From 2022 to 2023 — Malinda Lo

Every year I do an annual review post in which I look back on what I did and look forward to what I hope to do in the year to come, and I tag them annual review on my blog to make them easy to find. This is a holdover from the years of active blogging (a decade ago now!), and I still do it because I still like having this record of what happened to me. This means if you’re interested you can go back over a decade to see my annual reviews.

Last year (at the end of 2021, in case you forgot what year this is), I wrote that my goal was to figure out what to write next, and I can report that I have indeed figured out what to write next. I even wrote the first chapter! It needs work, but it’s a beginning that showed me a lot about what I need to think about and research before I do anything else. I’ll need to go back and rewrite that first chapter, too.

The reason I didn’t get more writing done in 2022 was because it was an intensely packed year for me travel-wise, and Last Night at the Telegraph Club just kept going and going and going, and then I published a new book, A Scatter of Light, which also demanded a lot of my time. Here’s a bulleted list of what happened and where I went over the past year:

Last Night at the Telegraph Club won the Stonewall Mike Morgan & Larry Romans Young Adult Literature Medal, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in YA, a Michael L. Printz Honor, a Walter Dean Myers Honor, the John & Patricia Beatty Award, and the Chinese American Librarians Association Best Book Award. It was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in Young Adult Literature, the Goodreads Choice Award, the New England Book Award, the SCBWI Golden Kite Award, and the Cybils Award. And just last week, I learned that it won 2022 Teen Book of the Year from the Kids’ Choice Book Awards, the only national book awards voted on solely by kids and teens. Wow!
Last Night at the Telegraph Club hit the New York Times Paperback Best Sellers List in February 2022 (my first time on the NYT list!) and ultimately spent five months on that list.
I traveled to 10 states (not counting the one I live in), the District of Columbia, and Canada.
I did 43 book events (I’m counting conferences as one event, although I often do multiple events during a conference), including virtual and in-person events.
Several of my books were translated into non-English languages and published around the world. Ash was translated into Portuguese. Last Night at the Telegraph Club was translated into Italian, Polish, and Portuguese (twice! Once in Portugal and once in Brazil). Huntress was translated into Dutch.
The Carnegie Corporation recognized me as a Great Immigrant, and I’ve been nominated for the 2023 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.
A Scatter of Light debuted on the New York Times bestseller list and spent a month on the Indie Bestseller List. It also received four starred reviews, was a Junior Library Guild selection, a Kids’ IndieNext pick, a Target YA Book Club pick, a Barnes & Noble Best YA Book of 2022, a Buzzfeed Best YA Book of 2022, a Parents Best Children’s Book of 2022, and was named one of NPR’s Books We Love for this year.

By now, I’ve had nearly two non-stop years of book promotion and Being a Public Person (a.k.a. Authoring), and when I returned home after my final trip of 2022 (to Atlantic City the first weekend of December), I almost felt as if I were no longer present in my body. I was so frazzled by social media (especially twitter’s demise), traveling, bad sleep, Lyft stress (they don’t always come!!), awful airport and hotel food, and being on while meeting countless strangers that I was overwhelmed by a need to burrow under a pile of blankets and do absolutely nothing for as long as possible.

I’m not ready to come out of hibernation yet, but I am looking forward to spending several months not being a public person. I plan to read books that interest me, research my next novel, and rest.

Don’t get me wrong – I was so grateful to have the opportunity to be an Author this last year. I can still hardly believe that A Scatter of Light debuted on the New York Times list and I got to go on a real book tour to promote it! This book has meant so much to me for so long now, and all the travel stress and anxiety was worth it. But all that travel stress and anxiety also handily showed me (again) that being an Author is not as fulfilling as being a writer.

In 2023, I’m planning to get back to that. I know that I won’t be able to finish a whole new book in 2023, but I do plan to get a good start on it. I’m so excited about this story. I’ve been thinking about aspects of it for my entire life, and it’s going to challenge me in ways I’ve never been challenged before. I don’t know when it will come out, but it will probably take a few years, because it’s a big book – not necessarily in terms of length, but in terms of ideas. And it takes time for me to shape big ideas into a readable story. I have faith in this story, though. I think it’s going to be a good one.