Welcome to The Scroll, a new column that checks in with your favorite writers, asking them to exclusively reveal and annotate the best moments from their brand-new books. We also get them to dish on their writing process and divulge a few plot secrets along the way.
This round we chatted with SenLinYu, author of one of the most famous fan fiction stories in the world. After leaving her stamp on the internet with Manacled, the author is now taking their iconic story and truly making it her own in Alchemised. Here, they shares an exclusive excerpt and talks about their love of gothic motifs, creating their own alchemy system, and the power of coining new words.
With Alchemised, you revisited Manacled and truly reinvented its world and characters. What was that process like?
I wanted Alchemised to be something very unique and different. Even though it was drawing from this story I had written previously, I didn’t want it to feel like it was the same thing. It was a little bit like putting two puzzles together: a 5000 piece puzzle over here, and then having another 5000 piece puzzle and trying to splice them together somehow.
After the initial drafting process, it was a trilogy. I ended up condensing it down into one standalone work and writing it several times over in order to try to find which parts really spoke to this story the best. It took about two years and four full rewrites.
Given how beloved the original fanfic is, did you feel a lot of pressure?
There were definitely moments where it felt daunting. But I couldn’t make it its own story if I held on to maintaining all of these elements for sentimentality’s sake. That realization helped me feel less beholden to giving people all the same feelings they got from Manacled.
I knew there were certain fundamental plot elements that I needed to maintain for the structural integrity of the story. There were good reasons for all of those elements to be maintained and it wasn’t just like nostalgia or my own personal attachment to them. But then, at the same time, there were choices that I had to make that were really sad to cut.
But it still exists. Normally, for an author, if you have to cut a scene you’re really attached to or a character, it’s such a loss and you’re the only one who really knows that grief. With this, there isn’t that loss. This isn’t the only version they are going to have. There was a very long period from when we made the deal announcement to when Manacled went down, so readers have that previous version saved.
How did you stay inspired while writing?
I find that inspiration comes best when I give myself a really large well of information to draw from. Whereas if I feel like I only know the very like surface level, and I’m just kind of like extrapolating wildly from there, I just don’t feel very confident in what I’m writing.
I’m very drawn to the sociological elements of stories. How does society impact this character? What sort of expectations are there? What are the religious ideals that are informing this? All of those things I find are have such an interesting impact on the way that people interact, what they believe, the way they behave. So I really wanted the world building for Paladia to have a lot of those elements.
I did a lot of research on alchemy, really going far back to Greek philosophy. That kind of undergirded the initial alchemical ideas and then how those went to the Middle East and how they were reinterpreted and imported back to Europe.
So alchemy plays a major role in this book. What about the new magic system?
I tend to lean toward a hard magic system as a writer. I didn’t want to say, “They just have these powers because I wanted them to have these powers.” Helena, the protagonist, is a very scientific and academic character.
It was important to me to build a world that felt incredibly real and multifaceted in order to put the characters through these really complicated, complex, and traumatic experiences.
The book is full of gothic motifs and, of course, there’s Spirefell, the eerie castle-like setting for so much of what happens. Where did all this come from?
One of the first fiction books I picked up was The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. You open that book and the house is a character, and in my book, one of Helena’s most intense relationships is with the house itself. Environment is such a crucial element to gothic literature in particular.
Helena’s most intense relationship, aside from with Farron, is with the house itself. For so long, you see this house as this cage that she’s trapped inside of and it’s very ominous and terrifying for her. Later, when she encounters the house in the past, she sees it in a very, very different way. There is this really stark contrast because of the context in which she’s experiencing it and it very heavily informs how she perceives it all.
Gothic literature is so fun because it just leans so hard into the messiness of human relationships. It’s just so willing not to ascribe a morality to characters. People can be likable and do bad things. People can be evil and still have charisma.
The excerpt you annotate here shows how language plays such a huge role in this story, including new words you’ve created. How did you decide on these?
I wanted to avoid inventing too many words, and if I did create new ones, I made them grounded in vocabulary and etymology. I’m an audiobook listener, where I never have a glossary to look at and be like, Oh, what is this thing? I have to be able to parse it and figure it out by its context in the story. Like with “necrothrall,” there’s “necro” in “necromancy.” “Thralls” are slaves, and so I put those together. So it was very important to me to try to choose terms that were fairly obvious.
We always ask authors to pick their excerpt! Why was this one important for readers to check out before the book is released?
The story takes off once she meets Ferron, especially for the first part of this story. This is sort of like the opening scene and you’re getting a sense of where she is being kept captive. We wanted it to be something earlier on in the book that was sort of introducing the context of the world. It’s the interlude into the next section of the book.
Book cover: Art by Eva Eller; Design by Regina Flath/Del Rey.
Excerpt from ALCHEMISED by SenLinYu, Copyright © 2025 by SenLinYu. Used by permission of Del Rey, an imprint of Random House Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Alchemised, by SenLinYu will be released on September 23, 2025 from Del Rey. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:
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