“hi cassie! i have a couple questions that i figured I’d ask through email because its always really hectic on twitter so:
- can parabatai be love interests? i thought they couldn’t but emma/julian are right? that always kinda confused me
- so you’re writing the dark artifices, TLH, & are you writing another shadowhunter book aside from those as well?
- are we gonna see tessa/will/ jem in cohf?”
Yes, twitter has become a bit of a madhouse - I can only get on for a few minutes, and then there are so many questions I can’t follow them (usually about things I know nothing about and can’t influence, like what countries there will be movie premieres in and where the cast goes) and then I run away. I am a a wuss, I guess! But if I don’t answer you on Twitter, it’s not personal!
“- can parabatai be love interests? i thought they couldn’t but emma/julian are right? that always kinda confused me”
The Clave says no. You’re not supposed to be romantically involved with your parabatai. In Clockwork Prince, one of the plot points is a past pair of parabatai, one of whom committed suicide because he’d fallen in love with his parabatai and was afraid of the secret being exposed.
The Clave has their reasons for this old Law. However, like pretty much every cultural/social law decreeing that people can’t fall in love or can’t marry, plenty of people break it. It’s not like no priest has ever fallen in love with anyone. And Emma and Julian’s relationship isn’t defined yet - not even by me! We know there is probably going to be an issue of romantic interest, but they are not a couple at the beginning of the books. They might never be a couple. We will see.
- so you’re writing the dark artifices, TLH, & are you writing another shadowhunter book aside from those as well?
My plan at the moment is to do five Shadowhunter series, total. I don’t know if I’ll do any series in the Shadowhunter world beyond that. I don’t know why five exactly — maybe because one of my major literary idols has always been Tamora Pierce and she did five series set in Tortall. :) Maybe I think I have five stories to tell in this world. Maybe I’ll get to the end and want to tell more. Maybe not — I have a stockpile of other worlds and stories in my head; I’m writing one of them by writing Magisterium now, but there are many others.
There is a special sort of enjoyment in developing stories in a created world, because you can take the rules you yourself have invented, and bend them or break them. You can create connections and history — the story of Isabelle’s ruby necklace stretches back all the way to Vampires, Scones and Edmund Herondale. Then again, with a brand new world, you get to make everything up again. It’s like: brand-new baby or adorable five-year old? They’re both good.
(The five Shadowhunter series are TiD, TLH, TMI, TDA, and very far down the road, TWP. Don’t even ask about that one! It’s too far in the future! There are other Shadowhunter projects like The Bane Chronicles and the graphic novel project about the Circle, currently in planning stages and known as TST, but I’m not counting them: I’m only counting book series/trilogies written solely by me.)
- are we gonna see tessa/will/ jem in cohf?”
I cannot say, because those are major spoilers. All I will say is that nobody from TiD is going to be a major character in CoHF because it’s too confusing and too spoilery for the mass majority of TMI readers, who have not read TiD. (There are also plenty of TiD readers who won’t read TMI — historical can be tricky; people either won’t read it at all, or will only read it, a lot of the time.) TMI is still Clary’s story at heart. I think for TiD readers there will be a lot of interesting connections, and the fact that Tessa is still alive is not a huge secret (we saw her in CoG) but nothing in CoHF is going to give away the ending of the Clockwork series to people who haven’t read it, and that includes who Tessa ends up with. Keep that in mind, and hopefully that can help shape expectations.
