I have a reading coming up for Midsumma Festival. It’s the very first time that I will be reading something from my new book in progress. I’ll be reading an excerpt from my piece “What are the attributes of God?” and I’m excited about sharing some new words at last. The venue is perfect for what I wanted. It’s intimate,...
Read MorePlaces to visit when I go to Japan #329
Sanrio Puroland? Check.
Read MoreMerge! Residency!
Tomorrow, I’m going to have my first Japanese language lesson. Why? Because I’ve received an Asialink writing residency. Next year, I’ll be at Aichi Shukutoku University in Nagoya, Japan for 3-4 months. I’ll be researching various Japanese popular cultural interests to broaden my use of pop culture in my fiction and also to inform...
Read MoreA sneak preview
I have 2544 decent words so far for what is the second piece of my book. These words have come extremely slowly, especially in the last few days. For the last 2 days, I’ve been writing like the Australian Cricket team has been fielding – i.e. with little in the way of breakthroughs. I’ve never spent so much time working on the same...
Read MoreWhere do you get names for your characters from?
Fiction writers: where do you get names for your characters from? These days, I’m getting most of my character names from here.
Read MoreMaking associations
My method of composing fiction is very associative in nature. It’s how I’m able to integrate such seemingly remote concerns in my work – rock stars, gigantism and embodiment; Pinocchio, the Muppets, fictitiousness… and, more recently, robots, art theory and the attributes of God. Due to the associative nature of my process, I find...
Read MoreFunny but not
I just wrote two funny sentences for my current story. Which is funny, given how unfunny – in fact, downright agonising – it has been trying to write this story. This isn’t really anything new – it seems to be how I compose, really. But the unfunniness has really been brought out by this particular...
Read MoreHot damn
I’ve been working on the same damn page all day. But I’m writing and the words are more or less working and I’m even clearing up a few problems that have been perplexing me for most of this year. So, for all of these reasons, I am so damn...
Read MoreI haven’t posted to my website for a whi…
I haven’t posted to my website for a while. In fact, I’ve been lying pretty low lately. The reason is that I’ve been a little weary of Tom Cho the author – that is, Tom Cho the public persona who does things like speaking at writers’ festivals and posing for a camera. And that weariness of ‘Tom Cho the persona’ has...
Read MoreI was a teenage linguist
Years ago, when I was doing my Bachelor of Arts, I majored in linguistics as well as professional writing. You could say that I was literally a teenage linguist (as well as a teenage writer). After I graduated, I didn’t immediately pursue a career as an artist. In fact, I had big ambitions to become an academic in the discipline of linguistics and I...
Read MoreI’ve got a few things on.
Not only is it a very busy day at my day job today but, outside of that, I’ve also been trying to reconcile the existence of human suffering with the premise of a good...
Read MoreOn The Meaning of Life and Other Fictions
Here’s a little update. I was going to talk about it here first but Twitter was closer to hand so I posted a couple of tweets earlier today: Tom Cho 曹勵善 on X (formerly Twitter): “Will be submitting my latest short story to 2 mags soon. Excited about this and also v happy to be back in the world of sending to lit mags / X” Will be...
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