YA Fantasy, Heists, and Vampires with Hafsah Faizal: A Tempest of Tea

In this week’s episode Marissa chats with Hafsah Faizal about her latest YA fantasy heist, the first of a new duology, A TEMPEST OF TEA. Also discussed in this episode: how a non-reader can turn into a reader and then a published author, planning out a heist when being mostly a pantser, struggling with doubts and imposter syndrome, planning out romance, worldbuilding and the wisdom of editors, the benefits of time and space away from a project, and so much more!

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Transcript

[00:10] Marissa: Hello and welcome to the happy writer. This is a podcast that aims to bring readers more books to enjoy and to help authors find more joy in their writing. I am your host, Marissa Meyer. Thank you for joining me. What is making me happy this week is that yesterday the girls and I decided to play hooky, take a day off from our normal homeschool routine, and instead go out and see a movie. And we opted to see this new movie, Argyle, which I had not even heard of until we were like, looking at previews and trying to decide what movie are we going to go see? Because I am so out of touch with pop culture. But if you're not familiar, if you have not heard about this movie, it is about a writer. Like, oh, I love it when movies are about writers. And she is the author of this really popular series of spy novels, but then it turns out her novels are like a little too close to the truth and so suddenly all these bad guys are after her. And of course, what else? This charming spy swoops in to save and protect her. It was ridiculous. It's one of those movies that is so campy and just like totally leans into the campiness. And I absolutely loved it. I am there for the camp and the ridiculousness and a movie about a writer and spies. It's like they were thinking of me when they wrote it. So it was a lot of fun and I highly recommend it. Highly enjoyable movie. I am also so happy to be talking to today's guest. She is the New York Times bestselling and award winning author of we hunt the flame and we free the Stars. In addition to being a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree, she's also the founder of Icy Designs, where she creates websites for authors and really, really beautiful bookish goodies for everyone else. I was looking at it this morning and drooling. It's totally worth checking out. Her newest novel, a tempest of tea, comes out tomorrow. Please welcome Hafsah Faisal. Hello. Hello and welcome. Congratulations on your new book coming out.

[02:30] Hafsah : Thank you so much. I'm very excited and I'm also excited to be here.

[02:34] Marissa: I am very excited to have you. It's been a while since I read this book because I was given an early copy months and months ago and it was one of those books that I've been thinking about ever since. So I'm so excited to finally have you on the podcast and get to chat about.

[02:51] Hafsah : Aw. Well, when my publisher asked me if they should add you to my list of authors to send copies to, I was like she's the author of Cinder. I read that as like a teen and I don't know if she's going to be open to reading my little book. And here we are.

[03:09] Marissa: And here we are. Oh my gosh. That's funny that I turned 40. Actually, the day that this podcast comes out is my 40th birthday. So you saying like I read that when I was a teenager just kind of feels like, and I'm 40 now.

[03:25] Hafsah : Well, I mean, that was a long time ago.

[03:28] Marissa: No, it was. And honestly, I'm not scared of aging. Life just keeps getting better with every decade. So it's all good. But thank you. I'm so honored you thought of me and I really enjoyed this book. It's a really fun book. I don't want to give anything away yet. Before we start talking about it, I actually want to start what I ask all of my guests. I'd love to hear your origin story. How did you become a published author?

[03:55] Hafsah : Firstly, happy birthday.

[03:56] Marissa: Oh, thank you.

