Sarah Kuhn

First Draft Episode #308: Sarah Kuhn

June 10, 2021

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Sarah Kuhn, author of the Heroine Complex series, Shadow of the Batgirl with Nicole Gaux for DC Comics, the Star Wars audiobook original Doctor Aphra, talks about her new young adult novel, From Little Tokyo, With Love.

Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Sarah Kuhn, author of the Heroine Complex series, Shadow of the Batgirl, the Star Wars audio book original Doctor Aphra, I Love You So Mochi, and many, many more, about her new young adult novel, From Little Tokyo With Love.

I so loved what Sarah had to say about her history in geek culture before it was the dominant culture, what her background as a journalist taught her about structure and character, the self-rejection that comes from believing in conventional wisdom, and on staying open to the many different, and sometimes unexpected, possibilities that present themselves in our creative field.

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Okay, now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Sarah Kuhn.

Sarah Enni:  So hi Sarah, how are you doing this morning?

Sarah Kuhn:  I am all right, how are you Sarah?

Sarah Enni:  Oh, I'm so good. I love that we're having a Sarah combo convo.

Sarah Kuhn:  Yes, a Sarah summit... finally! I feel like we've been wanting to have a Sarah summit for a while.

Sarah Enni:  Forever. I'm so excited to chat today. There's so much that you've written that I want to get to, but I want to start with a little bit of background about you. So we're gonna go all the way back to the beginning and I'd love to hear about where you were born and raised.

Sarah Kuhn:  Oh my goodness, that is the beginning. I was born in a very small Oregonian town called McMinnville. That's where I lived pretty much all my life up until I turned 18 and went to college. And yeah, it was an interesting existence, small town Oregon.

Sarah Enni:  In addition to asking you about where you born and where you grew up, I'd love to hear about how reading and writing was part of growing up for you.

Sarah Kuhn:  Oh yeah, I always love hearing about this from other writers too. I've talked about this a decent amount before, but the town that I grew up in, especially at the time, was very small, very white. I felt constantly like an outcast, like I didn't really belong there. And I think for me, I was like a lot of writers, I was a very early reader, I loved stories. I think my mom also really tried to instill that in me.

She wouldn't let me and my brother watch TV. So, of course, we later became totally addicted to TV. But she was very encouraging of our reading and always made sure we had books and that we had access to the library, and all of that. So I think growing up, I really just used the library as kind of a way of finding books that sort of felt like escapes. It sort of felt like, "Oh, this is showing me that there's a bigger world out there. There's a world beyond myself." And that, of course, was very appealing.

So I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy. I still remember what that wall of the library looked like, cause at the time, it was just this one wall that was like, you know, the big shelves with all the different books shoved together. So I read a lot of that.

Then, of course, a lot of the kind of tween teen girl touchstones, like Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley High. And then also just everything sci-fi fantasy/fantasy. And of course comics, I was very addicted to from a pretty young age. And as far as writing, I tried to think about this because of course now, I mean, I'm sure you get this as well, as a writer you always get asked like, "What was the moment when you really felt this was a passion," or whatever it is.

And I'm not sure what it was for me. I think, obviously, being a big reader, I naturally embraced stories, but I don't really remember when exactly I started writing. I remember as a kid, I did a lot of the things that a lot of kids do, I wrote comics with my brother, we were both really into comics. And I did find, when I went back to Oregon a couple of years ago, I found the old yellow legal pads where we had written and drawn all these comics.

And the best one was, I don't know why, I feel like as kids you just get obsessed with things that you don't really know why. And I guess that's part of the fun of being a kid is also there's no one being like, "You should actually not be obsessed with that. Please stop." And so I guess at the time that we made these comics, we were really obsessed with two things, Star Trek and Lamb Chop. You know, the little puppet.

Sarah Enni:  [Bursts out laughing]

Sarah Kuhn:  I really don't know why.

Sarah Enni:  I loved Lamp Chop too, but I would never have guessed that that was gonna be what you said next.

Sarah Kuhn:  It seems like not things that usually go together. So we made these comics that were called Lamb Trek and they were Star Trek, except everyone was a Lamb Chop.

Sarah Enni:  [Laughing loud, again] That's so good!

Sarah Kuhn:  Everyone had like the little eyelashes and the fluffy coat and the little tongue sticking out, except they were drawn like the different Star Trek characters. And apparently the way that we thought we were so clever is like, all of the characters were just the characters, but they had names that started with "L". So Worf is Lorf.

Sarah Enni:  [Continues to laugh out loud] I love this!

Sarah Kuhn:  But I was looking at those and I was laughing, but I was also like, "Oh, you know, back when we were kids, it looks like I actually did know what a page turn is." Like I did know that you're supposed to have that last panel that makes someone want to turn the page, which is something I then relearned in a more official sense when I was actually writing comics.

So I feel like I was always doing things like that, these weird creative things. And, of course, when you're a kid it can be for fun. No one's asking you like, "Are you getting paid for that?" You can actually do stuff like that for fun. And so, I think this then genesis of me as a writer is something else that I did for fun, which is in middle school, me and my friends, it was like a group of six or seven girls started - I don't think we knew this was what we were doing at the time - but it was basically a zine, it was like an old school zine.

So we would all write or draw different pages. And then our friend, whose dad worked in an office, she would take it to his office and she would make copies of all the pages and staple them together and that was our zine.

And it was just a creative outlet, it was really fun, but I think that's kind of when I was like, "Oh, I would love to have my own magazine." Something where I can just share all these important opinions I have and stuff like that. So I think at some point, you know, because my mom was a Japanese American, I am a third generation born here, and she had, I think, in a very classic Asian American mom way, she was always worried about me.

She was worried about my potential to make a living and take care of myself and be okay on my own. So she was not really being like, "Oh yes, definitely be a novelist." Like definitely go into this thing that there's no sort of path, there's no guarantee, all of that. And so she was, I think, always very encouraging of me doing those things as hobbies. When it came to actual careers, I don't think she really thought that was something someone could do.

