ABIGAIL HING WEN: Turning "Loveboat, Taipei" into a movie + "Kisses, Codes, & Conspiracies"

Would you leave two teenagers and a small child alone for a few days while you went on vacation?

Well, that's the start of Abigail Hing Wen's new book, "Kisses, Codes, & Conspiracies". As you can imagine, things get a little crazy from there.

Abigail Hing Wen made her San Diego Comic Con debut in 2024 to talk about her book-turned-movie "Loveboat, Taipei" and her latest YA novel, "Kisses, Codes, & Conspiracies".

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Transcript

00;00;00;02 - 00;00;18;13
Speaker 1
Hi and welcome to Literary Hype. I am Stephanie, your literary hype woman. And today's author conversation is a really fun one because not only are we talking about a book, but we are talking about a film adaptation and that is now available on Netflix after the strikes really messed things up. We can now watch this on Netflix. And so it's very exciting.

00;00;18;13 - 00;00;43;11
Speaker 1
Abigail Hanlon is the author of the Love Boat type-A Series, which the first book is now a movie, and she's got a brand new book out Kisses, Codes and Conspiracies, which is not set in that universe. So we've got a lot to talk about. So without any further ado, here's my conversation with Abigail King. When welcome to Literary Hype and welcome to your first Comic-Con.

00;00;43;11 - 00;00;47;24
Speaker 2
Thank you. I'm so excited to be here and overwhelmed. There's a million people everywhere.

00;00;47;24 - 00;00;53;26
Speaker 1
Overwhelming. Is this a very common reaction to this? If you can make it through a week of this without a mental breakdown, you're a superhero.

00;00;53;26 - 00;00;54;28
Speaker 2
I feel like I'll make it.

00;00;54;28 - 00;01;08;11
Speaker 1
I'll make OK, then you're a superhero. And there we go. So you're here for a couple of reasons. One of them being this beautiful book in your hands, kisses, codes and conspiracies. So give us a little snippet about what this book is about for those who haven't heard about it yet.

00;01;08;17 - 00;01;33;01
Speaker 2
Yeah. So it is my sophomore novel Universe. It's the first outside beloved type-A series set in Silicon Valley. Three teenagers from Palo Alto High School. They think it's going to be an ordinary week babysitting Tan's younger sister. But then his ex-girlfriend from Shanghai shows up on his doorstep with a bunch of Tang Dynasty coins in her possession that turn out to be carrying millions of dollars of cryptocurrencies and a bunch of international thugs on their heels.

00;01;33;02 - 00;01;39;00
Speaker 2
So they're chasing them all over Silicon Valley. And it turns out there's a lot more going on than meets the eye.

00;01;39;09 - 00;01;58;08
Speaker 1
Well, first off, like what parent leaves two teenagers and a small child alone for a week while they're in Hawaii? Oh, that's like that. I was like, OK, that was kind of shocking to me. But maybe I'm just I'm a sheltered high school child, but I love hearing that. You know, the.

00;01;58;08 - 00;02;14;14
Speaker 2
Thought never really occurred to me. They're 16, 17 years old, and mom and dad were like, you know, you guys are so responsible. You get along so well. Your little sister is like easy. She's five years old, and they walk to school like there's no, you know, no danger, like, no driving around and having to worry about getting an accident.

00;02;14;14 - 00;02;28;01
Speaker 2
So it was supposed to be a really low key weekend. And then Winter and her mother, her mother's widowed, so they actually rent out the back rooms of their home and they've just been living there for over a year and everything's so easy.

00;02;28;13 - 00;02;42;12
Speaker 1
So it's like that idealized world of, yeah, you can leave my two teenagers home alone for a week and nothing will happen. And then of course, shenanigans abounds. I feel like this book is a lesson on why exes are exes. And then when exes pop back up, it's trouble.

00;02;42;12 - 00;02;47;14
Speaker 2
And they should stay exes. Maybe I don't give away the ending of the love triangle. I mean.

