Hi there! Welcome to my first newsletter! I am nervous and giddy, like filling out and forwarding my first “20 questions to get to know me” survey chain email back in middle school.
First off, thank you for subscribing! If you read my novelette “The Day We Returned To Sunnytown,” you might already know I have an enduring fondness for Hotmail (and all 90s/00s internet nostalgia), hence the newsletter name. I’m aiming to send out a new issue every month with updates, recommendations, and tangents (but knowing me, this may end up being once every half year).
1. Writing Updates
Still battling my way through the dark fantasy novel, but I have a few big updates in short fiction and poetry.
“Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down The Moon” is a NEBULA FINALIST in the novelette category!! It also placed 3rd on the Clarkesworld Annual Readers Poll in novelette/novellas. Thank you to everyone who’s read, shared, and voted for this story. I will be awkwardly dancing about this until the end of time.
If you’re an SFWA member, I would be honored if you considered it in your final vote! Nebula Voting ends on April 15th.
My weird sci-fi flash story, “An Incomplete Body Has No Answers” is now free-to-read in Lightspeed. There’s also a wonderfully creepy podcast of the story.
Don’t forget to submit your own fantasy flash stories while Lightspeed’s open (until 3/31, 12:59AM EST) !
I was on my first podcast (and amazingly, a German podcast)! Huge thank you to Yvonne and Jamie for inviting me.
My poems “The Beauty of Monsters” (Small Wonders, small poem category) and “An Interrogation About A Monster During Sleep Paralysis” (Strange Horizons, long poem category) made the Rhysling Award longlist.
My stories “Pinocchio Photography” and “Kwong’s Bath,” my two most personal stories, made the Locus Recommended Reading List.
Anyone can vote in the Locus Awards, so don’t forget to sign-up and vote by April 15th (you can write-in your favorites if they’re not on the recommendation list!). Would be honored if you considered either of my stories.
I’m attending the Nebula conference in June! This will be my first ever writers conference (and also my first time in California!). Don’t hesitate to DM (on X or instagram) or contact me on my website if you want to hang out or chat! Special shout out to Ai Jiang whose kind and enthusiastic messages relieved my immense anxiety at attending a conference for the first time.
I recently signed the cover artist (one of my favorite Japanese artists) for my short story collection, BEAUTIFUL WAYS WE BREAK EACH OTHER OPEN! Hope to share the cover design soon. Preorders will hopefully open by May, and hopefully then sending out ARCs soon after.
I have a new poem and micro coming out in early April! One is illustrated!
2. A Story About A Story
I've always been obsessed with Behind-The-Scenes looks at my favorite stories, from books to movies to comics. It's so interesting knowing that Akira Toriyama had no intention of writing a fighting series when he started Dragon Ball (he was encouraged by his editor to go in this direction) or how Naoko Takeuchi was an avid fan of haute-couture and based many of the outfits (of both sailor senshi and enemies) on high fashion designs she saw. Behind every story is another story that serves as both a snapshot of a time period and the life of the author who wrote it.
So every month in my newsletter, I'd like to give a Behind-The-Scenes (inspirations, writing process and all) look at one of the stories or poems I've written. For this first month, I chose my Nebula-nominated novelette, published in Clarkesworld #201.
“Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down The Moon” started off just like it did in the story: as a ridiculous visual prompt. In the summer of 2022, my husband, who is a programmer, asked if I wanted to try out a new service he’d recently found called Midjourney that had just gone into open beta. This was back when the Midjourney Discord channel was still manageably small, still mostly free of corporate users looking to save a buck, and the two of us spent hours just trying out different prompts to see what kind of things we could generate. Here are the results from two of the earliest prompts I put in.
We stopped experimenting with the service soon after, and months later, the escalation in copyright-infringing AI art became a major problem in almost all industries, creating huge ethical concerns among artists. This is what led me to begin writing the story. This question of what do we value more, the artist or the art? What becomes of art in a world where people stop caring what is real? What becomes of history/memory and how we view reality itself? There was something uniquely horrific about constantly checking pictures for discrepancies in fingers and teeth to make sure they were real.
