Slice of Li(fe)

pride.

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 02:31:02 GMT

content warning: this piece will contain homophobia.

Late last summer I came out to my mother on a visit home when we were going home from her church event. I told her that I was queer; that I liked girls in addition to liking boys and I was always this way, and waited for her reaction. I braced myself for outburst or anger; instead what followed was only a gentle silence. She leaned forward and, calmly and urgently, told me that that part of me needed to die. She said it in a tone that I know genuinely meant no malice; to her it was only a matter of self preservation for me. I know that, and yet it still shocked me.

My parents don’t read my work and I always said I preferred it that way. That I have wrestled with and dissertated upon my identity, the topic of queerness, is very clear in most of my books — yet it felt too intimate, too exposed, to share with them before I was ready. I waited, ten years after I first knew, when I had read, watched, seen, witnessed, even written pieces of media depicting this critical coming out scene, this resolution — if only I studied it enough I knew I could make it mine.

That moment came and with it disappeared entire future versions of myself. I knew that this reconciliation I imagined for myself would not be happening in this timeline or universe. I felt foolish for hoping for it, for hoping that all that has happened the ten years from when I was a closeted sophomore witnessing the Supreme Court ruling, would have made for a more understanding or accepting reaction.

But in a way, those years — and all the years before — have mattered. I still remember seeing Ash by Malinda Lo in my middle school library and picking it up. The Miseducation of Cameron Post. The Half of It and Saving Face. My friends’ beautiful, poignant, stirring books. I have carved out a life surrounded by found family in my home and in their homes and in book events and at bar tables that spill to the side of the street in the summer. I have gotten to write the stories of my heart and share them with readers who have in turn told me about their lives and experiences. And all of this is possible only due to the work that came before; all the work that was done by the people who sought joy and were punished for it; who have had those same isolating conversations with people they loved and lived a life that defied them, and created works that have gotten banned and fought those bans. Those pillars of my life allowed me to walk away from that conversation knowing that it was just one conversation. That it wasn’t the verdict on the life that I could or could not live, because look: here are all the possibilities that have been created for me and that I have created for myself. Here are the universes of joy that are real. This is why I fight so hard against book bans and why I create. I want those lifelines to exist for others too.

I could say much more about this month but here is what it means to me this year; it has always and continually brought me affirmation that I am meant to exist as I am, that pride stems from love, and all there is around me is love. I and my work will never forget that.

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The Year in Which I Was Supposed to Create

Christina Li — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 23:58:03 GMT

**Content Warning: this essay will discuss disordered eating.

I haven’t written a book so far this year. I’ve written words, sure. Not enough to amount to anything. I had grand plans to write a book this year, to start it during the week in February between when I quit one day job and started the next. I had grand plans to write and finish the book I was supposed to write this summer, after my previous book came out. I had grand plans to start writing this fall, to salvage what I had left of this year, to participate in what is commonly known as “The Great Lock In” season.

I have been doing this book writing thing for almost fifteen years. I know how to write. I also possess an anxiety that if I don’t have a book coming out this year, and see a book in the works out next year, if I’m not constantly reinventing myself, selling enough copies, working on something new, marketing myself, then my career is over. I thought those were enough to power me through.

A common question I get is how I balance writing with life and my day job. Being a student and writing. Doing a day job and writing. My answer is that it is a balance of time, energy, willpower. If you wanted it badly you would work for it. I approached this with a ferocity that pushed me through 6 AM wakeup alarms. Called myself a slacker if I started my day at 9. Pushed through copyedits due within a matter of days; edits on tight timelines. My evenings after my day job were a careful tightrope of plans. A free night, a free weekend day, meant a night of luxury — because it meant I could have hours to write. Many do this, and do it better than I do. I’m not alone.

Because this is a job. I worked for this, dreamed of this job, gripped it with all of my past selves and hoisted it up in front of me and made it mine.

The night before The Manor of Dreams came out, I was working overtime for my day job to prepare to take time off for my events. I knew I would have to work while doing my events anyway. Sometime around eleven at night, while poring over spreadsheets, I got the text that my grandfather who raised me had died suddenly. I went to bed at 2 AM that night because I still had to finish my day job. I woke up at 8 AM. I walked down New York City signing copies and could only think about him. I wrote the eulogy on the flight to my LA event.

As painful as that night was, I still don’t begrudge it. I was doing my job, this privilege of a job I worked for and got to have. I am a creator, because of and in spite of it all.

So why couldn’t I write this year? A few thousand words, a paltry sum compared to the tens of thousands I used to conjure in even a single week with such joy and vim and vigor— what had happened?

Never mind that I was leveled by things this year: unprocessed grief, successive twin heartbreaks, a coming out conversation with my family that went so badly it eradicated entire possible avenues of what my future could be, and confirmed that the reconciliations I had wrote about in my books could only stay fictional for me. What was the most disappointing to me was that in this time I didn’t - couldn’t - create. I was supposed to write my way through it all. And while I feel like the sum of many failures this year, the biggest failure is that the one thing I had going for me at the end of the day - the ability to alchemize this all to something with narrative meaning, or growth, or wisdom - evaporated.

I have slowly begun to realize that maybe expecting myself to create output out of obligation — out of the fear of falling off this tightrope; out of fear that if I don’t hit a certain word count, if I don’t sell an X amount of copies, then I will be done for, then I won’t have a career; out of the expectation that this toughness and turbulence needs to translate into something meaningful or commercial — might not be a kind or healthy or tenable thing.

When I was thirteen, I had all the signs of disordered eating; the tracking, the weighing, the precise honed ability to look at an apple, or a spoon of peanut butter, and do the mental math that would indicate just how ruinous it was. This continued for a year, and then I read Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls and it saved me. Looking back on that year, it was as if my mind had tunneled down a specific path of neurons, and had ended up in this room. I thought that this room would be where my mind lived forever, this Sisyphean cycle where everything was numbers, where I was constantly disappointing myself because one of the things that used to give me joy was now punishment. I read Wintergirls and a doorway appeared and I realized the numbers meant fucking nothing outside of that room. I could have walked out of it all along.

I have come to terms with the fact that I will not write the book that will salvage this year, or that I might not write more than a few thousand words this year after all. I have promised myself that I will only write again when it brings me joy. I see a future where I create again like I used to, a future in which I am not flattened by the personal events of this year. Where I won’t measure my worth by my word count, what I have or haven’t written, copies I’ve sold or haven’t sold. Where I don’t feel an obligation to create in spite of pain. I see a path forward where writing once again becomes a lighthouse; refuge; respite; nourishment. That the dwindling days until the end of the year don’t feel like a countdown, the proof of time wasted, but instead a tenuous path out of this room, to a becoming.

Love is for the ones who love the work

Christina Li — Fri, 30 May 2025 11:58:25 GMT

The title of this Substack is a quote from the brilliant Joseph Fasano poem, “For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper”.

There are many things that move me every day. Have you ever heard the Frances Ha monologue? Have you ever heard the Robin Williams quote from Good Will Hunting? Have you ever read a Lucille Clifton poem, the one about running into a new year, once, twice, every year, and then, finally one new year’s, understood it? Put all those things into an AI machine, extract the summaries in one sentence, and they flatten into nothing.

The point of living and creating art is not to tell the story right immediately. The point is that we get to tell it in a million different ways until we tell it in a way that matters to us. The point is that we get to see something told a million ways until we finally, fundamentally, understand it. Because someone in the past has miraculously captured in their work just how we feel in the present moment.

It took me ten years from when I first wrote a book to when I published a book. Every day of those early years I wished it would come sooner, that I was a better writer, that I could write the magic words that would make a publisher immediately drop everything and publish me. I now know there is nothing more precious than the decade I spent working, tearing my work apart, self actualizing, revising, rebuilding my craft, playing in the sandbox of my mind and my mind alone. That was my becoming.

Those years of labor do not linearly translate to my popularity, or sales, or critical success. I know any book deal could be my last. I write all over the place and hop across genre. My first book will probably go out of print soon. There is no commercial reward I get for putting in those long and unyielding years of work. There is only the hope that in my attempts, over and over, to write something, that one line, one book, will move someone, across space, across time. That I will have completed the communication. Maybe that’s a sour deal. But this is how I understand art to be. We do it because we have something to say, and we have things we want to share with other people.

