Zen Cho's Blog, page 5

After spending a year and half revising Sorcerer to the Crown under, er, challenging conditions, you’d think I’d be thrilled to go on submission to publishers. But to be honest it was sort of an anticlimax!

I’d sent the latest in several versions of the manuscript to my agent and was waiting for more edit notes, when instead she emailed me saying it’d gone off to publishers. She gave me a list of the editors she’d submitted the manuscript to, and said she’d asked them to get back to her in si...

Podcasts

On Thursday I went to Broadcasting House (!) to take part in the first episode of Late Night Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4, which was on women in fandom. It was super fun — like a convention panel, only you had to keep remembering you were talking to a mainstream audience and stopping to define terms like “fanfic”. If you’re interested in listening to a lively discussion of women in SFF, the geek culture wars and fanfic tropes, you can download the podcast here:

Reclaiming the Nerdiver...

There is a certain trend within the huge volume of writing about publishing on the Internet, which I think of as being the writing advice equivalent of grimdark. The people who give grimdark writing advice point out how incredibly difficult it is to get a foothold in publishing. They explain at length how small the rewards are, how disheartening the challenges, how huge and cold and indifferent the world is when you are a writer who is just starting out — and even worse, when you are a writer...

One thing I haven’t yet mentioned in my posts about querying agents and signing with one is that my method of identifying agents to query meant I ended up with a list of agents who were almost exclusively American. I don’t really know why this happened. (I mean … apart from the American cultural hegemony … but it’s not like the British are wilting flowers either when it comes to cultural hegemony. I ought to know! Plus I actually live in Britain.) Anyway, it’s a bit odd in retrospect. If you...

It’s been a world SF-themed couple of days!

Åcon 8

Yesterday Åcon announced that I’m going to be their 2016 Guest of Honour! It is my first Guest of Honour invite ever and I’m thrilled that it’s from such a cool con. Here’s how they describe themselves on their website:

Nine Worldzzzz

On top of my three panels and a reading, I’ll now also be on Paul Cornell’s Only A Moment quiz panel on Saturday night at Nine Worlds. It’s a take-off of a well-known British radio and TV show. You’re supposed to talk for one minute on a topic given to you without hesitation, deviation or repetition. Those are my three greatest strengths in conversation! Updated full schedule here — do come and watch my inevitable downfall.

Thanks to everyone who’s ordered copies of SPIRITS ABR...

As I said in my last post in this series, once I had a complete novel manuscript I had rewritten once, line-edited and proofread, I started querying agents with it.

I’d once read a blog post by a published novelist who said that they’d queried around 40 agents before signing with one, and the process had taken 18 months. Totally arbitrarily, I decided I would only think about rehauling my manuscript and/or giving it all up and running away to the circus after I’d queried 40 agents and/or 18 m...

I am going to have copies of the super rare and totally awesome SPIRITS ABROAD and CYBERPUNK: MALAYSIA paperbacks at Nine Worlds! A few of them are already reserved:

I KNEW I was going to find a retrospective excuse for having bought these incredibly cute post-it notes at Daiso.

And here’s what CYBERPUNK: MALAYSIA looks like in the flesh. Shiny and chrome!

I’m hoping the books will be available at the Nine Worlds dealers’ room, but I don’t know yet if I’ll be able to arrange that. However, y...

In the last episode, I wrote two books and chucked them because they sucked, and then I produced a very rough first draft of a Regency romance/fantasy crossover. This, unfortunately, sucked as well. But I could see within it the bones of something that could maybe not suck, so I thought I’d see what I could do to draw that out.

I put the draft novel aside for a month to rest in its juices, and in that month I researched. When writing the first draft I’d based my conception of the world on all...

You can now request an electronic review copy of SORCERER TO THE CROWN on NetGalley!

SORCERER TO THE CROWN on NetGalley

This is the American version (though they left me my British spelling because it’s historical fiction \o/) so US and Canadian residents are preferred, but I am hearing from non-US/Canadian readers who are getting their requests approved. So you may as well try! I believe Macmillan will be getting the UK & Commonwealth version up on NetGalley soon as well.

Speaking of Macmill...