Authors Roshani Chokshi and Sarah Nicole Lemon Talk Unlikely Friendships, Ghosts, and Their New YAs

Roshani Chokshi: OUR MAIN CHARACTERS ARE QUEENS! (*bows down*) Does the word “strong” female character irritate the heck out of you, and if so, how did you push back on that when you crafted Tourmaline and Virginia? 
Sarah Nicole Lemon: I don’t get irritated by “strong female character,” but I definitely feel like it’s weird. As if a large part of literature is not made up of strong female characters, regardless of how that strength is made evident. With Tourmaline and Virginia, I tried to push against that idea of “exceptional” women. Tourmaline is the exceptional woman and Virginia is just like all the other girls, and their journey is about changing those fates. In the process, Tourmaline becomes all the other girls and Virginia is someone special. But that’s not what they’re looking to become. The end game for both girls is to determine their own fate.
Speaking of female relationships, I was SO THERE for Maya and Gauri in The Star-Touched Queen and loved how you captured sisterhood in that space. And that there was both love and toxicity in Maya’s relationships with other women. What can we expect for Gauri’s journey in A Crown of Wishes with female relationships? How intentional are you about balancing that whole picture?

Hooray! I’m glad you liked those relationships. I do, too. Gauri had a very different childhood from Maya in the harem. She wasn’t reviled, but wholeheartedly loved. And sometimes I think that can be a burden because it throws so many expectations on you. I really love stories about how people met and how people become friends in the first place, so there’s a strong friendship aspect in A Crown of Wishes. For that friendship, I was very intentional about how friendship is so often about peeling back layers of assumption. Which is something I loved in Done Dirt Cheap, because you only know snippets of a person before they decide to let you into their lives.
Your settings are so MAGICAL. One thing I love about our books is how all of our main characters are on the outside peering at different worlds. When you worldbuild, does mythology influence that? 
*Takes Rosh to the beach*
*Points at the sky*
*Plane buzzes by with my answer waving behind it*
YESSSS
Contemporary books were extremely restricted as a kid, so I grew up on a steady diet of Norse, Greek, Gaelic, and German mythology and fairy tales. I think I was meant to be a fantasy writer, but it just comes out contemporary.
Now that we’re at the beach and I’m plying you with french fries drenched in vinegar and freshly made lemonade, what can you tell me about your favorite fairy tales or myths that you drew from for A Crown of Wishes? *turns around, phone poised to make secret notes*

Ooooh lemonade…*slurps* So, I really love food. And I think this keeps coming up over and over in my stories. I love the idea of the food of the Otherworld as an edible portal. You take in a part of the Otherworld, and therefore get to stay within its realm. Even though it’s honestly horrific, I loved the fairytale “Catskins,” where the heroine has got these epic dresses as she escapes her gross father. And to me, it extended this idea of cosmetics and ballroom gowns as weapons of their own. I was really inspired by tales from the Ramayana, and Betal Panchisi for A Crown of Wishes, too! Particularly for the male main character’s background. Speaking of hot boys…
Wait, where? *looks around the beach excitedly*
How’d you develop the romance?
Oh.
You’ve got dudes who are royalty of their own kind and cruel kings with hearts of gold. What makes a guy a worthy character?
For me, the best books have romance as a part of the greater plot. I can’t imagine writing a story that doesn’t include it. I love male characters that are made up of tensions. I try to keep my attraction to deadly things reined in when writing, but…. *looks awkward.*
Worth writing about is really just interesting, conflicted, and ready to change or challenge the world. I’m into power couples. And they all look like Jason Momoa.
Yes. All of them.
Boy, world, magic, yes, yes, BUT TELL ME MORE ABOUT KAMALA (Maya’s demonic horse companion in The Star-Touched Queen). You have this incredible ability to weave humor into the dramatic and darkness into whimsy (side note, I’m way jealous), and I felt like Kamala was its epitome. Where do you draw that from? (And are we going to see more of that sort of humor in A Crown of Wishes?)
YES. IT’S ALL OVER THE PLACE IN A CROWN OF WISHES. I can’t wait for readers to meet the vetala. He’s an animated corpse. He might be my favorite. As for where this humor comes from…I was always a weird kid. One time at a really boring Indian party, a group of kids wouldn’t let me play with them (*plays a sad violin*) so to force them to hang out with me, I said I could see ghosts and their deaths dangling above them and if they wanted to stay safe that meant I had to be on someone’s team for Scrabble. I was 10. My parents were horrified. But impressed?
Omg, YOU ARE MAGIC.
What about you, how do you balance the darkness and light in your books? I think some of my favorite scenes with Tourmaline and Virginia were always them on the chase, but also lovingly sniping at each other at the same time. As one does.
If you aren’t disagreeing on the run, one of you is useless and will be fed to whatever is chasing in order to become useful. Too real?
Balancing light and dark is something I have to be very intentional about, actually! I’m super great at layering on the dark—the setting, the people, the plot—pretty soon, we’re just in a death spiral of depravity (also the name of my doom metal band). Part of learning craft, for me, was to see it as two separate piles, and you alternate which pile you choose from to create tension of opposing forces to hold a balance. I love that tension so much as a reader—like, reading Kamala was just this delicious tickle of whimsical death and I’m totally enraptured by that kind of balance where you feel the current of those oppositional forces.
Sarah Nicole Lemon’s Done Dirt Cheap goes on sale March 7, Roshani Chokshi’s A Crown of Wishes goes on sale March 28, and both are available for pre-order now.