[03:57] Hafsah : It's amazing. So my origin story, like I said, I read Cinder as a teen. I was 17 when I started blogging about books. That was way back in 2010 and I was actually not a reader or even a writer as a kid. I didn't like it at all. But when I started homeschooling around 6th grade, I had friends where we were because I went to public school before that. And then we moved and so I was very lonely and all I had was my books and I was just like studying. And then my dad was like, you know what, you need to read some fiction instead of just poring over your textbooks all day. And so he took me to the library and I would bring home those stacks and finish them really fast. I got back into reading, I think it was like early, late 16, early 17, and I found graceling. It was my first YA book and my first foray back into reading. And I devoured, just I could connect to her on so many levels because, well, she's lonely too. I was like, wow, this feels like it was written for me. And so I just started bringing home stacks and stacks after that. And it was just never enough. It was like all those years I spent disliking reading, I was now trying to fill all that in by gouging on all these books. And so it was just not enough. Like, I couldn't keep waiting for my dad to take me to the library every so often. So I was just looking on my library's website and I found this one program that they had where they're like, review a book for us and we will give you a book for free. And so I was like, wow, a free book. And so I did that, and I got my first free book. And I was just like, I won the lottery here. I got a book for free, which now it's like, I have a library full of books, but as a kid with limited financial capabilities to buy books at the store, books are expensive to buy books at the store. It was just the most amazing thing that had happened to me in forever. So I started reading that book. I would read books, review them, and every month I could get a free one. And again, that soon was not enough. And that's when I started blogging about books. So when I say that librarians changed my life, I really mean that they changed my life because I would not be here without them. So, yeah, I started blogging and I got in touch with publishers and I would review books for them from there because I had just been reading so much and reviewing so much. I had this really weird dream one night, and I woke up and I was like, all of these authors are writing books. I can write one, too. It's no big deal.

[06:56] Marissa: Confidence there.

[06:57] Hafsah : Confidence of this 17 year old. So I wrote a book. It took me a few months. It was based off of that crazy dream. And instead of thinking, okay, this is my first book, maybe I should set it aside and work on another one, in my head, I was like, I spent so long working on this book, I am going to try to get it published. I queried agents. I had a few requests. Of course, none of them worked out, which I'm grateful for, but I still thought today I'm grateful for it. But at the time, I was like, how dare these agents say no to me? And I self published that book. I don't even know how it was edited. I have no idea what happened.

[07:37] Marissa: Was it edited?

[07:39] Hafsah : Yeah, it's somewhere now. But since then, I just kept writing and I kept querying and I kept reading all the while. And then, as you saw, icy designs, I started that a few years after my blogging career began and that business picked up. And so writing just got set on the back burner because I was making money here and didn't have time to focus on writing anymore. And of course, I was still in high school. And just like trying to get through everything eventually, I don't know what happened, but I knew that I was not working on the book much. And I kept telling myself, if I ever finish this, this is going to be my last attempt at publishing. After that, I'm just going to give up. That's enough, like, putting time and effort into this. And that book was, we hunt the flame. So I started tweeting about it, and an agent was like, you know what? When you finish that, I want to see it. And a few other agents chimed in, too. And so I was like, okay, now people want this. I need to work on this book. And so I finished it up as fast as I could, edited it, and so that book took me four years because I was just not focused on the book at all. But I got through it, queried those agents and got numerous requests, and then eventually signed with one of them, and we had the flame sold to Macmillan.

[09:04] Marissa: I love that. There's nothing like a little bit of outside pressure. No, that's a really cool story. I love hearing from authors who, because it's much more common to hear from an author. I loved books my whole life. I was a constant reader, blah, blah, blah. I enjoy it when someone's like, I wasn't a book person, wasn't a writer, wasn't a reader, and then something changed and suddenly it's like the whole world of literature opened up. And I don't know. To me, that's like a really special thing. And it gives me hope that so many people in my life who are not readers, they just haven't found the right book yet. It could still happen. Yeah.

[09:46] Hafsah : That's one of the things I told myself. I was like, I don't know if I can be a writer because I was never a reader or interested in writing. And so now I like telling the story so that people who aren't interested or just feel like they're not qualified to write or read, to call themselves a reader, that this will give them hope.

[10:08] Marissa: Yeah. No, for sure. I do find it interesting that you're, like, on your path. You're talking about doing this blogging, and you've started this design business and you're like, also, I was still in high school. You seem very ambitious.

[10:26] Hafsah : Those were some very tough years. But I got busy with work, so that helped. Like, helped me carry on, kind of.

[10:34] Marissa: Yeah. Okay, so now here we are. Your third book is now coming out. Would you tell listeners a little bit about a tempest of tea?

