 And I'm going to put a link in the chat box right now. This link has library information as well as links to tonight's panelists and their books and their social media handles and their website handles. And all right let's jump in and I still see people filling up the room but we'll get started with library announcements. We want to welcome you here tonight and this is part of our AAPI celebration and our mystery panel, I'm going to go ahead and call it a series because this is the third one we have done in connection with our Heritage and Cultural Month celebrations. And tonight we have Gigi Pandian and Mia Manasala and we will be turning it over to them right after our library announcements. And we want to welcome you to the unceded land of the Eloni Tribal people and acknowledge the many raw, mutitial, Eloni tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards in the lands in which we work and reside in our Bay Area. The library is always committed to uplifting the names and cultures of the Eloni and First Person culture. We encourage you to learn more about land rights and Indigenous culture and Indigenous politics. And I have a reading list in that document that I shared. There's many reasons I love working in the library and one of them I'm really proud of is that our library is not a neutral institution and we work very hard on really standing by the motto of libraries for all. Our racial equity committee has been working extremely hard since we went into shelter in place. We want everyone to know we stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter as well as condemn the horrendous violence against Asian and Asian Americans in our community, our state, and nationwide. Both the invisible crimes that have both the those reported and the invisible crimes that have occurred. Anti-Black and anti-Asian racism both uphold white supremacy and we are all harmed by these racial structures. The library believes everyone has a stake in dismantling white supremacy in favor of a true multi-racial democracy. And this quote I love by Grace Lee Boggs. Love it. And there is a film on Canopy which you can get through the library called Grace Lee and she is featured in it and it's about all of the Grace Lees. It's a really cute film and very quirky but Grace Lee Boggs amazing. We are still wearing masks at our library so when you come to visit one of our three locations that are currently browse and bounce keep those masks on and protect our library family and your families. Our May on the same page is author Vanessa Hoa and she will be in conversation with Yelitza Ferraris on May 24th. On the same page is a bi-monthly read where we encourage all of San Francisco to read the same book. So May and June we are celebrating a river of stars very San Francisco so check that book out. Now it's also available in E or E audio. I'm going to breeze through some of the events because we do have a lot of events coming up still with AAPI. If you don't follow Chinatown Pretty on Instagram check it out May 25th. Adrienne Lowe and Valerie Liu will be in the virtual library. On May 19th we have author Lewis Gordon discussing his book Freedom, Justice and Decolonization and he will be conversation with a member of the Before Columbus Foundation. On next let's see that's coming up on Thursday this Thursday. We have our first total SF book club and total SF is Heather Knight and Peter Hartlaub of San Francisco Chronicle celebrating a Leibos book home baked and super San Francisco and lots of great history and fun facts and some sad and tragic facts as well. So come check that out and total SF will be joining us quarterly. On Thursday we have our poet laureate bringing in special poets from Mississippi Poetry and Resistance. Summer is really it's like just door knock away it is here. Marlon Peterson, Kesey Lamone and Tango Eisen Martin in conversation. I encourage you all to attend this one it is going to be amazing and they're celebrating Marlon Peterson's book Bird Uncaged an abolitionist freedom song really powerful book. All right now on with tonight's show we have author Mia Mananzala and Gia Pandian. Mia is a writer and certified book coach from Chicago who loves books baking and badass women. She uses humor and murder to explore aspects of the Filipino diaspora queerness and her millennial love for pop culture. Her debut novel Arsenic in Adobo came out on May 4th and you can put a hold on that at the library it's currently all checked out which we love to see that or a shock from your local our favorite local bookstore and I'll put some links into the chat of Mia's favorite bookstores you can purchase from there. Gigi is the co-founder of Crime Writers of Color is a child of cultural anthropologist from New Mexico and the southern tip of India. She spent her childhood being dragged around the world on their research trips and now lives outside San Francisco with her husband and a gargoyle who watches over the guardian garden. Pandian writes the J.A. Jones treasure hunt mystery the accidental alchemist mystery and locked room mystery short stories. The alchemist illusion her latest book was recently awarded the Anthony Award and was shortlisted for the GP Putnam Sunsoon Grafton Memorial Award given out at the Edgers and I know you all know what I'm talking about because these are mystery awards and I assume you are all here for mystery writers. There will be time for Q&A afterwards towards the end and I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing and I am turning it over to Mia and Gigi. Are we spotlighted yet? Should I dive in? Okay, awesome. So I am so excited to be here tonight both because the San Francisco public library for so many years was my local library and it is the library where I wrote by hand long hand in a notebook my first ever published mystery short story which is a locked room mystery which I absolutely love. So I love this connection being here tonight but mainly I am so excited that I get to be here talking with Mia to celebrate her debut book launch of arsenic and adobo which came out earlier this month and Mia and I have actually even though this is the month of her debut book launch she and I have known each other for a few years now because we had a kind of similar path to publication in that we both write cozy traditional mysteries so mysteries that are all about having an amazing fun plot but not a lot of gratuitous violence or anything like that but are all about amazing mysteries and characters. So we both won the Malice Domestic Grant for our unpublished works in progress and so that was really the start of our careers and that was how I met Mia because part of the grant pays for the recipient to attend the Malice Domestic conference that year and so I had already previously won and had fallen in love with the mystery writing community and gone been going to that convention ever since and so when Mia won the grant I met her there and I knew right from the start that she and her writing were incredibly special but I just didn't know how much so until I was so lucky that I got an advanced reader copy of arsenic and adobo that I got to write an endorsement for and it was just so great and the thing that I love about this book and that we're going to talk more about this evening as well is that