1–What is the title of your latest release? THE LOTUS FLOWER CHAMPION   2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book? THE LOTUS FLOWER CHAMPION, by mother-daughter authors Pintip Dunn and Love Dunn, is pitched as Squid Game meets Peter Pan with folktales from Thailand. It’s a YA fantasy thriller about a girl with OCD who is marooned with 11 other people on a remote island that looks like paradise but feels like hell, due to the machinations of a scientist desperate to unlock their latent psychic abilities.   3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place? A family vacation in beautiful Koh Samui, where the craggy islands and turquoise waters hurts the heart, and burns the skin, because we’re not meant to brush up against so much beauty.   4–Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life? 100 percent!   5–What are three words that describe your protagonist? Passionate, kind, resilient.   6–What’s something you learned while writing this book? Love writes way faster than Pintip. In their daily word sprints, she beats her mother, every time.   7–Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done? Wait until…

Instead of trying to find your perfect match in a dating app, we bring you the “Author-Reader Match” where we introduce you to authors as a reader you may fall in love with. It’s our great pleasure to present Pintip Dunn!  Writes: DATING MAKES PERFECT is an #ownvoices Thai YA rom-com that includes heartwarming family dynamics, fake dating, and an enemies-to-lovers romance. The Tech girls have never been allowed to date in high school. But when Winnie’s college-aged sisters declare that they won’t marry for 30 years –not until they’ve had lots of practice dating, their parents decide that their youngest daughter, Winnie, must date in high school in order to gain the necessary relationship skills. They’ll pick the boy and design the dates around classic rom-com movies. The only problem is… their first candidate is Winnie’s sworn enemy. About: First-generation Thai-American author seeks devoted reader who loves to laugh and swoon. From small-town Kansas to Harvard University and Yale Law School, I’ve lived in lots of places and have had many diverse experiences. Maybe that’s why I love writing within different genres of the YA category. I’m proud of my accomplishments (NYT bestselling author, two-time RITA® Award winner), but even prouder of my stories….

10. The world. The planet Dion is absolutely breathtaking! Although my characters are confined to a small piece of land protected by energy shields (the result of a terraforming experiment gone wrong), the outside planet is characterized by brilliantly colored streams of water. As Vela says, “If a nebula broke off and fell into the water, this is what it would look like.” In addition, when the rain falls on the energy shields, the water explodes into different colors depending on the weight of the drop. 9. The food. Land is scarce, so there’s not enough food to feed the colony. Enter the Aegis, who have accepted a genetic modification so that they may convert food into energy more efficiently. The nutrition is then extracted from them via a pill and distributed to the rest of the people. However, when eating becomes your duty, and you must imbibe food all day long, it is no longer pleasurable. Thus, the food preppers’ task is to produce the must luscious, mouth-watering spreads possible, in order to entice the Aegis into taking one more bite.  8. The sacrifice. An Aegis may get to experience the taste of real food, and they have the…

Kisses. Hot, steamy, sweet, funny, chaste. They come in a hundred different varieties, and I love reading about them all. Who doesn’t? (Well, my husband, for one, but I’d guess he’s in the minority in this audience!) However, as much as I enjoy reading “the kissy bits,” as a good friend of mine labels these moments, I certainly don’t write them all. That’s because I write young adult fiction, and kissing serves a different purpose here than in adult romances. In particular, kisses are an opportunity for me to take my character on an emotional journey of “firsts,” and my goal is to pull the reader along for that ride. Does that mean that kisses in YA fiction are any less swoony or emotional? I hope not! Instead, I’d argue that although kisses in YA novels have a different feel, they can be just as enjoyable. Exhibit A. Callie and Logan’s first kiss in FORGET TOMORROW, where I focus on her feelings rather than the mechanics: His lips touch mine, as light as a moth dancing on a breeze. I’m lost. In school, we learned about the butterfly effect, that something as insignificant as the flapping of insect wings could…