you know i love a norwich girl
publishing news TLDR, a residency, and preorders for BUTTERFLY & TDWK paperback!
Two weeks ago I quit my job, and now I have the privilege of taking a break and start a new phase of it. For several years through and immediately after Covid, I had a constant sense of just going through suspended motions. Now things feel tentatively new and possible, if slightly scary—I’m a full time writer!—but necessarily restorative. I was burning out hard; the job was affecting both my sanity and my physical health. I’m relearning rest and also reconfiguring what my life looks like when it has space for other things.
After quitting the job, I spent a weekend in Ho Chi Minh meeting my friend Trang Thanh Tran for the first time (their next book They Bloom At Night is coming out on 4 March!) Then I returned home to celebrate Chinese New Year, and then got on a longer, cross-Pacific flight to Norwich, UK, where I am now and will be all February as a writer-in-residence with the National Centre of Writing! I’m supposed to be working on Butterfly 2, but there’s some other things happening too.
It’s my first extended stay back in the UK since I graduated, although Norwich is a much calmer place than London. I immediately came and bought new jumpers. On the first day I also did a Boots run and a grocery run at both the regular and the Asian supermarket, where I discovered what might be the entire East Asian population of Norwich. By the second day I went to three different bookstores along the same street and got a new tote bag for all the books.
I talk to my Scottish translator housemate Annie about the translation scene, variances in Scots language, ethics of care, and her thoughts on Babel. (She liked it! She also clocked my literary taste for dark and strange almost immediately. I told her I picked up a Mariana Enriquez collection. She recommended me Samantha Schweblin’s Mouthful of Birds, also translated from Latin America. “Her name is Schweblin?” “You know, bunch of Germans moved to Argentina in the 20th century…”) I attempt to schedule meetups with like 14 different people with day jobs in 3 cities. I enter a random cafe on the corner of the street with my indie bookstore totebags, order a frittata and a hot chocolate and sit there reading for an hour like a stereotype. I order a veggie English breakfast and sit outside in the sun in my coat and journal like another stereotype, and also begrudgingly find I can now enjoy beans on toast. I look at the cottage’s bookshelves and spot books by other Singaporeans. I eat vegan sausages and Quorn picnic eggs and finally wear my folklore cardigan. I tell myself I will get a ploughman’s sandwich in a meal deal that will taste like undergrad, and a Wasabi curry that will remind me of my uni friend Nathan. My friend Jaeho says he will come to me in Norwich instead and I am incredibly moved. I cook soup noodles every day and eat them out of the pot because British people don’t own large soup bowls. I make French press coffee in the mornings because my jet lag means I actually get up for breakfast. I hear about how this building I am staying with was built in the 15th century and I think about history and nationhood and architectural temporality and what we attach civilisation to. I buy a little crossword book and try not to check the answers. I am given a free miniature by the guy in the Warhammer store and told to come back to try painting it. I am given a stamp card by the guy in the indie bookstore and told I have to come back because I just need three more stamps to get the voucher. I look up train tickets to Manchester and Cambridge. I have not gotten that much work done and I am kind of stressed about it, but I feel like I am Living In A Place Again.
When They Burned the Butterfly has now gone to copyedits, which means the bulk of it is pretty much set in stone, which is wild to think about. The cover is also almost done, and the art for that, by a Chinese-Indonesian artist, is STUNNING. We’re starting to talk about blurbs and ARCs. And…
You can preorder it now! It’s available in Barnes & Noble’s 25% off preorders sale ending today (7 Feb), but it’s also in all the usual big retailers. (Singapore store preorders will open later)
I also posted an epigraph reveal for Butterfly on IG, but I’ll put them here, too. I love epigraphs because I love intertextuality and I managed to find a set for this book and the second Butterfly book that I immediately felt were perfect.
The first is the classic Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi’s The Butterfly Dream, translated by Lin Yutang:
Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhuangzi. Soon I wakened, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things.
And the second is from a letter to The Straits Times, Singapore’s national broadsheet, on 13 August 1946, which I stumbled on while reading Kevin Blackburn’s The Comfort Women of Singapore in History and Memory":
These women are one hundred per cent infected… the sight of these painted dolls behaving shamelessly in public is a blot on the fair name of Singapore.
the publishing news tldr
As overwhelmed as I’ve been, I did not do a 2024 roundup. Here’s a quick run of things from the last few months I couldn’t mention, sorry (follow me on IG for more up to date things):
The Dark We Know
TDWK was a best-of-2024 YA pick for School Library Journal and Booklist, and was on a couple of other roundup best lists including Reactor and Parade!
