How We See Ourselves
An interview with Felicia Low-Jimenez
Felicia Low-Jimenez is one half of the writing team behind the best-selling Sherlock Sam series of children’s books and the writer of the young adult fantasy comic, Tiger Girls. She is also the publisher and co-founder of Difference Engine. She has worked in bookselling and publishing for over a decade and believes stories have the power to change the world.
What we discussed
Chapter One of The Hysterical Girls of St Bernadette’s (2024) by Hanna Alkaff
Theophilus: We’ve been thinking about how writers talk about craft, in parallel with the very tangible – and magnificent – craftsmanship involved in, say, the making of antique furniture. How do you think about craft?
Felicia: It’s an interesting question for me, because I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about craft. It sounds strange, but I often take on projects because something sparks an idea, sparks a memory or a visual, or an opportunity comes up and I’ll say yes to the project. Even if I might not yet have the ability or the craft, I take it on anyway.
I’ve spent the last thirteen years co-writing a children’s book series with my partner, who’s here tonight. But the last two or three years have been really chaotic because in addition to writing that series where we’re very comfortable, and where I’d say our craft is quite known to us already, we’ve also started writing a series for an older audience. And then I started writing Tiger Girls, which is a graphic novel and webcomic. Put together, all this displacement from my comfort zone has made me think more about craft and what it takes to shift from one medium to another, one age group to another.
Right now, I’m working on a brand-new project that could potentially be young adult (YA) or adult, and shift between historical fiction, horror, fantasy and mystery, and there’s a lot I don’t know how to write. Craft becomes really important here: what I can read, who I can turn to, what I can do to get better as a writer. So it’s a really interesting time to be answering this question!
T: I do want to pick up on some of those ideas about moving between mediums and age groups. But before that, something that jumped out at me as you were describing your work was that compared to the other writers in our series so far, you’re much less solitary! You’ve collaborated with Adan [Jimenez] on the Sherlock Sam series, but also with Claire [Low], the illustrator of Tiger Girls. How does that process of collaboration differ from when you’re working on something on your own?
F: I think when you’re collaborating with someone, they do half the work! [Laughter] With graphic novels they do, like, 80% of the work. I’m missing that with my own story right now, because I have to do everything.
Adan and I are married in addition to collaborating as writers, and we had to learn to work together as two very different people. He’s from the US, so culturally, language-wise, we were very different as writers and as people. But we learnt to compromise and after a while, we also realised that because we write for kids, there’s a lot of responsibility that comes with that. A lot of people think writing for kids is the easiest thing in the world, but it’s not. Kids are brutally honest, and just don’t have the patience if your writing or your story doesn’t sit well with them. That’s something we learned together.
These days, we know our individual strengths and play to that when we’re writing. Adan’s much better at anything to do with directions, and in our latest book I wrote a story that was very location-specific – both Adan and our editor didn’t understand where anything was, like the living room, they couldn’t place it. Because I had made up an imaginary space that didn’t work in a physical space!
With Claire, it was very different. Claire is a very visual person and this meant I had to unlearn some things I learned as a prose writer. One of my favourite lines from the author Seanan McGuire is something about how one of her characters has “unfinished eyes”, which is such a beautiful metaphor for a young person. But when I told Claire this character should have unfinished eyes, she was, like, what does that even mean? She literally gave me a visual of creepy unfinished eyes, and it was just a lightbulb moment for me as a prose writer.
Every collaborative relationship, whether it’s someone you’re writing a children’s book with or an artist you’re working with, will always be new. And like marriage, if you go into it thinking that it’s going to be the same, that’s going to be problematic.
T: We were saying just before this that you actually worked on Tiger Girls as a short story first, which appeared in the anthology Fish Eats Lion Redux, and only turned into this graphic novel later on. Did you have to adapt it significantly as it took on this new form?
F: I wrote the short story ‘Tiger Girls’ sometime during the pandemic, and it was actually the start of a YA novel I wanted to write. Then I saw the open call for this speculative fiction anthology and submitted, thinking it probably wouldn’t get in but wanting to try anyway. I’d say what was published – the beginning, middle and end, and the characters – is fairly similar to the graphic novel, but the difference is that you cannot translate everything directly as it is.
