My reading roundup: 2017
For the better part of the last two years I’ve been trying to do better at reading diversely. I already knew I wanted to read more books by women, but I’ve been espousing this idea of reading diversely using the…
Cover Letters: A brief primer
Some of you may know that I edit prose for the Tahoma Literary Review. This submission period we had a little over a thousand submissions; by the time I’m done, I will have read somewhere between 350 and 400 pieces of…
What Do Your Characters Carry Around in Their Pockets? (Or, Bite Me, #EverydayCarry)
There’s an exercise I sometimes use on both myself and with writing coaching clients: What does your character carry around, all the time, in his or her bag, or in their pockets? I am obsessed with this exercise: It allows…
When Your People Are Hurting: Part I
Part I: Near In the summer of 1999, I was living in New York and pursuing the beginnings of a dream career. That same summer, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake jilted my home country of Taiwan. It was big enough to…
Me and My Headshot
Three things happened in the past few weeks or so that have me noodling about the way we present ourselves to the world. A friend, upon seeing me at a panel with my accompanying headshot, said, “Well, that’s pretty glam.” I…
An Obituary for My Aunt (Of Obituaries and Passing Regrets, Part II)
Shu Chuang Wang, my mother’s elder sister, passed away April 8, 2017. She is the first adult to have been there for so much of my own life to die. She is the person we relied on when we moved to the…
Of Obituaries and the Passing of Regrets, Part 1
I spent a good amount of time last week editing obituaries for my day job. While such a task can feel honorary, part of the work made me sad. Not for the passing of the people, exactly–most of them were…
“Self-motivation” is a myth, and what I’m doing about it
Hey guys. Remember when we were back in school, or applying for our first jobs, and “self-motivation” was a thing? Like, it was a quality you touted during job interviews, and that your teachers may have called out on your…
A short story
Hello, I woke up this morning with a memory floating around my head. If you know me in real life, it’s probably a story I’ve told you before, but I’ve never actually committed it to paper, and I want to…
HELLO THERE I KNOW I HAVE BEEN GONE A LONGGGG TIME
Hello! I have missed you guys. Well. I have not really been gone. I have been dutifully sending out a monthly newsletter. You can see a sample and sign up to get it here. But I actually do have something…
