This blog is incredibly backlogged, and I was on a social media hiatus for the past 4 months, only to be dragged out of my grave by my dear friend Julia Vee who essentially went, “Get in loser, we got a few days left to promote our Kickstarter!”

To summarize this 4-ish-year project in the making (time is a blur), my friends and I all banded together to create our wuxia-themed anthology when we were all rejected from a magazine’s wuxia-themed special edition. Frankly, it’s been way more fun to take part in our band of Chinese diasporic misfits. We screamed as a group when we hit $1k within 13 minutes, with laughs about what we were doing in the time in took for the Kickstarter to be fully funded. For one, it was the amount of time to walk to the fridge, get a slice of cake, and then return to sit down at her desk. For me, I was brewing tea and had yet to take a sip when our group chat exploded with awed reactions over hitting our funding goal in record time. I am forever grateful for the hard work of Julia, Miki, JF, and everyone else who made this possible.

My short story, “Six Swans and a Sister,” is a cyberpunk reimagining of the Six Swans fairytale. I’ll have to write another blog post about it later (if I ever get around to it, side-eyeing my abysmal track record of keeping this blog updated), but to make a long story short, one of my inspirations was the video game Cyberpunk 2077 and my frustrations surrounding Goro Takemura being clearly set up for a romance storyline, only for CD Projekt Red to publicly admit they ran out of time by the time they were forced to release the game (*cries from a sea of thirsty fangirls*). Since writing it during the pandemic, my craft has evolved, so it’s rather strange for me to revisit the story and see a vastly different version of who I was as a writer.

Speaking of cyberpunk, Ken Bebelle’s story, “Poisoned Pearl,” also explores the cyberpunk genre. He and Julia are coauthors of the The Phoenix Hoard series, and I love that we’re both integrating and imagining the traditions of wuxia in our tech-driven world (the future is here, whether we like it or not!).

Thank you to everyone who has unlocked all the audio rewards. Julia, JF, and I will record the audio of our respective stories, “The Youngest Sister of the Southern Watch,” “Assassins Have a Short Shelf Life,” and “Six Swans and a Sister.” I had to update my Audacity software this past weekend and do some test recordings to make sure my macros were all still running correctly.

Tomorrow, June 25, is the final day of our Kickstarter! If you want a copy for yourself, please pick out the Kickstarter reward of your choice. Once the copies are gone, they’re alllll goooooooone! 🫢 Once they get shipped from China to California, the plan is for Julia, Miki, and me to package up and fulfill orders and make sure everyone gets their rewards!