36. K. X. SONG: Mixing Mulan with Magic and Improved Motivations | The Night Ends With Fire

K.X. Song is flipping Mulan's story a smidge. What if Mulan was motivated by greed and ambition instead of duty? That's what her book "The Night Ends With Fire" gives us exactly that, plus some fun fantasy magic. Enjoy this conversation from San Diego Comic Con 2024.

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00;00;03;24 - 00;00;25;26
Speaker 1
Hi and welcome to the Literary Hype podcast. I am Stephanie, your literary hype woman. And today's Off The Conversation is a fun one because this book is it's a page turner and it is The Night Ends With Fire by K Song. This is a Mulan retelling, but she makes some more realistic turns for this character, which I really appreciated and enjoyed.

00;00;26;07 - 00;00;48;05
Speaker 1
It is a fantasy. It is a bit of a romantic sea. It is high stakes. This is a good book. Yeah, but don't take my word for it. Here's my interview with K Song Welcome to Literary Hype. I'm so excited to have you on to talk about your Mulan retelling.

00;00;48;12 - 00;00;49;18
Speaker 2
Thank you for having me.

00;00;49;29 - 00;00;56;12
Speaker 1
So for anyone who has not seen The Night Ends with fire, talk a little bit about what this book is about and how it's different from the moon.

00;00;56;25 - 00;01;13;23
Speaker 2
Yeah, so growing up I loved Mulan. Obviously, I watched the original animated Disney version so many times that my VHS tape actually broke and my mom had to buy a new one. I think that the one thing that always irked me as a kid, though, is that when the emperor at the end of the day, Mulan saves the kingdom, right?

00;01;14;00 - 00;01;32;03
Speaker 2
And at the end of the war, the emperor offers her limitless wealth and power, and instead she chooses to just go home and forsake all of that and go back to live with her dad. And even as a kid, I was thinking if I was in Mulan shoes, and I was offered that much power, would I and said, choose to be selfless and honor my dad?

00;01;32;03 - 00;01;45;20
Speaker 2
Or would I choose to lean into that power and be more ambitious and be more greedy in that sense? And so I wanted to write a Mulan retelling where the main character is motivated out of her own selfish ambition rather than a sense of filial piety or honor.

00;01;45;23 - 00;02;02;15
Speaker 1
Which feels more realistic just in general, like Disney has. It's special how it everything works out nicely, but things don't always go according to plan. Suckling about how how you crafted making this different than the story we all know.

00;02;02;20 - 00;02;21;03
Speaker 2
Exactly. And it's funny because obviously we all love a good, happy ending and I am also a huge Disney fan as well. However, I think I gravitate toward writing darker things, and maybe it's because I consider myself a bright person in real life. I think my writing is how I find that outlet for release and for writing through some of the darker things that we see in our world.

00;02;21;03 - 00;02;44;16
Speaker 2
And so there definitely isn't as happy an ending in my book as there is in the Disney version. But I think that because I was exploring these real life ramifications of how our society treats ambitious one woman versus ambitious men, and the ways in which ambitious women are so often vilified, that's sort of why it was necessary to create these darker themes around the story and make it realistic for the world that we live in.

00;02;44;24 - 00;02;56;17
Speaker 1
And you were very intentional in your name selection for your version of Milan. Her name is Madeline. Talk about how you picked what name you wanted her to have and some of the other characters that she brought in.

00;02;56;19 - 00;03;14;27
Speaker 2
That's a great question. I think it's tricky, especially when you're writing Chinese stories, but for a Western audience and you, I think every author has a different approach to this. And so it's a very personal decision and there's no right or wrong answer. For me personally, I wanted a story or a name that would make sense in Chinese, but also be phonetically pronounceable in English.

00;03;15;04 - 00;03;38;25
Speaker 2
And so that's why with all my characters, I if I chose a Chinese name, I chose a name that would be able to be pronounced in English quite easily, but also would make sense in Chinese too. And then for some of the characters, it felt right to use the English translation of the Chinese name. So Skye's name is based off the Chinese name Tian, which means Sky but it felt it made sense for his character to have that name.

00;03;38;25 - 00;03;41;10
Speaker 2
And same with his brother, who's named Winter.

00;03;41;20 - 00;04;08;02
Speaker 1
It's very interesting reading it because like some do have the Chinese names and somehow are more Western words that we would recognize easily. So it's very interesting to see that balance play out in your naming structure with your magic system. Because this is a fantasy. You pulled a lot from traditional stories in the Chinese culture. So talk about how you crafted that in with blending the traditional Chinese magic in with your story.

