• WIP Wednesday,  Writing

    Stealing Laurel from the army

    A little excerpt from Petals. How baby Laurel ends up with his shifu:

    (I really do love Li Qiuyue so much.)


    Li Qiuyue, in her twenties at that point, looked down at Laurel, this small soldier who has thrown himself in the mud, clinging to her robes. She considers him with that immovable, clear gaze of hers. She doesn’t say a simple yes or no.

    Instead, she murmurs, “What is it you suppose I can teach you?”

    Laurel looks up at her, eyes shining with unshed tears. It is the closest he’s come to crying in all of his short life. He can’t even be ashamed of himself, so worked up is he with the burning desire to follow her.

    “Anything,” he says. “Whatever you see fit to teach, I will learn.”

    “You won’t have an easy life if you follow me. If I am loved in the capital, I won’t always be. Will you regret it, if one day you’re hated for following me?”

    “Never,” Laurel says vehemently, with a child’s simplicity.

    He’s a child and can’t possibly know what he’s saying. It isn’t a promise Li Qiuyue would ever think to hold him to, but nevertheless, it brings the pale ghost of a smile to the imperial granddaughter’s shapely lips.

    “Alright,” Li Qiuyue says simply. The words seem breathy and deceptively light for things that will change the both of their lives. “You may follow me.”

  • Book Release

    New Book Release: Fairytale

    Happy New Year! I’ve got a new book out, called Fairytale. It’s a slice of life m/m romance featuring a Kpop boy group. I’ve really loved spending time with Charis and the rest of Fairytale, and I hope you will, too.

    Right now, you can purchase an eBook copy on Amazon and Smashwords. In the coming weeks, I’ll upload it to my eBook store on this website, and you’ll be able to find it at Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, and other eBook retailers as well. The paperback version is also coming soon!

    Your charms thaw the Ice Prince…

    The K-pop group Fairytale is living out their dreams. They made it to debut, and now their star is on the rise.

    Charis is hailed as the beautiful Ice Prince of Fairytale, but he’s never been special. He’s here just to fill out the numbers. No matter how hard he works, he’ll only ever be second best. A pale imitation of talent.

    Not like his teammate Mouse, an internet sensation who was famous even as a trainee. Bursting with talent and charisma, he’s the ace not only of Fairytale but of their entire company. Everyone loves Mouse, the uninhibited Dark Prince of Fairytale.

    Between comebacks and contest shows, the members of Fairytale learn to support each other and lean on each other through accidents, rumors, and incidents. They work hard to prove their dreams and to answer the biggest question of all: Is it possible to find love after your happily ever after?

    Fairytale is a standalone m/m novel. It is part of Modern Witchblood, a collection of books that take place in modern times several hundred years after the events of The Witchblood Heir series.

  • Writing

    Thoughts and character ramblings

    Thinking about Charis since I just spent three months writing about him. He was simultaneously kind of peaceful and frustrating to write because he feels like he’s on the other side of some plexiglass from his own thoughts and feelings. Nice feels like that, too, to a lesser extent, but I think Nice is so much more chaotic and prone to acting out that it doesn’t feel so muffled in there. Like you can hear an echo.

    They both end up supported by people who love them; I’m hesitant to use the word ‘found family’ because of the kind of aggressively Pure connotation it’s taken up in some parts of the internet. Plus, Nice ends up supported by family with no other qualifiers, considering he marries into it.

    But I think the tenor of that support changes, too. Charis’ found family, in the form of his members, feels much more tight-knit and a bit more careful. I think Charis is very honestly surrounded by love, care, and support by his peers. Nice’s family doesn’t love him or each other any less—they very obviously love each other so fiercely—but I think they’re just as chaotic as he is, in their own ways.

    They feel like… that big house of people scattering in different directions, and it makes sense. After all, they all have their own lives.

  • General,  Writing

    Finished a book

    Here to lie flat facedown on the floor because I finished a book, hallelujah.

