When he started writing ManacledSenLinYu (34 years old)—who uses the pronoun elle—dedicated herself full time to her two young children and felt that her life was going away. “I was losing myself.” After putting it off again and again because she didn’t feel ready, she launched her first book project, taking notes on her phone while her son slept. The result was a love story between Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy, characters from Harry Potterwhich he mixed with The Handmaid’s Tale. What in the digital age is called fanfica fan-created fictional story based on an existing work.
Three years later, SenLinYu is at the Vincci Capitol Hotel in Madrid, on the eve of a meeting with the readers of his new hit, Alchemised. It turns out that after the triumph of Dramione, As they called the couple of magicians, the publishers contacted them to publish the story. The only condition was that he remove all traces of the characters and narratives from which he was inspired. Converting one book into another took him the same 18 months as writing his first work. The most difficult thing about this metamorphosis was detaching itself from its first creation. “I was very tied to the story. I didn’t want to lose certain parts, but I had to prioritize the heart of the story. I couldn’t anchor myself to the feeling that people would miss something, I had to focus on telling the story in the best way possible.”
Thus was born his first publication in the traditional publishing world, which reached 300,000 copies sold in one week. Legendary Entertainment has confirmed that it bought the adaptation rights to bring the story to the big screen for three million dollars, a record for this type of book. On Goodreads, where it has 123,395 reviews with an average of 4.48 stars, it was crowned readers’ favorite debut novel of 2025.
It’s not a love story. Although it was born from the initial story between Hermione and Draco, Alchemised It does not belong to the romantic genre. “I didn’t write this book with the idea of it being seen as something aspirational,” SenLinYu emphasizes. Although he does not deny that there is romance and that it is an important part of the story, he defends that it is not there to be read as an idealistic version of love. “For me it is a human story.” It’s a medley of genres. It has its historical touch, also fantasy, science fiction, magic. “I don’t like that it is classified as a romance in itself because it doesn’t meet the requirements to be one.”
Before devoting herself to writing, she did not have a specific professional occupation, but rather did whatever arose until pregnancy and parenting arrived. She never decided what to study and, when her first child arrived, she simply postponed the decision without suspecting what would happen: “I had no idea that I would become a writer.” But the stories had always been in his head; He imagined them while he walked, he narrated them to himself, and when it was time to sleep, he visualized them.
Archive of Our Own, a digital platform for uploading writings, was the first showcase for his texts with an audience that was growing by leaps and bounds. “People said, ‘I love it, I liked it, I wonder what will happen.’ There was a little bit of feedback“But this feedback did not condition the story of Dramione, but rather it helped him to know if they were understanding what he wanted to say. Even at the beginning there were many negative opinions that threatened to not continue reading the story because it did not write what they expected. “I had a very clear vision for the story and those opinions did not influence me in any way. If you want a different story, look for it somewhere else, but this is mine.” Still, there was some feedback she did hear, from some online readers she befriended, who did understand the purpose and helped by reading the drafts before publication.
The entire writing process Alchemised It was while there were—and are—two great wars in the world. “There was a lot going on and the book is also about me processing patterns I see in recent history.” Violence, torture, human experimentation, medical torture, eugenics, cannibalism, necrophilia… The second book—1,030 pages—has 12 content alerts for scenes of violence, cannibalism… It turned out to be a dark and complex universe where SenLinYu narrated a part of his own story. “In the United States there is an idea about World War II where they see the military as something good, as saviors. But I am half Japanese and my grandmother and her family, when she was 16, were in concentration camps.”
The belief in America as heroes, he says, is untouchable and indisputable: “They don’t like to admit that there was racism.” SenLinYu grew up in a family that did not teach him the Japanese language or culture because they wanted to go unnoticed. “When I grew up, people saw me as an Asian person, because of my appearance, but I had this huge cultural disconnect. They wanted to erase my identity so that I was totally American.” She dedicated part of her time to studying “the Eastern Front” of history, where she read about Soviet women, other experiences and narratives of the war, and the desire to recover these ignored experiences was born.
He is not comfortable with the idea that people are bad and that because you are good, you will not do those atrocities. He believes that it is important to talk about the issue, to question why those limits are crossed: “We like to believe that we are good, but that prevents us from doing certain preventive work to prevent other people from taking that path,” he reflects. “That makes us much more blind to the damage we can do to someone.” In his experience, the writing process is about unraveling a tangle of complicated, head-spinning moral and ethical questions that have many nuances.
Although the more than a thousand pages of his book are dense, violent and dark, he acknowledges that creating and developing this world has not affected him personally: “I am not a super-emotional person. But when I write, in a strange way, that is when I feel the most emotions. It is cathartic for me to write about these topics, because it becomes a place where I can put all these negative emotions.” In addition to its role as an emotional repository, the story has two objectives: to denounce and draw attention to the horrible things happening in the world, but also to give readers what they wanted. “I feel like in literature and especially in modern fantasy, in movies and even in the news, we have a strange treatment of war as a kind of spectacle and I wanted to create a story that was a reminder of how horrible it is.” There are many people who will not be interested in reading non-fiction books, he believes, so he takes on the task of taking the complaint to the world of fiction. “We need to have that reminder in other spaces.”