[10:46] Hafsah : Yeah. So I have been describing it as peaky Blinders meets a dash of king Arthur with vampires and a heist. But it's also so much more than that because it deals with colonialism and a girl who is wronged by it and the vengeance that she seeks. This girl's name is Arthur Casimir, and she is the owner of Spindrift, which is a tea room by day, but a bloodhouse, an illegal bloodhouse by night. And when this illegal bloodhouse is threatened, she has to strike a deal with an unlikely adversary who is also quite handsome in order to save it. So she has to pull together a crew of ragtag misfits to infiltrate the glittering vampire underworld in order to save her tea room.

[11:35] Marissa: All right, so first, let's talk about vampires. Why vampires?

[11:42] Hafsah : It was very accidental. Very accidental. So I started writing the book, and I had this tea room because I just love tea. So I had this tea room, and I was like, you know what? I want something sinister happening here because tea is just such a cozy, comforting thing. So I wanted the complete opposite of that happening at the same time. And then I can't remember if I was joking with my sisters because they're the ones who are always around when I'm brainstorming a book. Then I think it was a joke where we were like, oh, what if there was blood in these cups? And then we're like, who's serving blood to who? And then we were like, what if there are vampires? And that's how they stepped on the page.

[12:28] Marissa: It is such a fun contrast between the tea. What could be more wholesome than a cup of tea, but secretly at night, it's a den for vampires. It's such a great twist.

[12:41] Hafsah : Yeah, I had a lot of fun with that.

[12:44] Marissa: So obviously vampires are one of these things, these trends that kind of come, they go. Some writers are waiting for vampires to come back all the time because they can't wait to write another vampire book. Where do you stand as far as the trend? Are vampires coming back? Do you not even care if it's a trend right now? You just wanted to write this vampire book. What were you thinking?

[13:10] Hafsah : Yeah. So I feel like vampires are always not the trend. Been hearing that a lot where it's like vampires are done. No one wants another vampire book. But almost every year we have new books releasing that are centered around vampires. Of course, once you've written a book and you're in the industry, you start worrying about meeting trends and whether a publisher will pick up said book or what. But with this, I felt like vampires weren't the main focus. It was just a fun part of the world, and I wasn't going to make the story completely about them, so I didn't fully mind not meeting a trend or just worrying about being very commercial. But like I said, there's just vampire books releasing all the time, so I didn't really worry about it too much.

[14:05] Marissa: Yeah, and that's a really valid point, that it is a vampire book in a way, as in, like, there's vampires in it, but it's also very much a genre mashup. There's a lot happening here. We've got on one hand the vampire element, but it's also a heist book. Like, for me, total oceans eleven vibes. It's also kind of a revolution story, trying to take down this evil dictator of sorts. So there's like a lot of blending of genres.

[14:38] Hafsah : Yeah, I think from the get go I didn't want it to be too vampire centric. Like I said, I didn't even plan to put them in until I realized I could have tea and blood served in the same cups. So it was just a fun side introduction, where this world is, like you said, very vampire centric, but at the same time, it isn't.

[15:00] Marissa: Yeah. 

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Marissa: All right, so let's talk about heists and writing heists, which in my mind, there's two types of stories. There's like murder mysteries and there's heist, which as far as if you could come up with a sort of book to really challenge yourself, these are one of your two options. They're so hard for you. At what point in planning out the book did you realize it was going to be a heist story? And then how did you kind of go about starting to think about what the heist element was going to look like.

[16:53] Hafsah : Well, I knew from the start that it was going to be a heist story, but I also knew that I didn't want it to be money related. I didn't want them getting something in order to get money out of it. At first it was a set of documents, and it changed quite a few times throughout until I kind of figured out the plot, which was a challenge because for me, outlining is always very hard because I don't like when I have an outline and I kind of feel beholden to it. Like I need to stick to it. And my brain is like, okay, you already did all of this work, maybe you don't have to do any more of it.

[17:38] Marissa: I'm a horrible work here is done.