00;04;08;03 - 00;04;29;15
Speaker 2
Yes. So I think that with the magic system, I was influenced by Chinese mythology, but also by some of the themes I was trying to tell. And so in the magic system, we have four mythological creatures from Chinese mythology. It's the Dragon, the Phenix, the tortoise and the tiger. But for me personally, I've always been interested in seeing the ways that power corrupts and especially magical powers.

00;04;29;15 - 00;04;48;22
Speaker 2
I want the character to feel the burden of utilizing that power. And so I decided to tie each of these mythological creatures powers to a dark human emotion in the sense that, for example, the dragon, he feeds off of me ambition. And so as she utilizes his power more and more, she also grows more and more greedy and ambitious until she starts to lose herself.

00;04;49;00 - 00;04;54;18
Speaker 2
And so that was one of the ways in which I wanted to tie the magic system more closely with the theme that I was also trying to tell.

00;04;54;23 - 00;05;10;14
Speaker 1
Especially early on. It felt like magic and mental health going hand in hand and like how magic can influence a person's mental health. Can talk about the relationship between Marilyn and her mother and how the magic impacted the way that she thought.

00;05;10;17 - 00;05;30;04
Speaker 2
I mean, there's there's so many elements there. And so I love this question. I think a big part of it is like the way women are gas lit in our society and also the way that powerful women are specifically light in our society. And I think that, like in our real world today, when you have immense power, it changes who you are, no matter how pure your original intentions were.

00;05;30;11 - 00;05;53;23
Speaker 2
And so I think that was a big part of the way that Madeline's relationship to both herself and her mother are sort of shaped by the way that they both wielded this power that the Dragon gave them. The other thing, too, that I was curious about is there's this legacy that Malin has that she's trying to escape. And it's this legacy of both madness and also of addiction, because her father and her mother both suffered from these afflictions in different ways.

00;05;54;02 - 00;06;09;22
Speaker 2
And that's a question that she has to struggle with and fight through across the course of the novel, where she's wondering, is our inheritance something that we have an agency in choosing whether or not we take it on, or is our inheritance something that we end up with no matter how hard we try to run from it?

00;06;09;28 - 00;06;20;07
Speaker 1
And while this is Chinese historically inspired it's not directly China. So talk a little about your research process and deciding what to keep true to history and what to switch up.

00;06;20;17 - 00;06;43;03
Speaker 2
Hmm. So actually, my book before that I inspired was set in a realistic world setting and involves so many hours of research and just a lot of midnight calls because I was also in California when I was writing it. And so I was dealing with the time zone difference between Hong Kong and the U.S. And so I think because I was so burned out from research, I was like, I don't want to do any more research for the next book.

00;06;43;11 - 00;06;58;18
Speaker 2
So I would say that the night ends with fire has very minimal research in comparison. I grew up watching Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is this Chinese classic novel that has had many TV adaptations and so naturally, a lot of those elements just kind of fell in, but not in the sense that I had to do specific research for it.

00;06;58;18 - 00;07;10;10
Speaker 2
More so because these were the tropes and the little scenes that I enjoyed as a kid, and I wanted to then incorporate in my sort of homage to Chinese mythology and Chinese luxury retellings.

00;07;10;17 - 00;07;29;25
Speaker 1
So there is a really good quote in there, and I probably I'm going to butcher this because it's my chicken scratch notes, but I as a woman, needed to prove that I could be better than them, that I could be free. And I feel like that really resonates with society. At large right now. Talk a little bit about the kind of feministic aspect of this story.

00;07;29;29 - 00;07;56;20
Speaker 2
Yeah, it's it's feminist in the sense that Malin is a very flawed character, and yet she's still given center stage and given agency to be her entire flawed self, where I feel like we have sort of the first wave of feminist fiction and stories where like the animated Disney version where Mulan is this perfect character and we root for her because she's so likable and so incredible of a human being that she has to be the main character.

00;07;56;27 - 00;08;14;23
Speaker 2
And I think now as a society, collectively, we're reaching this point where we're OK, centering flawed female protagonists at the center of the story, even if they do have mistakes and even if they do mess up. And so for me, Lynn, I think a big part of what makes her so flawed is, as you're saying, she wants so badly to be better than the men around her.

00;08;14;23 - 00;08;37;14
Speaker 2
She wants to prove that she belongs here and that she is worthy of their respect and their attention. And so as she is, you know, going and joining the Army, fighting this war, trying to save her kingdom, she's ultimately motivated by the sense of people pleasing and by the sense of wanting so desperately to belong And the question that I was trying to ask the narrative is, is this a flawed quest from the start?

00;08;37;22 - 00;08;47;16
Speaker 1
So while I was in line for your event in Saint Louis, there were two guys who had started reading it before they got there and could not stop. And they're reading it online and they're like, this is such a page turner.

00;08;47;16 - 00;08;48;08
Speaker 2
That's so funny.

