Hello 🐉

An introduction + year in review

Dearest Reader,

Happy New Year.

And happy soon to be year of the dragon.🧧

I hope 2024 is a better year globally, than this past year, which the consensus seems to be was a pretty miserable one writ large.

According to Chinese astrologers, 2024 is supposed to be an especially auspicious one for the monkey, rooster, and pig zodiac signs. (So not for me, a tiger, unfortunately.) So, make of that what you will.

Introduction

By way of a brief introduction: my name is Thomas. I’m a 25 year old writer and poet from the suburbs of Chicago living in Brooklyn. I moved to New York for college in 2017 and plan to live here more or less till I die.

Over the years, I’ve published a handful of essays and poems and small things in a few places here and there which you can find here. I still like to say that I’m a “recent college grad” even though that is rapidly becoming less and less true.

After several unpaid internships and stints as a barista, I currently work a nine to five job in publishing as an assistant at a literary agency, which I will refer to here as “The Agency.”

On some days, I love my job and feel incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to work here. And on other days, I wish I was back working as a barista in Grand Central (more on that TK).

This year, instead of embarking on something genuinely healthful and useful like working out, or learning how to knit, or taking up taekwondo etc., I have decided to begin something infinitely more embarrassing and probably also less healthy: a Substack.

(If you listen very closely, you probably can hear the stirrings of tens of hundreds of other people like me starting Substacks in this new year.)

“H Mart Realism”

The title I’ve landed on for this Substack is a combination of the nifty term “KMart Realism” which I learned from a friend and coworker recently, and a nod to Michelle Zauner AKA Japanese Breakfast’s runaway bestseller, Crying in H Mart. A full title breakdown probably warrants a post of its own, but for now I’ll say that it seemed like a decently apt choice given my half-Asian background, suburban Midwestern roots, and longtime obsession with different historical modes of literary realism.

What for?

Mostly I am envisioning H Mart Realism as a container of sorts. A place to collect reflections on books, film, TV, and the travails and tribulations of writing while working a full time job in publishing. And also as a way to keep myself accountable for my writing: a writing diary of sorts, documenting the writing process in general and especially the process of writing and revising my first novel.

I see this Substack as a place to keep writing that is somewhere between a formal review or essay and a journal entry or a note on my phone. I’m not sure what exactly future posts will look like or how frequently they’ll come, but I’m hoping this blog will evolve and change and remain flexible enough to meet any new demands and needs.

I’m going to end this introductory post with a kind of round up, of my year in writing, books read, and movies viewed, to hopefully give a sense of my past year and of what is maybe to come.

2023 Writing Roundup:

Words written: ~60,000 words

2023 was a big year for me, in terms of writing. This year, on January 30th, I finished a first draft of my first novel, Paper Son.

I’ve been working on it, since its very earliest incipient stages, for about two and a half years. I began it the month I graduated (virtually) from college, back in May 2021.

After about two years of writing extremely slowly, scene by scene, in random bursts, I put in real, concentrated effort in the second half or so of this year. A friend made a deal with me where I would send a first draft to him by the end of the year. He self-describes as a non reader and he said that my book would be the only one he’d read this year.

This not-real deadline worked like a charm. I wrote about 20,000 words of the 80,000 words of this draft in the past three or so months. Something I’ve learned is that my schoolpilled brain seems to do really really well when I have someone setting a deadline for me, even if it’s ultimately an arbitrary one. If you’re someone who works well under deadlines, say a formerly gifted burnout type, then self imposed deadlines can be a great way to trick yourself, psychologically, into writing. But they definitely don’t work for everyone.

I plan to spend the next months to year revising heavily. Since the draft is a rough one. Stay tuned for more updates on this process as they come.

2023 Reading Roundup:

Books read: 68 books

(Original goal: 75)

I sadly did not make my initial Goodreads goal of 75 books this year.

In terms of discoveries, Annie Dillard, Dorris Lessing, Norman Rush, and Mary McCarthy were my favorite new writers (to me) that I read this year.

I consumed a lot of audio books this year, more than usual. This was largely due to work-induced reading fatigue. In no particular order:

Top 10 Books Read this Year

1. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

2. The Years, Annie Ernaux

3. The Writing Life, Annie Dillard

4. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

5. Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain

6. The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing

7. In the Miso Soup, Ryu Murakami

8. Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck

9. Lou Reed, Will Hermes

10. Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin

2023 Film Round Up:

81 films this year

In no particular order.

Top Ten films Watched this Year:

1. A Swedish Love Story (1970) dir. Roy Andersson

2. Theorem (1968) dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini

3. The Long Day Closes (1992) dir. Terence Davies

4. Bigger Than Life (1956) dir. Nicholas Ray

5. A Dream Longer Than The Night (1976) dir. Niki de Saint Phalle

6. Show Girls (1995) dir. Paul Verhoeven

7. Koyaanisqatsi (1982) dir. Godfrey Reggio

8. Gabbeh (1996) dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf

9. Kung Fu Master! (1988) dir. Agnès Varda

10. Rebel Without a Cause (1955) dir. Nicholas Ray

More TK,

Thomas