the short story that took 3 years to get accepted
aka chaos of the publishing industry, a lot of luck and nudging, and also somehow about selling my novels at the same time
I have a new short story out!! “The Name Ziya” is now live on Reactor - it’s a fantasy dark academia novelette about a girl whose names have a cultural magic, but she sells off several of them in order to attend a prestigious imperial university, and grapples with the continual change in her identity as she progresses through the school. It’s about names and identity, complicity and assimilation and access to colonial education. It’s the only novelette and also my favourite short story I’ve ever written.
I first wrote it at the end of 2021, for my application to the Clarion West SFF writing workshop. (The story eventually got me into the workshop on a full ride under the Octavia E Butler Memorial Scholarship, administered by the wonderful Carl Brandon Society.) I was working part time at a bookstore then and I vividly remember being on evening shifts behind the counter typing away when there was no one in the shop, trying to get the story to work. I was capturing something thorny and necessary I wanted to get off my chest after recently graduating from university in the UK, grappling with certain ways I found myself behaving there, and how after three years of shortening my name to Wen (easier to pronounce) and flipping my name around to Western conventions (I got tired of people thinking my name was Lee) suddenly the name I’d grown up with felt strange to read and speak, like it belonged to a different person.
Various people have messaged me about the ending of this story. It’s difficult and complicated and I love it. There’s no clean answer, and it captures I think exactly the place I was trying to reconcile for myself. The story is also lightly inspired by this essay, “Decolonial Aesthesis: From Singapore, To Cambridge, To Duke University”, which my friends and I came across years ago, and through which we have filtered what we call our ‘fish knife’ pieces. “The Name Ziya” is my fish knife piece.
But circling back to the publication of the story.
The submissions
While waiting on my Clarion West application, I started sending the story out to fantasy magazines. The story is about 9000 words, which puts it in novelette category, which unfortunately SEVERELY limits your submission options (most magazines cut off at short stories, about 7.5k words, and even if they accept novelettes, your story really needs to justify taking up that much of their budget). I got a couple of rejections and was already running out of places to send it to.
It just so happened, though, that a reader for one of the rejecting magazines was my soon-to-be Clarion West classmate. Her editor had rejected the story for xyz reasons (totally no hard feelings, these things are all subjective) but she had loved it so much that she messaged me and said that, if I was interested, she would love to refer it to her editor at Tor.com (now rebranded as Reactor).
If you didn’t know, Tor.com/Reactor has been closed to general submissions for years. Their short fiction is almost entirely by solicitation, internal authors, and referrals. There’s a whole other conversation about how short fiction is also boosted by who you know, especially as more magazines have limited their submission windows in recent years, but anyway. At that point I didn’t think I’d ever have the chance to send something to Tor, basically my dream SFF publisher. I said yes thank you so much??? And emailed the story to editor in early 2022; she said received and looking forward to reading and hope to get back to you soon!
So I waited.
And I waited for 3 years.
In the meantime, however
If I had only been focusing on short fiction at the time I think the wait might have driven me crazy. As it was though, I went on submission with my debut YA book around the same time as Ziya, and then I was spending an intense 6 weeks writing at Clarion and also working on an adult manuscript, a historical fantasy about a girl gang in Singapore called When They Burned the Butterfly. My brain was very much in Novel mode; I wasn’t too worried about the short story submissions.
Over this summer, the Tor editor (we’ll call her Editor #1 for reasons that will become clear later) happened to meet my agent, who mentioned not the novelette—but the historical fantasy. Editor #1 loved the sound of the book and was really keen on getting a look at it once it was ready. Having never gotten direct editor interest before, I said ???!!!!?!?!?!?!?!!?!? but also um hey could we also at the same time nudge her about Ziya?
My agent nudged Editor #1 about the novelette and I got back from Clarion West in August 2022 and kicked Butterfly revisions back into full gear. My YA had been on submission for a few months and it was mostly crickets; my coping response to crickets has always been to consider it dead in the water and move on to the next thing—which actually had an editor already interested! I was prepared to focus entirely on getting Butterfly ready for sub.
Then, predictably because publishing never respects your plans, a few weeks later we got the first offer for the YA book, which meant I had to put Butterfly back down.
I spent most of 2023 jumping between revising The Dark We Know for publication and editing Butterfly for sub. We went on sub with Butterfly in late summer 2023, starting with giving Editor #1 a few exclusive reading weeks. When those weeks were up with no official news, we sent the book out wider. A few weeks after that, we had 3 offers—including from Editor #1 at Tor!! I loved her and her vision for Butterfly, including being on board with my pitch to make it a duology, and we eventually sold it to her in a 2-book deal in September 2023.
At which point I told my agent, again, !!!!!!!!!!!!! but also, hey so could we officially nudge on the novelette or—
The great editorial shakeup
I would spend 2024 asking my agent to nudge a couple more times on the novelette. It wasn’t URGENT to me, you know, it wasn’t going to pay bills or anything, and it wasn’t the only iron I had in the fire, and there also weren’t many other places I could or wanted to send it to—but it would be nice to hear back, since it had been sitting on the slush pile for like 2 years at this point, and I had sold Tor 2 entire books in the meantime! Don’t be afraid to be a little bit annoying when it’s your work on the line, seriously.
