Reading and writing questions for Nikky Lee

The award-winning Australiaborn young adult author’s latest book , The Rarkyn’s Familiar, was published as the result of a Twitter competition, PitDark, in which authors pitched manuscripts to agents and publishers over 12 hours.

What prompted you to pitch on Twitter?

The first thing I learned about publishing is it is extremely slow moving. Agents and publishers receive hundreds of submissions per day, so it can take months to get a response to a query. What appealed about using a Twitter pitching contest was the opportunity to speed up the process somewhat.

There are multiple pitching events during the year, so in between them I send out queries to agents and publishers through the usual channels and the responses would slowly trickle back in. However, the pitching events were where I had the most traction and interest from the writing and publishing community.

You write to cope with anxiety – how did it help?

My first experience of anxiety was in my early 20s in the form of panic attacks. And I had no idea what it was, which made it all the more terrifying. Unlike today, there was very little awareness about anxiety then – I ended up learning about it from Google! (Also, plugging symptoms into Google is a terrible idea, don’t do it.)

Creative writing is a very meditative process for me; it’s a way for me to unwind and process. Sometimes my anxieties unconsciously end up in what I write – and it’s not until I read it much later that I notice. Other times, it is simply a way to shut off the worry loop and escape somewhere else. It’s like sinking into a warm bath at the end of a long day. It’s my happy place.

How do you write now?

I’m definitely a night owl. Most evenings I alternate between writing at my desk and on the couch – it all depends on whether I can ignore whatever my husband is watching on TV. Most nights, I pop my headphones on, fire up a playlist to drown the TV out, and tappity-type away. Sometimes I have to negotiate typing around a cat who likes to curl up between the keyboard and me.

How did you hope to make this fantasy series different?

Probably the most notable difference is the creation of a completely new fantasy race, the rarkyn. Rather than rehashing the traditional fantasy races that I’d seen before (elves, dwarves, orcs and so on), I decided it would be more fun to make up my own! I also love reading non-human points of view. There’s something about exploring humanity from outside itself that I find fascinating. So when I came to write The Rarkyn’s Familiar, this was a must-have.

As a teenager and young adult, I’d steadily grown more exasperated with how frequently female characters were portrayed as helpless damsels in need of rescue. I decided early on that my female protagonist would not be any of those things. Her journey is also something of a mirror to my own journey with anxiety. She goes from not understanding this strange, dark power inside her, to trying to fight it off, to finally accepting that it is part of her, and in doing so, discovers that acknowledging her condition reduces its hold over her.

What are you reading right now?

I’m listening to the audiobook of Hail Mary by Andy Weir (who wrote The Martian) – it’s utterly gripping. I’m also thoroughly enjoying The Stone We¯ ta¯ , a cli-fi (climate science fiction) by Kiwi author Octavia Cade and The Eternal Machine,a steampunk, alternative history fantasy by Australian author Carol Ryles.