My memories are not complete nor perfect. My brain is not a machine. But I do remember when I got my first book deal. It was a balmy August evening in Washington, DC. I got the email and I wept. I walked along the waterfront and I was, for a moment, filled with all of my past selves from the last ten years who had dreamed and worked for this moment and crafted every sentence in that book. The sweetness, the relief, the hard-fought sheer fucking joy. Nothing but time and labor could give me that.

translation

Christina Li — Tue, 06 May 2025 12:43:14 GMT

Today, my new book, The Manor of Dreams, comes out. I’m so proud of it and grateful for everyone who’s worked on it with me. I’m thrilled that it’s out in the world. For more information on the book and the events I’m doing, see my website. Here, though, I’m going to write a little bit of a different post than what I was planning.

I lost my grandfather last night. He meant the world to me and I will miss him dearly. Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote a book called Ruby Lost and Found that was dedicated to my family and that I specifically wrote for my grandparents, who had helped raised me when I was a kid and were the sweetest, gentlest souls. I was asked to write a speech last summer for ALA and I immediately thought of my 外公. If you’ll indulge me, I would love to tell the story I shared in that speech now, because I want to share it somewhere.

“I grew up in the Midwest and every day, my grandfather walked me to school and picked me up when it was over. It was about a mile or so. One day I was still at school and the sky started getting all dark at the end of the day, and the sky turned green, and a terrifying windy storm picked up, and the tornado warning came on.

They wouldn’t let us out of school. For an hour, we were in a real extended tornado drill. When they finally let us go, my grandfather was waiting for me outside. I hadn’t even realized at the time how scary it must have been for my grandfather to be walking alone, outside, in these terrifying conditions, not even knowing what a tornado was and in a place that was foreign to him. The umbrella he was carrying was entirely busted and had scratched him up. He was pretty shaken. But when I asked him if he was okay, why he left the house, he simply said, “I had to pick you up”, because he thought I would be waiting for him to and that I would get anxious if he didn’t. He had walked through a literal tornado because he was doing what he always did; he wanted to walk me home from school.

It’s no wonder I wrote a story about grandparents. I had the best ones. I lost my grandmother to dementia when I was a teenager and back then I wasn’t quite mature enough to articulate just how much I missed her and loved her. I eventually found a way. I think, as kids, when you’re young, it is difficult to come to terms with loss, to even put words to it. There is a good deal of loss in my book, Ruby Lost and Found: the loss of a grandparent, her grandmother’s loss of memory, the impending loss of a beloved Chinatown bakery due to gentrification. But at the same time, Ruby discovers that she is surrounded by such an enormous magnitude of love, from her Chinatown community, from her new friends, and the kind of love that lingers and emerges from loss. That is always hers to keep. She will not lose that.”

To me this really is what my writing is about. They are love letters. When I write them I think of my family, inherited and found. Ruby is dedicated to my family; Manor to my found family. How lucky I am to have been cared for in a way that allows me to carry that love in my stories; how lucky I am to get to do this, two years ago, and now. If anything, I will think of him and celebrate that today.

things that are feeding me

Christina Li — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 18:12:00 GMT

A list of things:

The book The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry

I first read this book when I was on a nonfiction kick as a teenager and wanted to inhale every prescriptive thing about creativity. This book emerged as a gem: it describes creativity with five core tenets: Focus (prioritizing what’s important), Relationships (cultivating healthy and supportive relationships), Energy (the motivation / energy to do things), Stimuli (bits of information and inspiration), Hours (the pure hours in a day). It also introduced the practice (which I should bring back) of bringing an index card with me and writing down things that intrigue me wherever I go, or when I read a book, I accompany it with an index card and write down passages I love, kind of like my own table of contents.

This Rainer Maria Rilke poem (the Stephen Mitchell translation) that I think about constantly:

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

This illuminating Substack post by author Edan Lepucki about social media, creativity and “the music we aren’t making”:

I have a daily screen time average that’s bordering on 7 hours. Each time I get such a notification I face it with a grim resignation. Social media makes up a lot of those hours. I have come a conclusion that there are two sides to my artistic self; there is the creative side, and there is the author side. Both are equally intrinsic. The author side is public-facing, sharing a formed book, thought, idea, aesthetic. Connecting. And social media has been incredible for that; necessary, even. But when I’m my creative self there is everything that comes with creation — uncertainty, revelations, anxieties, fixations, an ungainly rawness. That, I think, is what social media is less conducive to. The article refers to the increasingly crowdsourced creative world we find ourselves in, about musicians who may subconsciously adjust their music or angle it towards the playlists and existing sounds on Spotify; what, then, is the music they’re not making because they don’t think it’ll be palatable, viral, popular?

I don’t think I’ll quit social media. But it was nice to read the article above; it makes me think about what my relationship to social media should be, how it often encroaches on my creative self, deflates it, maybe. It’s like when I’m on the subway and I look up from my phone to see that the majority of the train car is also on their phones, feel some dense sense of melancholic awareness, and then go right back to looking at my phone.

Permission to do nothing:

I have been feeling a constant urge to be working all the time or to be on the move doing something. I think part of this came from my last few years, when I was always on one deadline or another. I used to pride myself on being able to hit any deadline and work through holidays and wake up at 7 AM on Sundays to work. But recently it’s gotten to a place where I would basically shame myself for doing any leisure activity because I wasn’t working.

I was looking at this Twitter / X account that posts an absolutely serene picture of a five-mile walk they went on that day and then another picture of the meal they made. That’s the whole post. It makes me so incredibly happy. I’ve read stuff on this concept of “deep work”, coined by Cal Newport, about people who were incredibly prolific, but really, truly filled their days with doing what seemingly was nothing except thinking, and in turn produced profound work. I’ve also read about the death of daydreaming, in which people feel the increasing need to fill their “nonproductive hours” with some activity — being on their phones, watching something, in some act of consumption.

I’m giving myself permission to do absolutely nothing once in a while, partially to rehabilitate my burnout, partially because I want to accept more deep work and daydreaming into my life. I think it’ll bring me closer to that creator side I talked about above.

my third book is out soon <3

Christina Li — Sat, 04 May 2024 11:56:37 GMT

Hello dear friends who have allowed me to subject them to my newsletter!

My third book, True Love and Other Impossible Odds, is out soon!!! IN A LITTLE OVER A WEEK

Cover art by Christina Chung! I am the luckiest

It’s pitched as Lady Bird meets The Sex Lives of College Girls and follows a first-year college student, Grace Tang, who invents a class algorithm that pairs people with their perfect romantic campus match, only to have everything thrown into question as she explores questions of love, identity, and her past. I wrote this book as a college senior navigating my own questions of identity and love, and it is so surreal, almost four years later, to get to share it with you soon (May 14th!!!)

Preorder the Book!

If you’d like to preorder a SIGNED and PERSONALIZED copy of True Love, preorder HERE from my local lovely independent bookstore, Books of Wonder!

If you’d like to preorder it from another independent bookstore, here is a list on my website.

And here are the links to preorder from Target, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon

I can’t emphasize enough how much preorders matter to authors’ careers! They help project sales numbers and demonstrate enthusiasm to the publisher, which is so so appreciated.

Submit Your Preorder for an Art Print!

If you’ve preordered a copy of my book, fill out this form to receive a free art print of my main characters, Grace and Julia :)

Get an Art Print

Enter a Giveaway for a Free Copy!

Goodreads is giving away 5 copies of TRUE LOVE!

Enter the Giveaway

Come Celebrate with me at my NYC Launch Event!

And lastly, for any NYC friends in the area, I’ll be celebrating the release of this book on Thursday, May 16th, at 6 PM at Books of Wonder, in conversation with dear friends Tashie Bhuiyan and Chloe Gong! I would love to see you!

