think for someone who had just been writing for, like, the sanctity of the blank page, it was just like, oh, my God. Like, I can reach someone this way and that. Like, they might not agree with me, but it's still. It's still, like a. It's a form of. Of actual communication. Like, to me, still, the way that I understand art is, like, I have a feeling. I write it down, and I basically shove that feeling into someone else's chest. And they can reject it if they want, but if they accept it, that's beautiful. That's communion. So, yeah. So, for me, it was not so much wanting to be a writer as understanding that the best version of my life and the best version of my brain and the best, like, the most productive way that I personally know how to be human is to write fiction, because that's sort of my way of processing what I think and see about the world and what I understand about the world. And significantly, with my young adult works and the idea of coming of age and finding your place in the world process of writing that out, that was something that made me feel like, okay, this is the road I'm supposed to be on. Like, this is if I stop trying to be practical and start being passionate, this is the thing that comes most naturally. And I do have a very strange career in that. I wrote a bunch of fanfiction. I wrote a bunch of stories that were not right for the market, and so I self published them instead. And then I tried, at the same time, tried to traditionally publish. So it took me a long time to get an agent. I think it took me five years of writing, three years of actively querying, and before I got an agent for my first young adult book, my mechanical Romance. And I was like, well, I guess I'm a young adult author now. And then a year after that, my self published work went viral. And that's how I have sort of two separate careers. We have Olivie Blake, which the real distinction is that Olivie Blake writes for adults. That is also me. My therapist is like, please stop dissociating in this way.

[10:10] Marissa: No.

[10:13] Alexene : So when I am writing as Olivie, I am writing more complicated themes, is the way I look at it that when I'm writing as Olivia, I'm writing about ethics and power and exploitation. And when I'm writing as Alexine, I am writing for a teenage audience, and I'm talking about coming of age and understanding who you are.

[10:33] Marissa: So was it the Atlas six book or series? Was that, did that start as the self published work that kind of went viral?

[10:40] Alexene : Yes. So the Atlas six, I self published in 2020, it went viral in 2021, and then Tor picked it up a few months later. I do like to emphasize, because publishing is such a difficult beast to understand, that when the Atlas six went viral, I already had an agent. So I told her, this book has gone viral. It sold this many units, and then she took it out to various publishers, and Tor came back with a preempt, and that's how they got to own the rest of my titles. Basically, I like to emphasize it because it is very, very possible to have a viable career, self publishing. And I like to make sure that people understand that if you like to own your own business and run your own business and be in charge of your own production and all of that, then self publishing is definitely a way to make money. I don't want to do any of that. I just want to write my little stories.

[11:34] Marissa: Yeah, no, and I appreciate that distinction. And people will sometimes ask me, like, why? Why only take your, whatever, 1012 percent royalties when you could self publish and, like, you have a name, you have an audience, people would buy it. And it's like, do you have, it's so much work. It's so much work to self publish. And then you are the editor, you are the marketer, you have to hire the COVID artist, you have to do so much. And I'm like, like you said, I just want to, I just want to write the book. I don't want to worry about everything else.

[12:03] Alexene : Some people love to have full creative control, and I think some people do really love self publishing, but I just, yeah, I also, I think with self publishing, you have to have a pretty solid pipeline, and production is a lot, and, like, you have to write a lot. You write a lot. I still prefer the timeline of traditional publishing.

[12:26] Marissa: Yeah, no, and it's funny, too, when you think of, if you're self published, it's all on you, and that can be a good thing or a bad thing. And there's some comfort to thinking, okay, if I release a book and it doesn't do well, I think a lot of us are like, well, it was the COVID art, the publisher did terrible cover art, or, oh, the publisher didn't market it enough, you know, or whatever. It is like, you can kind of have these little excuses that ease the road a little bit. With self publishing, it's all on you. The successes, the challenges, everything. And that's. It's a ton of responsibility. And some people, like you say, some people love this and love being in control, and it just really works with it for them. And some of us are like, no, thank you.

