Perfect heroines, like perfect heroes, aren't relatable, and if you can't put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, not only will they not inspire you, but the book will be pretty boring.
I think that 'City of Heavenly Fire' is definitely a book where all the characters are tested to their limits, and they have to make really significant choices about who they are and who they wanna be.
You put books out into the world, and people form their own visuals and images and attachments to characters; those characters become part of them, and they have their feelings about them.
Nobody sells books like J.K. Rowling. We have a rule in publishing: Never compare anything to 'Harry Potter' because it's like lightning in a bottle.
I had just moved to New York in September 2001, and immediately 9/11 happened, and of course it completely changed the city and everybody who lived there.
When I started 'City of Bones,' I knew exactly what was going to happen in 'City of Glass.' When I first started the six-book series, I thought of it as a three-book series.
She was learning something important: how to live within the sound of her own slow breathing, how to love the view when her eyes were shut.
I would just like my children to be able to eat fish when they grow up. Now, I don't think there's anything controversial about that.
As a kid, I wasn't sure that I would ever get married - I was not the kind of little girl who played at being a bride.
Dismissing socialization and gender roles as piddling compared to this amorphous idea of 'maternal imperative' is part of the reason progress is stalled for family-friendly policies.
One of the difficult things, especially about blogging, is that you put all of your personal out there, into the political. And what's been difficult, for me at least, is trying to keep some of the personal for myself.
Readers have actually changed the way I've done things, changed the course of my career even, about four or five times. Just from reader feedback.
In 2008, I was one of the young feminist whippersnappers who voted for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries - or as many of my older counterparts called me at the time, a traitor.
It's not always easy being a full-time feminist - especially as a young woman - when you're constantly being told that what you do is irrelevant. I'm on the defense all the time.
I've always set my stories in places I know well. It frees me up to spend more imaginative time on the characters if I'm not worrying about the logistics.
But certainly in my grandmother's time - and when I was growing up, yeah, Demetrie's bathroom was on the side of the house, it was a separate door. Still, to this day, I've never been in that room.
It's always difficult to say goodbye, especially when one has spent a long time - literally years, in the case of a series - inside a character or two, suffering and celebrating with them.
I have a nice little office, with a nice little window in it, but I do basically spend huge amounts of time in what you could consider solitary confinement.
I have a gruff side. This is not exactly news... At the same time, anyone who wants to judge me for this can walk a mile in my moccasins. And then we'll talk.
Virginia Woolf: I was going to kill my heroine. But I've changed my mind. I fear I may have to kill someone else, instead.
Virginia Woolf: A woman's whole life in a single day. Just one day. And in that day her whole life.
