Dear Friends,

I’ve been deep in the trenches lately of life. Sorry for the radio silence! I was at AWP in Baltimore last month, and it was heartening to see everyone.

I’m excited to announce that I am now represented by Nicole Cunningham of Trellis Literary Management! Nicole’s vision for [upmarket speculative novel about messy women making questionable life decisions] has breathed new life into my manuscript. I’m stoked to see where our collaboration will go.

Not too get too woo-woo on main, but I feel like novels are living things when you’re working on them. I love short fiction, but novels are alive in my head in a way short stories can’t be because of wordcount limitations. It’s very easy to choke a short story to death by overworking it. Novels are sturdier, and the more you work on them, the more alive they get.

I’ve spent a lot of time and effort writing short stories. I actually think I’m a bit more optimistic (and probably more commercial as a result) as a novel writer than a short story writer. I want to believe people are capable of positive change. If I’m going to spend several years working on a single story, I want to see my Messy Narrator(s) become hopefully slightly less messy. I think my longform fiction is more optimistic than I often am in real life. My day job involves a decent amount of number crunching to test whether results look wrong or broken. It suits me because I tend to expect the worst. When I write novels, that’s where I can imagine better alternatives.

What I’ve been reading

• Uketsu: LOL I’ve been enjoying the unhingedness of Uketsu’s mystery novels. I am now scared of floor plans after Strange Buildings and Strange Houses. Strange Pictures offers the most satisfying narrative IMO, but I thought Strange Buildings was the scariest of the three. Looking forward to reading Strange Maps when it comes out Stateside.

• Babylon, South Dakota by Tom Lin (out May 2026): I loved Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu and was excited to dig into my ARC of this novel. The setting work was beautiful again and our farming family’s fate sad. Midway through this 600 page novel it turned from Asian American farming family epic into the plot Zero Time Dilemma, a low-budget visual novel with awful graphics I played like 10 years ago, which was unexpected. I think it could have been 100 pages shorter but the ending still got me emotionally.

• The Tuxedo Society by Paul Rudnick (Out May 26, 2026): Thanks to Atria for sending me an ARC of this book! It was so funny. (The marketing tagline for The Tuxedo Soceity is “They are fierce patriots. They are licensed to kill. And they are really, really gay. Welcome to democracy’s secret weapon, the Tuxedo Society.”) The gist is underemployed 20-something gay actor in NYC gets recruited into a secret cadre of gay superspies and goes on superspy adventures. The part about infiltrating the Olympic games had me laughing so hard.

Other Updates

• Our current intern at Split Lip Magazine, Ethan Lam, interviewed me about the Gothic and writing short fiction here.

• My weird hybrid prose poetry piece “At the Dentist’s in Arlington Heights” was chosen for Best Microfiction 2026!

• I wrote about fox spirits and a few books that inspired me while novel-writing in khoreo! Read it here.

• I reviewed Kim Fu’s new novel, The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts in Strange Horizons.

• I was a guest on the Flash Frontier Roundtable podcast’s March episode and talked a bit about writing endings for flash fiction. Man, I miss writing flash—it’s been a couple years since I wrote a lot of it because of novel writing, and I can’t wait to get the mental bandwidth back for some short fiction again soon.

Wow, I guess I have been doing a lot in the last few months, now that I see it all listed out here haha. That’s all folks! I’ll be back with something more substantial next time.

Tina