LAST TANG STANDING is an #ownvoices comedic epistolary novel set in Singapore that explores love, friendship and family through the lens of a 33-year-old Chinese-Malaysian singleton, Andrea Tang, who is determined to climb the corporate ladder in her prestigious law firm, yet must appear to date towards marriage in order to appease her traditional family, especially her mother, who has no vices and would probably live a very long, very adult-children-focussed life.

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1. It’s freaking difficult to name a book for publication, and your “gut instincts, which, despite the inordinate amount of alcohol you’ve imbibed throughout your working adult life have never failed you, ever” will usually be horribly, horribly wrong, which suggests that you might be harbouring some intestinal worms that you must kill, immediately, with a deworming tablet or suffer the consequences (warning: consult your physician before taking medical advice from an author). Oh, and a title isn’t final until your publisher decides it is.

It is done. All i’s are dotted, all t’s crossed. You let out a howl of achievement, pleased with the efficiency and brutality with which you have eviscerated your latest coven of Twitter trolls, may their families disown them for crossing swords with you. Then you turn back to your manuscript, still panting, your gaze now soft, pliant, unlike the way you look at your own family IRL. You open your book with a click and bask in its textual glory. Here you are with your precious one, all proud because you’ve spent X amount of time on it, constantly obsessing over every word and detail to the point where you might even have made love while plotting a scene where someone dies, and now the time has come for you to name the yowling thing you’ve just expelled from your mind canal. What should you call it? Your mind races. You already have a name, but your publisher is not keen on it, and now you’re back to the drawing board. My advice? Steer away from going too big, too boring, too specific, too vague, too personal, too esoteric, and you’ll be fine. Easy peasy. And definitely do not infringe on any existing intellectual property or veer into libelous territory. After all, those pesky, money-grubbing lawyers will come crawling out of the woodwork to make your life a living hell if you let them (spoken as a former legal counsel myself—hey, we can’t all be perfect).

Anyhoo, that’s how my book went from ‘My Mother is Watching Me Date: A True Story” to a much more palatable, memorable, and (bonus) legally unproblematic “Last Tang Standing’.

2. Editing is a shared responsibility, and deadlines are real and will haunt you.

Listen: your precious one is not perfect. And it will never be. Perfection, like a politician who keeps all their campaign promises, does not exist. What is more important is Respecting the Deadline instead of polishing what has already been sold—the sooner you get this in to your thick head, the more likely you will perform to your publisher’s satisfaction, and the more likely you will get another book deal.  As a perfectionist, this was a hard lesson for me to learn, and I’m trying to save you and your editor a bunch of passive-aggressive emails where you negotiate for extensions of deadlines to “try a new idea” and your editor has to pretend to entertain your lunatic ramblings before shooting them down. At a certain point, you just got to let go and let your editor take over. And no, you can’t edit your own book—by now, you and the manuscript have forged unholy soul ties. You can no longer see the wood for the trees. Hand the book over to your acquiring editor. You need to let the professionals handle this next step. Trust me. To illustrate: the manuscript that got me my agent, the novel that very important people you’ve never heard of but are String-Pullers of the Highest Order are calling “ground-breaking”, “the funniest thing I have read since the chapter about reproduction in my high-school biology textbook/the latest coronavirus-related hoax” and “should be made into a movie, ASAP, with Michelle Yeoh and Awkwafina and at least one token white supporting actor in it, stat”, is not the same one that’s being published, not even close. The latter is, like, the fifth or seventh iteration, I don’t know.  I went down a couple of dark rabbit holes. Finally my long-suffering, super generous editor told me that I had to stop “tweaking” it, i.e. straight up revising plot points, and hand it over. Now. Or Else. And that my friend, is when you have to relinquish the reins. Or their lawyers will come after you, #becausecontract. And even then, there will still be mistakes, from time to time. May you never find any of them *vampire hiss*.

And another more specific reason why you should listen to your editor: they know how to avoid the lawyers. While going through the first round of edits, your editor might tell you that, haha, some parts of your manuscript need to be edited to avoid it being a potential liability. For instance, the restaurant where your characters got food poisoning from bad oysters ideally should not be an actual, operating restaurant with the same name and address as the “fictional” one. You might also want to avoid a situation where your “fictional” ass-licking, backstabbing, yoghurt-and-boyfriend-pilfering co-worker somehow shares the same name and general physical description with your living, breathing ex-colleague— you might be asked to maybe, I don’t know, be a little more creative with the embellishment, make sure each character is really a composite character bearing only 100% coincidental resemblance to any person, especially the living.

My point is: Your Editor Is (Almost) Always Right. Obey them.