[13:08] Alexene : I mean, I will say that the Atlas Six, like, the Atlas Six, would not have worked with traditional publishing because there are a lot of books like which. A lesson in vengeance by Victoria Lee. That book was written before the Atlas Six. But because I self published the Atlas Six and it came out faster, it looks as though I was on top of a trend rather than reacting to it, even though I might have been reacting to it. You know, like, when I wrote the Atlas Six, 9th house hadn't come out yet, but it had been announced, and a deadly education had been announced, and I thought, well, I guess I'm behind. Like, I guess, you know, I guess this is just dark. Academia wasn't a word yet, or, like, it wasn't the thing we were saying yet, but I actually thought, maybe this won't work for traditional publishing because there's too much of it self published, and it came out immediately. It looked like it was ahead of the trend.

[14:02] Marissa: Interesting. Yeah, no, it's. Trends are so weird, and we all want to hit on a trend, but, you know, the common advice you hear is don't try, because as soon as you pinpointed this is a trend, you're probably too late to jump on that bandwagon. So it's. Yeah, it's a difficult thing to try to time the market or any of this. And so it all kind of comes back to writing what you really love and what you're excited about, and maybe you'll get lucky and hit a trend. If not, that's fine. Your book can still find its readers.

[14:44] Alexene : Yeah. And time is very industry. Time is extremely cyclical. When I first self published masters of Death, which has a vampire in, it was 2017 or 18, and every single agent was like, don't send me vampires, because we were only oversaturated in paranormal romances. And I was like, but she's not like other vampires. And they were like, I don't care. So. So I self published matches of death in 2018, and then it re released in 2023 last August. And when it came out again, it just happened to come out at the same time. It's very tonally good omens. And the second season of good omens had just come out and people are like, vampires are back. And it hit the New York Times list, which is crazy.

[15:29] Marissa: So, so funny.

[15:31] Alexene : Yeah. That, like, you write a story for yourself and, like, the right readers, the right time, all those things, you can't. You can't necessarily predict how those things fall together, but sometimes they really do.

[15:42] Marissa: Yeah, no, it is sometimes. Sometimes the serendipity. Serendipity just happens. It is funny with the vampires. I was noticing in my, like, the last year, I get a lot of requests to blur books, and there's been like seven or eight vampire books that have come across my desk and I'm like, where are all these vampire books coming?

[16:01] Alexene : The vampires are definitely back. They're back. This is another example of me being so behind. I was ahead. You brought back vampires. That's like. Well, I didn't.

[16:13] Marissa: Yes, you did. I think it was.

[16:15] Alexene : You clearly take it. I accept.

[16:19] Marissa: Okay, so. But the book we're here to talk about is not dark academia and it is not vampires.

[16:25] Alexene : No.

[16:26] Marissa: Would you tell listeners a little bit about your book that just came out? 12th night?