I’ve written a bonus short story from Mason’s POV for the TDWK paperback, which will be out July 29, 2025. You can preorder it now everywhere!
Short fiction
“They Will Give Us A Home”, about the mlm/wlw lavender marriage from hell in a dystopian lottery-run state housing city, will be out in Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity from Erewhon Books on May 27
“An Eye for an Eye”, a short monstrous feminine/mother-daughter piece written in response to Pacita Abad’s art piece “Evil Eye”, produced in conjunction with National Gallery Singapore’s fiction podcast
I sold a historical magical realism short story to Uncanny called “Red, Scuttle When the Ships Come Down”. I wrote this at Clarion West in 2022. It’s about indentured colonial laborers mining a strange substance, inspired by the history and ecology of Christmas Island (where my grandmother was born) as well as Singapore’s Pulau Senang prison island riot. It should be coming out soon.
I also sold—which a much wilder sub story that I’ll share when the story’s out—the one and only novelette I’ve ever written. It’s a decolonial dark academia fantasy called “The Name Ziya”, and it should be out from Reactor sometime in June!
Non-fiction
“9 Books About Haunted Asian Girls” - Electric Lit
“We Inherit Our Ghosts: On Gothic Fiction and the Need to Remember” - CrimeReads
“The comfort (and discomfort) of retellings” - Reactor
currently consuming (singlit edition)
Over the new year I speedran through some books by Singaporean authors on my shelf that I’ve sworn I was going to read for months or years. Recently read, and loved:
The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei: Out in April! Both of us have adult debuts this year about sisters and female relationships in the tides of change in historical Singapore. Jemma’s, spanning the 1990s into the 2010s, follows Genevieve, a complex protagonist whose life is upended when a secret half-sister enters their family. It’s astute and empathetic and such a familiar portrait of home and some of its systemic and cultural flaws.
Be Your Own Bae by Daryl Qilin Yam: A collection of interplaying short stories across Singapore, Korea, and Japan, featuring queer millennials who are a little fractured. I love stories about messy Singaporeans. I especially love the two center stories and there was a particular line — “Oh, oh life. It was possible to want less of it.”
The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng: The epic Singaporean historical that blends magical realism with charting the shifting tides of the country from the Japanese Occupation to land reclamation projects in post-independence 70s. Many many people raved about this and I can completely understand why. The history and perspectives aren’t exactly new to me, but articulated beautifully and poignantly anyway, and a necessary entry into the canon.
Nine Yard Sarees by Prasanthi Ram: A story cycle following several generations of women in a Tamil Brahmin family, from India to Singapore. Also has sapphic rep in one of the pairings! I loved how the format was used here to gently illuminate all the different sides of the family, some more likeable than others. Felt epic despite the bite-size and was tender and warm and succinct.
blurbs!
I also wanted to shoutout some books I’ve gotten to read and blurb—some by friends, which I read as early drafts and have now gotten to see them get published. This and next year, you should check out:
The Coven Tendency by Zoe Hana Mikuta: Endlessly unique. Necromantic witch sisters and their companions in a spectacular Museum who commit the cardinal sin of having feelings for one another, and also there’s an apocalypse, and killing your crushes for the high of resurrecting them. Deft and engrossing madness, viscerally wanting, sharply aware about modern spectacle, artificiality, and distorted intimacy.
Volatile Memory by Seth Haddon: Also sapphic and visceral, about a trans scavenger who finds a piece of powerful and secret biotech, falls in love with the consciousness of the woman in it, and embarks on a joint revenge spree against a shady corporation. This was an action-packed raging gut punch bloody lovers’ spree in novella form. Completely delicious.
This Raging Sea by De Elizabeth: YA/NA fantasy about a girl whose more-than-best-friend disappears in time, and she has to try and find him even as her own world starts crumbling. Gorgeous and tender and sweeping! And if you like sexy supernatural villainous dark king trope this is especially for you.
And The River Drags Her Down by Jihyun Yun: More necromancy! A meditation about a girl who brings her dead sister back to life only for things to go very wrong. Dark, taut, and perpetually stunning, woven with a myth passed through surviving women and a palpably soaked atmosphere.
We Were Never Here by Sophia Hannan: A sapphic paranormal about a group that ran a ghost-hunting show as a cover for art heists until their leader was killed, only for the painting from their final job to come back to haunt them. As I said in my blurb, “Paints ghostly grief for the gay Buzzfeed Unsolved generation.”