Atom Yang Guest Post

Gay Book Review is thrilled to welcome Atom Yang to the blog today!

WTH Am I Doing

As I sit here drinking smoky and strong Russian Caravan tea, I understand that I understand very little about what it is I write.

I’d like to say I know, but I don’t.

I don’t have characters talking to me. I don’t have plots that need to be written. I could give this up now, I think, and I gave it up for ten years, or so it seemed, but now I’m back so maybe I shouldn’t mistake dormancy for death.

How could I have known? I didn’t until I got here.

This is my point. Not until I’m finished writing a story, do I have an inkling of what I wrote, and really, not until someone has finished reading my story and told me what I wrote, do I know what I’ve written—and it is never one thing.

I have control over the craft (mostly). The presence of water throughout Herc & Pyotr, the water of tears, laundry, showers, and more—washing and washing away the past and making way for the future. Commas conducting the pace of the prose, as much as a composer imposes pauses in a symphony.

What I don’t have control over is the interpretation—the reception within the reader’s mind, the history they each bring into the theater that colors their perception of what it is I’m saying.

By the way, I’m red-green colorblind. I’ve played the “what’s this color” game with every person who’s ever found out about it. They like to see what I see, but my blindness highlights something we don’t think about when we assume that everybody’s reality is the same as ours, and that is we don’t see the same things. Perhaps ever.

We may get close. Bridges are examples of that, and any act of cooperation. And maybe that’s one of the points of being alive, to eat-love-pray—to take in something, to give something back, to be open to the many paths we can take to the center where we aren’t separated and lonely.

Where we recognize that we’re facets, not shards.

When we think of ourselves as shards, we have edges that cut and we don’t see how what affects me affects you, too. (Remember The Dark Crystal?)

I like hearing a reader’s interpretation of my story, of what was important to them. It shows me another side of myself that previously, I didn’t have access. I’ve heard that art shows us something about ourselves that we didn’t know before, and I believe this to be true, and it’s as true for the reader as it is for the writer. What is a storyteller without an audience but wind blowing through a tunnel? We are each other’s ways of knowing ourselves, of becoming alive.

I am not sure what I’ve written. When I’m finished, I have an idea, as if I’ve stopped moving to check my progress on a map—and I’m surprised. It’s one more trail into my psyche, and maybe into yours, too. This trail, it looks like a line that connects us, the reader to the writer, from here to there, to home and away.

Title: Herc & Pyotr (Storming Love Series: Meteor Strikes Book 5)
Author: Atom Yang
Publisher: MLR Press
Release Date: March 24, 2016
Genre(s): Apocalyptic Romance
Page Count: 106
Reviewed by: Crabbypatty and Lili
Blurb:

Herc thought he had the perfect life: a great partner and a meaningful career as a psychotherapist–until his partner left him a week ago and Herc became too depressed to see his clients. When a random meteorite punched a tidy hole in his car’s engine, it seemed like the world had it in for him, but bumping into Pyotr, the handsome older man who’s moved in a couple of doors down and happens to study things like falling stars, things might be looking up for Herc–and more may be falling than the skies in this light-hearted, apocalyptic romance

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