Meet our SFF Indie author of the Month, Delilah Waan. She is a literal bookworm who alphabetically devours her way through the shelves at her local library. When she’s not binge-reading the next doorstopper on her TBR, she likes to spit bars in her best Angelica Schuyler impression and walk her cat.
- To begin with, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?
I was born in Hong Kong but my family emigrated to Australia when I was about five and I didn’t speak a word of English. We moved from this old, old apartment on Nathan Road, the main thoroughfare in the busy Kowloon district of Mong Kok (literally: prosperous corner) to a series of short-term rentals before we ended up in a brand new project home in a brand new street in Sydney’s Hills District.
When I say brand new, I mean brand new. The street wasn’t a paved road; just a dirt track. Every single plot of land was just bush. The local school was so small there wasn’t even an ESL (English as a Second Language) class for them to put me in.
I still have no idea how I learned English. Osmosed it, probably.
2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?
Twelve was when the Spice Girls were touring as the biggest pop act in the world, when I saved up all my loose change to buy the latest issue of Smash Hits. Twelve was the era of Britney and Christina, so obviously there could be no other choice.
Twelve-year-old me did not appreciate my mum pointing out that none of my idols were Asian and telling me that if I seriously wanted to be a pop starlet, I should stop refusing to speak Cantonese, start learning Mandarin, and study Taiwan-born Canadian Sally Yip’s very successful Cantopop career in Hong Kong.
Eighteen was when I told my parents I wanted to study music at Juilliard as a performance major and become a concert pianist.
Eighteen was also when I realized that just because your Asian parents approved of you dedicating a decade of your childhood to piano, and your piano diplomas and eisteddfod trophies are the first thing any visitor to their home sees, they never actually meant for you to pursue music as a career.
Thirty was a year after my husband came home one day to find me sobbing on the floor, because I couldn’t figure out how to balance the demands of being on the partner track at a top accounting firm and going for my one shot at composing for full orchestra when the deadline for submitting the score clashed with audit busy season.
He asked me why I was putting myself through that torture.
I had no good answers.
So I ditched my job, finished the orchestral piece, and we flew to New York to hear it performed, then I came back and went part-time to write post-graduate accounting textbooks and work on my music. A few years after that, I fell into writing and publishing books. Thanks, COVID!
3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you do not have now?
That if I wasn’t already well into pursuing my dreams by my early twenties, that I would have missed the window of opportunity and they would never become reality.
I would set these goals based on what my heroes had achieved by the time they were such-and-such an age, without considering those achievements in the wider context of their lives. It was very much “You want to be like them? Then be exactly like them!” energy.
4. What were three works of art – book or painting or piece of music, etc – you can now say had a great effect on you and influenced your own development as a writer?
Rent by Jonathan Larson. I fell in love with the score long before I ever saw the show. I know every number and the libretto by heart. And when I finally got to New York… There’s a magic in theatre that’s all its own. The actors live the story and the audience is there as witness. You know it’s just performance and yet you can’t help but be viscerally moved. It’s unforgettable.
I love all of Janny Wurts’s work but The Empire Trilogy (which she co-authored with Raymond E. Feist) holds a special place in my heart. It was the first epic fantasy series I read where there was a character like me. Really like me. A girl, with a face like mine, from a setting with a culture akin to mine. And she wasn’t just some bit character slotted in to be the exotic oriental love interest/temptation for some guy; Mara of the Acoma was the titular character, the central figure without whom the story could not exist. She has agency, she has conviction, she has depth; she has strengths, yes, but flaws aplenty, too.
The plot and setting and other characters do not contort themselves to accommodate her, and yet Mara shines anyway. Whenever I reread these books (which is once every few years) they never fail to make me cry.
Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson. There are so many things I’ve learned from Erikson about writing, from the elliptical narrative (see his excellent essay, Deconstructing the Siege of Pale Aftermath Scene) to character (“Biography is not character”). Erikson is the reason I’ve become hypersensitive to exposition to the point of being borderline allergic to it, and sometimes my beta readers have to tell me, “no, you really do need to stop and explain what’s going on here because we’re totally lost.”
5. Considering the innumerable artistic avenues open to you, why did you choose to write a novel?
Why am I not working on that Broadway musical instead?
Well, I was.
There is a complete libretto and about 3/4ths of a completed score for Dreams Beneath Your Feet, a new musical exploring identity, family, and love in this modern age, cowritten with a friend.
We were performing songs at open mics and going to workshops and reading books like Broadway Investing by Ken Davenport. We had friends crowdfunding and self-producing their shows in very small venues; we had friends of friends who went nearly all the way (see the SBS documentary, Angels in New York) before things stalled.
But we both had demanding day jobs pulling our focus. Big collaborative work sessions got harder and harder to keep up after I moved from New York back to Australia and had a baby. I did, eventually, pick up the manuscript again (sans my collaborator) but put it back down just as quickly.
One read-through immediately told me the show was broken. There were bigger problems with the story than I remembered, and I didn’t know how to fix them.
So I thought I’d take a break by trying my hand at writing something simpler with every intention of coming back to the musical once I had developed the skills to tackle all those story problems. And here I am: two books in to what was supposed to be an epic fantasy trilogy but has now turned into a five-book series!