[17:41] Hafsah : Exactly. I'm horrible at outlining, horrible at planning. I'm very much a pantser. But since signing the book deal and knowing that I had to create a proposal and all of that, I had to do some planning up ahead at the start, and I needed to know where the story was going so I wasn't just aimlessly wandering around white roaring, especially because I have deadlines now. So I kind of found this middle ground where I plan some of it. I have very loose points, and they can't be in one document. They have to be scattered throughout. I have multiple gmail drafts, multiple Google Docs so that I can spend more time looking through them to find what I need. But that's just really weird. It's like organized chaos. I need to have that or I cannot work.

[18:33] Marissa: Yeah.

[18:33] Hafsah : So planning out that heist was a lot of work in the sense that I knew what would happen, and my brain automatically wants to figure out the most efficient way to get there, which isn't what you want with a book. You want it to be convoluted, you want them to suffer. You want them to go through a lot of things before they get what they need. And so it was a matter of figuring out how to giving them more obstacles that they needed to get through and also discussing their plans beforehand and then leaving enough to keep readers going so that they can see what will happen, like see it play out in real time. So it was like finding that balance between the two was, I think, the most challenging to me.

[19:19] Marissa: Now, it's also interesting with a story like this, a heist esque story, where you do want to kind of give readers the knowledge beforehand. Like, here's the plan. So that when things go wrong, the readers know that things have gone horribly wrong. Yeah.

[19:40] Hafsah : Yes, that is very true.

[19:42] Marissa: Yeah. Building a little bit of extra suspense there. One of my favorite things I love heists. Heist spies and superheroes are, like, three of my all time favorite genres. And part of the reason I think I'm so drawn to heist is because so often they have this found family element, and you get to see this kind of cast of ragtag characters who feel like they shouldn't be working as a great team, and yet they band together to try to pull off the impossible. So here, of course, we have this wonderful ensemble cast. Tell me about creating the characters, but particularly with the heist concept, trying to figure out, okay, what do I need these characters to be able to do? Why are these the. I think, is it five people? Why are these the five people who are going to pull this off?

[20:38] Hafsah : So we hunt the flame also has a cast of five. And so I guess in my brain, I thought my brain was just like, let's just do the same thing again. Yeah. Unlike the cast of we hunt the flame, though, it took me longer to figure out the five from a tempest of t. And I think that was because, like I said, I have a hard time outlining. And since I sold this on proposal, I needed to figure out what my characters were beforehand. And so I thought I was doing a great job creating these profiles. Like, this is what this character is like, this is their personality, their wants, their needs, all of that. But once I introduced them to the page, they were breaking those barriers pretty quickly. And so I have this one folder in my Google Drive titled Graveyard, and I have multiple versions of characters, like, their different personalities that I went through before. I was like, they're just not meshing with one another. And I think ultimately, I went back to something very close to the original, which is very funny, but it did take a lot of back and forth before I could figure them out. Like Arthur, from the get go, I had her down. Arthur is the main character of the book, and it was just trying to figure out how she played with the other characters, what we needed for the heist itself, that side of things where it's like we need these different skill sets. I feel like I had that down pretty quickly. I always liked the idea of flick, our sheltered sunshine girl, being a forger. That's like something pretty cool to me, like being able to. She was taught penmanship, and now she's using that for something else entirely. So I think I had their skills down first and then the heist aspect, because I like playing around with characters more than I do. Plot sometimes, yeah.

[22:45] Marissa: So I think it's interesting. So you started with the idea of who the characters were, and then you went and you tested out some other things because it wasn't coming together, but you said that you more or less ended up with them as you'd originally thought of them. Any ideas why that felt like they weren't meshing to begin with and what you had to change to get them to mesh later on, it might have.

[23:10] Hafsah : Just been an instance of me not trusting myself, which, I mean, I know we talk about being unsure of ourselves when we're querying authors like we're trying to get an agent, but this book is just not good enough. But that doesn't go away. Once we get published, we'll write a book, and then it's like, oh, by some fluke chance, this book is doing well. People like them. So I can never do that again. Of course I can never do that again. That was not me who wrote it. It was just an accident. So the same thing happened with Tempest, where I just didn't trust in myself. And I kept thinking that this was wrong and that was wrong, and eventually I went back to it. I do that a lot with my first chapters, too, where I will write a first chapter, and then I feel like this came to me way too easily. It's got to be wrong and multiple times.

