Recap of Cassandra Clare’s Munich event (11 October) (original) (raw)

Credit: Hugendubel & Bookstock Festival

Good morning, afternoon or evening!
You may have seen on our Instagram or Cassandra Clare’s Instagram that she was in Munich, Germany two weeks ago and today I’m giving you a recap of Bookstock Festival 2024!
Of course I was absolutely thrilled that Cassie was returning to Germany after seven long years. The last time she met her German readers was at Frankfurt Book Fair 2017 and let’s just say that not everything went to according to plan back then.
Bookstock Festival is an event for book lovers that started out online during the pandemic and is still streamed on social media. Before six different authors hit the stage on Friday night, attendees were treated to lots of bookish fun: embroidered tote bags with your initials or name on them, friendship bracelets, airbrush tattoos, and many more things.
Cassie was the final author to be welcomed on stage and as always, it was an absolute blast listening to her!
I’ve transcribed bits of her interview, but you can also watch the whole talk below.

You started your Shadowhunter saga twenty years ago and […] now you’re about to complete the saga. How does that feel?

It feels like a breakup with someone. Even if you know that maybe it’s time, there’s still this very sad feeling of not really wanting to say goodbye. For me the last series in the Shadowhunters books is The Wicked Powers and that’s three more books and I’ve only begun the first one, so I know that I have three more books to write, so I don’t have to say goodbye quite yet. I don’t know how I’m going to feel when I get to the end of the last book. I might be like ‘No, don’t go! Come back! We can work it out.’

As you prepare to leave one saga behind, you start a new one. In what kind of world are you taking us?

Sword Catcher is a classic high fantasy book. It was inspired by my love of things like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, so it is a completely different world that isn’t connected to our world that the Shadowhunters are, and it’s a world that’s very influenced by sort of the history of the Silk Road. I wanted to create a city that was a centre of culture, so that I could have people from all sorts of different parts of my fantasy world there and I could really have a city that was diverse in the way that cities of the Silk Road era were diverse, because so many people came there to trade and do business. The lifeblood of Castellane is trade and commerce which I know sounds boring like it’s about taxes, […] but the point is that it’s run by these very wealthy, very corrupt nobles who have this incredible amount of money and that allows them to kind of do anything that they want to do and because they can do anything they want to do, morally they’re very troublesome. Our two characters, we have a girl named Lin, who is part of the Ashkar people, which is sort of a minority group of people that live within Castellane and have a different religion from the main, and she is a doctor. Then we also have our second hero, Kell, who is the sword catcher of the title and it is his job to be the body double for the prince of the city who is himself fairly – I’m not going to say he’s corrupt – but he is fairly dissolute, licentious. He drinks a lot, he spends a lot of money, he makes a lot of bad decisions. I love him, but terrible boyfriend material. So Kell’s job is to be him at any kind of event where there might be danger, where somebody might try to assassinate him, so he will take his place. We follow these two people through these sort of winding, twisting stories of adventure and betrayal.

How did you start creating Castellane?

I did a lot of research into the time period of the Silk Road especially into Venice, which was sort of a huge hub of the Silk Road and how the government worked there. How they dealt with trade. It was fascinating to me, because […] everybody came to Venice and there was such an enormous quantity of money and because of that there was this enormous quantity of corruption. The way that the system worked, there was a duke and there was a charter of ten families and those merchants were the richest people and they had the most amount of power. So that was something I kind of wanted to play around with, so it’s very lightly based on Venice of that time period.

I know you travelled as a child a lot, did you travel for the book for research?

I did actually. I got some of the idea for the setting of the book when I was travelling with my husband and we were going from Italy to Turkey and […] that route is part of that classic Silk Road, so I became interested in sort of ‘How did the Silk Road work? What were the places that were involved in it?’ There are two different Silk Roads; it’s a lot of historical research, but I did end up going to a lot of the places that inspire places in the book. I think if you read the book, you can kind of see the different countries in the book and how they parallel real countries in our world.

How did you not get lost in creating [the world]?

I think that’s always a question with worldbuilding, because you can just spend your whole life building notebooks with notes about the world that you created and the language and the food and the perfume and the money and the taxes and nobody wants to know all of that. […] I think of it as like an iceberg, you create a lot of things you need to know, but you only show 10% of it, so there is a lot of knowledge that I have about Castellane and the history and the world, but I think I’ve only tried to put into the book what I think is necessary for the story.

The characters are in their early or mid-20s so it’s not quite YA, it’s actually just A. Did that change the way you write?

Yes, it was one of the hardest things for me to adjust to because I’ve worked with writing about teenagers for a very long time in young adults and they’re in a very specific time in their lives. They have very specific concerns and very specific things that they’re thinking about. When you write YA, it’s not more simple and it’s not any less smart, it’s just different and so with adults I had to suddenly start thinking about ‘Okay, they’ve actually passed through this stage of their life and now suddenly these are people who are going to be thinking about their things like their careers, their overall destiny, their place in the world.’ They’re making these very big decisions and they have no safety net like parents or something like that. That was actually a real adjustment.

Question from a user online: Do you have an all-time favourite character from the Shadowhunters world?

I can’t pick a favourite character. Usually what I would say is that Tess is the most like me and Simon is the second most like me, because he like me, he’s an ordinary person when the books begin and doesn’t have any powers. He’s not a Shadowhunter and then he instantly gets killed and that’s what would happen to me. And then Magnus is the most fun to write.

Do you sometimes wonder how your book characters would handle real life situations? Who would break down first in the pandemic?

It’s an excellent question. I actually did spend a lot of time thinking about my characters during the pandemic and which one of them would handle it well and which one of them would handle it badly. I actually think Magnus would be fine. I feel like he’s been through a lot in his life, and this would just be another thing, but I feel like Jace would really not handle it well. He needs a lot of interaction with other people and attention so he would probably be sad, and Alec would have to cheer him up.

How long are you going to linger in the world of Sword Catcher?

The second book in the series is called [The] Ragpicker King and that is coming out at the beginning of next year. I am hoping to do two more books in the world after that, so for me it really is just a question of schedule. I’m excited to write them, but of course I am committed to writing The Wicked Powers and also another series, so it’s about finding the time. But I believe that absolutely it may take a little while, but we will get all the books.

For more photos of the event, you can check out this Instagram post.

Danke, Hugendubel and Bookstock Festival, for bringing Cassie back to Germany! ❤ I had a fantastic time.