My author interview is now on READING (AS)(I)AN (AM)ERICA!
I’m honored to be one of the Taiwanese authors Shenwei featured on READING (AS)(I)AN (AM)ERICA for their Taiwanese American Heritage Week series this year. My interview went live today, on the two-month mark of the release of A Milky Way Home, and you can learn more about my creative process as well as other fun facts in the post.
Last weekend, I attended Nebula Conference online, thanks to SFWA for providing me with a scholarship to cover the registration fee. Compared with last September when I attended WorldCon, I benefited a lot more this time as I’m more familiar with the SFF writing world. I enjoyed hearing various panelists talk about writing in English as a second language, short fiction they’ve enjoyed, stories in unusual formats, legal systems in SFF, and what working in a writers’ room is like (#WGAStrong). The conference re-invigorated me to continue my adventure in SFF short story submissions, even though I haven’t sent out nor finished anything over the past two weeks. We’ll get there soon, I promise.
Due to how I ended my previous newsletter, I now come bearing gifts in the form of a recipe. I got this gluten-free fluffy cheesecake recipe—yes, the same one as Yen-Chen’s in A Milky Way Home—from Taiwanese blogger Carol. Her original post was in Traditional Chinese, so here is my version with minor alterations:
Ingredients
1 block of 8-oz cream cheese
3 eggs
4 tablespoons of sugar (50g)
1 teaspoon of lime juice
Directions
Preheat the oven to 160ºC / 320ºF with a tray of water inside.
Separate yolks from egg whites.
In a large bowl:
Whisk cream cheese until smooth.
Add yolks, and mix them.
Add lime juice, and mix them.
In another large bowl:
Add egg whites, and whip them until bubbly.
Add half of the sugar, and whip until fluffy.
Add the rest of the sugar, and whip until foamy (soft peaks).
Add 1/3 of whipped egg white to the cream cheese bowl, and mix it gently with a scraper spatula.
Add the mixture in Step 5 to the rest of the egg white, and mix with spatula.
Pour the mixture into a 6-in nonstick cake tin.
Put the cake tin in the water tray in the oven, and bake for 30 minutes. Then bake at 140º / 284ºF for 25 minutes.
Let the cake cool and refrigerate before enjoying.
This year, I’m trying to balance writing with more reading, and recently, I’ve been choosing stories and books that are tangentially related to my ongoing writing projects. The following doesn’t even cover a quarter of what I’ve read in the past two months, but I wanted to highlight a few of them:
“Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self” by Isabel J. Kim (Clarkesworld, March 2021): I may have found my favorite short story ever. This is not a multiverse story, but it might as well be. Absolutely stunning. It’s about diaspora and the choices not made. Enter if you want to hurt, too.
“Rabbit Test” by Samantha Mills (Uncanny Magazine, November–December 2022): An incredible yet horrible story on abortion rights set near the turn of the next century. I read this story last month, but since then, it has won a Nebula and been anthologized in BASFF 2023.
“Laura Lau Will Drain You Dry” by Wen-yi Lee (Nightmare Magazine, March 2023): You probably already know I’m a fan of Wen’s. What stands out to me the most was how satisfying it was at a word count of fewer than 2,500. A brilliant horror short about a villainous teen girl revenging against misogyny.
“Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness” by S.L. Huang (Clarkesworld, December 2022): This was thought-provoking in a fascinating but also haunting way. The novelette is in the form of a piece of journalism writing, and it was really well done. I read it last month, and it has since been anthologized in BASFF 2023, too.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee (Mariner Books, 2018): Chee’s writing is gorgeous, and I loved everything about this essay collection. It also made me appreciate his debut novel Edinburgh (2001) more.
Warcross duology by Marie Lu (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, 2017 & 2018): This young adult science fiction duology was incredibly engrossing. I picked this up because it promised a cyberpunk story, and I left this series gaining a new author whose backlist I want to devour.
Feed Them Silence by Lee Mandelo (Tordotcom, 2023): As an academic, I love a good academic horror.
Summertime is never a break for a doctoral student like me. For the next three months, I’ll be traveling a lot for my day job, but if we’re lucky enough to get some good writing news, I might pop in and send another newsletter or two.