November 2024
post-lambda high, audiobook grant, i'm actively writing again
In the last week of July, I attended the Lambda Literary Writers’ Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ+ Voices as a fellow in the speculative fiction cohort. Even though it took place during a very stressful time for me, I came out of the weeklong workshop feeling creatively rejuvenated. Our cohort faculty member was the one and only Charlie Jane Anders, and she is the best champion any writer can have. I don’t think I could adequately describe how I felt with Charlie Jane being genuinely excited about my work — the way she deeply cares and nourishes — but her support as well as the generosity of my cohort have healed me. It had been a very long time since I felt compelled to write. I convinced myself under the false pretense that my stories need to take a backseat to my day job (doctoral studies on space plasma). As time went on, days and weeks and months and eventually more than a year had passed where I didn’t write any stories. I began to wonder if I could ever write as I used to — free and coherent. Maybe I’ve fundamentally changed as a person/writer; maybe the past one and a half years of burnout meant I could never write the same way as I used to. But that is okay.
I’ve always been a writer, even when I was a kid: several notebook pages of my stories transcribed by my dad before I could write (English), a dozen tiny chapbooks of Peanuts fan comics I drew when I was, like, six (English), unfinished wuxia stories I wrote in my preteens (Chinese), a fantasy novella I wrote during middle school English class because I needed something to keep me occupied (English), many melodramatic short stories I wrote by hand in high school (Chinese). Then I stopped for the better half of the decade. It wasn’t until I was a doctoral student that I started writing again. I enrolled myself in creative writing workshops for a couple of semesters, and I vowed to never stop telling stories again.
Just this week, I submitted to the Writers’ Retreat anthology Emerge, which comes out Spring 2025. Get ready for some weird new content from me.
A Milky Way Home is getting an audiobook!!! I’m so incredibly grateful for Audio In Color for this opportunity. Sometimes, I can’t believe this is my life.
Earlier this year, some of my friends encouraged me to apply for the grant to get my novella made into an audiobook. This wouldn’t have happened without them. Now, my wildest dream came true. I had an audiobook production meeting recently, and I cannot wait for Yen-Chen and Florence to get their own narrators.
I’ve been talking about starting a new long-form project for a while. Most of my 2023–2024 were spent on reading and not writing for day job reasons, but recently, I finally felt my brain relax and started drafting again. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this project I’m currently working on is not any of the ones I’d been toying with over the past year. I had wanted exercise some of my speculative fiction writing muscles, but a previously-just-a-silly-little-short-story-idea blew up in my head and it is now going to be a full-length novel.
While I’m only a couple thousand words in, I’m optimistic about completing this project next year. Here is a sneak peek in the form of a mood board:
It’s a transmasc/nonbinary pairing! Unlike A Milky Way Home, food and pets don’t play as big of a role in this story. It is a romcom about grad school life and doctoral students with depression. Is it going to have heavier themes? Probably. Is it also going to be fun and cute at the same time? Absolutely.
This doesn’t necessarily mean I will pause other writing projects during this time. While it is unlikely I will be juggling more than one long-form project simultaneously, I’m still hoping to write a couple short stories that explores folklores and/or technology.
Last month, I saw the aurora and Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS here in Illinois. While both were barely visible with the naked eye, my camera (a Sony APS-C mirrorless) and phone (iPhone 13s) can see them. My partner graciously waited for a horrendous amount of time on multiple nights as I did my best to capture the sky. Maybe someday, I’ll get into astrophotography.
Back in my last newsletter in May, I thought I would take my preliminary exam for my doctoral degree (the second out of three exams) in July. For reasons I will not divulge here, the exam hasn’t happened yet. But since then, I’ve read 56 books. Here are a few highlights:
Fiction
Ocean’s Godori by Elaine U. Cho (Zando – Hillman Grad Books, 2024)
The Mistress of Lies by K.M. Enright (Orbit, 2024): I think there’s something about the way Enright built the atmosphere that sucked me right in. Yes, it’s a vampire book where vampires are called Blood Workers.
Toward Eternity by Anton Hur (HarperVia, 2024)
Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe (Ecco, 2024): It’s about found family sisterhood but also really about being alive.
Nonfiction
Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc (Coach House Books, 2020)
Never Say You Can’t Survive by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com, 2021): It’s about writing stories to survive dark ages but also a craft book.
Essay
“All Girls Want to Eat Each Other” by Mallory Pearson (Autostraddle.com, October 2024): Cannibalism is queer.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve allowed myself to dream about submitting stories again by looking up submission windows of the publications I’m interested in. But first, I’m going to write some more stories.