In my defence, most of my actual blogging happens on some very verbose posts on Instagram - this includes book reviews, event promotions, and cooking notes.

It’s been a habit for some of the local writers to post an annual roundup of their submissions - basically to show others the ratio of accepted : rejected and demystify the whole process. This year (even if you don’t count the big chunk done in December) I sent more work out than I did in 2019 and 2020 combined, and just by law of probabilities, received a number of acceptances. As always, I am honoured each and every time someone has read my work, and taken the time to consider it. (I received some very nice rejections!)

I finally managed to put together a manuscript, though it is of course, still a work-in-progress. The bones of it have been laid though, and I’ve sent it around to publishers, and we’ll see if anything happens after. I am at the same time, heavily contemplating independently publishing it while doing a simultaneous second print run of my first book. At the same time (as I bemoaned on Twitter) - the work of that is enormous, and I am reluctant to do it until I have a bigger space to store my copies, along with packing and postage-related items needed to handle shipping myself.

Things that I am still astonished got published include a silly short thing on fanfiction tropes in Jellyfish Review, a literal Sekiro fanfiction poem in Cartridge Lit, as well as an early draft of a poem on army ghost stories in Strange Horizons (that poem has since been edited and is, I think, much much better and I can’t wait to share that when I can get a publisher for it). I’ll probably be anxiously waiting to hear back regarding the last nine submissions for the next few months, but really, it’s been a good year on the publications front.

In other writing news, I managed to eke out 13 (13!!!) fanfics of varying length and quality between January to March alone, and then just stopped writing prose after that. I’ve gone back to working on a new project, which I started in November, but it’ll be a very long time before I get through that and put it up somewhere. (My guess is that it’ll eventually hit 80k words?) I’ve been neglecting it after the productivity spurt in the first couple of weeks, but at least that writing muscle is being flexed there.

And I read some 26 books (finishing two more on 1 Jan 2022, and with another four half-read somewhere). A bunch of them were rereads, but I did manage to make a good dent on the stack of ‘Not-So-Freshly Bought and Still Untouched’ pile. I’m starting to realise that I’m moving away from general fiction and sticking to fantasy - so I guess nothing has really changed.

Books I really enjoyed reading for the first time include:

• Black Water Sister by Zen Cho

• Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky (I loved it enough that I bought a copy for my own)

• Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

• Monstress Vol 6 by Majorie Liu

Rereads that I loved enough to come back to include:

• In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

• Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniwan

• Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (and I am so excited for her new novel Persophone)

• The Dream Hunters by Neil Gaiman

Video games I’ve enjoyed include Disco Elysium, in which you play an amnesiac police officer trying to solve what looks like a lynching. The voice acting and art is fantastic, there is no shooting or action until the very end but you can run around and have amazing dialogue options to pick from. It took me a while to get into the roleplaying mindset of a trashheap of a man (early on I kept screaming “WHY WHY ARE THESE MY OPTIONS I DON’T WANT TO SAY THESE THINGS”) but it’s very fun and I started a third playthrough because there are so many different ways you can play the game. It’s also 55% off on Steam until 5 January.

The other game was Horizon Zero Dawn. To be honest, the sidequests are mostly very lame subquests, but the main storyline is so good and is, as I keep telling people, proof that just using known-tropes is not automatically a bad thing, this game was full of them, but was told so well and with so much heart (and horror) that I almost cried at that last cutscene. Oh and the combat is very, very fun. The game is also currently 50% off on Steam, and I have put myself on a waiting list for a PS5 for the sequel (I was told the list is a year long and balked but I shall just wait for it).

I’ve just placed an order for Lindsay Ellis’ books ‘Axiom’s End’ and ‘Truth of the Divine’ next and I shall attempt to tackle some of Ted Huges’ writing while I wait for it. I recognise this is a statement of enormous privilege but - what a wonderful thing to be alive and to be able to look forward to reading so many books.

