It’s been a while. 

I’ve been….um….recuperating? 

I got hit by a drunk driver, broke four bones, landed in the hospital for five days, was bedridden for six weeks, packed up and left Malaysia, flew home to Texas, and am now preparing for a move to Korea.

It’s been a lot.

One day, when I’ve processed more, I may write about it, but for now these last two months are going to go on the back burner of “Things to Think About Later Because It’s Too Much Right Now.”

And then I thought, why not add something else, like publishing a book?

Just kidding, this venture has actually been underway for the last year and was supposed to be completed in June, but, uh, see the last few paragraphs. 

Anywho, I’m excited to announce my collection of short stories, Chronicles of the Supernaturally Inept, is coming out July 14th and, if you’d like to read more of the process and backstory behind it all, feel free to keep reading!

I’ve been writing since I was seven years old. Back then, the American Girl company had just released a “write your own book” for your “Create Your Own” American Girl doll. I had just received a Chinese American Girl doll and promptly named her Jackie (yeah, I didn’t know a lot of Chinese names) and started writing her story right away, following the outline given in the book. 

And from then on, I was hooked on words.

I’ve written a lot of books over the years….some of them well over three hundred pages. I love doing National Novel Writing Month in November (a challenge to write 50,000 words in a month). Stories and ideas, even finishing projects, weren’t an insurmountable challenge and I knew one day I wanted to pursue publishing.

It’s just…every time I finished a book, I couldn’t bear to look at it again. 

I’m terrible at editing my own work. I will edit and critique anyone else’s work, but I just can’t stand editing my own work. Either I become horrified at what the story became over time or I’ll know that something is off about it but I’m not sure what and I don’t know how to fix it. 

Hence, I’ve never published any of my creative works. 

I also, five years ago, moved to Malaysia and in the midst of transitioning to a new country, starting a new job/career, going through a pandemic in a foreign country, and really not getting a “normal” schedule for three years, most of my creative writing went out the window. 

I felt so incomplete not working on some kind of creative project. Writing helps me process so much and brings me such joy that not writing creatively for a solid three or more years was terrible. 

But I also found I couldn’t write my long, detailed novels that I used to write. My brain just couldn’t get past writing a few chapters and couldn’t think of endings – which I learned long ago, if I don’t have an ending in mind, I should not start writing because I will not finish that book. 

I was so discouraged and decided maybe I should just work on my blog posts and reflections. 

This worked for a while, but then I remembered a short story that I wrote back in college, “For the Love of a Sandwich.” It’s a quirky little story about a ghost with a love of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches who haunts a family until they make him a sandwich. 

And an idea started to form.

What if?…What if I wrote short stories? Maybe, to get out of my creative slump, I just needed to set a more reasonable goal. Maybe, I could expand on this idea of strange supernatural creatures. Maybe, I should just try writing some humorous works instead of epic long novels. 

So I set a small goal to write 200 words a day. 

It was kind of torture. Somewhat because I knew I used to write thousands of words a day once upon a time and yet now I struggled to write even 200 words a day. And somewhat because I wasn’t sure if there would be enough ideas or material to write on.

But God was gracious, especially on the days that I struggled most. Sometimes just pushing through and finishing the daily word count was enough, even if I wasn’t happy with the end product, at least I got something written. I found that the more consistently I wrote, the more ideas came to me. 

I won’t say that it magically became easier to write again, because it certainly didn’t, but when the time came to write, I found that I didn’t run out of ideas. 

I started to have fun.

I started to have a vision for where this could lead. 

And I actually liked most of my stories once they were finished – something that hasn’t happened in a long, long time. 

Even though these weird stories about strange supernatural creatures were not at all what I thought my first published book would be about, I warmed up to the idea.  

Over the last year, I’ve added bit by bit, story by story, and found that the more that I wrote, the more I wanted to write. I even found myself enjoying the editing process – at one point scrapping and rewriting one story entirely because its serious tone did not match the lighthearted quirkiness of the other stories. Piece by piece, it came together. 

All that to say, I’m publishing a book! Since I’ve been writing on here for a while, I thought I would also mention it here. Like I said, my official publishing date is July 14th, 2024 and, if you’re interested in pre-ordering, you can order it here on Amazon (digital format only right now, but print version is soon to come!). 

Thank you for your support over the years as I’ve been writing blog posts. My quirky supernatural stories are a bit of a departure from many of the themes I’ve explored on this blog, but I hope they can bring you some joy as well. Here’s to new ventures, huzzah!