I ended up writing an entirely new script for the graphic novel, and discovered in the process that I have a very bad sense of direction, and also time and space. Claire would ask, what are the different heights of important locations in the story; and in my head, everything was just flat, a flat space. I drew it out for her and she said, this doesn’t make any sense. Other things I didn’t realise: my characters like to sit and stand, and they like to stare at each other. Again, that doesn’t work in a graphic novel because all you’d have is characters going up and down, right? The other thing that I learned so much from Claire was using visual cues, like I would ask her to do a close up on this character’s face for an impactful moment, but she would suggest maybe showing the back of the character’s head, to remove her from the scene instead.
So actually, reading the short story is quite a different experience from reading the graphic novel. We also added a prequel to the original short story. And because I felt I wasn’t doing enough work, with Claire doing everything, I decided to write another short story to accompany it… Since Tiger Girls was initially a web comic, we had a lot of reader reactions before the book was published, and the runaway star of that series was actually one of our secondary characters. So I wrote this new short story from that character’s perspective.
T: What you said about writers – prose writers, at least – not having a very good sense of space certainly reminds me of putting this show together, where I thought I’d just put everything on a single shelf! Thankfully Sarah, the wonderful designer who worked on this, said, cannot lah, people need an experience. What you see is all credit to her.
It’s interesting to hear you describe your process of working with Claire, because you’ve also founded a company that publishes graphic novels, and you shepherd others through this collaborative process too. In your role as publisher and editor, how do you help this happen?
F: My role in the editorial process usually comes at the beginning, where we acquire a project for publication. Usually, I’ll be involved in the structural editing before handing it over to the project editors. I do have to say that while I have experience editing scripts for graphic novels, writing one myself was a very different experience. And I have a lot more empathy now, as well, for how much the artist has to do.
I might be writing five thousand words of a script, but the artist has to visualise how it might appear on the page. Very often in graphic novels, you use the tangible page as part of the storytelling; a page-flip can be important to the story because something is revealed. Or a close-up, or a pan-away, can be important too. And that’s something I initially didn’t understand as an editor, how difficult it would be for an artist to translate this. We usually sign projects when they are in the concept stage, so nothing is really finished yet. Then we work with the creative teams to take it from the structural editing, to the storytelling, the thumbnails, all the way until the book is published. The editorial team adjusts their style according to the creator or creative team they work with.
T: Coming back to what you mentioned about writing for different age groups, so much of your writing as well as what Difference Engine publishes is for young people, whether kids or young adults. How does your craft as a writer allow you to really get into the skin of a young person?
F: I don’t know how to answer that question, to be honest. A lot of the time, when people think about writing for a younger audience, there’s a level of condescension, especially where we are grown-ups and we think we know what young people want. When Adan and I first started writing Sherlock Sam thirteen years ago, we were much younger and we didn’t have kids – this was seen as a strike against us, wanting to be children’s book writers. We were actually given a list of do’s and don’ts. Some of the suggestions were like, “what would a young person learn after reading your story?” or “maybe you guys shouldn’t actually have a bad guy at the end, maybe the bad guy should be redeemed?” I’m happy to say that we didn’t follow any of the rules that felt uncomfortable to us.
At the same time, because we were very new children’s book writers, we didn’t fully understand the responsibility that came with writing for children. In our first book, the grandmother called the little boy “sayang”, and a mother said now my son just says “sayang” all the time, he calls everybody sayang and he learned that from your book. In another story we had a villain with goggles, which made a kid terrified when he met a man wearing goggles. So we realised that as children’s authors, we had to be really responsible, but at the same time think about what we would want to have read as kids and put that in.
Writing for a middle-grade audience is also very different from writing for a YA audience. Those are things we come to learn both by reading a lot in those age categories, and meeting people. If you write for a middle-grade audience, usually parents will be involved. And the kids in the story will have, maybe, their first burst of independence. But if you’re writing for young adults, they very likely don’t want to have much to do with their parents, and it’s all about interiority and asserting independence. These are some of the things we had to learn along the way.