RSVP for the Event

That is all for now! I will stop hawking my wares at you (for today)

i give a speech

Christina Li — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 22:03:54 GMT

I recently got the incredible opportunity to give the keynote speech the New York Public Library to an amazing group of children’s librarians. We’re approaching a year of Ruby Lost and Found, and it was wonderful to talk about places we love, people we love, the journeys we go on, cats, and the lasting, life-changing impact of our beloved childhood librarians. Below is a transcript of the speech for The Archive now known as my newsletter.

Thank you so much to the New York Public Library for having me here today. It’s an honor to stand in your presence and to be able to give this speech. I love the theme about journeys, and so I want to talk about that in my literary and personal life. But first, since Ruby is about places, I want to talk about places, and how I came to be in this place of New York City.

So I had a friend visiting me a while back. She wanted to know the best places to go in New York. I’ve been in this city for about two years and I consider it home. And so it is a very fair assumption that I know things about this city, like places to see and go and everything that can well equip a tourist. But in reality I am very bad at that. I haven’t actually been to many places of note. When I leave a subway station I still get turned around and confused. When my friends come I beg them to navigate for me. But anyway. This is not a keynote speech about my directional deficiencies, so I’ll leave it at that. All that is to say, my favorite places in this city might not be remarkable to anyone at all. My very favorite place in this city, actually, is a little grocery mart in the West Village. I first walked into that store three years ago, when I was living in New York for the summer, because it was really hot out that day and I wanted to grab a snack and cool down. There was this little gray cat standing there and she came right up to me. I spent a good half hour petting her, and she was so friendly to me, asking for pets, rolling over, as if I was someone she’d known her entire lifetime. I forgot entirely what I came into this store to get. I grabbed a pack of candy to make up for it and walked up to the register, where this very kind elderly man was just watching all this happen. He had a bunch of pictures of the cat framed around the register. I asked him about the cat. He said that she was fourteen years old, and that her name is Candy. I looked at the bag of candy in my hands, and then back at the cat, who was now entrancing yet another visitor, and immediately understood why, and I felt this immense kinship with this man and his beloved sweet kitty who probably charmed so many people to buy candy just so they could spend a little more time with her. And that was the moment I became certain I wanted to live in New York and rearranged my entire future post graduation plans to make that happen.

There are other places I love in this city that probably are of zero significance to others. I love this one pier on the West Side Highway. I love this tiny garden on Greenwich. I love this one ramen place in Astoria, on my favorite street in the city, because that’s where I go to see one of my best friends all the time. Similarly, Ruby Lost and Found is a book about favorite places. I call it my love letter to San Francisco, because it’s about the city, and about a girl remembering the scavenger hunts she used to do with her grandfather, her Ye-Ye, every single summer, and specifically the last scavenger hunt he did before he passed away. Each year, he would sketch up a scavenger hunt for her that starts at their favorite bakery, and then takes her to places that hold significance for him, or for her, or for the both of them.

The thing is, Ruby Lost and Found is about San Francisco, but it isn’t a guide to the objective best places in San Francisco. I should say that if you are looking to travel to San Francisco, Ruby Lost and Found should not be at the top of the list of books to read. She doesn’t go to the Golden Gate Bridge, or Lombard street, or any places of architectural and historical significance. Instead, she goes to a small Japanese eraser shop. She plays Go with her grandfather in an unassuming park. She goes to a butterfly exhibit at the science museum because she did a class project on pollinators and her grandfather thinks she’d love the exhibit. She goes to the bakery in Chinatown every year, this bakery that is tucked in the corner of the city, because of the delicious treats, because t the place that holds significance for her and her grandfather. It’s the place her grandparents reconnected decades ago and fell in love. During the course of the book, when Ruby’s spending the summer after her Ye-Ye passes grounded with her grandmother at a Chinatown senior center and when she realizes that this beloved bakery is at risk of folding and being priced out because of the very present issue of gentrification, she wants — and tries — to do everything she can to save this place, because it’s her favorite place, because it’s the place where her grandfather is most present. This story, of course, is inspired by my own late grandparents, who took care of me since my parents both worked full time. They would always take me to my favorite places in the neighborhood, similar to Ruby’s scavenger hunts. And they would never pass up a Chinatown bakery.

Ultimately, Ruby Lost and Found is about a girl and her grandfather who cared enough to create scavenger hunts for her, about her grandmother, who is slowly losing her memory to dementia, and her community and city, which is changing beyond her recognition. These people form the throughline of her hometown for her. This book is about the time in her life when she makes the heartbreaking and very human realization that everybody eventually does - that sometimes you don’t actually have as much time as you think you do with the people you love. But they do linger in the places that you shared together, and that memory returns to you again, and again. Sometimes on my runs through Central Park, I see these worn-down benches with placards that hold so much devotion and optimism and dedication. I think about the one bench I saw the other day, where this entire extended family wrote a note to their daughter who was about to come into the world and told her how excited they were for her arrival. The placard dates back to 1966. I think of her now, this woman walking around in the world, and how sweet and extraordinary it is that she has a bench to herself, this special place in Central Park forever. She didn't need to do a single thing or prove herself to receive this love. It was already always hers to keep. And I think that really is what location and geographies mean to me; that our memories and experiences and people we love anchor us to certain places and once they do, even the most ordinary and unassuming of places are changed forever for us.

I want to shift gears and talk about my writing and publishing journey. I know when writers talk about their careers and trials and tribulations in publishing, it’s always a hero’s journey of some sort. We talk about the piles of rejection that we have to slog through. We talk about the hundreds of No’s that we got, and that one life-changing instance in which we get that one yes, and another, until we finally see our book on the shelves in front of us. But today I won’t talk about the moment my agent offered representation, or the moment I first got the news that I would be a published author. I want to talk about the most important rejection of my professional life and the person who gave that to me.

This was nine years ago and I had been querying already for a year. This was a great powerhouse agent. I’d attended one of her writing seminars, one of those Writer’s Digest ones. She had liked my query and requested my manuscript. And a month or so later, she rejected me, and it was crushing. But this rejection letter was almost a page long. Usually agent rejections on manuscripts aren’t more than a few sentences. It’s fully understandable — they have so much to do, and so many books to read, so they simply don’t have the time for detailed feedback. But this one agent took the time of day to do it. She gave me precise and thought-provoking notes that I couldn’t have come up with myself, and she wished me the best. And that was the best thing that anyone could do for my career at the time, because the truth was, my book wasn’t good enough then. It would have been so easy for her to pass on it with a brief note. But she sat down, and said kind things about the book, and pointed out the ways it could be better. I revised it with her notes in mind, and I grew and learned as a writer, and eventually, that was the book that did get me my agent a year later. My journey doesn't end there. That book went out on submission and didn't sell. I walked away from writing for years. I finally came back to write a practice novel that I thought would help me re-learn the joy of writing and that book became my debut novel, Clues to the Universe. But this agent's rejection back in 2015, this passing act of compassion made a difference to the trajectory of my career as a writer.

We have never crossed paths since. There have been other incredible people who have helped me to get to where I am today. I could write entire other speeches on how much I love my literary agent, how lucky I am to get to work with my editors, and how fortunate I am to have my friends and my family and my support system. I have also gotten many other rejections since, some helpful, some not. But when I think about the defining moments of my publishing career, I think of this agent, this one kind person who reached out to help me when I was alone, and lost, and gave me the time of day.

There is one last person that I want to talk about, and I saved the best for the last. I want to talk about my middle school librarian, Mrs. Cronin.

Mrs. Cronin is the smartest person I know, and she cares more about books than anybody. My English teacher would say that Mrs. Cronin read a book a day and that’s not even an exaggeration. We would have library time about once a month. We got the after recess slot, so we were a bunch of sweaty sixth graders who were now confined to a very quiet room full of books. But Mrs. Cronin managed to make books fun and engaging. She would make entire PowerPoint decks with detailed summaries of the books that she wanted to talk about. She would pitch the books that had just been released that she was excited for. If you expressed even a whiff of passing intrigue, she’d place it in your hands and encourage you to check it out. She made sure to keep the shelves well-stocked with everything she could get. And if you had read a book in a series and liked it, she would move heaven and earth to buy the rest of the books.

