oh, it was a long long long time ago. 2014? 2013? my first hq fic was the first character death in the ao3 tag or something. so you can see why i’d really rather pretend the fics never existed 😭 they’re the equivalent of my chuunibyou years to me… on top of all the layers of fandom lore there, too. the state of the sports animanga spaces before the hq anime aired… just not a vibe at all. it’s why i deleted everything, fics included, and was an online hermit until jjk ;;

i do see people still talk about them sometimes, though! so copies are indeed out there. it’s funny bc i remade in 2016, but a yoi reader at some point was like… by any chance, you’re not [my first ao3 pseud], are you? and i had to be like ehe [fades out]

i won’t prevent anyone from getting access to my dark history, to be clear! it’s just probably way harder now, is the thing, and i promise you the effort of looking is not worth those fics. it makes me sick to even think about someone having to endure them. i just entered high school when i wrote them, mind you. i was in my lispector and dostoevsky era! chuunibyou years! save yourself!

like… original fiction? that has not occurred to me as an option before ( ˶°ㅁ°)

i mean, i could! i’d love to! i have these three things i’m working on, but it’s more…. my own interests and my own thought processes than things perhaps that people associate with my fics. i hate that i can’t really talk much about them beyond like. publishing buzzwords. but. it’s whatever. one is like. oresteia lite, and a storyline i’ve been hacking at for like. a decade now, probably. deeply dysfunctional family, an intelligent apartment tower that may or may not be developing a theology, a dead daughter, and two profoundly codependent boys making everything worse. so, you know. the usual.

another follows a struggling young woman cast in a horror film, and her seemingly ageless co-star, who has carried the philippines’ colonial history with her for more than three centuries. partly about vampirism as a colonial relationship—who gets to consume whom, and whose hunger becomes romantic—and partly about performance, femininity, inheritance, appetite, and infinite debt—what it means to be “saved,” what gratitude is supposed to cost, and how easily exploitation can be defended as art. there’s also a lot in it about performance, racialized femininity, hunger, and the strange ways a woman might feel most herself only after she has stopped trying to appear human.

the third is a space-age catholic mecha story spanning several generations of pilots, in which humanity imprisons the extraterrestrial beings it worships as angels and builds its war machines around their bodies. the pilots are taught that being chosen is a form of grace, even as the units consume their blood, their flesh, and eventually their consciousnesses. it’s about faith as military infrastructure, bureaucratic evil, the seductions of order and sacrifice, and why people so often mistake their own servitude for salvation. this one i’ve been reworking far more in recent years for obvious reasons. also very tied to my grad school work.

but this is very sweet to hear ;; maybe i’ll share little excerpts or bits of worldbuilding sometime. idk. i’m kinda embarrassed having to explain my own stuff in this kind of language as someone who doesn’t even believe in reducing fics to trope tags, but also this is just my wind-down writing work and it truly is not that serious.

or maybe you just meant non-fiction writing. in that case. i will update my substack very soon, i promise. ignore everything else i said. how mortifying.

goodness me… i genuinely don't know what to say other than i'm so, so touched that my words have stayed with you for so many years. knowing it found a home with someone means more to me than i can really put into words, ironically. there’s some equivalent exchange happening here.

and ahhh… i have an embarrassing confession to make. i actually don't read very much romance in the strict genre sense. annie ernaux is probably the closest. sally rooney? though they write more about desire than romance; the interpersonal dynamics is secondary to their dogged investigation of how desire is compelled and impeded.

but anyway—this arrangement is not out of dislike, i promise! i find romance incredibly interesting. it's probably one of the biggest intellectual blind spots i have. i love thinking about intimacy and companionship and the ways people become important to one another, but i've explored those questions much more through literary fiction and film than through the romance genre itself… or even irl. the trouble is that i'm a bit picky with prose, so i tend to bounce off a lot of contemporary romance before i can fall in love with the story. it's honestly something i'd really like to change because i know i'm missing out on so much.

most of the romances that have stayed with me have actually been films, though! roman holiday, bringing up baby, say anything... and nora ephron, my queen. i also like before sunset far more than before sunrise. maybe… i'm less interested in grand declarations than i am in watching two people slowly become legible to one another. i love romances where affection is built through conversation, shared attention, small habits, and the quiet realization that someone is beginning to understand the shape of your mind. my love for romance feels to me a natural, inevitable evolution of my love for dialogue in fiction. it’s no wonder i gravitate towards films and plays.