[24:11] Marissa: What am I missing? Yeah.

[24:13] Hafsah : And nothing ever feels as good as the original chapter that I wrote. Oh, it's a struggle.

[24:19] Marissa: No. Impostor syndrome. It is such a real thing. I still struggle with it. It seems like every writer I know still has those moments of doubt and feeling like, oh, it was just a fluke before. I'll never be able to do it again. It's a really hard thing to overcome. So if somebody's listening to this and that's what they're experiencing right now, that they just feel like I'm never going to be good enough. I'm fraud. I'm just pretending to be a writer. What would you say to them?

[24:48] Hafsah : I will say that you should trust in yourself. But sometimes we can we stop seeing the forest for the trees? So if you need help, find that group that will be at your side no matter what. Your support group, they will be frank with you. So if something's not right, they will tell you. They will be honest with you, but at the same time, they are there to uplift you and be your cheerleaders all along the way.

[25:16] Marissa: I love that. I don't know what I would do without my writer friends.

[25:20] Hafsah : Yeah, same.

[25:22] Marissa: Let's talk about romance. How much do you love writing romance?

[25:27] Hafsah : I like it a lot.

[25:30] Marissa: I can tell from the way the romances are written that, like me, I love writing the romance. And I felt like we had a kindred ship going on there. So we've got a few different romances happening in this book. There's this kind of triangle happening between Arthur and Lathe and Matteo, and then there's Jin and Flick, who are so adorable. There's some really great kisses, lots of slow burn happening. So for you, when it comes to romance, how much do you think about it in advance? Do you plan it at all, or is that another thing that you kind of just pants and let see what happens?

[26:18] Hafsah : I usually know where a ship is going, like, who I want to pair with, whom. It seemed like it was easier to do with. We hunt the flame, because I knew from the get go that would be an enemies to lovers. Very slow burn romance with this having five characters and three points of view, and just, I knew that I wanted flick and Jin to be a couple, but with Arthie, I kind of knew what I wanted from the very beginning, but she's just so stubborn and hard headed that it a lot along the way. So I really struggled with her romance with I. There was a lot of back and forth with my editor. It got to the point where she was just like, I don't think he's working. Why don't we just mix him altogether? And I was like, no, he works. There's just something wrong here. And it was, like, very close to the end when I realized that some of the scenes were just spaced out wrong. They needed to be rearranged in order for the story and their romance to work. So I think this book, I struggled with the romance a lot, which was really od to me, because in all my previous manuscripts, that was always the best part for me.

[27:33] Marissa: Interesting.

[27:34] Hafsah : They were my cookie scenes, cookie in a jar, where I was always trying to work towards that. Just need to get through all of this boring plot stuff so I can get to the romance.

[27:45] Marissa: I feel that way sometimes, too.

[27:48] Hafsah : Yeah.

[27:49] Marissa: Why does so much have to happen in this book? When do we get to start kissing?

[27:53] Hafsah : Yeah, when I'm reading a book, I usually get bored after the kiss. After the first kiss. Like, I live for all that angst and build up and the tension beforehand.

[28:06] Marissa: No, I get that I work very hard to push the kissing back as far as possible, because, yeah, once you lose that romantic tension, you feel like you've lost something for you. What makes a good romance? Like, what are some of the elements that you're looking for or that you're trying to create?

[28:26] Hafsah : I do like there to be some sense of suffering and that longing and yearning. It's like I want this person, but I don't fully know if they want me. It's that slow burn, just angst, and that dragging it on as much as you could and creating tension to the point where one little touch can send them off the edge, sort of. So that's usually what I look for. And building that between two characters so that when they do kiss, it's like this momentous occasion. A big explosion.

[29:00] Marissa: Yeah. Back to the slow burn.

[29:02] Hafsah : Yeah. All right.

