Christina With An A

I should mention that I originally wrote this post probably over a year ago. I did not post it right away because — well, for the reasons listed below. I felt like now would be a good time to finally share my thoughts given how I've been struggling lately to feel like I'm doing anything of value with my skills and talents. This is the most honest thing I've written, probably ever. So to channel Usher, these are my confessions. First, I feel like I owe an apology to several people. Namely to the people who read my first self-published book, The Dragonlord's Heir . Yes, I self-published a book under the pen name, Christina Kenway, after Edward Kenway, the protagonist of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag . Dorky, I know. I published my book four years and three months ago, to be exact. It was a middle grade novel about a young boy who discovered he was a modern-day dragon slayer à la Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson. I wasn’t proud of my book after a while, but about...

After recently dropping out of an MFA Program for personal and financial reasons, I realized that if anyone else was going to take my writing seriously, I had to first take my writing seriously. That means that I have to discipline myself to read, write, and network regularly. Most, if not all, MFA Programs have a required reading list for the students to read over the course of the program. My program list was made up of 30 books, 20 of which were determined by the fiction faculty, and 10 of which I chose myself. The 20 required books on the reading list neither interested me nor suited my writing tastes. I’m all for branching out in craft and subject matter, but I struggled to find any personal value in the few books on the list that I did read. Which got me thinking: If all MFA reading lists are fairly generalized (except of course for the books the student chooses), how is that really helping the student and his or her specific writing style? You can learn just as much from thi...

Once upon a time, I wrote a bunch of fanfiction. Oh, who am I kidding? I still write fanfiction. I think the last one I wrote was a Final Fantasy X fanfiction a few years ago about Yuna’s father and his pilgrimage with Auron and Jecht. But anyway. I wrote fanfiction before I even knew what it was. When I was eleven years old, I wrote a twenty-something-page story about a woman named Jessica Weller who was basically a Lara Croft rip-off. I became obsessed with Tomb Raider at the ripe age of six. I thought I would become the youngest published writer ever known to mankind. I sent that masterpiece off to a handful of publishing houses in the U.S. and awaited the inevitable flood of acceptance letters. Surely, publishers would be vying for my literary work of genius. It was just a matter of time. While I waited for those letters to come in, I bought myself a handy-dandy professional leather briefcase and stored my stories, my (terrible) illustrations, and my publishing notes...

I’ve been a little baffled by the reaction to Pixar’s newest short film, “Bao.” Based on internet comments, it seems there have only been a handful of people who liked or appreciated it. The majority found it weird and “didn’t get it.” What’s not to get? Sure, it’s a little unusual compared to some of the other Pixar shorts like “For the Birds,” which Pixar itself calls “deceptively simple” in terms of its plot and humor. Maybe that’s where viewers got lost with “Bao”: it is neither simple nor light, which one would expect for children’s entertainment. For those who haven’t yet seen “Bao,” the short film preceding The Incredibles 2 , let me give you a rundown of the story. Like most (all?) Pixar shorts, there is no dialogue, which I find quite impressive. The short opens with an older Chinese-Canadian woman preparing dumplings and an extravagant meal for her husband, who gobbles up some of the food before leaving for work abruptly. The mother begins to clean up the mess when one o...