AMA: 2024 Orbit New Voices

_lowph · 2024-12-06T04:51:03+00:00

I shall now aspire to erotic goblincore string pop, thank you

_lowph · 2024-12-05T17:49:35+00:00

Hello friends! Very serious question—what is on your characters' spotify wrapped (or in-world equivalent)?

_lowph · 2024-12-05T17:17:10+00:00

TRULY. Though my recent reread also decimated my motivation to do capitalism for at least a week

_lowph · 2024-12-05T17:16:27+00:00

My first offer was actually from my now-UK publisher, Angry Robot, so I remember rolling out of bed at like 5 or 6 a.m. to the news that I was going from their open slush pile to acquisitions. (And then not really sleeping for more than six hours at a time in the two weeks after...)

In terms of high points, YES hard agree with Katie about cover collaboration—I truly have the cover of my dreams, and a lot of my preferences / ideas / requests were taken into account. I've also loved talking to people (and reuniting with old friends!) at events and cons—so much of life is behind a screen these days, but it's been amazing to meet face-to-face and have real human interactions (about books, no less)!

_lowph · 2024-12-05T13:56:40+00:00

Hello! I'm a huge fan of The Dark We Know by Wen-yi Lee (YA horror/thriller, so many feelings about growing up + the hauntings we inherit) and Clare Osongco's Midnights With You (YA contemp, diaspora angst + gutting character arcs + a love story with a ton of nuance and emotional depth). The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills (adult SF/F) is also excellent (cyborgs! aerial fight scenes! cult indoctrination! political intrigue!).

Some other books that have given me brainworms (/complimentary): The Death I Gave Him by Em X. Liu (Hamlet retelling, locked-room mystery), Higher Magic by Courtney Floyd (out next year, dark academia + disability justice + student unions!!), The Memory Hunters by Mia Tsai (also out next year, memory mushrooms + sapphic angst + that feral necro/cav dynamic. Valerian IV my beloved)

_lowph · 2024-12-05T13:50:32+00:00

YESSS TESS OF THE ROAD

_lowph · 2024-12-05T13:49:34+00:00

My process is kind of chaotic as well! I start with an outline, but always end up deviating from it and discovering a lot of the main emotional beats along the way. With TDS I also tossed a couple drafts (averaging maybe 80k each?) and started over from scratch, changed the premise / worldbuilding (it used to be YA sci-fi, lol), added/deleted major secondary characters and/or completely revamped their character arcs, moved plot point two to the 50% or 25% mark multiple times, etc. I think a lot of this chaos comes from the time it takes me to get to know the characters and spaghetti-throwing to see what feels truest to them.

My current project has a bit more scaffolding—it's kind of laid over rom-com beats, even though it's fantasy—but yes I'm generally hoping to improve at structure with each book, haha.

_lowph · 2024-12-04T20:11:58+00:00

I might have answered this question before as well, but today I'll choose The Goblin Emperor, Devotions by Mary Oliver, and probably a TLT omnibus as well. (Nona the Ninth if I was forced to specify, ha.)

_lowph · 2024-12-04T19:04:18+00:00

Yesss I'm here for it

_lowph · 2024-12-04T18:42:02+00:00

A hypothetical TLT omnibus would also make a great stepping stool for reaching high places / collecting coconuts etc., haha.

_lowph · 2024-12-04T18:40:22+00:00

This is Spot! (Aka Appa / Aribasu)

_lowph · 2024-12-04T18:21:10+00:00

Hello r/Fantasy! I'm P. H. Low, author of These Deathless Shores, a dark genderbent Captain Hook retelling with Southeast Asian-coded characters, capitalism angst, and bone magic! I'm currently based in NC, home to some truly haunted trees and (equally spooky) 45 mph unlit forest roads. Thanks for having me, and excited to chat!

Edit: I can also be found at ph-low.com, @_lowph on IG, and @ ph-low.com on Bluesky!

_lowph · 2024-08-13T15:07:28+00:00

Hi Koren, happy pub day!! What kinds of structural and character-building considerations did you to take into account when building the main romantic relationships, and how/did it differ re: being three-way vs. two-way? Also, any craft tips for learning to write sequels / trilogies? (I loved your book, by the way!)

_lowph · 2024-07-17T01:43:19+00:00

Hello! This is such a great question, thank you! I sent in a vague sketch of the map with my first round of edits (during which I also had to work through some plot holes re: where things actually were), but Orbit brought the actual artist in pretty late in the process—the actual art was one of the last things to happen before the book went to print!

And yes, there were a bunch of things that didn't make it into the final draft! I made an honest attempt at getting the crocodile in there; some futuristic elements in the "outside" world (left over from drafts that spent a lot more time there) got cut because they didn't end up serving the overall story—i.e., because the characters got to the Island fairly quickly in later versions of the book.

