1. What originally drew you to fantasy writing? Have you always wanted to be a writer?
HB: I’ve been writing since I was a kid. I always loved fantasy. It was what I read and so the genre I naturally wanted to write in. I believe that the best thing we can do as writers is write the books that we want to read.
2. Can you tell us how the unicorn versus zombie debate came about? I am Team Unicorn by the way.
HB: I am very glad to hear that you are a member of team unicorn! Actually the whole Zombies vs. Unicorns thing started in Justine’s blog. She was giving unicorns a hard time (and promoting zombies) to harass her friend Diana Peterfreund, who was then working on a secret project which would become her unicorn-slaying novel, Rampant. I argued vehemently in favor of the unicorn. Zombies have always freaked me out! It turned out that many more people had an opinion about this conflict that you might guess. And lo, an anthology was born!
3. Your series, Curse Worker’s is one of my new favorites. What inspired the idea of gangsters with magical powers?
HB: I loved noir and heist films and I wanted to write something really different from what I’d done before. I had the idea for Cassel and I knew I wanted to retell one of my favorite fairy tales, “The White Cat.” To that end, I decided that I needed a magical world that felt thematically linked. I started thinking about modeling the magic in the world on organized crime, and since Prohibition was such a boom time for the mob, I decided it would be interesting if in this world, magic was illegal — and, consequently, controlled by the mob. I kept building from there.
4. How would you describe Cassel Sharpe to someone who hasn’t read the series?
HB: Cassel is someone who grew up in a family of grifters with a totally warped sense of right and wrong. From the outside, he’s a dangerous, gorgeous con artist with wavy black hair and a crooked smile. He looks like a whole lot of trouble. On the inside, he’s struggling with a lot of guilt and self-doubt.
5. When White Cat left off, Lila had been turned back into a human, but she’d been put under a love spell by Cassel’s mother. Can you tell us what we can expect in Red Glove?
HB: In WHITE CAT, Cassel had to discover his past, but in RED GLOVE he has to decide on what kind of future he wants for himself. Lila, the girl he loves, is forced to love him, a family member has been murdered, the mob wants him, and federal agents are trying to get him to betray the only life he’s ever known. He’s being offered everything he ever wanted, but the price of accepting it is very high.
6. Are you currently touring for Red Glove? If so, where can readers find the schedule?
HB: I am currently home from tour! The last event we had was the one that you came to, Stacey, in New York at Books of Wonder. I will be back at Books of Wonder on June 9th for a WELCOME TO BORDERTOWN event though and I will be in Boston on Thursday for the Diversity Tour. You can check out my events here: http://blackholly.livejournal.com/
7. How did you and Cassandra Clare originally meet?
HB: I was following her blog and one day I wrote to her. She wrote back to me 
and said that she’d read my book – which was a surprise to me, since it had just come out. Anyway, we arranged to meet for coffee after my very first signing ever (at Books of Wonder in NYC). We hung out and then went shoe shopping. It was excellent!
8. I think it’s so cool that some on your characters turn up in Cassandra Clare’s novels and vise versa. Please continue to do that, BTW. Can you tell me if you ladies would ever consider writing together? A novel or series?
HB: We’ve talked about it before. We co-wrote two short stories “The Perfect Dinner Party” for TEETH and “The Rowan Gentleman” in WELCOME TO BORDERTOWN — and both those stories were a lot of fun. It’s really about finding the right project for us to work on together. So, maybe!
9. What is the best piece of writing advise you’ve ever received? If you don’t have anything specific then can you offer advice to someone who’s interested in writing fantasy?
HB: I have three pieces of writing advice, cobbled together from things people said to me over the years and from my own journey: (1) Read a lot and in a lot of different genres – read nonfiction, read mystery and fantasy and realism and romance, read thrillers and historicals and especially read in the genres you write. The more you read, the better you’ll write. (2) Write a lot and revise a lot too. It takes a ton of flawed drafts and a lot of practice before you get good. If you read my early writing, you would howl with laughter. Seriously – I read some aloud at a panel on juvenilia. It was so terrible that I could barely read it because I was laughing so hard. (3) Find a critique partner. Having someone who liked the same books that I liked and was there to tell me when my scene made no sense and pointed out when I missed deadlines got me to get serious and stay that way.
10. Where can your fans find you on the internet?
HB: You can find me at www.blackholly.com I also hang around Twitter a lot, as @hollyblack
Holly Black is the bestselling author of contemporary fantasy novels for teens and children.
Her first book, Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale, was published in 2002 by Simon & Schuster. Tithe was called “dark, edgy, beautifully written and compulsively readable” by Booklist, received starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, and was included in the American Library Association’s Best Books for Young Adults. Holly has since written two other books in the same universe, Valiant (2005), and the sequel to Tithe, Ironside (2007), which spent five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Valiant was a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award for Young Readers and the recipient of the Andre Norton Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature.
Holly collaborated with her long-time friend, Caldecott award winning artist, Tony DiTerlizzi, to create the bestselling Spiderwick Chronicles. The first two books, The Field Guide and The Seeing Stone were released together in 2003 by Simon & Schuster, with the next three, Lucinda’s Secret (2003), The Ironwood Tree (2004) and The Wrath of Mulgarath (2004), following in rapid succession. The Wrath of Mulgarath climbed to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The five-book serial has been called “vintage Victorian fantasy” by the New York Post and Time Magazine reported that “the books wallow in their dusty Olde Worlde charm.”
The lavishly illustrated Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to The Fantastical World Around You (2005), The Notebook for Fantastical Observations (2005), and Care and Feeding of Sprites (2006) expanded the Spiderwick universe. To date, the books have been translated into 32 languages. There are three more chapter books in the Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles series,The Nixie’s Song(2007), A Giant Problem (2008) and The Wyrm King(2009).
The Spiderwick Chronicles were adapted into a film by Paramount Pictures in conjunction with Nickelodeon Films. Released in February 2008, the film stars Freddie Highmore and Sarah Bolger, with Mark Waters as the director.
Holly has also been a frequent contributor to anthologies, and has co-edited three of them: Geektastic (with Cecil Castellucci, 2009), Zombies vs. Unicorns (with Justine Larbalestier, 2010), and Bordertown (with Ellen Kushner, 2011). Her first collection of short fiction, Poison Eaters and Other Stories, came out in 2010 from Small Beer Press. She has just finished the third book in her Eisner-nominated graphic novel series, The Good Neighbors, and is working on Red Glove, the second novel in The Curse Workers series. White Cat, the first in the series, is out as of May 2010, and is about capers, curse magic, and memory.
Holly lives in Massachusetts with her husband, Theo, in a house with a secret library.