Zen Cho's Blog, page 7

Like many writers, I have a day job. I’ve been asked a few times whether I’d like to write full-time or (put it another way) why I haven’t given up the job now I’ve got a book deal. The answer varies a fair bit depending on my mood and the time of day, but the three main reasons why I don’t write full-time are:

1) I’m quite risk-averse. (I’m a lawyer by day. This is very common amongst bookish Malaysians whose parents want them to be able to cari makan.) Sadly, having one book deal is no guar...

The days have been such a blur* since I arrived in Malaysia that I forgot to post about this article I wrote for Poskod.MY sempena Cooler Lumpur:

What being an alien taught me about stories

I am eight years old, a new pupil at SRJK (C) Kwang Hwa.

“This is my new friend from England,” chirps my classmate when she introduces me. I have never been to England in my life, but why should she know the difference between USA and England? Here in Penang both countries seem equally distant and unreal.

...

CYBERPUNK: MALAYSIA is out in the world! I’m really excited about this anthology and hope people will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed putting it together.

(Although I am never editing another anthology. It is TOO MUCH WORK. Hats off to the editors of the world.)

Here’s the Table of Contents:

Intro / Zen Cho
Underneath Her Tudung / Angeline Woon
Codes / Anna Tan
Personal / Sharmilla Ganesan
Attack of The Spambots / Terence Toh
ONE HUNDRED YEARS: Machine / Rafil Elyas
What the Andromaid R...

I have been meaning to write a post about this ever since I spoke with an author friend about how I got my short story collection Spirits Abroad published and realised how opaque the process is. This is an author who is way more established than me and has published a bazillion short stories, and yet I don’t think it had occurred to them to do what I’d done.

Mind you, this is because they operate in the US/UK market and I was focused on another market altogether. After I broke through the Bl...

Or, how I started writing and publishing short stories.

I’m always a little puzzled to know how to answer when people ask me how I got into writing, because there are a few different answers.

1) I started when I was 6 years old, with a 101 Dalmatians-style story featuring a plucky little girl rescuing rabbits kidnapped for their fur.

2) I started when I was 16, writing fanfic and posting chapters on a Yahoo Group.

3) I started when I was 25, writing short stories and selling them to SFF zines...

I enjoyed my brief jetlagged experience of Cooler Lumpur last year, so I’m looking forward to it this year! I may be less jetlagged — maybe. But since I’m not doing any heavy lifting this time around, maybe I’ll have the energy to actually go to the events I’m not on myself!

Here’s what I’m up to.

Everything I Know In Life I Learnt From Science Fiction
Date: 13 June 2015 (Saturday)
Time: 11.30 am – 12.30 pm
Venue: Black Box, Publika Kuala Lumpur
Speakers: Ian McDonald, James Smythe, Ian Does...

Singapore writer and bookseller Felicia Low-Jimenez kindly interviewed me for Kitaab, a website for Asian writing in English. I talked about Sorcerer to the Crown, how I’m not any of the immigrant Chang Es in The Four Generations of Chang E, how writing made me better at being a lawyer (and vice versa), and more. You can read it here:

Kitaab interview with Zen Cho: “I write stories as a way of asking questions”

New publishing journey post going up soon! I’m going to be werry organised and sch...

The time has come to give away free books!

You’ve already seen what the SORCERER TO THE CROWN galley from Ace looks like …

The back also features a familiar (in more than one sense) dragon!

All you’ve got to do to have a chance to win is log in via Rafflecopter. You have to answer a question because that’s the way Rafflecopter works. You donot have to sign up to my mailing list in order to participate, but if you do subscribe (or confirm that you are already a subscriber), that raises your...

I guess I’m getting to the stage where people look at my writing career and think, “That person must know what she’s doing”, because I am starting to get messages from people who are keen to talk to me about publishing.

I am reluctant to disillusion them. I do not like to explain that I know bupkis about publishing. To me it is a mysterious opaque world, the landscape of which is only occasionally illuminated by emails from my agent and editors, and tipsy conversations with other writers.

How...

I’m sure the title of this post is terrible for SEO (search engine minimisation??) but it is going to be a grab-bag of things I’m catching up on. If you would like to get updates on writing stuff in REAL TIME, Twitter is generally my first port of call for reporting book news (I am zenaldehyde!) and I cross-post to Facebook as well nowadays, though the posts aren’t identical because Facebook permits me to be as verbose as I naturally am. I can be found here on Facebook: my profile is public s...