Engineer. SFF Writer. Triple Nebula Award winner. Việt/French. She/Her 🏳️🌈 Loves trà, nước mắm. Profile: @yendraws @readatmidnight
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Jun 3, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Sigh
I find the speed with which marginalized communities accuse their own members of selling out to be disquieting (albeit not very surprising). Its... like hatred of success or visibility or something and I've seen it happen in so many different communities now, same playbook.
To me it feels like that marginalized identity becomes enmeshed with oppression so much that even a modicum of success, of respectability causes a casting out. "One cannot be xxx if one isn't miserable and oppressed" (2/?)
Jun 3, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Ok a small 🌈thread of my queer books for Pride
🧵
(1/?)
(might be adding to this throughout the day rather than do it in one go)
Thinking on craft decisions this morning and the assumptions readers bring to a story (1/?)
In many ways, writing a story is an act of letting go. I have certain ideas and a certain mental landscape when I write it, but people who read the story will have their own, and that's not something I can or should control. People bring their own baggage (2/?)
Jun 28, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Oh God, new rule: before making any comment on the efficiency of vaccination against variants based on % of people admitted into care or % of people who tested positive, please look up "conditional probabilities"
A % of not getting a covid infection IF not vaccinated absolutely does not translate intuitively into a % of having a vaccination IF tested or hospitalised. These are totally not comparable statistics
(also look up Bayes' theorem, while you're at it)
Apr 30, 2021 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
About people who complain they cannot write such and such a book and this is a symptom of cancel culture given free rein: what I will simply say is that some years ago, I pitched a Vietnamese-influenced SFF book and was told it would never sell. (1/?)
I was told, in more or less subtle ways, that people like me shouldn't be writing SFF and certainly shouldn't be winning awards for it, the subtext being we should be grateful for scraps. (2/?)
Apr 15, 2021 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
PSA: chị/em (big'sis/lil'sis) are the pronouns used in Vietnamese culture for intimate relationships (whether romantic or not) between two women. They're not terms referring to kinship (that'd be chị/em ruột, lit. sister of guts). 1/?
The entire Vietnamese pronoun system is predicated on terms like these. They're not, I repeat NOT, terms referring to kinship. I call elderly women bà/grandmother, they're not my actual grandmothers 2/?
Apr 13, 2021 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
I do want to say a few things, which is that this particular Hugo nomination at this point in time means a lot to me. (1/?)
I drafted the first version of "The Inaccessibility of Heaven" in 2007. At the time, I didn't have the craft or ability to finish the draft, and I left it literally mid paragraph (IIRC mid sentence) (2/?)
Feb 24, 2021 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Oh I realised I forgot to explain the system of naming I used in Fireheart Tiger (thread)
Every Vietnamese Emperor has an era name (Niên hiệu, they used to have several, but the Nguyễn dynasty only had one per emperor). Era names are used for calendar purposes and naming/numbering of years
Feb 19, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This is what dragons are for me: beautiful and terrifying and they could tear you in half and choose not to
You have to trust that they are good (and they mostly are) because what could you do, if they are not? You would clutch your sword and your rice paper with hastily scrawled-out protection sutras, and wonder how much time you had left
Feb 18, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Having very complex feelings about the relationship between Thanh and a certain other character in Fireheart Tiger described as a romance
I recognise it's in part because of a deliberate choice: I used the outer trappings of a whirlwind romance, but I also undercut them as I was writing them. There are PLENTY of red flags as said relationship unfolds
Feb 17, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Fascinated by the end of S1 of the Mandalorian (there will be spoilers)
You know that thing about trying to avoid Deus ex Machina? To me S1 manages to get around it with IG-11 by leaning into "this makes narrative sense"
Nov 30, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Sigh I see we are having the conversation about how the future should be secular again and SF should downplay religion (not going to link to the tweet because I refuse to give oxygen).
It should not.
(small thread)
Lots of complicated thoughts on SFF (esp media) depicting civilisations as advanced based on their lack of religion (often white Christian atheism), and Othering civilisations which continue to practise religion regardless of the nature of said religion.
Oct 11, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Being a statistician on twitter in COVID times is seeing people forget about things like variable spread, correlation is not causation, hidden factors, and selection bias, among other things
It's painful to see numbers waved about & really dodgy looking conclusions reached
It's not because numbers increase at same time as event that the event is responsible!
Increase in cases means nothing if increase in tests is not being factored in!
Don't compare 2 sets of numbers from 2 places without checking they are indeed the same!
Oct 11, 2020 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
I'm still super upset at #TheWatch trailer, a thread
I've said many times that Terry Pratchett was foundational for me 1/?
I discovered him when the Discworld video games came out, at around the same time that the books in Pocket SF (the silvers covers with the detachable cardboard cover art inside!) showed up at my local bookshop. It was a French translation, but I DEVOURED it 2/?
Aug 1, 2020 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
Look, I'm annoyed, so: a thread of things that have happened to me. They're disjointed, and they're just off the top of my head. They're not intended to be exhaustive: just my personal experiences
When I got listed for one of my very first awards, the presenter couldn't pronounce my name (I'm super elastic on how my name is actually pronounced because most people get it wrong). This was WAY OUTSIDE THE RANGE and involved swapped letters and entirely new letters.
Jul 30, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Can't stop thinking about @jeannette_ng's point that the drop in representation in Korra vs Avatar partly stems from an inability to imagine an Asian dominated future, and how much easier it was to write a medieval/age of commerce fantasy than a steampunk or future setting (1/?)
In Hollywood media we have futures dominated by Asia but where asian people are absent (Blade Runner, Firefly) or oppressors (Man un High Castle). That the best case because there are also options with continued western dominance.
Contrast to actual anime aesthetic and plotlines
Nov 4, 2019 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Thread on my writing process:
I'm not a discovery writer *at all*, or more accurately I do all my discovery in the pre-drafting phase. You know how everyone is either an architect (extreme planner) or a gardener (extreme discoverer)? I'm the quintessential architect
Of the time it takes me to write a novel draft, easily 50% of it is research (TONS of books), plotting (mostly me going for long walks, playing with ink, and generally letting the plot come together without trying to overly force it), and outlining (scene by scene)
Apr 7, 2019 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
OK so real talk I design critical systems for a living.
if you design a spaceship like the Discovery? Networks will be isolated. There is no way critical systems of the spaceship will be in easy contact with the outside/subspace comms/etc. 1/
2. I'd expect a couple separate networks with full redundancy and encryption, and an extra layer of security against malicious attacks which makes it rather hard to hack an entire ship
2/
Jan 10, 2019 • 23 tweets • 11 min read
So hiiiii Hugo Awards nominations have opened and I'm in deadline hell, so here's a thread of eligibility and recs until I get around to the actual post
I wrote THE TEA MASTER AND THE DETECTIVE, a gender-swapped Sherlock Holmes in space where Watson is a traumatised cranky spaceship subterraneanpress.com/the-tea-master… amazon.co.uk/Tea-Master-Det…
Eligible for best novella.
Nov 23, 2018 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
My writing advice: 1. It's ok to write, it's ok not to write. 2. When actively drafting a project I'll try to write 3 sentences a day on most days. Any day when this happens is a win 3. Bribe myself to write if necessary 4. Remember that the adjustment variable is my health
5. It is not selfish to want to write 6. Try not to postpone the writing to the end of the evening because I will have no energy left then. 7. Sometimes stuff just happens and there's no writing: it's ok. 8. Balls will be dropped. My job is making sure they're not spiky ones
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