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.What is your favorite type of writing – Short stories, Novels, or Collaborations?

HB: Novels are my favorite type of writing. I really didn’t know how to write a short story until I wrote a novel – once I finished my first book ( Tithe ), I understood enough about plot to go back and fix the half-dozen short stories I had stalled out on.

Collaborations are wonderful because they push you to think of things you might not have considered on your own, but my own novels will always be the projects I love best.

3. Who are some of your favorite characters to bring to life?

HB: I love characters with secrets and people who struggle with their own nature. And I always like it when character motivations are at odds with the results – like people who do bad things for good reasons and good things for bad reasons.

4. Where did the idea for the Spiderwick Chronicles come from?

HB: Tony and I had been good friends and we talked about doing a project together. We talked to some kids who said that they’d had real experiences with faeries. We had no idea if it was true, but we were interested in the idea. Tony had done some work on a field guide to faeries and I was already captivated by faerie folklore, so it was natural for us to dive into the project together.

5. 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!

6. Do you think you will ever write a series with her?

HB: We’ve collaborated on two short stories, “The Perfect Dinner Party” for the anthology Teeth and “The Rowan Gentleman” for Welcome to Bordertown . It was a pleasure to work with her – and so much fun to just pass the computer over when I got stuck and to get it back with the scene going in an unexpected direction. Maybe someday we’ll collaborate on something longer, but I can’t imagine collaborating on a whole series.

7. 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!

8. Can you tell us a little bit about The Curse Workers series?

HB: With White Cat, I started with the idea that I wanted to retell the fairy tale of the same name – and I also knew that I have long loved stories about cons, capers and thieves.

So I knew I needed magic – curses specifically – to do the retelling and I knew that since I didn’t have a long folkloric tradition to draw on, I needed to make sure that the magic matched up thematically with the noirish caper fantasy novel I wanted to write.

So I thought about the ways that magical societies are structured in novels.  You have this idea of solitary wizards like Gandalf, you have magic schools, like Harry Potter attends, you have wizard councils that are almost like corporate boards of directors.  So I was thinking about other possible models and I thought:

Well…what if magic worked like organized crime?

So from there I came up with the alternate history of The Curse Workers where there has always been curse magic.  Less than one in a thousand people have the ability.  There are seven types of curse magic: luck (which is what most people have), dreams, physical or body cursing, emotional curses, memory, death, and transformation (which almost no one has).  In 1929, magic was outlawed in the US and like Prohibition led to the rise of the five big crime families in New York, the ban on curse magic led to all magical power being controlled by the mob.

White Cat takes place in an alternate now and concerns a kid named Cassel.  He’s not a curse worker himself, but he comes from a family of curse workers and grifters.  He also has a memory of killing his best friend, Lila, when they were both fourteen.  When he wakes up on the roof of his dorm room with no idea how he got there, he starts to realize that maybe his memories are hiding more than they’re revealing.  He has to investigate his past and figure out who he really is and what he’s really done.

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? Do you have any upcoming book tours scheduled?

HB: You can find me at www.blackholly.com — although I am in the middle of overhauling my site. I also hang around Twitter a lot, as @hollyblack.

Holly Black is a writer of contemporary fantasy of all different sorts. Some of her titles include Tithe, Valiant (winner of the Andre Norton Award), Ironside, The Spiderwick Chronicles (with Tony DiTerlizzi), the graphic novel series The Good Neighbors (with Ted Naifeh), and the new mobster fantasy series, The Curse Workers. She lives in western Massachusetts with her husband, artist Theo Black, and several odd cats in a house with a secret library.