The VIOLET MADE OF THORNS cover is here! (along with some excerpts) â¨
(cover design by Casey Moses / art by Sasha Vinogradova)
If you want to read:
đš a fairytale-flavored fantasy
đ° feat. asian antiheroine seer + golden boy prince
đĽ in a love/hate trainwreck of a romance
Find out more about VIOLET & preorder! (or just click to see the webpage I designed because I am: extra)
For those hearing about my debut book for the first time: I call Violet Made of Thorns my âfairy tale for cynics.â Itâs a fantasy romance for people who think feelings are the worst. The heroine multitasks by flipping off the gods with one hand and flipping off the prince with the other. Itâs somehow both sillier and bloodier than youâd expect. And it comes out July 2022!
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I went into sub(mission hell) with a glorious mix of high hopes and low expectations, which was the only practical way I could process things: want for everything, expect nothing. My agent Elana sent emails out to editors and I descended into literal hell by playing Hades (Iâve since gotten the true epilogue, by the way).
Then a week later I get an email from Elana mentioning âfun newsââtwo hours after she sent it because I am a west coast timezone straggler.
I leapt out of bed! Crashed into the bathroom to brush my teeth! Fumbled for my phone!
The fun news: A PREEMPT!! OFFER!!
There were more fun details in the call and subsequent calls and emails that flew around, and this all happened very fast. This book couldn't be in better hands from my agent to my now-editor Hannah and the team at Delacorte. Hannah and I have been not-subtly circling each other ever since she read my short story âFoolsâ in Foreshadow. It was truly to my utter relief that she adored my manuscript, too, and we were both so excited to finally yell at each other (âYou were watching me?? I was watching you??â).
The thing that I could have never prepared for is, after the deal settled in, I felt the next years of my life hurtle at me. Everything is about to change. Everything is not hypothetical anymore. The thing I'd been working forever towardâit's here. Oh my god.
Counting from the beginning, Violet Made of Thorns (formerly known as Vile Vile Violet) took four years, but the latest incarnation of my manuscript really only took root in 2019, and I completed most of it during the first half. I queried in 2020 and heavily revised for three months after signing with Elana. I'm big on big revisions, I love doing them, and I expected to do this one because it was only after this last version that I really adored this book.
If you know VMOT's inspiration though, you know it started nearly ten years ago, when I started writing a snarky contemporary fanfic just for fun.
I had only barely begun writing continuously, and I was still in my I-don't-like-writing-I-just-wanna-tell-stories phase (I was That Self-Taught Artist who wanted to make a webcomic as a teen, shouldâve seen the signs). I wrote fanfic in the loosest sense: 98% of my characters were original characters or the most minor of canon, they just existed in a fandom space. The only reason I figured out I wanted to tell original stories was because I had such a supportive audience; that love was born from reader interaction. Though I keep a professional divide from my fanfic, Iâve always been open about referencing it, because without it, I wouldnât be writing at all and besides, weâre well past thinking fanfiction is a taboo or inferior medium (and my opinion is people who do think that have no imagination re: storytelling or canât fathom that some stories simply arenât written for them).
The fic that inspired VMOTâit became so much more than I ever thought it would. I wrote an indulgently prickly gossip girl OC who reigns with a scathing pen and pursues a questionable relationship with the resident golden boyâand readers loved her! Okay, a lot of readers also said they hated her but also said they couldn't help but be hooked.
And as the story progressed, the silly satire became a more personal story, and so many people said they never read any character like her and that they felt seen for the first time. I got essays, yâall, legit hundreds of essays in the comments that I loved responding to (which I canât do as a pro author, forewarning, but I appreciate any future essay writers) because I knew exactly what they meant, because I was writing about stuff I always wanted to see myself. The way ambitious (anti)heroines were rendered across media often left me wanting, coming across as wish fulfillment by and for people who didn't actually understand these characters. In this storyâs case, I wanted to see ambition dissected uncomfortably, cynicism that can't be solved, romance for someone who didn't totally get romantic love, and everything tied up with a startling frankness.
So I decided to write these characters all over again, but in a completely original setting.
Writing an original second-world fantasy is very, very different from writing contemporary fanfic. I had to fill so many gaps in my skill I never had to deal with before. These last four years were spent learning how to worldbuild and introduce characters that an audience wouldn't have an automatic buy-in for and structure a story that wasn't serially written. While I worked on it, past readers would pop up and tell me they couldn't wait for me to get published while I'd be like "hahaha we'll see," because I knew the realities of publishing, but truly, it was the sweetest thing.
