What Do I Write Anyway?

If you have wondered what exactly I write besides the Shane Hollandoc and the various posts here at Undertrees, while the specifics are between me, my friends, and my local writing group, I can let you in on a few details.

My preferred genres lie under the speculative fiction umbrella and range from fantasy to sci-fi to paranormal and post-apocalyptic. My tastes include queer love stories, zombies, werewolves, magic, and history-inspired tales that are critical of the US and similar systems. I joked during after an exercise at a Prose Craft Study session that I default to writing Japanese-American experiences, and given that every active creative writing project that I have includes a main Japanese-American character or JA-inspired character, that's just true lmao.

The Werewolf Novel

I don't plan to publish most of my creative projects; they're just for me and some of my friends, but there is one novel that I am writing with the intent to publish, at least locally. The short description is that it is about werewolves and monster hunters in Sacramento. The long description is that it's about three characters, two werewolves and one hunter, that are caught in a resurgence of anti-wolf fanaticism. The hunter is a Japanese-American woman with a family scarred by the incarceration camps, and the two werewolves include a recently widowed Chicana and a Japanese/Irish-American that moved to the area from Salinas. By "Chicana" and "Japanese/Irish-American", I mean that they are wolves that have adopted human form in order to survive in a human world that drove many wolf subspecies extinct.

I've drafted the first chapter and jotted down a list of scene ideas. I use this story for most of my monthly prose craft practice sessions. My hope is to create a version of my beloved Sacramento that feels alive and real and full of complicated, horrible, werewolf and hunter-specific history. Every moment I spend walking and driving and living in the city, every piece of Sacramento history I absorb, contributes to this novel.

Part of it is inspired by a text-based werewolf RP that me and two good friends wrote in a frenetic month. Although the setting and characters are very different, the idea of werewolves based on real world ecology and history gestated in that RP.

Just For Fun

The Big One

I've written hundreds of thousands of words for my longest-running writing project. It's gone through multiple drafts, although I've never written a complete one. It started as a few ideas and random scenes written out on my work email and sent to my personal, then turned into plans scribbled in various small journals and notebooks, and has been included in just about every writing tool and word processor I've ever tried.

This very long project that I leave and come back to periodically is a second world fantasy inspired by late 19th century and early-mid 20th century American history. It's changed massively from the first draft; there used to be five main characters, then there were four, and then one of those four was removed and replaced with another, and a side character got upgraded to a more major role. Originally, each main character was fantasy-Japanese-American, but that changed too and now there's just one, although every main character is still a (fantasy) person of color.

Short Stories for RP Characters

Sometimes I write short stories for my RP characters, including not just the text RPs with my friends, but also TTRPGs, and even video game RPGs like Dragon Age, Fallout, and Mass Effect... and technically, Pokemon lmao.

I wrote a short story to flesh out my notoriously immoral player character for a sci-fi "fight the empire" TTRPG my friend is designing, and a few short stories about two of my most popular (among my friends) OCs. Currently, I'm writing a zombie apocalypse story featuring those two OCs based on a dream I had about them years ago.

I don't really want to publicly publish any work that uses the OCs I use with my close friends; I prefer to keep them to us rather than sharing them with strangers.

To Publish or Not to Publish...

I have a few other stories I haven't revisited in awhile, including a sapphic fantasy romance (romantasy? idk) with a bit of a disillusioned fairy tale spin on an Old Hollywood-inspired setting. I've kicked around ideas for spy throuples, space operas, small scope fantasy stories (even with world-changing stakes)...

I do want to publish apocalypse fiction one day. I've always got ideas for apocalypse societies and stories, but we'll see which one I actually manage to finish.

Finish Your Damn Novel Month

After breaking away from NaNoWriMo's support for generative AI, many writers have joined in on "Finish Your Damn Novel Month" instead. I'll be participating, but who can say which project I'll work on!

Join me!

If you've got at least an Orchard Crew ($10) paid subscription, you can follow along with my creative writing adventures including whatever the hell I end up writing in November!