A Reflection

I started writing Little Favors in secret. This was not the first time that I’d tried doing this, but it was exceedingly rare. For most of my life, validation had to come as I wrote. I fed my friends each chapter as they came out, eager, needing praise to filter in and coat my keyboard as I typed the next letters out. The concept felt as incredibly selfish as it sounds—did I really need validation at every single step? Was this the only way that I could write? But I couldn’t resist it—it was helping me write, helping me push myself, but it also felt good. Why should I stop? What was the downside?

The downside was that, if I gave the people around me every word that I created and needed praise every time, then I would need to create something better every time. What if they realized that I wasn’t that good after all? What if they received something that I put my whole heart into and didn’t reply or—worse—what if they told me to stop sending my writing, that they were tired of it and, by extension, tired of me?

At the time of this culmination, I was working on a project that had been so far five years in the making: a fantasy called Boy that followed a young trans man named Beau who found himself at the center of a war between the gods and their creations. It was ambitious—angels, demons, an elaborate world that I built from the bottom up. When I wrote the first draft, I posted each chapter in a little Facebook group full of my friends and basked in the comments they left under the updates. But then I wrote the second draft, dragged myself through it, printed it out and filled it with comments and sticky notes. The pressure was building. I didn’t know how to make it perfect. I wasn’t in the right place. Still, when I wrote my thesis in my senior year of college, I tried writing a third draft—this was it, I thought. I’ll finish it once and for all. But it still wasn’t done. It felt like it was weighing me down, dragging me—this burden that I’d promised those people in the Facebook group I was no longer in contact with, this burden that I’d sent my brother, to my mother, who sent me messages asking me when I would finish the next draft. This burden that I said would be the first book I ever published. This burden that I needed to be perfect.

Little Favors was not the first book I wrote in secret. It was the second. The first was His Evening Star. I planned it out on leftover notebook paper from engineering school. I wrote down all the tropes I loved, brainstormed character names. When the ideas ran out, I just started writing. I wrote. I wrote. In three months, I had a hundred and sixty thousand words that, upon revisiting, I liked quite a bit. It wasn’t done—I had only gotten halfway through the plot I’d written out—but it was…fun. It was relaxing. I’d written all of that, and I hadn’t told anybody about it. I was able to produce something good without a constant stream of feedback. Suddenly eager, I sent out what I’d written to a few people, and they loved it to. But I was stuck at that point. Again.

Trying to operate off the same process that had made His Evening Star so successful and easy to write, I started planning out Little Favors. I had a few concepts, but everything out I scribbled out with a stylus in OneNote—an incredibly messy timeline that looks like a tangled mess if you zoom too far out. Part of keeping Little Favors secret was because the secrecy of His Evening Star had helped, but also partly because Little Favors was the first time that I was writing such explicit material. His Evening Star had bits and pieces, but Little Favors was…I definitely was not ready to show the likes of this to my friends, let alone my mother.

Little Favors was finished in four months. There was an editing process after that, a formatting process, a cover art process, even a movie trailer process—I was excited at every step. I was thrilled. This book felt the closest to complete that I had ever been. Publishing felt less like a distant dream and more like a reality—something tangible. Something that could happen soon, not just some kind of vague “in the future.” I released ARCs, I posted covers, I built a website, I got reviews. Time passed. Overall good reviews, one or two less impressed. More time passed. I asked my friends to read it too. Some did. Some of them left reviews. I’d seen my friends publish before me, and they’d done so well—every part of it was so confident, successful. People loved their books. People talked about their books. What did I do wrong? How could I get people to read my book? How could I get people to even be interested?

More time passed. I abandoned my Twitter account, got hope again, came back for a couple weeks, then abandoned it again. I tried working on the new project I’d started, a xianxia with an enemies-to-lovers slow burn romance that would have made me celebrate if I’d found it on my own. It went well, for a while. But something was changing. It was a suffocating pressure again, but it was different than what I had felt last—it felt worse. The anxiety that I’d felt about disappointing my friends felt like nothing in comparison to this. Disappointing my friends? No, instead I was disappointing someone who had been with me a lot longer—baby Adik, opening a notebook for the first time, writing stories about dalmatians making friends with dragons and having adventures. I was disappointing—and betraying—that kid who’d had dreams of becoming an author who was, in any sense of the word, successful. I could feel that kid’s eyes on me, waiting. When are you going to figure it out? When is a person other than one of your friends going to be as excited about your books as you are? Why can’t you just

figure

it

out?

Writing became laborious. Writing to prove myself to my friends was a moot point. How could I prove myself to the world? How could I prove that I could write—that my writing was worth reading? What was the point of any of this? I missed when publishing was a dream, not my reality. I missed when my writing was just something between friends, or little stories in anthologies in tiny publishing houses that no one read. The computer was daunting. The keyboard was daunting. My notebooks were daunting. A year ago, ideas came to me in every waking moment—I kept a notebook in my backpack so I could always write down my ideas. Sentences and entire paragraphs would pop into my head even if I wasn’t thinking about writing. But, god—I had taken all that for granted, hadn’t I? Writing was so intrinsic to me that I thought I would always write this way, that I would never run out of ideas. But what am I doing now? Boy has been abandoned for years. His Evening Star I tried at again and then abandoned after two weeks of dragging my feet. My xianxia hasn’t even been opened since April. Little Favors was my pride and joy when I published, but now I was regretting having published it at all. In a moment of boredom, I drafted a new cover for Little Favors—maybe that was the problem?—and planned a re-release, but the brief excitement of that burst after only a week or two. So what, if I created a new cover? No one was going to read it anyway. What was the point?

I wrote all of this in the past tense, making it seem like I’ve somehow overcome this terrible combination of regret and self-pity and defeatism, but I haven’t. Everything about writing is still daunting. Everything about publishing is still daunting. Everything about putting myself out there and talking about my book is still daunting. I can’t convince myself that my writing is good enough to share. I can’t convince myself that I don’t become the most annoying person online if I talk about my book. I can’t convince myself to keep posting if I talk about my book and get no interactions afterward. There’s no lesson at the end of this story. No moral. The only real ending here is that…well, I’m going to try again. And maybe nothing will come of this, and maybe I’ll give up again a week later, but I think I have to keep trying. I have to keep trying until trying isn’t an option anymore. I have to keep trying for my friends, and I have to keep trying for that little kid who published one poem in the elementary school magazine and longed to publish more, and I have to keep trying for the audience that I know is out there, but we just haven’t found each other yet.

And if you don’t know anything about Little Favors, you can go read the synopsis, and you can go read the first chapter, so there’s no point in repeating those here. Instead, I want to give you a taste of what made me love this book—what made me love writing it, what makes me love reading it over and over again, and what makes me dream of others just like me finding just as much fun in reading it themselves:

Firstly, that there are three main characters who are all pieces of shit in their own way, but also all endearing in their own way.

Secondly, that the confession scene is completely unserious, and includes not just talk of “doing a lot worse in socks,” but also of pissing oneself (a conversation which is somehow…cute and romantic?).

Thirdly, that one of the main couple starts having sex with the other one while imagining…the other one’s brother.

Fourthly, that it’s a political thriller, a danmei, a dark romance, a commentary on abuse and generational trauma and breaking the cycle of abuse, and about found family.

Fifthly, that even though the main relationship is messy and weird and started in a questionable way, it’s the kind of romance that makes you long for something similar.

Thank you for reading.