We had these reading lists every year, these state-mandated or district mandated lists, the standard ones that we get in our English classes. Those books are very significant, and there’s a reason why they’re assigned every year. But not everyone resonates with every classic book on every list. Mrs. Cronin wanted to find the best books for each and every one of her students. And she was sharp. She observed the books that we checked out. She asked about them when we returned them, and she could tell if we liked them, or if we didn’t. And the next time we all visited her library, she made sure to personally recommend a book that she thought that we would like based on what we had read.

Her superpower, above everything, were her recommendations. I remember that she noticed I liked the Fablehaven series, and she recommended me Gregor the Overlander. She noticed that I liked Wendy Mass, so she recommended me Rebecca Stead, who has written some of my favorite books, who has since become my North Star when I write my middle grades. She noticed that I had already read the Giver, and so she recommended me the dystopian YA books that were just coming out at that time, most notably, Legend by Marie Lu, which I would say is the book that made me want to write children’s literature. She would place the books she thought we would like on the front display shelf, where it could easily be reached and seen and noticed. She read all the books that were more obscure or hadn’t really made it onto any lists, or had less attention, and she gave equal push to those. Of course she had read all the classics. Of course she knew which books had been part of the literary canon for decades. But still she took the time to get to know all of us and recommend the books that she knew that we would want to read, with stories that were personally resonant with us. Just like how Ruby’s grandfather takes painstaking care to craft the scavenger hunt stops that he thinks will have meaning for her, my middle school librarian transformed that blank slate of a library, that vast and intimidating collection, into a navigable space. It trained me to search for the books that I wanted, to seek out the stories that lay beyond standard lists, and to find the stories that would go on to resonate with me, teach me about the world, and save my life.

Mrs. Cronin also took notice that I wasn’t only a reader, but that I was a writer as well. This was something I didn’t know how to express. Writing seems like a nebulous hobby. It’s not something like organized sports or something that everyone does. My librarian was the first person I told that I wanted to write books. I was also a kid who, like many kids in middle school, like Ruby in my book, was in a hard and weird social space. Friendships were changing, school was hard, and everything was complicated. I was very shy and withdrawn. So, naturally, I spent a lot of lunches in the library. And Mrs. Cronin took notice. She made a Creative Writing club, which would meet weekly in the library on Tuesdays. She pulled in kids from other classes, kids who also quietly loved reading and loved writing, like me. And she sat and ate lunch with us while we would all go in a circle sharing our stories. She made these solitary lunches into a shared space, where we could all connect with each other. That was my community. And the best MFA program ever.

To this day I am still realizing the magnitude of my librarian’s efforts to instill the love of books and writing. She gave up her lunches so kids would feel less lonely. She took the time to get to know everyone. She brought so much unbounded dedication to her job, to a middle school no less, to a bunch of antsy kids who probably preferred to be at recess. But she made us care about books. Because of her we learned that reading is a personal journey, and that there is a book for everyone, and that there are so many stories that will connect with us if we care to seek it out.

So I talk about all these personal stories because these are the people who formed the throughline of my journey for me. I’m here because of my grandparents, who gave me my love of Chinatown and so much more. I’m here because of kind industry professionals who decided to point me in the right direction. And above all, I’m here because of my childhood librarian, who gave me my love of books, who believed in me so much that I started believing in myself.

I am deeply humbled to be here today with the most impressive, accomplished, and passionate librarians of New York. Stories are the most important things we have during this time. They are the facilitators of information and empathy. They help us bear witness to the world. Sharing those stories is a crucial undertaking. As authors, our stories would simply be these lonely, untethered islands floating around the ether if not for your advocacy and outreach and excitement. The work that librarians do is tireless and often under appreciated. I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the immense conviction and necessary courage it takes, in this day and age, with books being banned and contested, to face down that bigotry and vitriol and safeguard that truth-seeking. You seek out stories and help shape the formative years of children and their own journeys. You hand them books that can change the trajectories of their lives, or form their own ideas and opinions, or serve as lifelines, or help them see themselves and feel less alone in this world. Libraries are safe havens for many kids. Helping them navigate that space, to seek out the stories and books that matter to them, to make all this accessible to them, makes a universe of difference to kids. I know it did for me.

I love the New York public library. I love New York. It’s my favorite place I’ve lived in so far, and I’ve lived across the country. I grew up in the Midwest, and then went to California for my college years, and now I’m here. I’ve been to my fair share places in between. In each city one of the first things I do is to look up where the library is. At the end of the day that is always my anchor. There is always a library. In Ruby Lost and Found, it’s also no mistake that the second scavenger hunt stop, after the bakery, is a little free library. It is one of the things that makes her city home for her. Thank you so much for being here, for the work that you do, and thank you for this time.

Note: this speech has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

the bridge

Christina Li — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 22:52:39 GMT

I am back in my Ye-Ye’s apartment in Hangzhou, in eastern China. It is a beautiful city that rests around half a lake. The other half is ringed by mountains. It is very bitterly cold in this apartment, colder than New York, and the heating only works in one room at a time, and the stove has long gone out, but being here feels good and ancestral in a way. He’s had this place for the past fifty years. I actually wrote my debut novel in here, or part of it. I remember being here last time in the summer, filling a research book with color-coded sticky notes. I like being tied to something, to some personal history. There is a very old willow chair here that I jumped on so much my foot went clean through. I borrowed that detail to put into Ruby Lost and Found, the book I published this year, the book in which I finally could express the complicated magnitude of care, love, guilt, and gratitude that I feel for my grandparents.

I always wonder how that book came about. I didn’t even come up with the idea until I was under pressure, on deadline for a second book I’d committed to. And now I can’t fathom not having thought of it all this time. Maybe it has been living inside of me and all this time I have been subconsciously learning, growing into the person that could find those words. I could not have written this book at 16; that is for sure. I have grown leaps and bounds, since 16, since 18, when I wrote Clues. My books are infinitely better today than they used to be. They are about things that are important to me and that I have only learned about in the last few years.

I am also acutely aware that my Mandarin has gotten worse since childhood. I spent my first year in this country and yet now I misread words all the time. I forget idioms. The Mandarin translation of Clues to the Universe came out and is being taught in fifth grade curriculums in mainland China (!!!); if I am being entirely frank, I actually don’t know if I could fully read through the entire book fluently. These are my words. I thought of them while on a family trip to Hangzhou, in this apartment I had intermittently spent my childhood in, in this place I am so immediately connected to. I look at the beautiful copy of Clues I was so incredibly lucky to get (my first translation! In a language my loved ones can understand!) and I’m elated beyond words. There is also a small part of me that feels like I have let someone down.

What have I been doing all this time? Sure, I speak it with my parents, and when I go into Chinatowns. But all this time, in the past years specifically, I have not been using it regularly. Instead I have been reading books in English, expanding my vocabulary, refining my command of the language so that I can continue to write books about my experience in the diaspora.

Of course this experience is all my own. This is a shortcoming on my part. There are a thousand ways I could have mitigated this: I could have watched shows, practiced, read, self-studied. Things must be preserved intentionally and taken care of. This all I can start. Of course I’m complicit in the erosion of my first language and that will be apparent in any future potential generations. There is a moment in Ruby that I always loved, and that is when she describes the passage of Mandarin in her family as a sixty year game of telephone. In spite of her love for her grandparents and her devotion to her community, her Mandarin is imperfect. It is one of the most honest things I have written.

I think what I am trying to say is: sometimes, my articulation, my increasing command over the English language, feels like an act of betrayal. The worse I get at Mandarin, the better I get at describing the loss in translation between my two languages and the past and present; the grief and love; the complication that seeds in the in-between. The better I get at describing history, of certain phrases and words, and ideas, the more distance I get from my origin. I have built the bridge and now I watch it fracture behind me.

a story of a year

Christina Li — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 06:44:06 GMT

***originally published in October: I decided to leave it up in the archives. personal narrative and all that, right?

…

The first caveat is that this will stay up for a day. The second thing is that this is not the whole truth, it’s not entirely fiction, but it lingers in a halfway space between the two in a way that is more honest than anything. Hence the first line. I’ve mostly used my corner of the internet to talk about my book and the work I do. What life updates I give are peppered in and packaged neatly. I just moved to a new city. The leaves are changing, I’m discovering seasons again, I found my favorite new local cafe to write in. Which are all true. I think of my September (now October) self a year ago, and those were in fact the things I’d noticed, the expositional details that would set this particular era.

