Announcing a new novel: A Scatter of Light
I’m thrilled to share the news that my next novel, titled A Scatter of Light, will be published in fall 2022. Here’s the announcement from Publishers Weekly:
The text reads:
Andrew Karre at Dutton has acquired A Scatter of Light by Malinda Lo, a companion to the NBA-longlisted Last Night at the Telegraph Club. Set in 2013 after the first of the Supreme Court decisions that brought marriage equality to the U.S., the book tells the story of Aria Tang West, whose story of desire and self-discovery is subtly entwined with a note of closure for Lily and Kath from Telegraph Club. Publication is scheduled for fall 2022; Michael Bourret at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret brokered the deal for North American rights.
I’ve been working on this book seemingly forever now, and I’m both excited and nervous that it’s finally going to be coming out.
A Scatter of Light is a companion to Last Night at the Telegraph Club, except it's set in 2013 and it's totally different, so one of the first things I'll be doing is disrupting your expectations.
It's not a romance.
I don't think 2013 counts as historical yet so this is another genre change for me; I'm calling it contemporary.
This is the closest I've ever come to writing literary fiction, which means no murders, no aliens, no fairies, no 1950s. I know! Sorry!
That’s the top-line info about the novel, and if you follow me on social media you may have heard this news already, but I’ve saved the whole convoluted inside publishing backstory to share with you here today.
I first started working on this book in 2013. It went on submission beginning in 2014, going out to two dozen editors in New York (that’s a lot—it felt like it went to every single publisher/imprint in the business). It was rejected or ghosted by 23 of them for a variety of reasons.
First, I was a different writer then. I’d only published fantasy and science fiction, and A Scatter of Light was my first non-genre manuscript. I knew that would create a problem for some publishers, but I had no intention of staying within SFF, so I had to make the change sometime. By this time, I was also dragging along a sales record that wasn’t doing me that many favors. I’d published four YA books, and although my first novel, Ash, had done really well, each subsequent novel sold fewer copies. From a business perspective, things could have been better.
It was also a different publishing world in 2014. It was before We Need Diverse Books launched. In 2013, only 29 LGBT YA books were published by mainstream publishers; that number went up to 47 in 2014. Although on-the-page representations of heterosexual sexuality were allowed in YA in 2014, the same was not true for queer sexuality.
So, when A Scatter of Light went on submission in 2014, it had a lot of obstacles in its path. It was about a biracial, Asian American/white teen girl, going through a coming-of-age experience that involved queer sexuality that was described on the page. I knew I was pushing it. But I’ve always done that.
On the positive side, several editors praised the writing on a sentence level, but ultimately concluded they couldn’t publish the book. A few editors were very worried about the explicit queer sexuality in the book, and even went so far as to discuss with me how I could tone it down. Some rejections to the manuscript read to me as homophobic, but I’m sure that wasn’t intentional. That knowledge, however, did not make me feel better. It made me angry.
Honestly, the experience of sending A Scatter of Light out on submission was devastating. But I still believed in the book. I just knew that I had to find the right editor.
Around this time, I met Andrew Karre at a conference through author Sara Zarr, who arranged for a group of us to go out to dinner. Sara, unfortunately, ended up missing the dinner herself, but the rest of us went and I’ll always feel lucky that I somehow got myself invited. Andrew did not know this, but at the dinner, I was secretly trying to assess whether he’d be a good fit for this book.
(Publishing inside baseball: By 2014-15, Andrew had developed a reputation for editing exciting and edgy books. I had a suspicion he would not think A Scatter of Light was too sexy.)
After dinner, I concluded that I wanted to send him my manuscript, so when I got home, I asked my agent to submit it to him.
Well, Andrew liked it, and we even had a phone call about his editorial ideas. I remember that he said the manuscript at the time was like a photograph, and I needed to turn up the contrast and enhance certain colors. It was a metaphor that ended up having a significant impact on the way I would think about the book.
However, Andrew was not able to buy A Scatter of Light in 2015. He did want to buy a book from me, though, so ultimately I came up with the idea for A Line in the Dark, a psychological thriller, which Andrew acquired for Dutton.
This meant that A Scatter of Light was still unsold, but I had a new publishing contract, and I had to write a new book. Let me tell you: writing A Line in the Dark was super hard because I was grieving the weird hanging nothingness of A Scatter of Light. There’s a reason A Line in the Dark is titled A Line in the Dark—it was basically the opposite of A Scatter of Light. Really bad things happen in A Line in the Dark, and in retrospect I’m pretty sure I was trying to exorcise all the awful feelings I’d felt while on submission with A Scatter of Light.
Also, I became depressed. Fortunately, this had happened to me before, so I knew what to do. I found myself a therapist. I was diagnosed with general anxiety disorder, which explained a lot. I got better, and I learned a lot of coping skills that I still use today to manage my anxiety.
A Line in the Dark was published in 2017, and I’m still proud of the story I told.
Around this time, I made the decision to change agents. My new agent, Michael Bourret, persuaded me that I could turn a short story I wrote for an anthology into a novel; that would become Last Night at the Telegraph Club. We sold it to Andrew within weeks, and to my surprise, Andrew also offered to buy A Scatter of Light.
By this time, I’d put the manuscript on a shelf and told myself it was over. I tried to chalk it up to a learning experience. (We all know learning experiences are horrible.) But I couldn’t turn down the chance to work on it some more; I had never really stopped thinking about it.
One catch? We all agreed that Last Night at the Telegraph Club should come first. This was early 2017, and we were stuck in the nightmare of the Trump administration. I knew that the 1950s of the Telegraph Club had parallels to contemporary life, and I wanted to get this book out there as soon as I could.
It took four years. I’m not a fast writer, and Last Night at the Telegraph Club was a challenging book to write. I had to learn how to write historical fiction. I had to learn how to write fiction that was driven largely by character, not by plot. It was hard work, but I knew it would make me a better writer.
I returned to A Scatter of Light in January 2020, over six years after I’d last worked on it. I often tell writers that it’s a good idea to put a draft aside for a few weeks before you start revision, so you can gain some perspective on it. Well, when I came back to my draft, it felt like it had been written by a stranger. I was shocked by it—I had pulled zero punches. And I saw very clearly where the holes were.
I knew that I had become a better writer in those six years, and now I could turn this into a much better book. I deepened all of the characters, and I think Andrew’s comments about photography stuck with me, because photography became an important element of the novel during revision. While I was working on Last Night at the Telegraph Club, I also realized that A Scatter of Light is connected to it, and I was able to weave some of those threads together. That would never have happened had A Scatter of Light not gone through its complicated publishing trajectory.
But you know what didn’t change? The queer sexuality. Almost all of the book’s intimate scenes are word-for-word the same as they were in 2014. Back then, I thought those scenes represented some of the best writing I’d ever done. Today, even after all I’ve learned about the craft of writing, I still believe that.
A Scatter of Light is about art and family and sexual awakening. It has had a difficult journey, but every step along the way, no matter how painful, has been necessary. You’ll be able to read it in fall 2022.