the type of mystery that we write that really is so much about the characters and the story and that brings in diverse cast that are so much from our own backgrounds and experiences and and also gets to you know have such rich details like we both use lots of food in our books that these are just such such fun mysteries and so in so in her in in this book arsenic and adobo um Mia's character Lila has just suffered a bad breakup a really horrendous one from an incredible jerk and she moves home and her her ex so she moves home to help her family's restaurant and her ex actually drops dead there and so she and her family are implicated and so of course she has to set out to solve the crime so I would just like to know Mia how did you come to write Lila's story like what's what's the story behind the story yeah I mean first of all thank you so much for all those kind words DG if you all know is one of the like kindest most supportive people I've met and the crime fishing community in general is pretty amazing but she's definitely one of the best and I've always loved her writing um I feel like yeah you're right we do kind of follow a somewhat similar path um especially with the kind of characters that we write in the kind of stories which like feel funny to say like edgy considering how like cozy and like not like dark they are but they're they do kind of cross certain boundaries in certain ways so I kind of love being uh compared to you as a writer um as for this particular story Arsene can adobo um it came about for two reasons one uh culinary cozies are one of my favorite genres ever I really genuinely love um these kinds of books and they're my mom's favorite she's the one who got me into the genre um but as much as I love them and as many as I've read like diversity wasn't as common until maybe the last couple of years so I really wanted to write a book that's kind of reflected me in my experiences in my point of view that's like a more of a general kind of reason the more specific reason for this particular book is um I was chatting with my mentor and our mutual friend Kelly Garrett one day and we were just kind of joking about cozy tropes and how so many of them kind of followed we could think of as like maybe like or like early nineties rom-com tropes where you know cozy mysteries they're almost always a female sleuth from a small town um a lot of the times they had left to the big city to kind of like make things happen they suffered some sort of defeat you know maybe there's like a career failure a bad relationship um our family member is sick and they have to return something like that forces them to return home almost like against their will um and then while there they usually like fall in love um if not romantically then like with the town itself and the in in the life that you know they thought was too small for them but they they learned it's really the right place for where they need to be there was a lot of parallels and like the cosies I was reading and some like maybe the more like nineties rom-com books so you know we were just like oh my god cosies are just rom-coms with dead bodies you know if you think like a hallmark channel has so many hallmark mysteries now like for that reason like they they really if you like you know like sweet romance movies you'll probably like cosies uh in kind of like vice versa so one day I was on the the train to to work to my previous job and um the first line of the book popped into my head fully formed no joke with the character name and everything which is you know my name is Laila Macapagal and my life has become a rom-com cliche it was like boom I need I need to figure out who this girl was I pulled out my phone I wrote down that first line because I knew I'd forget it and they just kind of kind of went from there so so how similar are you two a lot of people ask that and um it sounds kind of weird that I say like I created her character almost as like a thought exercise so um so you mentioned that I'd won the Malus domestic uh so um if you don't know like the the the book that I wrote that won that award is not this book it was my first book which um gave a lot of praise it got me my first agent but unfortunately never got published um so with my first book that one that character was a version of me if I had never left the the the neighborhood I grew up in so I grew up in a working class majority Latinx neighborhood of Chicago um you know very industrial I literally grew up across the street from a ball bearings factory like next to train tracks like it was at the time I was growing up there it was considered a big deal if you graduated high school and you weren't pregnant you know there there were not a ton of opportunities in there so like I wanted to create a character where what if because of certain family responsibilities she never got out she didn't get to finish her college education and she had certain things that were kind of holding her back who would that person be and that was that character the character of Lila started in again like of course I obviously start with myself and because I am super vain in that way and I just you know but I also but I I make sure to veer in different ways so Lila was the opposite Lila was um so my family friends my family my sorry my parents friends uh that were all Filipino were usually more a little bit more middle class than us and rather than being like in the more inner city where we were they were usually in majority white suburbs of Chicago um and you know to my young mind at least um we're like a refrigerator that had an ice maker was like so much luxury going to their houses that were you know bigger because it's in the burbs there's more space I was like and they had um they had a sense of community that I didn't have because for me my exposure to Filipinos were just my family that's all I had I grew up in a multi-generational household with my grandparents my parents my brothers my cousins but there was my only real um experience to the Filipino community other than the occasional parties my parents family friends but when we would go there I saw how they had this huge sprawling like family connection um that I didn't have and I was wondering what that'd be like you know I was like how I like something that nature versus nurture thing like who would I be if I was raised just like half an hour away it in this majority white area but that still has a really vibrant tight knit Filipino and South Asian community that I that I didn't have who would I be what were my opportunities look like how would I change how would I change my point of view so like that was my base for her and then she kind of just like became her own character but like at the heart I think the one thing that kind of connected me with her is that feeling of being like a big fish in a small pond yeah yeah no and that's so interesting because I had a similar experience growing up so um I grew up in Southern California and and when I was young it was an incredibly diverse neighborhood but not in the same way that my family was and so it was just like all sorts of folks and so all of my friends had you know parents who were immigrants from all sorts of different countries and but um since my dad came to the U.S. from South India as an adult and my