The day I met him he had exactly a year left in the city. I didn’t know that at the time, nor would I have cared if I did. A year is a gentle eternity. An expanse of time. A year prior to that day I met him, I had just moved into my third-floor graduate apartment at Stanford, in that late September, a place with beautiful, aged stucco stairs, still walkable to the undergraduate campus I remembered but still far enough that it felt like a liminal space. I felt like a planet that shifted from its orbit a little bit but could still feel the familiar heat of the sun. It was a wonderful, uncertain year. I finally, finally fell in love with school. And I inched toward New York, bit by bit.

And then I was in the city I’d dreamed of.

He’d dreamed of this place, too, he told me. We sat across a table in an outdoor terrace section that would have felt lovely in the late summer, or even that week before. But temperatures had sunk and now I’d locked into myself, teeth clenched, determined not to be seen as cold and shivering. I kept the tone of my voice even. He had a playful smile and bright eyes that made me want to be clever with him. I wanted to appear unbothered, a little detached even. He was hot and I wanted to remain cool about it. I didn’t want him to know I was cold. I didn’t want him to know that my mind was gaping with a deluge of thoughts and anxieties and marvels about this city that I’d just moved to. On previous dates with other people I’d even lied about how long I’d been here, stretch one month into three, into half a year. They could tell, I think. Now I would be able to. But he didn’t press me on it. Instead he told me about how he’d worked and lived and went to school all over Europe, that he’d grown up in the Caribbean, but New York was the place he’d wanted to land at, for a little bit of time. I’m just here for a bit, he told me. On a rotational program for work.

That’s what I ended up telling myself over the next few weeks, and then months. He’s just here for a bit, I told myself, as I saw him again next week. Not for long, I’d shrug to myself as I emerged into torrential rain from a small indie concert on the Lower East Side to run to his apartment in the East Village. There was a magnetism about him that drew me to him, time and time again, but I always did so in that cooled, detached manner. We went days, weeks without texting, exchanging perfunctory correspondences. I went ahead and lived my life, learned to steady myself on the subway rides to work, dashed to book events after, sent emails, did copyedits, lugged Facebook Marketplace furniture across state lines, cooked shitty meals, revised books, worked, went to drinks, split joints in parks, prepared for my book release, and went on other dates with other people. I trekked to Williamsburg for the weekend in the dead of winter, saw the old apartment that I shared one summer with an old love, that same apartment through which I first discovered New York and in which we broke up, and remembered why I was detached in the first place.

He texted me happy new year and I took two days to respond.

Eventually as spring came around he emerged in conversations with friends and they would probe at my expression, probably the involuntary hint of a smile. They told me I liked him. I repeated the same refrain; he’s not here for long. What’s the point? He remained cool too, never asking more of me than I asked of him. I half-invited him to my book launch. I briefly thought about him in a plane on a work trip. There would be certain moments that would still me for a moment. He would call me darling in the most gentle of tones, in that low voice of his with his French-British accent. He asked me about my favorite treat and surprised me with it, weeks later, unprompted. I told him offhandedly I was a writer and found out months later he listened to the audiobook. As the days became warm I brought him ice cream and took him to my favorite noodle place in Chinatown. But we never talked about what we were to each other. I never allowed myself to fold and neither did he. I instead made a private Spotify playlist and then became increasingly puzzled by the songs I was adding.

I didn’t know I was in love with him until I visited Paris this summer, the late summer, sat on the subway, and for a strange moment I looked over and wondered which trains he took during his years here. The French words that he’d taught me, that slipped in through early mornings and late nights, came through in snippets around me. I imagined reaching through time and space and see him, the younger version of him, the university student version of him, on this train. I realized I was ruminating on our past selves that led to this moment, to the future selves, and then, finally: I realized.

And there wasn’t much time left.

Someone always leaves first, Richard Siken says. There’s always an uneven, staggered exit. But what about entry? Does someone fall first? Or is there a simultaneous, parallel love? We’d been circling around it, the both of us, each unwilling to concede, each having made like a bandit away from our pasts, from the aftermath of our previous loves. It wasn’t meant to happen and yet it did. He thawed me. Maybe I did for him too. When we talked about our lives now it wasn’t to intrigue or impress. It was, quite simply, because we wanted to know all about each other. And the limitations of the year, which I had once been so frivolous with and so dismissive of, became very apparent to me.

In the end there was no last minute airport run or alteration of plans. He had a six a.m. flight; I went with him at 3 to the airport to see him off. I started crying noisily and messily next to the security line, so much so that the girl next to me asked if I was okay. I told her I would be. We hugged each other; she was seeing off her mother. I watched the daylight break and then I went to wait for the first train that would take me back into the city. I switched cars and walked home in the misty morning and when I got home I stripped off the clothes I wore on the subway and climbed into my sheets and that was it: it had been a year, exactly a year, to the very date, of when I met him. I tried to fall asleep and wondered if this was something you could sleep off, because how else does one cope with this enormity of a love that has nowhere to go?

It had been a little over a year of me coming into this city and a year of coming into myself. It was a year that at once was not at all about him but now that I look at it he is everywhere, dotted through, like disparate stars you piece once together into constellations, and then you can’t see it any other way. It was an infinite kindness I did not think I deserved. I think of what he told me on the way to the airport: I can’t wait for the next version of yourself. He’d pressed a kiss to my forehead then, unselfish and unpossessive; he is willing to behold me, to witness me grow into my next eras and still hold love for me while he steps away. I can’t wait to see what you become.

5. Ruby Lost and Found is out!!

Christina Li — Tue, 16 May 2023 14:31:01 GMT

My second book, Ruby Lost and Found, is out today!

There are so many things I could say but I’ll keep it brief: this is the book that I’ve been trying to write my whole life and my most personal yet. I’ve woven in strands from my entire life: my childhood trips to Chinatown, my love for San Francisco, the scavenger hunt I went on during my freshman year of college, the monarch butterflies that reside in the park near my family home, and my dear relationships with my grandparents. It is a love letter to hometowns and to the family, friends, and communities who have raised you. I’m so glad she’s here.

Here are some places to order from:

Independent Bookstores (including, but not limited to):

Books of Wonder (NY) — I will be doing signed and personalized copies on all orders placed by today!
Anderson’s Bookshop (IL)
Astoria Bookshop (NY)
BookPeople (TX)
Books Inc. (CA)
Brilliant Books (MI)
Cafe Con Libros (NY)
Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore (CA)
McNally Jackson (NY)
Oblong Books (NY)
Parnassus Books (TN)
Tattered Cover Book Store (CO)

Barnes and Noble

Amazon

Bookshop

HarperCollins Website

And for friends around New York City, I’ll be doing an in-person launch event at Yu and Me Books tomorrow, May 17, from 6-7 PM. More info on the event is here. I hope to see you there!

I will now be going to get myself a very decadent slice of cake.

4. The Best Craft Advice I've Ever Received

Christina Li — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 22:00:12 GMT

Hi everyone! Happy new year! (I say this as we are almost a month into the new year, lmfao). And happy lunar new year of the rabbit / cat! It's really good to be back. I can officially say that it's the publication year for my beloved second book, Ruby Lost and Found! I’m really excited to start talking and sharing more about it for the new year, but for now, I’m going to drop the preorder links here.

I also wanted to state that Ruby Lost and Found is a HarperCollins book, and I stand in solidarity with the HarperCollins Union, who as of today has been on strike for 55 days, and their fight for a fair contract. You can read more about the strike and ways to support them here. And as for preordering, I suggest preordering books from indie bookstores and the HarperCollins Union-affiliated Bookshop page.

What has Christina been up to?

