Zen Cho

The Alchemy Press Book of Urban Mythic contributors line-up is out — in alphabetical order for now, though I gather this isn’t the final sequence!

James Brogden – The Smith of Hockley
Joyce Chng – Dragonform Witch
Zen Cho – Fish Bowl
Graham Edwards – A Night to Forget
Jaine Fenn – Not the Territory
Christopher Golden – Under Cover of Night
Kate Griffin – An Inspector Calls
Alison Littlewood – The Song of the City
Anne Nicholls – The Seeds of a Pomegranate
Jonathan Oliver – White Horse
Mike Resnick – Wizard of 34th street
Gaie Sebold – Underground
Adrian Tchaikovsky – Family Business
Ian Whates – Default Reactions

\o/

Coffeeandink very kindly sent me the link to this nice review of The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo by Aishwarya Subramaniam, and I wanted to say something about it. A bit awkward linking to reviews of your own things, but I wanted to flag it because it is such an enormous pleasure to — um — it is going to sound pompous to say “find readers who get what I am trying to do”, but I can’t think of a better way of saying it. It’s not like Jade is very hard to get like that, that’s not what I mean. It’s just that it’s nice when people who know and love exactly the sources you’re riffing off of — and who have similarly conflicted feelings about those sources — think you pulled it off.

For many of us who grew up on a steady diet of very light ‘English’ fluff, the lack of non-white people is something we very carefully do not think about — I’d rather not know what P.G. Wodehouse or Georgette Heyer would make of someone like me. But with this novella, Cho writes us into the period in ways that are politically astute, affirmative, and above all joyous.

*fists of determination* I shall keep trying my best!

I sold a couple of short stories!

Balik Kampung will be appearing in Solaris Books’ End of the Road, edited by Jonathan Oliver. It’s a New Weird road trip anthology, and (I gather from Twitter) will feature stories by Lavie Tidhar, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Benjanun Sriduangkaew, among others. My story is about a ghost who, while heading home during the Hungry Ghost Festival, a) discovers things she didn’t know about her life, and b) eats Kampar curry chicken bread.

(I haven’t had Kampar curry chicken bread — I put it in just because it sounded intriguing. Nice ah?)

And The Fish Bowl will be in The Alchemy Press Book of  Urban Mythic, edited by Jan Edwards and Jenny Barber — an urban fantasy anthology “blending modern life with the traditions of folklore from around the world”. The Fish Bowl is a grim story about maths tuition and being sixteen.

I think both anthologies are due out in autumn 2013. I will post when they are available for purchase!

Just a brief note that my historical romance novella The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo is now available again on my website, and can be read for free online at the following link: The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo. I private-locked the posts on my website and took the ebook off Smashwords while Jade was enrolled in the KDP Select programme (I enrolled it so I could make it free on Amazon, as I explained in this post).

I have no complaint with KDP Select in respect of sales (one person borrowed the ebook! That was exciting). But it was always my intention that the story should be free to read online as well as available for purchase as an ebook, and the KDP Select terms don’t allow for that. Also I am opposed to monopolies and like myself to be able to buy EPUBs of ebooks I want to read, so here we are again.

My flashfic Jebat Dies (or its secret fanfic title Three Ways Hang Jebat Died, And One Way He Didn’t) is in the April issue of Esquire Malaysia, available at all good newsstands near you.* Concrete evidence kindly provided by Amir Muhammad and reproduced below.

The art is so cute, right? Macam Thundercats aje. The story is mostly not SF, but consists of four scenarios:

• Hang Jebat’s actual, Zaman Kegemilangan Kesultanan Melayu Melaka, mengamuk-and-then-kena-executed-by-Tuah death
• Jebat and Tuah are gamer geeks who are members of the same of RPG guild
• Jebat and Tuah are actors in a modern film adaptation of Hang Tuah
• Jebat and Tuah are space academy alumni who are officers in a thinly-disguised version of Starfleet

*If you are located in a part of Malaysia where English-language magazines are widely available.