[29:05] Marissa: As much as I did enjoy the romance aspects, I honestly think that my favorite relationship was between Arthie and Jin, who have more of this brother sister relationship. They really rely on each other for you. How did you go about creating their characters and kind of setting them up as the center of this?

[29:29] Hafsah : I. As much as I love romance, I love platonic relationships and how you don't need to share blood in order to be very close and to respect one another and care for one another. So with Arthur and Jin, I introduced Arthur into the story pretty early. I knew what I wanted out of her, and she knew what she wanted out of me, and I just knew that she was a very dark person, and on her own, she might be a little too much for readers. And I just knew that she could not walk this road alone. And once I started writing her character, it was almost seamless. Jin's introduction into the story was almost seamless. He just was striding along beside her, and he was balancing her out in a lot of ways, and it was basically continuing that dynamic throughout the story and having them bounce off of one another, just being a foil to one another and building on that love and trust that can only come from siblings, but they're just not blood related. And I think I got into that whole because I do this in wehunt the flame, too, where I have a few relationships that are platonic, and they're very close. They're like siblings, but they don't share blood. And I don't know if it comes from my own relationships with my sisters, who are my blood sisters, but at the same time, they're much younger than me, and so it felt like we grew up in different times, so I didn't really feel close to them when I was younger or even as a teen, because they were at a much different age group at the time, so they were much younger to me, and so I didn't really feel like they were my sisters until I got older and they got older, and we could just start understanding one another, and it was like building a relationship years later.

[31:29] Marissa: Yeah, that's really interesting. No, and I think it's. Yeah, no, I think it's interesting. Know, and you kind of touched on this with earthy, and she know the sort of character that has walls. She's. She's very tough. She feels like the world is on her shoulders. She can't show this. And like you mentioned, that could be a lot to readers. It can be hard. If this is your protagonist, well, what is the reader going to relate to? What are they going to connect with with this character who doesn't want to reveal too much of herself? And yet by adding in a character like Jin, who knows her heart and soul, who loves her, that kind of is like a gateway for the reader to then get to know Arthie and be like, well, if he is so fond of her, clearly there must be something that I just haven't seen yet.

[32:25] Hafsah : I like that take on.

[32:27] Marissa: And I just as you were talking, it just kind of occurred to me, and, I don't know, it's kind of like a smart technique, and a lot of times we don't really think of these things consciously as we're writing. And it's not until afterwards that you can look back and be like, oh, look at that brilliant thing that I did. That really worked.

[32:43] Hafsah : That happens a lot, actually. And it always happens to me where I'll be doing interviews and answering questions months after the book is completely done and I start realizing things about the story that I just did not realize at the time.

[32:58] Marissa: Yeah, no, I know. I totally get that. I love to read craft books, and I feel like every time I read a book about the writing craft, there will be something that I'll notice, like, oh, I think I already do that. I just never really thought about it before or realized it. And coming back to what you were saying before about having to trust ourselves, we do have this intuition. We have this kind of natural creativity. Just sometimes you just have to trust that it's there, that you actually do know what you're doing. Before we go into our bonus round, I did also want to talk about world building, because we do have a fantasy world. We have vampires, we have half vampires. We have magical weapons. When it came to the world building and creating kind of the rules of the world, the rules of the magic. How did that come about?

[33:54] Hafsah : Worldbuilding is one of my favorite things. And so trying to expand and layer in a world is just something I enjoy a lot. And I knew from the get go that this book would be connected in many ways to my debut series. And it's set in the same world, and it has a lot of little threads that tie back to that universe or that kingdom, I should say, because this is the same universe. But I don't know. I just kept layering in things, and anytime I dug deeper, I was like, why is this the way that it is? And the more I went in, the more pieces just got unveiled, I guess, and so I kept layering those in. And there just comes a time when you're like, you have a lot of information in and you need to start paring back. And that happens to me a lot where I'm like, I need to streamline this. And I think, I don't always realize that, but my editor is always like, why do we need to have seven different leaders? Why can't we just have one?

[35:02] Marissa: What? Editors. Editors have such a way of seeing things they do.