SWF 2020 starts tomorrow and I haven't even figured out which programmes I'm going to be attending but by the grace of other authors who think kindly of my work I will be featured briefly in a couple of things:

1. Two of my poems will be read by the incredible spoken word poet Deborah Emmanuel on Love Radio, one of the programmes on the festival's radio station. This will happen tomorrow night, 30 October, between 9.30-9.50pm (Festival Pass only event).

Details on the festival radio here

2. I read one of my own poems and am interviewed by Marc Nair for Poetry Bites #6. The video was pre-recorded a month ago with all the appropriate social distancing measures in place, and is available after 4 November 9pm.

Details here

I also need to share this wonderful interview with Sharon Olds, by the incomparable Straits Times Arts Correspondent, Oliva Ho. I’ve been struggling a lot lately (and have also written a thing on this - but more on that next week) with the idea of intimacy within poetry - how much power then do you allow the audience to interpret from your writing, how people think they know you just from your poetry - and Olds’ speaks so eloquently on this subject.

Unlike many writers, Olds does not mind if people read her poems as autobiography. "It makes sense," she says, adding that she does not feel exposed by what she shares in her work.

But she stresses: "If the story of a poem is personal, or apparently personal - I think that isn't what's most interesting about a poem. I think that personal or not personal doesn't have to do with whether a poem works or not.

"Some poems might feel 'too personal' to some readers, others 'not personal enough' to others. For me, these are not the most important terms in which to talk about poems."

What matters to her, she says, are the myriad factors that go into making a poem come alive for the reader: passion and credibility; music, harmony and dissonance; relevance and originality.

From the time a poem is written - usually by hand with ball-point pen in a lined grocery-store notebook - to its successful fruition, she feels that it has gone over into the world of art.

"I am happy if someone likes it. But it's not exactly connected to me, as a diary entry might be. If it works as a poem, it has changed its life-form."

SingPoWriMo 2020 - I finished 30/30 poems for the first time ever. The list is up here along with self-inserted comments on whether or not I should revisit the poem.

I’m also incredibly honoured to have been contacted back in April by Justin Lacour, the editor for Trampoline Magazine, to submit some poems. I read through Issue 1 and was really floored by the poems there and of course happily submitted some of my own. A couple of them were admitted to Issue 2 (Look for 2.3). They’re currently on the front page of the site but will be moved when the next set of poems are featured.

My book was also featured recently on the Sing Lit Station’s #StayHomeStayLit2020 campaign. SLS is doing this wonderful feature linking up photographers and artists with a local literature book that they enjoy. I was fortunate enough that the very talented photographer Li Wanjie (@uuanjie) took interest in my book and created this beautiful image inspired by it. I had come across some of his photos years ago and was really taken by the surreal fey quality in them, and am really glad that we’ve gotten to meet this way.

I am trying still to write regularly. There is so much going on now, and even though I am barely leaving the house stillness feels impossible. How does one begin to make sense of everything happening now, let alone attempt to write something profound about it?

I’ve gotten something like three messages in the last two days to say that I've made it in life because my picture has been spotted in an IG ad but for some reason no one thought to save the link to pass to me! After a lot of scrolling on the Public Libraries Singapore Facebook page, I finally found said interview article about being the editor for the Singapore Poetry Writing Magazine, which I had completely forgotten I had done.

Interview here

As always, it is April, which is National Poetry Writing Month, and I’ve put aside my writing project (cough a novel-length Pokemon fanfic) to attempt to churn out a poem a day. I’ve also gotten 15/17 so far - so not too bad a backlog so far. It’s also really interesting to track how I’ve gone from writing a lot of breakup poems, and now I’m just writing a lot of horror and of course, COVID-19 related poems. I’ll put up a list of all my previous

SingPoWriMo Facebook

SingPoWriMo Instagram

On another note prose poem of mine has also been published in Of Zoo’s rolling issue, ‘T O G E T H E R A P A R T’. There’s an open call for poetry during this strange/bizarre/frightening period. I ended up writing something about being haunted. It’s my first publication for a while, because I really didn’t write or submit much last year, but given the weekly updates on Archive of Our Own, small poems I did not hate before SingPoWriMo started this year, 2020 will hopefully be a much more productive year.

