Julia Vee's Blog

Asian Urban Fantasy, On Writing, Urban Fantasy Stories[image error]

I read a lot of Urban Fantasy. I read broadly but UF is probably my favorite. As a reader, I was totally unaware of publishing trends. But in the last few years I’ve had to learn a lot more about publishing and then I started to hear that “urban fantasy is dead” from publishing insiders. I thought that was strange as I was still buying and reading a lot of it. Then I saw this Twitter thread from Seanan McGuire discussing her Toby Daye debut and I realized that perhaps there is a phase when UF is dead and then some hot talent breaks in and it’s not dead anymore, but then a few years go by and you hear it’s dead again.

I may be mistaken but I think I heard Dongwon Song say in a podcast interview that he thought the advent of Kindle Unlimited made it very difficult to build a UF fanbase in traditional publishing anymore because readers were able to binge read through Kindle Unlimited which made them less patient for the one book a year model of trad pub.

However, I’m seeing some uptick of UF (or “contemporary fantasy”) and I’m delighted. So maybe UF is back, or “undead” (which is fitting, right?). The one that immediately comes to mind is Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning. I absolutely loved that book.

This week I blasted through Zen Cho’s Black Water Sister. What a delight to read an urban fantasy set in Penang, Malaysia.

There is the intersection of all the things I love: food, humor, hungry ghosts, and strong women. The thing I wasn’t expecting from this book was the way I could relate to the exasperating family members, the heavy weight of Asian parent expectations and the almost delayed adulthood that one can feel when living at home after college. Emotionally tender and compassionate, this book hit me in all the feels.

Originally published ~2021

Julia:
I wrote a novel during the chaos of November 2016 during Nanowrimo. Then Ken and I started writing together in early 2017. By early 2020, I probably had something like 600k+ words of fiction under my belt with my writing combined with co-writing with Ken.

Ken:
Creative writing was something we had both done quite a bit of when we were younger. I still have a swords and sorcery fantasy story we wrote in (I think) the eighth grade. It will never see the light of day. Coming back to writing after such a long break was like finding water in the desert. But back to Julia’s story…

JV:
I have always been a lifelong learner. The craft of writing is something I take very seriously. I attended my third Superstars Writing Conference in Feb of 2020 and at the VIP dinner, Jonathan Maberry was being his normal encouraging self and asking everyone at the table what they were working on. I told him we were writing a “female Asian John Wick set in the Pacific Rim fighting Asian monsters.”

KB:
We love John Wick!

JV:
He said, “Are you going to query that? Because you need to query that.”

Until his comment, I had been moving along the indie path to publish it. We had lined up covers from the amazing Christian Bentulan. I had Vellum, Ken was good with Facebook Ads, I knew Amazon ads so we were set to launch the book ourselves.

But I valued Jonathan’s opinion and took his words to heart. Ken started reading up on how to write a query letter. If I thought writing a book synopsis was painful, the query letter was excruciating.

We engaged Joe Nassise for a developmental edit. He gave us great feedback. At that point, Ebony Gate was 58k words.

We worked on revising it. During the revision, we realized that in order to address Joe’s feedback that he wanted more from our final battle scene we needed to go back earlier and build up the villain more.

KB:
For me, this part is most of the fun of writing: banging my brain together with Julia’s to come up with amazing stories, then watching what we create take on a life of its own.

JV:
That was, of course, Joe’s first lesson to us when we first started working with him in 2018 – the villain shares the screen with the hero. So it was back to fundamentals as we went back to page 1 and really leveled up the villain to ratchet up the tension we needed to make the final battle more satisfying for the reader.

I participated in DVPIT on Twitter.

We sent out just 3 or 4 queries based on those Twitter pitch agent responses.

Henry Lien advised querying writers to send out 8 to 10 queries a week. We couldn’t bring ourselves to do that. We kept working on the revisions. Joe tweaked our awkward query letter. We made a spreadsheet where we put in 8 names of agents who we knew had represented some of our favorite authors in the UF genre or Asian Fantasy.

That’s it. Eight total agents.

KB:
To be fair, we were total noobs at this. Looking back now on what we did, I know we got extremely lucky. I have read countless stories of authors querying hundreds of agents without so much as a nibble. But Julia and I always felt like we had the self-pub route in our back pocket. If trad didn’t work out, we would simply go back to our original plan. Any headway we made into trad pub was proverbial icing on the cake.

JV:
At this point the manuscript had ballooned to 108k words. Yes, pretty much double the draft we sent to Joe for a dev edit.

