Fun question! Tessa and Clary do both fall in love with Hot Strangers, and though their love lives play out very differently and with different complications, I wanted to do something very different with Emma.

One of my favorite structures has always been the Friend Romance. It’s always enjoyable to take two people who already have an existing relationship and a history and create an inciting incident that suddenly changes everything. 

[We all know these kinds of inciting incidents. They include, but are not limited to:

1) One Of Us Has Gone Away For The Summer and Come Back   Enhottened (Otherwise known as “Holy Crap, Is That You?”)

2) Wait, You’re Dating Someone Else And Suddenly I’m Jealous (also known as “Secretly, I Sabotage All Your Relationships, or : The second season of Sherlock”)

3) Oops, We Got Drunk and Did It (Not really known as anything else - see “When Harry Met Sally”)

4) One of Us Has Loved the Other One Secretly Forever (see: Ross and Rachel, Anne and Gilbert)

The key fun part of Friend Romances is exploiting already simmering tensions that exist under a sort of shared We’re Just Friends mentality that both people have bought into and most likely believe in (see: the second season of Sherlock.) Friendship is a sort of grand romance in and of itself (see: Will and Jem) and some friendships, given the right inciting incident, can go off like a pin pulled on a grenade. And then you have all that lovely built up tension to play with. 

Nothing in my stories is ever simple, though, and while Emma and Julian are fun to write, that doesn’t mean they’ll be endgame or that there aren’t other players that factor into the story, or that there aren’t other kinds of romances I want to write as well. But right now I am enjoying that Emma’s story is so different from Tessa’s or Clary’s.