AFTER THE WHIRLWIND Mina Ikemoto Ghosh

 

Now that the whirling debut dust has settled Lui Sit invites Mina Ikemoto Ghosh to talk about one thing she's learnt since becoming a published author.

Mina Ikemoto Ghosh celebrating her debut novel

My debut YA novel, Hyo the Hellmaker, was published in March 2024 and I haven’t felt much of a whirlwind since. After all the editing and the drawing, things now feel calmer – like I’m out on a relatively quiet sea. Sometimes the sea has been choppy and that’s fine. It’s outside of my control and that is only to be expected of things that are bigger than a single writer ever can be.

With the publication of Hyo, this was one of the first things I learnt and maybe the hardest: that I cannot control my book’s fate. Ironically, for a book which features the control of bad luck and fate as ‘superpowers’, I was made very aware of the role of luck in a debut writer’s experience. 

Beyond delivering the book in reasonable time and quality, everything else – the publishing, how it would be sold, how it would be read – was out of my hands. Controlling the book’s post-publication future was like trying to cram a jellyfish into a jar. I could ask, ‘Are there any plans?’ but with few concrete answers the book’s post-publication fate could only be an exhaustingly shapeless, colourless thing that would sting me if I tried to get an inexpert grip on it.

You might call this submission of control defeatist but I was so busy and tired that I didn’t even notice that I could have been fighting. 

I finished line-edits and the front cover design in October 2023. Then I was illustrating from November into mid-January 2024 when Hyo was finally declared a wrap. I needed to start the next book’s draft at the beginning of February to make the April 2024 deadline so I put my head down and got to it. 

By the time I noticed that there would be no ‘proofs’, ‘blurbs’ etc it was late in the day. Somewhere along the line, I’d sabotaged chances of getting the book seen but I couldn’t plan for a cascade effect I didn’t know the steps of – and what cannot be planned for cannot be controlled.

Picture from Hyo the Hellmaker

All of this means the second thing I learnt was to focus on what I could control and to treasure and prioritise those things. 

Maybe I couldn’t stop the book from being assumed a graphic novel or mistaken for an action adventure, the murder mystery-ness obscure. 

But I could focus my energies on writing the next book, on hitting my deadlines, (or not), on finding time to celebrate with and thank all the people who stepped up to help me when we realised that there was a fight to be had, on surrounding myself with these people who were my firefly squids of joy in this experience and on not depriving myself of, well, the achievement of having seen a book project through to its end before it starts its second life with readers. 

None of this came naturally to me and I’ve had to learn to take deep breaths and actively decide how to interpret my debut experience. Crucially I wanted it to serve me in whatever came next rather than hinder me from moving forwards.

Book cake (by Tania Tay) at the launch party
Photo ©Simon Ghosh

So the third and final thing I’ve learnt since my debut is to not avoid that question, ‘What comes next?’ 

For a long time, publication and debuting as an author was the dream that kept me going through many ups or downs. I’ve achieved that dream, in its simplest terms, so my default answer for what I hoped might come next in my life is no more. There’s a sense of a void. 

It’s tempting not to think about the future because to do so means noticing that the dream I was chasing isn’t ahead of me anymore. 

There’s also an unexpected freedom. The weight of a dream, and all its doubts, is gone. Part of me didn’t want to dream and attach myself to a new weight again so soon. In short, the future, when I dared to imagine it, was suddenly shockingly dreamless but, being a massive coward, I was afraid of populating it with dreams again.

More celebrating 

Being mindful of ‘what comes next’ took two forms for me. 

The first was to identify new dreams that the debut experience had opened doors to. The opportunities only available because Hyo now existed, such as seeing the book in my local bookshop, (check), putting together a launch party, (check), eating my book as a giant cake – thanks Tania! – being invited to an author panel, (check), and meeting the readers who really got the book, (check and wow it’s been surreal). 

I’m hoping to put a copy of a book in my grandmother’s hands, (with the…er…darker and toothier pages safely paper-clipped together), by the end of the year!

Seeing Hyo on the bookshelves is a realised dream

The second was to trust I’d be okay to want things and to seek them out. 

Some might feel that to say ‘I want…’ can make you vulnerable. It’s giving others something to use against you – either as joke material for daring to want or as an easy way to hurt you by threatening its denial. But you need things to look forward to and you’re your own best hope of finding them. 

The point is to not to fill the void of a dream accomplished but to teach yourself that it isn’t a void at all. 

That first dream of the debut hasn’t disappeared but disintegrated, cracking open for a many-branched thing to sprout, with the buds of dreams you never knew to dream. On the quiet, (occasionally choppy), seas of the debut experience, I think about these dreams. The ones I won’t know I’ll want until it’s time, and I wonder what new dreams my writing might make possible next.

 

You can find Mina on Instagram and X. 

*Header image Ell Rose and Tita Berredo

*Photos courtesy of Mina Ikemoto Ghosh

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Lui Sit writes MG, non-fiction, adult short stories, and memoir. She is agented by Becky Bagnell of Lindsay Literary Agency. Find her on Threads, Instagram and on her website.

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Ell Rose is the Illustration Features Editor of Words & Pictures. Find their work at www.fourfooteleven.com. Follow them on Instagram and X. Contact them at illustrators@britishscbwi.org


Tita Berredo is the Illustrator Coordinator of SCBWI British Isles and the Art Director of Words & Pictures. Follow her on Instagram and X or www.titaberredo.com Contact her at: illuscoordinator@britishscbwi.org

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Anne Boyere is one of Words & Pictures' Feature Editors and runs the #SCBWIchat X chat about books for all ages @SCBWI_BI.