00;02;48;17 - 00;02;59;20
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. We'll just we'll just leave that at that point. We don't want to spoil the book. I hear Marissa Mayer had a little bit of the help in the spark of this book. So how did you come up with this idea?

00;02;59;23 - 00;03;16;25
Speaker 2
Absolutely. So Marissa Mayer very kindly invited me to join her anthology Serendipity. I was just a brand new author at the time, the Love Boat type. Hey, books hit The New York Times list, but I was still a relatively unknown author, so I just felt so honored to join this anthology. And it was turning romantic tropes on their heads.

00;03;16;26 - 00;03;36;23
Speaker 2
So we had to actually pick which trope we wanted to invert. And I chose class warfare. So Tan is kind of like you know, it's a scrappy family. They're like a rags to riches family. Silicon Valley made their money in tech, but his ex-girlfriend turns out to be from a billionaire family in Shanghai. So he had no idea because she was very low key about it all as billionaires, Philby sometimes are.

00;03;37;19 - 00;03;55;01
Speaker 2
So. So that was a lot of fun where the short story was called the Adam algorithm, their dating relationship disaster and how he you know, I kind of inverted the trope of that, spoiling it and that he thinks he's the good guy because he's the underdog. He's like on the wrong side of the tracks. But actually she had a viewpoint to a legitimate one.

00;03;55;14 - 00;04;19;04
Speaker 2
So my editor, Liz, loved the story so much, especially the set up with Winter and her mom renting out the back rooms. And that being so unusual that she asked for follow a novel so we can see what happened to the characters. And she pitched to me on a babysitting story. So that's actually the genesis of this. The original title was Spring Break, which is a very boring title for what was a boring story at the time of just like they're just at home for spring break babysitting the kid.

00;04;19;27 - 00;04;32;01
Speaker 2
But I was making the movie at the time and I just had this like itch for high stakes. And so I think that's why we ended up having this thriller. And this is kind enough to let me keep the thriller story, but it really, truly is still a babysitting story at its heart.

00;04;32;06 - 00;04;45;22
Speaker 1
At its heart, yeah. And it is high stakes with all this cryptocurrency and all this chaos that these kids are found find themselves in. What kind of research did you do into the tech side of things to make this story work?

00;04;46;03 - 00;05;08;10
Speaker 2
Well, so I worked in Silicon Valley for 15 years. I actually just left my corporate job about three years ago when we greenlit the Love and Taipei movie so I knew a bit about the space. Like, I my kids, like schoolmates are mining cryptocurrencies like five, six years ago, like little kids, like eighth graders. But to make sure I kind of shored up the book, like I wrote the whole thing.

00;05;08;22 - 00;05;20;03
Speaker 2
And then I interviewed a friend, Derrick Shoes thanks and acknowledgments because he was working at Coinbase at the time and he worked in Hollywood too. So I figured he would be open to talking like story wise about cryptocurrencies. And he was fantastic. Thanks, Derrick.

00;05;20;15 - 00;05;34;20
Speaker 1
I mean, it's always good to have friends in the business that you're writing about. You can get the real side of it and not just be like, Oh, this is the nice things. And it's like, you don't get the truth of how things work. So give some more layers to the story that way.

00;05;34;21 - 00;05;36;12
Speaker 2
More layers, yeah, absolutely.

00;05;36;20 - 00;05;48;11
Speaker 1
So at the beginning of this story, Tan is like he's trying to get with winter, but she notices that he's got some gifts from the ex. Have you ever kept something well past the relationship?

00;05;49;17 - 00;06;07;16
Speaker 2
Oh, so I had to be careful not to get myself into trouble here. I actually was the officer. I gave things back and then the friends were like, Why did you give that back? I'm like, I don't want to keep it and I don't want to throw it away. So that seemed to me the logical answer. And then in case he's just kind of like, not really.

00;06;08;03 - 00;06;23;15
Speaker 2
He's not really with it. And he's not really put together. So it's not that those things that were left behind by the ex, they weren't important to him, which the ex knew. And that was part of the problem. It's just they never got around to dealing with them. I think that's also like an analogy for he never got around to dealing with his feelings for the sex.