So I took a long break between the October issue of the newsletter and the January one. I had some deadlines for Ruby, and I also started a rewrite of this book I was working on. For the last three months, I’ve been pretty immersed up to my eyeballs on it. When I get really into a project, I always take some form of a social media hiatus. All my thoughts pour into the book. I’m thinking about it on my subway commute, I’m untangling plot threads on the weekends, I’m making folders of Spotify playlist and probably fucking up my algorithm for my Wrapped, as I do year after year (sometimes when I’m working on a particular scene I listen to a song over and over again, sometimes dozens of times, and before I know it Cornfield Chase by Hans Zimmer has made it onto my top five songs of the year). But also I liked living more of an offline existence in general. I got to see my lovely friends, enjoy holiday things, read some truly incredible books, both fiction and nonfiction, and be with my family.

All this is to say, I’m glad I’m back. And I’m really excited to talk today about the single best piece of craft advice I’ve ever received.

Finding — and Keeping — the Heart of a Story

So I was talking to my friend on the subway months ago about learning and memory and how sometimes it’s hard to intentionally commit things to memory. And my friend said something that I’ve been thinking about ever since: one of the strongest ways to commit something to memory is to actually have encountered something first and unintentionally re-encounter it later on.

Which, at the time, made so much sense to me. Have you ever seen or heard something referenced, only to re-encounter it later in another in completely unrelated circumstances? Have you ever tried learning something, forgot all about it, only to learn it again years later? And then it feels like some kind of strange subliminal synchrony, a click, sort of? And then you remember it, whether you intend to or not. You don’t forget about it.

In 2014, when I was in my Writer Craft era (as in obsessively reading as many books as I could about the Art of writing), I read this book called Writing the Heart of Your Story by C.S. Lakin. The main idea of that book had been that every story has this vein through it, an idea that comes up again and again. I realize that there are many words for this: theme, motif, etc., but the word heart just sounded so apt. Every story has the surface plot — and every story has a thematic heartbeat, an idea that comes back time and time again.

My upcoming book, Ruby Lost and Found, has a plot. Ruby spends the summer with her grandmother, who is starting to forget things, as the city around them is changing due to gentrification. That’s the logline; that’s the pitch. That’s what I think of as the mind of a story. But if I were to dig into my story I would say that it’s a dissertation around the ideas of memory and home. Those ideas don’t necessarily come up every chapter or every scene. But those ideas run through the story like underlying veins. I may reference them in a particular scene, and then subtly bring it up several chapters later. That underlying current—that’s the heart.

My hope, as the writer, is for the reader to encounter and re-encounter these ideas throughout the book, in an organic way that feels like solving a puzzle. I want to make it feel like an unintentional, hard-earned discovery. Synchrony. It’s like how movie soundtracks have running iterative themes that don’t pack an emotional punch until the final scene. Some of my most rewarding experiences with books or movies or shows are when I don’t even realize the themes until I realize at the very end that I’ve been following them and picking up on them throughout the story. The storyteller has been deftly tracing it through the story all along, like Ariadne’s thread. That subtle act of recall elevates the emotional impact of a book.

This piece of writing advice has carried me a long, long way. The more I write, the more I realize that while I can have the plot of a story, I can’t start writing it without the heartbeat.

That’s all I have for now! Thank you for letting me resurface in your inboxes with a very rambly craft post :)

What’s currently on my mind:

Currently reading (and loving): The Many Fortunes of Maya by Nicole D. Collier, The House Swap by Yvette Clark, Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, and Friday I’m in Love by Camryn Garrett

Currently listening to: $20 by boygenius, Oceans and Engines by NIKI, Landfill by Daughter, Love Language by Kehlani

Preorder my book!

My Website

Follow me on Instagram

3. Announcing My Second Book!

Christina Li — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 19:00:55 GMT

Happy October! I’m loving this first rush of fall: the changing of the leaves, the first chill in the air when I set out for my morning commute, the need to pick up every pumpkin-flavored thing at the grocery store. September and the beginning of October were wonderfully busy — I got to attend events, see some lovely friends, and just in general get the thrill of feeling like an author in the city. Now that it’s mid-October, I’m so so ecstatic to share a huge thing I’ve been waiting to tell you about ever since, well, forever.

SO. My second book!!!!

I’m writing another middle grade!!!

It’s out May 16, 2023, from Quill Tree Books!

Cover Reveal

Cover Artist: the inimitable Sian James

(Look at she!!! I have been staring at this cover non-stop since I’ve gotten it, it truly is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my inbox)

Preorder Now!

Synopsis:

It’s the summer after seventh grade, and Ruby Chu is feeling more lost than ever.

Her best friends aren’t speaking to her. She ended the year in detention. Her sister’s about to leave for college. Ruby’s still grieving her grandfather, Ye-Ye, when it seems like no one else is. And without Ye-Ye and his annual scavenger hunts across their hometown of San Francisco, their hometown doesn’t really feel like home anymore.

Things get worse when Ruby’s forced to spend the summer with her distant grandmother, Nai-Nai, in Chinatown. But the looming shutdown of a beloved former scavenger hunt stop, May’s Bakery, and a secret about Nai-Nai threaten to change everything. Though Ruby feels out of place, maybe this summer of forming unexpected friendships and fighting to save the bakery will help Ruby reconnect with the world — and discover what it means to find home again.

The Story of Ruby Lost and Found

RUBY LOST AND FOUND is a story I always say is “‘The Joy Luck Club’ as a middle grade book”. I didn’t know how much I’d wanted to write it until I did. There are many roots to this story; the deepest and furthest-stretching influences were my weekends spent in Chinatown when I was growing up near Chicago. That place and the bakery we visited every time now lives in the nostalgic corner of my brain. When I used to travel with my family, they used to search high and low for a Chinatown, or any hint of Chinese food in the city. I used to be confused, but now I realize — food is home, and when you’re in a place you don’t know, you go out of your way to find your home.

When I was in the Bay Area for college, I was in that period of freshman year where everything is very exciting and very overwhelming. I felt like I was adrift, in my own identity and in my sense of place. One of the first weekends one of the orientation activities we did was to go into San Francisco on a scavenger hunt activity. As we walked up and down the hilly streets and traversed the city, I came across the Dragon Gate of Chinatown and stopped. There it was: this other pocket in a home across the country where I grew up. (The history of Chinatowns is fascinating, too, but that’s something I’d love get to another day).

I also love multigenerational family stories. I adore my own grandparents dearly. In the summer before my junior year of college, I was working in Washington D.C. and saw the movie The Farewell in a basement theater with a friend. After the movie ended we just sat in that basement with the lights coming back on, weeping. I loved seeing the main character’s relationship with her grandmother and missed my own late grandmother very much. Later on I knew I wanted to write a story about a girl and her grandmother. I also knew I wanted to write a story about a big, sprawling family — not only in the sense of the traditional family unit with people who are related by birth, but also a big found family, one with friends and community members and a crowd of loving grandmothers and aunties who bicker over card games and always sneak you desserts. I also wanted to write a story about memory as well: then memory of places you grow up in, and what happens when those places and those memories begin to shift away.

That is how RUBY LOST AND FOUND came about: as a love letter to Chinatowns, a love letter to San Francisco, a love letter to grandparents and found family, and a love letter to my own personal history and where I came from.

I’m so very excited to share it with you come May. <3

More about the book here

2. Life and Life Balance

Christina Li — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 19:01:19 GMT

Hello! I’m really excited to writing to you one month later (maybe these will be vaguely monthly newsletters!)

What is Christina up to?

I have since accumulated all my furniture! Bookshelves are mounted, plants acquired, and I even have a shiny new library card (which I personally think is a hallmark of settling into a new place). I’m entering copyedits for my 2023 MG book soon, and just turned in my TRUE LOVE draft. So now I’m enjoying some of my free time, watching the leaves change colors and lighting my various scented candles (next task is recruiting a solid lineup of fall and holiday candles), and aiming to return to a project I started working on at the beginning of this year.

I’ve also been going to book events! It’s been wonderful getting to meet people and hear from my favorite authors! Last month I went to the launch for R.F. Kuang’s Babel, and just yesterday I had the incredible experience of going to Caroline Gertler’s and Melissa Dassori’s book event to celebrate Where You’ve Got to Be and J.R. Silver Writes Her World. It’s been so so fun!