[16:31] Alexene : Yes. So 12th night is, you are correctly hearing that it is a spin on 12th night, the Shakespeare play, which is my favorite Shakespeare comedy. And it's basically about, in my version of the story, which is a contemporary, like, definitely based off of the nineties and two thousands team rom.com adaptations. I wanted it to have. I wanted the feeling of reading 12th night to be the same as watching ten things I hate about you or Corlys or shes the man, that it was like, fun and a little bit absurd and were all just enjoying ourselves. But I also wanted to talk about basically, who is allowed to get angry. So in my book, 12th Night VI, who is the viola character, of course, she is seeking safety not from a strange land, but from predominantly masculine online spaces. So she is very deep in the world of fandom. She plays a tabletop rpg that's like dungeons and dragons. I called it something different, and it's called Conquest in the book. And she's really into fantasy media, and she plays in this MMORPG, 12th night. And the idea behind the game is that it's arthurian themed, that basically King Arthur has died suddenly, and there's these twelve realms and twelve knights that have all been scattered, and you have to collect all the relics, and it's meant to feel like World of Warcraft. And she loves these things a lot, but because she's a woman, she faces a lot of discrimination in these masculine spaces. And especially in the game of 12th night, where she has some trouble. I mean, I think being a woman on the Internet, hopefully we can. Unfortunately, I should say not hopefully. Unfortunately, I think we can all fill in the blanks for the kind of abuse that she gets online. And so she disguises herself as a masculine avatar called Cesario. And while she's playing as Cesario, she runs into the Duke Orsino character, who is. His name is Jack. In the book, he is a football player who has really badly torn his knee. And this knee injury is based on a multitude of knee injuries suffered by my husband when he was a teenager. He was also a running back who was prone to injury. And so we have these two teenagers who dislike each other in real life. They are president and vice president of the student body. They really don't get along. They make a lot of sort of superficial assumptions about each other, but they end up becoming friends in the game. Except that Jack doesn't know that Vi is Vi. He thinks that she's her twin brother, Sebastian.

[19:15] Marissa: Okay, so first. Yeah. No, I mean, it's hard to summarize things sometimes. I think you did a great job. I. For 01:00 a.m. not familiar with the play 12th night. It is one of the Shakespeare plays that I. I've never read. I don't know that I've ever seen a movie or stage production of it. So I went into this very much like, I love Shakespeare. I know this is a retelling of some sort, but that is all I know. I've got no idea what else is coming up.

[19:43] Alexene : That's great. I mean, I definitely. I didn't. I didn't reread 12th night before I wrote this because I wanted it to stand on its own. I didn't want to closely pattern the beats or make it so that you had to be familiar with the source material. So, you know, hopefully it's.

[19:57] Marissa: Yeah. Oh, no, no. It works great. And I love it. I love that you get some of these classic shakespearean tropes that you kind of recognize from taming of the shrew and some other things. And the girl dressed as a guy pretending to be blah, blah, blah. The enemies to lovers. I mean, some of these things that we just eat up, but set in this really fun, contemporary world with so many fandom references, which I definitely nerded out about, references to D and D. There's references to World of Warcraft, references to Game of Thrones. They at one point attend the fantasy convention. There's a ren faire talked about at one point. So for you, how deeply immersed are you in these fandoms?

[20:49] Alexene : Okay, so I, like I said, I started writing fanfiction. So I consider myself in terms of craft born from fandom. I really, that's why all of my work is very character first. And I love the framework of tropes. I love a comedy of errors, which is really what's happening here. And I love the really, like, I do like to lean on the absurd in a way that I think fan fiction is very good at tonally fan fiction and Shakespeare. But what is really the difference? You know, I think if fan fiction.

[21:21] Marissa: And Shakespeare, what is the difference?

[21:25] Alexene : Like, I think that, well, part of what makes Shakespeare so ripe for adaptation is that he was writing for the common man. I feel like we've sort of unfairly given him this very high brow reputation when the man loved the dick joke. So anyway, that's my son. Sidebar.

[21:44] Marissa: I love it. I love it. 

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[22:32] Alexene : So I'm not a gamer. I did have. I had my cousin help me, and then I had some consultants help me build my fake World of Warcraft. But definitely I come from fandom. I am used to being called a fascist based on which ships I enjoy. I love Renaissance fair. So I actually, this was my pandemic book, and it was quite disappointing for me, specifically related to Ren Faire, because I had auditioned for the LA Renaissance fair, and I forgot that, like, in LA, everybody who's auditioning for things is an actual actor. And so I didn't think that I was gonna actually get a spot. I ended up being in the pub crawl, and then I went through rehearsals for about a month before everything shut down for the pandemic. So I was still in my head in this, like, world where I got to be in the Renaissance fair and, like, play act my dream scenario. And I love, oh, my God, I love comic Con. All of these experiences were really because it's my pandemic book, and I was living, like, 100% in my imagination. Of it from life, things that I've really enjoyed. And I just shoved all this nerdy stuff that I've always loved and put it into this book. And I am very much like Vi in my first YA book, my mechanical romance, the main character is a very likable girl. Like, she's. She's almost. She's almost diabolically likable. Like, she just kind of goes with the flow. And that's what she has to be like for that, for that plot. Like, that's the kind of character she has to be. But she was just so much. She was just not like me at all. And so when I sat down to write a second one, I was like, what if we were honest about what we were like in high school? Which is to say an unlikable female character? And so, okay, I was gonna bring.

