Author Interview: Molly X. Chang

Get the inside scoop on ‘The Nightblood Prince’!

Molly X. Chang is the author of our July YA ‘Rule Them All’ featured book: The Nightblood Prince.
Read on to get the inside scoop from inspiration to favourite scenes and more!

What inspired you to write The Nightblood Prince?
I wrote The Nightblood Prince as a last hurrah, after I had received hundreds of rejections and contemplating whether writing books is a path meant for me. I had this Mulan retelling idea for almost a decade and I knew I wouldn’t be able to escape these characters until I tell their story. So I wrote a book for me, not for anyone else. I filled it with all of my favorite tropes and was deeply indulgent in the fun aspects of it. It is the book I never expected to sell because I wrote it in 2021, before the boom of romantasy, and I quite literally pitched it as “what if an angsty love-triangle in a fantasy trench coat and a fantasy fake ID walked into a bar and tried to get served?” Hahaha. 

Did you have to do any special research for The Nightblood Prince?
I didn’t use most of the research in the end. I read a lot about the Ballad of Mulan as a kid. In Chinese there is this saying, 红颜祸水, which is famously used to describe women who bring down great Empires, like Xishi and Daji. The closest Western equivalent might be Helen of Troy. And I couldn’t help but think about who gets to be a hero and who gets to be a 红颜祸水, cursed by men? History doesn’t often treat women kindly, and I wanted to explore a character who defies all expectations of how a woman should live and behave, and have her be the hero they never wanted. 

Describe The Nightblood Prince in 5 words.
For the cdrama love-triangle girlies

Can you tell us about your writing process?
I like to think of myself as a plantser. Because I rigorously plan all of my books in a kind of insane spreadsheet, which makes drafting so much easier. But sometimes after Act One the characters grow minds of their own and start acting like bratty little teenagers and refuse to say the dialogue I write for them and insist on fighting each other on the page, or start bantering for twenty pages and lose all sense of the plot. A headache for me and my editor, but I hope the readers love it, haha. 

What was your favourite scene to write and why?

In The Nightblood Prince I loved writing chapter 14. It is the first scene I wrote, almost a decade ago, and this was the scene that made me finish the book, because I had to find out what happened next. I had so many questions and my brain was flooded with follow-up scenes. To me, chapter 14 was the moment when an idea became a book, and it was magical. 

Did you listen to any particular songs/playlists whilst you wrote this?
I listened to many, many angsty songs while writing this book. I am tempted to post my entire unhinged 37-hour playlist if people want to listen to it and use it as their own writing playlist. My official, more curated playlist should be posted by the time this goes out into the world. But the song that captures Fei perfectly is Taylor Swift’s Prophecy. I wrote the book before the song came out, and when I heard it for the first time I felt like Taylor wrote the song for Fei.

When you write, do you have any go-to snacks? If so, what are they?
Just my own tears. Hahaha, I’m kidding. I drink a lot of coffee in the morning, and green tea in the evenings when I’m writing. I’m not really a snacker but I always need a drink at my desk for hydration. 

What did you find most challenging about writing this book?
I found writing Yexue a little challenging at times. The Yexue who was in my original pitch was a lot moodier and broody, and continues to be in certain chapters, with certain people. But whenever he gets a moment alone with Fei, this doberman turns into a golden retriever. After a certain amount of chapters, Yexue became a real person in my head. My friends always say Yexue is the character who is the most like me, because he makes so many terrible dad jokes, so clearly the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree (I think my jokes are very funny, so clearly they are wrong, hahaha). With that being said, please laugh at all of his jokes. There is nothing Yexue (and his creator) love more than when people laugh at his jokes, hehe.

What can you tell us (if anything) about the sequel? 
Well, luckily for you I am currently drafting the sequel. My editor and I still need to review Book 2 together, so nothing is set in stone but all I can say is that Yexue continues to disobey all of my carefully planned plot and say what he wants and do what he wants. There will be some unhinged jokes in the sequel, and I hope some of them make it to the final version, hahaha