T: Some of the titles Difference Engine has published – I’m thinking of To The Last Gram, which was released recently – also deal with difficult issues, right, and I imagine the question of responsibility becomes even heavier.
For those who may not have read it, To The Last Gram is a book about eating disorders and one’s body image. How did the creative team approach such challenging topics?
F: Adan is actually the editor for this project, but I’m going to steal what he’s told me as well as what I’ve learned from the creative team!
There has to be a lot of trust, firstly. To The Last Gram a book about living with an eating disorder, and doesn’t have a happy ending where you are cured from an eating disorder. We needed to navigate the responsibility of letting younger readers know that sometimes life isn’t perfect, and doesn’t end in a cure.
The story itself was based on lived experiences of different people, including the writer herself, with scenes that were really harrowing. There was a scene where cutting was involved, with a penknife, in sensitive areas, and I think Adan, together with the writer, couldn’t quite figure out if they wanted to remove it. Because we knew that if we left this scene in, the book would never be allowed in schools, right, where we wanted young people to read it. But then the artist came in, and found a metaphorical and symbolic way of depicting the intensity of the scene while keeping it… I guess, clean is not the right word, but safe enough, that young people could read it without having gatekeepers complain.
T: In your own writing, what’s the biggest challenge when you’re navigating your own projects and have to grapple with difficult questions? From a writer’s perspective rather than an editor’s?
F: I think why I gravitate towards science fiction or speculative fiction or fantasy, is because it allows me, as a writer and as a person, to tackle issues from an angle that would have been more challenging if I framed it as a conventional story. When we want to talk about serious issues, the biggest challenge is presenting it in a way that will resonate with readers, while knowing that at the same time, it will not represent everybody’s journey. So the story is unique, but universal – which is very hard to do. I think Shreya [Davies] and Vanessa [Chan] did it wonderfully with To The Last Gram, because we had people who don’t live with eating disorders, who don’t have experience with it, say that they related to it in different ways.
I wrote Tiger Girls at a moment in my life where I was angry with a lot of things I read in the news. I also heard, like, real experiences from people. We visited this literary festival in Sri Lanka where I heard about the disproportionate number of women who died during the tsunami, because culturally, women were not allowed to cut their hair – and also not allowed to learn to swim, because they did not have safe spaces where they could use swimming costumes. And that just made me so angry, but it’s also not my story to tell. I had to work out a story that could encompass so many different people’s stories, but also address my own anger. It’s something I hope I did well enough with Tiger Girls.
T: I thought this might be a good point to talk about Hanna Alkaff’s book. Some of you will know that what we’ve done with the series is not just to ask each writer what making means to them, but also, can you pick a piece of writing you think of as well-made, and we’ll talk about it.
The book that Felicia has chosen is called The Hysterical Girls of St Bernadette’s – it’s got this wonderful cover, and is by the Malaysian author Hanna Alkaff. I thought it was a good point to bring up this book because, well, it’s horror, right, but for young readers, and set in a girls’ school. All of these are fascinating, but when you bring them together, I thought the way she handled fear in this story was particularly interesting. Because what young people are afraid of is very different from what grown-ups are afraid of. Is this something that struck you as you were reading this?
F: A lot of adults read YA because while we think we’ve left our fears behind, a lot of our fears are still very similar in some ways. They might take a different from, but the root of the fear is still there – like, who am I? Do people like me? How can I fit in? Am I my job, am I more than my job?
I was actually trying to decide between Ponti by Sharlene Teo and this book, but picked this because Hanna Alkaff said something at least year’s Singapore Writers’ Festival that stuck with me, and informs how I write for kids and young people nowadays. Something along the lines of, “when we write for kids and young people, it’s not that we want to keep them away from darkness. We want to show them darkness exists, but we want to give them the skills to flick on the lights, so that they can learn how to emerge from that darkness.”
She put it a lot more eloquently than I have, but the reason why I love this book – though it’s an imperfect book in some ways, the ending felt a bit rushed – is the start of the book, the first paragraph. Obviously you didn’t go to a mission girls’ school, right, but I went to a convent school and it’s just so realistic. The heat and the humidity, the whirling fan, the tiredness and the boredom that teenage girls feel, the irritation that you have with the person sitting next to you… and then somebody starts to scream. And screams non-stop.