[24:29] Marissa: Up, because we hear this phrase, the unlikable female character, and it's one thing that I think we're at a point now where so many of us hear this and kind of roll our eyes. Why do we have to call her that? But, I mean, as archetypes go, Vi is very much fitting into this. She's brash, she's frank, she's. Doesn't care what people think about her. You know, can be rude, can be very abrasive. She's also hilarious, though. Thank you. So, for you, like, when it comes to writing a quote unquote unlikable female protagonist, what were some things you were thinking about as far as writing this character, writing from her point of view, but not having readers hate her?

[25:16] Alexene : Well, let me open with. Many readers do hate her. I mean, I thought it was such a funny, like, almost social experience, a social experiment writing this, because I worked actually predominantly with my UK editors on this one. This was Macmillan children slash, their new imprint, first ink, combined with tortine. And because my Tor team usually works on my adult speculative work, they let First Inc. Take the lead. So my editor, Emma, when I sat down with her, my editors, Emma and Charlie, they were like, do we really think that people are going to hate her? She seems so sweet. And I was like, no, no, she.

[25:54] Marissa: Does not seem sweet.

[25:57] Alexene : They were like, do you think we need to make her meaner? And I was like, absolutely not. Just. Just wait a few months. But, yeah, it is. It's been really funny for me because this book is so much about fandom and being part of this, like, collective imagination kind of world where everybody plays together but only surface level, you know, that. That Vi says explicitly on the page I know I'm an unlikable female protagonist. Like, I know this. And yet the reviews are, like, I just didn't like her. And it was so funny to me to just be like, all right, well, thank you for proving my point to the UK team, which is. Anyway, that's funny. That's such a tangent. But, like, it was. It was really funny to me. I think I wrote this whole book. This whole book has kind of, like a wink emoji vibe to it. You know, like, that there's just, like, I see what's ridiculous here. I see what's silly here, and. And it's still true. Anyway, so writing Vi was like, it has to come from an honest place, too. Like, part of what was great about crafting Vi is that she is not a cruel person. She is definitely brash. She does not think a lot initially. She doesn't think a lot about how people are taking her in, and she's doing this almost as a coping mechanism. It's this sense that she knows that people are going to hate her no matter what she does. And it's this very make me your villain kind of decision that she's like, you know what? If you're going to hate me, fine, I hate you first. I hate you more. I hate you in a funnier way and in a better outfit. And, you know, and that, to me, that comes from a place of, like, real vulnerability that she. One of the most honest lines that Vi has comes. It's in, like, chapter three or something relatively early on that she's like, I know that I'm not for everyone, and I wish that people would like me. I wish that people would accept me as I am. But since I know that they won't, then I can't waste my time trying to be something that I'm not. And it ends up being this. It ends up being the foundation for the romance because Jack is very much a people pleaser. And I said earlier that this book is a lot about who gets to be angry. So Vi feels like she can never be angry or that her anger is never taken seriously. It's never validated that people just want her to smile. They think she should be better. You know, there are mentions that she should be tamed because she is definitely the shrew. And then Jack is half black, and he can't get angry because if he does, he becomes a caricature and he becomes the angry black man, and he's aware of this. And so Jack is this extreme people pleaser watching Vi be this extreme villain who actually cares so deeply about the people in her life, and he admires her and respects her even before he likes her. And I just thought that was a really interesting thing to build their mutual sympathy on this feeling that, like, you know what? It is difficult for us to make our way through the world just because of who we are and the way that we've decided to survive. It makes it even worse because it makes us even lonelier. So it actually made a really good foundation for the romance between them to have her be this kind of person who is just, like, just totally misunderstood and willfully, willfully misunderstood, definitely putting on an act. And I think it means everything for someone to see through that. So I guess it was always, in doing the characterization, the romance was always built into it. There's just like, well, what would these two characters really love about each other? And I think it was that freedom to set your burden down and just be.

