Category Archives: Writing

Hi I’m a major fan of your book elsewhere (it made me want to be a writer from a young age) and I only just found out you had loads of social media pages (from wordpress- ahaha). I was just wondering if you had any advice for want-to-be-writers? Thank you for writing such awesome books that have really changed me :)

Thank you! I don’t know that I have much advice beyond the usual: read a lot; write a lot, etc. The one other thing I might mention is that one should never be afraid NOT TO WRITE. Thinking — about books, about your goals for your writing, about the kind of story you’d like to tell and the way you’d like to tell it — is for me at least an important part of the process.

On Strong Female Characters

There’s a lot of noise about strong female characters. Here’s one in the flesh. 

In the key moment of the interview, Stewart asked her how she reacted when she learned that the Taliban wanted her dead. Her answer was absolutely remarkable:

I started thinking about that, and I used to think that the Talib would come, and he would just kill me. But then I said, ‘If he comes, what would you do Malala?’ then I would reply to myself, ‘Malala, just take a shoe and hit him.’  But then I said, ‘If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others with cruelty and that much harshly, you must fight others but through peace and through dialogue and through education.’ Then I said I will tell him how important education is and that ‘I even want education for your children as well.’ And I will tell him, ‘That’s what I want to tell you, now do what you want.’


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/malala-yousafzai-left-jon-stewart-speechless-2013-10#ixzz2hLZlDacm

For those of you who have been asking why the title of the third book changed

Jen:
I’m so excited (and a little sad) that In the Age of Love and Chocolate, the final book in your fantastic Birthright trilogy, is coming out in October 2013. Did the book have a title change, because I’ve also seen it listed as In the Days of Death and Chocolate.

Gabrielle: 
Thank you, and I’m so glad you like the series. The truth about the title change is that I wrote two entirely different books for the last book. The first time I wrote the book it was called In the Days of Death and Chocolate. That version was pretty deep into the publishing process when I began to have a recurring, waking dream about Anya Balanchine. I kept having this fear that I would run into her and that she was mad at me. At first I tried to ignore her, but after a while, I couldn’t. I was at a party, and I actually thought I saw her across the room! That was a Saturday. On Sunday, I called my editor and I might have cried a little bit and I asked her if I could write the book again. She said yes, and now Anya Balanchine isn’t angry with me anymore. 

Read the rest of the interview and enter to win signed hardcovers of the first two books over at YA Romantics.