mom is American we were never um involved with the Indian American community especially but so I had I had all sorts of friends but I didn't have that community in that same way and so I you know so again it was just like my family experience and we would go do certain things but it wasn't you know that that whole thing and so when when I created my first character Jaya as well I wanted to explore more of those ideas too so I actually I I based her somewhat on myself in my own experience making her mixed but I also I gave her a brother and I made her I'm six feet tall and heel so she's five feet tall because I don't want to make sure you know all the little things we do to make sure that we don't get you know because we are not our characters so the little things that we do you have to make sure I did the same thing I'm like okay Lila like I'm five eight which like for a Filipino was pretty tall um and I'm just like okay she's short she's like five two you know my hair is like naturally wavy so like her hair is straight question you know like little things so like it didn't seem so much like a self-insert but but obviously there are certain aspects of ourselves that do get kind of woven into the character yeah that's so funny I hadn't even realized that like I didn't put that together with your description of her in the book but like I'm curly girl obviously but actually here's one rendition one of my artist friends made this comic of giant so you could you know she has her straight bob which is you know so very different than me but still you know all the black hair and stuff but um but it's just so fun to be able to play with creating characters like that so I would actually love to know about some of your literary influences so maybe some of your favorites from when you were a kid and right now um so when I was a kid if we're thinking like mystery definitely encyclopedia brown um I like to joke that um because my favorite book that I found at the school library that I've read like a million times because I'm a big re-reader um was like uh encyclopedia brown takes the cake which actually has recipes in it so I'm just like is this the beginning of like my love for culinary mysteries like you know I I even remember like trying out a like it was it was a kid's special recipe that didn't involve any like stove cooking that I made from that book so you know those kinds of mysteries definitely um I mean like just literature in general and things like reference so it's hard to imagine someone like a girl not of my generation who was it into the babysitter's club um and since it's a you know api month uh like claudia the character of claudia quiche everyone wanted to be a claudia I sadly wanted to be a claudia I was I was not a claudia you know because she was you know even though the the author was white it was my first time seeing an asian-american character in literature and being like not just a side character but she you know each of the each member of the bsc you know had their own books so she was a main character in several of the books and she had her own family and and her own issues and she was cool and stylish and bad at math surprise you know so uh like things like that definitely kind of stuck in my mind as a kid yeah so I actually like um I I never knew what I was missing when I was young and read things and didn't see that representation there because I was I did not read the babysitter's club I had you know like but I was such a voracious reader of like mysteries of all kinds like encyclopedia brown and the three investigators but it was mainly um elizabeth peters and her um before I fell in love with her Amelia Peabody series which is her most famous one I when I was a young teenager absolutely fell in love with her vicki bliss mysteries I don't know if you've read those ones but she was this like globetrotting historian who got to have like my parents are both academics and went on all these research ships but vicki got to do like much more romantic and adventurous and amazing things than the real-life version of it but so I never really thought about what was missing from that until I was wanting to write like I wanted to write books like that but tell my own adventures but then I wanted to write you know more like people like me and my own life you know which is why I created jaya you know but so you know so I never really until now like people are talking more about you know seeing representation and things but when we were growing up and reading these things that it wasn't um it wasn't as talked about as much but but I cut you off before thinking about current influences if you have any um anything that's been especially inspiring after after you grow up after those early influences I mean um like you said like I would also like I would read anything in the house so when I was um so when I was like in like middle school maybe like middle school ages like my mom worked at balden books um which means that she got to get like all the arcs and um oh nice and I don't know if like it was a general story policy or that particular one but she also got to like borrow books from the store as if it was a library so I would just read anything she brought home and you know at one point she was just really really into mary higgins clark and so you know I was probably the only like 10 year old for miles around reading mary higgins clark with my mom because you know she would she's like oh I think he would like this and she'd hand it to me and um and I got really into that so I think maybe that's kind of started also my deal like it's like you know it's an adult mystery but it's not graphic or too dark you know like I'm sure like my mom if you know um there are certain ones like if it was like really dark serial killer graphic she wouldn't be handing me that but the mary higgins clark when she felt comfortable doing that so that um those books probably um kind of helped shape me a little bit um lately I guess like you know I did complain about the lack of inclusivity both in the last few years it's been getting better so like when vivian chan's like noodle shop mysteries came out and I was like oh my god yeah a cozy mystery that centers around an asian restaurant you know um and just a lot of what's coming you know like a lot of our crime of color members uh like vm burns and her mystery bookshop series I really love those um if you're thinking of the like the the asian american like mystery writers that really you know like like Naomi harahara suja damasi you know the the ones who came before and kind of like really laid the way they definitely helped out a lot yeah so we talked about um uh food in mysteries a little bit but did you I don't know so I haven't read an early copy of your the your unpublished book that um that won the malice grant so I'm not sure if food is in that one as well but you do so food so well and I was so hungry reading this book so I'm glad it has recipes in it too I love that um but so did you always know you were going to include food so centrally or where did that come from yeah I think because like the the food aspect of like in books are like always my favorite so book one uh it took it took place at a murder mystery at a comic book convention so it wasn't you know food or restaurant based