Eunhae Han > Recent Status Updates

11. “Children of the Monsoon” — by X

South Asian climate refugees rebuild cities designed around flooding cycles instead of resisting them.
The future city thrives because it works with water, not against it.

10. “The Last Forest Choir” — by X

Trees genetically modified to survive heat waves communicate through sound.
A forest ranger becomes the last human who can interpret their music — the story of Earth’s pain and resilience.

8. “Plastic Sea” — by X

A scavenger community survives by harvesting plastic from the ocean’s massive garbage gyres.
A child discovers a living organism evolving to digest plastic — the possible beginning of planetary healing.

7. “Afterflow” — by X (title story)

Set centuries after ecological collapse, humanity lives in small river-based communities.
Technology exists, but harmony with ecosystems governs all choices.
A historian records the mistakes of the old world so future children will never repeat them.

6. “Ancestor Wind” — by X

An Indigenous futurist story where ancestral spirits ride the wind to warn the living of coming storms.
A teenage girl learns she is the last wind-listener — able to interpret these messages — and must guide her people through the new climate era.

5. “The Seed Keepers” — by X

After industrial farming collapses, underground seed libraries preserve extinct crops.
A young archivist risks everything to protect a cache of seeds that could restore food sovereignty.

4. “Carbon Ghosts” — by X

The dead do not rest.
They appear as “carbon ghosts” — figures formed from pollution particles, haunting the industries that killed them.
A corporate executive is forced to confront the people his company displaced and poisoned.

3. “The Salt Mothers” — by X

In a coastal world swallowed by rising oceans, women build floating salt-harvesting communities.
Salt becomes currency, medicine, and ritual.
A daughter must decide whether to leave this fragile ocean culture for the mainland’s false security.

“The Great Drought” — by X

A multi-generation story following a rural family after water sources disappear.
The grandmother remembers rivers that once existed; the granddaughter grows up never seeing rain.
The family becomes water stewards, guarding a remaining spring from corporate theft.
The story explores grief, memory, and what it means to inherit a wounded land.

approaches. So for me, revision is a combination of cutting away (like sculpting the sentence from stone) and also a constant layering of the language (like working with the sentence as you would clay.
The palimpsestic layering part of the process often leads to sudden surprises-puns, oracles, and revelations-that I'm always looking

Character: based them on a principle, drawing them from real people, basing them on myself, or basing them on his historical figure figures

I try, as I rework and revise, to remember a note I made to myself in my writer's notebooks: "In great fiction the main element of importance is the fusion of character and event, their interplay, the way the latter reveals the former, and the way the former leads inevitably to the latter. One must also see how event transforms character even as it is produced by character."

I try to make sure each paragraph can justify its being on the page. That is, each paragraph should have at least one good idea in it. Or do something to advance the story. Or enrich the details of the world in which the story is taking place or the characterizations of its people. I work at being

I'm constantly rethinking a story's beginning as I work on the middle and end.) Sometimes my ratio of throwaway to keep pages is 20:1. From the third draft forward, I work at varying sentence length in every paragraph and also varying sentence formsI see each sentence as being a unit of energy. The music and meaning of each sentence and paragraph must carry into the next and contribute to a larger rhythmic design.

Real fun begins on the third draft

90% of good writing is rewriting. often hear that 90 percent of good writing is rewriting. We also know that writing well is the same thing as thinking well, and that means we want our final literary product—story, novel, or essay—to exhibit our best thought, best feeling, and best technique.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.
—Rumi

Rememory is a term Morrison gives to Sethe, which describes memories affected by not only an individual but also by others. In this way, rememory-ing is communal as well as individual, as are so many of our memories. What is remembered or rememorized can seep into the emotional history of a family, a people, a community for generations.

When I was five, _
2. What I think about God:
3. My father always_
4. I miss the smell of

What I said was
was
6. Last night I dreamt about _
7. My mother always said
8. While the family gathered at the I would.
9. I wish I could remember _
_ but what I meant

_, but all I remember
10. Sunlight hitting the floor from the window made me remember

Writers are often taught (and rightly so) the craft of language economy-the use of as few words as possible to convey a point.
And, generally, this makes for a smoother style and less laborious text. However, sometimes, in order to establish a Black rhythmic pulse in written discourse, one needs more words, more instruments with which to play the symphonic complexity of Black life.

Technique is for craft essays. Coiling is for essays that appear seamless. Plaiting is for fragmented essays with a single source. Twining is for essays that bring together material from different sources.

Indigenous peoples understand that there is no difference between the telling and the material. They understand how we all, in fact, live inside and through the narratives we tell and that the importance in telling stories is inseparable from the identity, community, and history they compose and the spiritual, economic, and political realities on which they depend and which they subvert or preserve.

G ood writing generally evolves from three sources: a knowledge of the elements of craft the extensive reading of the works of well-respected writers from various genres, and an enormous amount of practice. If creating a novel were easy, everyone would be doing it. The fact that it's not easy, the fact that it requires talent, knowledge, perseverance, discipline, and passion,

But for those for whom writing is a psychological and emotional necessity as well as a way of life, the more they know about the craft itself, the more they practice, and the more they work to develop a process that benefits them, the better the chances of finding someone willing to take a chance on them in the world of publishing.

Routine … 5 pages with rough draft ..or 50 pages with second draft. … write objective like two character analyses or 10 step outlined or two running plot scenes or to a timer ….

Self-discipline is all about being willing to delay gratification. It's all about doing what you have to do or need to do first and doing what you want to do second.

only. I want to be finished with the book because, frankly, after all the work I've put into it, the novel holds virtually no charm for me.
I also go through all of this because I'm a perfectionist. I take enormous pride in my work, and when I show it to someone-particularly to my editorI want it to represent the best I can do. Handing off a rough draft and telling my editor, "You figure out what to do with it,"

Why go through all this? you might well ask. I go through it because once I've sent the novel to my editor, I want to spend as little additional time on it as possible. I want my editor's letter to me to be very brief, suggesting

The other set I give to her in a sealed envelope. She opens this envelope immediately upon finishing the novel. Now she sees the questions that I feared might influence her reading if she'd had them in advance. These are questions like "I think I have too many Barbara Havers scenes. … then send third draft to my editor

set she reads in advance so that she'll know what I'm looking for from her. Examples might be "Mark any spot where your interest is flag-ging" or "Mark every place where you suspect someone of something"