It's a Jumble

All her life, Lee Lien has heard the story: her grandfather once ran a café in Saigon, and one day an American journalist named Rose walked in. Rose was a surprisingly old woman, covering the Vietnam War at a time when few American women were in the country. She and Lee’s grandfather became friends, and Rose left behind a small gold pin. . .
Years later, Lee is an adult who was raised in the American Midwest and now has a Ph.D. in English Literature. She’s also jobless, so has returned to her mother’s house in the Chicago suburbs to work at the family’s Vietnamese café. Restless and wilting under family tensions, Lee one day remembers the gold pin left behind by the mysterious Rose. And Lee remembers that the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder was a journalist named Rose, who covered the Vietnam War in her old age. . .
This novel is part literary mystery, part family drama; it’s a look at the second-generation Asian-American immigrant experience through a fresh and surprising lens. I lov…

I’ve heard this analogy many times: that books are both windows and mirrors. But I didn’t know the originator of this analogy until now. 
“Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience.”
--Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, 1990. From Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Class room, 6(3), ix-xi.is.

Last week I sat down for my first podcast interview. And now it’s live! You can click here, in order to hear me on Hampus Jakobsson’s podcast, Full Worlds. 
Hampus and I discuss the science behind the “mind-uploading” scenario in my science fiction story, “Traces of Us” (first published in GigaNotoSaurus in 2018, and soon to be reprinted in Best Science Fiction of the Year-Volume 4, edited by Neil Clarke). I had a lot of fun discussing the science and ethical implications of this story! And as a bonus for listening--if you click on the link to the podcast, you’ll also see a link to a Gumroad discount for my fantasy novelette, The Lilies of Dawn(a very different type of story. And thanks to my publisher Annorlunda Books for providing the promotional discount!)
P.S. The sound of my own voice makes me cringe, so I haven’t been able to listen to this recording yet. But hopefully the rest of you won’t have that problem!

It’s a new story day for me! “The Message” is now out in the latest issue of The Future Fire. It’s a quiet story of First Contact, of communication (and missed communication) both between the stars and here on Earth. It’s also about anime and fan-fiction, and the accompanying illustrations by Pear Nuallak are perfect; I am in utter love.

This also happens to be my fourth appearance in The Future Fire! This lovely magazine has helped to launch the careers of now well-known writers and continues to be an encouraging place for new and emerging writers in the science fiction/fantasy scene. This looks to be a particularly strong issue; I’m acquainted with the work of a number of my fellow writers in this issue, and I look forward to getting to know the work of the others. And the illustrations are all wonderfully evocative. 

Update #1: I've read the entire issue of The Future Fire, and it is indeed a strong one. The editors have done an absolutely lovely job of curating stories and poems…

For a few years, now, I’ve been writing up these short story round-ups on a bi-monthly basis. But of late, there’s been so much good stuff coming out that summarizing two months’ worth of great fiction at a time is overwhelming. So, I’ve decided to try a monthly format. . . and, of course, I still found myself behind.
But better late than never. Here’s a list of things I read in January—stories dark and brutal, and stories beautiful and hopeful and full of light. Sometimes all of those at once. 
“Red” by Malinda Lo at Foreshadow Magazine
A retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood” as you’ve never seen it before. Set in China during the Cultural Revolution, this is an incredibly dark, brutal tale in which real-world violence stands in for the fairy-tale wolf. Yet at the end, despite horror, there’s a kind of triumph as well.
“Burrowing Machines” by Sara Saab at The Dark
There was a strange agitation to London that summer from the very beginning, a hormonal moodiness, a belly heat, if cities co…