on writing with ambition

BUTTERFLY arcs, writing sequels, & trying

Physical ARCs for When They Burned the Butterfly have landed!!!!!!!!!!! They’re beautiful. Showstopping. I have so many of them. Giveaways on social media are incoming!

Butterfly is in pass pages, which means we’re just catching typos now. It’s set in stone, going to print as a long-gestated product of me from 2021-2025.

It was a difficult book to write. Calibrating the balance of historical research and fantasy, the internal duty to get a story about my home right at a scale that feels like yearning, the large cast and all their moving pieces, the psychology of belonging and the dynamics of a group, the themes of the postcolonial time period and the positionality and what I wanted to express in them, the queer coming-of-age, and keeping it all from sprawling out of control. There are some stories that start as a plot and there are some that start as something I wanted to say and explore, and unfortunately this was the latter and unfortunately that’s always the hardest, I think, for me to nail down. Because it’s constantly expanding, because it constantly feels bigger than I know how to capture, because I’m always my own biggest critic.

It was a difficult, ambitious book to try and write. It took a lot of drafts to figure out what I actually wanted to do with it. I want the sequel that I’m drafting now to be difficult too, and slightly undefinable. Because that means I’m pushing myself.

I’ve been circling back to something my friend Lisabelle said, that she prefers a writer being ambitious in their story and falling slightly short, as opposed to feeling like a writer has nothing interesting to say. I feel like I’m often more ambitious at the point of a story’s conception than I’m necessarily able to fulfil, but the crux is what’s gained in having to bridge as much of that gap as possible; I would rather be constantly pushing myself than pull safely back. I would rather never be satisfied than settle. If a book is short a step of perfection I’m looking back at when I first started writing it and realizing I still got myself over ninety-nine steps in a hundred.

In an Andor quote, because I’m still buzzing from the finale: Remember this. Try.

As I draft Butterfly 2 with everything I learned from Book 1 and the simultaneous knowledge that Book 1 is now being received and reviewed, I inevitably start marinating on what feels like thinner patches of Book 1 that I have to accept as being set in stone. It’s easy to do with hindsight and distance. But I also have to remember the absolute gulf between the first draft of Butterfly and the final, and how I’m starting on a leg up now. I’ve never been someone who knows how to let things be and be happy about it. But the thing about publishing books is that they’re a time capsule of who you were when you wrote it, and you can only move on and create the next thing.

And, as two halves of a whole, the Butterfly duology is becoming something that’s really special to me. Writing and preparing to publish it has been liberating and scary and isolating and also transformational in ways I can’t entirely articulate. Sometimes I go about my day and think wow, I really did thematically put lesbians falling in love at the core of national history and the founding days of my country as an independent nation! And I’m doubling down in a second book! And also this is lowkey the first trad pub book centered around sapphics in my country’s literature, like, ever, which kind of stresses me out.

It’s entirely possible that barely anyone reads it. I’ve been talking to friends lately about holding on to the motivation to keep doing this publishing thing when it literally just never gives you peace, and the rewards almost feel nonexistent most of the time. But it means something to me that I put it on the page, and at the end of the day a book just needs to be worth it to me.

and about the logistics of writing a sequel:

Working on a sequel while the first one starts being perceived is also slightly terrifying, in that 1) you’re no longer working in your safe little bubble and 2) what if they don’t like the first one and then they never even get around to the second? But that’s out of my hands. In isolation, craft wise, I think Butterfly 2 is the best thing I’ve written so far. I’m a much more capable first drafter than I was in 2021, from the trial by fire that was learning to make my first two books work. I’m fixing problems now that would have previously taken me a year’s worth of revisions to even spot, and my confidence in approaching story structure is way higher. It’s vindicating to feel your own development in action. It’s like a muscle I try to keep pushing.

It’s also interesting, working within the constraints of something you’ve already laid down, while taking the story in a different place but also developing the same themes. I was talking to a friend about writing prequels with similar conditions. Butterfly 2 isn’t a totally conventional sequel, I think. Relationally and somewhat thematically I’ve been calling the duology what Harrow the Ninth is to Gideon. Writing something for press, I called Butterfly about gangs the way Wong Kar Wai’s Fallen Angels is about an assassin. I will not explain further at this time.

I will say that after writing one contemporary horror and two historicals, though, I am chomping at the bit to get back to my roots and do something that’s purely fantasy. I am tired of rigorous authenticity; I want to get to make everything up!! I want to work on something completely fresh!! I hope to be able to write a full length secondary world soon, but in the meantime:

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a new release & an upcoming one

Amplitudes, the queer SF anthology edited by Lee Mandelo, is out now! My story in this is called “They Will Give Us A Home” and it’s about two influencers in a lavender marriage to keep their dream apartment in a dystopian city where housing is tied to marriage. This was really fun to write. I first drafted it at Clarion West in 2022, and originally it was a lot campier, but as I returned to it over the years I realised I had something a lot more earnest to say about who gets homes.

Aaaand on June 18, the only novelette I’ve ever written—and my favourite short story that I’ve ever written—will be coming out on Reactor!!! It’s called “The Name Ziya” and it’s a decolonial dark academia fantasy. I’ve been sitting on this since 2021 and I’m SO excited to finally have it out.

You can also still preorder When They Burned the Butterfly and also the paperback of The Dark We Know!

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recently consumed

• Salt Slow by Julia Armfield: Our Wives Under the Sea is one of my favourite novels, and it was fascinating to step back in a writer’s bibliography and read its precursor. And Salt Slow is very much a precursor; there’s ocean and turning bodies and much strangeness that is really a vehicle for the relationship at the centre of the story; there’s a story that’s literally about a dead girlfriend coming back wrong. I’m obsessed with Armfield’s prose and atmosphere, although I think the stories work better for me in novel form.

• Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins: Yeah ok Ms Collins devoured as per. The number of recognizable characters was kind of fan service but I am the fan that was serviced. I finished this in almost one sitting and I kept thinking of Andor, in how the weight of these prequels lies in knowing how it ends, and how many of these characters will, as Stellan Skarsgard says, burn their lives to make a sunrise they know they’ll never see. Revolutions are built on hope and long years baby.

• Andor Season 2: Phenomenal. Showstopping. Still can’t believe the generally unserious (affectionate) franchise that is Star Wars turned out such a sharp, slick, deeply relevant examination of its own empire trope and the creation of a rebellion.

• Dream Storeys by Clara Chow: A Singaporean indie release from almost 10 years ago that it’s taken me this long to get around to, but a genuinely thought-provoking and cool book that blends speculative fiction with interviews with architects, meditating on architecture as social project, politics, and speculative art form.

• The Beasts Beneath the Winds, edited by Hanna Alkaf: Currently reading this one—a middle grade anthology of short stories surrounding creatures from Southeast Asian folklore! This is such a special book to exist and I wish I had this when I was a kid, because it took me so long to learn about the folklore of the region I live in. It comes with field guide illustrations of the creatures and it’s SO LOVELY.