Lightspeed Issue 88 is on sale!

The September issue of Lightspeed Magazine is now available for purchase! I'm really excited about it for several reasons. First, the incredible cover by Alan Bao:


It's a smaller version of the illustration he did for my short story, "The Last Cheng Beng Gift"!! It's my first ever story to become the cover story for a magazine, and hopefully it won't be the last! 

Secondly, I share an incredible table of contents... I'm in this issue with stories written by Genevieve Valentine and Tobias S. Buckell (who writes incredibly fun Caribbean space opera!!) and the non-fiction is by some of my favourite fiction writers, Amal El-Mohtar, Theodora Goss, and Joseph Allen Hill!!

Not only that (sub-second-point??), while my story goes live in the first week of September, my Clarion classmate Giovanni de Feo's story, "Ugo" goes live in the last week of September! That's like, a werejelly sandwich!!! Gio read his draft of "Ugo" to me and my roommates out loud, and at the end of his reading, I burst into tears. I'm so excited to be in this issue with him, and with that story, too!! It is a story of time-travel, determinism, the resentment of giving up dreams for some pre-determined narrative, and sacrifice for loved ones. I hope everyone else will recognize how great a writer he is!

Thirdly, it's Issue EIGHTY-EIGHT which is a really really really auspicious number in Chinese numerology!! "Eight" in Cantonese sounds like the word for "prosperity" so whenever people can choose a good number to use (for say, car license plates, or phone numbers), there's sure to be someone claiming some number of 8s in them. 

And finally, my story goes live on the Lightspeed website next Tuesday, Sept 5th, which is the day of the Hungry Ghost Festival itself! It's the fifteenth of the lunar month, which makes it the peak time when ghosts can get out of the Underworld... most people celebrate it around then, although some diaspora communities will caution their children to walk carefully throughout the whole month. I will attempt to attend one of the all-day rituals at the Thien Hau temple in Los Angeles Chinatown this weekend!

You can purchase the issue right now, or wait as the content is released. I will post on the day my story goes live with the full illustration by Alan Bao! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Race in Cartoons

So I was moseying on to work this morning when I started hearing the theme song to 6teen in my head, and I was reminiscing on the time I used to have cable TV and I watched cartoons and the SciFi channel just about incessantly (okay, I also watched TLC). 6teen was an interesting show to me. The basic premise is that of six teens who hang out at a fancy lemonade stall one of them works at, and it follows their trials and travails as they figure out how to get by on their own, holding their jobs (or not) and how they work through their problems. It also happens to follow a very smart comedy formula, with multiple storyarcs within a single episode. The creators did a good job realizing that yes, a younger audience could indeed appreciate smart shows. The characters, being cartoon characters in themselves, are not exactly what one might call nuanced, but the creators certainly did try to explore different aspects of their characters. Jen, for example, works in the sporting goods store. She
Read more

My Pidgin Does Not Signify Lack Of Intellect

I recently received in my inbox an email from my father, who likes to forward me a lot of things that he thinks will interest me. Except of course, he never really realizes just how easily antsy I can get, and how willing I am to pick apart an article. (I used to hit Reply to All whenever he'd send me an email to let all and sundry know what I thought and all the problems with whatever he sent me, so now he wisely BCCs people instead.) This article was about Miss Singapore, and I can't find the original article, but hree's another one about the same issue . While at the Miss World pageant in South Africa, she inadvertently slipped into speaking Singlish, the Singaporean creole that mixes English, Malay, Chinese and god knows what else. And this was a huge fucking deal because apparently, all beauty queens must be able to speak perfect English, the standard of which is probably set by the English-speaking world that is the UK and North America, I guess. And because Miss S
Read more

May 13 Blogswarm Links Post

This is where all Malaysians and residents of Malaysia are welcome to leave links to their participation in the May 13 Blogswarm. For more information, check out LiveJournal and Facebook . Comments Policy:  Please note that moderation is turned on for comments older than 7 days. I try to check in regularly, but this may be hard as I will be traveling. Do not use this place to debate what others have said. If you do and you crash my site in due process, I'll get very irritated at you. That shit is rude. Don't do it. 
Read more