The other students don’t understand what’s happening, the teacher is trying to calm everyone down, and this girl won’t stop screaming. Which is really horrific, right. And at the end of the chapter, which happens in maybe five pages, you realise that there’s a whole bunch of other girls screaming in the school as well. You really want to read it to find out what happens next. I think Hanna does a really good job in allowing the fears of an adolescent to translate well to an adult reading the book.
T: You mentioned Sharlene Teo’s Ponti as well, and something that joins both books is the way they indigenise horror in a very Southeast Asian, very tropical context. And I’m just going to read the first sentence of Hanna Alkaff’s book to our audience here – just so you know how sweaty, how monsoon-like this is. “It is 12.32pm, a little more than half an hour before the school day ends, and the classroom is swampier than a sinner’s armpit in the depths of hell.” [Laughter]
So much writing for young adults, and horror, is so international – by which I mean it comes to us from the West – but Sharlene Teo and Hanna Alkaff have both made it a point to delve into our tropical context. What are your thoughts about the way they locate these stories in Southeast Asia?
F: I think it’s really important for people to see themselves in stories. Not just in the characters, but also the setting. As someone who grew up reading boarding school stories, I wanted to frolic in the snow or own a lamb… which are not things you can do in Singapore. But Hanna’s story, Sharlene’s story, Wen-yi [Lee]’s upcoming novel When They Burned The Butterfly, are all located in a familiar Southeast Asia. Even though Hanna’s book is set in Malaysia, the convent school experience is very familiar, and her using the “sinner’s armpit” as a metaphor is sacrilegious in a really wonderful way as well. It takes skill to not exoticise Southeast Asia for a western audience, and for these authors the setting becomes an integral part of their characters’ personalities. It becomes an integral part of the storytelling, not just because they want to have someone eating kaya toast in a HDB flat.
T: Let’s see if our lovely audience have any questions.
Q: My question is about the Sherlock Sam series. Your character is named Sherlock – by any chance is there a character based on Moriarty?
F: Yes, we actually do have a character known as James Mok, and he is a recurring villain, the arch-nemesis of Sherlock Sam.
T: It’s an interesting question to think about how we take such internationally known storylines and make them local. How did you decide what elements of the Sherlock story to steal or borrow, and what to leave out?
F: We knew that it had to be a boy detective who is obsessed with solving mysteries. We adapted the original Sherlock Holmes series, but along the way it also became a pastiche of… Scooby Doo? And apart from Sherlock and Watson – Watson is a robot – we had a bunch of different characters.
With James Moriarty, there’s a really famous scene where they fall off a waterfall, but we did it such that they fall into an inflatable pool. And if you knew the Sherlock Holmes story you would see that, but if you didn’t it would still be funny for kids. I don’t think we stuck too closely to the novels, but gave them attributes of the original characters while incorporating our own personalities.
T: Just to add another layer to that question. Since you worked on this for thirteen years, did your approach to telling this story change over that time?
F: Yeah, we were very new writers when we started, as I mentioned. I don’t think we’d ever thought of being children’s book writers, but when someone gives you the opportunity to get published, you say yes. We ended up learning a lot from our second editor who was a children’s book specialist. Sometimes the word choices or sentence structures you use when you write for an older or younger audience would be very different. Which doesn’t mean that you need to write down, you just need to write differently.
The other thing we learned was that when you publish children’s books, grammar is very important to educators. But characters can still sound Singaporean, and have good grammar. Some of the kids who read the Sherlock Sam stories ten years ago are now at university; I met one recently and it was the most adorable experience. But kids have changed so much in the past five or ten years that we’ve had to change how much of the character’s inner worlds we write into the story. The complexity of plot has also grown, just because kids are so exposed to different media nowadays.
Our latest book is an anthology of seven stories, and none of them are actually mysteries – we wrote sci-fi, gothic horror, magic, and that was kind of a craft experience for us as well. [Adan interjects.] Oh, there was one mystery? Sorry, I forgot about that. [Laughter] But the point is, there was room for us to grow as writers, while keeping it kid-friendly.
