t-minus three months till these deathless shores

Hello friends,

I have finished my MFA comprehensive exam, which means I have a bit more time than I did before! Also, we’re a little less than three months out from These Deathless Shores coming out (?!?! time is fake??) which means it’s high time for a Spot update:

On the publishing side, things have been feeling strangely (?) quiet on my end. A nice thing I can't talk about, a couple promo articles written on the tide of verbiage that occurred after I turned in my master's thesis revision, but mostly it's been studying for my comprehensive exam (in which I got to write about, among other things, Teixcalaanli narrative structures and Robin Swift’s minor feelings, heh) and learning a new role at the day job and packing up to move cross-country (again; as the prophets say: tumbleweed) and preparing to draft a new project—which sounds like a lot now that I’ve written it out, but feels a bit sporadic when spread across the weeks.

So in lieu of process notes, I thought I'd pass on some writing advice I found on the internet recently that might make its way onto my desktop wallpaper at some point:

“So long as a writer is working to satisfy imagined expectations that are extraneous to his art as he would otherwise explore and develop it, he is deprived of the greatest reward, which is the full discovery and engagement of his own mind, his own aesthetic powers and resources. So long as a writer is working below the level of her powers, she is depriving the community of readers of a truly good book. And over time a truly good book can enrich literally millions of lives. This is only one instance of the fact that when we condescend, when we act consistently with a sense of the character of people in general which demeans them, we impoverish them and ourselves, and preclude our having a part in the creation of the highest wealth.” —Marilynne Robinson, “Imagination & Community” 

—which I found on R. F. Kuang’s Instagram; Kuang reflects:

“writing students often ask me about writing with a fear of backlash, writing with reviews in mind, writing to the market, writing in the era of social media… usually i say that you must block it all out, that you’ll drown yourself in noise before you even start writing…Marilynne Robinson’s essay ‘Imagination and Community’…articulates a much better response - that to write with fear of your audience is in fact condescension, condescension to yourself and your reader and to literature, condescension that deprives us all of what could be a very good book…”

And this Twitter/X thread from Qian Julie Wang:

“my first book was, in many ways, a fluke. i wrote it on my iphone during my commute…because no matter how much i tried to bury it or shove it into silence, there was a story inside me that demanded to be freed…i remember stepping off the subway after having written a memory i had not dared to revisit for years, tasting the fulfillment of having finally looked into the darkness and of committing it to paper…

“all [the publishing accolades that followed were] breathtaking and incredible; they were joys and honors that i’ll spend the rest of my life processing. but truthfully, none of it came even close to having stepped out of that subway car, knowing that i had excavated truth and power from an ancient rubble of shame and secrecy. none of it comes close to finding out that i’d accidentally written a book, by doing simply what my body and mind had demanded me to do.”

Which helped me remember how it felt to write TDS—propping my laptop on a secondhand bookshelf because I didn’t have a desk, wrecking my thumbs typing in Gmail drafts on the subway. Because it was bursting out of me. Because my body demanded it. Because even when I knew it wasn't yet up to my standards—for example, in 2019, draft four of approximately eleven—there were parts of my brain that were on fire, that only writing could put out.

I think that's still true. I'm one of those people who writes every day; if I go too long without, my brain starts feeling weird and gross, like I lay down in bed wearing outside clothes. And so even as I account for the career I hope to build—even as choosing the types of project(s) I spend time on becomes more of a team effort—when I sit down in front of the blank page, especially a first draft, I want to remember, not just in my mind but in my bones: that before these words belong to the world, they are mine. That no one's watching until—or unless—I ask them to.

Actually I lied about the absence of process notes. I got to fill out an audiobook brief recently! Questions included whether I had ideas for intro/outtro music and possible fancasts for the characters, and so without further ado, here are some of the audio references I provided:

• Audiobook intro/outro insp playlist:

  • BONES UK, “Dirty Little Animals”

  • Samantha Margret, “Rage”

  • Billie Eilish, “What Was I Made For?”

  • Halsey, “Ashley” (for that final argument—but also, generally, most of Manic and If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power)

  • PVRIS, “Hype Zombies” (big fan of the gritty bass situation)

  • Sleeping At Last, “Eight”

  • LAEL, “Open Waters” (closing credit roll)

• Characters:

  • Jordan: Halsey, “Lilith”; PVRIS, “Good Enemy”

  • Baron: Mikky Ekko, “Time”; Jonah Baker, “A Thousand Miles—Acoustic” (specifically that one fifth that opens the first chorus hhhhh)

  • Chay: Laura Shigihara, “Everything’s Alright”; An Bai, “是什么让我遇见这样的你”

  • Tier: I couldn’t think of any songs at the time so I just wrote “British.” Sorry Tier. (In hindsight: maybe “I Need Control” by Will Jay?)

If you’ve read the book already, do you have any fancasts / voicecasts? [Youtuber voice] Feel free to drop them in the comments, I’d love to hear about them!

In other news:

• These Deathless Shores is now available for request on NetGalley! Also, a bunch of authors—including Shelley Parker-Chan, Emma Törzs, and Neon Yang—said some nice things about it!

• I’m having a smol signing event in NYC, so mark your calendars for Thursday, July 11th at 5:30 pm! There will be free character art and possibly free food. Or food afterward. or something.

• I have some new poetry out at the lickety-split (“paying for author photos”), beestung (three cyborg sonnets), and Haven Spec (“After they blasted your home planet to shrapnel”). Many thanks to Ann Keniston’s poetry workshop at the University of Nevada, Reno for providing the space to write and workshop some of these.

Reading / listening:

• I just finished The Prospects by K. T. Hoffman (romance)—aaAAH this was such a lovely read about baseball and queer joy and letting yourself want things.

• The Night Parade by Jami Nakamura Lin (speculative memoir)—this book explores Asian mythology, mental illness, grief, and memory, and broke open the way I see diasporic ventures into telling stories of the “homeland,” given culture gaps and meanings lost in translation.

• The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar (fantasy)—I find it fascinating how Samatar uses perspective here. There are four main sections, each of them—except the interstitial texts—from a different point of view. It’s lyrical and melancholy and so lush in worldbuilding and also unexpectedly horny, in more ways than one (ba dum tss). I haven’t read A Stranger in Olondria yet, but it’s high on my TBR now. And if y’all have any recs for SFF that is Structurally Interesting, I’d love to know about them in the comments as well :)

• Current music hyperfixations: Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS (spilled); “Alive” and “Big City Thing” by The Scarlet Opera; the Hamilton German EP

Thanks so much for reading! Hopefully the next update will be uh. checks calendar fewer than five months from now 😅