Home, Bleeding - a recurring theme in my work
The City Bleed (Transients Mag, 2025) and Into the Shadow (All Worlds Wayfarer, 2025) are out now
Quick announcement: This post is bilingual! You can now read it in Vietnamese!
More to it below.
Happy winter solstice! It’s been awhile! 2025 has been slow, has it not? I haven’t been the best at substack after the summer heat and hype is over. Winter has kicked in and it becomes dark and cold here, but as we are entering hibernation period, I want to use this time to wrap up my plans for 2025 and look at the publishing achievements I’ve gathered this year.
So please join me in celebrating 6 months of publication of my poem with Transients Magazine and my short story release in Into the Dark: An All Worlds Wayfarer Anthology!
Into the Shadow (Into the Dark: All Worlds Wayfarer Anthology, 2025)
I’m so so thrilled to announce that my first short story is published in All Worlds Wayfarer’s anthology! All Worlds Wayfarer is a bi-yearly literary magazine specializing in character-and-theme-driven speculative fiction. My story INTO THE SHADOW reflects the life of a woman in the feudal time, female rage, and revenge. It is inspired by CHUYỆN NGƯỜI CON GÁI NAM XƯƠNG by Nguyễn Dữ. This story is my official debut in the speculative space.
She brought nightmares to the sleeping folks. Every cliff, every free fall, every suffocating living grave, every drowned victim crawling on the ground with their lungs filled with water. She made people relive the burning pyre and the delicious smell of perfectly roasted flesh and let them sweat over the sickening desire of hunger.
Stories have the power to confront the shadows—whether they lurk in our world, in realms beyond, or deep within the human psyche. They can take us on harrowing and haunting journeys, introduce us to fascinating and frightening characters, and leave us haunted and changed long after the final page. Yet it is within the darkest stories that hope burns brightest: acts of desperation, passion, and overcoming reveal the power and resilience of the human—and sometimes non-human—spirit. In the gaping maw of the blackest abyss, beauty and wonder await.
Throw off the shackles of the safe and mundane and delve Into the Dark.
In the third All Worlds Wayfarer anthology, immerse yourself in 34 unique stories of dark fantasy and fantastical horror.
Out now!
Amazon (hardcover | paperback | ebook)
Walmart (paperback | hardcover)
The City Bleed (Transients Mag, 2025)
The poem was initially entitled “Grandma twitched in her sleep,” as during my early teenage years, my grandmother, my cousin, and I shared a room. There, in my most formative years, I learned about my grandma when she was asleep. I was young and dumb back then (still am, honestly) and at that same age, different people in my family experienced vastly different things.
In this piece, I write about Hanoi, about the city and how its history weaves through three generations. It’s about pride and pain and the thing we gave up in the fight against imperialism.
He chased after everything foreign because freedom is,
too, a foreign concept.
He yearned to travel the world because the sky was caged in
with American helicopters
and the water was poisoned with an orange chemical.
I’m honoured to have my poem published on Transients Magazine’s second birthday. Transients is a new literary magazine asking what home is and what it means to be away from it. Please support Transients Mag’s mission and my poem in Issue V.
Personal news,
This was the most unexpected thing ever happened to me: my family clan has been recognised as a historical and cultural relic at the city level. From passing the imperial exams to modern day pursuit of knowledge, the clan has continuously contributed our effort to the cause of building the homeland and the country. The family council has decided to erect a stone stele to honor the Doctors and intellectuals with high academic titles and degrees of the clan.
In other words, my name will be on a stone stele.
Academia has always been an integral part of my life. Every year starting from 4 to 16 years old, I went to the Temple of Literature to pay my respect to the first university and first teacher of Vietnam. Even after leaving academia, I couldn’t stop writing about it. So you can imagine how important this news is to me.
This sacred stele will be solemnly placed in the grounds of our Ancestral Temple. This is a place to record the merits of education. Along with other outstanding descendants, I am honored to uphold the spirit of my ancestor and to serve as an example for future generations to follow.
I hope to share with you academic stories from my family in future posts!
In case you missed it, The Sun Dispatch will become bilingual!
(with the third language in German coming in the future). This blog is the first issue published in both English and Vietnamese. Vietnamese is my mother-tongue and I hold it very dearly to my heart. With this new feature, I hope to reach out to more readers in my community. All the posts are human-translated, so not every post will be in multiple languages. I aim to have all my publishing updates in English and Vietnamese, with the rest going up scarcely.
What you can expect from me in 2026…
As the title suggests, this will be my last post in 2025. I know I haven’t been the best at writing updates, but please trust me that a lot of things are moving in the background. I’m keeping my head down and working hard on my manuscripts, but until you hear more from me, I have another short story coming out in soon!
THE QUEEN’S JUSTICE is going to be published in Dark Horses: Magazine for Weird Fiction in February 2026! More to come regarding that delicious piece later!
As always, please know that I’m thankful for all of your support.
So proud of your achievements this year!
Go Solar! Bye 2025 and onto a great 2026 :3