In the whimsical City of a Thousand Dolls, Miriam Forster takes us into her foreboding, beautiful Asian-inspired world populated with lush estates and girl assassins. Borrowing from the history and non-fiction she finds most fascinating, Miriam has constructed a fine novel, which she discusses here.

YOUNG ADULT: What made you decide to start writing?

Miriam Forster:  I’ve always been a storyteller. Stories tend to run on a constant loop in my head, little daydreams about movies or books I think are cool. One day I found a map generator in this computer game I was playing, and I spent hours making this amazing world with all my favorite things in it.  And I decided to write a story about it. 

YA: Tell us a little bit about your latest work. What is different about City of a Thousand Dolls?

MF: City of a Thousand Dolls is a South Asian inspired fantasy. I wanted to write a world that was grounded in the food, clothing and nature of South Asia, in the way so many western fantasies are grounded in European settings. The Bhinian Empires is a world that’s been completely cut off by magic for five hundred years, and they have a two-child limit in place and a very strict caste system.  My main character is kind of an outlier, someone with no defined place in the system yet, and this causes problems for her. 

I have this habit of killing characters when I get stuck on a plot point, so the book is murder mystery as well. And there are talking cats.

YA: Take us through a typical writing day for you.

MF: I don’t have a typical day at this point. I was working in retail for a long time, but I recently became a full time writer. I’m still trying to find my balance from the switch. But usually getting up, eating breakfast and walking to a coffee shop works best. Gets me out of the hang-out-at-home mindset. 

YA: Can you describe the path to getting this work published? What were the challenges? What was easy about it?

MF: The most challenging thing was learning to write well. City of a Thousand Dolls was the second book I ever wrote, and I restructured it and revised it numerous times in between writing other books. I also spent two years querying agents with it, which was also hard. It’s a lot of rejection to go through. But I finally found the rewrite it needed and soon after, an agent who loved it. Submitting to editors was easiest because I wasn’t doing it, my agent was. And the book sold fairly quickly, so that was really nice. 

YA: What were your specific influences for this book? Films, literature, other stories?

MF: Most of my influences are books: Agatha Christie, Mercedes Lackey, Terry Brooks, etc.  But much of the the specific inspiration for City of a Thousand Dolls came from the history and nonfiction I was reading at the time, like the history of the Indus River Valley, and some really interesting books about geishas.

YA: If you could cast the Dream Film Adaptation of your work, who would you cast?

MF: Wow, I hadn’t thought about it to be honest with you. I think it might be a hard movie to cast. But I’d love to see what they did with it!

YA: What advice would you give to young hopeful authors today?

MF: My go-to piece of advice is “Write the next book.” Don’t just get stuck on your first novel forever. And keep writing above all. You can’t be good without practice.

Nisha was abandoned at the gates of the City of a Thousand Dolls when she was just a child. Now sixteen, she lives on the grounds of the isolated estate, where orphan girls apprentice as musicians, healers, courtesans, and, if the rumors are true, assassins. Nisha makes her way as Matron’s assistant, her closest companions the mysterious cats that trail her shadow. Only when she begins a forbidden flirtation with the city’s handsome young courier does she let herself imagine a life outside the walls. Until one by one, girls around her start to die.

Before she becomes the next victim, Nisha decides to uncover the secrets that surround the girls’ deaths. But by getting involved, Nisha jeopardizes not only her own future in the City of a Thousand Dolls—but her own life.

You can find more about Miriam Forster at her website,  msforster.blogspot.com