ETA: If you aren’t so located that you’re able to pick up a copy of Esquire Malaysia from your local newsstand, it appears you can buy a digital copy of the issue online at Pocketmags, iTunes or direct from Mongoose Publishing. It looks like you’d be getting it as a mobile app.

I have just emerged from a 13-hour flight into a brilliantly cold Easter Sunday morning — and the public announcement of this year’s Hugo and Campbell award nominations. So, um, I’ve been nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer! The other nominees are:

Max Gladstone
Mur Lafferty
Stina Leicht
Chuck Wendig

I am terrifically pleased and honoured to be part of this list, and to be part of a longer list of past nominees which includes (to mention only names from recent years) Naomi Novik, Aliette de Bodard, Tony Pi and Karen Lord. Among others! (Jo Walton is, of course, also a prevous winner ….)

But more than anything else I value the nomination for what it implies — i.e. that a number of people valued my work enough to put me on their ballot. I’m pretty sure I know who some of you are! Thank you for that, and thanks to everyone who recommended my stories and linked to my awards eligibility post. I feel very undeserving, but will do my best to produce good work and retrospectively justify the nomination!

I’m also gonna hazard a guess that I’m the first Malaysian to have been nominated for the Campbell (though I’d be delighted to be contradicted, haha). That’s pretty cool! TBH though it was only officially announced yesterday I have been telling friends and family since I found out a week ago, because, as I said to my BFF Max, never mind six degrees of separation, it would take like twenty degrees before anybody I knew IRL would link through to somebody who actually knew or cared what the Campbell Award was. (It is a bit difficult to explain to people whose primary association with “Campbell” is likely to be soup. I start by saying, “Do you know what the Hugos are? Well, it’s not a Hugo! ”, but my loved ones seem to find this singularly unenlightening.)

***

On another pleasing note, I am informed that I should have a short story in the April “Brilliant Malaysians” issue of Esquire Malaysia! If I sound uncertain about this point, it is because I am: I do not even know what Esquire ended up calling the story (I offered a couple of different titles, since the original — “The Many Deaths of Hang Jebat” — was too long).

It is basically a “Four Ways Hang Jebat Died, And One Way He Didn’t” story (see this Fanlore entry about Five Things for background regarding the format). Except I had to cut one of the ways Jebat died because, again, it was too long! So it’s more of a Four Things story.

Anyway, Hang Tuah fanfic is the best. You should buy Esquire Malaysia and let me know if the story IS in the magazine, and if so whether I should have included the “Tuah and the Hangs are a time-travelling boyband” scenario. (I suspect the answer to the second question is yes. You can never go wrong with a story that posits Tuah as the floppy-haired caramel-voiced lead singer of a boyband.)

ETA: Confirmation! The story is in Esquire under the name JEBAT DIES: see pictorial evidence.

A reprint of my story The Four Generations of Chang E will be in Alex Dally MacFarlane’s anthology Aliens: Recent Encounters, due out in June from Prime Books. Am impressed by the august company my wayward immigrant Chang E will be keeping! I know Alex is actively engaged in seeking out and promoting science fictional perspectives from people other than white dudes (though there are also stories by white dudes in the anthology, just in case you were worried!). If that is something you are also interested in, do check out the anthology.

I am populating my Google Reader with blogs so I can check it when I am bored e.g. at a bus stop or something. Do YOU have a blog I can subscribe to on Google Reader? If not, do you have favourite blogs you would like to recommend? Here are things I like reading about:

• Food
• Stories
• Clothes
• Women
• Asian … stuff

The tone I like best in blogging is one that is friendly, personal, funny and not always to the point.

Pls have at it!

Aliette de Bodard’s kind inclusion of me in her awards eligibility post reminded me that I should probably make one myself. It will not be as generous as Aliette’s because I’m not very good at keeping up with new stuff in sff — for the past two weeks I have been sailing along blissfully in the lovely Surprise, troubled only by Stephen’s laudanum habit — but I do recommend having a look at her post because she has lots of interesting recommendations.

