Zen Cho's Blog

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

I’ve set up a Patreon!

If you haven’t heard of Patreon, the concept behind it is that you can be like the kings of old who funded scholars and jesters and artists at their courts so they had someone on hand to tell them jokes and play them soothing music and dance a jig for them at all times. What it means for the scholar/jester/artist (viz me) is that I can build an income stream that is independent of the vagaries of large corporate publishers.

I’m doing this as part of a long-term strategy...

I am really nervous, sitting down to write this — almost more nervous than I am about the fact that The True Queen is out today. (You can buy it! Please do!) But I promised myself I’d do this once the long nightmare was over, because it’s helped me when other writers have talked about the hard parts.

I had second book syndrome in spades. Two things contributed to this. The revision process for my first novel Sorcerer to the Crown had been extensive and emotionally challen...

Towards the end of last year I wrote a short story as a coda to my novelette about a failboat imugi striving to be a dragon, which was sent out to subscribers to my new release mailing list. I’ve now posted it to my website and you can read it here!

Head of a Snake, Tail of a Dragon by Zen Cho

Also I hear Hugo awards nominations are now open for 2018 publications! If you enjoyed If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again, I’d be thrilled if you’d consider nominating it in the Best Novelett...

I’ve let this website go to pot somewhat while I was busy finishing my book, but I’ve now updated it!

The follow-up to Sorcerer to the Crown is in the bag and will be published in March 2019. The True Queen is a standalone novel set two years after Sorcerer, about a young woman from the Malayan isle of Janda Baik who goes on a quest to break a curse and save her sister — and becomes enmeshed in intrigue in England and Fairyland along the way. It’s about sisterhood and magic and growing into...

A sequel to If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again, published on The B&N Sci-fi & Fantasy Blog on 29 November 2018 and included in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 13, ed. Jonathan Strahan.

There was a dragon outside Jin-dae’s cave.
 
Fortunately Jin-dae saw it before it saw her. She slithered hastily into a copse to hide herself.
 
“Why’ve you stopped?” said the human in her mouth.
 
“Shurrup!” said Jin-dae.
 
She was startin...

In my last email to new release mailing list subscribers, I asked people to email me if they’d be interested in a chattier newsletter — like a blog post, but sent direct to their inbox. (I only send out emails about new releases to the new release mailing list and given what an enormously long time it takes me to write anything decent and get it published, it does not get a huge amount of action … )

It turns out when you ask people to email you, often they do! There was enough interest that I...

I usually have a pretty good idea of how tasty something I’m making will turn out to be, but this took me aback with how well it turned out. It was totally beyond expectations and also pretends to be fancy, even though it’s essentially a store cupboard recipe. It’d be a good one to serve friends at a dinner party, with a bottle of Mediterranean wine.

To give you an idea of how easy this was, I based it on a John West tinned sardines recipe.

Perhaps not beautiful, but it WAS good

Ingredients
S...

Despite this update I’m not actually hiding in my room working on my novel for the whole of this year! Here’s a bunch of appearances I’ll be doing in the coming months:

London Book Fair (14-16 March)

I’ll be hanging around at the Fixi London booth at London Book Fair this year — konon being helpful, sebenarnya sibuk je. In particular I’m hoping to make it for the launch of LITTLE BASKET 2017: NEW MALAYSIAN WRITING on Wednesday 15 March (event is free but must register at the link).

I also rea...

This is a post inspired by Likhain‘s Letter to Apex Editors Re: The Intersectional SFF Roundtable.1

CONTENTS
Introduction: Why I am making this post
The facts as I saw them: An account of various encounters, direct and indirect, with RH/BS and her associates
Commentary: Speaking of opinions …
Conclusion
Footnotes

INTRODUCTION: Why I am making this post

I have asked myself why I am making this post, given that the actions of Requires Hate/Benjanun Sriduangkaew have been .2...