Mind you, Ken and I both live in California. In addition to the awfulness of the pandemic we had wildfires, hazardous air quality, power outages and evacuations. So that was fun.

We queried the manuscript in fall of 2020 to eight agents.

Then I took a lecture with John Truby on Nature Myth over Christmas of 2020 and his breakdown of the movie Avatar. It gave me a revelation about the final battle. I called Ken and said we had to revise the final battle scene again.

Just before the end of the year Laurie Mclean at Fuse Literary asked for a full.

KB:
A heck of a way to end the year!

JV:
We wrote the final battle over Xmas break and sent her the full after Jan. 1, 2021. She wrote back that same week and asked for a call.

I had no idea what the call would be like. I hit up friends. Joanne Machin and Denise Beucler gave me their “what to ask an agent” notes.

We had a great call. Laurie loved the book. She had read 864 queries, asked for full manuscripts from 5 authors and offered representation solely to us. 1 out of 864. No wonder Jim Butcher’s Twitter handle is “longshotauthor”.

Ken and I loved Laurie’s enthusiasm. She struck us as someone who would swing for the fences. We signed with Laurie. She asked us to add one story beat to one scene (roughly one paragraph).

In the meantime I had another revelation about the love interest in the story. I’d imagined him as the rebound guy. We wrote him that way. It didn’t quite work. So I said to Ken, “I have to re-write Adam.” So it became the enemies to lovers trope. Laurie said, “I trust you not to break your story.”

No pressure.

I re-wrote the Adam scenes. The manuscript for Ebony Gate was now 110k words. Laurie sent it out on submission.

Two weeks later she called us. I was having a Zoom work call and eating a sandwich. Laurie told us TOR gave us a pre-empt. Claire Eddy loved Ebony Gate!

KB:
I was also at work when this happened, but we were so early in our relationship with Laurie that she didn’t have my cell phone. She’d emailed me and I’d been too busy to check. By the time I got on a three-way call with Julia and Laurie, Laurie sounded like she’d been banging on all the doors and windows trying to get my attention! The call was such good news I couldn’t stop smiling the rest of the day.

JV:
TOR was our first choice. I danced around my kitchen. We accepted the pre-empt. That was February of 2021.

We finished drafting Blood Jade, book 2 in the Phoenix Hoard series. It clocked in at 133k words.

We inked with TOR in July of 2021, after Mercury came out of retrograde.

TOR issued their announcement in August of 2021. Ken and I were overjoyed. We know that it could have gone really differently. We are happy that our book will go out to readers in July of 2023.

Ken and I are in the thick of revisions right now. The manuscript of Ebony Gate is 131k words presently.

KB:
While we were waiting (and waiting) for things to move forward with TOR, Julia got the spark of an idea for a post-apocalyptic Seattle, where the rise of magic has ruined tech and allowed the rampant spread of vampires and werewolves. We imagined a half-wrecked city, dripping with magic, defended by a band of misfit heroes based loosely on the Seven Freaks of the South, from  Legend of the Condor Heroes .

As we are revising Ebony Gate we are also drafting the first book in the Seattle Slayers series,  Stakes and Bones . We will be self-publishing Seattle Slayers later in 2022, and we would love to have you along for the ride. 

Asian Urban Fantasy [image error]

I rented out a theater for the opening weekend of Shang-Chi. It was a special treat for my family and we had a blast. The film exceeded all of my expectations and I still can’t get over that bus scene. There was so much to love about Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings but I couldn’t help wondering…What If?

The movie was fantastic but because the character arc of Shang-Chi (who am I? Will I join my father? Does my father love me?) was largely completed once Wenwu released the 10 rings to him, I found myself not as engaged by the dragon fight (I mean, it’s a demon versus a dragon and it’s still awesome). I realized it was because I cared so much about the characters and their personal dynamics that the battling of great evil had become an afterthought for me. Which is why I couldn’t help but wonder…what if it happened all together?

What if Wenwu, Shaun and Xialing had fought the He Who Dwells in Darkness together?

Picture it. They fight as a family, united against this great evil, and Shaun pitches into the water and connects with the Great Protector. And then, in this heroic battle, Wenwu dies and transfers the Rings as his dying gift AFTER this mega-melee.

What if Xialing could have witnessed her father dying?

The sheer conflict she would be feeling to see that as his dying act, he gives the rings to Shang-Chi. I mean, there are 10 rings…in theory he could have given 5 to each of his kids. But it would have been the ultimate betrayal to give all 10 to her prodigal brother in front of her–snubbing her yet again in death as he did in life.

