We’re excited to have “How to Build a Homecoming Queen: A Guide by a Bad Asian Girl” in Lightspeed Magazine! How did this story come into being, and what are the inspirations behind it?

I’m excited that this story is in Lightspeed too! The first scene of this story came to me in a dream. Once I started writing it, I couldn’t stop, and the first draft came together quickly. The target audience I had in mind was my teenage self, who I think would have appreciated this story a lot.

I took a lot of inspiration from the delightful, unselfconscious campiness of classic teen movies and from my actual high school experience. I was a nerd in high school, though I wasn’t involved in the robotics club and don’t have any professional experience working with robots. Overall, I would say I was a pretty happy teenager. (Unlike Connie, I went to a high school where being a nerd gave you some street cred, which helped!) I also love writing about messed-up families and siblings and how complicated those relationships can get. The only sibling I have is a younger brother, so I’ve always wondered what it’s like being the younger one and what it’s like having a sister instead of a brother.

You juxtapose delightful details, such as “lemon-battery-powered robot cars” with Confucius and Aristotle, or comparing “deep dish Hawaiian white sauce anchovy pizza” to kissing. Can you talk about the use of contrast and selection of detail when writing?

It’s generally considered bad writing to have an excessive amount of adjectives, and they’re often the first words to go onto the cutting room floor in short stories because they’re so limited in word count, but I choose to keep them because they help give this story its voice. Connie is a very distinctive narrator, and the descriptions in this story reflect how she sees the world and what she would notice. I wanted her to come off as high-energy. She’s a product of the Internet, for better or worse, so her jokes are colored by memes and Internet culture.

There is so much interplay between your characters and their competing wants and desires. How did you balance who gets time on the page and which conflicts are brought to resolution?

Balancing all the moving elements in this piece was a challenge for me. One way I narrowed down the focus was thinking about Connie and her tendency to repress things she doesn’t want to think about. Her mother, for example, becomes a doomsday prepper after getting divorced. What Connie doesn’t realize she actually wants is for her mother to come back. She blames herself on some level for not being good enough to warrant her mother’s attention, and she blames herself for not being good enough for her sister to want to come back. I didn’t want to resolve both conflicts cleanly in this story, because in real life, most things don’t get clean resolutions. That helped me focus this story on Connie, her sister, and Mulan, who is this version of Connie that has everything she doesn’t and forces her to come face-to-face with her insecurities.

If you were to return to these characters and write another story, where would you take them? If you would never return to these characters, can you explain why?

I have thought about what happens to Mulan after the ending of this story. I’ve had some ideas bouncing around for a while that haven’t coalesced into a story yet. I think the first thing she does after escaping from Connie is stop using the name Mulan. Who knows? She might make a cameo in a future story by me.

I had to cut a lot in the revision process to get this story to fit into a short story container. There was more about the Robotics Club initially, and there were a couple cut characters in the Robotics Club, including someone Connie has a crush on and someone else who the school ships with Connie even though they don’t like each other very much. I’d like to think Connie and Clara’s fake boyfriends become unexpected friends after the events of this story, too, like a bumbling gay disaster version of the classic mentor-mentee relationship. I think this story could definitely be expanded into a novel version where Connie gets into all kinds of trouble by using lots of spells from abandoned Angelfire sites. If I ever get the chance, I’d love to write a full Connie and Clara novel someday.

Are there any recently published stories or authors you’d like to recommend?

Yes! I can’t pass up a chance to recommend Kelly Link’s White Cat, Black Dog. I’m currently reading Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s short story collection Beyond Reasonable Doubt, JESUS IS ALIVE! As for authors, Thomas Ha and Sam J. Miller are two current writers whose short stories I admire and are two of the most frequently recommended authors on WYRMHOLE, the speculative fiction recommendation newsletter I help edit.

What projects have you been working on lately? Are there any themes you’re excited to be exploring or news you’d like to share?

I tend to write about a set of themes for several years before moving on to something else. This story was written when I was knee-deep in my fairy tale phase and my teenage girl narrator phase. I was at Clarion recently, and I’ve noticed at Clarion and for the past year or so, that I’ve been exploring different aspects of fame. I think there’s something there, and I’d love to finish a whole collection of horror and horror-adjacent stories about fame. If I call it The Fame Monster, will Lady Gaga object? I have also been working on a horror novel in the background about a toxic girlboss weatherwoman haunted by the legacy of her mother’s fame. I guess celebrity and fame are what I’m interested in at the moment, in both short stories and novels.