Welcome to hot yuzu tea
Who are you?
Hi! I’m Isabel Yap. You can also call me Isa. I’m a Filipino writer and poet. Most of my stories involve girls and monsters. I grew up in Manila, and am currently based in the US. I’m a long-time fandom person, and have sporadically written fanfic since 1998, when I decided I wanted to write an alternative ending to Mulan. I’m also an MBA graduate and product manager. I've been working in tech since 2013, so I have a lot of lived experience being a writer with a day job.
My debut short story collection, Never Have I Ever, was published by Small Beer Press in 2021. It won the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection, and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy, Ignyte, Locus, and Crawford Awards. My website is yonder. I'm not active much on social media, but you can also find me @visyap on Instagram, BlueSky, and Twitter.
Why should I sign up?
I’ve been told by a handful of people that they like my writing advice. I think and read a lot about craft, storytelling, publishing, and author careers. I want to share worthwhile things I’ve encountered in all my years of trying to make a writing life work, in case it helps you too.
I've been writing short fiction since the mid-2000s, and I just went through a five-year-process of learning how to write a novel. Developing the skill of novel-writing was excruciating and fascinating, and I took a lot of notes with the intention of eventually sharing what I learned. I'm also constantly working through how to build a sustainable writing practice while keeping a full-time job. Every writing journey is unique and different, but if these are things you’re struggling with, maybe something in my experience will help.
Lastly, if you enjoy my fiction, I’ll sometimes discuss how I think about stories or what went into them. I’ll also share things I find inspiring, since this is always something I’m curious about when it comes to my favorite creators.
I know everyone’s got inbox fatigue. I’d like to build a real community, so do only sign up if you’re genuinely interested! By subscribing you get every new newsletter automatically.
Will you ever charge for this newsletter?
I pay an annual fee for the new service I'm using, so it would be nice for it to at least recover its own cost (it's $60/year at my current user base level). However, I plan to always keep the majority of the newsletter free. If I ever do a paid version, it'll probably have extra content, and I'll be sure to clarify how it's different.
I can absolutely afford the fee (see: dayjob), but if you're so inclined to want to support it monetarily, feel free to send me a coffee. 😄
Anything else I should know?
My goal is to send out at least one newsletter a month. I tend to work well with accountability, so I’m going to try that cadence and see how it goes.
This isn’t exactly an advice column, but if you have a writing/craft/publishing-related question that you’d like my perspective on, you can submit it here—I’d love to try and answer it!
Why hot yuzu tea?
Have you tried it? It’s delicious! There’s this cafe in San Francisco that I used to buy hot yuzu tea from. Then I found out you can buy Citron Tea with Honey from Hmart, and it tastes exactly the same. I wanted to pick a name that was comforting, so this is what I settled on.