Q: Given that we’re here today at the intersection of contemporary art and writing, I’d just like to ask your views, perhaps facetiously, about the assertion that a picture is worth a thousand words.
F: In graphic novels, the best craft I see is where the text and the art have a really strong interplay, as opposed to stories where the text is secondary to the art or vice versa. In the comics we publish, the stories cannot be anything but a comic. And I think that shows that a comic is really well done.
Q: I don’t mean to be the irritating person who asks about AI – but I understand that in the children’s book landscape, there’s been a flood of AI-generated content, and I wonder how you think that will change the craft and the market.
F: AI is here to stay, and I think it’s very problematic. One, because there’s the theft of a lot of content – the copyright issue – and two, because there’s huge environmental cost. When you use ChatGPT, you use a lot of energy and water that is unnecessary. I think there is a lot of content being churned out using AI, not just in children’s and YA, but in nonfiction and fiction as well. I’m hearing from some regional publishers that they’re seeing a lot more content being submitted with AI.
With any new technology, we’re going to reach the stage where there is a lot of crap that’s churned out by people who think it’s easy to do. They’re basically there to sell content quick and fast. There will also be writers who do not use AI, and rely purely on their skill and craft. And there will be those who have figured out a way to incorporate not just AI, but other forms of technology into their practice. Many other interdisciplinary creators have been doing it long before AI became popular.
So I think it’s here to stay. We can’t avoid hearing about it, we can’t avoid it encroaching on our craft, but every writer has the choice and the responsibility of how we choose to interact with AI.
T: I was at a meeting yesterday where someone, contrasting AI and human workers, spoke of “artificial agents” versus “carbon-based agents” – i.e., us! So thank you, Difference Engine, for championing carbon-based writers. A last question from the floor?
Q: We’ve talked about craft a fair bit, and one question I have is about sustainability. What does that look like in the field of writing?
F: I think I would write, and be a writer, regardless of whether it’s sustainable as a career. Even if I never published another book, I wouldn’t stop writing or being a writer. The sustainability of a writing career is actually very separate from that of a publishing company – which is a whole other conversation. But we’re at a point where the world is both so big and so small, and writers are also much savvier in the business and career aspects of it, that literally the world is your readership. If you are savvy enough or good enough, if you work on your craft, you don’t have to publish in certain locations – you can publish anywhere.
Despite a lot of people saying that you’re going to be replaced by AI, attention spans are shortening, I think it is a challenge to any creator to figure out how to tell stories that are authentic and relate to readers. Instead of demanding that readers come to you, part of what you can do as a writer is think about how you can go to them. One of the things we champion at Difference Engine is an imprint called ‘DE Shorts’, which are shorter-form stories. These are meant to start conversations and fit in the small spaces of time that you have in your life. I’m very excited right now, in terms of the potential of building a career and telling stories in different forms and mediums.
T: So much of what we’ve talked about – thinking about word choices, grappling with difficult issues, putting yourself into the shoes of different audiences – is so tiring. A big part of the craft we don’t often talk about is how we can sustain ourselves to continue doing all this. What does that part of the craft look like for you, how do you keep yourself going?
F: I think I’m a very bad example of this. [Laughter] Because two or three years ago – the tenth anniversary of Sherlock Sam – Adan and I made a decision to not publish a book that year, and take a sabbatical to explore writing in other fields, maybe write a video game. I’m not quite sure how, but we started writing a new book. I started writing Tiger Girls, and now I’m writing another new book.
T: It sounds like Stockholm Syndrome! [Laughter]
F: Every writer is very different. I work a full-time job, I’m an only child, I have two ageing parents, and writing is a way of doing something that is just for me. I’m not the kind of writer who struggles to find time to write; I like writing enough to make time for it, if that makes sense. So I’m not the best person to talk to about rest, or pacing yourself. It’s something of an obsession? I have to write.
T: That was beautiful. Please join me in thanking Felicia and the team at Difference Engine.
This live conversation was recorded at the launch of the Supper House installation at Journey East, 13 Sept 2025.