This is as close I get to fan fic, but I can’t help thinking Xialing didn’t see what happened and now she doesn’t know if Shaun killed their father and took the 10 rings for himself. She didn’t get closure. You know a movie is great when it grabs you and sticks with you after like this, where you ask “What if?”

Asian Urban Fantasy [image error]

I wrote a mega post about DragonCon and decided I should break it up into chunks. The big thing that stood out for me during this event was THE ART.

I couldn’t get over the art. There were four floors of Art and assorted cool things at the America’s Mart and then inside the Hyatt was THE FANCY ART. More importantly, that was where Saiyre Illustration & Design had a booth. We were super excited to meet our artist.

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Julia Vee with the artist Saiyre Illustration at DragonCon

She brought Emiko and Bao to life for us in a piece we commissioned for Ebony Gate. We can’t wait to share the whole piece with everyone but for now, here’s the zoom in on Emiko and her Bronze Blade!

As authors, Ken and I used words to describe Emiko and her foo lion, Bao. But there is some magic when an artist translates those words into a beautiful, vivid image.

Also, with much excitement, we can share what other authors have said about Ebony Gate from the early reads:

Praise for Ebony Gate

“Ebony Gate is a snarky Harry Dresden meets Shang-Chi, with a dash of Monster Hunter International.” — Kevin J. Anderson, New York Times bestselling co-author of Dune: House Atreides

“A wild, exhilarating ride through a living San Francisco populated with ghosts, magical beasts, and one tough-as-nails heroine. Adventurous and filled with heart, exploring the struggles of a bloody past and familial duty, Ebony Gate is a spectacular start to what promises to be an engrossing series.” — Andrea Stewart, author of The Bone Shard Daughter

“It’s like reading my favorite martial arts movies, with magic that will blow your mind.” — Brian D. Anderson, bestselling author of The Godling Chronicles

PRE-ORDER NOW!

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Emiko art by Saiyre Illustration & Design

Because of the pandemic, there has been a paper shortage going on. That means it helps authors and publishers plan properly when readers pre-order the book. Ebony Gate is available for pre-order now at Barnes & Noble!

Asian Urban Fantasy, On Writing[image error]

Yesterday I thought I thought I would be all fired up because of seeing EBONY GATE in print, and I was, but turns out what really fired me up yesterday was meeting so many booksellers, meeting other authors, and just being surrounded by people who love books.

The California Independent Bookseller Alliance (NorCal) Spring forum was held at the Oakland Asian Cultural center. I used to work in downtown Oakland and it was a real treat to return to my old stomping grounds for a book-related event.

Something like 75 independent booksellers from all over Northern California showed up yesterday. They gathered to talk about issues their stores faced, hear from the publisher’s sales reps, and to commune in person after a long hiatus due to COVID.

The keynote speaker was Gene Luen Yang. We’ve been big fans of his and love his Avatar the Last Airbender stories. I’m so thrilled that American Born Chinese is being made into a tv series with a phenomenal cast (all the beloved actors from Everything Everywhere All At Once) on Disney+. I really can not get over Ke Huy Quan’s comeback story. It is so beautiful.

So I put on makeup, took my tween to school and drove through YET ANOTHER ATMOSPHERIC RIVER up 880 to get to Oakland. By the time I arrived, I was frazzled and undercaffeinated.

Then the lovely team of CALIBA folks ushered me in, welcomed me warmly and sat me down at the back table and began to unpack a box of Ebony Gate ARCS!!!

I was overwhelmed. I used a red Sharpie and wrote in the First Law – PROTECT THE HOARD. That was the first time I’d seen and held Ebony Gate.  A friendly bookseller in Chicago had received the ARC and described it to Ken as “a bit of a chonk” which was pretty amazing and very accurate. I cannot wait to behold it in hardcover!

After signing, I went down to my car to practice my little “author speed dating” talk and instead I just got so choked up and cried in the car instead.

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Signing Ebony Gate ARCs!

When Ken and I were writing Ebony Gate, we really didn’t know where the road would take us. We wanted to write something fun, we wanted to write a book that we wished we could have had when we were younger. We wanted to feel seen. So we wrote a story that had all the fantasy and adventure elements we loved, but with martial arts and monsters ripped out of Asian myth. And that was Ebony Gate. In the end though, it became a bigger book. It’s about learning how to walk in two worlds, how to go from feeling like an outsider to an insider. I’m so grateful to Claire Eddy for championing this book, and happy that TOR will be launching Ebony Gate into the world.