And certainly myself, it's not like I was seeing tons of Asian American women being authors, being really visible either, so I don't think I thought that was something I could do either. When we started doing that little zine in middle school, I did sort of internalize something someone said to me, which is, "Journalism is a job where you write every day and you get paid for it." And I will say, I think that's maybe not exactly the case anymore [chuckles], sadly.

Sarah Enni:  More rare now, sadly.

Sarah Kuhn:  A lot of the journalists I know are freelance like us, it's not like they're getting benefits. It's not like there's guaranteed work. But anyway, at the time it seemed like something that was more steady or quote/unquote respectable, or just something that seemed to have more of a path laid out. So I was like, "Okay, well maybe I could do that. I could be a journalist and then I could get a job and I'd have health insurance and I'm still writing, but my mom can maybe see this as more of a career that someone can have." And I suppose that I could also see that a little easier as well. So I think those were the starting points.

Sarah Enni:  The building blocks are all there.

Sarah Kuhn:  Yeah, the hobbies and then the journalism and the zines, and all of that, I think, kind of contributed.

Sarah Enni:  I do want to ask, just because this is so relevant to the rest of your work that you do now, about quote/unquote nerd culture at that time. You and I are around the same age and when we were growing up, like nerd culture is the dominant culture now. Marvel and DC are brands that everybody knows and all of those characters are things that people are engaging with regardless of background or interest level, honestly.

But that was not always true. I would love to hear about what it was like to find comic books and to have that love of Star Trek and what the environment of genre meant for you as a young person.

Sarah Kuhn:  That's a great question. That's something I certainly thought about a lot as nerdy things have become so much more popular in kind of a more mainstream seeming way. But when I was growing up, that was not cool. When I was a really little kid, before you are actually in school a lot, and have a regular class and all of that, I don't think I really understood that it wasn't cool because my family was very sort of nerd-centric.

My two aunts were very into Star Wars and Star Trek and fantasy novels. And they kind of exposed me to that a bit, like exposed me to what that was. And I don't even remember when I saw Star Wars for the first time, I feel like it's just always been part of my life. It was probably my first big obsession.

I do remember that once I got to middle school, I somehow knew that those things weren't cool. I was obsessed with all the Star Wars novelizations and I remember hiding them, cause of course, I didn't think like, "Oh, you should leave the book at home." I always took the book to school with me, which I think is probably another thing that a lot of writers can relate to. I knew that those things were not considered cool.

And I think, especially the era that probably we were in middle school and high school, those things were not as prevalent as they are now either. Like Star Wars was sort of considered this very old fashioned... there weren't new movies coming out. It was sort of this cheesy, like people made fun of it.

I don't remember when the Next Generation stuff was first airing, but I think Star Trek also was not seen as something that was super cool. Comic books were not seen then as super cool. So I just hid a lot of that part of myself. I knew that I could talk with my little group of friends about things like The Babysitters Club, like that was cool.

And that was also something that was, I think, pretty obviously aimed at like tween girls. So it seemed like, "Oh, this is something we should be talking about. This is something that is made for us." The other stuff I just kind of didn't really talk about. It was sort of that thing where if I met someone that showed even the tiniest bit of interest in something like that, I would strategize ways I could bring it up so that we could talk about it more.

Because also the internet wasn't what it is now. I mean, it was like starting, but there wasn't like Twitter where you could just be like, "Hey, does anyone here like Star Wars?" And you'll get thousands of responses. That way of finding other people who like the same things that you did was not quite as easy, was not quite as immediate. And so I just felt like a big weirdo.

When I got to high school, I did finally make one friend who was also really into, in particular, Star Trek. And so then we could kind of have our own little two-person club of girls who liked sci-fi because I think gender was also a part of this too. I think it was not as acceptable for girls to like that stuff. Or if you did like that stuff, you were sort of subjected to 5 million quizzes to make sure that you were a real nerd, you weren't just pretending to get men's attention, because that's, I guess, the only reason we do anything.

Sarah Enni:  Well, and part of the reason why I asked that particular question is because you have been a part of broadening the world of, especially genre and quote/unquote nerd, I'm gonna use that as a broad term. You write in the DC universe, you write in the Star Wars universe, you write superheroes and you are not only bringing female characters into it, but also Asian American characters into it. So you are part of, I think, the vanguard of people making it more possible for these young D&D amazing new generations.

Sarah Kuhn:  Oh, thank you. That's nice to think about.

Sarah Enni:  I think that's what people of our generation can start to own in some way, shape, or form. Okay, I want to make sure we get to your book, or your mini-books. I do want to talk a little bit about how you evolved to pursuing journalism and how, while you were making a living doing journalism, how creative writing was still happening in the background before you actually were a published writer.

Sarah Kuhn:  So I really started doing journalism pretty much right out of college. I mean, I was doing it in college, which I don't know if this is still the way people do things, but it was like, you're in college, if you want to pursue journalism, you try to get an internship usually the summer before your senior year.

So the summer before my senior year, I interned at the Oakland Tribune in the arts department. And because it was a pretty small staff, I did get to write the occasional article, which was really great. And then when I went back to school for senior year, I kept freelancing for them a little bit. So that was also great, it kind of gave me some of my first professional clips. And then when I graduated college, it was kind of a weird, interesting time because in the Bay Area, it was the dot-com boom.

The very first job I actually got out of school was not exactly a writing job, I got a job at Ask Jeeves, the search engine, and learned how to do things like... I don't think I know how to do this anymore, but it was like, you'd code the question so that you get the right hits. Or, figure out how to get something to show up at the top in a search engine. I don't know, it was really interesting.

And it was all around the content I was interested in, which was like movies and TV and sci-fi and stuff like that. So while I was doing that, I was still freelance writing for the Tribune and some other places. And I started writing for the website IGN, which is still around after all of these dot-com booms and busts.

