Compendium

I struggle to consider myself a published writer despite the fact that I have been published throughout the years in a few different places. This is because the publications were small-scale, lacked prestige, and are therefore easy for me to deride and dismiss. In the interest of acknowleding my past accomplishments, no matter how juveline, I'd like to create a list of all my published work.

Vertigo

This was my high school's literary magazine. I think the physical copies of the two editions in which I published poetry somewhere between 2012-2015 are currently buried in a box in my mom's garage, and I want during my next trip home to retrieve them to bring back to my apartment. It's interesting that I didn't publish any fiction in Vertigo, given that my journey as a writer began through fiction and has mostly continued to progress in that direction.

I never identified as a poet or actively studied it while pursuing my creative writing degree in undergrad, save for one incredibly fascinating class about translating foreign-language poetry into English. (This class introduced me to perhaps the single most interesting coffee table book in my collection: Into English: Poems, Translations, and Commentaries. I would highly recommend this book to everyone.) I also remember writing one poem immediately after graduating college, right at the start of the pandemic in 2020. I was living in a beach-side apartment and felt so moved by the picturesque nature of my life that I felt compelled to express it through poetry.

After that, I didn't write any more poems until this year, when I wrote three. Two were inspired by my recent breakup; the third was inspired by a poet parked at a tourist spot with a typewriter, charging 15$ apiece for on-the-spot poetry based on any word of choice. I didn't like her poem, and endeavored to fashion my own version of it. Later, I joined an informal writing workshop consisting primarily of poets. Despite having intentions to workshop old fiction pieces, I decided to edit and submit the three new poems I'd written. Later, when I reclaim my two copies of Vertigo, I'll write up a post containing all of the poetic work I've done throughout my life, since there isn't that much of it.

Mirrors: An Anthology of LGBT South Asian Voices

This was a publication created in 2018 by a Pittsburgh-based organization called Rangoli, which is now inactive. My entry in this anthology is a short story called Domesticity with Frances, for which I also won a second-place award in my university's annual creative writing award program. The story was inspired by my one-sided infatuation with my straight best friend/roommate and explored the conflation of domestic peace with romantic love.

When I talk to folks about my creative writing journey, I often represent this time period as my "peak" after which I fell into a years-long creative slump. I'm trying to modify this narrative and reconsider my metrics for success. While it's true that this was the time during which I received the most external validation for my creative work from a legitimate, trustworthy institutional body of professionals— and that I have not experienced such formal validation since— I am most certainly a better writer now. This is due not just abstractly to the natural maturation process that occurs throughout one's twenties, but tangibly to the hundreds of pages of drafts (fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, everything) that I have developed over the years. Most importantly, I have, now, the ability to validate my own work and progress, though it often falters during emotional crises, which is why I feel the need to write this post.*

Medium

In 2020, I published an article on Medium about the live action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which had just recently been announced as beginning development. Having never really dabbled in journalism before (I took one journalism class in middle school and was too anxious to have to Talk To People About Things, leading me to abandon the form for the rest of my educational career), this was a fun departure from fiction and screenwriting. I tried pitching my article to publications like Screen Rant or Variety, but was rejected due to my lack of experience, which is why I ultimately self-published. It didn't get much viewership, but I'm pretty happy with the article to this day. Funnily enough, now that the show is out, I haven't watched past the first two episodes. I didn't like them and generally don't care for new entries in the A:TLA universe.

Nightmarish Conjurings

This was a now-defunct website that covered all things horror. The founder, Sarah Musnicky, is still an active horror critic. Between 2022 and 2024, I published reviews for the following films: Organ Trail (2023), Sewer Gators (2022), A Woman Kills (1968), The Long Walk (2019), Shapeless (2021), Good Boy (2025), Ditched (2021), and Holy Shit! (2022). I also had the chance to attend a press screening for Avatar: The Way of Water. It was due to my aforementioned Medium article that I was accepted into the fold of Nightmarish Conjurings, and I'm glad I have some more legitimate pieces under my belt now, even if they can no longer be accessed online. At the very least, I have my final drafts, and I'm mostly proud of them.

Not included in this list are my 2011-2017 fanfictions, which still exist on AO3 and fanfiction.net, nor any movie review or long-form text I've posted on social media (Tumblr, Instagram, etc). I maintain my social media accounts strictly for casual forms of self-expression to close friends, and have no intention for the forseeable future to create any sort of branded, artistic identity out of them.

This brings me to another topic that's been on my mind ever since moving to New York: whether or not to post on Substack. I could have written all of this on there, as it's the medium of choice for most other writers I know, but I have never felt comfortable doing so. I think what I've realized, after a great deal of agonizing, is that I don't want my posts to appear on anyone's "feed." There's something about the instantaneous nature of Substack that makes it feel anxiety-inducing, similar to the way Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok feel anxiety-inducing: as soon as I post anything, I check constantly to see if people have seen it, wait anxiously for the likes and comments to pile up, then feel immense disappointment upon any relative lack of them. Here, for whatever reason, I don't feel as interested in validation, feedback, or visibility. Even when I do eventually share my Dreamwidth journal to people, it gives me comfort that they will have to manually go out of their way to open the link rather than receiving automatic updates and notifications on their Substack feed about new entries I write. This small inconvenience of delayed access makes me feel as though my entries have space to breathe between my writing them and people reading them.**

I intend to use Dreamwidth as a sort of public, polished version of my physical journal entries and Google Drive files, which are where I collect my thoughts, ideas, and drafts from classes and workshops I've taken over the years. The content of these entries and files are intensely valuable, but I often struggle to synthesize them into more cohesive forms. I see Dreamwidth as filling that space between raw material and formally published work, whereas Substack feels more firmly in the latter category (from my perspective) and therefore unsuited to my needs. I am also a chronic, pretentious contrarian and like very much to be different.

*I'm trying to validate myself outside of my writing, too, and let go of this narrow view I have of myself as a writer first and foremost. This self-imposed identity put a lot of pressure on me as I was moving through my early twenties and attempting to try other things, like surfing, painting, yoga, sewing, rollerskating, etc. I saw everything unrelated to literature/film as a distraction from my "main" goal, which was to write a critically-acclaimed book or a movie. Now, I want to use this journal to document endeavors and projects of all kinds, like cooking challenges, guitar achievements, notes from classes I'm taking, or select pages from my newly-created junk journal. I am more than just what I write.

**This benefit is proven by the fact that I have edited this journal entry several times since posting it. I love that I can do this without feeling peoples' eyes on it instantaneously. I don't enjoy the feeling of being "watched" or "followed" online. I don't want to have "followers," only readers, or friends. But that's a topic for another post.