I don't know how many of you have been lurking all this time, but I'm glad that optimism hasn't been for naught and I will actually have a novel to show you after the long wait. This story is very different from the one you know. It's a love story. Like, really, actually, this time. And it's fantasy. Like, fantasy fantasy. Itâs still blithe and bantery until it slingshots to serious (less about celebrity journalism and more about uh, complicity in imperialism and environmental destruction), but the plot, the words, the everything is different. The most obvious echoes come from the characterizations and those personal themes I wanted to explore, but even so, Violet isn't totally like her previous incarnationâand I never wanted her to be.
And I'm a much better writer now. Violet Made of Thorns is the best thing I've written. I hope it doesn't stay that way, because I have a lot more stories to tell, and also Book 2 to finish :)
Things you can do right now âĽď¸
Add Violet Made of Thorns to your Goodreads
Follow me on Twitter and Instagram and here, on Tumblr
Sign up for my nascent newsletter, if you prefer getting your news condensed and intermittently
Yell to your friends about this, to their utter confusion
The Foreshadow authors will be talking crafts and stories on the virtual tour! There are five stops, each with different authors, plus Emily and Nova - Iâll be at the one at Oblong Books!
âWhat Doesnât Kill Youâ
Thursday, Oct. 29 at 7pm ET
Hosted by: Oblong Books, Rhinebeck, NY (via Zoom)
Emily X.R. Pan & Nova Ren Suma with story contributors Tanya Aydelott, Tanvi Berwah, and Gina Chen
More info & RSVP here
Order a signed copy (signed by Emily and Nova) from Oblong Books.
You can find the full details of the entire tour here.
Foreshadow: Stories to Celebrate the Magic of Reading and Writing YA comes out October 20, nearly three years after I first wrote the short story âFoolsâ inside this anthology. Itâs been an age! A whole era, creatively and otherwise. Every time I read it, it's like a look back in time.
In January 2018 when I wrote âFools,â I was in the middle of drafting the second or third version of the manuscript that I queried this year (I would not get past 30k of a draft until 2019). You can see the influence of itâthe shared themes (the building of stories and oneâs place in it, and how that awareness shapes a person), the remnants of my manuscriptâs first setting, the first person present. Some ideas are eternal: I have always loved writing heartless girls, literal and figurative. And both storiesâlike all my original storiesâare specifically written with an Asian diaspora lens.
A few months after submitting to Foreshadow, I was told I was shortlisted. A few months after that, I got an email that made me shriek loudly and without explanation to my two poor friends who were in the same room at the time: Sabaa Tahir selected my story. It took me half an hour to read the email in entirety because I was busy telling everyone (it's a lot slower when I have to type everything in capslock). Later that year, I worked with an editor for the first time, the lovely Alexa Wejko. I added entirely new elements to âFoolsâ in order to anchor its strongest themes (Iâm a chronic kitchen sink-er; I tend to put everything into my stories and pick out the straggling bits later). We did a few rounds and I also got copy edits (alas, I donât have the name for who did mine, but thank you for tidying my words).
Then in February 2019, my story went up! It was my first new writing posted online in two and a half years. I got exceptionally nice comments, many Howlâs Moving Castle comparisons (unbelievably, I didnât consciously take Howl as inspiration but it's obviously there), gorgeous fanart, agent interest for my manuscript, and something to link to on my sparse website at last.
And it didnât stop there! As you can see from the very real photos of the very real advance copies, the thirteen new voices in the digital Foreshadow YA anthology are becoming a physical anthology. Exactly two years after I wrote âFools,â I got to revisit it for Algonquinâs copy edits. I saw pass pages, a cover from the incredibly talented Sarah J. Coleman, my name in trade reviews, and most recently, advance copies. In the same time, I alsoâfinally!âfinished my stubborn ever-changing manuscript, queried, and signed with an agent.
In less than two months, Foreshadow will be in bookstores. Inside, you can read âFoolsâ and twelve other short stories from new YA voices, as well as craft essays from the pair who started it all, Emily X.R. Pan and Nova Ren Suma. It's been an amazing experience, both behind the scenesâso many administrative things that went smoothly!âand in everything we got to show off, and it wouldn't be possible without the efforts of the Foreshadow staff, the Algonquin staff, the many who have supported Foreshadow along the way, and especially Nova and Emily and their vision.
Three years have been a long time and no time at all. Publishing is full of stressful unknowns, but this anthology has been a positive beacon the entire time I've been part of it. âĽď¸
Buy Foreshadow: Stories to Celebrate the Magic of Reading and Writing YA from Indiebound / Barnes & Noble / Amazon
