And as she grew up, she had always wished that she could read about characters that sounded and looked like her having exciting and big adventures, so she created a main character with a similar background to her own. She wrote the novel for her teenage self, and included a bunch of archetypes and tropes that she loves (heists, a magical underworld, enemy soulmates, and time travel). So the first seed for the story was that feeling when some hero, maybe even an upright, good, and decent hero, ain’t necessarily on your side when they are fighting against you instead of for you. However she knows that in her own experiences, she can find herself highly aware of the few people that look like her onscreen and in books, which sometimes means being aware of folks lying dead on the ground while the camera moves away. She has a line in “Only a Monster” about how in films, the camera follows the hero after all the bad guys have been killed. She would notice that sometimes Asian characters would show up just for the fight scenes. However she did occasionally see herself represented in the ‘bad guys’ of the stories. While she was growing up, there was not a whole lot of representation of people that looked like her in the huge blockbuster action films and television series that she loved. Vanessa was originally inspired by the feeling when the hero of a story is not necessarily the hero of your story. She is a graduate of the Clarion Workshop in San Diego, and lives in Melbourne.
Since she is an educational editor, she has worked on everything from language learning programs to STEM resources, to professional learning for teachers. Vanessa Len is an Australian writer of Maltese and Chinese-Malaysian heritage.
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