So one of my "beats" was covering Buffy. So I wrote about all the episodes, I interviewed most of the cast, I got to do things like that. And I did things like that for other shows and properties and comics and stuff that were big at the time too. So that was like my first big journalism job out of college and I worked there for a while. That was actually where I got my first fans, I guess, my first followers. And some of them will still email me sometimes and be like, "Are you the Sarah who wrote for IGN about Buffy? Because I remember that and that's why I bought your book."

So I was like, "Okay, well, I hope you're not disappointed that there's no Buffy in the book, it's people I made up." So that was a really fun first job. And then from there I did some other journalism type jobs. I was pretty much always still freelancing. I worked for a while at the Star Trek website, the official Star Trek website, during a not great era of Star Trek, I will say. The fandom was maybe in a bit of a dip, but that was a cool job. I got to report and write about Star Trek and be on the Paramount studio lot right next to where the sets were, and that was pretty cool.

My last full-time journalism job, my last sort of quote unquote "real job" before I became a full-time author was at Backstage, which is an actor's magazine here in LA and also in New York. So I was doing things like profiling a lot of actors, writing about different industry things like 'How to break into animation,' stuff like that. So that was really cool. That was really interesting.

I felt like, especially writing those in-depth profiles, gave me a really good handle on things like structure, like story structure. Or even just like, since the profile is focusing on this one person, you're trying to bring out who they really are, that maybe people haven't read about before. I feel like that helped me with things like character, like zeroing in on what is actually important about this person. What is the inner thing that maybe they're not saying out loud, but it's sort of the core of who they are?

I always found that super, super interesting. And I had not really kept up with doing a ton of creative writing, creative in the sense of fiction like making things up, I think journalism is still obviously very creative. I hadn't done a ton of coming up with my own stories since college and maybe a little bit after. And I started again, because I had this little website with a few friends that was another nerd website. It was called Alert Nerd. And it was just us writing about geek lifestyle things.

While we were doing that, the person who started the website, Matt Springer, who's still a good friend of mine. He was like, "We should do, again, a zine." And the other person was Chris Stewart who's also still a good friend of mine. I can't remember which one of them had the idea that it should be a zine and it should be like a PDF. And so we started that and the thing was like, "Oh, it'll be not something that comes up that often, like maybe it's twice a year or something, and it will always have a theme, like a prompt or a code word, or something that we can loosely base whatever is going in here, on."

And so the theme of the first one, and again I don't remember which one of them came up with this, I just remember it wasn't me, was pon farr, which is the Vulcan mating ritual. Wherein they only do it every seven years, but when they do do it, they're like super horny, like Vulcans are actually super horny. They're just like suppressing it a lot.

So I was like, "Okay, pon farr, what ideas does that spark?" Like, "What does it make me think of?" I don't remember why I thought of this, but I was like, "What if there was this girl who definitely has not had any romance, anything like that, in her life for at least seven years and is actually quite opposed to that." And also, like a lot of geeks, has these very strongly held beliefs about stories, about fiction, about who's the best X-Men, who's the best Batman, all of those things. What's the best Star Wars? She has a lot of opinions about all of those things. What would it take for her to change her mind about something? That was sort of initial thought.

And so what I ended up writing was this novella that was like a serialized novella. We put it out and I think three parts, and then we collected it. It was called One Con Glory. And it's about this girl who's a really grouchy journalist, who's covering nerd things, and conventions, which was basically my job for a while. And, of course, she ends up having a romance with this guy who is an actor that she's supposed to interview and it goes really, really badly. And the reason it goes badly is, honestly, because she's a jerk to him. Because he is playing this character that she feels very strongly about and she feels like he's miscast.

It's that classic rom-com thing where she's like, "He's too handsome! He's just too handsome. Which is not a thing that will affect me at all, ever! Because I don't like things that are too handsome." But of course she finds there's a lot more to him under the surface. I think I was also kind of trying to do a little bit of a gender flip on something that I had dealt with, which was people not thinking I was a quote/unquote real nerd.

And so she goes into it being like, "Well, he's not a real nerd. He's just like this pretty face." Like, "He read the Wikipedia or something, he hasn't read the millions of comics that I have that entitle me to act like a jerk." Right? And then, of course, she finds out that he has, and he actually is a nerd, and he has this kind of, you know, geeky origin story. And they actually connect because they both are obsessed with this one issue of the comic that no one else likes. It's like the most unpopular story.

I call it my comic con rom-com and it takes place only over comic con. So it's over the three or four days that comic con occurs. It was just me kind of writing something in a context that I knew. There was also this character I felt like I hadn't seen very much of before where it was like, "Okay, it's this girl, she's a nerd, but she's the main character." She's not the girlfriend, or the side kick, or the girl who like takes off her glasses and she's been a supermodel the whole time.

She's not a prize that someone has to win. She's not a nerdy boy's reward. She's the main character. And she's kind of just as much of a jerk as some of these other guys. She's always fighting with people about Superman and stuff.

I think, because she was so central and this was an experience a lot of geeky girls could relate to, it did get a following amongst that sort of demographic where they're like, "Finally this girl she's arguing with these guys about all the things I'm always arguing about. She's actually in the main role and it's not what we're used to seeing." So yeah, that was interesting cause that was really something I just kind of wrote, honestly, to entertain my friends off of this prompt, pon farr. And I kind of thought they would be the only ones who read it. But yeah, that was my first foray into fiction after really primarily doing journalism for a while.

Sarah Enni:  And One Con Glory, I think, it was like even optioned for film?

Sarah Kuhn:  Yes! I mean, it still is, it's still technically in development, but yeah, that was a fun experience. I wrote a screenplay for it. I changed some things. I even wrote another version a few years later to kind of reflect how fandom had changed. Because in the original, in the novella, she was, the main character, was the only woman writing for this big geek site.

And that had been my experience as well. When I started at IGN, there was one other woman editor on staff who wrote kind of the sex and relationships type content, and then there was me. Then I think at one point she might've left, or something, so then it was just me. But I was very used to being in these man dominated spaces.