[29:43] Marissa: Yeah, no, that's so interesting, because I do think in writing romance, you, of course, are going to have the overarching romance plot that drives the entire story forward, and then you're also going to have a character arc for the protagonist, the female protagonist, and you're probably also going to have a character arc for the male protagonist. And, of course, in this one, we have both, because we're in both point of views throughout. But ideally, if you can get all three of those, the romance and the female protagonist, or both. Both leads, both romantic leads, male, male, female, female, whatever, if you can get them all to mesh and gel and be, like, one story kind of interwoven, that carries throughout. That's like when the magic happens. And it is not always easy to do, to kind of get those things to really jive and feel like one thing is constantly influencing the others.

[30:39] Alexene : Yeah, definitely. And it was interesting trying to figure out how to pitch this book as well, because in terms of romance, the book is slow. Like, it. I'm talking about this from a very. From a craft perspective within the industry, it doesn't hit romance beats exactly as it should. There are moments, for example, when my editors would say, like, we haven't had Vi and Jack interact in a while. Like, they should interact again here. And I would just push back and be like, but it's not about them right now. It's about Vi and that, you know, and that contributes to what she's like with Jack later. But in this moment, it's not about their romantic relationship. So in that sense, I wanted to really lean heavily on the fact that this is a coming of age story that happens to have the benefit of a romantic relationship. But it's really interesting, I think, industry wise, that we had to make that distinction, because I could see how a romance reader who is used to romance pacing would find it too slow or that there are moments when they were absent from each other. When I think about the media that was formative to me when I was young, I think it did have a lot of that. There was less of an emphasis on romance, I think, like, one of the books that I think was so, actually, a bunch of books are popping into my head right now. But the first one that comes to mind is this lullaby by Sarah Dessen. I recently reread it and was like, oh, my God, I just rewrote this lullaby, but because it's just such a similar, like, character dynamic and stuff. But the. The kind of books that I was consuming that made me feel like I was seeing something important about myself often had more to do with the coming of age arc than with the romance arc. Like the roman something. The romance was the reward for coming of age. That was just, like, because we've accepted who we are now we get to have this beautiful love story. And I think that also, like, as an adult, that's what I've come to consider true about my life is that, like, I'm pretty open about my mental health, specifically my mental illness, that I only got diagnosed because I met my husband, because I didn't want him, like, the things that I had to do to get through the day that were so self destructive and hard on me. I didn't want him to have to suffer that as well. And so it's just. It's like, the reasons that we change that happen to be because of love or because love has happened to us, because it's, like, lifted this veil from our eyes or something that means that all of life will be better. That was the story that I wanted to write. This feeling of a soft landing that you go through, all this change that it's worth it to be vulnerable. It's worth it to choose intimacy with someone. And the reward is this wonderful relationship with a love that is also a very good friend.

[33:25] Marissa: Now, I particularly love thinking of the happy ending, the culmination of the romance, as the reward for doing all of the hard work and making it through the character arc and going along for the journey and accepting who you are and all of these things. And I think it's so interesting that you mentioned that it does have a different pacing than so much romance, because I definitely noticed that. Because, of course, my brain is so just plot structure, and I know typically have read so many books that you just, like, it does feel like it's happening differently, and I remember noticing it, I don't know, around page 50. It's like a 300 page book. The two characters aren't actually together in the same space until, like, page 50. That's unusual. And I think they're still, like, the midpoint halfway through the book. They still pretty much dislike each other, and it's definitely a different pace. But also, that's not a bad thing. Like, we love slow burn. We love when things take a long time to really simmer and get cooking because then the payoff is so much more rewarding and to really feel like the characters had to work for it when it comes to romance, like, that's what I want. I want to feel like they had to earn this.

