July 18, 2025
I’ve always thought of creativity as a kind of personal agriculture, an organic private space, though I’ve never actually been much of a gardener. Like, when you let yourself play in sandbox decorating games or when you spend time making characters in doll makers – it gives you ideas for interiors, or character designs, or lore building. Not everything has to be Produced and Posted to be valuable. It’s enough that it exists as a place for your creativity to incubate, and then, when it comes time you’ve got a book deal, or an official project finally has a contract and money, you’ve got this fertile field where you can finally plant it and help it thrive. At least, that’s how I’ve been operating in recent years.
Lately, I’ve been gathering old sketches and things for possibly a new “sketchbook” part of the site. But as I kept going over one of my old project ideas, I was struck by how much working on it has informed my Scholastic books like Please Be My Star.
At the time I developed this old never-released project, I’d been making a huge personal shift from cooking up sci-fi/fantasy ideas to thinking about real-world romance. As much as I’ve been influenced by Sailor Moon, Trigun, and Gundam in my life, I realized I was spending way more time watching & analyzing every adaptation of Boys Over Flowers by Yoko Kamio. And that, in turn, was my gateway into lots of other romance television and comics. And that’s not even scratching the surface of how much I loved artists like Amy Sherman-Palladino, Ai Yazawa, and Mari Okazaki up to this point, in addition to all my favorite filmmakers I’ve discussed here before. Each of them: people who wrote romances set in the real world.
A lot of people back then loved to give out advice on social media saying something like: “Just because you enjoy a kind of art/storytelling doesn’t mean you’d be good at making it.”
Like, that’s nice. Good advice if you need it.
But I’m not satisfied with that.
Thus, Prickly Pair was born. I was trying to wrap my head around what a “rich man/poor woman” style romance would look like for me. I wanted it to be set in Austin, Texas – I wanted to imagine my neighborhood, the vibe of my city, the cafes and bookstores I went to as these adorably designed kdrama sets. And me being me, I wanted to figure out how to write a bisexual/queer lead falling in love with a cute boy. How would I portray that queerness? I didn’t really relate to the way I’d seen it done in a lot of other stories . . . Just saying a label out loud or explaining it overtly to the audience felt unrelatable and stale to me – that’s never been how I conveyed my queerness while dating.
Those were the biggest challenges I gave myself when brainstorming this project.
Prickly Pair was always going to be a Webtoon pitch, because I was really fascinated by the vertical format & what that could do for interesting layouts & panel breakouts. It was also the only place that seemed to be publishing romance comics about people in their mid-20s, which is still kinda true, at least for the kind of publishers who would be interested in my style of drawing/writing.
So I was taking pictures around town & trying to draw them for that Webtoon-background look. I was paying more attention to the architecture of houses in various neighborhoods, taking pictures of interesting office buildings. I was stealing little moments from my own early 20s in Austin: mishaps dating people, fun hanging out with friends, chasing my ambitions to be a Real Comic Artist while working other jobs.
The truth is, I’d done all this in my webcomic balderdash!, too – but that was set in a fantasy world without office buildings and highways. Now, in the real world, my characters could go to karaoke; they could have reclusive roommates who play lots of video games; they could get rejection letters from job applications (okay, that last one still happens in balderdash! actually).
Looking back, I’m noticing just how much I stole from this personal brainstorming project. How much it cleared a path for me to look at high schools, Texan suburbs, even the cars characters drove as part of the cute set-dressing. I stole entire scenes from it for my upcoming book Finding Myself with You, like the opening (FMWY spoilers ahead): the romantic lead jumping up to sing Alex’s song at karaoke & pissing her off in the process. & I even aged-up the main couple from Prickly Pair to be Alex’s parents in Finding Myself with You (a classic shoujo manga indulgence, though the reference is only for me, lol).
But this little note is probably my favorite. I was practicing a lot of narration & layouts & symbolism here and this aside surprised me: “The slow burning theme should be this kind of negative self-talk, how it affects you inside, but also how it makes u a dick lol”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
I didn’t even steal that one on purpose.
It would be so easy for me to look back at this project and call it a failure. Hell, it didn’t even make it to submissions; it was shelved before I sent it off to any publishers.
This has been true of so many projects of mine: there were bad deals, overt rejections, subtle rejections (I remember hearing through the grapevine one editor pleading for “no more witch books” as a big turning point in my career), or I’d moved on to other ideas before ever submitting it. Prickly Pair was developed on the back-burner as I was working on Yummy and Tasty and then composted before I even pitched Please Be My Star.
But calling it a failure isn’t quite fair, because I’ve stolen all my own best ideas from it to use in my current books. No one ever read Prickly Pair! Prickly Pair isn’t even real! I have literally never even posted about it until now! So what’s stopping me?!
Reusing beats, characters, settings, visual theming – this is what gives my current work texture, depth, flavor. It’s like a stew where I’ve made the very stock from scratch. It’s like a sourdough mother I’ve been using bits of for a decade. The flavor in my books now is richer because I’m putting in well-aged ingredients from all these shelved project ideas. And my current work in books like Please Be My Star and Finding Myself with You is better for this mixing and blending than Prickly Pair could have ever been on its own.
(Perhaps I should stick to food metaphors rather than gardening metaphors. I’m not much of a gardener, but I do love cooking. . .)
In many ways, too, it’s grounding. My current books feel more meaningful and truthful to me because they’re tethered to bits of my creative journey from years past. I’ve always related to obsessive artists who circle around the same themes and subjects for years and years at a time. Prickly Pair was just the beginning of this newest obsession.
Anyway, that’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed this look at an old project. And I’m excited to share more of the fruits of this obsession with you in the future.