    It occurs to me that when I say that, I have to specify reading or writing or else people get confused. But yesterday I finally glued my ass to the chair and finished writing Fairytale.

    I don’t know why endings are so hard for me— or well, I guess I do. I tend to second-guess myself a lot when it comes to endings. I don’t have a lot of confidence for being able to land the plane well, which leads to a lot of planes in suspended animation, just sort of hovering until they fall out of the sky.

    Which is to say, I realized I’ve developed a very bad habit of getting 40k-80k words into projects before jumping ship and abandoning them for shiny new WIPs. I’m trying to stop doing that because where at first I thought it was a manifestation of different interests, now I mostly think it’s a manifestation of fear.

    The end is usually pretty close whenever I decide to jump ship. Maybe it’s just hard to make decisions. Saying yes to one fork in the road means saying no to all the others, and the closing of possibilities can seem scary—but it doesn’t have to, right?

    This is just a stray thought that I’m marinating on, but I think I’d like to do some kind of personal challenge for the year. Maybe I can call 2024 The Year of Endings if that doesn’t sound too horrifyingly ominous. I’d like to make my peace with endings. Maybe I’ll try to finish as many things as I can. Sounds kind of uncomfortable. I better get some gold stars for this. (Literally, I’m going to buy stickers. I’ve had some galaxy-themed star stickers in my Amazon cart for ages now.)

    Because it’s not just fear of choosing the wrong ending, I think. I avoid endings even when I’m reading, even when I’m watching things. There’s just something in me that squirms away from a certain kind of emotional discomfort, and I’m really so sensitive when it comes to fiction. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, but I do think I want to get a little better at holding my hand to the fire. I want to know how things end. I want to stop keeping myself away from things I love because of some inchoate fear.

    Anyway! I felt guilty for not writing today for all of a hot second, but since I just finished writing a novel yesterday, I think I actually deserve a break. On the subject of endings, I picked back up a danmei I had paused in reading, Evil as Humans, which I’m really liking and I’m about halfway through. I’ve been reading it all morning, and I have a small pot of jook simmering on the stove.

    I think I feel pretty good today. Kind of hopeful. Maybe I’ll do a little bit of sketching later.

    There are still some extras I want to write for Fairytale, but I think I will save that thought to percolate for another day.

  • Language Learning

    Thoughts from 4 months into Korean studies

    SO, I’ve been thinking a lot about language learning, as you do. I spend a lot of time thinking about language learning and language in general, tbh. I don’t know why I get so surprised pikachu about it— the person who is obsessed with words in English is also obsessed with words in other languages, news at 11.

    I’ve been study Korean for a little over 4 months now, just coming off a month-long break where I was mostly very sick and didn’t study very much of anything, although I did make feeble attempts to keep reading 혼불 and got through about 3/4 of a chapter.

    I think what strikes me, with a fair amount of glee, is how absolutely chaotic the process is. I’ve never self-studied a language before now. The fundamentals of Japanese I know were learned in a classroom, and so I think I had this idea that that was the only or certainly the best way to go about it.

    But I don’t know, I have a sense that I’ve learned Korean much faster and probably better than I learned Japanese. I find the process of learning a new language fun, and funny, and incredibly satisfying. It mostly consists of me throwing myself at media that is too hard for me, struggling my way through with a dictionary, googling wtf is this verb ending that I keep seeing, then eventually tossing myself at my textbook when I get confused enough. Repeat forever.

    It’s satisfying to go back to things I read or listened to before, weeks or months later, and find that I understand much more this time.

    I used to be really afraid of learning things wrong. Not so much anymore, mostly because experience has been showing me that it’s not a big deal. Misconceptions happen, and they straighten themselves out over time. Sometimes understanding something wrong is the first step to understanding it correctly a little ways in the future.

    Anyway, the third chapter of 혼불 is way too hard for me, but I’m going to keep throwing myself at it whenever I have the time and patience.

    난 계속 한국어를 공부할게! 화이팅!