Hello, friends! It’s good to see you again! ❤️ I’m coming to you from somewhere over the Atlantic, giving Kody little head pats through his carrier beneath my seat and promising him he’ll get to stretch his little legs soon during our long layover at JFK.

Because I’m still figuring out this newsletter, I turned to you with an Instagram poll last week to see what you’d like to hear me yap about this month. You evenly split the vote between wanting to hear more about my current work-in-progress and my querying journey. So that takes care of this month and next—thank you! I thought I’d focus on my current project this month (if I have to suffer through it, I wanna share the pain with you) and my querying/publication journey next month (which marks one year since the craziest week in my life).

So, let’s begin!

What’s Next?

I wish I could be one of those writers with a dozen projects simmering on various back burners in their mind. My brain will only allow me to work on one thing at a time. I have to give my current idea my all, or I will absolutely be lured by shiny objects and abandon half-formed, misshapen manuscripts left and right.

So after I wrapped up Tyrant Spell last fall and sent it off to my agent, I sat down and tried to whip up some new ideas. Something that would stick and get me itching to start writing. This is a very anxiety-inducing phase, where you play around with ideas before tossing them out and wondering if you’ll ever have an original thought again.

Usually, I begin by asking myself what I want to explore next, which will then (hopefully, best case scenario) lead to ideas that lead to fully formed characters and plots. For my debut, The Wives of Herrick Hall, that question was how far you’re willing to betray your own identity for security. For Tyrant Spell, I wanted to explore growing up and crafting an identity for yourself while still trapped in the shadow of the one imposed on your by your upbringing.

They say to write what you fear, and so for my next project, I turned to a part of myself that I’ve spent years trying to reconcile and articulate.

~Being Biracial~

I like to joke that I’m bi² . I’m super proud of being both biracial and bisexual, but neither comes without complication. I don’t want to bog down this newsletter with a whole essay on identity (though always happy to converse one on one), but suffice it to say, identity is complex. Especially when you exist within the intersections of multiple identities.

(I’ll start off by saying that as a half-white biracial person, I recognize that I live with certain privileges and face different levels of oppression and discrimination than someone who isn’t white.)

I find that the second the issue of race comes up in relation to biracial and mixed race people, people have OPINIONS.

Very loud ones.

I wake up every morning and see the same face in the bathroom mirror every day. Mine. But it’s also abundantly obvious to me that people on the street don’t see the same face I do.

I can’t count the number of times people have done double takes when learning I’m half Chinese. I get “Oh my gosh, I can’t see that AT ALL!” and “Oh my gosh, I thought you were 100% Chinese!” equally. My identity often seems to be up for grabs—consumed and determined for me—while I watch from the back seat as strangers “choose your own adventure” with it (I literally had an Uber driver spend an entire ride going “ooh ooh don’t tell me! I can guess!” and decided I was “vaguely exotic” so… “probably Thai”).

After a teenagehood and four college years of existential dread, I shrug it off mostly now. Because I 100% know my identity.

I’m Chinese. I’m white. Neither cancels out the other (my family laughed when I did a DNA test and it came back exactly 50/50 - “WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?!”). Both are my lived experiences, and no one can sever me from it.

But imagine… what if it could? Wouldn’t that be fertile ground for exploration in, say, a horror?

SleepwalkingWIP

My current project, as you can see, is one of my most personal yet. I’m still terrified to put so much of myself on the page, but it also keeps me coming back to my word doc every day. The book still taking shape and developing every day, so I won’t share too much. However, if you know me, you can probably guess it’s a combination of the below:

• Queer (very bi with a sapphic romance subplot)

• Historical (1920s & 1930s)

• Dark (maybe one day I’ll write cozy??)

In lieu of an official little blurb, enjoy this little moodboard I put together a while back to hype me up as I drafted it.

SleepwalkingWIP follows a biracial young woman (half Chinese, half white, and all anxiety and dread, like me), who curates her appearance for others’ consumption, passing as white to climb the social ladder and escape the ravages of the Great Depression.

But guess what? You can’t keep parts of yourself buried, no matter how hard you try.

Comps-wise, it has (or will have after numerous more revisions) the psychological warfare of REBECCA mixed with the gothic horror of MEXICAN GOTHIC. If my agent reads this, pls ignore and I promise I will have more updated comps for you ❤️❤️❤️

And, as the temporary title suggests, sleepwalking is involved. There are nightmares and monsters, and the boundary between waking and sleeping thins…and possibly breaks.

The Process

So, where am I at with this project now?

Currently, crying as I write it from scratch for the third time.

My writing method is “draft fast, revise later.” Once I break and outline a story, I can typically spew out a rough draft within a month, give or take a week. However, the finished project is anything but clean, so my revision timeline is consequently LONG.

What prompts this method, you ask? My inner fear I will get discouraged and abandon my book—if you go fast and don’t give yourself time to hate your project, that won’t happen, right?

But boy, the rough draft I cobbled together at the end of last year was ROUGH. The messiest draft I ever drafted. I cried and told myself it was okay. I gave it a good think, figured out what it needed, and rewrote the entire project from scratch a second time.

After that, I thought, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to re-break it yet again and switch the voice?” So I had another cry and started typing it again from (mostly) scratch.

If my brain decides to do this again for the fourth time, everyone here has my express permission to break into my home and hold my manuscript hostage until I agree to start proper revisions 😂

Once I finish this step (and you help make sure it doesn’t happen again), my revision process usually looks like the below:

• I do a proper read through of the manuscript, where I make notes in the margins of things I want to change. I resist the urges to start tweaking things now or throw my hands up in the air in disgust and give up.

• I then make a checklist of everything I want to accomplish in my next pass, breaking my notes down into big picture, developmental stuff (like “tie MC’s emotional arc more strongly with mystery” or “make answer to mystery less obvious”) and then character and relation specific goals (like “refine romance subplot” or “sibling dynamic”).

• Then I dive in, moving from note to note rather than chronologically through the story. I’d rather deal with a thematic or character arc as a whole rather than get bogged down too early. Everything’s still a mess at this point, but you can only polish once the main pieces of the story are in place.

• As I revise and make my way through my notes document, I’ll inevitably think of something I want to go back and fix. I resist as strongly as I can and jot it down for my next revision checklist.

• As the above suggests, once I’m done with my pass and check all my little boxes, I go back to step one and do it all over again.

Then, once I don’t cringe when I read my book, I send it off to beta readers. I’ll often have a list of specific questions I want their insight on, but I typically don’t share it with them until after their read (as I wouldn’t want it to influence their initial digestion of the story).

In Conclusion…

…Writing is hard. Interiority makes me cry. You can break and re-break a story, but every single time your characters will just go off and do their own thing anyway.

But, okay. Wow. This post is way longer than I intended, with a little detour into identity and hopefully enough craft to satisfy you without glazing your eyes over.

Please know that I absolutely am procrastinating on actually revising my draft by writing to you instead. So thank you ❤️

It was nice to spend a little time at the top of the month together. I will soon be back in the PNW, fighting jet lag and trying to see as many friends as I can before I pop up to Canada at the end of the month. I’ll be visiting British Columbia for the first time and am so excited (if you live there or know the area, pls send me all the recs!). I’ll share more about the cute little town we’re visiting next time we come together, when I’ll be still chipping away at SleepwalkingWIP revisions and be gearing up to start edits on my debut with my publisher… DUN DUN DUUUUN

All the best, my lovelies! Have a marvelous March xx

Julie