Published short stories this year were:

The First Witch of Damansara in Bloody Fabulous, ed. Ekaterina Sedia, Prime Books (October 2012). 6,100 words.

The Earth Spirit’s Favourite Anecdote in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #54 (Table of Contents and link to purchase — you’ve got to scroll a fair way down) (May 2012). 5,500 words.

I’m also in my second year of eligibility for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, as Aliette observes.

I’m happy to provide copies of these stories for anyone who’d like to read them for awards-related purposes — just comment with your email address, or drop me a line via the contact form.

I haven’t been keeping too close an eye on the sales figures for The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo ebook, but fairly recently I ventured into the jungle of Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing earnings reports and was intrigued by what I discovered.

As you probably noticed if you were reading my blog then, I self-published Jade as an ebook at the end of May this year and also published the novella for free as a web serial on this very blog, posting a new section a day for 20 days. Even though all the content was free on my blog, I set a price on the ebook of US$0.99 — I figured the different, more portable ebook form was worth something even if its innards were on display for all to see in blog posts.

What I thought would happen

What I figured would happen was that people would buy the ebook within the first week of publication — mostly my friends, and perhaps some people who didn’t know me personally but had read and liked my short stories. Sales might continue as long as I was posting new sections and tweeting about them, since that might draw more attention, and then sales would tail off and eventually peter out.

What actually happened

Contrary to my expectations, my sales haven’t yet died a natural death, and they haven’t been decreasing steadily as I expected. Sales went down after the first two months of publication — but then they went up again, to my great surprise. Apart from the first couple of months (when I sold about 60 copies), I’ve been selling about 20 copies per month, with the ratio being about 15 on Amazon and <5 on Smashwords per month.

I’ve now sold 140 copies in total — 47 via Smashwords (through which ebooks are available on Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc.), the remaining via Amazon. Now 140 is obviously rather a small number, but given that Booker shortlisted author Tan Twan Eng’s Garden of Evening Mists shifted a grand total of 174 copies before the Booker effect kicked in, I’m rather pleased about it!

The marketing

[...]

Rather belated, but urban fantasy anthology about fashion Bloody Fabulous, ed. Ekaterina Sedia, was out in October. My story is in it! You can get a copy from Amazon or Book Depository, and there’s an ebook version as well. My story THE FIRST WITCH OF DAMANSARA is about annoying family members and pretty dresses.

Vivian’s late grandmother was a witch–which is just a way of saying she was a woman of unusual insight. Vivian, in contrast, had a mind like a hi-tech blender. She was sharp and purposeful, but she did not understand magic.

This used to be a problem. Magic ran in the family. Even her mother’s second cousin who was adopted did small spells on the side. She sold these from a stall in Kota Bharu. Her main wares were various types of fruit fried in batter, but if you bought five pisang or cempedak goreng, she threw in a jampi for free.

Vivian is an accountant. I’ve realised I use accountants too often in my stories, as a sort of symbol of order and rationality. I must diversify. Why should accountants take on all the fictive burden of championing order? Why not plumbers, transfer pricing specialists, fish feed salespeople, corporate communications executives?

***

I am trying to decide what I would call a collection of short stories by me. Awesome Title of Awesomeness is the current working title, but it probably won’t do. What proposed title do you like best?

1) Here, There and Elsewhere (I think this is a bit boring, but Cephas likes it. It’s because the collection would be organised according to setting, with stories set in Malaysia, overseas, and in other places (e.g. the Moon) grouped accordingly.)

2) Between Worlds

3) The House of Aunts

4) One-Day Travelcard for Fairyland

5) First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia

They are none of them too good, are they? I would like something quite hip, but not offensively so. I am open to suggestions! My stories are mostly about sensible girls or women dealing with a puzzling world. Maybe I should call it The Book of Accountants.