And now, a word from the author of Muscle Memory...

(Full disclosure that I chose the book cover and it's not her design, because I got so excited I forgot to ask her if she had/wanted a specific cover).

Hi, Mayyah’s friends! I’m June, the author of Muscle Memory, a short story about various themes that were important to me. I don’t want to prattle on too long about it, but the basic gist is that I wanted a summer romance that featured Vietnamese American youngsters.  (Before I prattle about the deep stuff, the short and sweet summary of the story is that a girl named Y Nhi wants so badly to fall in love but has been destroyed by it so entirely in the past. Her childhood friend Vinny has picked up her pieces many times before, but he kinda…wants to put her back together for the rest of her life while also never letting love destroy her again because his love is different.)

I’ll be honest, being a Vietnamese American is kind of weird. You know there’s a bunch of others like you, but sometimes you can’t see them? Y Nhi and Vinny are both part of a church youth group. In my head, this is a very real organization, the Vietnamese Eucharistic Youth Movement aka TNTT (you can look it up! It’s actually international, but you might encounter the US-based VEYM.net first). I’ve been involved with them since I was in kindergarten. Very instrumental to my development as a person. The general program involves intersecting faith formation and cultural roots, since that’s been fading at an alarming rate. 

But it’s not something a lot of people know about. I explain it to my friends and they tell me it sounds like I’m in a cult. Which… Has not been my favorite interpretation of this. Is VEYM especially important to the plot of Muscle Memory? Not really. But a lot of the undertones and inspirations came from experiences I correlate with the group. 
I tried to mess around with love languages a little bit in this short story.

The intersection of Vietnamese and American general love languages was on my mind. For example, the adults of my life are more likely to show their affection by buying my favorite food than necessarily giving me a hug. They’ll do outrageous acts of service but will never say, “I love you.” I understand this language. But sometimes it feels like they don’t understand mine because, well. I like hugs and being told that people are proud of me and love me. And I was thinking about how two people who love each other so deeply can miss each other just because their love languages don’t match up. About how love is an effort in small ways like that. 

So anyway! It’s a pretty layered wip considering its astounding < 5k word count. Here’s the link to the full wip on tumblr, and here’s a playlist I made for the wip.

Shoutout to our bff Mayyah for loving this work of mine so much she straight up got it printed. ❤️

And lastly...