in that way but my I think I don't know if it's impossible to write a character who's not into food in some way um so like yes there were still food descriptions in this myrrh in this comic con book um and just because I think food can be a great stand-in for so many things um you know for like diaspora kids like I like to say you know it it's that immediate connection to your culture like I was born and raised in Chicago I can't speak the gala look I can only understand it you know I've been to the Philippines a handful of times um but when I think of my family and I think of the culture food is the first thing that comes to mind because it's what connects us um food is a love language right like you know I I've been saying a lot but like not to be too stereotypical you know I didn't grow up in a family that was um outwardly affectionate you know the the words I love you were not things that were said often you know there were not a lot of hugs growing up um food was how like my dad particularly uh showed affection uh that's how he showed his care and his service for the family um same thing with my grandmother like because my dad and my grandmothers were the ones who cooked my mom bless her not a chef um but um and even though my grandmother wasn't the cook that my dad was and she was like a little she was a little bit more like the little floor uh character like like kind of like based around the my maternal grandmother I grew up with she still showed she cared um in the way that she would like prepare after school snacks or or how she noted that um like there's this particular like Filipino omelette called a torta and it usually comes with meat and like when I was growing for some reason the meat version didn't really appeal to me so she always made a special one just for me that the boys weren't allowed to eat because I was the only girl in the family it was me and four boys with my brothers and my cousins and she was like no that's not for you you can eat that this is Mia then she would set it aside um so you like little things like that that don't seem important what are just these gestures that show that there's there's care being taken I think this is is interesting because it shows character um which works well in books as well without me having to be like she cares about X or or you know uh without having to say these things I can show these things yeah that's one of the things that I love in books that that food not only like what people are eating but people's like how they're treating food and how they're feeding others or that that says so much about character without just saying oh this person likes X that you know just like seeing how they're interacting with it and you know that that can really um give give so much to a story and so since I know that that both of us love uh food in books so much and I think that that lots of folks watching us tonight are really into food in books as well I thought that we could take like a two minute detour that I would love to just ask you if um I thought it would be fun if we did a little what I eat in a day you know that you know all the people on the YouTube um I love watching those things I love those voyeuristic things you know seeing what people so I it can either be you or Laila if there's if there's a few recipes that are things that are are cool what I eat in a day things oh man Laila's life would be so much more exciting in my because there's someone from the restaurant um so for me I'm gonna get starting today I guess I can go with myself because usually I eat like my day to day meals are really boring in all honesty because I again the reason I sent around food is because I am also a person who shows love and care through food and service so I hate the day to day cooking like cooking for sustenance is very boring to me even though you know just even even like even though I'm cooking for my husband as well he's much pickier than I am so like what the things I can make for the that would make both of us happy is very limited so I guess you know but I I host the holidays at my house because I'm the only one who has like a house in the family so cooking meals for 1012 you know more people that excites me that's what I like to do but my day to day is very simple but today my meal was very Filipino in that I made sardines and garlic fried rice which sounds like that's why are you sound so excited about that but it was one of my favorite breakfasts growing up it like I don't know how people but like in the Philippines like there's these little cans called like legal like sardines that are in this like tomato sauce and my dad would always like saute it with like garlic and onions and then we'd have like a garlic fried rice and like a fried a lot of frying in the Filipino food I had growing up so it's not all unhealthy like that it's just that my mom is a very picky eater she doesn't like vegetables or fruit so my dad again showing he cares he was trying to cater to her taste so a lot of that like you know meat and fried stuff but when I eat that it makes me think of like my childhood so today I just happen to have a craving for it so that's what I had for breakfast and lunch because I made a double batch just to make it easier and then it was a really really gloomy day today in Chicago just like ugly and rainy and for some for some reason that weather makes me crave Chinese food I think it's like a comfort thing for me and there's like a great like a Chinese Thai place by me so I had like like a combination pads to you and like hot and sour soup for dinner so like that was my day oh and I also recently tested a recipe that I'm thinking of putting in book two which is it's my spin on a healthier lemon poppy seed loaf but I used calamansi which is like a citrus fruit that's really common in the Philippines and chia seeds instead of poppy seeds so it's not quite right but it was pretty tasty I'm very happy with it that is actually one of the most fun things I think in writing culinary cozies is that I um the recipe testing that we like oh we have to you know do this it's part of writing yes exactly and so like that's and I come I actually end up with some of my favorite recipes from things that I'll be testing and trying different things on because I put recipes in the back of my accidental alchemist books and then I also I'm gonna have recipes in the back of my new series that I'll I'll make sure that I'll mention before the end of our thing but but yeah and so that I think is so fun but I also you mentioned that you don't like the the day-to-day cooking as much but I've actually gotten so much more into that in our year of quarantine that I'm not good at meditating but that cooking you know just taking time to like slow down and cook a meal rather than just rushing through it has been so meditative to me this year because I'm out of my you know normal routine and I you know I've even had to learn I didn't used to be someone who could rate at home I used to have to go I would either go to the library or go to a cafe with friends or things like that but now that I have to write at home I don't have that transition you know to going somewhere to write but if I'm you know taking the meditative time to be cooking something even if it's something that I've cooked many