[35:09] Hafsah : It can get frustrating where you're like, I know I need this many people in this place, and they're just like, why? It's such a simple question. And then you start trying to answer them, like, trying to figure out ways to say why, and then you're like, yeah, actually, they're right.

[35:27] Marissa: Hate that.

[35:30] Hafsah : How dare you be right?

[35:36] Marissa: Other than an editor telling you, like, you could probably cut x, y, and z. It is hard to pare down things. Like, if you've written you have a world that you've fallen in love with, you have lots of details that, to us, is really cool and interesting. How do you decide whether or not something is benefiting the story and whether or not to cut it?

[35:55] Hafsah : Well, with a tempest of tea, the book took me a long time to get through because in the midst of it, I met my husband and we ended up getting married and all of that. And so there was just so much happening that I wasn't working on the book for long stretches of time. Some of my editors notes I reopened once I finally did have time to look through them, and I was going over my book, and I just didn't see why I needed them. So I think that time and space gave me room to think, like, come back with a clear head. And I didn't remember a lot of stuff. So when I opened it, I was like, what does this even mean? So I ended up cutting a lot. But in general, when I am working on something, I feel like when I have more, it's always more helpful than when I have less. So that I can try to consolidate information or just get rid of certain plotlines. Because in the end, if you have too many plotlines, it kind of waters everything else down. And sometimes you need to pair them so that you can spend more page time or more words and more emotion can get redirected to those heavier scenes that you want to keep.

[37:15] Marissa: Yeah, no, I think consolidation is a great word for it. I know I spend a lot of time at every level, from outlining to drafting to revising. I'm constantly thinking, okay, how can I squish these two scenes together? Or if I take the important information out of this scene and put it here, then I can eliminate mean. I tend to write long, big books and so I'm sure people are shocked. Like, Marissa, you've never consolidated anything. But I do. I really do try.

[37:44] Hafsah : I mean, a tempest of tea is my shortest book. Like we hunt the flame is, I think, 130,000 words. We free the stars. The sequel is 155,000 words, I think. Yeah, tempest of tea is very close to 90,000. So it's very short. So I guess I did consolidate a lot this time.

[38:05] Marissa: Nicely done. All right, are you ready for a bonus round?

[38:10] Hafsah : Maybe. I'm kind of nervous.

[38:12] Marissa: No, you're fine. What book makes you happy?

[38:17] Hafsah : See, I'm nervous. I'm not sure, actually. There's no one book that I always go back to, but graceling will always have a special place in my heart because that's what got me into reading. So anytime I think of that, I think of happy things.

[38:34] Marissa: I love that. Graceling was a really impactful book for me as a teenager as well. I get that. What are you working on next?

[38:42] Hafsah : I just finished copy edits on a book that I still haven't been able to announce. It is another fantasy, though. And now I am working on the sequel to a Tempest of Tea because I feel like after that ending, people.

[38:58] Marissa: Will need it, right? No, they're going to be asking, so when is it? Lastly, where can people find you?

[39:08] Hafsah : I am online at huffsafaisal. I have a website, huffsafizal.com, but yeah, I'm pretty much everywhere at Hufsafaisel.

[39:17] Marissa: Awesome. Hafsah, thank you so much for joining me.

[39:20] Hafsah : Thank you. I had a great time.

[39:22] Marissa: Readers, definitely check out a tempest of tea coming out this week. Of course, we encourage you to support your local indie bookstore, but if you don't have a local indie, you can check out our affiliate store@bookshop.org, slash shop Slash Marissamire. And please don't forget to check out our merchandise on Etsy, Instagram and teapublic next week. I am super excited to talk to literary agent Lucinda Halpern and about her new nonfiction guide. Get signed, find an agent, land a book deal, and become a published author. I know she is going to have lots of great insights, especially for all you aspiring authors out there. If you're enjoying these conversations, please subscribe and follow us on Instagram at Marissa Meyer, author and at Happy writer podcast. Until next time, stay inspired, keep writing, and whatever life throws at you today, I do hope that now you're feeling a little bit happier.