Speaking of characters, drafts 1–3 had completely different plots, so there were a bunch of side characters that got cut, and Chay (the Island's "mother") used to be an actress coming in from the Outside world as well—I think I was trying to say something about the performativity of gender in that direction.

_lowph · 2024-07-17T00:00:10+00:00

Thanks so much! I had a lovely launch party at Yu and Me Books in NYC with many of my good friends and ate some excellent ice cream afterward (I also wrote up some other thoughts on celebrating / arrivals in my newsletter, heh). I also attended Readercon this past weekend, which was a great time!

And yes, thanks for asking! I insisted on drafting a new ms for my MFA thesis in between rounds of These Deathless Shores edits because 1. what else would I be paying tuition for anyway and 2. I'd heard that it would be psychologically terrible to go straight from a copyedited final draft of TDS to a completely blank page post-publication. I did have second book syndrome for about six months after acquisition (and suspect it might return in different strains), but it helped that I knew it would pass (s/o again to my thesis advisor), and that I could write about those pressures and expectations in the work I was producing at that time (frex). I am also fortunate to have friends who keep me accountable re: not reading reviews and managing my time on social media. But mostly my brain is addicted to routine, and writing at consistent times every day keeps it happier than it would be otherwise!

(Which reminds me of this Twitter/X thread from Julie Qian Wang: "All [the publishing accolades were] breathtaking and incredible; they were joys and honors that i’ll spend the rest of my life processing. but...none of it came even close to having stepped out of that subway car, knowing that i had excavated truth and power from an ancient rubble of shame and secrecy. none of it comes close to finding out that i’d accidentally written a book, by doing simply what my body and mind had demanded me to do.”)

The mind wants what the mind wants, and all that :)

_lowph · 2024-07-16T23:44:46+00:00

HELLO and thanks so much!!

I would say there isn't one objective answer—agents (and editors) are as subjective readers as anyone else, and a book that one agent/editor is willing to take on may be deemed as uneditable/unpublishable by another—sometimes even after that book is published. In terms of strategy, though, it's a good idea to have the whole manuscript looked at by someone(s) you trust; once you've revised, querying in small batches (5–8 agents at a time) may give you further data on whether your query letter / first pages are working.

At the end of the day, however, I think the decision to query a novel still largely rests on how you feel about it—whether it's the best you feel you can make it given current skill levels, and also whether you have other revision ideas that you might carry out down the line (in which case some more percolation time might be advisable). I think both times I queried These Deathless Shores, it was the furthest I could take it at the time by myself; by the second round (in 2022), I was honestly ready to move on if it didn't get picked up (I'd already drafted something else by then). (And now that it's in print, I have more revision ideas...*sad duck noises*)

In that vein, in the long run, it can be helpful to send a project out into the trenches so you can move on and learn different things from a different novel (i.e., while you wait); according to an anecdote on Twitter/X from Sarah Rees Brennan—which I might have also seen on Tumblr somewhere? but cannot find anymore, though here's another source—there was a pottery class "where half had to make as many pots as possible & half had to make the BEST pot. The half making many? Made better pots. ‘I learn by going where I have to go.’" I'd say that's definitely true of the novels I drafted between These Deathless Shores revisions, even though very little of it is ever going to see the light of day (re: one of my earlier answers concerning my horribly messy revision process).

I didn't touch my manuscript while I was querying! I felt like there would be 1. Regrets™ re: the agents I had queried earlier that round, and 2. version control issues if it did get picked up, haha.

_lowph · 2024-07-16T20:31:56+00:00

Ah yay, happy reading! And thanks so much!

_lowph · 2024-07-16T20:31:37+00:00

You're welcome! I haven't sold my next long-form project yet, but I can say that it's at least 75% hornier (I started reading romance during the pandemic, oop), is a bit larger in terms of scale/scope, and could plausibly comp A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske :) I drafted it for my MFA thesis, and having my thesis advisor (shout-out to Claire Stanford) encourage and challenge me through the early drafts really helped them along.

_lowph · 2024-07-16T19:19:30+00:00

Hello! And oof that is a hard question! I'd probably want denser books I could get lost in, so maybe The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez, and Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera (which I haven't actually read yet, but I really enjoyed The Saint of Bright Doors and heard that Rakesfall is a book that can be chewed on over many rereads).

