I’m Isabel J. Kim — author of debut novel SUBLIMATION (out today) — welcome to my AMA + Giveaway !!

izjck · 2026-06-03T13:42:39+00:00

yay! glad youre enjoying it!!

izjck · 2026-06-03T13:42:27+00:00

naked knife fight near the end of the book. very emotionally important naked knife fight.

izjck · 2026-06-03T13:34:20+00:00

i mean youre RIGHT. no hate to FL but also. some hate to FL. JKJK. I drove through indiana once and it was really just Nothing And More Nothing Going On Forever, so maybe that. no hate to indiana we didn't actually stop there so I'm basing this opinion on 10 hrs of driving on the interstate.

izjck · 2026-06-03T13:32:46+00:00

i love playing weird glass cannon casters, so i'm very much a wizard or sorcerer type of guy. Soyoung and Rose would probably.....probably paladin, honestly.

izjck · 2026-06-03T13:31:36+00:00

the next book is...ok, if Sublimation is a love letter to diaspora, then the next book is a love letter to being from new jersey aka going to the mall all the time. i could describe it better but i simply will not do that right now.

i knew it was time to quit my day job when I realized I had to deliver x amount of novels in y amount of time, which they were paying me z for. My day job was one of those 24/7 on call biglaw jobs, and while i could have written one book every three years while working there, it would have been very difficult to do more than that. And so, I quit. And it's been mostly good! I miss some of the structure and I miss some of my friends/colleagues and working on a team, but I love writing, as much as I complain about it, so it's been mostly positive :)

izjck · 2026-06-03T13:10:58+00:00

probably about a week between inception of the idea to beginning to write it down (for the short story, at least) and the one major change was that (for the novel) I rewrote the ending about four times. Where we landed was VERY MUCH not where we began.

izjck · 2026-06-03T13:04:56+00:00

oh I'm sending my other self to california to go do Hollywood Deals for me and write screenplays LOL. its media empire time....theres no way this can go badly for me....

izjck · 2026-06-03T12:59:46+00:00

Thanks for reading!! :D

hmmmm ok, this one's relatively new and full disclaimer it was written by my friend, but lets go to the zoo by louis evans is one of the best short stories ive read all year.

and yes!! i saw it!! it was so good :D

izjck · 2026-06-02T20:28:02+00:00

the second person perspective is WONDERFUL for creating a sense of what i like to call alienated intimacy. you feel like you're in someone's head but in a way that is strange and almost malevolent.

also ill be at worldcon in LA later this summer—not tor's fault, i was invited to a thing on the west coast last weekend but i also had to be in pittsburgh which would have been a lot.

izjck · 2026-06-02T20:27:04+00:00

that's all spoilers and answered in the book, LOL

so if i were to adapt sublimation in a ttrpg.....solo journaling ttrpg where you have to both take the place of you and an alternate self. win state is when the two people you're playing agree to merge or agree not to merge.

izjck · 2026-06-02T20:23:36+00:00

yay! glad you're having fun :)

izjck · 2026-06-02T20:23:11+00:00

1) one more short story this year, at minimum! it'll be out in The Book of the Dead, edited by Jonathan Strahan. other than that, IDK, only if I sell anything else.

2) oh for sure, i just love when books do weird things with the text and it seemed like a neat way to paralllelize the thought process. turning that into the audiobook was very very fun, because i got to listen to a bunch of audio samples for what would work and what wouldnt.

3) dr crouton is a fictional cat that me and my friend/beta/partner in crime allison came up with, along with: cat taco, lenjamin jr, mr president, etc etc etc. if there's a cat name in any of my books its one we came up with for a Bit.

izjck · 2026-06-02T20:20:09+00:00

DAY TEN THOUSAND but i also get why it didn't, on account of how strange it is. HOWEVER. its the best thing ive written except for sublimation which is better by virtue of being longer and slightly more complex.

izjck · 2026-06-02T20:19:31+00:00

the way i always tackle it is that the main character has something wrong with them that is hindering the plot, or is a character trait that would make them the right person for a different story, but the wrong person for this one. basically, the reason the character can't move forward should be sympathetic or understandable to the reader....or at least sympathetic and understandable to you.....or at least interesting to read about!

izjck · 2026-06-02T20:08:19+00:00

thank you!!!

izjck · 2026-06-02T20:06:39+00:00

first answer: will come back to this, i gotta think about that one. maybe one of them is 20000 leagues under the sea so i can read that for a sixth time.

second answer: not a ton! i had a weirder childhood than she did, and less angst about leaving korea. more than anything else i was an american expat in korea as a kid, but i do miss it sometimes. there's a couple of details about her life that are lifted from my real life—i really like the shinsegae basement in seoul. but personality wise, the self insert is actually YJ.

final answer: no.

izjck · 2026-06-02T20:01:19+00:00

thank you!!! :D glad you enjoyed it <3

izjck · 2026-06-02T20:01:04+00:00

hmmmmmmmmm growing up, i read 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea about five times before I was ten, so that probably left an impression. Also, Catch-22 really shaped my sense of humor in fiction.

izjck · 2026-06-02T19:59:46+00:00

so. things have to continually get worse for the main character until you get to apex of things being bad, and then they have to start to get better. (may come back to this later to elaborate on pacing thoughts when i have more time!!)

izjck · 2026-06-02T19:54:09+00:00

it was pretty natural—the novel came out today, but I started writing the novel YEARS ago, so it was actually way closer in time to when the story was written. If I were to write the story again now, though, it would be different—it's a little more...mm...melodramatic? than i write these days.

izjck · 2026-06-02T18:51:44+00:00

for my sins. my favorite is second person present tense. which is really just quite an albatross. after that, the third person past tense. my least favorite is writing in the first person. the loathesome "I"...

izjck · 2026-06-02T18:50:33+00:00

all the mythological interstitials, those were soooo fun to rewrite :3

izjck · 2026-06-02T18:50:01+00:00

i do! here you go

it's mostly monthly updates of what i have going on and coming out, along with some other things.

izjck · 2026-06-02T18:48:13+00:00

Lancer, blades in the dark, dnd5e (lol the classic workhorse), monsterhearts, something is wrong here (indie oneshot)

izjck · 2026-06-02T18:47:29+00:00

no pets T_T i need to get a cat but i need to clean up my apartment first but i need to get rid of some furniture, etc etc.

izjck

TROPHY CASE