Zen Cho's Blog, page 9

I’ve set up a Pinterest board for Sorcerer to the Crown! I don’t think of myself as a visual thinker, so never thought I’d have much use for a Pinterest board (except for keeping track of food — I admit I have a secret Pinterest account, the password for which I have forgotten, which is 70% green tea baking recipes and 30% black sesame baking recipes).

But all the cool kids seemed to be doing inspiration boards for their books, so I started one up too. And I have to say, it doesn’t come natur...

Sofia Samatar interviewed me and Crawford Award co-winner Stephanie Feldman about fantasy, family, history and diaspora over at Electric Lit. We did the interview in a Google Doc, and it was really interesting to me how Stephanie’s answers and mine reflected each other, often unintentionally. Here’s an extract!

Samatar: Spirits Abroad and The Angel of Losses are such different books: Spirits is a short story collection, Angel a novel; Spirits uses quite a bit of humor, while Angel is written...

Ahhh, I am so excited about this book! Aliette de Bodard unveiled the US cover for her post-war Paris urban fantasy THE HOUSE OF SHATTERED WINGS today:

The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard – US cover

It’s so pretty *_____*

THE HOUSE OF SHATTERED WINGS is a murder mystery set in a Paris reeling from the impact of a war in Heaven, featuring (in the author’s words) Fallen angels, Vietnamese dragons and entirely too many dead bodies.

The cover is just how I imagine the book, and the...

We knew it was coming, but it was still a shock to read that Terry Pratchett died yesterday.

Pratchett’s work had a huge impact on me, as it did for a lot of people. My Twitter feed has been full of writers, editors and readers attesting to that fact. I was thinking about this, and as I thought about PTerry, the characters he created and imbued with such extraordinary life came to mind as well – it felt like I was remembering a group of friends, of people I had once known in real life. Vimes,...

I have been quietly bashingouta (veryfirst draftish) first draft of the second book in the SORCERER ROYALtrilogy, but have put it aside brieflyto work oncopy-edits toSORCERER TO THE CROWN, which came in last week. It’s early days yet, butthe bookfeels realer and realer!

We’re starting to get a couple of sightings in the wild. Earlier this week SORCERER TO THE CROWN showed up on the Barnes & Noble SFF Blog in a list of 5 Awesome Alternate Earth Stories Coming in 2015. And blurbs have been comin...

I’ve stolen the headline of the Locus piece for this post because it makes me feel so weird and official. I am the Cho that has won the Crawford Award! It’s for Spirits Abroad, tied with Stephanie Feldman for her novel The Angel of Losses. (Which sounds super cool, and I can think of several people on my friends list who might be interested in it. If they haven’t already read it!)

I’m unbelievably chuffed to be in a list of winners including Karen Lord, Sofia Samatar and Chitra Banerjee Divaka...

An Alphabet of Embers

Editor Rose Lemberg has published the Table of Contents for An Alphabet of Embers! An Alphabet of Embers is an anthology of lyrical/surreal speculative flash fiction, poetry and unclassifiables. I’m delighted to be in the ToC with the first short I have completed in a while, Everything Under One Roof. And I’m absolutely thrilled that the multi-talented writer and artist M Sereno, who did the cover for the Spirits Abroad ebook, will be illustrating the anthology.

Sightings...

I had a really interesting (and long!) email exchange with Daphne Lee of local, a reviews/opinion site focusing on Malaysian and Southeast Asian literature. We talked about writing fantasy, finding a voice in which to write Malaysian stories, how your reading influences your writing, Western/Malaysian publishing, and a bunch of other things. Read the interview at the link below!

Q&A: Zen Cho

A couple of other small updates:

There are 12 whole copies of SPIRITS ABROAD in stock at Amazon! Small vi...

I tell a lie. My agent Caitlin Blasdell sold my book to Ace/Roc Books in the US, and they sold it to Pan Macmillan/Tor in the UK. I didn’t do any selling myself, just fingernail-biting and jumping around in excitement. The book’s called SORCERER TO THE CROWN, and I’m to write two more in the same world.

The book

SORCERER TO THE CROWN is set in London in the early 1800s and it’s about Zacharias Wythe, England’s first black Sorcerer Royal. (As in, he’s a black guy. Not as in black magic. Zacharia...

If you liked Likhain‘s cover for the SPIRITS ABROAD ebook, you can now download it as a desktop wallpaper at her website:

We Are Forests — downloadable wallpapers

I’ve got it on my desktop now and I gotta say, it’s pretty intense. I like to think that unflinching gaze is keeping me honest.

And the SPIRITS ABROAD paperback is now available at Big Green Bookshop, a friendly North London indie bookshop. I met Simon at Loncon, where Big Green had a stall in the dealer’s room where they’d sell any ra...