story notes

below are some scattered notes and reflections on the above stories and their process. for transparency, i also included how often they were rejected and approximately when i finished the first draft.

taidu (5 rejections; accepted apr 2022): it’s really tough to complain about an award-winning story but looking back i can see now how different my writing was then, compared to the writer i became a year or two later. i think i would have made a few different choices if i went back to this. but taidu (and carve, for publishing it) will always hold a special place in my heart. i talk a little more about the story here and here. one additional little nugget though: the setting of this story, in my mind, was jiuzhaigou.

oatmeal (5 rejections; accepted oct 2023): oatmeal grew out of a confluence of factors: practicing prose poetry with a relative; my own experience in grad school with a bad case of dermatitis and needing to explain to my roommate why i needed to take an oatmeal bath; and my sense of cultural loss. the original version of this story just had the grandmother napping in the tub. it wasn’t until i encountered some more speculative publications, like hex, was i inspired to jump that realism gap into something more interesting. i’d previously gotten a kind note from hex, inviting me to submit again with something more speculative so when they re-opened that september, me being in the throes of newborn care in the wee hours of a sleepless night, i did some last second editing and submitted this grandma dragon.

dead dog (56 rejections; accepted apr 2023): woof. process-wise, rejections are part of publishing but 56 is a doozy, and a pricy one. the culprit was a poor process when i first started to submit my work. i’d submit in massive waves without waiting for a response and only making minor edits in between. it wasn’t until i’d been rejected over 50 times that i used my brain and decided to make significant changes. namely, to add more moral peril to raise both the stakes and the complexity. by then, it was january 2023. i sent the new version out to 3 litmags after that, one of which was the minnesota review, who were kind enough to pick it up.

this story is based on a prominent professor i had in graduate school. when he asked me to be his research/teaching assistant, i was ecstatic to learn from him and, of course, to burnish my resume. while i did learn a lot, he gave me an unusual assignment once. i was to go to his home and change out all the cds in his 100+ cd changer for others from the even larger collection on his shelf. suiting his vibe, every cd was either classical or opera. all except for slot 1, which was to remain unchanged and stay in slot 1. it was pink floyd’s wish you were here.

circuses (54 rejections; accepted sep 2024): another process doozy. 54 no’s is a lot of punches to take, but this is one i kept believing in. it was the finalist for a contest and also got a good number of “really good but not for us” type rejections. on one hand, this is a shout out to all the asians who grow up in a place with an accent that doesn’t seem like it should match their appearance. what kind of voice or sound or dialect truly belongs? on the other hand, what kind of masculinity belongs—what makes for the good father, son, or brother? big shout out to kira homsher who helped me edit the story and whose kind, constructive comments convinced me to keep submitting. this story was waiting for the right home and quarterly west, stewarded by their great team, was it.

maneater (19 rejections; accepted feb 2024): [tbd]

pigboy and his artificial jesus (5 rejections; accepted sep 2024): [tbd]

nice-ville station (42 rejections; accepted oct 2024): [tbd]

the twelfth vial (17 rejections; accepted nov 2024): [tbd]