Back from Korea!

For the past 3 months, I was in South Korea writing Soaring. This was:

• My 3rd time flying
• 1st time outside my home country, USA
• 1st time in a nation where English is not the primary language

I can speak and read Korean to an intermediate level so I have that on my side, otherwise, I would have never gone. I can speak 5+ languages so there are a lot of countries open to me but I picked Korea because I can lazy-read Korean and it’s one of the very few nations on the planet that doesn’t fly head-first into activating my trauma disorders. I struggle heavily with being in America due to my disorders so my doctors thought Korea was a good idea when I brought it up. They wanted to see how I would be without being surrounded by triggers. Mine is primarily about drugs/drug culture because I grew up in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood of Baltimore City and saw all the violence that mess can very easily produce. Things are a lot worse now for me because of cultural attitude changes about that stuff, like full-blown agoraphobia worse. The docs wanted to see how I would fare in a nation that’s not so, well, pro-That Nonsense. Turns out, I do extremely well when I don’t think I’m going to die every five seconds on both a conscious and subconscious level and I tend to walk everywhere when the air doesn’t risk smelling like Coachella at too-constant random (I will take terrible air quality over air that locks my lungs down any day, Seoul has awful air quality but hey, at least it doesn’t give me lung-pausing panic attacks). My disorders don’t magically disappear but at least my doctors now have a functional baseline so they can see how much of my condition is environmental vs disorder-produced. Some are not going to like me saying that that but, hey, I don’t really care. I can’t write if I am under a prolonged sense of terror all the time. There’s a reason why I can crank out a several hundred page novel in about two weeks or less, my brain is working on constant terror mode. I noticed I slowed down a little in Korea. Which is a good thing. Kinda. I still wrote until my hand couldn’t function, though – several times.

I handwrote 570 pages/roughly 200,000 words (would have been more if I had less interruptions) and exhausted a 50 ml bottle of ink, Kaweco’s Midnight Blue. I also wrote with Troublemaker’s Freedom Park Rose and Wearingeul’s I Am A Cat, they were samples I had. I earmarked the bottle of Kaweco for Soaring, which I have mentioned in the past [link] and I wanted to make sure I would exhaust the bottle. The empty bottle currently is now part of the Seoul Queer Archive, as are the swatches used for Soaring and the custom inks I made at Dominant Industry.

I went to Paju, for Dominant Industry to make ink by hand. This is different from ordering from a bevy of swatches on Kiwi Ink, you actually sit there and make ink. I’ll talk about that at length later because I wrote a whole blog post detailing that but I recommend going if you like fountain pen stuff. But know some Korean first if you do, you’ll need it.

I went to Gwangju because book research, especially about May 18. I already saw the virtual versions of the exhibits at 518 Archive and a little bit of building 245 so I was kinda able to speed run the museums a little bit. They were already very male-focused, women only got a single I-guess-they-did-something room and dassit, so I didn’t want to stay for very long or I’ll start saying that – in Korean. It took about 5 hours to get from Seoul to Gwangju via bus so that was a trip and a half. We stopped at a rest stop, which I was a bit stoked about because I saw them in shows like “Human Condition” and “Running Man”. It was maybe a week into being in the country so I had next to no idea what I was doing. I bought some takoyaki and tried to not get left behind. I don’t fully know what rest stop we were at but it was bustling, I will tell you that.

Gwangju was pretty ok, I got a massive bingsu at 245 so that was neato. The city is one of the many, many settings in my book series so I wanted to do more than just see stuff about May 18 because I personally feel that focusing purely on things like massacres and such almost implies A) that place is dead (and maybe someone should take it over) and B) People from that place are only good at and for one thing and one thing only – dying. Orrrrr, you can just look at how Palestine is depicted in media if you need a modern example, notice they usually are in news and media: dead, violent, soon to be dead, emaciated, extremely dead to bits, etc. There’s a reason and it does affect how you see them. Almost implies that they brought it on themselves in, in oppose to someone doing it to them. Same for Gwangju, there are people still living extremely normal, boring, incandescent lives, just like the rest of Korea. The massacre is one part of their history but it isn’t all of their history and it isn’t something they brought upon themselves, it was something done to them. They also drive better than people in Seoul ;_; Much appreciated.

I wanted to make sure I got writing in but I also visited museums such as the Women and War Museum (I even donated an electric mosquito mat machine because there were so many down in the Vietnamese comfort women section, which is an outdoor exhibit), the North Korea Database (NKDB) art show, the Comfort Women statue in front of the Japanese embassy, and the Seoul Queer Foundation, where I bought stuff, talked their ears off and donated money. And I went to Olive Young. A lot. It was the first time I was somewhere where the colors matched my tone and suited my skin (once you avoid all the skin lighteners, which is a LOT) so I went nuts. I also saw that Wearingeul had a pop up at the Hyundai mall and got free ink there, as well as an in-store exclusive and the next ink I plan to continue Soaring in, Human Issues (also known as From Wonso Pond) by Kang Kyeong Ae. (Wearingeul has an ink series that names colors after Korean, Japanese and European diasporic books, might as well be relabeled “Korea and the Colonizers Book Series”.) I also bought things that helped my work a lot, such as a portable book prop.

Soaring is a sci-fi/fantasy alt history work that looks at the complexities of prejudice, such as intersections, but, more importantly: what if prejudice, such as racism and colorism, had a corporeal form and they can be seen, possessing others like a ghost? No one is born prejudiced, it’s taught and brought to life through thought and action. That’s what Soaring explores but on a global scale. From Palestine to Armenia to Togo, I’ve had to look at the histories of the 200+ countries that exists today. First got the idea when I worked at the Library of Congress back in 2014. It’s expected to be a series but the first book already has taken up three handbound journals that are 200+ & 300+ pages a pop. I brought five. I would say Soaring is similar to Ring, Shout but I haven’t read that work. The work will (hopefully) be out in 2035, at least the first book.

A sample of the super rough draft of Soaring will be available in coming months, mainly as a proof of work and to drum up monies to go back to Korea for another 3 months (most likely Oct 2027) to continue working on it. Lots of human rights stuff but it’s not going to be wall-to-wall race/gender/queer trauma porn because who the hell wants to read that? I don’t. I am a reader of color and so is the vast majority of readers around the world, statistically speaking. It will still be a bevy of stories of people living and existing and marginalized people won’t be depicted as if they’re marginal but as people of the global majority, which is also factually true. They have lives and things happen in those lives, good, bad and historical. Not “they don’t exist until someone comes to save/kill them”.

I also super appreciate the sweet lady from Hong Kong who helped me down a steep, icy, wet road when I wore rocking horse shoes and I was struggling to not die all on my own ;_;