I’m delighted to introduce today’s guest essay by Emily Midorikawa, whose debut novel, A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing, has just been published. Congratulations, Emily! Today is the pub date for the ebook version in the USA. I was fortunate to receive an advance copy of this fabulous novel, and it was a great pleasure to write an endorsement. Here’s what I wrote:

As Anna Layne adapts to a dramatically different new life far from home and yet possibly closer than ever to the mother who abandoned her when she was a child, her obsession with her glamorous and mysterious roommate, Loll, a nightclub hostess, grows stronger. Weaving in elements of folk tales and commentaries on contemporary Japan, Emily Midorikawa creates a stunning portrait of urban life in Osaka and highlights the vulnerabilities of those who live on the margins. A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing is a taut, terrifying, and irresistible novel in which the reader, like Anna, is never quite sure whom to trust and whether it’s safe to answer the phone, open the door, or turn the page.

Here’s the US cover:

Emily is also the coauthor, with Emma Claire Sweeney, of A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf (for which Margaret Atwood wrote the foreword), and the author of Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice. I hope you’ll enjoy reading her essay about her first novel and what she learned from writing biography.

Here’s my copy (with the UK cover):

Two years ago, my literary agent got in touch to tell me that a commissioning editor at a London publishing house was interested in taking a look at the manuscript of my novel, A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing.

This scenario might not sound particularly unusual. I was the published author of two group biographies and had, indeed, recently started writing fiction again. However, the manuscript in question was that of my first novel—begun over two decades before when I was in my twenties—and which had never made it into print. Having long consigned this book to a metaphorical bottom drawer, I was astonished to hear that anyone would suddenly be making enquiries about it.

But as my agent explained, this editor had first read my manuscript some years before, at a time when circumstances prevented her from acquiring it. Amazingly, its story had stayed with her and she was now interested in the possibility of taking it on. Of course, I was flattered to hear that the editor remembered a novel over which I’d toiled for many years. But after several past near misses with publishers, I didn’t hold out much hope that this time would end differently.

I was stunned when, a few weeks later, my agent delivered the news that Manilla Press wanted to publish A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing—a literary suspense novel set in the Japanese city of Osaka in the early 2000s. It is the story of an intense friendship between a young schoolteacher and a nightclub hostess, and what happens when one of them suddenly disappears. I was, of course, delighted that it would be finding an audience at last. I also felt something like fear: fear of exactly what I would find when I returned to those long neglected pages.

Writers are sometimes advised to put a piece of work aside before coming back to revise it. In this case, though, the manuscript had remained untouched for the best part of a decade. I worried that I would struggle to reconnect with the characters, the plot and the novel’s key locations. I also wondered whether I would be able to draw much on my prior experience of revising two nonfiction books. Would preparing a novel for publication prove so different that it would need an entirely different approach?

What I discovered, however, was that the processes for revising fiction and narrative-driven nonfiction share significant common features. What’s more, I soon realised that my three books were more similar than I’d realised in terms of their narrative structures, the (real and imagined) characters that appear within their pages, and their key themes.

My first book, A Secret Sisterhood (cowritten with Emma Claire Sweeney), is about the literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. My second, Out of the Shadows, focuses on six Victorian spirit mediums who used their contemporary celebrity status to find public voices that brought them social and political influence. The early stages of work on my biographies versus work on my novel were certainly different; research for A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing did not involve the many long days combing through age-yellowed papers in library and museum archives, for instance. On the other hand, the latter drafting and redrafting stages were marked by striking parallels.

Firstly, like novelists, writers of narrative biography are seeking to tell a good story—an honest story bound by facts, but a story nonetheless. A biographer cannot simply throw everything into the mix. Each incident that appears in the published book has to earn its place there. The biographer must present a coherent narrative, woven from all that they have discovered about their subject. This lesson drawn from my earlier experience would prove particularly helpful when I returned to work on my novel. Right away, I could see that there were lines, paragraphs, even whole sections that—though sometimes interesting in their own right—would need to either be cut or rethought since they weren’t doing enough to earn their place in the book.

Secondly, what I’d learned as a biographer really helped me to explore my novel’s characters more deeply. When presenting a historical figure on the page, those who write biography are beholden to available facts. In contrast, a novelist can theoretically simply make things up. However, just as the biographer attempts to present a true interpretation of a subject based on their discoveries, a novelist is seeking to give the reader a character who, within the bounds of the fictional world they inhabit, is believable and coherent. And so here too, my past experience of analysing a subject’s motivations at specific moments in their life turned out to be excellent preparation for strengthening my portrayal of the fictional characters in my novel.

Finally, the more I immersed myself in the extensive redrafting process of the novel, the more I started to notice shared themes and concerns between these different books.

Most obviously, perhaps, a chief focus of both A Secret Sisterhood and my novel is the subject of female friendship in its many and varied forms. The relationship between Anna, A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing’s young schoolteacher, and Loll, the nightclub hostess, is full of intensity and sometimes hovers within a territory that unsettles the book’s other characters. Similarly, while the bonds between the women in A Secret Sisterhood were often loving and supportive, they could also contain jealousy, rivalry and friction.

The careers of the six Victorian Spiritualists I write of in Out of the Shadows could be said to embody the themes of disguise, misdirection and reinvention. It was interesting to realise that the same could be said of the character of Loll, the missing hostess in A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing. The protagonist, Anna, will ultimately come to believe she felt a great closeness to Loll while knowing very little of her at all.

The news that the novel I’d begun as a young woman would be published at last when I was in mid-life marked a turning point in my writing career. It was not only the point at which I returned to a project that had been shut away for a long  time, but also the joyful moment at which two seemingly separate parts of my writing career began to fuse together.

Emily Midorikawa’s debut novel, A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing is published in hardback, ebook and audio versions in the UK, and ebook and audio versions in the USA (with a paperback to follow). Emily is a winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize and the author of the biographies A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf (cowritten with Emma Claire Sweeney) and Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice.

If you’d like to sign up for Emily’s monthly newsletter, you can find it at emilymidorikawa.com.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, please sign up.

Here are the links to the last two instalments, in case you missed them:

“It was essential for her survival” (The 2026 L.M. Montgomery Institute conference and a keynote address by Megan Follows)

The oldest building in Halifax, Nova Scotia (St. Paul’s Church)

CBC Radio Documentary: “Our Jane”

CBC article: “‘Our Jane’: N.S. fans celebrate her 250th birthday, and her Halifax connection”

My debut novel, The Austens, is now available from Pottersfield Press! Order signed copies (personalized, if you wish) from Bookmark (for shipping within Canada) or Woozles (for shipping within Canada and the United States). Order from Jane Austen Books (they’re based in Ohio and accept international orders as well as orders within the United States). (The Austens is #1 on the list of the Top Five Selling Books at Jane Austen Books, published in the May/June issue of Jane Austen’s Regency World magazine.) The ebook is also available; additional sources are listed here.

Copyright Sarah Emsley 2026 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.