(but if you have romance recommendations with beautiful prose... please send them my way. i am very much accepting homework.)

thank you again. this message genuinely made my day :(

no no this actually makes perfect sense, and i think it’s something a lot of people run into once they’ve spent enough time thinking about a character.

analysis and writing are related, but they’re not quite the same skill. i think of it more like… analysis asks, “why is this character the way they are?” writing asks, “okay… but why does that matter? does it actually change anything about the way they interact with the world?”—bc the answer isn’t yes by default, even when it feels like it is. if you’ve reached the point where you feel like you understand a character really well, i'd actually stop asking questions with traditionally “correct” answers. it’s easier to ask questions that open doors. what do they consistently misunderstand? what are they right about that nobody else seems to notice? what tiny habit did they pick up from someone they loved and is that a good thing? what memory do they keep telling incorrectly—not because they’re lying, but because that’s genuinely how they remember it now? what ordinary thing embarrasses them? which… i mean. those kinds of questions don’t explain a character, but they do generate scenes. something i’ve realized over the years is that i don’t actually write because i know the answers. i write because i’m hoping i’ll stumble into them somewhere along the way. isn’t that fun!

i do think one of the biggest traps is trying to make a character internally consistent. one exercise i really like is asking myself, “what are two things i know to be true about this character that don't seem like they should be able to exist together?” as an example, i’ve been tinkering this past month with an itfs story idea that has a slightly unwieldy premise, and i think some of my favourite moments in writing happen when two things that “shouldn’t” coexist somehow do. yuji, to me, is both profoundly cheerful and profoundly sad. megumi is incredibly detached and desperately loyal. both of those things are true at the same time. yuji is hopeful, but he also carries this lifelong grief that he almost doesn’t know is there, and that alone recontextualizes hope and how the definition for it is operationalized in the first place. megumi is fiercely independent, but almost every important decision he makes is shaped by other people. neither contradiction is something i’m trying to "solve." they’re the engine. that’s where writing becomes exciting for me. not when i can prove i understand a character, but when they start surprising me. let your characters contradict themselves. real people are inconsistent. they’re kind in one situation and selfish in another. they have values they fail to live up to. they tell themselves stories that aren't entirely true.

and don’t underestimate the value of writing scenes that nobody else will ever read! sometimes you’re not writing the story; you’re just spending an afternoon getting to know somebody a little better. i always think that… relationships end when there’s nothing further to negotiate with/about someone. the same is true for stories. if full, certain understanding is your end goal, that’s not a story, that’s just analysis. that has its own value. but that means your exploration begins from the finish line.

oh gosh... this is such a hard question to answer. first of all though, thank you so, so, so much. i’m honestly a little overwhelmed that first love, late spring could stay with someone for so long, and it feels like it’s never gotten easier knowing how to properly convey my gratitude.

i also feel like i’m about to disappoint you because i don’t think i have a particularly mysterious answer. i’m just... pretty nosy 😭 not even necessarily in the sense that i love people (i actually think i have a fairly complicated relationship with humanity as a concept and lean towards misanthropy), but i do love observing. or idk. i can’t help observing. i really can’t help it. people at work make fun of me sometimes for remembering what someone wore on a specific day seven months ago, or the particular way this or that person likes to phrase things. maybe it’s overvigilance. i just like to tell people i watched crime shows too young and became convinced i would someday be called to the stand for a crime i witnessed and must provide exact details.

anyway. sorry for the tangent. what i meant to say is that writing gives me permission to ask questions that would be very strange in ordinary conversation, and if i have any advice about characterization, it’s paying attention to those details that only prose gives you space to delve into without jeopardizing like. the narrative logic of our irl social contracts. why does someone remember that moment and not another? why did those particular words stick with them? why does one person interpret kindness as pity while someone else experiences it as relief? i think the world feels more beautiful when it’s more legible. writing is one of the ways i try to make people—and myself—a little more understandable. it’s the closest i get to loving the world, i think. so when i'm writing characters, i’m usually less interested in what they’re like than in how they arrived there. i want to know what memories they keep returning to. what assumptions they make without realizing it. what they misunderstand about themselves. then once i understand the shape of someone’s thinking, dialogue tends to come pretty naturally.

one thing i do think i pay a lot of attention to is the way people speak. in the boring way you do when you’re learning other languages, but it’s been helpful since i’m writing in a language that i also had to learn second. everyone has these tiny conversational habits that become invisible once you know them. the kinds of metaphors they reach for. the things they answer directly versus the things they quietly sidestep. whether they ramble, hedge, interrupt themselves, apologize too much, ask questions instead of making statements. dialogue starts to feel much easier once i'm not thinking about "how would this character say this?" and instead, "what kinds of thoughts would naturally occur to this person, in this order?”

i also spend... a frankly unreasonable amount of time just thinking. a lot of writing, for me, happens long before i’m sitting at a keyboard. i'll spend days turning over one interaction or one line of dialogue in my head until it finally clicks into place. and then the flow state will finally follow. some of the best sentences i’ve ever written (in my humble opinion) came from noticing something in real life that i couldn’t quite stop thinking about. be obsessive, be nosy. to quote susan sontag:

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

also i answered another ask about writers that have influenced my diction, if it’s okay for me to link it here: https://alterspring.org/@sha/a/116983598472352949 (but i’m sure i can actually compile a more flls-specific list, now that i think about it… written on the body by jeanette winterson was a big one, even though it’s frankenstein that megumi ends up reading in-fic bc i thought it was funny for mahito’s newsletter to recommend it)

ooooooh do you mean visual artists-ish? that’s how i’m interpreting this but call me on discord to yell at me if you meant musicians 😵‍💫

i always love a good building, but lately it’s been an especially particular rabbit hole of artists who are interested in architecture !! gregory crewdson has been a big one. technically a photographer, but every image feels like a horror film that’s been paused halfway through. he has these like. meticulously staged (?) suburban scenes. where it feels like something has either just happened or is just about to. liminal is a popular word these days when it comes to spaces but i think crewdson is more like… winter snow. not so much liminality as ephemerality. there’s a difference in terms of the quality of permanence.

(which. speaking of. really loving this account: https://note.com/n55_pafu/n/n1a6a68ff6b35. they also have a twt: ​​https://x.com/n55_pafu.

also also there was this exhibit in tokyo called 1999: memories of a day that doesn’t exist that i’m soooo gutted to have missed. if you can find videos/photos online… join me in mourning.)

i’ve also been revisiting rachel whiteread… i love that so much of her work is about casting absence. making sculptures out of the empty space inside rooms or around furniture, etc. there's something so quietly unsettling about treating negative space as the thing worth preserving. gah.

do ho suh is probably the mildest person on this list, but i adore the way he thinks about homes as things you carry with you. his translucent fabric houses feel like memories you can walk through. fun thoughts about tactility without the durability (?)… three little pigs core. something meta in it too coming from such a high profile nepo baby.

and then two artists i've discovered more about recently:

james casebere builds miniature architectural models and photographs them, so you're looking at buildings that never actually existed. they’re all empty institutional spaces, impossible corridors, flooded rooms... looooove

thomas demand recreates entire interiors out of paper before photographing them. i love that the final images look completely ordinary until you realize nothing in them is real in the ontological sense. it’s such an interesting way of thinking about memory, reconstruction, and place. also so spooky.

i’m just one text away too my dearest dearest ina mwah ily !!! (˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶)

hello!! i've been good, just... very, very busy. but when am i not? i hope you’ve been doing well too <3

hmmm poetry is always hard for me to rec bc i don’t think i have much discerning taste for it… i’m perhaps not the most poetically-minded person. i find myself thinking more in dense sentences/paragraphs and nested lists; i like arguments and footnotes and etymologies. which is a lovely subcategory of poetry in itself, one might argue, but. still. be forewarned.

first names to come to mind:
— sonnets by diane seuss (always always alwayyyyyys. i genuinely think about this collection at least once a week.)
— soft science by franny choi
— marie howe, who writes with this incredible quiet that somehow sneaks up on you
— mary ruefle, whose work have pushed me forward in many of my personal writing.
— hanif abdurraqib, whose poetry and essays both feel impossibly generous and attentive

and then a few more i've enjoyed off the top of my head:

— victoria chang (obit) — somewhere between poetry, memoir, and essay. it's one of those books where the form itself is carrying the grief. it’s been really interesting for me in the past year especially.
— monica youn (blackacre, from from) — she writes about identity, language, and the self in a way that feels incredibly thoughtful without ever becoming dry. a weakness of mine.
— solmaz sharif (look) — if you're interested in the politics of language itself, she’s extraordinary! but some poems i like far, far more than others, certainly.
— don mee choi (dmz colony) — translation, archives, memory, history... not always for me, but a really rewarding read when i am able to slow down.
— layli long soldier (whereas) — one of the most inventive collections i've read. she does fun things with legal language, bureaucracy, and silence. and form. which all three, you could argue is.

who else… you already know i love anne carson doooown. forever indebted to her and the way she’s constantly taking language apart and putting it back together again while acting as a… sieve, almost, to get to the absolute clearest version of a thought. i love, love, love that. i love poets who treat poetry as a process of thinking, who are interested in language itself. where words come from, how they accumulate meaning, how history lingers inside them. the architecture gets so thin and specific with poetry, so seeing the same shapes i know with the materials it provides is always a different kind of high. idk idk

and… also… alex dimitrov. we don’t always get along, but when we do, it’s magical. “the years,” they will never make me hate you.

not what you asked as well but i recently had the honour of being invited to a 4K restoration of a litany for survival (the audre lorde documentary) and doing some writing on it, and it’s just been very inspiring as i reckon with returning to writing. lorde had such a musical understanding of language and to see it in film/biographical form, featuring so many other poets (including such an endearing adrienne rich) was so… it really did feel like i was seeing the world in a new light for some days after.