And I felt like for a while, when I was going to these nerd events to cover them, or conventions, or junkets, or whatever, a lot of times I was the only woman. And then there was, I think, kind of a sea change where now I feel like I look at the landscape of nerd journalism and it's mostly women. The site Nerdist is run by women. There are sites that are dedicated to women and fandom. That is not something that was happening when I was working in that profession.

Sarah Enni:  I'd love to hear how Heroine Complex came about, which was, I believe your first published novel. Is that right?

Sarah Kuhn:  So yes, One Con Glory was meant to be a short story and then it turned into novella. And then the guys that I was doing that website Alert Nerd with were like, "Oh, maybe we should collect this into a volume of sorts and kind of add stuff." And we added some little sketches and things like that. So we did that. And again, this was something that I was like, "This is for my friends, there's no real ambition behind it. It's just a story that I hope people enjoy and that people seem to connect to."

And when it started getting a following, I did get kind of some interest from quote unquote official publishing types, like official people. And some of them were just fellow authors that read the novella and connected to it and then became friends with me. Or agents were like, "Oh, when you have something that's a book, a novel, send it to me." Or, "I'm interested in seeing it." Or, "I really liked this." Or whatever it was.

So that, I think, gave me some encouragement as far as trying to write something that was actually a full length novel. I, again, had grown up loving fantasy and I did really love this sort of sub-genre that had emerged called urban fantasy, or I guess now it's more like contemporary fantasy. And there was this crossover with paranormal romance, which I also loved. So I read a lot of books in those areas.

And, of course, I loved superheroes and I was like, "Okay, I think I want to write something that's kind of in this urban fantasy paranormal romance area with superheroes with capes and tights, like very classic." And when I went to sort of conceive it, the first concept was like, "Okay, I want to write about the assistant, the assistant to the superhero." Because I feel like all these fabulous super heroines, and all of these fabulous ladies who were on these urban fantasy covers, they're such bad-asses. They're always wearing leather pants, and they have a big sword, and just look really tough and cool.

And, of course, my question was like, "But I feel like you're always doing these battles. They're very messy. You have a lot in your life you have to organize. I don't know, someone probably has to update your social media, or take your costume to the dry cleaner. Who is that person? Who has to do that? Who's the support staff for these superheroes?"

Sarah Enni:  Yeah, "Who's your team?"

Sarah Kuhn:  And so it was like, "Okay, that's it. I want to write this book about the personal assistant to the superhero." Who, of course, perhaps has her own super-powers that she has to grow into. When I was starting that book, when I was kind of starting to think about it, I have talked about this a lot as well. With One Con Glory, I created this protagonist who was a lot like me in her job and her attitude, her general demeanor, all of that stuff. And I remember having this thought at the time of like, "Okay, should she be exactly like me? Should she be Asian American? Should she be biracial?" Like, "Is this basically just a reflection of myself?"

And I remember how quickly I rejected that. I was like, "No, that... no. Because then the story has to be about racism." Like, "She's gonna be dealing with more important things than whether she has to get this action figure back." The whole story then has to be about things that are hard, things that are sad. It has to be about the struggle and that's not what the story is.

I still remember how quickly I dismissed that, how there was this kind of built-in self-rejection. And when that story started becoming popular, what I learned was, a lot of people just thought that character was Asian because they thought she was me. And I think this is also interesting because it seems like, especially with women writers, and women of color writers in particular, sometimes there's this assumption that you can only write about yourself. And I do write a lot of characters that are pieces of myself, but I thought it was really interesting that people had sort of projected something onto this character that I hadn't necessarily imagined.

So when I was starting Heroine Complex, I was like, "Okay, so it's about this girl who's a personal assistant to a super heroine. And then the super heroine, of course, will also have a major role." And it was like, "Well, you know, I think no matter what I do, everybody's gonna think these characters are Asian. So I might as well make them Asian." I always say like, "I wish that was a braver story." Like I was taking a stand on something, but I really wasn't. I was just kind of like, "Everybody's gonna think this, so I'll just do it anyway."

It wasn't really until I was writing that book, when it was this sort of pure blast of fun, it was supposed to be a lot of the things that I had grown up loving. You know, the fantasy, the super heroes, the sort of wild romance, all the adventures, all of these kinds of fun, pop-y, cartoon-y things, putting girls who looked like me into that context did feel really cool. It did feel pretty empowering.

I think sometimes we also maybe assume that there is certain conventional wisdom out there that ends up not really being true. And I don't want to say that in a way that downplays any of the barriers or any of the actual horrible racism that certainly exists in every industry I am part of. But I think with Heroine Complex, when I was first writing it before I even had an agent or anything, there were people who were like, "Oh, you will never sell this." Like, "This is very niche. If you do want to sell this, you have to make these characters white." Or, "They won't let you have two. You can have one of them, but you have to make the other one white." And then it was like, "Oh, but they won't put them on the cover. They won't put their faces on the cover." Like all of these things that none of them ended up being true.

And sometimes that really boggles my mind because I'm like, "Look, I have also experienced a great deal of racism in this industry. It is a systemic problem that is not easily solved." But there are things that are not necessarily true all the time. And if you start from a place of rejecting yourself right away, then yeah, I guess nothing will happen.

But you might want to think about like sometimes when people are like, "Oh, what advice would you give younger writers?" I'm like, "I would tell them not to listen to any advice." Because a lot of people, especially with writing, really want to give you advice. And much of it is probably not applicable to your very specific situation.

Sarah Enni:  Yes. I do want to ask, just from a publishing standpoint, the Heroine Complex became a trilogy, and now we've re-upped to a new trilogy, which has kicked off in 2020 with Haunted Heroine. And I want to just hear about, like, was it sold as a trilogy at first? How did it expand? I mean, obviously people love these books and you're being asked to bring more of them into the world. So I would just love to hear about how that came about.

Sarah Kuhn:  I've been really thrilled with the reception and how people have connected to that. Cause you know, Sarah, I'm sure that you may feel this too. Sometimes when we're writing these books, we're like, "Is this just for me?" Sometimes it feels like, I dunno, like you get an idea and then you're like, "Everyone feels this way." And then you're like, "Wait, maybe I'm the only one that feels this way." Like, "No one's actually gonna answer."