[34:45] Alexene : I agree. And I find the third act breakup quite frustrating, which I know is the staple of romance. And often there are very good third act breakups. And obviously, this book has something like that. It had the conflict that happens around when the third act breakup would. But I think it's just more satisfying to see a relationship build meaningfully in a way that isn't so easily cast aside. That's just like, well, this whole thing wasn't real. I just didn't want that sort of unearned feeling to be there. So I think in structuring it differently, that part is also different. That that's like, there's a real understanding that there's something so real here that it can't just get thrown away.

[35:29] Marissa: Yeah. No, and I think so whether it's the nineties teen movies or Hallmark movies, and that's such a classic kind of cliche, the third act breakup. And so often it can feel very contrived, like, oh, we're only throwing this in here because we need a little jolt of drama right here at the end. And it can work if it's built up to. If there's foreshadowing, if, you know, sometimes. But sometimes it just comes out of nowhere. And as a reader, that's so frustrating. You just, like, want to reach into the book and shake people. And I really appreciate that you didn't do that.

[36:06] Alexene : Well, thank you. I'm a very self indulgent writer, so, you know what? Would I want to read this? No. Then I won't.

[36:14] Marissa: No, that's good. I think that's an excellent rule as a creative to live by. All right, one more question before we move on to our bonus round. You, of course, have come from science fiction, fantasy world, and now have moved into the contemporary space. What for you, would you say, were some of the biggest challenges of writing contemporary, specifically?

[36:40] Alexene : This is so minor, but writing social media is really hard when the social media could be dead by the time the book publishes.

[36:49] Marissa: Oh, it's so true. No, I get copy editors always flagging things. Like, you mentioned TikTok. Are we sure TikTok's gonna be around when. Yeah.

[37:00] Alexene : I have not yet used TikTok because, like, what if it's banned? I don't. I don't know. And in this book, I thought Twitter was safe. It wasn't.

[37:10] Marissa: Yeah.

[37:12] Alexene : Contemporary. What's hard about contemporary is, like, the reality of cell phones, but also, like, most misunderstandings can be cleared up very easily, or, like, even just certain behaviors. Like, it's really hard to not know a person or not know about a person now. Like, Jack and Vi would know a lot about each other just from existing. Like, even though I built them into this very large public school, which is. I went to a very large public school. My graduating class was, like, a thousand people, so it was really easily easy to be invisible. I don't think that's true anymore. There's the world, our world. It feels so silly to say that. It is hard to record the contemporary experience to the page because you also want to write a story that's timeless. So it has to still make sense, but it has to feel right for today's teenager. It has to fold into a current 17 year old's life in a way that doesn't feel like it couldn't be that way. I think, yeah. The real challenge is existing inside a real world that is very fluid. And one example I like to bring up, because my team and I have spent so long on it. There is a moment where Olivia, who's also a very major character, Olivia and Vi are doing a scene together from Romeo and Juliet. And Olivia is very much a romantic, and Vi is not. And Olivia is trying to persuade Vi to find Shakespeare's poetry beautiful. And she quotes a line from one of Romeo and Juliet scenes, and Vi goes, is that one direction? And my team flagged very. They were like, do we think one direction is the right reference here? Because it's kind of an old reference now.

[39:02] Marissa: Yeah.

[39:03] Alexene : And I was like, yeah, I guess you're right. And we spent a long time trying to change it. We tried out so many different things. We tried out Bts. We tried out Taylor Swift. We tried out Harry Styles. We tried the Jonas brothers.