00;08;48;08 - 00;08;57;11
Speaker 1
How do you because it is so much action and it just keeps going. How do you balance the story and the plot with the action itself?

00;08;58;19 - 00;09;23;17
Speaker 2
I like this question also. That's such a cute anecdote, so thank you for sharing that. A big part of the pacing is because I was feeling burned out from reality. I was writing it in the pandemic, I was writing it in the midst of the current news cycle and just feeling like I wanted to escape from reality. And so that's why I think that I wanted to return to that childlike state where I would be turning the pages like a night, like unable to go to sleep because I was just compelled to find out what happens next.

00;09;23;25 - 00;09;46;11
Speaker 2
And so in that sense, that's why I think I made the pacing as quick as it could be to sort of, you know, go back to that childlike state I think ideally I would love for the action to inform the themes, as in not for them to be two separate entities, but for them to feed off of each other and therefore to allow the action to inform the reader more about the themes that I'm trying to share with them.

00;09;46;19 - 00;10;18;00
Speaker 2
And so with, for example, the scene where not to spoil anything but villain has a large bite conflict with one of her love interests, and that's an example of an action scene where you're getting that feeling of something's happening, the pages are turning, but also you're learning more about the complex dynamic between them and their relationship and also learning more about Merlin's own goals and priorities and how those are changing in light of the new reveals around information and her love interest.

00;10;18;12 - 00;10;24;14
Speaker 1
What is your writing routine like as you go through and prepare this book and other books that we will talk about?

00;10;25;15 - 00;10;52;18
Speaker 2
My writing routine is I have no routine. I think it's been especially hectic because I've been trying to finish book two while on tour for book one, and so it's been bouncing around city to city, kind to, you know, different country. And so I've been trying to be very flexible and not be precious about my writing routine in the sense that I would just pull out my computer and force myself to open it on a plane on a train or like in a airport waiting area.

00;10;52;29 - 00;11;15;21
Speaker 2
And I think that the hardest part for me is getting over the hurdle of opening my laptop, because that's where your brain switches from. I'm going to sit here and waste an hour on tick tock to I'm going to sit here and try to like make my brain muscles work. And once you just create that space for yourself and try, you end up being able to, you know, function or think about writing.

00;11;15;28 - 00;11;28;16
Speaker 2
No matter what circumstance or no matter how loud your environment is, it's more so being able to take that initial hurdle of telling yourself, let me just try like 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and then usually the writing will flow from there.

00;11;28;29 - 00;11;43;00
Speaker 1
Morally gray, especially men have become huge on book talk and tick tock books to cram all the things. What is it about a morally gray character that we love, and what was it like creating a morally gray female main character? For once.

00;11;43;06 - 00;12;12;20
Speaker 2
Morally gray characters have always just appealed to me more because I think as a kid I was a bit cynical where if I would see someone who was too perfect, I'd be like, Oh, but like, what's under the surface? Or even when I meet people in real life too, when someone is almost too kind and not in the sense of obviously a small interactions, but when you get to know someone, especially like in a dating context, for example, and they're too perfect on the page, there is sort of the novelist's part of my brain that's like, but what's underneath?

00;12;12;20 - 00;12;32;19
Speaker 2
What are you hiding? And so in that sense, all my characters are morally gray, not because I'm trying to, you know, write to this current trend, but in the sense that that's what real people are like. I think it's not that some people have higher morals and others or that some people are more heroines and more villains. It's just we all think that we're the hero or a story.

00;12;32;29 - 00;12;51;07
Speaker 2
Our morality or our lines of morality just fall under different lines depending on our context. And our upbringing. And so with both Merlin, with Sky and Lay, like, they all are following their own moral code. How much that moral code aligns with the societal, moral code is what brands them as a hero versus as a villain.

00;12;51;19 - 00;12;54;18
Speaker 1
Awesome. What can you tell us about Book two?

00;12;54;23 - 00;13;20;04
Speaker 2
So Book to the first shop was just finished with Woot. Well, see, I actually just turned it into my editor this morning, which is fun book too. Well, I kind of liken it to specifics and his giant boulder. So book one is Malin pushing her giant boulder up this very tall mountain and putting it all her effort to get this boulder to the top of the peak.

00;13;20;13 - 00;13;26;08
Speaker 2
Book to is the boulder comes crashing down and all the consequences and ramifications that follow with that.

00;13;26;16 - 00;13;31;22
Speaker 1
So writing this as a do ology. How much did you know about book two before you finished Book one?

00;13;32;15 - 00;13;54;09
Speaker 2
That's a great question. And I think my issue is that I hate following rules and so I don't like outlining too extensively in the sense that it makes me feel trapped into the story. However, if I had been the outliner, I would have made life so much easier for myself. Because there's actually a scene in book to where I realized I wanted to make a character immune to the magic system of the world.

