Yicheng Liu's Blog

Thought it would be good to try and collate the things I have written and put it here on the blog. It’s a piece reflecting on disability pride and some general thoughts I had about it as a disabled person, published last month. So that’s pretty neat I think. Link at the end of the article.

**essay below**

“Explain yourself to me.”  

 I’ve had to think about this question for a time, in various healthcare settings, how I would best go about it. For all of my life, I had been told by ot...

This review is of an ARC provided by Netgalley and Yale University Press in exchange for an honest review.

My rating for this book is 4/5.

I am personally interested in reading more about the overall political conflagration that would lead to the onset of war, and also with regards to how dynamic and fluid nature modern types of warfare. In particular the analysis of economic and political methods through which to wage war as well as the analysis of more ‘traditional’ type of warfare of te...

This review is of an ARC provided by Netgalley and Penguin Random house in exchange for an honest review.

My rating for this book is a solid 4/5.

I am personally interested in reading more about the craft of writing and particularly about crafting fantasy worlds. I have long being a sincere fan of worldbuilding as well as being actively involved in the process of writing my own book series. So, as such, I requested an ARC of this book seeing what would be included in this book and if the advice in...

ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Cultural warning: Indigenous Australians are advised that some references in this blog include images or names of people now deceased.

ANZ LitLovers will again be hosting Indigenous Literature Week in July to coincide with NAIDOC Week here in Australia. (7 to 14 July).

This is a week when Australians celebrate the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and this year the NAIDOC Week theme is Voice, Treaty, Truth. This This th...

My dearest Lyanna,

It has been 35 years since I last saw you. You might think they were purely joking about the whole ‘eternal damnation’, it is with a heavy heart that I write this for I am weary. It is not just because of the syringe of liquefied talking anal centipedes injected into my rectum every sabbath day, but also because of the barriers of life and death that separates us. There are no days or nights in Hell, and Prince of Darkness happened to be quite demanding in his infernal punishments. With the worst of us taking unscheduled dips into the Lake of Fire, I had begun to suspect that Satan isn’t a fan of rules.

The agony of perdition is long and I have moments when I fear I’ll never see you again. If only because you’re a better cheat and an even more shameless liar than I could ever claim to be, to cheat Saint Peter out of a spot in heaven from those Irish Catholics (whom I have nothing against and personally think are just delightful people. Really, some of my best friends are Irish Catholics)

With sorrow, I must say that the demons aren’t terribly great conversation partners. The closest I had managed to a coherent conversation had being a five hour evening service co-hosted by an ex-youth pastor on the glory of the eternal kingdom and how everyone had been one Snapchat filter away from being offered the eternal ticket. We’ve now been assigned routine constructions of border walls that are routinely knocked over by low-flying pygmy owls and the occasional swarm of pigeons. It was either that the Lord of Darkness had a sense of humour and enjoys Greek Mythology or pigeons go to hell: take your pick.

Owing to the many reports which has been put in circulation by the heretics and by the naysayers against our Glorious Leader Lucifer, so far as I have such facts in my possession, I have come to the conclusion that the idea of the place was about torture, though I might be wrong. It reminded me so much of the early days of our beautiful marriage. Do you remember that day when we were married? Our parents disowned us, our friends sent a thug with a cricket bat to go down collect our debts, and everyone told us that it will never work, that it will be a disaster. But that didn’t stop us, now, did it? Our monthslong identity theft scam paid off, and we borrowed a long-term parting gift of two and a half million dollars from our friends to start a new life under a new name.

It has been so long. How I miss those days of holding you next to our wall because we had been newlywed homeless millionaires. As I sit here late at night writing this with the blood of the lamb on papyrus scraps, my thoughts interrupted only by the occasional beatings of wings of fifty thousand pigeons excreting their faeces onto our backs. I ache to again hold you, darling dearest, and to spend the night near our wall, safe in the knowledge that our friends will no longer try to kill us until next Thursday when we murder their entire family.

I will write again soon, unless Satan changes his mind about down time between eternal damnation and the Second Coming. Tell the children, Joseph and Nathaniel, I love them and hope that we will be able to correspond with them again when we’re reunited. They are really silly nitwits, but I love them with all the unconditional love of a pigeon towards french fries.

Now, I shalt dream, yea, and writhe painfully on the ground in immense spiritual and metaphysical pain as the talking anal centipedes starts whispering Coldplay songs into my spiritual abscess. I will dream of you when I sleep, dearest wife, assuming I am not shat on by the imperial army of pigeons which now patrols the night sky looking for those who dare to open their mouth.

To conclude with the primary purpose of my letter, happy Valentines Day, my love, for I sincerely wish for you to have a terrible time. Now, I shall conclude in loving memory of the time when I could still remember the joys of opening a private offshore bank account with you in some desolate tax haven that we’ve never been to.

All my love, forever,

— Toby

John Robin's Blog

I will make two promises on this new approach to blogging:

-I will not talk about religion

-I especially will not talk about politics

But I will occasionally lapse into musings, or some of the things that keep me up at night. This is my blog and the place to pick my brain, after all.