Now, onto the very long-winded thought of this edition:

Life and Life balance: on Writing, Devotion, and Artistic work

Starting a new project is like falling in love. There’s nothing like it. You get dizzy. It permeates all corners of your mind. The more you feed it, the more it takes over.

The other day when I was talking with my friend Joelle (who has a brilliant and funny Substack of her own here and is also the author of the forthcoming Their Vicious Games, which you should immediately add on Goodreads) who mentioned that just like with a 9-5 day job, I needed to set boundaries on my writing time, too. A “close the laptop and take your mind elsewhere” moment in the day.

And I thought, oh?

Because I’d never really thought of writing that way before. Writing is a form of art, and I’d read an endless amount of books on the artistic life (all the Bird by Birds that I could conceivably consume over the years). I always believed that as an artist, you’re in collaboration with the muse, and so you let it lead you wherever it wants — when it wants. I stay up in the late hours of the night putting together book aesthetics, and wake up in the predawn hours, hopped up on nothing but my own adrenaline, to type down a scene in Scrivener as fast as I humanly can. There is no 9-5. The work slips in — at night, when I’m thinking of story ideas, or during the weekends, when I’m on a run, when I hear a song, when I’m out at dinner with friends.

That is the narrative of an artist. If there is one thing that defines our practice, it is devotion. An unflagging, deep, sometimes unhinged devotion that makes us cut back on sleep and ignore our obligations. We develop an enamored and slightly obsessive passion, and in turn, we produce beautiful art.

Every time I’m consumed by a new idea or a project, it is like a whirlwind romance with the buzziest of honeymoon periods. I go to coffee shops with my notebook and stay up late at night thinking about it like I’m waiting for a text from someone I have a crush on. There is no work life balance, because your art is your life. Your work blends into life. You are defined, quite literally, by the work, the output you produce, and your devotion to it.

Or your obsession.

In other news, I recently got into K-Pop. I’m discovering so much great new music! It’s wonderful. I bring this up to mention two songs that are related to my concept of a devotional artist. The first is Red Lights by Stray Kids. The Korean title is “강박” — which, to my understanding, literally translates to “compulsion”. The song talks about devotion to work from a musician’s perspective, and how that obsession with their work sometimes turns unhealthy. You become driven — compelled — by another force. The English translation of some of the lyrics are below:

“But I know, you and me
There's no other way
No matter how hard I try to run away, set the mic up
Until the moon falls asleep, even deeper
I really wanna know, yeah
I've already lost control, oh”

The love burns. Sometimes it consumes you —and sometimes you burn out.

It happens often in the artistic pursuits. Your heart lurches towards this vision and the rest of you is racing to catch up. There is a natural impulse to wrap yourself around your art, to let it become your identity. The hours melt away. Your nerves are jangly. I wish I could describe what it feels like to work on a book, why it becomes an appealing thing to sweat in your chair and churn out a story instead of relaxing, taking a break, and going out and having fun. In any standard day job, you set boundaries. You balance life and work — or you strive to. There are on hours and off hours and even the occasional happy hour. But here, when the art isn’t necessarily defined as work, when it becomes a hobby, an interest, a part of your identity, a part of your life—

Then what?

And what happens when you fall out of love?

BTS’s song “Black Swan” talks about the fate of a musician who, having devoted everything to their passion, no longer find a spark and feel trapped — on the stage, and in the studio. They have encased themselves in their identity as an artist, and as that passion dissolves, so does their sense of self. The title and music video alludes to the 2010 film Black Swan, in which the ballerina has a complete and total psychological and physical breakdown and subsequently achieves what she believes is a “perfect” performance. She compromises everything toward that ideal of artistic excellence — and she achieves it at an ultimate cost.

We judge artists based on their work, and on that singular devotion. We hear of artists pulling compromising on things — self-care, friendships, family time. But then they produce dazzling art, the world consumes it and lauds the artist, and then the artist can continue to define themselves as such. There is little nuance for burnout, for rest, for time away to cultivate an enriching and soul-nourishing life outside of artistic output. Countdown accounts and twitter bots speculate daily on whether musicians have released a long-awaited album. Authors apologize when we go on hiatus for months. God forbid if we go offline for a year. I know in theory that this is all well-intentioned — it’s an honor when people like your work and want the next installment! Maintaining a presence is key to relevance in this attention economy! It all makes sense. It really does.

But sometimes I look at this, and wonder what it demands of art, and of the people who produce it.

At a certain point in my life I had tied everything — my identity and my self worth to my writing. Then I burned out. When I stopped producing writing for a few years, I fell in a deep, deep, sense of loss and confusion, because since I had lost my writing, it felt like I had lost myself. I had a call with one of my very dear writing mentors at the time, Andi Buchanan (who recently released the stunning Five-Part Invention), and she told me: “No matter what you’ve done or what you do from this point forward, you are always a writer and you always will be, if you choose to be.”

Hearing that was immensely freeing. I no longer subjected myself to an ultimatum that I had formed around myself — that I either would devote everything to writing, or I wouldn’t deserve to call myself an artist anymore. I allowed myself to take time off, to not write a single thing for two years, and then I came back—with a well-rested, healthier perspective — and I wrote the best work yet. I knew I had grown. And that book, miraculously, became my debut.

I think what I’m trying to say in the midst of all this is: Writing is work. I want to develop a work-life balance with writing too. I want to carry the mindset that if you identify as an artist, you always are one, and that it is not always tightly tied to the work you produce. Taking rest does not mean you have lost your license to be an artist. You are in a lifelong collaboration with your ideas and with your passion. The flame can burn slow and steady. Your art can and should make space for your peace of mind, your rest, your excitement, your life, your community, your growth — and it will be all the more fulfilled for it.

What’s Currently on my Mind

Currently reading: Where You’ve Got to Be by Caroline Gertler, The Gingerbread Witch by Alexandra Overy, an e-arc of Not an Easy Win by Chrystal Giles, and Babel by R.F. Kuang

Currently listening to: Decimal by Novo Amor, Wild Side by Suki Waterhouse, Hope by Arlo Parks, Man Who Loves You by Noso, It’s Still Cool if You Don’t by Briston Maroney

Until next time,

Christina

1. 10 Things I Learned from 10 Years in Publishing

Christina Li — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 21:00:19 GMT

Hi I’m writing this from the floor of my new apartment! I just moved places, and so naturally I decided that instead of putting together any working furniture I will start a newsletter. (I did acquire a secondhand globular lamp. I love it dearly.)

Thank you for tuning in to this first edition! As a quick introduction: I’m Christina, I’m a children’s book author (middle grade and young adult) and I’m not quite sure what direction my newsletter will take, but it’s likely going to be updates on my writing, updates on my life, with generous oversharing in both categories. I very much want this to be like a letter to a friend.

So, onto some updates from my corner of the internet…

What is Christina Up To?

I just turned in my line edits for my second middle grade book, which is coming out in late spring of 2023 (I can’t wait to share details on soon — I haven’t said much on the internet about it but I love it and mean it when I say it’s the book I truly wrote for my kid self). I also am surfacing from drafting my college YA, True Love and Other Impossible Odds (which is on Goodreads!).

I was reading this article where Madeline Miller compared drafting to a very deep dive. Which feels apt to me, because when I draft, I’m in a very immersive, surreal headspace. Time passes weirdly in there. I’m really bad at keeping up with things. I think about my characters all the time and get very into their heads. I find myself weepy on a Tuesday morning. And so when I do finally finish drafting, it really does feel like I’m emerging from my own head and into very bright and loud sunlight. But drafting this YA was a very cathartic, emotional, and at times joyful experience that I’m grateful for. It explores love of all forms — romantic love, familial love, the platonic and slightly-more-than-platonic love you have for your friends, love that comes from a math algorithm made up to determine your most compatible match (I digress), set against the backdrop of a wintry college. I can’t wait for you to meet Grace Tang and her crew in 2024.