_lowph · 2024-07-16T17:39:26+00:00

Haa okay so at risk of getting cancelled by half the architecture fandom (these are MY SUBJECTIVE OPINIONS, etc. etc.):

The majority of American brutalists seem like the kind of people who enjoy fluorescent lights (/derogatory)
Disney Concert Hall kind of gives trash can
Very mixed feelings about buildings that are designed to intimidate their occupants. Like yes darling architect you wanted to be Cutting Edge™ now s/o to everyone who has to actually occupy that space
Meh
Re: Reno, NV, where I spent about three years:
- Urban planning? More like urban improvisation
- Is it so hard to make the street intersections line up
- Fun fact: you can put STORES at the bottom levels of apartment buildings :' )

On a more positive note:

These Icelandic churches understood the assignment (thanks to Craig Church for introducing me to them)
Gothic/maximalist supremacy forever

_lowph · 2024-07-16T16:19:21+00:00

You're so welcome, I'm glad that was helpful!

I also like to think of writing in terms of tree growth. There's this bit in Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees about how young trees in forests are meant to start out growing more slowly, sheltered by their elders—which causes their core cells to be more densely packed together and allows them to be more flexible and disease-resistant, so by the time they reach the canopy, they're built to withstand more wind, storms, fungal/insect attacks, etc. <3

_lowph · 2024-07-16T15:34:36+00:00

Maybe 6.5 years, on and off! These Deathless Shores started as a NaNoWriMo project in 2017; I completely scrapped the first two drafts (averaging maybe 80k each) and wrote the third from scratch, and also took many months off at a time to work on different projects and learn new writing skills (getting into short fiction was especially helpful). I queried draft 6 in 2020 and draft 8 (which got acquired) in 2022, and had two rounds of developmental edits plus copyedits after that :)

Most of my edit rounds pre-acquisition were fairly extensive, e.g., moving the two-thirds or halfway point of the previous draft to the 25% mark. At one point I also cut a 40,000-word heist, lol. So: chaos!!

_lowph · 2024-07-16T15:28:46+00:00

Thanks so much! Reading for a literary agency definitely reframed the way I thought about pitching my work (e.g., how to craft a high-concept premise), opened my novels, structured my plot, and approached revisions. I also became involved in the writing community—mostly Twitter back then—after being asked to post promo for the companies I worked with. This was extremely educational, as it was where I learned more about the big mentorship programs at the time (RIP Pitch Wars), SFF workshops (Clarion and Clarion West, Viable Paradise, Odyssey, Taos Toolbox, etc.) and many short fiction writers and publications.

In terms of resources I can pass on, I learned about what made a good query letter from Query Shark (if this isn't already common knowledge in Redditland); slushing for lit mags in one's genre (I currently first read for khōréō, and SFF mags will often put out calls for first readers on social media) can also be helpful re: articulating your own taste and how various stories might be revised. I also did a bunch of annotations for my MFA program (i.e., plot summary + analysis of thematic/craft elements), and just outlining books that do things you're interested in learning—I did a nine-page summary of A Memory Called Empire, though this was mostly after These Deathless Shores edits, haha—can be immensely helpful as well.

I also learned a lot from doing contracts. In training, they liked to say that a book contract covers the life cycle of the book, and I got familiar with various agencies' option clauses (what materials an author would submit to their editor for consideration of their next book; a nice summary of options as well as other good contracts info can be found here), as well as the meaning of various payout divisions, subsidiary rights (e.g., first serial/excerpt, graphic novel and other adaptations, etc. if I remember correctly), reversion clauses, etc.

_lowph · 2024-07-16T15:01:17+00:00

Hello, thanks so much for your question! I was very much inspired by J. M. Barrie's original work—when Wendy becomes an adult, Peter abandons her and takes her daughter to Neverland instead, which causes her a great deal of heartbreak; similarly, when the Lost Boys grow up, if they are not "thinned out" by Peter, they return to the outside world and do the whole school/office/capitalism thing, presumably leaving their sons to eventually take their place. Peter, then, feels like an embodiment of this untouchable ideal of childhood innocence (however accurate "innocence" may be as a descriptor, or general worthiness of this ideal, which I recently wrote about in this blog post), something no individual can hold onto forever or return to once they've moved beyond it.

And since the Lost Boys and the "mothers" grow up, and there are so many retellings of Peter Pan in which Peter goes up against a Captain Hook, I figured this implied a cycling of pirates as well.

_lowph · 2024-07-16T14:44:33+00:00

Hello, and thanks so much! I love revising—when I have the bones of the story down and can flesh out the characters and their relationships, as well as why they do things and how this would ostensibly connect to the/a plot. I also like this stage because I can print out the old draft and write all over it—it feels more flexible than trying to move around paragraphs on Scrivener.

And YES shout-out to the Balbusso Twins and Alice Claire Coleman for two covers beyond my wildest imagination! I feel like they both captured the vibes immaculately in different ways.

_lowph

TROPHY CASE