You can read ‘Why Are You Haunted?’ here.

I have far too many things to do in the next few days and am still recovering from a really nasty cough picked up from the UK and a vicious combination of jetlag, night shift cycles and cough medicine means that I ended up falling asleep at 9pm last night and woke up at 4am this morning and I don’t know what is wrong with my body. But Singapore Writers Festival is coming and I am extremely excited.

SINGAPORE WRITERS FESTIVAL 2019 EVENTS I WILL BE A PART OF

Surreal World, Stranger Tales
3 November 8.30pm, The Arts House Blue Room

Panellist alongside other far more distinguished writers Indra Mas and Jon Gresham on urban legends and Asian folklore, moderated by Daryl Qilin Yam (who has already sent an email of fantastic questions) and you should really come by.

Spoke & Bird #27 Feat. Natalie Wang and Joses Ho
5 November 7.30pm, The Arts House Play Den

Will be one of the featured writers for Spoke & Bird - Poetry Open Mic with Joses Ho, as organised by Steph Chan. This is a free event and there is an open mic so come by.

SWF Conversations: The Spaces Between
10 November 1.30pm, The Arts House Living Room

This is a panel with Jennifer Anne Champion, Stephnie Dogfoot, and Zakir Hossain Khokan on the very many cool events that they organise and I'm very excited to hear what they have to say and you should be too.

There are also many many amazing events that I am going to be an eager audience member in - I cannot wait to get my copy of Pachinko signed by Min Jin Lee.

On an unrelated note, I’ve just finished reading Phillip Pullman’s latest novel The Secret Commonwealth, and am really impatient for the next book. You can read my minireview on Instagram here. And then, instead of reading the many many books I have accumulated from the last Book Depository order in August, my trips to Melbourne and London (I say accumulated like they somehow hopped onto my shelves all on their own and have nothing to do with me), I have instead chosen to reread Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver. Given that this is one of my favourite books read in 2018 though, I cannot bring myself to regret this decision.

I really wish Instagram and Facebook posts could be directly linked to Squarespace, then I can stop saying I will be more consistent with my posting because I post plenty on both, even did a big pow-wow literary event-related update thing in June for but didn’t post it here for some reason unknown even to myself. So very quickly here are things that have been happening

1. "Singapore’s Emerging Poetic Voices”
Poetry Writing Festival
21 July 1500 at Arts House
Panellist with Max Pasakorn, Marylyn Tan Andrea Yew, and moderated by Crispin Rodrigues
It is $5 but come see me talk with other people far more prolific and productive than I am and hopefully we will speak about writing that has *nothing* to do with 'what is it like being a millennial writer' because my god if I have to deal with a question about Rupi Kaur one more time I will throw something, preferably across the room, preferably the person asking the question.

2. "When I was Twenty"
Read! Festival 2019
27 July 15.30 at National Library
Panellist with Deborah Emmanual, Grace Chia, Leong Liew Geok and moderated by Joshua Ip
Come see us talk about poetry and writing and I will laugh awkwardly as the only person in my twenties and I have only been writing emails and naggy work WhatsApp messages.

3. SingPoWriMo: The Magazine
Because book sales for previous SingPoWriMo anthologies have not been doing well, there was a big discussion earlier this year on the future of the anthology. I always say my vote is to basically scrap publishing it altogether - but the end decision was to make it an online magazine with three issues. Fingers crossed that it goes well.