So yeah, those books were sold initially as a trilogy, it was a three book deal. And, obviously, that was my first novel. So I had completed the first manuscript of Heroine Complex. And then I had written up a little document that had maybe like half a page about like, "Oh, here's what the second book would be. Here's what the third book would be."

And the only thing that I really knew for sure was that I wanted the books to have different POV's. So the first one was Evie, the second one is Aveda, the third one is Bea, that felt to me a little bit more like the romance part of it, right? Where you introduce the secondary character and then the next book is their book.

And I also didn't want to do the thing that I had seen in some wonderful, long-running urban fantasy series where it's like, you get them together in the first book, and then you get to the second book and you're like, "Oh, shit!" And then they have to breakup. I was like, "I want these couples to definitely be together. I don't want to break them up. I want people to know this is like HEA (Happily-ever-after)."

So we sold that as three books, which I was really excited about because it felt in-line with all these series that I loved so much that had helped inspire me to write this. Then I'm trying to remember how the continuation came about. I think probably I was working on book three, it was probably right after book two came out, they were like, "Okay, we're really interested in whatever you want to do next. We've been really thrilled with the response to Heroine Complex and then the sequel Heroine Worship and you have the third one, but that's the end of the contract. So do you have ideas for how this would continue? We feel like this has also really good momentum. What do you think comes next?" Like, "Is it different protagonists? Is it exploring another part of the world? What is it?" And they were pretty open about that.

And during the launch of Heroine Complex, when we were doing the little tour and everything and I was talking about the books so much, which, I know you know what that's like too, you're just like, "I'm so tired of describing my book. I used to dream of people asking me, 'What's your book about?' Now I wish to never answer that question again. I'm just so tired of my own voice." But at that point I was working on the second book. I was really in Aveda's mindset, but I kept coming back to Evie since I kept talking about her so much.

And I just had this feeling of like, "Okay, I'm still not gonna break her up from her boyfriend, but I feel like there's just something here that I want to revisit. I feel like she's not done. I kind of want to go back to her." So I pitched the publisher like, "I think the second trilogy would be kind of a sequel for everyone. We did do a time jump in the third book. So the first two books are Evie and Aveda in their twenties. And then Evie's younger sister Bea, who's the protagonist of the third book, she's a teenager.

So to make her an age appropriate heroine, because again, this is an adult series with a lot of adult moments, I was like, "Well, I think maybe there's little time jumps so that now she's in her twenties." She's still like 22, 23, she's still pretty young, but she's in her twenties. Evie and Aveda are in their thirties now, we are letting these heroines age as well as I am aging.

And so I was like, "Okay, I feel like doing this time jump and everything, there still maybe a lot more to explore with these characters." And the first trilogy was kind of like second coming of age. The second one I had sort of pitched as like, "I feel like this is maybe taking on in different ways, that idea that still exists of like, can you have it all?" Which is only put to women. "Can you have it all? Can you do it all?"

And I think however you answer that question, it's just so toxic, right? That premise is so toxic. I wanted to kind of explore that idea of like, "Okay, these heroines, the first two anyway, are now in their thirties. They're probably thinking about some different things. They're probably dealing with some different life events."

And so that took me to Haunted Heroine where I was like, "Okay, now the heroine from the first book, Evie, she's pregnant. She's kind of freaking out about it, even though she knows she's just supposed to be happy." She and her husband are still together, and will stay together, but they are perhaps having some communication issues, just like we all do in our relationships.

And so, yeah, I just kind of wanted to write everyone a sequel and then send them off all happy and I'll leave the door open for, there have been other secondary characters that people are like, "When is that person getting a book? When is that person getting a book?" So I'm like, "Well maybe not now." I feel like I've actually written a lot of words at this point in the Heroine Complex universe. I think after this sixth book, I'll be kind of ready to give it a little bit of a rest. But I'll always leave the door open to revisit if I feel the urge, or there's something I feel like I want to say.

Sarah Enni:  I want to talk a little bit about the IP work. I want to make sure we're focusing on your original stuff, so I don't want to get too deep into it. But you have written, very notably, in the worlds of DC, and Star Wars, and Archie, and Barbie, lots of stuff. You're a very busy writer. So I just want to hear about how you got into that kind of writing and what you've enjoyed about getting the opportunity to write for existing IP.

Sarah Kuhn:  I think it's always come about in kind of a roundabout sort of way, especially the first times. I was trying to remember the first licensed things I wrote, I feel like it might've been Barbie. And that was just off of the first ever comic I wrote was for this romance comics anthology called Fresh Romance.

I wrote this story about this girl who is actually a creature from another dimension who her day job is supposed to be to help humans make love matches. She's kind of like Cupid or something, but she hates it. I love this idea of like, if you have like this drudgery type office job that you hate, but her job is she's supposed to help people fall in love, and that's how she sees it. I thought that was funny. So I wrote that as like my first comics thing.

And then people kind of started contacting me off of that, which was really cool. And I think that's actually how Barbie came about. And then off of that, I started getting offered some other things and yeah, it's really fun. A lot of these characters are, of course, characters that I've loved forever. I mean, the fact that I have gotten to write the Cassandra Cain Batgirl who, you know, she was always my favorite Batgirl, I just love her so much. Or, the fact that I have a Star Wars book with my name on it? That still just weirds me out so much. But yeah, it's really fun.

I always see it as kind of a fun challenge, right? Because when we're creating our own work as writers, we can sort of do whatever we want, I mean, within reason, within what our editor will say is okay. But we're in control of that universe, it's our creation. We can expand it however we like. And with IP and licensed work there are, of course, always guidelines, or guardrails, or do's and don'ts, or things like that.