times so it could either be something new or just you know making like a slow cooked steel cut oatmeal like I can make oatmeal like 30 different ways so I have oatmeal for breakfast like nine times out of 10 but it'll never be the same oatmeal because I can do it all of the different interesting ways but but yeah so getting great like backyard gardens you post pictures of your garden and like this fresh produce you have and like I was like why didn't I start a pandemic garden because I like it was only the first half of the pandemic though because our gopher nemesis has taken it out so we're right now I haven't been posting photos as as recently so the first half of the pandemic we had all of the wonderful things to harvest um from from the backyard but but lately the gopher nemesis he's winning so that's why I haven't seen as many I've seen a couple of your bread photos though those are yes I've been focusing yeah on the bread but not our beautiful collared trees the gopher got them the last collared tree from our backyard has been felled um so so that is um yeah that is unfortunate yeah oh I do want to shout out though because you've mentioned your recipes I love your I think they're like the the vegan brownie bites or something oh yeah yeah like I tried making them you know I'm not vegan but I'm like this sounds really good I love dates and they are amazing I brought them once to um it's like my previous workplace because I used to like share my baits and things like that with them and I was like and nobody could tell that they were vegan they generally thought they were brownies until like I said anything and they're like these are so good and they're so easy to make yeah I love them I'm so glad that you enjoyed them there's actually there's some of so I'm I consider myself an almost vegan because I'm not strict but all of my like cooking and stuff that I'll do at home is uh plant-based but so there are some recipes that if you if you don't tell people what's in them they will like them but if you tell them you know the the ingredients that are anything they'll be skeptical because I can make a really killer um avocado chocolate mousse but if you tell people that there's avocado in their chocolate mousse it it does not always go over well with people so you have to feed it to them first so you just have to make sure you know there's no food allergies and then get them to try it before before sharing that oh yeah yeah that's definitely been a problem with me too it's like oh like why don't you just like any allergies yes no no okay just give it a shot and then I'll let you know what it is um well I mean Filipinos we use avocados in desserts all the time anyway so I'd be like that's amazing that sounds like a great idea yeah yeah so it's good so um okay so I would love to turn to chatting about um the writing community because I think as as folks can tell that we you know before just being um at this event tonight we already knew each other so just the importance of writing is such a solitary profession but um mystery writers this is we're so lucky that we are in this genre that I feel like there there is such a wonderful community um of writers um so if you what has your experience been I don't know I actually this is something I don't know how long you were writing before you found writing community like how long was it a solo thing and and how did what was your entry point into the writing community yeah sure so anyone who's who's maybe like like you heard me talk about something or read an interview with me I almost always shout out the two uh two of the same people which are Lori Rader Day and Kelly Garrett and the reason I do that is because I completely credit them with helping me not just become part of the community but help me stay because writing is hard and and the staying power is difficult if you're you know facing rejection after rejection so I started writing seriously like with the thought of completing a novel and hopefully find representation back in 2015 um at that I had been so I had spent almost four years abroad teaching English in South Korea uh I came home 2014 and like a year later I was just I was in a rut I was like I I had all these adventures and now I'm back living in my parents house hanging out with the same people doing the same you know and nothing and I was gonna turn 30 which like at the time seemed like so much older but like it's 30 is awesome uh but so but then I remembered how much I loved writing when I was younger and I thought maybe now is the time for me to start taking it seriously I had never taken a creative writing class before um so I just literally googled Chicago writing class and I happened to find a one day writing a mystery writing workshop and I hadn't originally planned on being a mystery writer even though they were like my favorite books I always thought I'd do kidlet because that was kind of like um my thing but I was like you know what it's one day I love this genre I can afford it let me let me just give it a shot and that class was taught by Lori um who was the sisters in crime past president and at the time she was the mystery writers of America midwest president and um I came up with the idea for my comic con book the one that won the malice grant in her class oh wow yeah she read like the early concept and she was like have you done this before I was like no this is my very first class and she's like I think you're a mystery writer and she's like I really I really think you need to to like keep working on this this sounds amazing um and she told me about the the meetings for MWA and sisters in crime she's like hey by the way I'm part of these organizations the meetings are free and open to the public you should come join us um and I didn't think I was gonna go but I found out they were being held at a bookstore that was literally just one mile from my house because I don't drive but I was like this place is walking distance it's free I want to take my writing seriously so I started to go um but it was kind of scary because when I went there there was like two other people of color everyone knew each other everyone was much older um but Lori saw me she remembered me and she like really invited me in she introduced me to people um she already had my email so you know she's the one who told me about the malice semester grant she's like oh hey this would be this sounds like it'd be really good for you like she would send me these opportunities and kind to make me feel like I was part of the community and to really help me stay and then um after winning the grant I met you and I also met Kelly uh Kelly Garrett was also one of the co-founders of crime writers of color she told me about a community an organization called pitch wars which is a mentorship program um and she was like hey um I know your manuscript's not finished but if you finish it by x-date you should apply because I think this would be a really good opportunity for you I did I applied she became my mentor in 2017 and you know she's been you know a constant support and cheerleader the whole time um so the crime fiction community has been really really kind and supportive um the people like Lori and Kelly and you of course um uh Gigi is amazing my first agent and I split up and she was there very