I haven’t given up on the musical but right now, it’s firmly sitting in the “some day” bucket.
6. Please tell us about your novel, Petition.
Petition is about an angry Asian daughter of impoverished fisher folk fighting privileged rich kids in a ruthless job hunt tournament, and takes place in a Song dynasty era fantasy setting where everybody is an empath.
It’s a classic underdog story about a talented girl from a poor family rising above the circumstances to earn herself a higher place in society through sheer grit.
It’s also the immigrant story.
What do you owe your family when your parents gave up their lives and left everything they owned behind to be foreigners in a strange country where they don’t even speak the language, just so you could have a chance at a better future?
What happens after magic school, anyway?
Why do so many fantasy stories begin with school and end with graduation, then skip past the intervening years to the end result, when those difficult years spent on acquiring experience and developing mastery are some of the most interesting and formative stages of a person’s life to explore?
Those are some of the questions that were on my mind when I wrote Petition.
7. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?
Understanding and empathy for people like Rahelu and her family, if they’re not familiar with the immigrant experience.
And catharsis, for those who have lived that story. I hope they’ll get that same flash of “oh my god, that’s me; that’s my life” recognition that I had when I first read The Empire Trilogy.
There aren’t many Western fantasy stories told from an East Asian perspective. For those who found the immigrant perspective new and fresh and interesting, I hope they’ll continue to seek out other diverse stories. Things are better now than they were in the 90s, but stories by BIPOC, female, and other marginalized voices are still few and far between, and often not as widely read and discussed.
8. Whom do you most admire in the realm of writing and why?
Janny Wurts! The Wars of Light and Shadow, her completed 11-book epic fantasy saga about two half-brothers cursed to enmity, belongs right up there alongside the works of Tolkien, Jordan, Martin, and any number of white male authors people typically name when asked to make a list of “the best epic fantasy series of all time”.
Her prose is gorgeous. Her characters are complex and nuanced. Her plotting is tight and relentless. Her settings are immersive and layered. Her themes are deep and timeless.
She’s an artist who does her own maps and interior art and paints her own book covers. She can ride a horse and sail a ship and survive in the wilderness and her lived experience of what it’s like to actually do all those things imbues her writing with a veracity that can’t be imitated.
She’s also one of the kindest authors on the internet, who spends much of her free time lifting up others. Not only did Janny Wurts read Petition, and not only did she leave a review on Goodreads, she also consistently goes out of her way to tell people to read my book!
There are many reasons to admire Janny Wurts but one thing that sets her as a writer apart from others is her foresight, patience, and maturity. She waited something like twenty years between when she conceived of The Wars of Light and Shadow, and when she started writing it, and held off putting pen to paper until she knew had the life experience and writing chops to do the concept justice.
And she did. Song of the Mysteries, the final instalment which came out in 2024, is the capstone on an absolute masterpiece.
9. Many artists set themselves very ambitious goals. What are yours?
I have two very simple goals: I want to get better with every story I tell, and I want to tell stories that stand the test of time.
10. What advice do you give aspiring writers?
Read, write, crit, repeat.
Read a lot, read widely, and read critically. Read in and out of your genre. Read books that you think are amazing and books that you think are trash. Learn how to deconstruct your reactions as a reader, and analyze prose and structure, so you don’t fall into the trap of equating high personal enjoyment with high literary craft.
Write a lot, and make writing a habit. By writing, I mean “produce words”; by habit, I mean “a thing you do so often and so consistently that the question of whether or not you are going to do it doesn’t enter into the equation”. If you want to be a writer, then write. Make the words come out of your brain and onto the page. Yeah, they might suck, but the thing with words is you can write more of them and make the next ones better. Finish the piece before you go over the sentences again. I’ll quote Will Wight here: “Finish the book…until you write ‘THE END’, you do not have a story, and you’re not qualified to evaluate it.”
Get crits on your work and give back, by doing lots of crits for others. Learn how to give honest, specific, and actionable feedback, and learn how to receive feedback—in whatever form, constructive and not—then learn how to get over your own ego and figure out which issues you need to address and which you don’t and which are not actually issues but symptoms of a totally different and/or deeper issue in your writing.
Then do it all over again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.
If you adopt this mindset, you will never be as good a writer as you want to be, because you’ll always identify something else you can improve on. But you will be able to produce writing that you are proud to publish under your name, and work that people will want to read.
Good luck!
Petition
In the Dominion of Aleznuaweite, anyone can rise to the greatest heights-if they are willing to pay the price. Failure is a luxury Rahelu can't afford. Her family sold everything, left their ancestral home, and became destitute foreigners for the sake of her resonance skills. Now she can manipulate emotional echoes to discern truth from lies, conjure the past, and even foretell the future. But an act of petty revenge by her rival destroys her chance at joining one of the great Houses. Desperate to prove her family's sacrifices were not in vain, Rahelu calls upon the most dangerous magic of all-altering fortune. A slight twist of fate is enough to restore her way forward...with deadly consequences she never bargained for. The Houses make a pawn of her in their bitter struggle for control of the Dominion. A shadowy cult grows ever closer to completing an ancient ritual. And Rahelu discovers that fulfilling her oath to her family might come at the cost of her mother's life.
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