FAQ

General

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Short A: I like dragons and spaceships.

Long A: I read a lot of 19th-century British and North American fiction as a kid growing up in 20th-century Malaysia. This taught me to enjoy stories set in alien worlds featuring strange people who spoke a different language, had mysterious, intricate social customs, and used outlandish technology like post-chaises and handkerchiefs.

I like writing stories positing that what the ordinary Malaysian believes about the world is true. This can sometimes lapse into the supernatural.

I enjoy stories that are in conversation with other stories. Science fiction and fantasy offers a conveniently delimited selection of works to draw upon, and a community that will recognise your references.

I am afraid of death and hantu and am trying to defang both by writing cute stories about them.

It is part of my process of decolonisation. It’s as good a form for understanding the world as any other.

All of these things are true. It may be that none of them are the real reason.

I wrote a blog post about this! One important reason I don’t mention in that post, because it seems so obvious, is that the money is much better in law than in writing fiction. This is because most people and businesses will require legal advice at some point in their lives, whether they like it or not, whereas it is hard work convincing people that they need your story about dragons and spaceships.

Most of my ideas for new projects are fantasy (often with a historical flavour), so it doesn’t seem likely in the immediate future. Though never say never! The moment time frees up or I get struck by unavoidable inspiration, there are two genres I’d like to write more of: science fiction and romance.

Publishing and writing advice

Sorry, no. If you are a Malaysian writer looking for critique partners or writing buddies, you might want to join the Malaysian Writers Facebook group. There’s also a group specifically for Malaysian speculative fiction writers if that’s what you’re into. Good luck with the writing!

There is so much excellent advice available on the Internet about getting published that it’s hardly worth my repeating it! Typing “how to get published” into the search engine of your choice will give you lots of helpful results, but here are a couple of guides to get you started: publishing professional Jane Friedman’s (US-oriented) post on How to Get Your Book Published and a (UK-oriented) guide from Waterstones, How to Get Published.

If it’s advice about publishing short stories you’re after, I wrote a quick guide to selling short stories to Western science fiction and fantasy magazines and anthologies.

I published my novel in the most standard way possible: I wrote a whole book, I sent it to literary agents and signed with one, and eventually she sold it to a publisher on my behalf. If you would like to read about the process in more detail, I wrote about my experience here: My Publishing Journey.

The process is not different for Malaysians who write in English and want their book to be distributed internationally. Living in Malaysia will make it more difficult for you to attend writers’ conferences or conventions and meet US/UK editors and agents in person, but in this day and age that does not matter. I’d never met my agent or editor at the time my book sold.

While you’re listening, I will say one last thing: getting published is not that important. It is nice to be published and have readers and all that sort of thing. But if you can turn your writing into a nourishing, sustaining practice — if you can find joy in it divorced from the need for external validation — then you will have a source of meaning and reward that no one can take from you and that is dependent on no one but yourself. That is something many people never have, and it’s much more important than book advances or reviews or short story sales.

Not really, because there are a lot of agents out there and which one(s) are right for you will depend on your book. Have a think about published books that are similar to yours — you can generally find out who represents the authors by looking it up on the Internet or checking out the acknowledgments page in their books.

You can research agents who are seeking books like yours by looking at the Agent Spotlights on Literary Rambles, or checking out sites like AgentQuery and QueryTracker

If you pay for a Publishers Marketplace subscription, that gives you access to their deals database, which you can search to find out what sort of deals an agent has made. (You can sign up for a month and then cancel if you don’t want an ongoing subscription.) I only did this once I had offers of representation from agents, to help me decide which to accept, but you could check it out at the querying stage if you are struggling to decide who to query.

Books

No. I originally wrote Sorcerer to the Crown as a standalone. It was sold as a trilogy, but when I came to it I found I didn’t want to write a trilogy, so there are just two novels: Sorcerer to the Crown and The True Queen, which is a standalone set in the same world, with a number of familiar characters from the first.

I do have plans to revisit the world and characters at some point, but that will probably be in the form of short fiction.

I don’t know yet! I have a couple of seeds of ideas, but they haven’t yet germinated, and of course it depends on whether the publisher wants those stories once germinated.

I have a vague plan some day to write two or three more novellas, also in the form of diary entries or letters, about Jade’s descendants. Unfortunately I am not sure when I will get the time and inspiration to do this, so it’s a “maybe some day” right now, rather than “I have booked this out as a thing to do at an actual time in the actual future”.