The Legend of Auntie Po by Shing Yin Khor

This book sort of…popped into my head in fairly fully fledged form – I wrote the synopsis in just two days during the X-mas holiday while home with my parents. Many Chinese cooks were known for being excellent, and often a mark of a good logging camp that could draw the best and most reliable loggers had Chinese-run kitchens. Some details I had gleaned from other research and was comfortably familiar, but one specific detail stood out to me – that some Chinese cooks were paid more than white cooks. I was continuing to do Bunyan and logging camp research, and I was reading an academic book, Sue Fawn Chung’s Chinese in the Woods. I can write a lot of things, I love writing lots of things, I was just unclear about which things other people wanted to buy. I am not a person of few ideas, so writing pitches is just not the hard part for me.

It is probably worth mentioning that the most motivating thing for me is a contract and deadline, and it is extremely hard for me to complete a long project without some external forces bearing down on me.Īnyway, I decided to challenge myself to just write one new pitch a month, and query agents, and see if any of my ideas were actually things other people might want to read. I had a lot of freelance and self-directed work, but I wanted to work on a longer project and frankly, I was craving some publishing industry legitimacy and income. I’d finished my first graphic novel, but it was in publishing limbo and I had no idea if it would be published (it has been now, but I didn’t know that at the time). But that book’s a bigger project, and I didn’t really have a clear sense of how to approach it yet, and I was flailing around a little bit about what to do with my career. I’ve been really into logging history and Paul Bunyan for a while – I wasn’t trying to actually write this book in particular, I was hoping to eventually write a non-fiction graphic novel about the evolution of the Paul Bunyan mythos. This is going to be an extremely practical and technical answer.

The Legend of Auntie Po by Shing Yin Khor