character, with a different story. From my outside perspective as a writer, I'm not interested in writing the same story over and over; but more importantly, once inside a story, I'm committed to writing what feels like the true story. Bitterblue falls in love for the first time, and that's an important experience for her. But she has a whole lot more going on than Katsa or Fire ever did. She's defining herself in terms of her relationships with the people she already loves, her relationship with the past and future, and perhaps most vitally, her relationship with her kingdom. She's the same age Katsa and Fire were, but she seems younger to me in some ways. And I do think it's relevant that romance is more complicated for a queen. Let's give her time. Helen: "Hear hear" to not replicating the same story over and over! Another aspect of Bitterblue that really intrigued me though, was the part codes and code breaking play in the story. Is this something you've always been interested in, or did you have to do a lot of research for the book -- or both? Kristin: This question gets to one of the funniest things about being a fiction writer. I enjoy the idea of ciphers as a construct in a book, but I'm not particularly interested in solving ciphers myself. I don't particularly enjoy the mental challenge of them, nor do I always understand them; often, if they show up in a book