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...

Cormac listened quietly to this report, and the only indication of his rage was the wreaths of fog coiling around his feet like cats, which swelled and billowed behind him like a cloud before he hissed out a breath and it quieted to nothing more but tendrils of mist, cold and spreading across the floor. Wren braced herself against the reach and touch of it, felt a grim sort of perverse pleasure at the way Threader flinched, the way the others fidgeted, discomfited.

“The traitor must have been a shifter too,” Tamsin concluded. “The runners all agreed the smoke didn’t do anything to her, and she didn’t have a gas mask.”

“How did she slip under our radar?” Cormac asked.

Tamsin swallowed, lifted her chin, said evenly, “We don’t know, sir.”

Cormac said nothing.

“The overseer was the first killed,” Jacks volunteered into the charged silence. “Everyone said he was in charge of the hiring. So no one knows how a shifter got past him. Sir,” he added belatedly, as Cormac’s pale eyes slid from Tamsin to fix on him. 
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“Hm,” Cormac said. The mist on the floor thickened into a carpet, opaque enough to hide the sight of their own feet underneath it.

Chronicles of Mourra

To Halah, it reminded her of the rare expeditions of her youth, when she’d accompany her grandfather to the mountains, where he would retreat to his dwelling there for quiet contemplation (though it was not very quiet with his granddaughter chattering to him and demanding he tell her stories).

It was something about waking up before the sun and watching the stars fade, something about putting out the fire and packing their hasty camp and leaving behind nothing but footprints and soft grey ash, something about the road stretching out before them, that brought it all back to her.   

It reminded her of a song, though she couldn't remember the words, only the melody, which she hummed, half under her breath as they tramped through springy grass and along stony hills, the birds chirping from within the scrubby vegetation. The land folded in on itself outside Qarun’s limits, rising and falling unevenly, raggedly, as though some great animal had torn it up and it had settled like that, with great gouges and strange towers of stone and earth and grass and bush, worn by ages of wind and water.
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It reminded Halah of one of her favourite stories, featuring the great battle between the Anqa bird and the King of the Jewelled Serpents.