Writing can be a really solitary experience and I am lucky because I have a writing partner, which means Ken and I talk about story together all the time. Yesterday though I was with all these booksellers and listening them talk about how to train up associate store managers, how to navigate Edelweiss, where they keep their ARCs, what type of store events work best and all these really nitty gritty things that they do to get more books into the hands of readers of everywhere. To some, it might have seemed mundane but to me, it was magical.

Author speeddating was really intense, and I loved getting a chance to talk to Katherine Lin who has an amazing book launching in June, “You Can’t Stay Here Forever”. Since we both practiced law, and the book features the widow of a lawyer, I couldn’t resist picking her book up. Set in SF and France, it promises to the be the beachy book read of the summer for me!

Also very cool, I had an opportunity to meet the Macmillan field sales representative, Brittany Greenway. She covers all of California! That is a huge territory. She had read Ebony Gate and she told me she loved it. She didn’t have to do that and it totally made my day.

Another big treat, Emma Mieko Candon came to town from Hawaii. Their ARCs of The Archive Undying were out from Tor.com. I can’t wait to read it. Anything that talks about gods and machines has that vibe I totally love and this book will be catnip for me.

It was wonderful to sit with Emma and Nick Candon in a boba shop in Oakland Chinatown and talk about the vagaries of publishing, our next projects, and mostly we were just all bracing ourselves for so much extroverting. I mean, I had already extroverted, I was just mainlining caffeine at that point.

So, in summary, yesterday was a wonderful day.

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Emma Mieko Candon and Julia Vee at CALIBA 2023

I will be in conversation with Khan Wong to The Booksmith for the Down in the Sea of Angels on April 24th at 7pm. Please join us! RSVP is not required, but appreciated. Seats are limited and can be guaranteed with the purchase of a book.

See you at the shop!

On Writing [image error]

The other day, I participated in a panel discussion alongside David Wragg, Sebastien de Castell, Marina Lostetter, and Jennifer Dewes (J.S. Dewes) for the SFF Addicts Podcast. We talked about developing character through dialogue.

All of the panelists are authors who create books with a wide-ranging cast of characters. Our initial focus was ensuring that each character’s point of view (POV) had a unique voice. My advice for achieving this is to examine a conversation between two characters and then strip the tags to see if you can distinguish who is speaking.

TIP ===> Remove any action and dialogue tags.

Without the tags, can you identify the speakers? If not, it suggests that your characters’ dialogue lacks distinction. This is crucial to shaping a character’s voice because our diverse backgrounds shape our vocabulary. A soldier, priest, journalist, politician or artist will all use different vocabulary and come from different mindsets.

For example, Marina’s fantasy novel Helm of Midnight features Krona Hirvath. Krona is a soldier and works with a team of Regulators, when they speak, it’s decidedly different than the way a civilian would speak.

Sebastien pointed out that if a character is talkative early on but suddenly becomes monosyllabic later, it can signal an issue. This shift can convey something is amiss between characters.

Jennifer emphasized the significance of slang and inside jokes in her work, given her characters’ close quarters on a ship at the universe’s edge. Shared slang reflects their growing intimacy. In her Divide series, the two POVs (captain and conscript) of Rake and Cavalon work so closely together to save humanity that their speech patterns and inside jokes reflect that as the series progresses.

Sebastian also says that he does a voice pass in his manuscript revision just to make sure that all of the povs do have a very different and distinctive voice.

Sebastien noted that characters justifying their actions are akin to pleading their case outside Heaven’s gates. They can be giving a speech or monologue of sorts that shows their world view.

We discussed pre-establishing distinct voices for POVs. I shared how I envisioned my character, Uncle Jimmy, in the magical Chinatown of “Ebony Gate,” using actor James Hong as inspiration. This aided me in crafting his dialogue.

TIP ===> Identify early the way the character is going to speak, and then be consistent throughout.

Corollary ⇒ What the character doesn’t say is just as important as what they do say.

In Sebastien’s Malevolent Seven, Cade and Corrigan are war mages who have fought side by side through many battles. When Corrigan wants Cade to keep his mouth shut, he just has to make a gesture, like putting his hand on Cade’s shoulder and that’s enough to signal to him that Cade needs to bite his tongue.

I noted that in East Asian culture dialogue can also show the social hierarchy between the characters. For example, the way a younger student might address an older student at a school in Asia is very different. In Ebony Gate, a conversation between Emiko Song and a shinigami, a death god, demonstrates their disparate societal roles. The shinigami is a bureacrat and uses formal speech and long sentences. Emiko, a mere mortal, responds politely despite her unease.