4. Melbourne RMIT Intercultural Studio I was basically in Melbourne for 19 days - the first three days for a holiday, and the rest was basically spent doing an intensive (ie. four hour class thing) at RMIT. I’ve written a lot about this entire experience on my Instagram but basically I learnt a lot, met a lot of people, and have realised I still have so much to do and grow.

Also finally got a photo of myself doing a reading looking fairly badass.

5. I’m in London in October, and just learnt that the London Literary Festival is happening from 17-27 October. I won’t be around for most of it but fingers crossed that I’ll have time to catch a couple of events.

6. And of course Singapore Writers Festival is coming up and I am lucky enough to be invited again as a featured writer - like last year I will be moderating one panel, speaking at another, and reading at one event.

“Written in both prose and verse, Wang’s poems are surprising and contain moments of curiously grotesque epiphany and charm. In “After Sodom,” Wang reinterprets the story of Lot fleeing Sodom: “I sprinkled some of mother / into our soup, wondering what she would think / of me, of us.” Here, as in many other poems in the book, a spellbinding and ritualistic capacity for understanding is as distinct within the text as imaginable beyond.”

I received a very kind review from Greg Bem from Rain Taxi. Have a look and check out fellow Math Paper Press writers as well!

I keep telling myself that I will actually make use of my existing blog since I do pay Squarepsace money for this space and I actually should be making use of it. At one point I was even considering doing a cooking series - on my Instagram I frequently post photos of my meal preps and then make notes on how to improve it the next time I cook it and figured it would not hurt to do more elaborate details about each recipe - and then never got round to doing it. Tbh I don’t even have much about my life to update because nothing very much has happened. 

Stock image of blank pages because THIS IS MY LIFE

So LITERARY TYPE UPDATES: 

Conducted my first writing workshop! 

In March, I conducted a workshop for the Singapore Young Writer’s Lab for Singapore Book Council called ‘Reinterpreting Asian Mythology’. Most of my teaching experience comes from being a debate coach, so I warned the kids before the class started that I was probably going to sound like a drill instructor (I probably did). Reviews from the kids after the class was really good though, and made me think a lot about mythology in Singapore and how our ghost stores - those that take place in the army, girls schools, HDB void decks - have a place in that. 

I took part in SingPoWriMo 2019

I’ve been doing Singapore Poetry Writing Month since I accidentally stumbled on the Facebook group in 2014, where the challenge is to write one poem a day. Shockingly, last year (and also the year I started corporate life) was my best performance where I wrote 26/30 poems. I was hoping to repeat that success this year, but only ended up with 15/30. Still, it was a good month and I experimented a little with rhyme and form, which I never thought I would because I usually just free verse everything. Was also trying to go for a more obsessive kind of persona voice for a couple of poems and mostly succeeded. You can find the round up post for all my poems here and I even managed to write the poem about ghost stories in Singapore I was previously talking about - this one focusing on school stories. 

I finally finished a prose piece

I never thought that I would end up writing poetry - I’m pretty sure I was convinced that poetry was death when I was studying for my O levels. Thank goodness I had a lovely lit department in Junior College to beat that notion out of me, and then the lack of time meant I stopped writing short stories and fan fiction and wrote a lot of poetry (because shorter) but it also means that I have hardly ever gone back to short story writing since. I’ve had one short story published in LONTAR #10, I did this bizarre play on the Chinese tradition of scholars falling in love with animal spirits last year that has yet to be accepted in any journal and probably needs a lot more editing, but beyond that I have hardly touched prose.

Then I read this Twitter thread (please read it if you like the new Star Wars trilogy, and especially if you are a Reylo shipper) and somehow ended up writing this. It is by no means perfect and I really am unpracticed with dealing with the second halves of stories and ending things properly - probably because I have very rarely gotten to the ending of a story in years - so I have to work on pacing still. But yes it is at least done and I hope will at least kick me to continue writing some kind of prose on a regular basis, even if it is fic. 

I also forgot how sweet the fanfiction community can be - like yes leave all the kudos and sweet comments yesssss. 

