She said, Jo was the only agent who ever gave her proper feedback on her manuscript and offered her a revise and resubmit. Naomi revealed she found her agent, Joanna Moult at Skylark Literary, through cold querying. She was bullied at school and there was nowhere she got any respite. Then she piled the stress on her: her younger brother had died – an event that tore her parents’ marriage apart and forced her dad to leave the family home, resulting in Lydia being left with her mum who was barely coping herself. Naomi explained it was through the use of a character questionnaire, she discovered Lydia had a very sad home life. It was important to Naomi her characters were authentic, and to do this she leaned heavily on her own experiences and memories of being a teenager. Her loneliness and desire to be loved drives the plot.įirst and foremost it deals with grief and the relationship between grief and technology On another level it addresses morality and humanity, and what leads us to make decisions that might be ‘bad’ but understandable, and how certain choices are defined by our humanity – or lack of.

It made sense to me that a lonely but intelligent girl would create her own AI. Soon his own desires grow to the point where Lydia must decide how far she’ll go to help him. As Henry grows in sentience, he sees how Lydia is treated and helps her exact revenge on the people who’ve been mean to her. Lydia is bullied at school and overlooked at home, and she pours all of herself into creating an AI named Henry after her dead brother. She told me she didn’t set out to write a book about artificial intelligence – the book was driven by her main character. She prefer to write first thing in the morning rather than pulling an ‘all-nighter’ as ideas percolate whilst she sleeps and when she wakes up it feels like her brain has sorted through it all, making for an easier writing session. Naomi uses this method for all her books she told me as I long as she knows the character backwards, the plot drives itself. I ended up re-drafting about seven times.” Naomi Gibson I completed this first draft in a hot and messy two weeks back in 2017. I knew Lydia inside out so when I sat down to write, the plot came naturally to me because I knew what she wanted and what she feared. Then I wrote and wrote, sometimes until three in the morning, and didn’t stop until two weeks later when I had a first draft of around 60,000 words. “The class left me so inspired I went home and I did a lot of character prep.

Every line of you by naomi gibson