The shinigami’s eyes burned a fiery red, the light burning through me. He crooned, his voice caressing. “Yes. I believe you would be a sufficient anchor to close the portal.”

The energy in his hands flared, spewing icy cold power in purple waves that made my stomach flop over. His words sent a shiver down my spine. “Yes, I could bind you into the Gate, turn you into statuary. It would be lovely. You would spend the next millenia keeping your city safe. What do you think?”

The death god smiled at me. It was not a comforting smile.

I willed my hands to stay relaxed at my sides as I held his gaze. I gave myself a moment to quell the rising bile in my throat, passing it off like I was considering his offer. “As generous as your offer is, I’m afraid I must decline. Surely there is another way.”

The shinigami clapped his hands together and crushed the purple ball of energy between them. It made a low thump like someone dropping a heavy book and my ears popped. “As I said, my authority is limited. I cannot act with impunity in the mortal world. You shall be my agent. You know the city and your reputation precedes you. I know you will protect those under your aegis.”

OTHER TECHNICAL TIPS FOR DIALOGUE:

Sebastian shared a tip from the Marshall Plan for Novel Writing which is that dialogue should flow in the F-A-D direction: Feeling, Action, Desire.

For instance, “Inspired, she reached for her pen, wanting to record her emotions before they faded.”
Compare with: “She wanted to record her emotions before they faded. She was inspired and reached for her pen.”

The FAD sequence ensures a natural rhythm for readers. Sebastien also does a voice pass during revisions to enhance distinctive voices for each POV.

Dave not only outlines, but outline where in the story the characters will have major arguments, signposting conflicts. His latest fantasy novel, The Hunters, has a great cast and I enjoyed Ree’s POV. Ree is a woman with a violent past. She’s older, jaded, and her speech style is more curt. In contrast, her 12 year old niece Javani is a hot mess and talks quite a lot.

I suggest blocking out the conversation by using dictation. Speaking is more natural and often results in more realistic dialogue. I use an app on my phone and just record dialogue as I’m walking the dog.

Lastly, if you’re writing something like an action scene, i suggest shorter sentences to speed things up. Fewer words means more negative space on the page for the eye to travel faster.

We also recommended works with strong dialogue examples. Marina suggested Terry Pratchett’s and Tendai Huchu’s books, praising Huchu’s young protagonist adopting a mature detective’s tone due to heavy responsibilities. In addition to T.L. Huchu’s Library of the Dead series (I am fan of the audio especially!) I recommended “Rivers of London” by Ben Aaronovitch, praising the distinctive protagonist Peter who rambles about architecture and jazz music.

The Youtube replay is here.

So in the hellscape that was 2020, we wrote Ebony Gate. Ken and I are delighted that Tor bought the trilogy. Our girl Emiko will be coming to your bookstore in July of 2023! Tor.com’s announcement here.

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TOR acquires Ebony Gate in a 3 book deal.

Finding an editor who championed our work was a dream come true. To read more about our Path to Publication, the in depth write-up is here on our Patreon. It is free to read, you don’t need to be a Patron to view it.

We are knee-deep in revisions now and it’s been an interesting process to revisit this manuscript after some time away.

We received our pre-empt offer in Feb. of 2021. To give some context, we finished drafting Blood Jade (book 2) in April of 2021. The draft for Blood Jade was 133k words, and we have written a bunch of other things in the meantime, which meant we were like 200k words past Ebony Gate and had to rewind our brains. Revision has been mostly about deepening the immersion for the reader and really getting into the emotional interior life of our protagonist, Emiko Soong.

Last week we chatted with our editor about cover concepts, which was very exciting. Our cast of characters includes a foo lion and if there were some way to work that into the cover art, that would be amazing!

The other day, I participated in a panel discussion alongside David Wragg, Sebastien de Castell, Marina Lostetter, and Jennifer Dewes (J.S. Dewes) for the SFF Addicts Podcast. We talked about developing character through dialogue. All of the panelists are authors who create books with a wide-ranging cast of characters. Our initial focus was ensuring that […]

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I was lucky enough to score an ARC of Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig. It is so great to see this version of the legendary Chinese pirate queen, Shek Yeung (also sometimes spelled as Ching Shih). For readers of Outlawed, Piranesi, and The Night Tiger, a dazzling historical novel about a legendary […]

The post AAPI Book of the Day – Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig appeared first on Julia Vee.