I actually wanted to keep this to Twitter and Patreon so you wouldn’t get bothered by all these posts but … well, the one I wrote was kind of long so I felt like sharing it, after all 😅

Anyway, let’s start with the second piece of information and the cover 😉

Today’s snippet of information might also help with figuring out yesterday’s riddle (the Hobbit and Marilyn Monroe one, you know 😁). So let’s see if anyone can manage to get closer. So far, nobody on any site managed to guess either of the reasons 😁

So … Have you seen interviews with authors before? I swear most interviews (especially with ‘smaller’ authors) will re-iterate some questions each time like ‘What was your inspiration for this story?’, ‘What do you want to tell your audience with this story?’ or ‘How much do the characters resemble yourself?’

That can get a little maddening when you don’t have a cool story to tell. Like, literally nobody wants to hear me say “Oh, I was doing the dishes for my mother the other day and felt like a good person. Then I was wondering if I shouldn’t write a story about a good girl.” (Yes, there was a time when I was still trying to find my voice as an author and writing hetero romances. – I swear this is relevant. 😅)

The second question stumps me just as much because I always think “Uh, well, I actually don’t have any agenda. The story popped into my mind and I felt like writing it. It’d be cool if people enjoyed it though. Does that count as an answer?”

The third question is the worst though. How much do my characters actually resemble me? I always went with a big, fat “not at all” back in the hetero romance days. The past one or two years have made me wonder if I was a little too fast on answering that though 🤔

I think it’s pretty obvious with my BL stuff that there’s some resemblance. Like, nobody actually thinks it’s a coincidence I wrote a series about a quirky author, right? 😅 I hope I’m not as dense as Su Yan (although I’m not sure …) but otherwise, we do share a lot of characteristics. That was, in part, what made writing the series so much fun.
I never went into writing either LWS or any of my projects with the thought of “Oh, let’s write a story about someone that shares xyz with you” though. For the most part, it was just a subconscious thing (for their personality traits and backstory) or a matter of convenience (for things outside of their identities).
Like, it’s kind of easy to write a story about writing since that’s what I’ve been doing for years and where I know my stuff. I’d have to think way more if I decided to write a story about, let’s say, a male nurse. And I can’t see blood or wounds so research would be a pain in the ass. 😣

Anyway, JHMH is completely different. This is the first time that I’ve went into writing a story with projecting a big part of my own identity and life’s journey onto the characters. It’s also the first story that actually has a message to it.

Just like there are two reasons for why I chose October 20th as the publication date, there are also two reasons for why I wrote this story in the first place. It is a very personal story and everything around it – from the publication date to the information I share about it – is meant to reflect that.