So I always find that an interesting challenge; to create a story that fits within those parameters, but still has something of me in it, still has some kind of stamp of my own in it. So I always find those kinds of challenges really, really interesting. Or, like with DC, like the Shadow of the Batgirl, which is the book I did with artist Nicole Goux, obviously those weren't connected to the DCU canon, they're kind of their own little world, the DC Young Readers books. But there are still things set up about that character, set up about Gotham City and things like that.

There were still things we had to keep in mind, you can't just start making a bunch of stuff up. You still have to think about like, "What is the actual thing that people know?" Like, "What is Gotham City? What does it look like?" All of those things. I do remember the one area where we kind of deviated, and this was something I didn't really think of until we were pretty late into the book, because we had to come up with like, "Okay, so Barbara Gordon..." Who is, of course, the original Batgirl, but she's not telling Cassandra that she's the original Batgirl. She's moved away from that life and she's a librarian now. She's kind of in our book on her way to becoming Oracle, but she has not done that yet.

So we were talking about like, "Oh, then we have to show when Barbara finally reveals to Cassandra, 'Oh yes. I used to be Batgirl.'" Like, "Here's how that went. Here's how I got the idea." I was like, "I actually don't think Batman exists in this version of Gotham City." I was like, "We don't need Batman. He doesn't have to be here." But also, part of the book is that there's this big crime wave happening and I was like, "If there's a big crime wave happening in Gotham City and Batman isn't doing anything?"

Sarah Enni:  He's like MIA.

Sarah Kuhn: I feel like that reflects very poorly on him, you know? Cassandra still has to have a reason to suit up and be Batgirl. But if Batman's already there solving all the crimes, then she wouldn't have to do that. So I was like, "I feel like Batman doesn't exist." I felt like Barbara actually got the idea to be Batgirl not because she saw Batman, but because it was something like, "Oh, she and her mom, when she was a kid, they always made these gadgets and a lot of them were in the shape of a bat, and her mom really liked that." So then she adopted that.

And it was sort of stuff like that, that we tried to convey in the visuals in that flashback. But I still think it's funny that we wrote this whole Batgirl comic, and then at the end we're like, "Yeah, Batman just doesn't exist in this world."

Sarah Enni:  Oh my God. I love that. That's cool. I read, or I heard you talking in another interview about, you got fan mail after I Love You so Mochi from readers who said that they really related to the depiction of anxiety in the book.

Sarah Kuhn:  Oh, that was actually Heroine Complex.

Sarah Enni:  Oh, was it?

Sarah Kuhn:  Yeah, well maybe it was in Mochi too, I don't know. I've probably written anxiety into a lot of books. But the fan mail I remember specifically was, because when I wrote Heroine Complex, honestly, I did not know that that was a thing. I didn't know that anxiety was something you could be diagnosed with. I thought it was just like, "Oh, I am just nervous." Like, "I'm just stressed out." Anxiety is just like a feeling or whatever.

And so I had written Heroine Complex and then, like I suspect perhaps a lot of us authors do, my debut year was when I had to start therapy. I'm very glad that I did that. I'm a huge proponent of therapy, which again, I feel that a lot of authors are, for good reason.

So it was in therapy that the therapist was like, "No, you have an anxiety disorder. This is actually a thing. Here are the behaviors." And I was like, "Wow, okay. I do all of these things in this very helpful handout you have given me. I am, apparently, a textbook case of this." She helped me learn what a panic attack was. That that wasn't just like, "Oh, you're breathing funny." It was like, "No, that's an actual medical thing."

So I had written Heroine Complex before all of this, but the main character does have these moments that are panic attacks, or are the sort of classic anxiety things, the spiraling, the catastrophizing, all of that stuff is in that book. But it is not called that because I didn't know that's what it was.

Then I started getting emails from people where they were like, "Wow, this book is a great depiction of what it's like to have anxiety." And I was like, "Oh, I didn't realize that I did that, but I'm glad. I'm glad you were able to connect to it that way." But I guess that's the case with a lot of things we write about, right? We don't realize what it really is, or that it's actually about us, until much later.

Sarah Enni:  That's what I connected to with that story was just that we write things that are truthful, but often it takes, you know, it sounds so wild to be like, "It took me writing 120,000 words so I could understand this one small thing." But that's sort of what it is, you know, very intriguing.

Okay. I really want to get to From Little Tokyo, With Love. So please, if you don't mind, actually pitching that book for us. And I'll ask more questions about it.

Sarah Kuhn:  Sure, I'm trying to remember what the actual pitch for that book was. So it is about a very angry half Japanese American girl growing up in Los Angeles's beautiful little Tokyo neighborhood. And she does not believe in fairy tales. She does not believe in happy endings. She does not believe in romance. She's very against all of those things. And then she gets swept into her own modern fairy tale. And I guess, spoiler alert, she might change her mind about some of those things.

Sarah Enni:  Perfect. So obviously after your first YA novel, I Love You so Mochi, you got the opportunity to write this book. Obviously it sounds like you had a good experience with YA, so you wanted to do it again. How had you been thinking about what else you wanted to explore in the teen space?

Sarah Kuhn:  I had a couple of inspiration points, but one of them was, and again, this was not me really thinking like, "What is the next YA book?" It was just kind of like, "Here's an idea." But like most of us, I saw Crazy Rich Asians the day it came out. And even though I had, at this point, had a few books come out, they always focused on Asian American women. They always had this big element of romance. They're very fun and pop-y.

And I had spoken so much about representation, and Asians, and fun stories, and the importance of having these fun stories starring Asian girls, and all of that stuff. I feel like in that area, I am reasonably aware, I have a reasonable amount of knowledge about all the other wonderful work that's out there. And still seeing that movie was mind blowing to me.

Seeing this big, splashy, studio picture with a pretty much all Asian cast, with this joyful story, with this big emphasis on romance, with this focus on the main Asian American female character, it just really kind of blew my mind. And one thing I was thinking about was, "What if there had been a bunch of these movies?" Like, "What if I had grown up with these movies? What if there was an actress who was basically Constance Wu, but had done a bunch of these?" Like sort of an Asian American Meg Ryan?