………………………… marcus tullius cicero (⸝⸝๑﹏๑⸝⸝) i want to say it’s a bunch of different writers (and of course it is, maybe not even writers alone; i know i’m like a sponge in the weeks leading up to when i lock in and write something dedicatedly, but that kinda means it differs from work to work and not necessarily representative of my writing “style” as a broader voice, whatever that even means) but in my heart of hearts i know you can tell the exact point my writing style changed pre- and post-a phd seminar my prof threw me into where i was forced to read in verrem near exclusively for a year nonstop ;;

maybe it’s not fair to only credit cicero, though. it’s probably really just latin as a whole. i had a brief stint in journalism around the same time, too, and i think… together with latin + studying linguistics + me not writing fiction for years in that period, it all just kind of rewired my brain a little. or at least it gave me a way to reframe how i think about language and embrace that the most natural way of writing for me is to do so almost... mathematically? structurally? it’s like building an answer to a long formula, almost. i found that i especially like the step-by-step tedium of putting words down word for word, and you generally learn latin in a way that directly engages with and challenges that.

i don’t think i’m a ✨ beautiful ✨ or particularly poetic writer (not self-deprecation!) and i always say that if i were a cook, i’d be someone who likes to work with good ingredients above all. and maybe latin didn’t give me style, per se, but it definitely informed my sentence architecture and internal metronome… and what is voice if not that, tbh. where the weight of a clause sits, when a sentence should tighten or release, how long you can suspend an idea before resolving it. if you read my teenage hq fics, they were very concerned with images, with beauty in the words instead of the content, and i was terribly disgusted with them despite readers telling me otherwise; i think i’ve learned to love the way i manage depth and density a lot more thanks to cicero.

i’ve maybe also spoken a bit about salinger being a formative experience for me, but that’s less for his prose than for his approach to characterization. it’s really very unfortunate haha but i remember reading him as a teenager and just having my mind completely blown by the honesty (?) of his characters. not even bc they were brutally confessional (though many of them are lol), but bc they felt... lived in. you really get to appreciate just how much when you read salinger’s short stories. everything was filtered through who they were: the words that bubble up, the words they swallow back, the things they notice without realizing they’re noticing them. a character isn’t a personality you assign to them; it’s the relationships you yourself build for them, the people you arrange around them to shape their life, the media they’ve read and watched, the stories they tell themselves and others and how, the tiny memories that keep resurfacing for reasons they can’t quite explain. it’s you getting to know them less through what they say than through how they see the world under your hands. if there was ever a part of me that was in danger of writing characters who thought in fact, i think salinger stopped that before it could blossom and taught me that it’s more fun to write characters who think in associations, who reveal the shape of themselves by what their minds naturally return to.

but. yeah. this is an extremely narrow pair to answer with, but… idk. i write against and to and for my internal compass. how that compass was built is, as you said, is not the work of a single author. if anything, the compass has probably been broken and repaired and broken and repaired so many times that it might not even be pointing where it says it is. but i know what feels good in what i read and write. and i know which star i personally call polaris in a given journey.

my deepest sincerest apologies for taking months to answer, and i hope these summer months are treating you well <3

there’s no such thing as receiving messages like this enough, especially for this particular fic ( ˶´ ᵕ `˶ ) i think i have such an odd relationship with it bc i didn’t know what questions i was asking myself and the characters as i was writing it, and even by the end, they felt rather impenetrable to me, as though i was being allowed to write their story only insofar as i remain a subjective witness instead of some kind of telepathic archivist. and as though i just had to be okay with that. i get described a lot as an author who writes “angst” (i politely disagree haha it’s not like i write a story thinking okay now how do i make this sad) but plmlyf might be the first one to fill with me a level of melancholy that’s not so much about letting the characters go as it is just not knowing for sure if i did my best by them. and pride is a weird thing when it comes to a story like that; idk if i can credit myself for something that they wrote more than i did. as corny as that sounds bleh

all to say, it’s always meaningful to me to hear that someone has not only waded through that beast of a story, but found something in it to love. combined with hairpin turns, it might be the fic i feel the most non-authorial tenderness for. like… ah, my clunky little attempts to write a bigger world. there they are. i’m thankful to the readers who see them and sit with them.

thank you for reading please let me love you forever in all its length and back-and-forth! not only that, but also lingering and stewing in the words. that’s the greatest gift as a writer, especially one that writes so much without certainty if my intuition is right. i imagine it’s not always rewarding for people who enjoy fic. so. thank you for letting the fic resonate with you, and for taking the time to message me 🫂🤍