Rebecca F. Kuang

have been reminding folks for a while now that the Amazon May release date is and always has been wrong. Thanks, Amazon. THE BURNING GOD is out in November.https://twitter.com/rinczha/status/1263888442439630848 …

i call this writing first the Aesthetic and then the Story, bc i can't write the Story until i'm vibing with it! plotters take a seat.

in one scene they're running drunk through a graveyard and they find a tombstone and i don't know whose tombstone it is or why it's significant they found it but BOY does it sound cool ...and that's the entire drafting process revision happens later

i can't draft chronologically, and half of my "scenes" are scribbles of actions I think look cool (some consisting only of a single verb) or ominous bits of dialogue I like and will find a way to work in later. it's a messy pantser's process so hard to show ppl in the middle

me: i am doing SO WELL on this new book, the plot and themes are SO CLEAR, i have 50K WORDS, i am THRIVING agent: ok so show it to me me: i,,,there are no complete scenes, no complete sentences, the only thing i know about the antagonist is that she's hot, suddenly i can't read

does america still fundamentally misunderstand what scones are yes are these nonetheless flakey, light, crumbly, melt-in-your-mouth, just sweet enough heavenly goodness? also yes

and i don't even LIKE military SF so that's saying a lot! i got to read an early excerpt of Linden's book when we were classmates at Odyssey, but this version just blows me away. the prose, characterization, and world-building are all so good. #tomatopride

copyedits for THE BURNING GOD are done!!!!! these mfing 700+ pages of copyedits are DONE! attached and sent, and that really WAS the last significant chunk of work i'll ever have to do on this trilogy!!!! i'm going to have a slice of cake.

i think a lot about what it means to write a China-inspired novel, for Western readers who mostly don't know Chinese, as someone bilingual but who thinks in English, using Chinese names and puns. usually that reflects in lots of copyediting dilemmas and hard audio calls lol

for other clearly Chinese names like "Nezha," "Runin," "Daji," etc, we chose to use the Chinese pronunciations but drop the tones. The non-tonal versions are also what I hear in my head when I'm writing–I think Nezha, not Nézha (哪吒). lots to unpack here w diaspora/language!

the way you say "Cike" is one of those cool translation things where it has special meaning in either language. it also highlights the fact that though the book is in English, it takes place in a non-English speaking world (Nikan). translation studies is fun!

i get this question a lot! the Chinese would be cìkè (刺客, literally, 'stabbing guests'–plug that into google translate for an audio pronunciation), but I believe in the audiobooks we chose to use "psych" because it's a pun of its own, as well as smoother for western readershttps://twitter.com/Hexbox76/status/1262844802820956160 …

it's almost my birthday and packages from Bookshop keep showing up at my door i know they're presents so i haven't opened them and don't know what books they are or who they're from but am just rly grateful for my friends rn altho can one of u nerds send whisky instead

i found what im wearing to my weddinghttps://twitter.com/JennRavenna/status/1262639408630517760 …

can "breathed" be a (good) dialogue word? asking to see if i should stet or not