Jack Cheng's Blog, page 6

#402: Body Doubling

I’ve been trying, this week, to finish my past studio projects. Key word: trying. The architecture program ended a couple of months ago and it’s been challenging – maybe predictably so – to slip back into a mode of hands-on making. There is concrete wanting to be cast and poured, wood that beckons joinery and glue. My final project calls for a writeup here, and part of it to be printed into a booklet or zine.

Folks in ADHD circles talk about body doubling, which is like coworking with a wider net...

#401: Three (More) Meditations on Maintenance

Julia and I have been taking an eight-week bike maintenance class at a local non-profit bike shop. Every Tuesday night, we go in and spend an hour watching the instructor demonstrate the process for a specific part or set of parts. Then we spend a second hour tuning up those parts on used kids’ bikes that are to be given away as part of the shop’s youth programs. There are six of us in the class, including me and Julia. We’re constantly joking about not screwing up our project bikes for their ev...

#400: Midsummer Odds & Ends

Apropos of nothing, Julia and I have been on an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie spree for the last month. Growing up she’d somehow missed virtually every film of his, including the Terminators, whereas in third grade I made a book about a kid who saves a dragon-tormented village that featured this climactic page:

A few standouts this go for me have been Total Recall (for Arnold’s tonally perfect overacting), True Lies (for Jamie Lee Curtis), and Junior, Ivan Reitman’s Twins reunion piece, in which Ar...

#399: A Book Launch

Saturday I had the launch party for my new book, The Many Masks of Andy Zhou. On the drive back, Julia asked me what was different between this party and the one I had in 2017. My answer? Community.

See You in the Cosmos came out a year and a half after I’d moved back to Detroit. I was only just starting to (re)learn the city and make friends. A couple of them showed up to that party, along with my brother and some people he knew, and a few high school friends and bookstore regulars. I talked abo...

#398: Pub Week, Summer Events, and the Audiobook

My new novel, The Many Masks of Andy Zhou, comes out on in less than 24 hours! For those of you in/willing to travel to Southeast Michigan: the book launch party is this Saturday, June 10, from 2PM–4PM at 27th Letter Books in Detroit. I’ll be joined by some local author friends, who’ll be reading from their own stories for kids/teens, and I’ve just confirmed today that a student-volunteer lion dance team will be performing. We’ll have some fried dumplings and bubble tea too – bring your kids!

Sum...

#397: Shanghainese Midwestern

My author copies of the new book arrived in the mail last week. The batch pictured above was gifted to a group of students from Ferndale Middle School who gave feedback on a draft last summer. There are some subtle differences between that draft and the printed hardcover, and one not-so-subtle one: The finished book contains 42 of my own illustrations, appearing at the start of each chapter, like so:

Did I mention you can pre-order the book before its June 6 release?

I spoke (or typed, as it was a...

#396: Maintenance Ethic

I’m currently writing about my experience as a student in Building Beauty , a two-semester architecture program based on Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order.

It’s my last week of class. Monday morning we had our final Studio presentations and I finished my prep a bit early, and spent some time cleaning my workspace, reordering the end-of-project entropy.

A big lesson for me over the course of the, um, course, is that it’s not only that the messy parts of the process beget a messy workspace,...

#395: Cover Reveal and Pre-Orders for my New Novel

An early letter this week (for a change!) to let you know about my new book, forthcoming June 6th. It’s called The Many Masks of Andy Zhou, and it’s based on some of my experiences growing up in Metro Detroit. Here’s the cover:

The jacket art’s by Yuta Onoda, and I think it suits my anime-loving main character perfectly. I’m waiting to get my hands on the printed hardcovers, which should be arriving any day now. There’s a big surprise in the hardbacks that wasn’t even in the advance reader copies...

#394: Pruning

I’m on spring break from the architecture program this week, and for a few days temperatures hit the 80s here in Detroit. I biked to coffee meetings and got ice cream. Twice. This weekend I caught up on yard maintenance and pruned some of the trees along the back and side of the house, which I should’ve done a month ago when it was still winter. But here we are.

There’s a particular Norway spruce that grows out from our house’s northern face. Curves out, is more like it. The trunk starts almost s...

#393: A House for Oneself, Part 2

Ahoy friends, including new readers coming from Robin Sloan’s newsletter. I’ve updated my dream house design project page with the second half of the writeup. You can read it here.