Upcoming things in May

BooksActually will be holding Math Paper Press Day at the bookstore on 25 May. Event page and programme details aren’t out yet but keep your eyes peeled on this!

I’ll also be a featured writer and doing some readings at a book launch on 28 May for Topaz Winters’ book ‘Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing’. (Event page here) I’ve already read a PDF version of it but I’m so excited to get my hands on a physical copy of the book and really sink into the poems!

 In my next post I really want to talk (read: rave incoherently) about the games I have been playing (basically Hollow Knight and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice) and superb storytelling and visuals and music and can all my friends who game please play these two things so we can talk about them? Please? 

Event page here

Happy International Woman’s Day everyone! I have spent most of it hibernating.

I have also been terribly remiss about plugging this (apart from an Instagram post a few weeks back) but arts producer FD basically read my book, liked it enough to ping me on my old site, met me up for tea and then told me she wanted to do a dance production based on my writing. For International Woman’s Day. Of course I gave all my blessings and you can catch the show this weekend! Tickets can be bought here and they’re also stocking my book at $10 (basically cost price).

You can also read up more on the process behind the performance in this Straits Times article. I’ll be catching the closing performance on Sunday and am so excited to see this in the flesh!

Source

Mychael Zulauf from Akinoga Press was kind enough to have a chat with me the other day; you can listen to our podcast here. I would like to think I’m intelligent and articulate on a normal basis but I mixed up Durkheim’s anomie with Marx’s alienation theory but in my defence I was really hungry.

“She said that was the only way for us to live, to be like the poets. That’s what she said. If all you ever see is reality, you just want to die. The only way to get over barriers, she said, is to live in the spirit of already being over them.”

— Durian Sukegawa, Sweet Bean Paste

I just finished Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa, and I will admit, this kind of soft soft slice-of-life stories are not my usual fare, but they definitely deserve a place in any diet (When it comes to Japanese writing I am more a Yoko Ogawa / Junji Ito kind of a person.) If you liked Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, you’ll probably enjoy this one a lot; it gives me that same warm fuzzy feelings. It is a simple story that follows the unlikely couple formula; washed out man working at a dorayaki store meets an extraordinary woman with extraordinary circumstances and gives him a new perspective in life and gently encouraging him. His problems aren’t all magically solved in the end but there is some hope for his future. And at the same time, the story sheds light on social issues in Japan - the way lepers (yes literal leprosy not a metaphor) were treated and continue to be treated today. 

And then a friend of mine introduced me to the mobile game Hungry Hearts Diner (Available on the Apple store and Google Play store). I highly recommend this! The game takes place in a post WWII Japan, where an old lady is trying to keep her husband’s diner going after he’s had an accident. You interact with customers, which unlocks conversations and you find out more about them as well as the old lady, and you have to be heartless to not be moved by the storylines.

I also adore reading the descriptions of the different dishes she cooks. The Braised Pork description is sassy “Some heathens leave behind the fatty bits” while Edamame is educational '“Selectively bred to accompany beer… or so you would think. Did you know they’re actually baby soybeans?” The game has also given me an intense desire to try to cooking Nikujaga, and also maybe giving Japanese potato salad (which is superior to the Western variety I maintain) a go.

i have slowly been consuming
the last traces of my mother

i hold the gurgling maw
of the vacuum as it swallows

tawny strands of hair &
dust on hardwood floor

today i read that household
dust is mostly skin

as if to say outside dust
is stranger or more spectacular

as if to say i am watching
this monster tear into

my mother again & again
& calling it “being productive”