3. Don’t fight over the cover.

So you think the cover of your historical romance should have a bare-chested he-man astride a glittering unicorn, and you don’t mean ironically. So you think the cover of your supernatural thriller should be a face projectile vomiting into a pit filled with writhing succubi. So you think the cover of your dystopian novella should feature an army of women with buttons for eyes. Don’t hold fast to your dream cover, because chances are it sucks, or at very least, will get you zero sales from your target audience. But my artistic vision!, you whine, oblivious to the fact that your cover has about as much appeal as free childhood vaccines for anti-vaxxers. You are a writer, not an artist (unless you are one of those annoying multi-talented people). Or a marketer. Don’t try to dictate your own cover (sure, you can protest, a little, or give guidelines on what you prefer, but not too many, you don’t want to drown your publisher in details). I may have wanted a woman doing her impression of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, piles of documents burning in the background, for the cover of my comedic novel set in Singapore. Obviously, for so many valid reasons, I was outvoted.

4. Your family/friends will want to know if they’re in it, the energy vampires that they are—well, some.

You must say no. At least on the group chat(s). Then you must pull them aside, one by one, and feed them sweet, sweet lies about which character’s redeeming qualities were inspired by their [insert positive characteristic trait that may be completely made up]. Or make up some bland, pleasant character with interesting, unoffensive physical and character traits that you can pretend is based on whoever feels left out on any given day.  Feel free to liberally massage your family members’ and friends’ egos—after all, aside from being rich source of materials, they would also be your first customers, willingly or through great coercion. And that’s how you preserve the unity of the clans. Because when all else fails, your family and friends will still be there. Hopefully. Except the ones you named the office gossip and the dirty, racist politician after—”as a joke”.

5. You must start mentally preparing yourself for feedback.

People will like your book, and they will tell you. Sometimes they will tell you with highly suggestive GIFs, or straight-up gifts. Or words. You must train yourself to have some self-restraint. I myself am easily susceptible to flattery.  The other day someone slid into my DMs and said they really enjoyed reading my advance reader copy, that it made them laugh so hard they choked, and I immediately, despite being in a happy, committed relationship, had to prevent myself from replying that if they wanted to, I would drive to their house right there and then with my book doused in sensual, sensual essential oils, tie them up and jam the spine hard into their open mouth while they gagged, but safely.  Of course, it had nothing to do with the fact they looked like their parents had made very astute breeding choices, resulting in pleasing physical symmetry and skin that could bounce light back into space. But yes. As I was saying, I am susceptible to flattery.

People will also tell you things they don’t like about your book. To these people you must smile and do nothing, unless they threaten your safety and the authorities must be despatched. Do not engage in verbal warfare, online or offline. Do not become a Twitter troll or IG stalker. Do not enrich another lawyer. Stop it. You are better than them—you are a published author.

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Lauren is a reformed legal counsel who writes funny, moving stories. Hailing from Malaysia, she lived in the United Kingdom, France and Luxembourg before moving with her family to Singapore, where she is ostensibly working on her next novel. LAST TANG STANDING is not based on her mother. At all. Seriously.

Lauren Ho: Twitter | Website

Last Tang Standing: Bookshop | Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

EDIT: And I’ve replied to the 15 winners below — please email me at terribleminds at gmail dot com with subject header FIYAH SUBSCRIPTION, and I’ll get you set up in the next day or so.

FIYAH is a speculative fiction magazine by and about black voices. I confess, I’m a ding-dong who has kinda stopped paying attention to SFF fiction magazines — not because there’s not an astonishing amount of great storytelling going on, but because honestly my reading time is constantly in competition with itself in terms of doing research for my books and getting books to blurb and I sadly do very little reading for pleasure. (Also, the pandemic has eaten my time even worse than usual? How has that happened?) Falling asleep at the wheel here has meant I have not paid nearly enough attention to a magazine like FIYAH, which is waaaay the fuck my bad. As such, I’m gonna try to rectify that error for myself and for some of you, too —

I’m giving away five subscriptions to Fiyah.

All you gotta do is reply to this post in the comments. I’ll pick five tomorrow, and you’ll get a digital quarterly subscription. (And if you don’t win, don’t forget you can subscribe on your own, too.) I’ll also ask that if you win, you donate to Black Lives Matter, to a bailfund, or the ACLU — somewhere that impacts and renders aid to black voices.

That’s it. Comment up to 11:59PM tonight (6/8) and I’ll pick the five winners and then I’ll get your email addresses and you’ll be sorted with a FIYAH subscription.

UPDATE: Ryan Sohmer is gonna cover another five, so that’s ten total subs to give away!

UPDATE: And Ben LeRoy is tossing in another five!