In truth, Purple-Haired Girl started off as a very different story. It was more horror-leaning and the image of the “purple-haired girl” had a significantly more sinister origin. Mina/Tina was just a minor character and the story focused more on the mystery of who the purple-haired girl was and the narrator’s growing obsession with finding her. There were nightmarish nightclubs, dead astronauts, and generally more unhinged behavior. After writing the few pages, though, I found myself falling deeper into the world, the black market for NC-orbs*, and the artists forced to create them. I found myself thinking of the sweatshops I’d often spent hours in as a kid, the suffocating steam, of the friends and family that worked themselves to near-death in them (often getting seriously injured) for someone else’s bottom line, and that’s when I started to see the story in its current shape. This was never intended as a dystopian story so much as a reflection of an analogous past onto a possible future. I've been told multiple times that this story would have been better if there had been a happier/more optimistic ending. I genuinely believe that this would have undermined where this story had come from. Not every story about grim realities, desperation, and the awful way people can treat each other is "just another" dystopia--there is truth in the misery, and I didn't want to dismiss that so easily.
For those interested in rejectomancy, “Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down The Moon” is the only story of mine that sold at the first place I submitted it to. Novelettes can be a hard sell with very few paying markets that take stories of that length and are open all year long, so it was an immense relief that the story found a home quickly.** The only person who read it before submission was a good friend from college who is not a writer.*** The story was published less than a month after getting accepted (with a few quick rounds of editing). Clarkesworld remains one of my favorite venues when it comes to editing. Neil Clarke is fast and never overly instructional. He points out areas that need clarification and never tries to rewrite an author's voice.
This story is also the one that taught me the dangers of reading reviews because out of all my stories, it has been the most polarizing. The one review that has stayed with me the longest is the one that called this story "so relentlessly grim it flirts with absurdity."
Be more absurd, friends. Tell your truths.
* The “Name Change” concept (which inspired the NC-orbs) is something I've been writing about for over a decade and is at the center of my story “You Will Be You Again,” which is set to come out at Interzone Digital soon.
** If you’re looking to sell a novelette, Fusion Fragment is another great sci-fi market with a fast turnaround that's open all-year long now.
*** Side note: I rarely exchange critiques, mostly because I read too slowly and hate making people wait, so editing is often a never-ending nightmare of self-doubt. Solidarity with all writers who also struggle through writing with little to no feedback due to social anxiety or other factors.
3. Recommendations
FICTION: I haven’t been reading much long-form recently, but four (fairly) recent short stories that I loved and still think about all the time are:
Tia Tashiro, “To Carry You Inside You” (Clarkesworld)
- an immersive, well-paced story about a failed child actor who now serves as a surrogate for the dead
Nbedita Sen, “Agni” (Sunday Morning Transport)
- a gorgeously written story about revenge, anger, and the power we don’t realize we wield
Sam Rebelein, “We Never Went Away, We Just Hid Better” (Gamut)
- a terrifying horror flash about the uncanny valley that is a perfect example of how to build dread
Jessica Luke Garcia, “First Girls” (Nightmare Magazine)
- a wonderful switch-up of the usual “final girl” trope. This flash has one of the best endings I’ve read in a while.
POETRY: I write mostly speculative poetry, but I read a lot of lit poetry. Three recent favorites are:
Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong, “Last Spring” (Only Poems)
Jessica Kim, “Montage” (Strange Horizons)
Jared Povanda, “Sleeping Arrangements in Howl’s Moving Castle” (The Daily Drunk)
Richard Siken, “Piano Lesson” (The New Yorker)
ANIME/MANGA: I started a pair of cozy anime after getting multiple recommendations on Twitter and Bluesky. Both are good, though it takes a few episodes to really get immersed/invested in the respective worlds.
Delicious in Dungeon
- as someone who loves food anime, this comedic fantasy series is an interesting, fresh take on the genre (they eat everything from “treasure bugs” to basilisk eggs)Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End
- this series is just so comforting to watch. It’s a wonderful study on how to develop characters by spending more time on their seemingly mundane everyday interactions (e.g. buying birthday presents, chats while cleaning up garbage, etc.). instead of bigger plot points
Thanks for reading! Until next time.
-Angela