00;06;23;15 - 00;06;42;14
Speaker 1
And you got where I was thinking and definitely the like holding on to items until you're ready to process those feelings vibes. How do you take that concept and put it into because this is a way but this is something that teens are dealing with as well as adults like how did you put this into teenage perspective?

00;06;42;17 - 00;07;05;02
Speaker 2
You know, the way I write is just like by increment. I write files like in layers. I write the first draft where I get the whole plot down and then I slowly kind of shut it until I figure out what the character arcs are. So I think it wasn't it took me a while to realize, oh, you know, like there are these things in his room and oh, winter, of course, would notice them and oh, that would actually inform like some of the reasons why she pulls away from him.

00;07;05;21 - 00;07;28;15
Speaker 2
But I think you know, those is all like young adult. A lot of it is first experiences. So your first love, your first heartbreak, your first betrayal. So that's probably how I think about it. Like, this is the first time towns had to go through a breakup with an ex and the first time he's pursuing a girl that he likes because he kind of just fell into a relationship with with Rebecca.

00;07;28;23 - 00;07;40;17
Speaker 1
Meanwhile, Rebecca is also dealing with some pretty heavy issues, including some hints at some domestic violence. Why did you want to include something so heavy in a what most would consider a rom com?

00;07;40;29 - 00;07;57;12
Speaker 2
You know, I got the same question with love vote type. Hey, because there's also some domestic violence in that one where Sophie gets hit by a guy on the boat that she's dating. And I remember being surprised at the terms like, oh, but it's not just our life. And I think I think that's what it is like. Our life is complex.

00;07;57;12 - 00;08;16;00
Speaker 2
And even though there are terrible things that happen, it doesn't mean we can't also be happy. Like, I think being the daughter of immigrants, I saw them go through so much that in some ways, like, these things are all part of the full package. Like, my uncle and aunt were kidnaped for ransom in the Philippines and my father was separated from his mother.

00;08;16;11 - 00;08;37;10
Speaker 2
At the age of 13 and actually never saw her again like he. I still remember when he when she passed away when I was seven years old, he couldn't get back because of immigration laws. And so I think like that's just a part of who I am and who a lot of people in the community are. Like we've experienced real traumas, but it doesn't keep us from like living life and having fun and falling in love and pursuing our dreams.

00;08;37;10 - 00;08;41;17
Speaker 2
And so I think that's why it's all just part of the story and part of you make up these characters.

00;08;42;04 - 00;08;44;03
Speaker 1
What do you hope readers take away from this book?

00;08;45;02 - 00;09;01;23
Speaker 2
So I one of the one of the threads that I tease out over time was Tan's story arc. So he's a genius, but he doesn't know it his because he's in a family of geniuses. His parents are cryptographer experts. His sister is a genius, and he's in Palo Alto where a lot of the kids are just really exceptional.

00;09;02;29 - 00;09;23;10
Speaker 2
So he kind of has imposter syndrome where he doesn't. And plus, he's just had like these disastrous romantic relationships. And I realized over time that's actually been my journey of having imposter syndrome and not realizing that I was capable of doing extraordinary things. So so that, I think, is just to realize, like, people like my what are we just going to sound like?

00;09;23;15 - 00;09;34;13
Speaker 2
Everyone has these unique gifts. And when you unlock them, like, you can really do amazing things. And I love it that my characters get to do extraordinary become extraordinary heroes in their own story.

00;09;34;18 - 00;09;44;14
Speaker 1
You touched on Love Boat Taipei, which is now a movie. So what was that process like for you of turning your book Baby into a movie? And it has to be an EP on it.

00;09;44;25 - 00;10;04;12
Speaker 2
Yeah, it was incredible. Like writing a book is one person with the page, and then you have your editor and your agent and that's pretty much it, and they check everything with you down to the last like comma, Oxford, comma or not. But with a movie you're seating creative control to 300 people, and in some ways no one actually has full control because everyone has to work with your creative input set.