But also, I really, really believed in this story. Occasionally I would go back and reread it and fall in love with it all over again. I would accept if it got rejected, but I had to at least keep trying to get an answer.
In early 2024, however, Editor #1 left Tor very abruptly. The reasons were complicated, but needless to say everyone in the vicinity got hit by the ripple effects. I was reassigned to Editor #2, Editor #1’s lovely assistant. The state of Butterfly inconsequential to this story, we now re-sent Ziya to Editor #2 to follow up.
A few months later, Editor #2 went on extended medical leave, and I was yet again reassigned, to Editor #3.
This should encapsulate how chaotic publishing can be behind the scenes, including the fact that publishing houses need to be better about treating their editors and their workloads, but also how much the editorial process of books can be impacted. Because of all the shakeups, I basically did most of the editing for Butterfly by myself. But I digress! At the end of 2024 I said, hey, it’s actually kind of ridiculous that I’m about to submit the final manuscript for an entire novel and we still can’t get an actual answer on a 9000-word short story. One more shot; we sent it to Editor #3 and caught her up on its whole history thus far.
And a couple weeks later in January 2025, FINALLY, Editor #3 officially bought Ziya!! From there everything moved super fast. Edits, copyedits, online copy, preview links. It would publish June 18, a day after my 26th birthday.
3 years, 3 editors.
I think the most amazing thing is that I barely edited the story at all before it was published, which isn’t something I usually say about things I wrote in 2021. Its published form is almost exactly how it was when I submitted it for the workshop, written over a couple feverish weeks as a 22 year old with many Thoughts. It’s one of those stories that knew what it wanted to be and managed miraculously to come out exactly in that way.
Now “The Name Ziya” is out on Reactor, and When They Burned the Butterfly is coming from Tor on October 21st :)
Here’s a bit from the opening:
When the cutter offered forty thousand shada for all five parts of my name, my mother puffed up. Absolutely not, she said, you brain-gored swindler.
I sat on his bench as they haggled, naked from the waist up. It was a cool morning and my skin pimpled around the ideograms on my bare chest. The full set of five was worth the most; forty thousand shada was more money than we took from ten harvests, and would have covered my tuition with coin to spare. But I was glad my parents had rejected the first offer. I was not prepared to lose the entirety of my name just yet.
“All right, all right,” Durudawanyi relented. Earlier, the rector had murmured and prevaricated as he examined my ideograms, evaluating their specific powers and different combinations, along with my age and other factors. “Twenty-five thousand, for the affective three.”
My mother hesitated. It was unfortunate that I had been born with my more powerful names all at the end: the ones that let me shape earth without cracking, find my way in the dark, share our dogs’ senses. You could only sell from the end, and never out of order, so selling three names would mean losing most of my magic. But where I was going, money was more important than magic. “Thirty,” she said.
Durudawanyi scrutinized her. “Twenty-eight.”
My parents exchanged a look. “Done.”
I clutched my blouse. Two days ago, I would never have fathomed sitting in the rector’s lush, airy hut, the place where people went and came back changed. But then the letter arrived. I had, beyond all hope, tested into the University of Ustonel—a place far, far away—a place that produced consuls and guildmasters and airship captains—a place that had never, until this cycle, accepted students from the Angze Hills.
The tuition for three years’ study was thirty-five thousand shada. A discounted price, as a welcome.
Not going was out of the question. And so I was here, selling the most precious thing an Angze was born with.
When the namecutter sliced the first part-name from my chest, I screamed. I had promised not to, I had sworn to be brave, but it ripped from me with a pain like I had never felt in my life. Blood was running down my chest. “It’s all right, darling,” my mother whispered into my hair. “It’s all right.” She had sold one part of her name to feed us during the drought a few years ago. My father had sold one when I was a child, and one before I was born. Now inducted, I pressed into my mother’s arms, fighting back tears. I thought of my name being carried to the anchorites in the hills, whose prayers from our names the bethel claimed kept the soil rich and the rivers flowing through the valleys. There were even those devout who offered up their part-names willingly. Though our village did not particularly subscribe to the faith, who was I to judge it when the bethel were willing to open their treasuries like this?
Durudawanyi deftly slipped the ideogram into a vial. It fluttered, leaving specks of red on the glass. For all the knowledge of its greater destination I stared at it hazily, wondering how that could have come from me; how such a fragile-looking thing could cause so much pain.
When he took the second part-name, I fainted.
I awoke at home, with pungent bandages around my chest and a throbbing ache in both my skull and my ribs. My sister wiped my face with cool cloths, while at the stove behind her my father was boiling lemongrass tea. A trunk was open on the floor. My mother was putting my things into it. It had been done.
I once had a name of five segments. But henceforth, and onward to Ustonel, I would simply be Ziya.