[39:17] Marissa: But there's nothing you can say that's not going to be dated at some point.

[39:21] Alexene : Right? And I was like. And I think that. I mean, it's not like one direction has been eclipsed. Like, I would not. I would argue that there is no current one direction. I even, like, went on what is no longer twitter.

[39:34] Marissa: Do you guys.

[39:35] Alexene : Who do you think is the current one direction? And everyone was like, one direction is the current one direction. Anyway, so that one conversation, like, it seriously took us weeks, and I ended up changing it back to what it was. But stuff like that is what makes it much harder than fantasy. If I were writing fantasy, I could just make something up.

[39:53] Marissa: Yeah, no, there's a lot of truth to that, for sure. Things that get dated so quickly, the.

[39:59] Alexene : Constraints of the real world. Yeah, very tedious.

[40:04] Marissa: Okay, so here we go with our bonus round. Uh, first up, what book makes you happy?

[40:11] Alexene : Oh, my gosh. Okay. Well, I am the kind of reader who loves to feel things I love. A book that makes me cry. Like, a book that just tears my heart out is, like, fantastic.

[40:20] Marissa: Um, not sure you understand the question. I'm joking.

[40:25] Alexene : Uh, books that may. Let's see. A couple things are coming to mind. Uh, when. So one of the formative teen books that I would bring up was I capture the cast by Dodie Smith, which I wouldn't say that book makes me happy, but I think it's with me in difficult times. I reread it very often when I was a teenager with the angst. I thought it was such a tragic love story. And now that I'm an adult, I understand that it is not, but it is a very, very good coming of age story, and I think has had a major influence on how I write. And I would also say, I think because she just had a book come out, Cat Sebastian. All of her books make me incredibly happy, and they leave me very much at peace. I read one of her books. It's one of those, of course, it's romance, so it has a title like two rogues make a right or something. I read one of those books, I want to say, like, five times in a row during the presidential election in 2020. I was so stressed that I could not leave the world of that one book. So, yes, I believe she just came out with a book called, you should be so lucky, and it's amazing.

[41:37] Marissa: What are you working on next?

[41:40] Alexene : My goodness. Well, I have a story anthology, so under all the. I don't have anything planned as a Lexine, but as all of these, I have my story anthology called January's that is coming out in the fall. And then next year I have two standalone SFF work. So gifted and talented, which is like succession with magic and girl dinner, which is a satire about a cannibal sorority.

[42:05] Marissa: Ooh. Lastly, where can people find you?

[42:12] Alexene : Okay, I am on the thing that is no longer Twitter. I'm on Twitter and Instagram asarrellfolmuth. I am on Tumblr and Spotify if you want public playlists. I just posted the 12th night public playlist actually on Spotify underneath and I'm also on YouTube. I occasionally do an agony ant series where I solve problems that are usually related to craft, although sometimes other things.

[42:44] Marissa: Awesome. Alexand, thank you so much for joining me.

[42:47] Alexene : Thank you. Sorry, somehow we woke up my siri. Okay, anyway, hello.

[42:52] Marissa: She has a problem for you to solve.

[42:54] Alexene : Yeah. Okay. Anyway, yes, thank you so much for having me. It was so nice to be here.

[43:01] Marissa: Readers, definitely check out 12th night. It is out now. Of course we encourage you to support your local indie book store, but if you don't have a local indie, you can check out our affiliate store@bookshop.org shop Marissa Meyer next week. Believe it or not, we are celebrating our 200th episode. I don't think that I believe it. I cannot believe how fast this has gone 200 episodes nuts. We are honestly not really sure what we're doing to celebrate, but we are bandying about a few different ideas. So definitely tune in to see what we come up with. And don't forget to leave us a rating or a review on your favorite podcast app and follow us on Instagram. Happy writer podcast. Until next time, stay inspired, keep writing, and whatever life throws at you today. I hope that now you're feeling a little bit happier.