"I read your book." | Sung J. Woo

LitCrawl 2011/Dirty Laundry!  The Launderette on Second Avenue was packed, as you can see from the photo below:

credit: nytimes/Jake Sugarman

We got some love from the local arm of the New York Times, too.  I read a flash piece titled Sacrifices, which appears below.  But before that, some more pictures.  Big thanks to my wife for taking these great photos and also editing my story.

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On September 10, LitCrawl will be happening all around downtown NYC, and I’ll be doing my small part.  Dirty Laundry, the great reading series that takes place in various laundromats, will be on at 6pm that evening:

Dirty Laundry: Remains of the Stain

September 10, 2011, 6:00 PM

Launderette (All Ages)
97 2nd Ave

Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose

Emily Rubin, author of Stalina, will host “Remains of the Stain”, writings about dribbles, spills and other moments of lust and panic.  Ten writers read short shorts inspired by memorable stains. Hear how a lipstick stain inspired a novel, and more.

Come on by to the second BooksNJ, which is happening on Saturday, June 12, at the Paramus Public Library.  I’ll be on the panel Life on the Turnpike with John Hilferty, Jon Michaud, and Pamela Redmond Satran between 2 and 2:45pm.  There are over 100 authors at the event, so it should be a pretty good time.  The event runs from 1-5pm.

[PDF: full schedule]

Next Saturday (May 28) at 2pm, I’ll be at the Atlantic City Free Public Library to do a reading/Q&A for Everything Asian and everything not Asian, too.  The nice folks at the library put together this nice flyer:

[in PDF]

So if you’re in the mood to gamble away your life savings, stop by the library before you do so.

Also, an advance notice — next month, on Saturday, June 12 between 1-5pm, BooksNJ 2011 will be held in Paramus, NJ.  In addition to myself, lots of fine authors will be in attendance, so mark it down in your calendars.

For the last month, I could see the end, that moment when I’d write the last sentence of my second novel. I imagined there would be exaltation, relief, a supreme sense of satisfaction rolled into that single keystroke when I’d tap the period and put an end to this work that began on August 11, 2002.

[more]

An essay for The Nervous Breakdown about the experience of writing the second book.  It’s mostly not pretty.

It starts with the words His father was against the idea, and it ends with and so was he.  In between, there are about 121K words, three parts, 26 chapters plus an epilogue.

The first draft of my second novel is done.

[Fireworks, flourishes, etc.]

Of course, the job is hardly finished, as now the real work comes — rewriting.  But the first draft is finished.  It may not be pretty, and it may not have a title, but goddamn it, it’s done!

I’ll be one of the many speakers this weekend at KASCON, “the largest and oldest student-run ethnic-specific conference.”  I’ll be on at 3pm on Saturday, 3/19, talking about short-short stories.  Other folks who’ll be there are C.S. Lee and Michael Kang, so they’ve lined up some pretty interesting people.

About a year ago, I wrote a little something for the good folks at I Am Korean American, and now that a year has passed, they wanted to know what I’ve been up to.  Here’s what I wrote:

That’s me, in a place I never thought I’d find myself — Doha, Qatar, at one of their souqs, a marketplace.  I was there with my wife in January to watch Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal play tennis, spend time with friends, and encounter a Muslim culture in transition.

You can read the rest of the quick post on their blog.