my teeth wearing themselves
down on leftovers: rice & soup & barley

picturing my mother stooped
over the stove bloodletting

when she was here
i couldn’t wait for her to go

now i sit alone in the freezer
& eat everything

without breathing
oh i eat it all

- Ang Shuang, Asian American Writer’s Workshop

Source: https://goo.gl/PWywMn

When at work on Friday, it was starting to physically hurt to look at the screen because my eyes were so dry. And given that my job involves sitting in front of a screen for 11+ hours without rest, and that ALL MY WORK these days is on Google Drive and Evernote and not to mention Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp/Telegram and my Switch, it is really really difficult to get away from screens. Like really hard. And even if I did get away from the screens, most of what I do involves excessive use of my eyes. Like reading. And there was some sewing I needed to get round to doing. And I have a short story I am only 10% through which I need to finish and edit in a few days for a submission deadline. Using Evernote at his point isn’t going to work so I walked into Popular and bought a couple of notebooks for the first time in years.

I was surprised and a little moved to see that they still had the same notebooks I used to buy obsessively in secondary school. I used a lot of paper back then - for diaries, letters to classmates, fanfiction - and it was so satisfying to see them pile high, their paper worn and punctured by ink. Now the callous on my finger where my pen sits on is almost gone.

So I will use these notebooks for the next few weeks while my eyes recover and work on minimising time spent on my phone. (I can still remember being so proud of buying my first smart phone; I wasn’t nineteen yet, my ex-boyfriend had offered to buy me one while we were dating and help pay for a data plan so we could stay in touch while he was overseas but I refused and then we broke up and six months after I drew a thousand dollars and walked into a Singtel shop and paid for it in cash and it was my first real #adult moment). Things I will hopefully get round to writing in the next few days:

1. Rapunzel-inspired short story

2. A blogpost on chick lit and the “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” series

3. More poetry - mine and others that I have read

So I somehow managed to miss that LocalBooks.sg tagged me three days ago with glowing praise I am stunned by but I am more stunned that I also somehow missed the fact that I was featured on Her World Singapore (article here) and only found out with this tag. I am also featured next to amazing female writers Clarissa Goenawan, Pooja Nansi, and Sharlene Teo and am so honoured.

You can get my book from BooksActually. Also, BooksActually will be having a 40% discount on all Math Paper Press (including my book) from 1-3 Feb. Just key in MPP40 at the checkout. Local shipping is free, and international shipping is a flat rate so you can go wild.

All hail the Faerie Queen

No spoilers below I promise

Yes, I know I gushed plenty about Holly Black in my previous post , but this is my site and I can do what I want, and what I want now is to scream to the world on how much I enjoyed The Wicked King and everyone should start on The Folk of Air series now.

I have been going around squealing about the series since finishing and have been demanding that friends began reading the first book, The Cruel Prince, immediately so we can discuss fan theories and just talk about the overall awesomeness of the series. I foolishly ordered it off Book Depository because I saw that Kinokuniya hadn’t stocked it yet and in the website they stated that it wasn’t in stock and would take two weeks and was almost twice the cost of the Book Depository item. So I ordered it off Book Depository and found it in stock in Kino two days later and was kicking myself every day afterwards until I received my Book Depository order.

To make it more bearable, I started to read Holly Black’s older Modern Faerietale series. While you don’t need to have read everything she’s written to get started on The Folk of Air series, it’s a lovely easter egg for longtime fans to see her characters pop up; the some characters from Tithe are mentioned in her other book, The Darkest Part of the Forest , but it’s only in The Cruel Prince that all the characters actually interact and meet. Tortured angsty elf boy Roiben (from Tithe, Valiant, and Ironside) pops up again a lot in The Wicked King.

Yes, it deeply annoys me that the covers are not a matched set. I’m this close to shelling out money for another copy of Ironside just so that they will.

It’s after reading her older writing that I really appreciate how ambitious The Folk of the Air series is. Black introduces a much larger cast of characters than in her previous books and you get to know them more intimately in this book. There are multiple intrigues and plot twists with enough setup and foreshadowing so that nothing feels like it’s completely out from the left field. Jude is the first protagonist we see who actually dishes out murder consciously and it shakes her up each time. I’ve been seeing how reviewers are complaining that a lot of her problems would be solved with better communication, but it makes sense that she doesn’t; much of the book sets up the reasons for her paranoia and she’s right to have trust issues.

