When I'm writing, I often feel as though I'm watching a movie playing out in my imagination. My fingers race across the keyboard, trying to record when I'm seeing as fast as I can , before the moment gets away. Many of my favorite scenes from the Lunar Chronicles are those that I could envision the most clearly- so vivid that at times I felt I was living them myself. I was in the ballroom, watching Cinder descend the steps in her soaking, filthy balls gown. My pulse was racing as Scarlet slipped on the roof of the speeding maglev train. My heart was breaking as Jacin risked everything to protect Winter from her murderous stepmother.

Though these scenes can be so clear in my mind, they are often the most difficult to write, as I want them to be perfect. My goal for readers to experience these moments as intensely as I do, to feel as though they are there. These becomes the scenes that I revise again and again, trying to capture them perfectly on the page. Sometimes this can be endlessly frustrating, as I continually rework every sentence, every word, every comma, hoping to land on the precise combination that will bring the scene to life.

But once the writing is finished and those frustrations are forgotten, these inevitably become my favorite scenes, These are the moments I continue to return to, on the page and in my imagination, and seeing them depicted in the artwork that follows has brought me enormous amounts of joy. These illustrations might be black-and-white as I'm writing this, but I know they won't stay that way for long.