Kat Cho Books In Order

Publication Order of Gumiho Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Author Kat Cho once hid books under the sink in the bathroom and would sneak in there to read after it was bedtime. Her mom and dad pretended they knew nothing about it. It helped when she decided to write a dinosaur time-travel novel when she was just nine years old. That book, sadly, was never published.

She lives and works in New York City and spends any free time she has attempting to figure out just what kind of puppy she should adopt. In her previous life, she worked in cancer research.

Kat quit writing while she was in college because she did pre-med track, and wound up going into clinical research. After her mother died, she began having vivid dreams about her family, each in different situations. In one, her family would be ancient Korean warriors, and her grandma was the elder and got to pick the people that would be accepted as trainees. Kat phoned a cousin that was pursuing publication and encouraged her to work on the story idea.

She wound up writing the entire thing in a total of nineteen days, and wound up reminding her how much she loves writing to begin with. At first, she thought if things did not pan out, she could just move on, but the story was something she could not put down. It wound up becoming an odd mass of the things she loves: family, heritage, Korea, friends, and angsty drama. It was here that Kat decided she wanted to write an actual book that was purposefully written for publication. “Wicked Fox”, she feels, is the book she always wanted to write because it would not let go of her, despite her being afraid of it.

Kat had the idea for her book for over a year before she could put anything on paper. She needed the encouragement of her friends and family before she could let go of her fears and start writing it down. Because she had let the story marinate for such a long time, she had quite a few ideas to explore for it. She also wanted to incorporate parts of Korean pop culture she loved, specifically elements of different Korean dramas. She also did not hold back, putting everything that she loves about her heritage and culture and finds she is lucky to have found others that are very supportive of the story.

Something else that gave her encouragement was Ellen Oh’s “The Prophecy” trilogy, and it was a huge deal for her to read these books. A friend had recommended them to her and said she is a Korean author who wrote a series of books for young adults that is based off Korean mythology.

The way she writes is that she writes out a whole fast draft version of the book. As she revises, she often winds up throwing out quite a bit and reimagines the story entirely. Personalities, family and friend dynamics, and back stories get changed.

With one of her manuscripts, she failed with it and had to move on with it. She is grateful this happened and finds that this is an important lesson to learn. It helps to know that she could try picking the story back up later on and try to rewrite it. This experience also helped take some of the fear away when she tried to query later on, especially because she already knew what rejection felt like. She did feel a little bit of fear since the story she was trying to get published was a non-Western mythology.

Kat loves working her Korean heritage into her writing, especially if it involves her describing food. She loves anything that encourages nerding out, including K-dramas, reading, anime, and K-pop.

She finds a lot, just enough, too much inspiration in K-dramas. That being said, she has no favorite K-drama. She does not have a favorite K-pop group, but the first groups/singers she loved were SG Wannabe, H.O.T., and BoA.

Kat also finds a major intersection between K-dramas and the young adult genre, because both are so character driven. She also sees a bunch of tropes that can easily be compared to young adult, but K-dramas just come at them from another angle. She decided to put easter eggs in for K-drama fans into “Wicked Fox”.

She is a co-host of the Write or Die podcast where authors are interviewed and talk about the long, often difficult, path to publication.

Her debut novel, “Wicked Fox” was released in the year 2019 and is a young adult fantasy novel.

“Wicked Fox” is the first stand alone novel, which was released in the year 2019. Gu Miyoung, eighteen years old, has got a secret. She is a gumiho, which is a nine-tailed fox that has to devour the energy of men so that she can survive. There are so few that believe any of the old tales anymore, and since there are so many evil men that nobody is going to miss, modern day Seoul is a great place to hunt and hide. After she feeds one full moon, she crosses paths with Jihoon, a human boy, who is attacked by a goblin deep in the forest.

Against her own better judgment, she violates rules of survival to help the boy, and she loses her fox bead, her gumiho soul in the process. Jihoon knows that Miyoung is more than just a beautiful girl, as he saw her nine tails that night she saved his life. His grandma once told him stories of the gumiho, of the danger they pose to men and of their power. He is drawn to her anyway.

He finds her fox bead, but does not realize he holds her very life in his hands. Murderous forces lurk in the background, Miyoung and Jihoon develop a friendship that turns into more. A young shaman attempts reuniting Miyoung with her bead, and the consequences are disastrous. They also reignite an old feud, making Miyoung have to pick between her own immortal life and Jihoon’s.