“Your ridiculous family might be surprised to find that not everything is solved by murder.”

— Holly Black

I also really appreciate that romance isn’t the main focus of the book. Also, with the Modern Faerietale, we already knew that the love interests were head over heels with each other and as readers could only shout at them from the sidelines for being so stupid. In The Folk of Air, I still don’t know what to think of Cardan (male supernatural love interest) and his intentions. It helps that we never get a chapter in his point of view (which we did with Roibin in Tithe), which I think is fantastic as we constantly feel on edge knowing that Jude is not the most reliable narrator given her paranoia but don’t have any other point-of-view to corroborate with her reliability/unreliability.

Also that ridiculous mic drop of a cliffhanger is driving me nuts and 2020 couldn’t come quickly enough.

The Folk of the Air series books #1 and #2

Beyond romance though, I think where Black really excels is in writing about dysfunctional families, and how difficult it is to not care or cut ourselves away from them, no matter how toxic they can be. We saw this a lot in The Curse Worker series, where the protagonist has a lying psychopathic brother who turns out to have been abusing him for years but they have to work together to save each other anyway. Jude is brought to Faerieland because her parents’ murderer takes her there, and basically brings her up like a daughter. It makes things complicated and my favourite scenes are the ones where the two of them interact; there is grudging respect and affection on both ends and Jude doesn’t know whether to count him as ally or not throughout.

If any of you get around to reading Holly Black please do let me know and we can talk! There’s a lot to unpack in this series and it was hard to write a spoiler-free post.

Image from BooksActually

I was interviewed and reviewed on by Dawn Teo on Popspoken, do check it out!

Dawn’s been doing a lovely series of reviews featuring Sing Lit writers like Cyril Wong, Rodrigo Pela Dena Jr, Melissa de Silva, Werner Kho, and Crispin Rodrigues, and I’m really proud to be included. All our books can be purchased at BooksActually. (psst they ship overseas and local shipping is free!)

I keep talking about how I haven’t been reading very much since buying my Nintendo Switch in November, so I figure I should take some time to talk about them. I’ve so far purchased eight games which is a bit ridiculous but the e-store makes it too easy to purchase games and there have been so many sales. I’m not very good at reviewing games (or books for that matter) but here are my thoughts. 

Title art by Ubisoft

This is a pretty decent turn-based battling system, though I suggest checking the Wiki page when it comes to weapons upgrades as that’s the least intuitive part of the game. The graphics and music are lovely and particularly effective at bringing out the melancholic nature of the quest and ruined surroundings. I finished it twice, and will probably replay it at some point. The biggest downside to it is the cheesy rhyming dialogue - there is actually a character who breaks the rhyme and is continuously corrected by all the other characters. On the second playthrough I didn’t find the dialogue as stilted though. Lots of fun, definitely worth getting if there’s a sale going on. 

Screenshot from Paste Magazine

Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu - Because of course. And while there are people who spent a long time debating over which version to get, I'm of the generation that played Pokemon Yellow so there wasn't really any other option for me. Lots of people were initially grumbling about how we really didn’t need a Kanto remake given that we already have Fire Red/Leaf Green, and the Ultra Sun and Moon remakes were deeply disappointing after the original. But I am so glad that I got this; the remake is done so well, and I am ridiculously excited that I can take my Pokemon out and have them trail after me. You can ride your Arcanine! Your Charizard actually flies you around! It is everything a child who grew up playing the first generation of Pokemon could have asked for!

Art by From Software, but the screenshot is from the Steam listing

Dark Souls (Remastered) - I guess I’m a Souls veteran? I didn’t play Demon Souls but I did play DS 1-3 and Bloodborne, but only finished one playthrough with each game and with long long breaks during the games. It is so magical now that I can play this on a tiny console.