supportive um helping me rally and and you know letting me know like this is not the end just keep pushing forward you can do it so I really Gigi's awesome I really appreciate you but so I love that our um that our entry point into the mystery writer world um that that even before we got the grant it's like similar to because I didn't know anyone in the writing community at all until I um so I discovered national novel writing months nano rimo you know the challenge to write a 50 draft of a 50 000 word um novel in a month and that's the only thing that got me to the end of what became my first novel because before then I just thought oh what I'm writing has to be good and I didn't know what I was doing but so I was just so excited that I had actually typed the end that I just googled you know and found out about the the malice domestic grant but I still didn't know anyone so when I got the call that I had won their grant that year it was like wonderful but also horrifying because I'm like I don't know writers I don't know this but then since they pay for you to attend I met the most amazing wonderful people then and for me it was Juliet Blackwell who writes um a couple of wonderful cozy mystery series she's absolutely fantastic but so I was already a fan of her then from her first series that she wrote with her sister as Hailey Lind but so it turned out so malice domestic the traditional mystery conference is in um on the east coast but so I it turned out that um Juliet Blackwell lived like two miles away from me in northern California and she was the she was the current president much like your lori raider day story so Juliet was the the president of my local sisters in crime chapter and she said oh you have to come and so I you know went back still didn't know anyone except for her you know local who I had met here I went to this event but so she remembered me and so she brought me over and introduced me to all the people and you know the rest of history because everyone is just so wonderful and welcoming and they helped me you know find a critique group and you know what local writing classes to take to actually learn how to take a novel that had promise and turn it into something that was actually good um so it was just fantastic and um and then Kelly I met shortly before you met Kelly that I um she and I Kelly Garrett um she and I shared a publisher um for our mystery series and I was published with them shortly before her and so I heard that her book was coming out and because there isn't very much you know in our genre like of um of diverse characters and diverse authors and I was so excited to hear about this woman and then I met her and she was amazing too and then I'm like can I get a copy of your book you know this is so cool and then her book was great too so you know all of these amazing people writing amazing books um and um so I got to blurb her um debut novel as well and then um she and I just started talking and Kelly really is the the driving force behind crime writers of color I was really happy to be there as a sounding board and to help with it all but seriously she is the the person who brings everyone together and so she is so generous and you know she just like if if you say something she'll be like oh this is the person talked about this she just like brings everybody together and so um she has really been an amazing force to um lift up so many voices and bring uh writing the writing community together so that has been um a really great experience I think yeah for so many of us we're lucky to have her as a mentor she's really helped guide me through yeah the the twists and turns shall we say of the of the of the publishing world but it's amazing how are our journeys kind of apparently they're they're so similar and so different I know I know I know and and and then and we share an agent now too so our amazing agent who I actually did who I did share that that brownie bites recipe was one that I gave her early on and she then like jokingly when we were like talking on the phone about something else she jokingly is like why did you give me that recipe we can't stop eating that recipe but yeah no she's fantastic and I will actually I know that so we are wrapping up um we're already at uh 745 and so I know that we want to leave a little bit of time for questions too so I will just um I think that I will wrap up then that I will um as our continuing journey with our shared agent I will I will share my one bit of exciting news that I got the okay to share a little bit early and then I would love to hear whatever you would like to to close on to talk about your book or what you have um what you're doing now before we open it up to questions um but so one of the um I mean I I hesitate to even call it a silver lining of COVID but um you know but we have to make the best of you know right the situation going on but so I actually um as I pull out my headphones so uh so that I have to stop talking um so I had been trying for meant there's there's a story that I had been trying to tell for many years so I um as lots of folks know I've been very public about this that I um nearly 10 years ago I was diagnosed with breast cancer so the month after my 36th birthday and that was really the impetus that you know life is short do what you want to do that was really the start of my writing career then but there was um I made a promise to myself that for my 40th birthday I would um take my writer's group to a writing retreat to Edinburgh of Scotland because I thought that would be an amazing thing I'll be totally well and you know save up and treat my writer's group you know rent us a flat there and so I um I did it I survived spoiler alert and so I did take my writer's group there and I started working on this new something completely different um a story about Tempest Raj who I had written a short story about and I loved her and she wasn't one of my series characters but I thought I need to do something else with her so this was a few years ago now and I you know worked on it at this writer's retreat I absolutely loved it but I didn't know how to tell the story at all I just couldn't do it and so I kept trying over the last few years to tell Tempest's story and I really wanted to but it wasn't until the beginning of lockdown and I just was like I you know I need to you know focus and not just you know sit around here watching Netflix which is wonderful for certain things and I was already reading twice as many books as I was already reading but when you know I still had to focus my energy so I finally figured out how to sell Tempest how to tell Tempest's story and so I had shown earlier drafts to our agent and she had been like hey this isn't quite working when I was trying to like write it differently but I finally figured out because much like with my cancer thing if I just like don't listen to whatever voices are telling me I'm supposed to do something as but just how I'm supposed to you know and just listening to what's coming out of me I figured out how to tell the story and the book sold at auction um last year and so that means that multiple publishers are bidding for it and so this news is already public the book sold as the Vanishing Act of Tempest Raj and so that part folks know but what is exciting now and is