C.H. Hung's Blog

Surviving 2023

I hate to start the year in review with a trope, but it happened, and it rocked my world for a good little bit. My dog died. It was quick, it was sudden, and I was definitely not ready. He was 14, best as we could tell (a shelter rescue), and the best good old boi a girl could ever hope for. We had 10 wonderful, adventure-filled years with him, and his absence leaves a giant hole in my heart. The year didn’t get much better from there. In mid-2021, I returned to working a full-time corporate day...

Crossing the (genre) streams

The Nov/Dec 2021 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine featured one of my short stories–“The Debtor,” a crime story set during Christmastime in New York City. (I don’t know what it is about New York City that has inspired me to base all of my crime fiction stories here–maybe it was one too many Law & Order marathons–but here you go and there you have it.) It’s a significant publication for me, not only because of the publication itself (EQMM has been publishing award-winning mystery/crime fic...

On the other side of our long, dark winter

Note: This is part 2 of this post series. Read Part 1, “Writing through a pandemic,” here. All the weeks and months of anxious mulling over the Ullr story hadn’t changed my mind about which party and which character I’d center it on. I still loved the opening lines, but I knew the happy-jolly fun romp tone was gone. And that was okay. I didn’t need to write a fun story. I just needed to write a story with a party in it. If there’s anything that I’ve learned as a writer, it’s that as a discovery ...

Writing through a pandemic

Usually, when I release a new story, I like to sit back and let readers experience the story for themselves without much set-up. Sure, I’ll write a blurb to let you know what the story is about so that you can decide up front if it’s the type of story you like to read, but I don’t set many expectations beyond that because I don’t want to bias your experience. The latest story I just released though… this one is different, in so many ways. First, some context. I knew I needed a write a story for ...

Owning our grandma stories

In the year before the Age of Covid, I had just started raising my hand for speaking gigs—tentatively, of course, because I had and still have a very young career in writing, and always with a sense of a shock whenever my application was accepted. And whenever I shuffled to my seat on a panel or stepped up to a podium to deliver a presentation, I’d scan the crowd—deliberately, methodically, checking each row and each face. It’s a matter of habit, you see, because I was looking for something quit...

“Me” enough for my own story

The first storyteller who taught me the value of stories was my Taiwanese immigrant mother. Her lessons and advice always came couched in a long-winded story or parable or anecdote rather than as a simple, straightforward admonishment, delivered in an “are you listening?” tone that demanded her audience’s attention more forcefully than the most skilled orators. I’m telling you, Rome’s best senators had nothing on my mother. As an impatient teenager, I perfected the art of the eye-roll thanks to ...

Grandma stories, and the gaps they bridge

You may have heard folks talking about their grandma stories, especially folks from various diasporas. But if you don’t know where these stories come from, or why they’re so important in diasporic cultures, or why they’re called grandma stories—well, then, pull up a chair and stay a while, because have I got a story for you. The term diaspora comes from the Greeks, from a word that means “dispersion.” And, oh, how apt that word is, to describe how peoples and cultures such as the exiled Jews and...

Farewell for now, Superstars 2020. See y’all in 2021!

I slept 14 hours last night. It was not the sushi coma from the mountain of sushi I ate first-thing after I got home, it was the Superstars coma from the firehose of information I ingested. This year, I went to Superstars thinking I needed a break from it because Kristine Kathryn Rusch broke my brain during one of her infamous craft workshops the week before, and I had a crap-load of work to do. (Happily, mind you, because her workshop was insanely insightful, and I am anxious to do the work. Bu...