Princess Calla, the powerful new protagonist of Immortal Longings, heads down a rebellious path fraught with revenge, death, and blood. While fighting to right the wrongs brought on by the monarchy that destroyed her world, will love get in the way of avenging her parents and their legacy?
Bestselling YA author Chloe Gong debuts her first adult fantasy with a mesmerizing story whose title and themes are inspired, in part, by Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Here, she spills details about the new novel, her creative process, and the transition from YA to adult themes.
Audible: Immortal Longings follows protagonist Calla, a powerful young princess who’s still recovering from traumatic events. What was it like writing her story?
Chloe Gong: Calla was such a fascinating character to write because from the very beginning there’s something slightly off about her, and I loved slowly peeling back the layers to uncover to the reader exactly why that is. The “fallen princess looking to reclaim her throne” is a classic trope in fantasy, but from the very beginning Immortal Longings is about Calla wanting to take down the throne and put a complete end to the monarchy. I wanted to start from the image that she presents at first glance—strong, bitter, stubborn. Then, as the characters around her interrogate her motivations and varying situations put her into tight corners, Calla gets picked apart and asked why she’s truly trying to break her kingdom. Being able to write a character of such three-dimensionality was tremendous fun.
You create such vivid worlds and strong characters in your stories. What is your planning process like while writing?
Sooooo much outlining. I’m a very visual writer, so when I’m building the world I need to have a complete idea of what it looks like first. It’s more about atmosphere than it is about technical details, so I’ll write myself paragraphs upon paragraphs of descriptors before I actually dive into the prose of the draft. Characters, on the other hand, are a bit more grab-and-go for me. I always start with who they are at their core, throw them into their world, and see what we get from there. It’s never quick—sometimes it takes multiple drafts before I actually figure out a character!
Instead of asking “Can I be loved?,” Immortal Longings is more concerned with, “What if love isn’t enough?”
What was your favorite part of narrator Jeena Yi’s performance of Immortal Longings?
It’s surreal to hear your own words out loud. While I’m writing and editing and proofreading, I become so familiar with the book and don’t notice small details anymore, but the first time I listened to Jeena’s performance, it felt like it was an entirely new book. Of course, I still recognized the words I had put down, but she made Immortal Longings such a distinct product because of her narration. The last chapter was absolutely my favorite—her performance gave me shivers.
You’ve written fantasy stories for the YA genre; what inspired you to create a more adult-leaning story like Immortal Longings?
Becoming an adult myself. I grew up reading YA, so it felt natural to start in the YA space when I wrote my own stories. With my YA books like These Violent Delights and Foul Lady Fortune, they’re primarily concerned with matters that I thought about a lot as a teenager— Where do I belong? What will I become? Can I be loved? As I started getting older and approaching the end of college, I was maturing as a person and also maturing in the types of stories I wanted to tell. Immortal Longings carries that frantic, upsetting energy that I think every person in their early 20s is familiar with, when you’ve realized that life has no linear path and you’re entirely in charge of yourself. The book is thematically built for adults at its core. Instead of asking “Can I be loved?," Immortal Longings is more concerned with, “What if love isn’t enough?”
