Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.

One common definition of the introvert/extrovert divide is that extroverts gain energy from being around people, whereas introverts spend energy when hanging around people. So parties make introverts tired, even if they like everyone there and are having a good time. It’s like playing a pickup basketball game with your friends. You might have a hell of a time, but you’re going to be very tired after an hour and have to call it, and go home.

And you can’t play every single day, it would wear you out. It doesn’t mean you hate basketball or you don’t like the other players, you just literally don’t have the energy to do it all.

Empowered” and “sexy” are not universally synonymous. That a woman is not a sex kitten does not mean that she’s any less comfortable or empowered or any of that stuff. See above, re: not a homogenous demographic. Stop making sexiness a universal demand. Let some characters be unsexy. And for f*ck’s sake, please, please stop drawing women who are injured, or dead, or being tortured, or punching bad guys, in sex-kitten pin-up poses. That is bad visual storytelling, and it is INCREDIBLY creepy. Let women be heroes for the sake of heroism. Women don’t have to be damaged or traumatized to be strong, or to want to make a difference. Corollary: Dropping rape into a backstory is not a panacea for making a female character complex and gritty.

Imagine you have a daughter. Imagine the kind of women you’d like her to want to grow up to be. Write them. Write women you’d want to be friends — really good friends — with. Write women you’d get in arguments with. Write women you’d be legitimately scared of. Write women like your mom, like your aunts, like your wife, like your friends, like your nieces and nephews and daughters and bosses and friends. We are not aliens… This, too, goes back to “doing things.” A lot of the time, male characters act, and female characters are acted upon. Let female characters make difficult choices — and sometimes choose wrong — and have struggles and the same real victories. Because without those things, they’re not characters; they’re just window dressing.

Some stereotypes about YA fiction are based on the idea that a YA novelist is deeply nostalgic for her teen years and wants to relive them through fiction.

Well, I can tell you for sure that I am not nostalgic about my teen years. I hated them, and I’m very glad there’s no such thing as time travel so that I never have to go back.

Many YA writers I know came to write YA fiction because they enjoy reading it. But I didn’t read YA until after I sold Ash. I think that’s why Ash has a kind of old-fashioned feel — it’s based in the reading experience of my own teen years, approximately 20 years ago. However, once I started reading YA, I quickly realized that as a writer, I absolutely belong in this category of fiction.

For me, there are some very specific things about YA that make creative sense. YA is particularly story-based. Think TV and film: you are drawn in to a story immediately, or at least, that’s the goal. Story, story, story. This is YA.

I’m the first to admit that I’ve never been especially drawn to adult literary fiction. I very rarely connect with it, although I have read and loved the odd literary novel. This is because I generally value story over literary affect. I tend to prefer an arresting tale over a pretty sentence. If I want a pretty sentence, I will read poetry, and I do enjoy poetry when I read it (even if I don’t understand it!).

Another thing I enjoy about YA is the fact that it allows the writer to mash together many genres. Adult fiction is fairly divided when it comes to genre: science fiction does not usually cross over into mystery, which does not usually cross over into romance. There are exceptions as always, but typically, a book is published in one genre, and the book must obey that genre’s conventions or risk alienating the genre’s readers. YA, on the other hand, lets me combine mystery and romance and science fiction into one glorious hybrid whole.

I think this is a reflection of the fact that adolescence is about trying new things. Teens aren’t fixed in their personalities yet, even though they have very definite ideas about what their personality is. They’re not afraid to smush things around a little and see what results. That kind of freedom is what I find so endearing and so liberating about YA. It enables me to tell the story I want, using many of my favorite tools (mystery! romance! intrigue! magic!).

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.