MBR: I have been hooked onto your books ever since I stumbled upon The Taming of Mei Lin. What made you venture into the unique setting of China to base your romances on? And the Tang Dynasty in particular?

JL: I grew up watching huge epic series based on the novels of Jin Yong (Louis Cha) and they just captured my imagination. These stories were the one thing that we shared across generations in my family: My grandmother, my parents, and me, my brother, my sister and all the cousins knew these tales. I always tried to explain what they were to my non-Asian friends, even trying to show them the episodes while I translated, but it was so hard to share with them what I loved so much. When I started trying to write my first novel, I think at the heart of it I wanted to be able to share this childhood love of the martial arts epics with people who hadn’t seen them yet.

The choice of the Tang Dynasty came from another historical series that revolved around the life and reign of Empress Wu and then the sequel about her daughter, Princess Taiping. I loved everything about that series: the costumes, the high drama, the intrigue. Most of all, it was the many empowered women of the Tang Dynasty that inspired me. As I researched Chinese imperial history, the more I learned about the Tang Dynasty, the more I felt it was the perfect place for adventure and romance.

MBR: At first when I picked up The Dragon & The Pearl, I thought to myself that Li Tao’s dangerousness would be mellowed to suite the requirements of the average romance reader. But, I was pleasantly surprised and later wowed by the fact that Li Tao remained true to his persona whom we come to know of in Butterfly Swords.
How did he emerge as a character into Butterfly Swords at first? Is he based on any real life person you might know of? And what made you decide not to let him be cast as just a villain but paint him in shades of grey so that he could have his own happily ever after in the end?

JL: His character development in Butterfly Swords is an interesting one. I very loosely plot my books and the last part of Butterfly Swords indicated that Ai Li and Ryam would be captured by the villain and there would be a showdown. That was it. So as I wrote the first half of the book, I wondered to myself who was this guy? My heroine had never met him, but she hates him because she’s learned he’s a traitor. I wondered would I make him cowardly? Would he be scheming and self-centered? Would he be old and fat and gross? It’s so easy to make a villain especially nasty so everyone knows he’s supposed to lose. In romance, the villains are often greedy, vengeful and shallow. They may leer and try to force themselves on the heroine. None of that was working for me.

The hero of Butterfly Swords, Ryam, was struggling with issues of worthiness and Ai Li was struggling with issues of duty and honor. In order to give them a worthy opponent, I decided I had to make him in many ways better than they were, though still a villain. Some of my favorite wuxia characters were villains or morally complex characters so following in that tradition, I created Li Tao with actually a deep sense of honor — only it was his own. It’s so easy to see what way the heroine should go when her family is forcing her into marriage with someone’s who is truly nasty, but what if Ai Li’s adversaries were well-meaning parents and a man who was by all rights, a bigger and more magnificent figure than the one she had chosen with her heart? That would truly be a test of love and conviction.

He’s not based on any real person I know, but a lot of his stubbornness and sense of conviction reminds me of my husband. (Shh….he doesn’t know). I think all characters should be gray as that’s more realistic. I didn’t intend for Li Tao to be a hero in a sequel to near the end of the writing of Butterfly Swords. In order to truly create this villain as a compelling character in so short a time, I experimented by plotting the last part of Butterfly like the beginning of a romance–only it was the heroine meeting the villain instead of the hero. If you track the events of the end game, you’ll actually see very familiar elements: Ai Li and Li Tao meet, they fight, the sparks fly. She accuses him of being a traitor, he accuses her of being impetuous and reckless.  If she hadn’t already had her adventures and fallen in love, this could have been the beginning of a hot romance! My sister recognized it immediately and told me that  Li Tao had to be my next hero.

MBR: You have a talent for creating heroines of the most unusual calibre, who nevertheless have that inner courage and fire deep inside that makes them very worthy as heroines.