My first newsletter!
My first newsletter, featuring The Phoenix Pencil Company origins, coding fun, and some pet pics.
Just a little newsletter if you'd like to keep up to date with my writing.
A quick intro
Hi, I'm Allison King! Since this is my ✨ first newsletter ✨, here's a quick bullet point introduction. I'm
a writer and software engineer
obsessed with my orange cat and derpy dog
And that's probably all the important facts :) Thanks so much for subscribing—this newsletter will probably follow a format of:
something about writing
something about coding
cat and dog pics
But we'll see and we'll iterate and we'll have a good time!
Words 'n stuff
I recently turned in my final edits for The Phoenix Pencil Company, my debut novel out 7/22/25. I’ve been working on this book since August of 2020, so that’s just shy of 5 years in the making.
Some of you may be here from having heard my short story “The Many Taste Grooves of the Chang Family” on LeVar Burton Reads. The Phoenix Pencil Company has a lot of the same themes of memory and family and technology. I think if you liked The Many Taste Grooves of the Chang Family, you’ll love The Phoenix Pencil Company.
I only know I started working on PPC in August 2020 because I found this very conveniently dated note I made during my brainstorming stage. It outlines my early thoughts on what PPC would be, and a lot of it actually stayed the same!
The paper is quite ruffled up from being lost in the bottom of my backpack for a few years, so here’s a transcript.
8/14/20
Hello
How goes it?
I'd like to get started on a new story that may potentially be on the longer (novel-esque) size. I have a seed idea, but I'm having a bit of trouble expanding it out into a plot.
Seeds
- Backdrop of 1940s Shanghai
- Dynamic of International Settlement against rest of Shanghai and how international status protected them for a while from Japan
- Waiting for Western help
- "Paris of the Orient" - an "alive" city
- A family owned pencil company
- Pencils are very finely crafted and desired by many
- A magic system involving pencil lead and the stories pencils remember
- Family can "ingest" pencils and output words they once wrote
- how output? --> bleeding
- Because of Nationalist raids to accuse sympathizers, written word destroyed (tension with pencil magic!)
- also during Cultural Revolution
- Nationalists bring their history to Taiwan but White Terror
- written word destroyed again
- Family has to figure out what to do with the power they have
What's the point?
I think there's something about remembering and honoring stories/people's voices which is in conflict with governments that don't want to be held accountable. Shanghai is also an interesting story that I think not a ton of people (including me) know much about, and also a place whose history has been distorted by various governments.
Okay, I think that's a reasonable theme, but I'm still not thinking of a really compelling plot yet. I think I need to fall in love with some characters.
Characters
Grandfather - once renowned reforger
Mother - very talented reforger (rewriter?)
Aunt - also very talented reforger
Brother (sister?) - regular only son, not trained in reforging
MC (female) - adopted daughter
Cousin (male) - budding reforger
- Power works better for women since their bodies are more used to releasing blood
- Family no longer reforges because of the pain + danger in political climate
- MC + her generation strive to bring it back after fleeing to Taiwan
- MC is given the power by one from the older generation
- Cousin probably dies or uses his power for evil at some point
A lot changed since this initial brainstorm, but the themes are pretty much the same. So if this seems up your alley, here’s a link to pre-order The Phoenix Pencil Company, out 7/22/25!
Code 'n stuff
I’m also a software engineer, and there’s a chance you’ve seen my code around. You likely immediately clicked away from it though, and I can’t blame you. I wrote a good chunk of the code that makes up The New York Times’ cookie notice banner.
I have some thoughts on data privacy, many of which make it into The Phoenix Pencil Company.
Outside of work, I've been working on my website. I built it from scratch which, now that I've done it, I can't really recommend. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and how much control I have over it, but boy was it a lot of work. For those curious, I used React, TypeScript, and NextJS + Vercel, all of which were a joy to use. But once you have to start thinking about how things look in mobile, in light vs dark mode, where to place a form to sign up for a newsletter... shudder.
In between writing and coding—I use git to version control my writing, which also lends itself to fun things like being able to graph my commit history! Here’s the commit history of The Phoenix Pencil Company, from August 2020 to August 2024. After August 2024, my edits moved to line level edits in Word documents or copy edits in PDFs, so those aren’t in the git history. And if you don’t know what commits or a commit history are, there’s actually a scene that explains it in The Phoenix Pencil Company ;)
Peach and Woody
Ah, the good part of the newsletter! Thanks for sticking through here, I thought I might have lost you during the data privacy part!
Meet Peach, an orange tabby, and Woody, a mutt (weimaraner mix). They are the best and very silly.
This picture pretty much summarizes how I feel about this year—nervous with a touch of silent screaming but still looking out the window, hoping for the best!
That’s it for this time! Thanks for reading!!