Soon after her husband’s tragic death, Robin Besher makes a startling discovery: He had recklessly blown through their entire savings on decrepit rentals in Four Points, the Appalachian town Robin grew up in. Forced to return after decades, Robin and her daughter, Haley, set out to renovate the properties as quickly as possible—before anyone exposes Robin’s secret past as a teenage prostitute. Disaster strikes when Haley befriends a troubled teen mother, hurling Robin back into a past she’d worked so hard to escape. Robin must reshape her idea of home or risk repeating her greatest mistakes.

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It’s not really that fun to buy and renovate a cheap old house.

The Distance from Four Points is about an affluent suburbanite who’s forced into landlording when she finds out her late husband blew all their money on rental properties in her Appalachian hometown. To research the story, I spent a few days in my hometown in southwestern Pennsylvania, having a realtor take me around to residential and commercial properties for sale. I wasn’t looking for viable places to work or live—the ones I chose to see were mostly priced below $50,000, many as low as $10,000, and I was interested only in the ones with tragically ruined beauty. These places were once homes to the wealthiest people in town—a former coal-mining town that once held more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the country. The homes I saw had turrets, original woodwork and stained glass, wraparound porches, gorgeous brick walkways covered over with weeds. They were also actively crumbling.

But: I bought one. Friends made the leap first, claiming a turreted, five-bedroom, red-brick house for $17,000, and asked me and my husband to partner with them on flipping it. The house had been split into a triplex decades ago. There were collapsing dropped ceilings, holes in the floor, broken or missing windows, and the turret was missing its pointy peak. It was a forlorn, forgotten ruin straight out of HGTV renovation porn. For a while it was exciting to lead the restoration; then it broke us, emotionally and financially. A cheap old house is not cheap to fix up. And even a gorgeously fixed-up house can’t be flipped when the location is all wrong. We still own it. We had to turn it into a rental. I could tell landlording stories for days.

Waitressing influences everything I write.

In the summers after high school, I was a waitress at a few different places in southwestern Pennsylvania, including a country club and a chain restaurant that, for a while, required all servers to wear a funny hat. The complicated joggling for tips, the conversations I shared or overheard, the glimpses of other families at the tables I worked, the blatant theft and scheming—even two decades later, these experiences feed my work. In the two novels I’ve published, my characters are waitresses. This isn’t accidental. Waitressing, even in a nice place, requires a particular kind of gritty resilience, a willingness to be swept along with the rhythms of the shift, a tolerance for—or an openness to engaging in—petty feuds and sordid liaisons. It’s no surprise that Robin, the protagonist of The Distance from Four Points, meets a trainwreck lover during a dinner shift, or that she meets the husband who’ll save her during a different shift in a different year. People pass through places, and they need to eat, and even in a small town where it seems like every single face is familiar, as a waitress, sometimes you’ll meet a stranger.

The protagonist from my first novel, Each Vagabond by Name, was a one-eyed bartender based on a man a waiter friend told me about one night after our shift. That entire novel wouldn’t have existed without that particular night of running tables, my arms aching from carrying BOGO platters of bourbon steaks and seasoned fries with a side of ranch.

Every day as a waitress was a chance to find new stories. I’m still drawing from them, all these years later.

My novels are political. (Maybe all novels are.)

I published my first novel, Each Vagabond by Name, in June 2016. It’s about a small Appalachian town that’s upended when a group of itinerant thieves start robbing people’s homes, and its themes are xenophobia, grief, and belonging. It’s set in southwestern PA—Trump country, though I grew up there and am connected to the area in a way that goes much deeper than easy labels and dismissals. When Trump was elected that November, xenophobia ran rampant; there was a constant thrum of debate over who was an outsider, who was a “real” American, who deserved to be valued, respected, protected. The vilified outsiders in my novel took on new meaning. The story became almost comically allegorical. I hadn’t intended to write a political novel, but there was no denying I had: the apocalyptic effects of small-town xenophobia were relevant well beyond the pages of Vagabond. 

This time around, The Distance from Four Points falls into similar queasy territory, questioning who exactly are the victims and the oppressors, who deserves leniency, how much we owe to others and ourselves. We’re all in lockdown now. The residents of Four Points are in a kind of lockdown too, unwilling or unable to see beyond their small-town borders. For them, there is no wider world, no such thing as expertise or global perspective. I know this for a fact: the characters in The Distance from Four Points wouldn’t be caught dead in a homemade face mask. It’s discomfiting to me that my affection for these characters only grows.

I write best when my time is limited.

I wrote most of The Distance from Four Points when my daughters were under age five, still in preschool. I had less than three hours a day to write, three days a week. I’d drop them off at preschool and literally run home, spending every second I could at my desk before I had to return for pickup. Somehow, I wrote a novel this way. I had a singular focus. I was master of the little time I had. I didn’t get distracted with errands or housework or crafting or exercising or meeting friends for coffee. Once both my kids began elementary school, I had the entire school day to write—yet I accomplished less. With more time, there was less reason to feel so frantically resolute. It’s hard to get back into that mindset of time-scarcity. I’d be well served if I could.

