📚Kyla's musings: VALLEY VERIFIED up on NetGalley + I crossed 100K followers!

Welcome to Kyla's Musings!

Hi friends! It’s been a hot minute since I’ve chatted with you guys and I hope you are all doing well. 😊 I come today with an exciting announcement:
 

Valley Verified is up on NetGalley!

That means you can request to read it (for free!) months before it comes out in the world and get to be among its first readers! And here's what Valley Verified is about:

When a fashion writer dives headfirst into the cutthroat Silicon Valley tech world, her future threatens to unravel in this addictive novel by Kyla Zhao, author of The Fraud Squad.

On paper, Zoe Zeng has made it in New York’s fashion world. After a string of unpaid internships, she’s now a fashion columnist at Chic, lives in a quaint apartment in Manhattan, and gets invited to exclusive industry events.
 

But life in New York City isn’t as chic as Zoe imagined. Her editor wants her to censor her opinions to please the big brands; she shares her “quaint” (read: small) apartment with two roommates who never let her store kimchi in the fridge; and how is she supposed to afford the designer clothes expected for those parties on her meager salary?

Then one day, Zoe receives a job offer at FitPick, an app startup based in Silicon Valley. The tech salary and office perks are sweet, but moving across the country and switching to a totally new industry? Not so much. However, with her current career at a dead end, Zoe accepts the offer and swaps high fashion for high tech, haute couture for HTML.

But she soon realizes that in an industry claiming to change the world for the better, not everyone’s intentions are pure. With an eight-figure investment on the line, Zoe must find a way to revamp FitPick’s image despite Silicon Valley’s elitism and her icy colleagues. Or the company’s future will go up in smoke—and hers with it.

Valley Verified officially comes out on January 16, 2023—that’s exactly 1 year after the pub date for The Fraud Squad! For those unfamiliar with the publication process, here’s what it looks like:

• Write the first draft

• Developmental edits (can be 1 round or more)

• Line edits (typically 1-2 rounds)

• Copy edits (typically 1 round)

• Pass pages (this is when your Word Doc manuscript gets transformed into its “book” version, with all the cool fonts and indentations and fancy line break symbols 😊) --> this is where I'm at

• It goes to print!

My other books

The Fraud Squad: It feels like a lifetime since my debut novel came out into the world, but actually, it’s not even been 6 months. A huge thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read my book, shared your book photos online, sent me really sweet messages—they mean so much to me, more than you can imagine. One of the weirdest parts about being an author is that after you’ve created something, it doesn’t belong to just you anymore but you also don’t know who else it belongs to. So it’s always really nice getting a sense that people are reading it and who’s reading it. :’)

May the Best Player Win: I’m wrapping up (what’s hopefully) the last round of developmental edits for my children’s novel about a girl who plays chess and makes a bet with a sexist teammate to beat him. I wrote the first draft for this in November 2020 and it’s set to come out in Fall 2024, so wow. That’s a 4-year-long process and the wonderful thing is: every time I read this book, I fall in love with the story (and chess) all over again.

I crossed 100k followers!

Oh and also, I passed 100k followers on TikTok. 😊 I created my account slightly over a year ago and it still boggles my mind that there are people out there who care about my random videos on fashion, pop culture, tech gossip and ofc books. Thank you to everyone who have given my videos a watch!

What's entertaining me

Sing Me to Sleep by Gabi Burton:
Obsessed with this—it’s absolutely entrancing from the very beginning. There’s SO much action and it’s impossible to put the book down. I finished it in one sitting.

An Echo in the City by K.X. Song:
I was lucky enough to get a signed copy by attending K.X.'s book launch! And it was just fascinating hearing from the author herself what inspired her to write about such a complicated, emotionally heavy topic (Hong Kong protests). This book tore at my heartstrings as I followed how the two main characters (who are so different from each other) came of age in a tumultuous time in their own way. 

The Godfather Part 1:
An absolute classic and for good reason. It’s pretty obvious that this is an “older” movie with a storytelling style that doesn’t quite follow modern conventions, but it just works so well. The cinematography is brilliant and the actors are just top-notch. And now, I finally get the origin of so many popular memes—the fact that a movie in the early 1970s spawned so many famous lines that still endure to 2023 is a testament to how timeless this movie is.

Kismat Connection by Ananya Deverajan:
This is just such a heartwarming, fun read and I want to be friends with the main characters irl! I just adore how the themes of family, culture, and love are woven together in such a charming way without an overly heavy hand.

And that’s all from me, friends. Hope y’all all have an amazing July ahead!

Love,
Kyla