I am so upset that there are so few people playing this! Co-oping was one of my favourite reasons to play the Souls series and now that there just aren't as many people playing on the online system; it was once really easy for me to get summoned/summon others to play with me but there just aren’t many players around. I got to the Depths and then got distracted by other things (namely other games) and was too busy sobbing at the difficulty level of the game to continue. Things are so much harder when you don’t have jolly cooperation with other players.

Edit: Typing this now in late January (this post has been sitting here for over a week) and I have killed the Gaping Dragon, Hydra, Moonlight Butterfly, and helped others with Queelag in the last three days and it feels so good to be back.

Screenshot from Game Skinny

Oxenfree - I was playing this obsessively last year on an iPad and then bought it on Steam. It's a lot more tedious without a touchscreen though, so really best played on an iPad or Switch. It features beautiful graphics (apparently the design team used to be part of Disney) and top-notch voice acting. There isn’t any action and much of what you do involves directing your avatar around the map and choosing from a variety of options, but the voice acting is so good you still feel very much involved in the game. I highly highly recommend everyone plays this, especially if you’re into puzzles and character-driven games. Bonus points to your experience if you understand morse. Oh and do play it without a guide the first time.

Screenshot from Polygon

Gris - A lot has been said about this new indie game. The trailer got me so excited, and was a big reason why I bought Child of Light because who doesn’t love soft watercolour backgrounds? The puzzles aren’t terribly difficult, but the entire immersive experience of the game was truly lovely as the smoothness of the animation matched the beauty of the graphics and sound. Make sure you play with headphones on!

I’ve also bought Hollow Knight and Night in the Woods, which I will start on after I finish a couple of books. 

I also finished reading this 55 chapter manga “Kiss Him, Not Me”, also known as Watashi ga Motete Dōsunda after seeing the video clip going viral on Youtube which is one of the most adorable things I have ever read. The manga so so self-aware of how fangirls behave and the problematic tropes in shoujo manga and portrays both really well. It is also so cute that all the love interests have numbers in their names so they are actually just love interest #4, #5, #6, #7 etc for easy reference and shipping. 

After that, YouTube threw some clips of "Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku", so I watched that as well. I’m not usually a fan of the slice of life genre, but I think I have grown into the genre after actually entering the working world and sympathising with the office worker protagonists. It was just nice to watch this while eating dinner after work. The show's basically about two couples at the same workplace who are huge otakus, though each are fans of different genres, and how they just have fun hanging with each other without (too much) judgement. 

Also, I was thinking the other day about how I made it a point to not talk about fanfiction or anime in front of other people because I’d be afraid of being judged, but I need to say that finding friends who actually support these same interests, as well as getting older and caring less about what people think of you is great and is an attitude I intend to continue to cultivate.

If you have read this post ‘til the end, please do recommend anything that brings you joy - movies, books, games, anime, fanfiction (I have gotten into fandoms just because my favourite author has and I wanted to read her work this is literally how I got into the new Star Wars Trilogy despite not being the biggest fan of the originals). I’ll be happy to give it a shot!

    - not a damn thing. So let me tell you what I know
about forgiveness - this joke can go on & on, see?
I guess I’m trying to understand what makes a man 
carry guilt the same way he would a bat. How my father
after being confronted about cheating
slapped my mother, came to my room, threw my sleeping body
over his shoulder, & drove off. Who wouldn’t 
beg for a story like this? A story to point & run toward
when asked to explain every decision you’ve ever made 
regarding love. A story to blame when your hands rush
toward the exit. Till this day every headlight is a lullaby.
Imagine: waking up, but this time it isn’t your father
in the driver’s seat, but a man who holds your head
to his lap until your breath is a song pulled from his skin
how just like your father, even when you begged
wouldn’t take you home, not until he was ready to be alone. 

-Hieu Minh Nguyen