This story began with a single line: “Do you remember what you asked it to forget?” It came to me without context, without a character or a world. Just that sentence, waiting. Haunting. Like someone else had already written the story and left that line behind for me to find.…

Origin of the RecipeThis story began, quite simply, with the idea: What if a demon fell in love with food criticism?It’s ridiculous. It’s theatrical. But it’s also a lens through which I could explore something I care about deeply: the intersection of absurd power and very human joy. I’ve always…

This story began, as so many of mine do, with a single image: a statue washing ashore. I didn’t know what kind of statue it was at first. I just imagined something old and barnacle-crusted, something that shouldn’t be moving but did, dragged in by the tide once a year…

I wanted this story to start with sweat. With exhaustion, frustration, humidity, and the quiet desperation of app-based labor. I wanted you to feel the weight of the insulated bag on Min-jae’s back before you ever saw a dragon. Dragon Express is about burnout. Not just professional exhaustion, but emotional,…

This was the hardest story in the collection to write—and maybe the one that changed me the most. The structure came first: I wanted to write a story that unfolded in reverse, not just in time but in causality itself. I didn’t want it to feel like a gimmick. I…

In most fiction, time is a line. Even in stories that travel backward, like Memento or Time’s Arrow, causality is preserved. The audience may encounter events out of sequence, but cause still precedes effect. The logic remains intact. In Because You Were, I wanted to break that. This story isn’t…

This story was born from a single discomforting question: What if the most ethically advanced surveillance system on Earth still violated something sacred? That’s what I wanted to explore—not just whether AI could be kind, or gentle, or empathetic, but whether its very presence, no matter how well-intentioned, altered the…

I didn’t set out to write a ghost story. Not really. Bridge at Crowsleep Market began with a festival—the Qingming Festival, or Tomb-Sweeping Day—and the sense of reverence and familial grief that clings to it like incense smoke. My family had just observed it the week before, and I was…