Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is Nghi Vo! Her short stories and novelettes include the Hugo Award winner “Stitched to Skin like Family Is” and the Shirley Jackson Award winner “What the Dead Know.” She is also the author of the fantasy novels Siren Queen, which was a World Fantasy, Locus, and Ignyte Award finalist, and The City in Glass, which was a finalist for the Mythopoeic Fantasy and Locus Awards plus the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. Her next book, A Long and Speaking Silence, will be released on May 5 and is the seventh installment in The Singing Hills Cycle, a series of novellas inspired by East Asian and Southeast Asian history and mythology that begins with the Hugo and Crawford Award–winning book The Empress of Salt and Fortune. I’m excited she’s here today to discuss what she’s discovered about writing routines in “No Wrong Schedules.”

About A Long and Speaking Silence:

A LONG AND SPEAKING SILENCE is a stand-alone story of refugees, roots, and finding one’s place in the world. It expands upon the beautifully imagined, immersive universe Vo introduced in The Empress of Salt and Fortune. This is a fantastic entry point into the series that has been shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award, the Locus Award, and the Ignyte Award, and has won the Crawford Award and the Hugo Award.

On the banks of the Ya-lé River, the town of Luntien gathers to celebrate the start of the rainy season, but the celebration is marred by the arrival of refugees from the sea. Everyone has a story about the foreigners newly in their midst—lazy, violent, unwanted—while the refugees themselves grieve the loss of the home they loved. Cleric Chih, very recently still Novice Chih, is also a stranger in Luntien. With their hoopoe companion Almost Brilliant by their side, Chih must help the refugees while also unraveling a mystery that may have roots in their own faraway home in the abbey of Singing Hills.

No Wrong Schedules
by Nghi Vo

A while back, I was up for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. Didn’t win, but I did get this fantastic framed piece of art: a cartoon self-portrait of Le Guin herself, back to the viewer at her desk and working away, a cat keeping her company. I loved it and hung it over my own desk, where my own cat often stares up at me angrily.

I don’t pretend to have a lot in common with the esteemed and much-missed Le Guin, but I do smile a little wistfully when I look at her workspace in that cartoon. It reminds me of her famous schedule that gets passed around in writing spaces so often, the one that starts with getting to work at 7:15AM and knocking off at noon for lunch. It describes a routine devoted to art and tolerable existence, firmly bordered and gorgeously orderly. Every time this beautiful thing comes my way, I’m fired with the urge to try something similar. You know, up with an alarm, a routine that can be contained by normal space and time, a cat that doesn’t have to worry about when I’ll be returning home from sea.

And every time I try it, it works for like a week at most, and soon enough, I’m up ‘til 4AM, eating quarter-cups of shredded cheese and calling it dinner, and on the phone with my best friend Carolyn saying something like “Oh yeah, no, I can totally come over, I’ll work after I get home.” At this point, I don’t know if it’s a lack of discipline, some weird brain chemistry or some small part of me that just hates order, but the regular schedule with its beautiful boundaries and predictable outcomes doesn’t seem to be for me.

I guess it makes a certain amount of sense. Before I was a novelist, I was a freelancer, writing mostly, but available for whatever other gigs might come along and make me some rent money. I was pretty used to working a catering gig for a week, transporting library books for a month, and settling in to write 20,000 words on vacuum cleaner parts for a while after that.

I dragged my laptop from place to place, and I set up wherever I could, including the lunchroom at my tech support job, the library where my then-partner went to college, and my friend’s living room on an old wooden TV tray. I had a desk, I always had a desk, and writing did happen there, but mostly it happened when I had been kicked out of the other places.

I like to think I’ve come along in my career since then (at least, there are no more vacuum cleaner parts in my immediate future), but some things haven’t changed.

I was working at my desk ’til dawn last Friday, and a few days before that I was typing away at one of the counters at O’Hare International Airport. I don’t have a great relationship with O’Hare, but I have gotten several thousand words of various things typed up in Terminal G. I do a good chunk of writing these days in the control room of a recording studio in Milwaukee, that’s a fun one, and in Carolyn’s guest room in northern Illinois. Right now, I’m at my local library, pleased to have found an outlet so I can stay a little longer. It’s a nice day, so in a bit, I’m probably going to go wander around for a while, and then head home and write some more at that desk I like so much.*

As I’ve started to do events and meet other writers, something that I’ve never really done much before, I’ve met a lot of people who are worried that they’re doing it wrong, writing wrong, researching wrong, existing wrong, maybe. Mostly what I tell them is that if words are getting on the page, there’s only so wrong it can go. Books begin and end with words on the page, and they really don’t care how they get there. You can write books on a beautiful schedule that’s the envy of most of speculative fiction publishing. You can also write books sitting cross-legged on the ground at Dulles International Airport during a winter storm. Did you get words on the page? Then you’re doing it right.

I’ll likely try something like Le Guin’s schedule again. It’s good to try things, and I’ll probably enjoy it while I’m on it. At the same time, I’m aware that a few weeks after that, I’ll be curled up on Carolyn’s couch, trying to keep her cat Bailey from headbutting my laptop to the floor, making wordcount at 3 in the morning.

Knowing me, I’ll probably enjoy that too.

*I do use it for work. It’s just also the best place for the sewing kit, the fountain pen repair supplies, the computer repair kit, the watercolors, the jewelry-making stuff, and the cat. There’s a lot going on in there!

NGHI VO is the author of the novels Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful, as well as the acclaimed novellas of the Singing Hills Cycle, which began with The Empress of Salt and Fortune. The series entries have been finalists for the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, and the Lambda Literary Award, and have won the Crawford Award, the Ignyte Award, and the Hugo Award. Born in Illinois, she now lives on the shores of Lake Michigan. She believes in the ritual of lipstick, the power of stories, and the right to change your mind.