A Milky Way Home is now out in the world!
It all started when the Clover Hill Romance series was recruiting. I hadn’t planned for any of this, but it was spring break of 2022, and I was in Seattle with all the time in the world. It had felt like an opportunity too good to miss. My first novelette “Island Burnt by History” (in Awakenings: A Cute Mutants Anthology) had just been released earlier that month, and I had been writing regularly due to this creative writing class I was taking at the time. A week went by as I toyed with the idea of being a contributor.
And then I joined.
The Clover Hill project—for the longest time, this was what I had called A Milky Way Home, so many notes and .docx and .scriv files were named exactly that—was a dream come true. “Island Burnt by History” (about 11,600 words) had been one of my longest finished works to date; the other one was a fantasy novella I’d written in middle school. But I told myself that I was ready to tackle a novella of 30–39k.
I was a very slow writer. I still am. It takes hours for me to spew just one thousand words. It horrifies me to do the math and think about how many hours I’ve spent writing the first draft of A Milky Way Home. But I had an amazing support system: friends who would read snippets—usually my best paragraphs—and react the way I’d hoped my readers would react. They kept me going.
So, A Milky Way Home is essentially this: my need for queer romances to feature two characters of color and my love for homemade food. This novella is, down to the core, very queer, food-based, and Taiwanese. I love Yen-Chen and Florence dearly, and I think I am one lucky writer to still be able to read their own work with such joy after all the revisions and countless days and nights spent writing it. It makes me very happy to see Yen-Chen and Florence finding their dreams and each other.
Now, everyone else gets to fall in love with them, too.
You might ask: What now, after the release of A Milky Way Home?
I’ve only started taking writing seriously last year, that is, I’ve only started writing regularly even when there was no assignment due last year, but before that, I wrote, too. The majority of my writing effort was spent on short stories. I write in all sorts of genres: literary, science fiction, dark fantasy, historical.
To answer the original question: I’m writing more short stories.
One day, they’ll see the light of day, and I will be sure to keep you updated.
Will I be working on longer works? Absolutely, but I’m still figuring out which story idea is ready to become a novel.
This newsletter is running long, but I wanted to share what I’ve enjoyed reading lately:
Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison: My writing instructor once recommended this book to me. It is about how narrative patterns don’t have to be “the arc,” and I’ve been thinking about story structures ever since.
Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li: I recently finished my second read. There is something about Li’s writing that feels like the warmest golden sunset.
Isabel J. Kim’s short stories
“Calf Cleaving in the Benthic Black” (Clarkesworld, November 2022): I spent days thinking about its perfect ending and the theme of whales, even though it is a sci-fi story set in outer space.
“Zeta-Epsilon” (Clarkesworld, March 2023): I love what Kim did with the narrative. It started with the ending, and scenes across time were interspersed throughout the story.
“The Big Glass Box and the Boys Inside” (Apex Magazine, January 2023): A fantasy story set in a futuristic Manhattan about humanity and desire.
“The Massage Lady at Munjeong Road Bathhouse” (Clarkesworld, February 2022): A fantasy piece based on the idea that our past shapes our future. Sort of.
“A Monster in the Shape of a Boy” by Hannah Yang (Apex Magazine, May 2022): This dark fantasy story is really satisfying. I think the execution is very clever, and I’m in awe of how much Yang managed to convey in fewer than 2,000 words.
“The Resonance of Hunger: Food, Family, and Colonialism in Trang Thanh Tran’s She Is A Haunting” by Wen-yi Lee (Tor.com, March 2023): I will read anything Wen writes. This piece is both about Tran’s book and hunger, food, diaspora.
Maybe next time, I’ll share a few recipes from A Milky Way Home.
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