Malinda Lo

Happy Day After Leap Day, everyone! I just watched the Leap Day episode of 30 Rock and now I really do wonder why we don’t celebrate this as a holiday. An extra day every four years! What’s not to love? For me it meant I got an extra day for rough drafting, thank goodness. Here’s what I was up to last month:

February in News

None! February was a month of traveling and writing for me, so I’ve got nothing to report. I’m almost 100% certain, though, that next month will hold some news. Stay tuned!

February in Writing

Last month I plugged away at the sequel to Adaptation. As of today, I’m at 37,554 words, which is just about 10,000 more than at the end of January.

What that word count hides is the fact that I spent most of my February writing time rewriting portions of what I wrote in January, so actually, I wrote more than 10,000 words. I don’t usually like to rewrite while I’m rough drafting, but this time I realized I started the book wrong, so I had to go back and re-start it. Yes, from the beginning. But! I’m moving forward now and I hope to continue plowing ahead until my deadline … which is April 1 (no fooling).

As I mentioned in January, if you want to follow my word count progress (and see which weird photos I choose to illustrate it), please follow me on Tumblr.

February in Reading

In February, The Girls of No Return by Erin Saldin was released. I loved the book so much that I blurbed it, so I highly recommend it.

I also read the ARC of a book that comes out in March (this month!), which I will tell you more about soon. But here’s the cover in case you’re curious:

It even has a blurb from one of my favorite writers of all time, Robin McKinley, who describes it as “dazzling good” — and it is!

February in Photos

I went to Florida last month to visit family and attend a friend’s wedding. Here is the astonishing view from my hotel room window (I was staying at the Westin Beach Resort & Spa in case you want to replicate the view):

Back in the Bay Area, I took a short ferry ride out to Angel Island, which is the site of the old immigration station where Asian immigrants were detained (sometimes for years) due to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Standing in the room where so many Chinese men were held like prisoners was extremely moving. They carved poems onto the walls to document their time there.

Chinese poems carved into the walls of Angel Island Immigration Station

The island itself is kind of a time capsule of American defensiveness (or hostility); there are two abandoned military bases and the remains of a Nike missile silo, in addition to the immigration station. And all around, there are amazing views of the bay.

The ruins of the hospital at Fort McDowell (they tore out the stairs!)

Officers' quarters at Camp Reynolds, with the bay in the distance

In March I’m going on a writer’s retreat in Mexico, and I’ll still be pounding away at the sequel to Adaptation, so posting may be sparse. Have a great March, everyone!