Ling Ling Huang: Don’t Edit Yourself Before You Even Begin

Ling Ling Huang is a writer and violinist. She plays with several ensembles, including the Oregon Symphony, Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra, ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, and the Experiential Orchestra, with whom she won a Grammy Award in 2021. Her debut novel, Natural Beauty, was a Good Morning America Buzz Pick, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction.

In this interview, Ling Ling discusses the feeling of peace from the onslaught of artificial intelligence that came with writing her new horror novel, Immaculate Conception, her advice for other writers, and more.

Name: Ling Ling Huang
Literary agent: Kirby Kim
Book title: Immaculate Conception
Publisher: Dutton Books
Release date: May 13, 2025
Genre/category: Fiction/Horror
Previous titles: Natural Beauty
Elevator pitch: Set in the fiercely competitive art world, Immaculate Conception details an obsessive friendship that is wrested apart by a new technology that purports to enhance empathy.

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For years, I’ve watched apps and new technologies that were begun with the goal of bringing humans closer to one another do the opposite, with catastrophic results. There is a quote by Tristan Harris that speaks to my experience, and which I clung to in the writing of the book: “With technology, you don’t have to overwhelm people’s strengths. You just have to overwhelm their weaknesses.” I was interested in writing a book where love, specifically, a strong friendship would be put to the test by technology… how it would or wouldn’t overwhelm the weakest parts of the people involved, and what would remain of their identity and love afterward.

I started writing this book a couple of months before my debut novel was published in April 2023 as a way of calming my nerves before publication! It will have been around two years from idea to publication. The idea and main themes never changed. I always wanted this to be about jealousy … about the flickering between love and envy, and the tense space between those emotions that friendships can have … but many small details changed during the writing process. Probably too many to count!

I have had friendships that have corroded with jealousy, and yet, there is a residue of love that accompanies those relationships and memories. This book comes from a very personal place in that regard, and I wasn’t sure if people would relate or understand. Because of that, I’m somewhat surprised and very grateful to hear from early readers how much this work has connected with them.

I was surprised, as I always am, to learn how I feel about a certain topic once I’m writing about it. I went into the book with a certain amount of cynicism about technology and optimism about humanity—and while some of that still holds, I feel as if writing the book expanded what I think are the capabilities for both.

At this moment in time, there is a lot of fear around AI and how it might affect literature and the arts as a whole, and while I have always worried about that, the moment is here and I’m oddly at peace, largely because of the process of writing Immaculate Conception. I hope readers get some of the optimism I feel about the strength and endurance of human ingenuity.

Don’t edit yourself before you even begin. To do so is to muzzle your thoughts before they have a chance to develop. Oh, and there’s no idea or combination of ideas too crazy!