A Probability of Being

I was recently invited to partake in a roundtable of sorts for International Women's Day at ELLE Malaysia, and was asked the question, "what is the greatest problem facing Malaysian women today?"  What a giant question! With no easy answer, and one either is going for incomplete, or totally pithy. I decided to go high abstract instead . It feels strange to read the other responses; my answer is so incredibly academic in comparison. Times like this, I worry that maybe I'm too academic. But it was an interesting challenge all the same!

A short short story I wrote, " Anak Sungai ," is now available to read at Truancy #2 . Truancy is a venue for fairytale re-tellings, re-castings, re-creations. I share a table of contents with the incredible Vajra Chandrasekera , fellow Malaysians Eeleen Lee and Sukhbir Cheema, and the lovely Mari Ness and Sarah Yasin! "Anak Sungai" is what my friend Munira calls "cerita rakyat moden." "Cerita rakyat" more properly translates to "folktale"; a direct translation is something like "tales of the citizenry," ha! It's the story of a river going out to sea. The animal names are in Malay, because I wrote this first and foremost for the audience that reads Malay and English at once!

I'm pleased to say that I am an invited author to the 37th International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts this year! I will be reading at 10.30am on Thursday, in Author Readings IV, Vista A! The chair will be Rachel Swirsky, and my co-readers are the inestimable Nisi Shawl and Sam J. Miller !! I think our outfit theme will be green.  Not only that, but my co-editor Joyce Chng will also be attending! It's her first North American appearance so I'm very excited to see her on this side of the Pacific for once. Please come! 

So now that " Liminal Grid " has been up for a few months now, I guess I should talk about some of the things I wrote into the story that are very personal to me!

This is a bit late (been busy) but the results of the Strange Horizons 2015 Readers Poll came out, and " Liminal Grid " is #3 in the fiction category!!! I'm stoked to be on the same list as my friend Gabby Reed, a tremendous writer. Also on the poll lists are incredible poems by Rose Lemberg and Shweta Narayan, and Rose's incredible article on using folklore in fiction ! Congrats to all the winners, and thanks for voting, readers!

My latest poem, "Assimilation," is up at inkscrawl , a journal of minimalist speculative micropoetry! I share a table of contents with some wonderful people, and the editor,   Bogi Takács is a delightful person who keeps an eye out for marginalized voices! E tweets about #diversesff with a series of recommendations. "Assimilation" was inspired by the batik-dyeing process and Sean Kelly's Rainway challenge dress on Project Runway !

Content warning for talk of depression and suicide.

At UC Riverside, there are two different science fiction reading groups for graduate students, one out of the English department which is more theory-based, and one out of the Creative Writing department which is more craft-based. I attended the latter one, and we had a writing prompt last month: a flash fic, 500 words, on the keyword "dinosaurs."  Because of a variety of reasons I didn't get around to writing my dinosaur flash fic until the meeting itself, and while everyone talked around me, I quickly typed up some 483 words. I had the idea for the first part most of the month, but didn't know how the rest of it would pan out. But I knew I wanted to think through evolution, and generational change. Here it is!

I am very, very, very happy to announce that I made a sale to Strange Horizons, one of my favourite zines on the 'net! It is my very first professional short story sale, and I was a little nervous about whether or not it could ever find a home, since it's in second person.  It went up today! Please check it out: Liminal Grid

The wonderful Bogi Takacs is guest-editing inkscrawl, a micropoetry journal, and e has put together a wonderful table of contents ! My poem, "Assimilation," will be part of "Atypical Weather" that will come out later this fall.  I can't wait to read what my fellow contributors have written! This will also be Stephany Lu's first publication, and I am SO excited to see eir work! 

I wrote this during the Bersih 2.0 rally a few years ago, and am bringing it back for Bersih4.

Last fall, when I TA'd for a course on introductory science fiction, I compiled a list of venues which publish science fiction and fantasy stories and poetry, for free online reading . How many such venues are there? The answer is: a lot. 56 in my list (which includes two sites of audio podcasts). The list sat on my Dreamwidth for ages, and I don't know if any of the students ever got around to reading any of them. Even I had only ever read three of them regularly, and never read most of them. This summer, that will change! I have set myself a summer reading goal: I'll work my way down this list, and select three stories to read from each venue. Just three, then move onto the next one. The idea is to get a sampling of all the venues.  My criteria for picking which stories to read should be simple; I'm still doing the Tempest Reading Challenge for most part. However, I've already broken the rule a couple of times, but it doesn't matter that much becaus...