00;10;04;12 - 00;10;29;19
Speaker 2
Everyone else is bring in the directors, take the screenwriter, the different the different kind of emphases the different actors and actresses bring to the story. And then, of course, the production designer. And so I think that was the fun of it is just getting to see what other people brought and how they took ownership and got excited and made things their own and then, of course, filming on set, we found that I had COVID in Taipei for 35 days, and that was incredible.

00;10;30;00 - 00;10;47;16
Speaker 2
Very bonding experience for me in the cast. We wandered around Taipei together. It was when the world was still lockdown and we got to be free. So I'm really thrilled to be here today with three of the cast members, Ashley Lao, who plays our main character ever, Chelsea Zhang, who plays Sophie Hart, and Janet Chang, who plays Santa Claire.

00;10;47;16 - 00;10;49;22
Speaker 2
And we're going to be on a panel on Thursday.

00;10;50;08 - 00;10;58;05
Speaker 1
Which is so exciting. So you get to do this. What was the hardest part of letting other people have creative input on your book, baby?

00;10;58;24 - 00;11;18;25
Speaker 2
Oh, gosh, good question. You know, for me, the primary concern was the authenticity of the representation because there really haven't been that many books where there's an all Asian-American young adult cast. And so I knew we'd have to have our new stars but it's also a very deeply Asian-American story of these kids who went to Taipei to reconnect with their cultural heritage.

00;11;19;20 - 00;11;41;11
Speaker 2
So those were the battles that I think I really I decided to fight like we're not filming in Korea, but we have to film in Taipei. That actually makes a difference. It's not the same country at all or like changing last names. So different ethnicities like things like that that I think are fundamental to who the characters are and like what this particular Asian-American story is about.

00;11;42;07 - 00;11;47;00
Speaker 2
But other than that, you know, I was just thrilled to have so many brilliant minds working on the project.

00;11;47;09 - 00;11;53;26
Speaker 1
You just touch on little travel. You do a lot of traveling internationally, and you post your pictures on your website. What's the favorite place you've been?

00;11;54;14 - 00;12;20;09
Speaker 2
Oh, everywhere. My gosh, I love to travel. I did spend a whole year in Vienna, Austria, with my younger kid who's a composer, so we fell in love with Vienna. It's a really cool city where the audience loves music and and that's amazing. But yeah, I've been all over Europe I've been to South Africa. I just was in Mexico and I've been to the Galapagos Islands are the most amazing ecological experience.

00;12;20;09 - 00;12;23;17
Speaker 2
And then, of course, around Asia. So I think I just love seeing all of that.

00;12;23;24 - 00;12;44;22
Speaker 1
You mentioned that you used to work in tech. Your bio says you're an eye specialist, has been a very big conversation in here at Comic-Con last year. It shut it down, basically. Well, not shut it down. Shut it down, but it really impacted things. Big conversation in Book World as well. How do you see AI playing out in the entertainment and book industry right now?

00;12;44;26 - 00;13;01;29
Speaker 2
Yeah, well, I think it's absolutely going to change things. So my biggest analogy is the iPhone. And so we no longer have portrait painters. Like I clerked for a judge who had the portrait painter who did the Clintons portrait for the White House. They that person painted her portrait and I went to her portrait hanging ceremony in the courts is really lovely.

00;13;02;09 - 00;13;26;07
Speaker 2
But we have very few portrait painters anymore. Instead, like, everyone has an iPhone and everyone can take portraits. And so we get to see the world through everyone's eyes. What is it that they find interesting? How do they position things? Where do they focus the lens? And I think the same thing is happening with the creative world. Like more people be able to express themselves in writing that may not actually have those particular skills, but they'll be able to share their ideas and share visuals the way they see it.

00;13;26;07 - 00;13;40;18
Speaker 2
It's going to bring down the cost of a lot of content creation. It already is doing that. I actually wrote a novel in 2015 about a generation, and it's only now getting published, so it's coming on in 20, 25. It's not been announced yet, but I'm really excited about. I love.