Because when we were younger, I feel like her and Julia Roberts, it was always them in these movies. And I love those movies, but I did not see myself in those movies. And so I don't think I ever pictured myself as like, "You could be the person who's having this romance and having their desire treated as something important. And running through the airport, or running down the beach, in a big giant ballgown," or whatever it is.

I didn't really ever conceptualize like, "That's something you could do." And so I was like, "Well, what if there was this Asian American rom-com star? How would that have affected people?" Like, "How would that especially affect young Asian-American girls?" That was kind of the start of it. Because, as you know, in the book there is an Asian-American rom-com star, and there is an idea that she perhaps has a little connection to the protagonist. And in creating that protagonist, I was like, "Well, I think this girl has to be just against all of this."

She feels like she is not someone who can imagine herself in this context, just as I could not imagine myself in this context when I was younger. She doesn't think that someone like her could have a happy ending cause she doesn't really see that a lot. So I was like, "Well, you have this person, and then she finds out that maybe she has this connection to this other person who's kind of one of the chief like perpetrators of this happily ever after business." Right?

That's an interesting setup, an interesting conflict. And it seemed like something that I could also use to do a lot of the things I like to do. You know, the romance, the very cinematic, epic scenes. There is actually a scene with someone running down the beach in a giant ball gown. And the family dynamics, the friendships, it's a pretty much all Asian-American cast. I was like, "I think this is something that maybe would be a great big idea that I could use to explore some of these things I like to write about anyway." And I hadn't really written a really angry character since One Con Glory, so it felt like returning to that a little bit.

Sarah Enni:  The main character, Rika, as you mentioned she is a little angry. She's got a little temper, an inner fire we shall say, which I related to really intensely. And over the course of therapy, as we've talked about, I think I've sort of identified that a lot of real rage for me that I have fostered since I was little, is a result of basically being told, "This is what it means to be a woman in America. And it means that you are limited and that you are less important." And it's a lot of do's, don'ts, box expectations.

And that just made me so furious. Gender norms are a real, as they say, gender is a real drag. So I've learned that that was a source of real frustration for me my whole life. And I was imagining with Rika, and with you in writing this character in this book, you have not only the gender expectations that come along with growing up in this country, but also the expectations of an Asian American woman, which are completely separate and specific within that construct as well.

Sarah Enni:  So I'm interested in what you think about that. Or, if you've identified the source of some of your own rage through writing this character?

Sarah Kuhn:  For sure, and I think probably a lot of women are having the same experience you described, like going to therapy and realizing that this rage that a lot of us carry inside is actually quite a justified response to many things. So I think something I had said about this book is that when I first started writing it, and this was another one that I wrote the proposal, we sold it on proposal. It was the outline and three chapters.

And this time we sold to my amazing editor, Jenny Bak, who is the first Asian American woman editor I've actually worked with, which is kind of amazing. I felt like she really understood the story on this sort of molecular level. And I think she also really connected to that anger, the anger in this character. And I think maybe she actually understood it a little better before I did, which happens sometimes.

But when I wrote the proposal, when I was writing those first chapters, I was like, "Okay, so obviously the arc of this is that this character needs to learn how to control herself. She needs to learn how to control that anger. She needs to learn that she doesn't need to be mad all the time, this is actually not healthy."

And as I was writing that first rest of the book, that first draft, and getting to the end I realized that this was actually a 400 page letter to myself saying, "This is actually not an inherently bad emotion. It is not an inherently bad thing to have anger, it is actually a necessary emotion. It's something that can power you. It's something that you can use for the greater good. It's something that is perhaps protecting you from being hurt, or from being harmed, or is telling you that something's wrong."

And feeling that was very powerful for me. And so the end result was I was like, "I think it's actually that she..." well, she does need to learn how to not die on every hill, which is something that a lot of us are very eager to do. But I think she needs to see that a lot of her anger, which she thinks of as this like monster that's always taking over her body. Like a lot of that anger is actually a correct response. She is not just angry... she is correct.

She is being mistreated, or her friends are being mistreated, or this is something that actually you should be angry about. That was something I really wanted to bring out because I do think that's important for young girls. And, of course, this is something that then has to be contextualized in sort of a complicated way.

Because I was remembering my own mother and how, again, we were one of the only sort of not white families in town. She was certainly one of the only Asian American faces in town. I think when they moved there, she and my dad - my dad's a big white guy - I think I remember her saying that people kept asking him like, "Oh, where did you get her? Did you bring her back from Vietnam or Korea?"

It was really messed up that that was the assumption. He was like, "What?!" But that was the environment. So a lot of times she was always trying to get me to not rage so much, especially in public. It was like, "You need to calm down, you need to breathe. You need to be very calm." And she was very firm about that.

And when I think back to that, I think it would be sort of easy to say, "Oh, she was trying to get me to behave like a classic, good Japanese girl." But no, I think she was trying to protect me. It was like, "You, specifically, with your face next to my face, cannot lose it on all these white people. You cannot let that temper go everywhere. You don't realize this cause you're a child, but you can't do that." Like, "That is going to have consequences. That is going to lead to bad things." And I don't think she was wrong about that.

So I think there's also a complicated way of thinking about this, depending on what your background is, what identity you are. Of course there is an issue of colorism. I'm a very pale person of color. So I know that for me, I could probably still get mad a little bit and not have those consequences be as big, or be as horrifying. But yeah, that's something that I have really been thinking about like, "Where did I get this idea that anger needs to be controlled? What are the situations where maybe it actually does need to be, because of these terrible external factors?"

All of those kinds of things I've been thinking about a lot. But I think ultimately with this book, when I did get to the end of this first draft, it was kind of like what we were talking about earlier, figuring out what things are about, and how we relate to them, and what our stories are actually about. I was like, "Oh, I was wrong this whole time." I was wrong about what this story was about. It was actually about this girl learning that she can make space for her anger. That it can be powerful and that it does not make her a monster.