Here’s one:

The value of holding a physical book in your hand.

This has a lot more meaning than might be obvious.

No, it’s not just about the psychology of how reading a book in print invokes different kinds of memory and experience (ie tactile). For me, it’s about what the gesture represents, more than anything else.

I’m typing this post up on my phone. Before this, I was reading my way through a print book (The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith). When I read a book, I by far prefer to read something physical.

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John Robin's Blog

It’s a new year, and with that comes new opportunities. To start, I’m going to change how I blog.

Over the holidays, I was inspired by fellow fantasy author Bruce Blake. (Check out his blog here.) I’ve been following Bruce’s posts for several years. Like me, he’s a laid back Canadian who mostly wrote about fantasy or writing.

Bruce has done some amazing work. Be sure to check out his books if you wander over. When I go to his Amazon author page, I get inspired. This guy tells some great dark fantasy. Blood of the King (the first in the Khirro’s Journey series) is a tale of hope amidst darkness and corruption. It’s even got a Necromancer. This one’s on my to-read list.

But it’s Bruce’s new spin on blogging that caught my attention. More specifically, it was this declaration he made:

“Fuck writing.”

That’s right. Fuck…

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This a 10/10 book.

Trigger Warnings for this book: This book is not suitable for people of all age, and contains elements of Rape, Murder, Torture, self-harm, drug (ab)use, drug peddling, child abuse, unhealthy study habits, genital mutilations, implicit genocide, war crimes on both sides, fictionalised aspects of the Second Sino-Japanese war and elements of high fantasy concerning the nature of divinity. Do not read if descriptions above could be considered triggering or challenging or psychologically damaging.

And now, onto the review of this book.

As a Chinese-Australian, with my father’s side of the family originating from Nanjing, mainstream fantasy stories with elements of Chinese culture always excites, intrigues, and horrifies me for mostly similar reasons: Excited because the community receives some representation; intrigued because generally the premise sounded nice on paper; horrified because nine times out of ten, it is written in a way that those aspects becomes completely unrelatable, cultural traditions gets butchered, the premise becomes poorly executed due to poor writing or a misinterpretation of things. I am happy to say that I am excited, intrigued, happy, and horrified for entirely different reasons that will quickly become apparent as you read on.

I originally found this book not through word of mouth, but through randomly following the Writer’s Twitter feed after a viral tweet by her made me care enough to visit the author’s website and read a bit about the rough premise of this book.

The rough concept of this book revolves around Dominance, Pain, and really really awful decisions being made by the ‘good side’ and the bad side. In execution, it becomes a splendid allegory that blends together aspects of modern-day China and its past in an amazing way that left me awestruck. Modern-day China is a cynical place and some of its cultural traditions were neglected and intentionally destroyed by the Cultural Revolution, and so the juxtaposition of past traditions being taken seriously within a cynical environment was pleasing. The aesthetic were nice.

TPW contains plenty of vividly brutal scenes that were placed there to illustrate the brutality of war and the supposed moral ambiguity on both sides and purposefully antagonises the protagonist Rin’s band of soldiers against the majority of the people within the setting. R.F. Kuang doesn’t pull any punches; though a criticism of the story was that, in a somewhat strange attempt to preserve historical accuracy within a fictionalised setting, she had chosen to explicitly painting The Federation of Mugen as a self-aware villain who does things for the sake being evil. There weren’t ANY sympathetic qualities that could be ascribed to them and it was apparent that there was no banality of evil being portrayed as there was examples of them being shown as anything but gleeful in their war tactics.

Of course, R.F. more than makes up for it by showing how a gleeful villain was made as the character arc plotted out by our protagonist becomes almost entirely parallel to the Federation of Mugen’s actions in the story. Without going into too much detail, Kuang asks the question “Is excessive revenge justified to be unleashed on bystanders simply because of their nationality because of the crimes of that nation?” This question had ended being explored with nuance within The Poppy War, however, the answer will likely only be discussed/revealed in the sequel since the story had chose to establish those meta-narratives rather than endlessly expand upon them in the story.

The Poppy War is a debut novel dealing with perhaps the most depressing contemporary story of military fantasy that I’ve ever seen outside of a Russian novel. This is also not a happy story, the world is not funny, everything is sh*t, nothing matters, we’re all going to die, monsters are real.

Also, the story doesn’t explicitly feature romance; only a borderline psychotic obsession that raises the bar for all non-anime/manga Yanderes out there. Yuno Gasai ain’t nothin’ compared to our MC, Fang Runin.

In the end, this quote in the middle of the story sums up the theme of this book: “WAR IS NOT ABOUT WHO IS RIGHT; ONLY WHO REMAINS STANDING.”

Of course, the nation Hesperia was referenced as well, but never shown to be much of an ally or enemy; only as an observer…so, essentially, a stand-in for the United States. It would be interesting to see what the author intends to explore about Hesperia within the story in the series.