With every novel I write, a line of discarded pages will stretch for miles behind me.

The very earliest version of The Distance from Four Points involved a nun faking a pregnancy and planning to kidnap a troubled teenager’s child. Another early version concluded with a dramatic and symbolic act of arson. The actual published novel includes none of these things; there is a nun, but she is only a next-door neighbor to a more important character, not the driver of the plot. I wrote hundreds of pages of story before I actually realized what my novel was about, and a lot of scenes, characters, and plotlines were discarded along the way. This is not an efficient way of writing, but for me, it’s necessary. I don’t outline because I often don’t know the twists and turns my characters will take. With Four Points, I didn’t even understand who my main characters would be. Cindy, best friend of my protagonist Robin, initially appeared in only a couple of scenes—until she elbowed her way into more. Vincent, Robin’s monstrous former lover, was terrible until he showed himself to be less villainous than regretful, aging, and weak. The process of finding a story isn’t something I can easily explain. There’s no formula for it. And there’s no avoiding the false starts and retries. I wish I could become a more efficient writer, but this novel has shown me that the long road to any future publication will surely always be lined with dead darlings.

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Margo Orlando Littell is the author of the novels The Distance from Four Points and Each Vagabond by Name, both published by the University of New Orleans Press. Each Vagabond by Name won the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize and an IPPY Awards Gold Medal, was longlisted for the 2017 Tournament of Books, and was named one of fifteen great Appalachian novels by Bustle. Originally from southwestern Pennsylvania, she now lives in New Jersey.

Margo Orlando Littell: Twitter | Instagram | Website

The Distance from Four Points: Bookshop | Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

A stolen throne. A lost princess. A rescue mission to take back what’s theirs.

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THERE’S A REASON WHY PEOPLE STICK TO ONE POV

My first book, THE TIGER AT MIDNIGHT, has dual POVs and it came to me pretty naturally. I had a clear idea for each of their storylines and it was overall an organic process. Not so for THE ARCHER AT DAWN. This book required me to meticulously plan out every step in both Kunal and Esha’s individual journeys in a fairly painstaking fashion, making sure that they had individual character arcs that merged with the plot––and with each other’s arcs. At the end, however, I had a truly intertwined and unique story that I realized only could have been achieved by planning it from the perspective of dual POVs.

HEISTS ARE HARD

I don’t know about you, but I always wanted to write a heist of some sort, especially after seeing Danny Ocean smooth talk his way to stealing a whole casino in Ocean’s Eleven (yes, I know it didn’t exactly work like that). But heists in films and heists in literature are two different beasts. I ended up doing a twist on a heist, a people heist, if you will. And it was one of the most difficult parts of the plot to figure out. Heists are hard! Especially in a fantasy world. But scribbling furiously onto large notepads and creating multiple excel sheets helps. Also, watching lots and lots of heist movies.

SECOND BOOKS ARE FERAL THINGS

Sure everyone tells you that second books are hard, but it isn’t until you actually try to write one that you understand the unique pain that is trying to wrangle a second book. THE ARCHER AT DAWN’s first draft came out as a tangled, snarling mess of words and it was my job to wade through and find the story. It was definitely there but at points it felt like the story didn’t want me to find it. I was in a constant battle between the story it wanted to be and the story I thought I needed to tell. It wasn’t until I let go and listened that I was able to tame the story and make it into a real book.

SECOND BOOKS ARE ALSO MAGICAL

Yes, second books are hard. But there’s also a certain magic to being able to dive back into a world and into the lives of characters you already know. Writing THE ARCHER AT DAWN allowed me to dive into my characters’ lives and backstories. To write them having special, hilarious moments with each other that they wouldn’t have had in the first book. It’s like when you reach the next stage in friendship with a new person. You’re past all the stilted conversations and slightly awkward coffee dates and finally on to the good stuff–the emotional rewatches of your favorite teen movies, the late night drinks pondering the vagaries of the universe. That’s the magic of a second book.

NO ONE WRITES ALONE

The typical image of a writer is alone at their desk, typing or scribbling away furiously as inspiration pours out of them and onto the page. We all know the latter is untrue and just rude, but the idea of the solitary nature of writing has endured. It’s romantic in a way, I suppose. But none of my books, and certainly not THE ARCHER AT DAWN, would exist in their form without the support and help of my many writer friends. They were the ones who helped me brainstorm a new way to tackle a plot hole or encouraged me when I was absolutely sure my deadline was out to murder me. And while I’ve always loved my writer group, I learned to truly and deeply appreciate them after writing THE ARCHER AT DAWN.

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Swati Teerdhala: Website | Twitter

Archer At Dawn: Harper Collins