Iz a Newsletter #2

IZ A STATUS UPDATE: 

Ok so it’s been like a year since I updated this (don’t worry about it everyone) so a lot of cool stuff has happened! I won a Nebula…no…two Nebulas (the second one as part of the Death in Hyperspace team) and a BSFA Award and have been nominated for the Locus, Hugo, and Sturgeon Awards, all for Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole. So, safe to say, very big very scary year for my hole! Please vote for me, etc. 

Expect a novelette and two short stories to come out from me this year (Depends on magazine timing, but that’s the plan!), the novelette from Lightspeed (probably! maybe next year!) and the short stories from Reactor and [don’t know if the TOC is public yet!]. Think the short stories will all be in autumn, so more on that later. 

Andddd we’ve got a release date on the novel! SUBLIMATION will be out on JUNE 2, 2026. REMEMBER THIS DATE: 6/02/26. IT'S ALMOST A PALINDROME! 

I will become increasingly more annoying about the novel release as the next 12 months roll past. Get ready everyone. I’m gonna share pictures of the cover and everything, it’s going to be vibe city. 

IZ CONTENT: 

I think I’ve gotta finally admit to myself that I am not a newsletter person in the traditional sense. It feels too much like writing an opinion column, but the opinion is about myself, and the audience is people who maybe want to know about that, which all feels super weird to me. This is in spite of having religiously updated my tumblr for ten years. 

In an attempt to write more, this is probably just going to be a variety column of unedited commentary on things interspersed with the “how did the book deal happen” stuff. 

Today we’re talking about writing my second novel, since I just recently punted the first draft of my second adult novel to my editors, and I now have opinions on workflow. So here’s what I did, with commentary including “whether i thought it was a good idea, in retrospect.”

Hopefully it’s useful or at least interesting :>

1. The zeroeth thing I did was think about this for two years and read a book about the subject and also think about it a lot in the shower, and also go to the mall a lot as a teenager, and also, grow up in New Jersey. I recommend growing up in New Jersey, I had a pretty good time. Whether I recommend thinking about your project a lot sort of depends on whether incubating it in your mind for 2 years is a useful part of your project. Sometimes I do it, other times I don’t. But usually while I’m writing something I’m thinking about the next thing I’m going to write. 

2. The first thing I did was write out the first 5-10k of the novel, without any outline, after a few false POV starts. I would highly recommend doing this because it prevents you from getting super attached to one “vision” of the novel before seeing whether it is viable and gives you a clearer sense of what the POV / main characters care about the most — this was a good idea. I do this for basically all my projects and it cuts down on false starts incredibly well. For short fiction I do about 500 words, rather than 5k. 

3. Then I wrote an extremely shitty outline (my outlines are TERRIBLE) that planned out the beats for the story and major elements and the vague shape of the main characters, as well as writing a couple of mission statements / messages to my friends dms / scribbles in a notepad. Also a good idea. I wish my outline had been better though, and I wouldn’t recommend everyone do this so disjointedly. This works for me because if I “know too much” then I lose interest in writing the story. 

4. Then I just started writing, with the goal of basically a) chunking the story out into three sections and b) every chapter being roughly about 4-6k and c) ending every chapter except for the last few with “things getting worse for the protagonist.” This worked really well for me, and it was a thing I implemented after the really messy revision I did on my previous novel (don’t worry about it!). It also worked because writing about 4-6k is my sweet spot re: short fiction, so it was a pretty natural arc. 

5. Because I wanted to write the draft pretty quickly, and to prevent getting bogged down in random research/naming people holes, I did a lot of [leaving brackets to fill in later], resulting in…..400 brackets to fill in later. I sort of regret this. I started doing this to save time / leave notes for myself but as I kept going… :I . I recommend doing this but judiciously. It was really helpful in not breaking workflow but by the end I was really just leaving shit like “write a fight scene later” in. Which was mildly demoralizing when it came to edits. 

6. I ended up on a schedule of: monday: 2k words; Tuesday 1k words; Wednesday 2k words again; Thurs-Sun 1k words. This ends up being about 9k or 8k (if you skip a day lol) a week, and about 36k a month. Which means you end up having a full draft in about 3 months. Of course, I didn’t stick to this exactly and took more time off than I probably should have, but if you’re trying to draft quickly I recommend this cadence because the spikes / valleys make it “feel” like you’re getting a break even when you’re writing 1k words. If I had a day job, I would maybe halve the amounts and then just take 6 months on the draft which is still pretty dang respectable. Super recc this for longer projects that you need to grind at. Writing fast also really worked for me because one of the issues I have with writing a project for a long period of time is…forgetting/losing steam on the initial idea. 

7. Then I put the draft away for two weeks. If you have time, I’d recommend leaving it for a month, until it feels foreign. 

8. Then I read it through, and just started working on edits from the beginning, clearing out all my brackets and cutting any information that I thought was unnecessary. The edit felt mostly like I was trying to shape a big pile of “stuff” into a streamlined, cohesive narrative, and also like I was trying to figure out which plot points and character arcs to keep. Overall, I made less changes than I thought I needed to do, but also had more brackets to fill out. One thing I really noticed was that I would explain things like 3 times because I had forgotten I had explained them. Cutting extra explanations and adding in explanations for things I forgot to explain was the main thrust of the work. Honestly, a lot of writing is just “information dissemination management,” but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post. This took about three months, but this is because a) I moved during this time period (Ah!) and b) because I had to do edits for SUBLIMATION, lol. No other notes, this is basically where we’re at right now. Editing is a totally different skill set than writing, but I enjoy doing it a lot except when I have to do it for 400 pages. 

9. Sent it to my editors after agonizing over the draft and whether it was anything. I don’t think it’s perfect yet, but at this point I felt like outside eyes would be helpful. (Sometimes I use beta readers, other times I don’t—shoutout to Allison Mills for reading this whole thing as it was being written) And this is where we are now! Hopefully ppl like it or else I will be like Ah! After this, I’ll get an edit letter and me and my editors will toss things back and forth a bit, but for now I’m free to work on other projects. 

anyway, hope that was mildly interesting. See you probably sooner than 11 months! 

xoxo
IJK