Malinda Lo

I’m happy to report that the latest draft of Huntress has been turned in! After I hit the Send button on Saturday, I spent the rest of the day wandering around my house aimlessly, half of my brain still stuck in Huntress land, and the other half just dead.

After getting some sleep, though, I’m (mostly) back to normal, and have a few things to tell you about. First up, last week the Shelf Elf reviewed Ash, and wow, this review totally made my day! Here’s an excerpt:

Part of the appeal of Ash is that it isn’t just one thing. It isn’t entirely a “fairy book,” or a romance, or a book about grieving. Somehow it manages to contain elements of all of these sorts of stories without any of the parts feeling shallow or underdeveloped and unconvincing. There’s real richness in this book, from beginning to end, and it will get you thinking, which isn’t something that all fairy tale retellings manage.

Thanks so much, Shelf Elf!!

I also wanted to let you all know that I’m giving away another copy of the U.K. edition of Ash, this time over at The Enchanted Inkpot, a group blog that I’m a part of. We’re celebrating our one-year anniversary this month, and we’re giving away a whole gigantic prize pack of great middle-grade/young adult fantasy novels, including Mistwood by Leah Cypess, which comes out next month; The Owl Keeper by Chris Brodien-Jones which was published this month, and lots more. Go here to enter to win (deadline April 28).

In other news, unless you’ve been under a rock I’m sure you’ve heard about the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajokull. I’ve been reading a lot of the news¹ about it because I’m supposed to go to Ireland in early May. Currently, Ireland (like most of Europe) is closed to air traffic, but my fingers are crossed that things will be working again in a few weeks.

I’m actually not too worried about it because, frankly, I have no control over volcanos! And when you see photos like this one², how can wonder not outweigh everything else?

Lightning in an ash cloud

I’ll wrap up this blog post of random items with a little teaser for Huntress. To be honest, I’m sort of terrified to have this book come out, but at the same time I can’t wait to share it. The writer’s paradox, right? Anyway, during the writing/revising of this novel, I listened to a lot of music. Last week Cindy Pon shared a song she’s been listening to while revising her sequel to Silver Phoenix that reminded her of her characters. I thought I’d do the same today.

Here’s a song I’ve listened to over and over again while writing Huntress. In my mind, it fits the mood of the book pretty well:

I listened to Uh Huh Her’s album Common Reaction a lot while writing Huntress. Some of the songs may have lyrics that fit the story better, but “Explode” is definitely the song that I identify with Huntress over everything else.

That video, though, doesn’t really work for me. I like the look of the girl, but the guy … doesn’t work for me (or Huntress). It’s so funny — a lot of times I don’t like it when book covers include an image of the main character, because I like to imagine the character on my own. With this song, I had images in my head that were from my book! But the video … no.

1. Every time I see that volcano’s name spelled out, I say a little blessing for all the copyeditors who have had to make sure it’s spelled correctly! [↩]
2. Which I found on Janni Lee Simner’s blog [↩]