Sarah Enni:  It does not make her monster. And it's so powerful to have a story that discusses honoring and respecting and, as you say, making space for a young woman's rage, while also saying, "You still deserve love and support, even though you feel these really strong feelings." So I was certainly pleased to see it kind of dealt with in this way. In a really powerful, nuanced way that was really refreshing. And again, for so many things in this book, I was like, "Oof!" If I had been a young, angry girl reading this book, it would have been like, "Yes, finally someone is speaking to me!"

Sarah Kuhn:  Thank you. I'm glad that that can still come true for angry, grown women like us.

Sarah Enni:  Totally, totally. Well, I always wrap up with advice. You've you have given wonderful advice all the way through here, but I guess I would just be interested in... you have a very diverse career. You write, as you said, IP and your own original works; novels, comic books, I mean, I feel like you could do anything.

I just would be interested if you have advice for a young writer who is interested in doing a lot of different mediums. What, if anything, you would tell someone like that?

Sarah Kuhn:  That's a great question. I think that, first of all, read widely. Read in all of the areas, the genres, the markets, that you are super interested in, so you know what that is. I assume if you're interested in writing those things, you are hopefully already a fan. Then just kind of stay open. We've talked a little bit about how being an author is, I mean, I guess being any kind of creative career person is kind of weird because there's not this set path of like, "You go to school. And then you go to this other school. And you get this certain degree and you do this certain internship, and then you apply for jobs." It's not really a set path like that. So I think the other thing I would say is just stay open, stay open to the possibilities.

Something someone said to me, maybe when I was starting out, was like, "It's great if you have a project that's really successful, or if your debut is like a big breakout, or any of those things. But this career is very up and down. It's very rollercoaster. Peaks and valleys happen to everyone." And so I think it's important to not put your eggs all in one basket. Like you're like, "This one book is by masterpiece and that's gonna be the only thing I write and I'm gonna make it so beautiful and perfect. And then I'm going to put every single hope and dream I had into this one book."

And, especially with books, as you know, it takes them quite a long time to come out from when you write them. So that's probably just not a good plan unless someone has given you like, I dunno, a $10 million advance or something, then maybe you can relax a little bit. Be open to what those different opportunities are, what those different avenues are. And a lot of times if you are doing that work anyway, that's when people will start to be interested.

I mean, when I got my first offer to write comics, or to pitch for comics, I had the book deal for Heroine Complex. But since books take a long time to cut out, I think we were still at least a year-and-a-half away from that first book coming out. And I had been in this mindset of like, "Well, I've really been focusing on novels, and so I have this book coming out now, so I should probably focus on that. And I do want to write comics, but you know, that's probably a few years down the road. I'll probably have to, I don't know, train and hone my skills." You know, a comics boot camp or whatever it is. A comics training montage.

But I'd always read comics. I'd always loved comics. I had a lot of friends in comics. And so one of my friends in comics, Janelle Aslan, was starting this romance comics anthology and she just emailed me out of the blue and was like, "Hey, I remember us having these great conversations about romance novels. I am doing this thing. Are you interested in pitching? Are you interested in writing comics?"

And I was like, "Actually, yes. Let me think of some pitches." And that's how that happened. And I think that happened because I had been open to those opportunities. I had been in those different communities. I had always read a lot in all of those different mediums and genres. So yeah, I think it's just the natural writer thing of being that curious person, keeping yourself open, and just not getting stuck on, like, "I need just this one thing to be the only thing." Because, for even the most starry, successful writers, they usually didn't write just one thing.

Sarah Enni:  Yeah, yes. That's not really how things happen, or at least not anymore. So I think that's such good advice. And like you're saying, I think that's a joyful way to look at it. You made these honest and genuine connections with other creative people, and then the beauty of having that network of friends is that then everyone's doing cool stuff and you can jump in and be a part of it.

Sarah Kuhn:  Well like you, Sarah, you're always doing cool stuff.

Sarah Enni:  My problem is I say yes all the time.

Sarah Kuhn:  No, I love that. I mean, I love that. Even before I was technically in YA, I always loved knowing all the YA people. We all are authors, we're all writers, even if it's different genres or markets, we're all doing the same thing. So I always love making those friendships and those connections and knowing people like you, who, it just seems like they're always doing a lot of cool stuff.

Sarah Enni:  Well same to you. It's like the Sarah hive is going strong.

Sarah Kuhn:  That's right.

Sarah Enni:  Oh my gosh. What a wonderful conversation, Sarah. I so appreciate all your time today. This was a total blast.

Sarah Kuhn:  Yes, thank you. That was really fun.

Thank you so much to Sarah. Follow her on Twitter @SarahKhun and on Instagram @SarahKhunBooks. Follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram) and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).

As I mentioned at the top of the show, leaving a rating and review on Apple podcasts is one of the best ways to support the show and help new listeners find us. I'm gonna read a recent review that was left, now.

This was left by Emily Joy Howard. Emily says, "Getting to the heart of writing. I am so grateful for Sarah's deep research and heartful questions. I've always appreciated her vulnerable approach, but was especially struck by the recent John Green interview where Sarah shared a personal connection to his work and was moved to tears. That moment, and the fact that it stayed in the final version of the show, made me think about how Sarah's brave approach makes her interviews deeper than other shows. Thank you for the gift of them. They helped me find meaning in writing on days, when that feels hard to come by."

 [Sighs] Emily, you're gonna make me get emotional about that. I am so grateful. I'm so glad that that moment connected with so many listeners. I'm really moved by everybody reaching out to me about that. That's the whole point of this show. I'm so, so grateful for all of those connections and especially that it gave you hope and made you feel more connected to your writing. That's... that's it. That's the whole raison d’état.

Thank you, Emily, leaving that review helps the show a ton and it makes me feel very happy.

First Draft is produced by me, Sarah Enni. Today's episode is produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to social media director, Jennifer and Nkosi, and transcriptionist-at -large Julie Anderson.

And as ever, thanks to you, Loorfs, Charlie querks, and hush ciscos for listening.

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