Entry 1: Identity Drag & A Star War
Identity Drag
As a queer, mixed-race child of divorce, I'm sure it's self-evident that I'm an extremely confident and put-together individual who has never once questioned their place in the world. Sure, these days I carry myself with a certain measure of, "I did it on purpose, and I'm not sorry," but I remember the ambient anxiety that intermittently haunted me all through childhood.
It certainly hampered by ability to engage with certain things in my writing. Being yonsei, four generations removed from Japan, and being white as well... Japanese culture and language felt off-limits. I was afraid. Of being weeby. Of getting it wrong. Of putting on some kind of drag performance of my own identity.
I suspect this sense of estrangement is familiar to a number of marginalized creators. The difficulties we face in articulating ourselves are joined at the hip to the fact of our marginalization. How the hell are you supposed to explain the simple fact of your existence--let alone to justify it? That's hard enough when you're a cishet white dude with an existential crisis, let alone when the society within which you live subjects your non-cishet white dude facets to excruciating examination. And you are also having an existential crisis. (It's 2021; whomst among us is not having one of those, and if it's you, I would like what you're having.)
So. A Star War, huh?
To wit, it was at once a relief and a terror to be asked to write for Star Wars: Visions. A whole Star Wars book through the lens of Japanese culture? ...Was I qualified?
Well, yes.
Thankfully, I'd come to that conclusion a number of years prior. Some time in 2016, I was lucky enough to stumble across an autobiographical comic by Jem Yoshioka: "Folding Kimono"
It's a short piece, and I encourage you to take five minutes to read it--or more, to really let it sink in, and to admire her colors and the delicate patterns of her lines. But I treasure the work for more than its artistic merit. This was the piece that gave me language and understanding to forge a little peace with myself. An agreement that I existed, and that my existence was the end of the argument.
Here I am.
I am indeed yonsei, I am mixed-race, and I am a product of the Japanese-American dedicated disengagement from the culture of their heritage due to the traumas of internment and war. I am queer as well, both in my experience of gender and my gender-related desires. I am ill too, and scarred, in my body and in my brain. But these facets don't exclude me from my Japanese-ness, nor do they cut me off from some specific purity of self--they are the facets that define my specific state of being alive.
Now here we are.
I wrote a Japanese Star Wars book, but it is, specifically, my Japanese Star Wars book. That is also a product of one of the first things Tom Hoeler, my editor, said to me. It was the end of our first big meeting about the book that would become Ronin, and he delivered words that were acutely impactful, given all these fears: "Don't write someone else's Star Wars book," he said. "Write your Star Wars book. The one only you could write."
I think I've done that. Ronin is inextricable from my experience as a child of diaspora, and the Star Wars book of an author of Japanese descent with closer ties to the Japan of today would be exquisitely, marvelously different. Very frankly, I want that book to exist too. My dearest wish for Star Wars: Visions is that it leads to a cavalcade of iterations on the root mythology. I would devour them all with a delirious joy.
Author News
I had a meeting with editor Carl today about The Archive Undying revision status and deadlines. It had to go on hold at the beginning of this year so that I could write Ronin and he could parent an actual human child. I hear she is mighty, and she is indeed mightily cute. We've settled on a date for me to turn in the next draft, so for the next three months my nose will be to the grindstone getting that out the door. Thankfully, I've got a couple different copses of writerly friends who will also be wailing as they sprint toward deadlines and/or feeding each other actual food as well as support in order to get there.
Ah. Also, Ronin comes out next week. WILD? I'm looking into what rules I'd have to follow to do a personalized/signed giveaway. There are some cheeky contests I'd like to run. If I manage to put one together, you can expect another update when I do.
What Else I'm Up To
Been slowly, slowly picking through Tales of Arise with the wife, when I'm not swamped under writing stuff + day job and she's not swamped under her thesis + switching day jobs. It is an exemplary entry in the Tales series, if you're into that sort of thing. As JRPGs go, the Tales series is extremely anime, which will make sense to some of you, but to those to whom it doesn't: melodrama. My god, the melodrama. And tropes! So many tropes! But Tales of Arise has been doing a grand job of both delivering tropes AND complicating them. Like the party member who looks like an absolute shounen punch-'em-beat-'em-up-do-your-best archetype IS that, mostly, but he's also depressed, and because he's depressed, he's a cop. (We're fixing that.) He's also pretty mortified by the possibility that anyone would ever find out that he has thoughts about things. I'm very fond.
It's also release day for The Death of Jane Lawrence by agent sibling Caitlin Starling. I...adore this book. I've read a number of drafts over the years, and its final form is so deliciously saturated with foreboding and hope and the sense of a ticking, ticking, ticking clock.
I'm listening to Friends at the Table: Sangfielle, because I typically like to let myself get a little behind and then binge my way through a bunch of their episodes all at once. Their Sangfielle season is folklore meets weird west Americana meets Castlevania, and I love it. They're so, so good at making me cackle or gasp in the midst of whatever I'm doing while listening, and this season is no exceptoin.