going to be up next month is I have my final title now that we have settled on for the book with my amazing publisher St. Martin's Minotaur and so we have the title and I have this gorgeous book cover which I can't share with the world yet but I get to share it with my newsletter subscribers in my email newsletter subscribers in my June 4th email a week before the publisher does the big public splash of it so on my website if anyone wants to sign up for my newsletter I have plant-based recipes and lots of other fun too but so the final title of the book is Underlock and Skeleton Key and it is a locked room mystery and it involves a supposed family curse and the intrigue of secret rooms and hidden staircases and so Tempest is a stage magician and much like the cozy mystery tropes but that are also resonate with us so much so she after a disastrous stage accident she moves back home to help her family with the family business but it's not so bad because the family business is secret staircase construction so they build magic into people's homes by building things like sliding bookshelves and secret staircases because her dad is a carpenter and her mom was a magician so it's the perfect family business so it seems like she'll be able to make things work out okay until her stage double is found dead at the first job she works on hidden inside a wall that hasn't been opened in more than a century so it is a truly impossible crime and it is a culinary cozy because her Indian grandfather cooks all the food for the crew so I get to do lots more food experimenting for the recipes in this book but it comes so it comes out in spring of 2022 and so it's not until next month that all of this stuff will be online so but I got the okay since I'm doing this that I get to give a little teaser here but I'm very excited for the new series and yeah so yeah so I just wanted to share that. Yay congratulations like I was already excited because I knew like the general gist of it when I saw like the announcement but like hearing you know like the background and like the family business and the food I'm like oh this is like I need it why isn't it spring 22 yet and so these things like but the years it's everything goes so quickly but so on one hand it feels like it's so far off but so you also like have you already finished the second book in the series or are you where are you so how are you feeling okay I'm gonna stop babbling okay I am gonna end on two last questions for you how are you feeling you've had the the book out for just a couple of weeks now and where are you in what's next so it still feels a little unreal honestly like it's overwhelming in a good way you know it's I said this several times and it feels so cheesy every time I say it but like I don't know how many people are really ready to have their dreams come true so like the fact like I like I know it's real I can physically touch it but sometimes I look at it I'm like who wrote that that couldn't have been me like how did this happen you know it's it's still it's still marinating it's it's still something that I'm obviously very happy about very proud of but it's it's gonna take a while before I'm just like I am an author you know kind of a thing as for book two I literally got the edit letter because like I turned in a finished version to my to my editors early a couple months ago on Friday they sent me the edit letter so I just started revisions on book two but we have a title in a cover book two is called homicide and hello hello and it comes out February 2022 if you're a newsletter subscriber you got to see the cover and the blurb already if not make sure to sign up again because I will be sharing it with in the June newsletter as well just because obviously I've gotten so many new subscribers with the book out and everything like that like Gigi my newsletter also includes recipes every month minor Filipino inspired and you know I have book news I do like giveaways because I really do love supporting and shouting out other authors and oddly I also am obsessed with candles so I've started doing a thing where I shout out like candle companies and the candles I'm obsessed with lately so if you're into that I think you might like my newsletter nice okay and so I think that we do have a couple questions in the Q&A here too so okay let us check those out okay first question is Mia I'm loving your book I grew up in Manila and read your calendar crew and Lola and Pinoy accent and I'm wondering if you can put on a Filipino accent so like I've tried but I've never been able to get it like just right like so sometimes when I do the so I've done like a lot of like virtual readings and so I do my best to kind of like bring the the characters to life but so when I'm reading like the the calendar crews dialogue I put like a slight accent but like I know I'm not quite getting it right but there's a part like very early on where the aunties are doing like their usual fat shaming thing and and and one of the aunties are like I'm not cool you know like you get bigger every time I see you know it's like a very slight one because I feel like I don't want to like caricature it but like in my head I very clearly hear it because it's something that was said to me by one of my godmothers you know so um I can only do it very very slightly I don't like doing it too much but thank you thank you so much and then and then there's also a follow-up uh if we would ever consider writing a joint mystery with Lila and Jaya that would be so awesome so we will have to stick a pin in that that would be fun maybe we could do something someday. That would be so awesome. Jaya is way braver than Lila. Jaya's gonna have to cover like do a lot of heavy lifting in that mystery because yeah that would be fun though okay so there's another question how do you combat writer's block? Hmm so for me because sometimes people ask like oh do you think writer's block is real I think it it's real in that when you're trying to be too much of a perfectionist it gets really hard for you to put words on the page um I think like you were saying earlier like the fact that like it took you so long you know with NATO is just because like you thought you had to be good right to trade out the gate right and I feel like a lot of a lot of us have that problem um so I kind of used like two things um I use a word processor called like like an alphas like with that like alpha smart neo like a literal tool just because um it's not connected to the internet so I can't like distract myself by like going on Twitter or anything and I can't I can't get stuck in the the endless revising so like what I used to do was like well if I can't think of what to do I'm gonna go all the way back and reread everything and just keep fiddling and that and I never got anywhere so the the alpha smart is only like the the screen is like literally this big and you can't really go anywhere so it forces me to write forward and because it's a weird mental thing because I can't see how bad the writing is as I'm drafting I can just I'll just I'll just let my fingers move and and then not really think about it too hard and just force myself through um a lot of times it will as long as I keep my hands moving um even if I'm reading nonsense eventually it'll go somewhere so