00;13;40;18 - 00;13;40;24
Speaker 1
The.

00;13;40;26 - 00;13;44;22
Speaker 2
Scoops. Well, the talk more wanted it once it is announced.

00;13;45;07 - 00;13;56;21
Speaker 1
Yes, once it's once we get to the arcs of that, I can dig into that. Then we will have another conversation. I love talking about all the books. I guess that kind of answers my next question, which was going to be What's next for you? And so that would be the next book, right?

00;13;56;21 - 00;14;05;13
Speaker 2
Yeah, so that's the next book. And I'm actually directing my first short film that is a prequel to that book. So hopefully those will come out some changes of each other and I can't wait to share it with the world.

00;14;05;27 - 00;14;09;20
Speaker 1
Very exciting to hear more about those projects. Is there anything else you wanna talk about?

00;14;09;29 - 00;14;20;02
Speaker 2
Oh gosh, I'm just so excited to be here. And thank you so much for helping to share the word on Kisses, Codes, Conspiracies. I just got the beautiful book. The back cover is gorgeous and the inside is gorgeous to.

00;14;20;24 - 00;14;25;10
Speaker 1
Be on it. So the last question we always ask, because this is literary hype. What books are you hyped about?

00;14;25;16 - 00;14;40;16
Speaker 2
Oh gosh, there are so many. But I always talk about my friend somebody here, his National Book Award winning book, All My Rage. I was actually in Vienna with her and we went around looking for it in German. So I have a German version as well as the English version. And then of course I love like my critique partners works.

00;14;40;16 - 00;14;52;09
Speaker 2
Stacey, me, Stephanie Garber's work is incredible. I Gregorio Carli Boy, Gilbert all of them helped me to get to where I am today and I'm really grateful for them and I adore all their works.

00;14;52;24 - 00;14;54;15
Speaker 1
What does the writing community mean to you?

00;14;54;29 - 00;15;13;07
Speaker 2
Oh, gosh, it's it's the reason I could keep going in the face of so many rejections. I feel like I've been rejected more than anyone in literary history, but I love it. I got rejected at version 25 and I think at that point I was just like, I don't know how to get a book through the gates. And my partners came around me, though, like, your stuff is good.

00;15;13;19 - 00;15;30;08
Speaker 2
There are weird reasons that you're not getting through the gate and they gave me good advice. They put me back on my feet, and here we are today at blah blah Taipei published version 31 and I think this one is version like 16 or so I have to go back and check, but I'm definitely getting a little bit better, but not that much.

00;15;30;08 - 00;15;31;16
Speaker 2
16. So a lot of drafts.

00;15;32;08 - 00;15;36;04
Speaker 1
I don't feel like it's that many more than normal for a lot of people.

00;15;36;14 - 00;15;40;26
Speaker 2
Because, you know, I have no point of reference. It feels like some people just write and they're done.

00;15;41;29 - 00;15;44;25
Speaker 1
It's not always the case. You're fine, everything is fine.

00;15;44;26 - 00;15;46;10
Speaker 2
Oh, good to know but thank.

00;15;46;10 - 00;15;50;22
Speaker 1
You so much for taking time to talk literary hype about this global conspiracy. I love typos.

00;15;50;24 - 00;15;53;00
Speaker 2
Oh, thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.

00;15;56;10 - 00;16;21;11
Speaker 1
Thanks again to Abigail for taking time out of her San Diego Comic-Con schedule to talk to me about kisses, codes and conspiracies and Love Boat Taipei. This was such a great way to start off the Comic-Con week. This was literally the first thing I did after getting to San Diego. If you're interested in getting a hold of courses in codes and conspiracies or Love Boat Taipei or any of Abigail's books, the links to do so are in the show notes for you.

00;16;21;23 - 00;16;32;05
Speaker 1
If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to subscribe to the Literary Hype podcast. Give us stars and share it with a friend. Thanks so much for listening to the Literary Hype podcast.