Crier's War Blog Tour!

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**This post is sponsored by Glasstown Entertainment for the release of Crier's War by Nina Varela**

Crier's War is described (and I would very much agree!) as an "own voices, richly imagined epic fantasy duology about an impossible love between two girls - one human, one Made - whose romance could be the beginning of a revolution."

 I had the opportunity to interview Nina about Crier's War, and I'm so excited to share it with you all! 
  1. How would you pitch/describe Crier’s War using only pop culture references (ex: Gilmore Girls meets Pretty Little Liars)? 
THE HANDMAIDEN meets THE IRON GIANT. Just kidding. Maybe THE HANDMAIDEN meets WESTWORLD? CRIER’S WAR lives at the intersection of WALL-E and every Hayley Kiyoko music video. 
  1. In addition to being a novelist, you are also a screenwriter! Has your experience writing scripts influenced the format of your novels?
It’s definitely helped me with plotting. Screenwriting is all about structure, the bare bones of the story—you’re working with a very limited page count, everything is either dialogue or efficiently written action/visual cues, you don’t have the room to get lost in lyrical prose for six pages and you can’t do internal monologue without, like, a voiceover. It’s a very external kind of writing, and it didn’t come naturally to me at first. (I didn’t have any screenwriting experience—like many other non-Los Angeleno classmates, the first screenwriting I ever did was for the film school application.) It was a learning curve. My strength was always in imagery, sentences that sound pretty; it didn’t translate into good screenwriting. I had to throw all the shiny decorative stuff away and focus on outlining, structuring, making sure every single scene feels important and necessary, and it made me a much better writer.
  1. In Crier’s War, the automae were basically once playthings for humans, until the rose up and took over. Did you take any inspiration from the way technology and AI are evolving in the world right now?
Sort of, although I think the current paranoia re: AI is more about how our phones and all other electronic devices are spying on us and listening in to our conversations and using it to plant targeted ads on Instagram. It’s about the collection and storage of information; it’s about the sheer volume of information we’re all broadcasting into cyberspace or the Cloud or whatever the kids are calling it these days and how easily it could be used against us. The Big Brother paranoia isn’t a thing in CRIER’S WAR—the fear is much more “We created something stronger and faster and smarter than us and somehow we didn’t think it would turn on us.” In the real world we’re not quite there yet, but we do keep messing around with Sophia the Brilliant Sassy Robot, so, you know. Maybe it’s only a matter of time. 
  1. Crier’s War is a #OwnVoices novel with excellent LGBTQIAE+ representation. In what way do your characters, or even the world they inhabit, represent your own experiences?
I think it’s a lot of the quiet things. There’s no homophobia in CRIER’S WAR, which tragically does not represent my own experiences, but anything blooming between Crier and Ayla is still strictly forbidden. So there’s a lot of just quiet yearning, quiet admiration of another person, looking when you know you’re not supposed to look. That longing kept close to the heart. 
  1. What would be your dream cast for a Crier’s War movie? 
Ooh... Honestly, my dream is always just as-yet-undiscovered actors, because I think it would be cool to bring in some new faces, but other than that: Janelle Monáe as... I don’t know, I’d write a whole new role for her. She’s the queen of sapphic androids, the original Electric Lady, she’s gotta be in there somewhere. 

Thank you so much for having me!

 Thank you so much to Nina Varela for stopping by The Feminist Bookworm for the Crier's War blog tour!

XOXO,

 Isabella

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