So. Those are my life and writing updates! Onto the heart of this edition!

What I Learned from a Decade-ish in Publishing

I’ve actually been wanting to start this newsletter for a while. I know I haven’t been published for ten years, per se, but I did spend a decade of my life around and involved in publishing, so I hope that counts for something. Ten years ago, when I went from loving books to seriously dreaming of seeing my book on a shelf someday, I made a blog. It’s very endearing and sort of funny to look back on now. I specifically remember writing those posts on a cup of coffee at 11 PM (???) at night after finishing my homework, hunched over on my tiny school-borrowed laptop, blasting some kind of movie soundtrack in my ears while all I could think about was seeing my book on shelves. I used a lot of dramatic verbiage in those posts. I made shitty graphics. I miss her!

Anyway, it’s ten years down the line, which feels like twenty-five in book industry years. I’ve acquired a more ergonomic laptop. I can only drink decaf now because my anxiety will overcome my body at any hint of caffeine. I did, in fact, publish a book (which, !!!) I accumulated a good amount of stress. I feel like I’ve muddled my way through and come out of it with things I’ve learned that I would love to share. Ten things, in fact, because I feel like it’s fitting with the theme of this post.

There is never wasted work - There’s nothing more frustrating than having a story be rejected, or having written something that you weren’t satisfied with, and to have poured all the time and labor into it to have come up with nothing. But I guess if there is ever a semi-redeeming thing about it all, it’s that even work that will never see the light of day has a funny way of coming back to you. Sometimes I crack a story years down the line, or finally get to work in a snippet I’d scrapped from a manuscript. Sometimes I have to know how not to write a character to be able to do it right later on. And when that happens, it feels like you’re running into your old self the way you would a good high school friend of yours. You feel how much you’ve grown.
There are a lot of good resources online - The fundamentals of a lot of writing — how to write a query letter, how going on submission works, how to set up a revision system that works for you — I basically learned through Googling. You can put together a very decent and free education through poking around the internet — there’s a treasure trove of information out there (and I always, always recommend Pub(lishing) Crawl as a pit stop! Thank you, Pub Crawl, for raising me.)
Be judicious with feedback - Feedback is immensely important for writing. I’m a very strong believer of that. I also believe that there are a lot of kinds of feedback. The right kind of feedback can change the whole trajectory of your work, or illuminate the message you’re trying to embed in there. Notice that I’m not categorizing this as positive or constructive feedback — sometimes incredibly helpful notes will sting! I’m rather trying to point out that not only learning to take feedback but also learning to discern which feedback aligns with your vision and which feedback doesn’t has been important to me in my writing journey as well.
There are different types of rejection - This goes along with the above. There is a lot rejection in this industry. And they all hurt. What I’ve learned to try to manage that hurt is know which rejections to let in and take personally. There are a lot of rejections that are genuinely a, “hey, I appreciate this, but not my fit” type of pass. The ones to even think about letting in are the longer rejections with the but — the ones where an agent really expressed some kind of interest or praised your writing, but had some kind of reservation. Agents and editors are super busy! So when an agent or an editor takes the time out of their day to write you a longer rejection, then that means they feel strongly about your manuscript, and there is a good chance of decent feedback or potential to be gleaned from there.
Kindness goes a long, long way — My agent says something along the lines of “a rising tide lifts all boats”, and that has been incredibly true to me throughout this journey. I still remember authors who were super kind and encouraging to me when I was just starting out. They had no reason to. I had no accomplishments or anything to my name. But they still stuck a hand out for me. I remember friends who helped me when I was directionless and had no faith in myself. I remember bloggers and reviewers who shouted out Clues and took time out of their day to spread the word about it (which, bloggers and reviewers and booksellers deserve the world. The backbone of the industry fr). Publishing is a brutal industry with a long memory. It’s a slog. The friendships and relationships I’ve encountered that were unreservedly encouraging and supportive are by far what make this journey even remotely worth it. And these days, even though I really am just starting out as an author, I very much try to pay it forward however I can as well.
Protect your mental health — I took a complete social media hiatus from 2017-2019. As in, I did not go on twitter at all, which is truly remarkable for someone who simply could rattle off every bit of writing twitter discourse since 2012 from memory. There were a lot of reasons I took that break — I was burnt out and depressed, I had flopped on sub and had no idea where to go with my career, etc. etc. — but that break was immensely helpful for me. I realized that at the end of the day, I wanted to protect and take care of my brain as much as I could so that it could do what it really loved best — which was write stories, and enjoy things, and be present in my life. My brain and I touched grass for two years, essentially. And it was fucking great. And now I prioritize my mental health so much more. I realized that though very valid and important discourse happens on the internet, taking breaks and protecting your mental space is also important as well.
And while we’re on that subject, take care of your body, too — I had a go-go-go hustle mentality when I started out trying to get published. It was the Hamilton era, so it was very much along the lines of “why do you write like you’re running out of time”. Which is kind of valid. I loved writing and wanted to be published, and to do so you have to be so motivated that it’s a little unhinged sometimes. But what happened is that I compromised my own health a lot. I cut sleep to force myself through 10k days. I thought I could blaze through on sheer willpower and “spite those who don’t believe in you” energy, which, again, valid! But turns out the body does keep track! I burned out, big time. My right wrist is still wonky. Even my writing suffered for it. These days I’m trying to have a much kinder conversation with myself. I’m still writing, but in a way that listens to my body. It’s much more sustainable, I think.
Be open and adaptive to changing things up — once upon a time, I was a YA fantasy writer. lmfaoooo. I even got repped for it! I thought I would be a YA fantasy writer forever. That was all I read. I had a very restricted idea of what I thought I liked and was capable of creating. But after flopping on sub a bit and burning out a bit (see 6 and 7), I was just entirely lost for a year or two. And what brought me back to my love for books and writing was a middle grade contemporary. I fell in love with the genre, and started thinking about these two twelve-year-old characters who were building a rocket. And the rest is history. I am very much a contemporary writer now. I love writing for kids. And I’m dabbling in other genres as well and having a great time.
Do the things that give you joy — There’s so much advice on how to be a writer in general: write every day, get Scrivener, get a Save the Cat beat sheet, get an aesthetic instagram, get on TikTok and market yourself. And so much of that is really solid advice, because, they all have a great track record of working. But I think the important question is whether they work for you or not. I’m really bad at keeping a routine. I can’t take aesthetic book photos for my life (although I am trying to get better about that). I mostly upload Phoebe Bridgers shitposts to TikTok. I know I can always be technically better at writing or marketing myself or my book, but again, I only really want to do the things that I like and want to be good at. I want to do things that give me serotonin, and feed back into the happy brain -> healthy headspace for writing loop.
Celebrate what you’ve done, no matter how large or small — Please do this. Finishing a book is a big fucking deal! So is finishing that query letter, or that pitch, or synopsis, or finally cracking that story open. This is partially a self-reminder as well. It is so so easy to slip onto that hamster wheel of worrying about the next big thing instead of taking the time and space to celebrate yourself the way you’d once dreamed of celebrating once you hit that point. You did that!

Those are my biggest takeaways so far, or kernels of wisdom, I guess. The word wisdom I use lightly because I feel like so much has changed and the industry I entered is, in a lot of ways, different from the one I’m in these days. It’s always changing, and I’m always learning one thing or another. Which I very much want to keep doing.

What’s Currently on my Mind

Currently reading: Hana Hsu and the Ghost Crab Nation by Sylvia Liu (which is an absolutely brilliant, inventive, and imaginative sci-fi and I’m loving it so far) and Pachinko (finally getting around to it after unanimous recommendations)

Currently listening to: The Cause by Tommy Lefroy, Lift Off by Labrinth, Grow Up by Stray Kids, and CUFF IT by Beyonce

Okay, thank you for making it to the end of this novel of a first newsletter. I promise my next installments will be shorter! And I will continue to overshare but also hopefully more succinctly! Thanks for stopping by :)

Christina

Coming soon

Christina Li — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 19:53:28 GMT

This is A Slice of Li(fe), a newsletter about writing, life updates, and whatever runs around in christina li's mind at this moment.

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