This book deserves a five-stars & a 10/10 rating simply because Kuang hits all the right notes in a masterful way using strong writing and genre-savvy skills that wove an intricate story of what makes and unmakes the Hero’s journey. I would highly recommend this story to every Song of Ice & Fire fan who is (im)patiently waiting our lord and saviour GRRM to release a new book to pass the time and read this. Of course, and also to people who enjoy reading about dark coming-of-age stories that offers nuance and complex themes & AREN’T MEANT FOR KIDS TO READ.

Hey folks,

I thought I’d give some writing advice from my perspective today. To be honest, there’s really no advice that will magically transform someone into a good writer, and so this is just my perspective on what drives me and what made me give enough of a damn to keep on keeping on.

What inspires you to get out of bed each day?

The fact that I have to go to work and get on with my life is generally what inspires me to get out of bed each day. Regardless of what your opinions are and who you are, life goes on. No matter how much I hated rising up each morning, I still need to get up early in the morning even if I hated mornings with a burning passion. I believe that everything is easier to endure if other people also have to suck it up and feel just as bad as you.

When you’re not writing, how do you spend your time?

Reading. I would generally spend my time either reading good fiction that had caught my interest or helpful books that helps me improve my understanding of the craft and how to better polish my work. Through either searching for them in my ‘recommended books’ section of Goodreads and other websites that I frequent often or personal recommendation from friends or librarians, I can find great works that I can enjoy from other writers. Librarians are generally very experienced in the mystical art of picking out great books and hidden gems of the genre, thus they are always my go-to target of inquiry for good books.

Describe your desk:

My desk is a clean and tidy place with a small box of writing equipment, some blank notebooks, a box of tissue and a laptop. The messier your desk is, the harder it is for you to be able to actually find it comfortable to work on.

What is your writing process?

I would start writing a story with a beginning and an end already in mind before getting any deeper. Since the first time I attempted writing a story with no coherent structure and sequence in mind before actually writing had turned into a horrible mess…I have since then learned to plan my stories out and have at least a rudimentary outline before writing.

Hello, everyone.

Haven’t blogged in a while. To the…four people who follow my blog, you must be quite surprised. So, during October 2017, I had submitted an RPG article for the Dark Times Fanzine for Horror RPGs. It was an article on using Qi in a Call-of-Cthulhu Roleplaying Game, adding in a few of my homebrew rules for running a Wuxia-flavoured game. Which, I had the guilty pleasure of running once.

Here’s the link if you’re interested.

There’s a few pieces of advice that I would like to give to people interested in submitting articles for magazines.

#1- Formatting, it is important.

About three or four years ago, back when I had submitted an article to a magazine for the first time, I wasn’t very good at it. You see, I had sent it with whatever the default formatting that my word-processor used. I’ll admit that I didn’t even bother to check the formatting guidelines and had just sent it as is.

…Thinking back, that wasn’t the cleverest thing I had done. I ended up being rejected by the magazine, and in the email, a link to the formatting guidelines of the company was attached. A clean, neat presentation goes a long way to make your work that much more appealing to editors. As a struggling writer, I cannot tell you how many submissions I send in a month and how many writing projects I’m juggling, I imagine many writers are out there desperately sending in submissions and drafts as well. In order to stand out, I think the least you could would be to check the formatting guidelines of the company that you’re submitting to and offer minimal respect to telling that at you had the decency in you to at least read the submission guidelines.

If you’re can’t their submission guidelines, then it’s generally a good idea to play it safe and ask; failing that, just refer to the Standard manuscript format.

#2- Maintain regular contact with the editor

Writing is a cooperative job. Being a writer means that, ultimately, you’re going to have to listen to someone else’s opinions and follow a deadline. The best way to make sure everyone is happy in a situation like this is to maintain consistent contact with the editor. Communication is key.

Editors have to make sure that there’s no grammar errors, no inconsistencies, and also to make sure the theme of an article can fit the theme of the magazine. Ultimately, explaining the direction and the rough idea of the article to the editor is generally a good way making sure that everyone’s on the same page. It is also a good way of making sure that you can meet your deadlines. While there’s no guarantee that you can meet the deadline, but if you could explain to the editor in advance that, due to some unforeseen complications, you couldn’t make the deadlines, they’re going to be more likely to offer to put your article on-hold for the next issue rather than just sending an email at the last minute with a cheap explanation.

#3- Proofread before you send it off

It’s difficult being an editor, checking through article after article for grammar errors and inconsistencies. Make your editor’s job easier by checking through your submission first and make sure that the margin of mistake have been dialled down to the minimum. Reducing the number of back-and-forth draft exchanges could make things more efficient and make everyone involved feel much happier rather than just sending off an unchecked draft for the editor to fix.

Conclusion

Work with your editor, and listen to what his opinions are. There’s always room for polite disagreements, but giving people respect and follow the publisher’s submission guidelines would almost always make sure that you’re going to have a higher chance of getting another article published by them again.