eep thank you <3 I started writing while working on my BFA collection in fashion school. I was in the studio for 10 hours a day and needed something to take my mind off work before going to bed. it was around the time season 2 of euphoria started airing, so I started writing fanfic for that, and it was the first time anyone had read something I had written for fun, and I really enjoyed it! 4 years later, writing is the main thing I do outside my corporate fashion job. I still have a long way to go but it’s really cool seeing the progress I can make just by reading widely and applying what I learn. I hope to continue writing for a long, long time! thanks for asking :-)

omg i love this idea…

I have been reading a lot of pitt fic lately and my favourite ones are the medical procedurals. I love fics where the author has clearly trawled through dozens and dozens of medical journals in their research. so if I were to take a crack at it, I’d also want to do the medical stuff justice, but that is a level of research I don’t currently have time for lol.

i’m slowly reading my way through avocadomoon’s langdonmel oeuvre, so if I did, I’d probably write something inspired by their dynamic… autistic wonwoo whose only activities outside of work are taking care of his little brother and playing video games until his brain turns to mush. and sharp-tongued drug addict joshua who goes to rehab and divorces his husband after getting caught stealing pills by his attending. the only person in the entire ER he can stand to be nice to when he comes back is the stupid r3 who has to go do breathing exercises in the stairwell after every sibling case. and wonwoo has no idea he’s essentially getting princess treatment from the disgraced former ER prince. hmmngggrrghh…

1. we have always lived in the castle - shirley jackson

Merricat is a young girl who lives in a manor on the outskirts of their village with her agoraphobic sister and their crippled uncle. She is an unreliable narrator, fiercely devoted to her sister and hostile towards outsiders. This was supposed to be a psychological horror, but I felt genuinely soothed by merricat’s pov which probably speaks to my own hermit-like tendencies LOL. It also made me want to write a main character who uses sympathetic magic. The book is relatively short so it would be a great place to start with shirley jackson.

(honourable mention for the haunting of hill house, which I read after this essay in the new yorker by shirley jackson (https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/garlic-in-fiction) where she writes about the literary devices she used to transport the reader from a foundation of reality to a destabilized mindset where the horrors of a haunted house could be believably introduced. I love peeking behind the curtains and learning about the technical process of different authors. [girl who loves information voice] I just love information.

in that vein I’ve also been reading some of the art of fiction interviews in the paris review. the yu hua one is my favourite, maybe because he’s so irreverent, but also because he’s from the same generation as my parents (who are also chinese.) I read a translated version of his short story and got to discuss it with my mom, who I almost never have any media overlap with, so that was cool.)

1. o caledonia - elspeth barker

speaking of stories about wretched young girls, this is about an unloved teenage girl name Janet. she has her shortcomings, but is also simply shackled by the curse of being a girl in 1950s scotland. it’s a tragedy (her death is literally described on the first page) but it’s also funny and poetic. this book made me realize I love gothic novels as it combines my two favourite things, morbidity and perversion.

1. the lives of girls and women - alice munro

I was fully an alice munro hater for a while but I’m so glad I stuck it out and gave her a second chance. this book is devastating in its plainness and the honesty with which munro documents what it’s like to grow up as a young girl. which even as I type out I can acknowledge how boring that sounds lmao but I promise it is a worthwhile read. her prose is so fucking precise and when that imagery hits it hits hard. her work is also making me realize it’s okay to write autobiographic fiction because she literally wrote about the same 3 things over her entire career and it was awesome and different every time.

I’m also 80% of the way through the trees by percival everett, a whodunnit horror-comedy about the history of lynching in america. I picked it up after reading james last year, which I also loved. everett’s writing is incisive and witty and unapologetic and returns so much dignity to black people in a media landscape where that has not always been the case.

thanks for asking <3

thank you this is so sweet. I haven’t been very active for the past few months because I’ve been hunkered down on 2 new wips. the first is a dreamscape horror thriller (a continuation of the teen wolf au I wrote last year) that I’ve been puzzling out. a japanese demon worms its way into wonwoo’s psyche via his friends and jisoo. It’s teaching me a lot about pacing and tonal layering, but I’m hoping it’ll be a very exciting romp when it’s all finished. the second wip is my new baby, the t4t with jisoo struggling to complete her grad collection and enlisting entomology student wonwoo for help. it’s got everything. pinkpantheress. yves. kibum from shinee. wonwoo is aloof and inscrutable until he very much isn’t. jisoo is undergoing a sartorial and emotional journey while holding this weird bug guy hostage. that will most likely be ready by the summertime, so please look forward to that.

I feel like my writing has undergone a transitional period since last fall and it’s taken a while for me to recover my footing. I’ve been reading a LOT and generally intaking as much art as I can which has been wonderfully eye-opening but has also caused my discernment to skill-level gap to go very lopsided, so please have fun with me while I figure that out. thank you for thinking of me and I hope you are having a good day/weekend/month as well <3