like I talk to myself through my fingers it sounds really weird but I'll it'll be like okay Mia what needs to happen in the scene well this is the scene where she meets X and and like I'll talk to myself as I'm typing and then eventually it'll go from like weird communication to like actually writing the scene um whereas like if I'm just sitting there like this and not really doing anything it never really comes but if I keep my hands moving eventually it'll go somewhere in my case anyway yeah no I have a similar trick that even if I know I'm writing nonsense just to be sitting there doing something it'll eventually become something and my added trick to that is that I will write the word perhaps to start a sentence because then it's my psychological trick this isn't what has to happen but perhaps this happens because then if it's terrible you can go fix it later and you know that perhaps it is you know but it does it's not set in stone or anything like that I also write on paper a lot um which is similar to you know just writing things like that because paper since you have to type it up afterwards as well then um that's when you can edit it and make it good and if anything is too terrible you just don't have to you know make it translate you know type it up so I always wish I could write long things I love pretty notebooks and I love the idea again of like just being able to do it anywhere but like my handwriting is so terrible so like the few times I've done it where I'm trying to transfer it over I'm like what is that word like what like oh so it doesn't work for me but that's it's super cool that you get to just you can do like knock out entire meant like longhand manuscripts that's so fun I have so many and it is really fun too to see yeah to see like I've saved so many of the old notebooks in like boxes and things you know and so to go look at things and remember where like what stories were like at that earlier stage because you know to be able to go um I found one actually from artifact my first novel when I was uh doing some cleaning this year and so much of it is the same but also how far I've come you know in terms of of writing everything so yeah it's like it must be like so like wonderfully nostalgic but also like if it was for me anyway like almost like embarrassing because I found like early manuscripts like that I'd printed out with my very first book because I like revising at least the first time on paper like it must be the teacher in me and I found once and I started reading it and I was like oh okay thank goodness I've gotten better over the last six years because like that was not uh I feel like definitely have can do better now yeah so I know we are coming right up at eight o'clock there's a couple more questions I don't know if our wonderful library hosts are have a have a hard stop for us if you do not have a hard stop and I do see a hand raised too so oh okay how do you can you call on the hand raised person I don't know how to do that let's see how about Shelly Massini from the crowd would you like to unmute you Shelly hey hey okay so that is just a total fluke gg hi I'm Shelly hi Mia hi gg I did not even mean to raise my hand but I guess I was meant to say hello because you were you were meant to say hello hello three writers this has been so wonderful oh my gosh I cannot wait to read arsenic in adobo when I first saw it um announced I even messaged gg and I was like this looks like an amazing book so I'm just finishing up um the woman in cabin 10 I don't know if you guys have read that but I'm finishing that up and then I cannot wait me but I've loved hearing about your journeys as writers and especially what gets you through the um the the blocks you know hearing the perhaps and hearing about your fingers keep moving until you get to a part where it actually um is something like you know that you're you're now writing this story that really resonated so I appreciated that I guess I'm really glad I accidentally raised my hand and thank you thanks for joining us yeah thanks Shelly and I don't want to keep people too late but there is okay so I'm going to ask this one question that's here in the the the Q&A box so if you weren't a mystery writer what other genre would you want to tackle would you ever consider YA I feel like oddly enough my I feel like my voice and I usually be better suited to middle grade um and I currently work um I made a big career search I used to teach uh I used to be an English language instructor for almost a decade now I work in youth services at my local library and I'm the middle grade that's coming out now is so fun and exciting like a huge like bucket list writing goal for me it's a someday write like um almost like like like Rick Reardon presents middle grade fantasy series centered around Filipino mythology but I'm not there yet I still feel like I need to read a little bit more deeply to get that voice right do more research on the different myths but that's something I really really like and also maybe maybe an adult romance I'm not a super romantic person but oddly enough starting last year I got really into diverse romance like I like I'm not joking I say like diverse romance Alyssa Cole is what got me into it saved my mental health and you know through Alyssa Cole and Talia Hibbard and like Courtney Milot and just so many wonderful um like BIPOC and other marginalized like romance writers out there and I think the hopefulness um the joy but also tackling very real issues um really resonated with me and I'm it's so I have ideas that kind of are like marinating in the back of my head so maybe someday that as well that's really funny because so I actually there was a character that didn't make it into that was in the an earlier draft of Tempest story and I love him so much that I'm like oh he needs a romance novel I don't know how to write a romance novel but this character didn't fit in a mystery he needs a romance novel so someday maybe but yeah like again we're just gonna keep on that that weirdly parallel path you know somehow do this I know and I'm gonna share another secret really quick um that Jill um our agent so I sent her a very terrible draft of a young adult book that wasn't working because it needed to be a middle grade book oh so if I might one day try to write it as a middle grade mystery because I love the story but I wasn't you know I was just like experimenting with it um but it's just yeah it's just all so fun yeah these weird parallels but yeah excited yeah so thanks everyone for coming tonight Gigi Mia that was so wonderful thank you for sharing all of your great recommendations and I'm gonna put really quickly one more time in the chat the link to tonight's event and I couldn't keep up with all of your your wonderful shoutouts but I did get a good chunk of folks that you all talked about and definitely sign up for Mimi and Mia and Gigi's um newsletters it's their websites are beautiful very thorough and I want to thank everyone for showing up tonight and spending your time with the San Francisco Public Library and we appreciate Gigi and Mia for being here you always have a space at SFPL you know how to get in touch and join us again folks we have lots more coming up for the rest of me thank you thanks for joining us take care bye all bye