This is an exciting week! Besides being the first week of the new quarter, and the week a good friend visits me after five years of not seeing each other, two of my poems went live!  Strange Horizons published "Magpie Wings," a science fictional re-telling of the folktale "The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl" in which the characters are separated due to, essentially, class differences. There are several variations of the story: usually she's a fairy, he's a mortal; sometimes they're both celestial beings but have different roles which keep them separate; she is always of a higher class than he is, though, and serves in the Jade Palace as a handmaiden of the Jade Empress. She goes to live with him for a while and they are happy, but her duty forces her to leave. In Heaven and on Earth, they pine for each other, and the magpies on their yearly migration, take pity on them and offer them their backs so they can meet each other. Their story is commemorate...

Every sliver of injustice in our bones must be picked at, or sucked from the marrow; else slit open the flesh, reach in with your knife, remove the festering source. What good are your tools of righteousness, of goodwill, if they cannot break the fever?

My friend Patricia posted a challenge to a writing group I'm part of: What does your past or future Malaysia look like, 50-60 years from today? Write it as a story or a poem, both works. Bonus Points: If your character(s) speak in Manglish or variations thereof Double Bonus Points: If your setting has magic/future tech Triple Bonus Points: If it's Malaysia in outer space WITHOUT referencing politics 

The other day, K. Tempest Bradford posted a challenge to XOJane: Stop reading straight white cis male authors for a year ! Typically, people are up in arms because how can they stop reading their straight white cis male favs! And how dare anyone tell readers what to read! And isn't excluding people based on their identity discriminatory anyway! But this challenge comes from a very particular place. In much of the English-language reading world, most of the authors who get the most attention tend to be straight white cis men, especially in the science fiction fantasy world. In trying to read widely, and read what the mainstream rates the most highly, it's easy to fall into a trap of reading the same type of writer, over and over again. As Silvia Moreno-Garcia points out, narrowing one's reading to particular themes, lists, and kinds of authors is actually a very normal and useful exercise . In English degrees, you will have classes like "Writers of the 18t...

Recently, I went to see Jupiter Ascending , and right now I can't think of a more wonderful movie to have experienced in theaters! Perhaps the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . But Jupiter Ascending isn't an adaptation, except one of the imagination, especially of the young imagination when we were busy creating impossible characters that people told us were unrealistic. It was so fun, my fan buddy Jeanne and I had to recap it! We included as much detail as possible, and added commentary. Jeanne's commentary is in blue , mine is purple ! Read the first half of the recap at her blog ! This recap will be long, and image-heavy, so you've been warned! Without further ado, ACT II:

Sometime around this time last year, I sent out a call for submissions to The Sea Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia. Over the next few months, my co-editor Joyce Chng and I would receive many submissions. Many didn't make the first cut. A few got past, but eventually we could not use them. We were eventually left with twelve stories, with various levels of editing work required, each unique. After that it was a matter of deciding their order, and then getting a cover. I approached Khor Shing Yin, an artist I found through Tumblr, who, it turned out, is Malaysian-Chinese, although she's spent most of her life in the States. We met briefly at San Diego Comic Con 2014, and more recently last August in Los Angeles. For SDCC, I made a frantic last-minute request for her to make up a promotional postcard that I could bring to raise awareness of the anthology. The result was the following:  I was elated! It was based off a photograph of a street in Melaka, with ...

When I was in my first year of undergrad, the prof had us read "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. He asked us, "do you think it's a psychological story of a woman going mad, or a ghost story?" and we picked "woman going mad" so he took the side of "ghost story," and proceeded to point out all the things that could be read as a ghost story. He also taught us that this was based on Gilman's experiences so we weren't totally convinced of its ghostliness at all. Years later I'd read "The Rocking Chair" and "The Great Wisteria" and now I can totally buy the ghost story angle, because she was a ghost story writer too. "When I Was A Witch" is still my favourite Gilman story so far, though.

My brother sent me an email with a PDF scan of a letter I received from Scotiabank, the bank I had been using in Canada, for quite a while. I had no problems with Scotiabank and moving cross-province was a pleasure.  The letter tells me that my account is now inactive, since I haven't used it in 2 years (which, yes. I still do have my Scotiabank card though!), and that accounts inactive for ten years revert all its funds to the Bank of Canada, which I did not know. I should make a small deposit once in a while. Perhaps I will forward my next few checks towards it.  I filled out the appropriate blanks, ticked the appropriate ticky-boxes (how satisfying ticky-boxes are) and wrote my address at the back of the envelope. On the front I wrote the address of my Scotiabank branch, all the way in Hamilton, which must be snowy at this time of year. I can still remember its edifice and the last time I walked into it to explain that I would be gone, a long time (hoping not fore...