Angela Liu

So after many false starts, I’ve finally put together a basic website (my first in years!). Hopefully this is an ongoing process, and I can play around a bit more with the graphics and formatting.

Still can’t believe how long it’s been since I blogged something (I used to have a fairly active one in my earliest years living in Japan in case anyone wants to dig for dirt). I’m hoping by starting this website, I can motivate myself to start blogging again (because my memory just isn’t very reliable anymore).

So I started submitting short stories and poetry at the end of 2021/beginning of 2022 after more than two decades of writing for myself. The whole process was terrifying to me (still is), especially as someone who usually can’t look at her older work without cringing. For the first few months, it was just a deluge of rejections (still mostly is). I received nearly thirty rejections before my first acceptance (a poem at Strange Horizons), but still couldn’t sell a single story. As someone who rarely shows her writing to anyone (I don’t know if this is the result of growing up in a non-English-speaking home and/or the stigma of trying to pursue art as a career as a second-generation immigrant), it’s hard to gauge whether or not anyone actually wants to read your writing. Nearly sixty rejections in, I was on the verge of quitting when I got my first fiction acceptance from The Dark. I was ecstatic, of course, but still, I didn’t tell any of my friends or family (other than my spouse). It seemed insignificant compared to friends who were becoming doctors, running multi-million-dollar companies, releasing books that were reaching NY Times bestseller lists. I celebrated in my own head, like I often did growing up, where good was rarely good enough.

I guess there’s an added layer of self-doubt when you decide to pursue art later in life. It’s easier to think you’re too late, you’re not good enough, that you will never be good enough, that your best ideas and stories have already come and gone with your teens and 20s. But I think there’s also a level of stability and a clearer sense of identity that I didn’t have when I was younger. I know how to fail better. I also know what I want and don’t want, and the effort and sacrifice that comes with pursuing the things you believe in.

At the end of 2022/beginning of 2023, about one year after I started submitting, I got lucky. I received a series of acceptances from F&SF, Clarkesworld, and Uncanny. These were the speculative magazines that got me started on writing short fiction. These were the magazines that I’d only ever seen on the list of publications from my favorite speculative writers and poets, the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy winners. Around this time, I got one of my first “I loved your story” DMs from a complete stranger, and I felt like a kid seeing the ocean for the first time. Like the world had suddenly become bigger.

But I’m also old enough to know that life comes in waves. I’ve had months and months where nothing but form rejections come, months where long holds turn into form rejections, or just weeks where I question if I’m still writing the things I want or I’m just writing to cater to the gatekeepers who will let me feel like I’m finally good enough. It comes and goes.

All I can do is keep writing. I try to tell that little voice in my head, the one of me, still an awkward teen, hiding her Word browser whenever someone walked up from behind so they couldn’t read her words, that it’s okay to write the things you want. The fun, sometimes trashy, stuff that got you hooked on writing in the first place. That sometimes no one will want to read your words, that there will always be people who look down on or ridicule what you write, but you are getting better, even if you don’t feel that way.

In the end, the things you regret the most are the things you never did.

(honestly picturing this book while writing this)