If you do art history at all, the Korean art form you’re most likely to have heard of is its pottery. One of the side-effects of the Imjin War (1592-1598), in which Japan invaded Korea but was ultimately repulsed, was that the Japanese invaders admired Korean pottery tremendously. The other thing that I drew on is my knowledge of Korea’s history with imperialism and invasion. That gave me the idea for the magical paints that are a part of the worldbuilding. In my Crayola days, I never thought of colors like Pink or Ultramarine as being finite, but when you’re talking something like watercolor as opposed to digital painting, those paint pigments are chemical substances, and there is no such thing as an infinite supply of any substance. I think you can still find tubes of the stuff on eBay but they run like $100 if not more (and you can’t have my stash because I will defend it to the death). This was all fine and dandy until the supply literally ran out. The paint manufacturer Daniel Smith bought up the world supply and put them in their watercolors.

It was originally manufactured for car paint until, I guess, gold-colored cars went out of fashion. I first got the idea when I took up watercolor and became fascinated by the story of a pigment called PO49, or Quinacridone Gold, which is this beautiful orange-gold color. Where did you get the original idea for Phoenix Extravagant? The setting is loosely based on Korea during the Japanese occupation (1910-1945). When they’re recruited to help build the conquerors’ war machines - including a mechanical dragon - they discover a secret that convinces them to take a stand against the conquerors and steal the dragon. Phoenix Extravagant is about the journey of Jebi, an ordinary artist who’s just trying to get by in their conquered homeland.

To start, what is Phoenix Extravagant about, and what kind of world does it take place in? Not a painting, not his cat getting into his paints, but an actual paint.

And while that’s what writer Yoon Ha Lee did in the following email interview about his silkpunk historical fantasy novel Phoenix Extravagant (which is now available in paperback a year after being released in hardcover, Kindle, and audiobook), the real life something he cited was a paint. When asked the inevitable “where did you get the idea for this story” question, writers will often cite something that happened in their real lives.

Phoenix extravagant