00;13;54;16 - 00;14;18;16
Speaker 2
And I realized I could not do it because he had already been affected by it and book one. And so I was like, Why did I do that to my pass off? But I think when I wrote book one, I knew the ending of book one, and I knew vaguely where I wanted book two to go, but it was more so I knew the atmosphere of book two and I knew the feelings that I wanted Baylin to have to overcome, but not be exterior plot points.

00;14;18;16 - 00;14;29;18
Speaker 2
And so a bunch of my drafting process was sort of figuring out like what makes sense in line of the new story that I'm trying to tell, but also while being true to the roots of book one.

00;14;29;25 - 00;14;40;09
Speaker 1
And publishing is a slow process. And that kind of affected your cover art for the books as well. So talk a little bit about getting your cover artist for this book that you were dreaming about.

00;14;40;12 - 00;15;01;26
Speaker 2
So this artist has been my dream artist for years, actually, and I tried to get her for my first book because she is a Hong Kong diaspora artist. And my first book is about Hong Kong diaspora characters. However, she was booked at the time, which totally makes sense. And so we had to go with someone else. But as soon as my editor and reached out to me for the I Answer Fire being like, Are there any artists you're interested in?

00;15;02;06 - 00;15;31;26
Speaker 2
I immediately was like, Victo Nai, like, please get her and she was free. And after that point it was just like a match made in heaven. Literally every iteration she would send a sketch and I would be like, No notes. It's perfection. And so it was just the smoothest cover process. And you hear horror stories online. There was none of that in this case, where every single sketch she made was just like, I almost wish that I could publish every sketch or, like, have different covers for all of her choices that she made because each one was so beautiful.

00;15;32;06 - 00;15;33;10
Speaker 1
Well, she was doing cover, too.

00;15;34;21 - 00;15;38;11
Speaker 2
I don't know if I can say that, but we are trying. Fingers crossed.

00;15;39;07 - 00;15;44;17
Speaker 1
So kind of hints. Hints. I can take a hint. Okay. Is there anything else you want to talk about?

00;15;44;22 - 00;16;07;02
Speaker 2
The one thing that I've realized, like this whole publishing process has been such a dream come true. And like people always say, writing is the most solitary profession, but having experience like book tours and coming to Comic-Con and meeting my team in person, too, I truly feel like the luckiest girl alive and that this like, even though when you're writing the story, it's in your head.

00;16;07;08 - 00;16;27;05
Speaker 2
You're talking to imaginary characters. You're interacting with an imaginary world. Once you release it to the world and you share your stories with other, it becomes the most, like, life giving communal process where you're getting so much support from people all over the world who read your stories and like, you know, fall in love with your characters and feel something from the imaginary story that you wrote.

00;16;27;05 - 00;16;38;03
Speaker 2
And so in that sense, it really does feel like just the most communal job where you're able to interact with people from all over the world and feel who they are, even in the same way that they feel who you are through your stories.

00;16;38;04 - 00;16;40;00
Speaker 1
The reading community really is the best.

00;16;40;00 - 00;16;40;29
Speaker 2
It is the best.

00;16;41;05 - 00;16;45;08
Speaker 1
The last question we always ask because this is literary hype. What books are you hyped about?

00;16;45;13 - 00;17;02;16
Speaker 2
So I am very hyped for the Gonzalez next book of the Hurricane Wars, which is, I believe, called A Monsoon Rising And then I'm also very hyped for my Cortland sequel to Five Broken Blades, which will be coming out in January next year.

00;17;02;20 - 00;17;18;27
Speaker 1
Can we just talk about that pages on that? Because the the sprayed edges, the stenciling, it was gorgeous. Like, you also had really great edges. I'm living for this pretty edges treads. It's amazing. But thank you so much for taking time to talk about your book with Literary Heights.

00;17;18;29 - 00;17;20;29
Speaker 2
Thank you so much for having me. This is such a pleasure.

00;17;23;16 - 00;17;38;25
Speaker 1
Thanks again to Kate Long for taking time out of her San Diego Comic-Con schedule to talk about the night and with fire. This is such a fun book. And if you want to get a hold of this or her previous book, the links to do so are down in the description below. So make sure you check those out and they do help support the channel.

00;17;38;25 - 00;17;55;05
Speaker 1
So use them if you want to get a hold of the night. Ends with fire or cakes. This previous book, the links to do so are in the show notes for you. If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to subscribe to the Literary Hype podcast give us some stars, share it with the friends, but thanks so much for listening.

00;17;55;05 - 00;17;56;01
Speaker 1
I'll see you next time.