The release date for Book 2 (January 31st) is already approaching. (Side note: please follow me on Instagram! I’ll be doing a cover reveal countdown there soon, and it’ll include a lot of new and fun behind-the-scenes material for Book 2.) I’m excited and even more nervous to share Book 2 with you. But I won’t be promoting Book 2 as aggressively as I promoted Eye in the Blue Box (which I like to abbreviate as “EBB”). Book 2 is me at my most vulnerable. Even more of my pain and trauma shape the words of this second installment. I hope readers of Book 2 will only be those who loved EBB enough to finish it. After all, such readers are less likely to be trolls who’ll trash what is to me such personal and hard-earned work.
In the coming weeks, you’ll see a slight uptick in my number of blog posts but only slight. Each post will be tied to Book 2 and, hopefully, provide more insight on how and why this book is so important to me. These posts will be correspondingly more vulnerable than the posts that comprised EBB’s launch.
But before we dive completely into Book 2, I wanted to celebrate EBB a little more.
It’s already been several months since Eye in the Blue Box released, and I’ve been wanting to write some kind of reflective post about the publication journey so far. I wondered if I should tell you about the discoveries I’ve made so far in book marketing methods or if I should write about all the unbelievably wonky systems that go into publishing a book or if I should detail how the business side of writing has grown my skills in patience and endurance. But as important as all those things are, they’re still secondary to how the publication process has impacted my personal relationships. Of course, EBB had already strengthened and even created relationships while it was being written. I need to give a huge shoutout to my husband, my mom, my book designer, and beta reading team in particular. But the release of the finished book out into the world opened a whole other dimension in my relationships too.
It’s strange how some people can leave such deep, indelible marks of love and care in your life, yet, when that shared phase of life dissipates, it becomes so difficult to reach out and simply tell them, “Hey! I remember you. I care about you. I appreciate the friendship we had. It made a difference. You made a difference.” I feel like the common ground we once shared crumbled away long ago, and there’s no real way or reason to connect again without seeming unnatural and intrusive. But my book became a perfect last straw I could clutch at to try and find that common ground, that excuse, to reach out again. “Hey! I wrote a book! That’s a big deal, right? I wanted to reach out because, you know, I have something that’s a big enough deal to share with you, and I know that you know that I’m artsy fartsy, and we used to talk about artsy fartsy things all the time, so it makes sense to talk again, right? Did you want a free copy? Everyone likes free things, after all!”
The publication of my book also invited yet another unexpected confirmation that I actually do have many loved ones. Many whom I not only love but who also love me. People who do keep me in their thoughts not just out of the obligation of memory but out of fondness. I discovered that I have the great privilege of occupying a small, cherished corner of my friends’ hearts. All this time, I wasn’t the only one revisiting shared memories in the spare seconds between busy hours of the day. I wasn’t the only one thinking about the other within the quieter moments of all these nights. I wasn’t the only one wondering if the other was all right, wishing that they were better than the last time I’d spent time with them. Even though years and cities have separated me from many of these friends, they still not only contacted me to congratulate me on publication but also bought my book. Through all my marketing efforts, I’ve grown a deep appreciation of how much of an uphill battle it is to gather attention for even the most exciting of books, never mind to sell one. But I had many friends who were excited to spend their hard-earned money on my work. All the hurdles I have to break down to get strangers interested in Eye in the Blue Box were instantaneously destroyed by the love my friends held for me. Love was what sold my very first copies.
My book also gave me opportunities to heal within relationships. I learned some time ago that when my parents were still in the thick of their messy divorce and my father was still neck-deep in his affair with his manipulative mistress, my mother and her mother (my maternal grandmother) had spoken over the phone about all the reigning chaos. My grandmother had told my mother to “throw away” her daughter, me, and foist me upon my father. “If he’s bold enough to have an affair and cause all this mess, then he must be good enough to raise his own child. Throw Yihyang away to her father, and come back to Korea. Get remarried here. Start over, and live your life!” is what my grandmother had told my mother.
But my mother had begun crying in response. “How can I throw Yihyang away?” is what she’d cried. “I’ll figure it out, Mom. Don’t worry. I’ll handle it.”
Because of this story, I’d believed that my grandmother didn’t love me. My heart hardened toward my mother’s side of the family, and I felt nothing but cold resentment toward my grandmother in particular. I was nothing but a piece of trash to be thrown away, after all. Even when my grandmother would ask my mother about my welfare with increasing frequency over the years, I would only respond with coldness, turning away from such news, remembering just how much I really meant to my grandmother when all was said and done.
But when EBB came out, my mother mailed a copy of it to my grandmother in Korea. And I heard that when she received it, she was ecstatic. She raved to my mother over the phone for at least half an hour straight. She’d imagined I’d written something more along the lines of a novella printed out as a simple word doc, but here was a full-length, legitimate book! “Oh, my goodness, how could Yihyang have even thought to write a book after everything she’s suffered in her life? A book! How did she even find the time, the will, the discipline? How extraordinary! How amazing! What an amazing child!”
My grandmother was so proud of me.
I realized that my grandmother really did love me. For all these years, she had loved me. And now, as an adult and knowing more about both my mom’s side of the family and the ways of life in general, I understand that my grandmother had simply felt frustrated and helpless all those years ago during the divorce. She had just been trying to look out for the best interests of her own daughter in all the hopeless chaos. Plus, there had been a ton of hardships that she, herself, had had to deal with, and we never really got to know each other or see each other’s suffering up close and personal, what with me and my mom being in America and my grandmother being in Korea. Yes, my grandmother definitely had said things she shouldn’t have said, but over the years, my place in her heart had clearly grown, and with time and age, she’d come to understand that not only my mother but also I had suffered much. So, even without me or my mom explaining, she’d known just how big of a deal it was that I’d come far enough in my life to write a real book.
Eye in the Blue Box has continued to act as a strange and wonderful gravitational force between me and my loved ones. Through it, relationships have been rekindled and strengthened. Wounds have been healed. It’s now a point of conversation that we can turn to when we don’t know what else to say but still want some kind of excuse to reach out and signal to each other through the veil of my book that we do care about each other, that our memories are shared and cherished, that we both want to keep our past, present, and future with each other. It’s a resource my friends instinctively grasp at when they know I’m going through a hard time. “Look! I changed my lockscreen background to a wolf because of Bloom!” “You got into Publishers Weekly, Ann! I’m so proud of you.” “So … your book is doing well! And … so, like, how are you doing?” I’ve realized that many of the times loved ones stay silent in the midst of my suffering, it’s because they really don’t know what to say. What can one say to console someone who is so distressed, whose darkness is so palpable, who’s wrapped in such a black embrace? “The book. The book! Ann likes her book! That matters a lot to her! Maybe I should talk about that.” That’s the internal monologue I often see playing through the minds of my loved ones, and it warms my heart. It makes me chuckle.
I often forget how far I’ve come in life. Trauma so often confuses the past for the present and future. My book has become a healing reminder of the love my friends and family have given to me not just during the book’s creation and birth but throughout so much of my own life. Eye in the Blue Box only really matters to them because I really matter to them, after all, and that reality is mind-blowing for some reason.
What else can I say but “thank you”? For someone who’s wept so many tears of sorrow, rage, and madness throughout the years, it’s a sigh of relief to be able to shed a few tears of joy too.