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Quiet is the Heart Full of Hope
My mother told my cousin something once, something that I’ve never forgotten: “When you try for something hard, don’t tell anyone.” We were in Taipei at the time, visiting relatives we hadn’t seen since my parents immigrated to the States when I was nearly 2 years old. My cousin — a bright, ambitious 15-year-old — was studying to get into one of the country’s most prestigious public senior high schools. Yes, in Taiwan, the best schools are public, not private, and everyone must take an entrance exam just to see if they’re good enough to be admitted. It’s like the SATs on steroids, and my cousin was burning the midnight oil…
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Writing to “The End”
I cut my novel-writing teeth on NaNoWriMo, as I’m sure a lot of us have. Before that, I’d written short stories and poems galore, but had never actually attempted to finish a whole novel. (Starts, though … starts I had down pat. I’d started plenty of novels.) NaNo taught me how to write 50,000 words in 30 days. It taught me that no matter how busy the day got, I’d better put my butt in that chair and crank out some words — any words — or I could kiss my 50k goal goodbye. It taught me various and creative ways to triumph over my supernaturally strong Internal Editor and…
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Wandering Down a Familiar Road
Frank Herbert’s Dune was the book that finally sparked the desire within me, at age 14, to write, even though I read voraciously as a kid without thinking anything more of it other than I really enjoyed stories. After finishing Dune, I promptly wrote the first three chapters of a horrid, epic medieval fantasy with space opera tinges that has never ever seen the light of day, and never will. (I’ve lost those chapters by now. Back then, we had what we call “typewriters” to format our words to readable type if we wanted to share our scribbling.) I told my mother I finally knew what I wanted to be…
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Making Good
I hit a bucket list milestone today; it was one I thought would likely happen this year, but even then, when I finally held it in my hands, I felt only ambivalence — even though I’ve worked all my life to get here. The reason: when I was a kid, I always felt that if I could hit this milestone, I’d “make it”. I’d have a nice car, a nice house, a loving partner in crime, and be able to care of my parents when they got old. I wouldn’t need to worry about which bills to sacrifice so that we could make the mortgage, eating dark meat instead of…
