THE WD INTERVIEW Cassandra Clare

Cassandra Clare wrote her first published novel in a closet. That is, in one of those “cozy” New York City spaces, wherein the bed doubles as an office chair and the desk looks suspiciously like a windowsill. At the time, she worked the night shift as a copy editor for the National Enquirer, spending daylight hours in her cramped apartment, cranking out chapters, researching agents, writing queries, reworking her manuscript and, eventually, signing a contract for publication of the soon-to-be New York Times bestselling YA novel City of Bones.

That book would prove to be the first of several bestsellers in a multi-series collection of 12 novels (and counting)—plus several short story anthologies—known as the Shadowhunter Chronicles: tales from an urban fantasy world brimming with angels, demons, warlocks, vampires and faeries, plus the enemies and allies thereof. Of those, perhaps the best-known series within the broader universe is The Mortal Instruments sextet. Clare’s follow up, the Infernal Devices prequel trilogy, harks back to the Victorian Era, and the December 2018 release of Queen of Air and Darkness completes The Dark Artifices, a sequel trilogy to Mortal Instruments. Fans of Clare can expect to further explore the Shadowhunter universe in a new trilogy, The Eldest Curses, the first of which will be released in Spring 2019.

Despite her early successes, it wasn’t until the stellar release of her book that the YA superstar was finally able to ditch her tabloid gig and embrace