I’ve managed to snatch enough energy today to do a smidgen of publishing work (after spending all morning in bed, ha), and I am very excited to have gotten Life Had Other Plans fully uploaded to the printer, which means I can order a physical proof copy in about a week, yay!
For expediency’s sake, I’m trying to get the next collection ready to go at the same time, so I can have both proofs shipped at once and save a little on shipping. This next collection is a rereleased of my old work, Cherry Blossom And Other Stories, fully edited and with a beautiful new cover and introduction. I’ve literally just finished writing the introduction now, explaining why this book is coming back into print, and I thought I might as well share it with you 🙂 Enjoy!
INTRODUCTION TO CHERRY BLOSSOM AND OTHER STORIES
The interaction between ourselves and our art is a fascinating one on many levels, but something that’s particularly fascinated me more and more the longer I spend in creative spaces is the way that we experience our own voice.
…No, there’s no need to be so highbrow about this. Let me put it plainly:
For a long while, this book was out of print because I thought it sucked.
Not the individual stories and poems per se, but the whole, the collection. It felt random and incoherent as a collection, with too disparate genres and forms for it to be successful. But that was because I was a beginner who couldn’t see my own voice, couldn’t see that what I took for imperfections were simply deviations from the norm—which is often all imperfections are—and that it was these very deviations that made the book mine.
Rereading it years later, I was struck by the similarity in all these works: not in their genre or form, but in their tone, their thematic approaches, their essence. This collection is as accurate a snapshot as it’s possible to have of me at that time in my life; it reflects the ideas I found important enough to write about, the experiences that were bubbling away in my subconscious, the things I cared about—and yes, even the vocabulary I preferred and how I expressed myself.
Brandon Sanderson once said that every book you write, every piece of art you create, is perfect, because it’s a perfect expression of who you are at the moment.
And so it’s with appreciation for the me who existed in the very early twenty-teens that I have brought this book back to the world. That younger, anxious, more brittle self—along with all the thousand variations that have existed before and since—made me who I am today, and I can’t but love her for that.
And so, I hope you enjoy this moody, emotional collection of works about human relationships and how we find who we are in the context of them, full of shadows and subconscious motivations gradually breaking free to something dawningly innocent, something wholesome in its desire to be nothing more or less than ourself, whole.
I have so much compassion for the me who wrote this book; I hope you find something in her to love as well.
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