花樣年華

[hwarium]

visitors book

thank you for visiting my corner of the internet *__* I love hearing about people's lives so please drop a comment and introduce yourself, anon commenting is allowed for this post! You can tell me anything, including:

• how you found me
• what you use dreamwidth for
• a piece of media you enjoyed but wish more people tried it out
• something that has made you happy recently

about

hwa
b. 1990s
favourite genre: science-fiction
weakness: sleeping on time
current concern: u-turns on my motorbike

brøther, I cräve the forbidden lämp

welcome to my personal journal ♡ I'm a longtime kpop stan (svt!), reader and fandom enthusiast. You can check out my reading or cooking tags to start.

Here, you can find essays like:

• learning how to be reflective about reading;
• sliding scale of tinhat comfort; and
• how I want to live this life.

I post my fandom meta in a separate account, @salutant. That's where you can find essays like seventeen's Love Languages, lore posts like dorm arrangements and translations. All of my seventeen writings are compiled into a masterlist here.

credits and permissions

credits

• dreamwidth layout is by tumblr user strulovic, some css taken from london fog by girlrock, and some customisations are my own (post tbc).
• as always, I always refer to the touchstone dreamwidth html/css post by girlrock.
• icon by twitter user itsres98.
• post art is by Kamome Shirahama, of the character Easthies from the manga Witch Hat Atelier.
• ui/ux inspiration taken from the tumblr themes:
  • lilac and zinnia by seyche;
  • golden by softcodes;
  • ignorance and bliss by glenthemes;
  • faults by solocodes;
  • terra by kosmique;
  • thin air by pneuma-themes

permissions

for all of my work, I provide blanket permission for non-commmercial derivative work in the form of:

• translations;
• podfics; and
• fanart.

I'm happy for transformative works to be created (you don't need my permission!) This would include adaptations such as music or fanart, commentary, or a fic remix. I would be grateful if you could link back to the orignal work and let me know (I love the fandom economy, we are all doing this for free and for fun!!).

html/css/formatting ref [TBC]

>

work in progress, come back in 10 business days

Comments

Hello!

[(Anonymous)]

hi hwa, i found your acc back in 2020/2021 i think when i was introduced to svt & have silently lurked. i sent an ask back when curiouscat was still around but im not sure if you saw it before the shutdown, asking about your process on writing notes from books — whether it was in analog or digital, how you keep track of them, etc. i loved “once again, love”. it was a story that i needed to read at that time and enjoyed how vivid your images or scenescapes are, how thoughtful your approach was in curating the internal world of your characters.

when i found your dreamwidth, i find myself agreeing to a lot of your criticisms on books i also didn’t vibe with like how i agree with vuong’s night sky with exit wounds to be his better work compared to on earth or time is a mother. i do look at your recs & trust that it’s going to be a good time if i happen to pick it up (trying out murakami’s 1q84 rn). this is an anon message bc i don’t have a dw acc but wanted to express my gratitude and admiration for how you write. i love your personal essays, the cn opera & thoughts about how you want to live your life.

a piece of media i enjoy is mr robot the tv show or decision to leave the movie. i feel like they’re both out there but not out there since i rarely see anyone rave abt it despite the critical acclaim they received. there’s a manga i enjoy too which that i feel is more of a hidden gem but i feel wary of putting it out here due to its content so instead i’ll leave you with a poem by leila chatti: after touching you, i think of narcissus drowning.

happily getting back to writing recently. i know you’ve posted a couple of considerations/inspirations for how you arrive at your stories (eg weight of heaven & ours for the moment) but if you ever do a deep dive on how you brainstorm, decide which scenes to cut and include, how to frame those scenes, i would be so over the moon to pore over it. thank you for sharing your work. i’m grateful to have had encountered it.

Re: Hello!

[hwarium]

hello silent lurker <3 thank you for revisiting my journal after all this time, and thank you especially for remembering my story and remembering the words I've expressed all those years ago, not just on fanfiction, which I wrote to be read by others, but also my personal essays, which was written mostly to understand myself. To hear that my honest thoughts have resonated with you across time and space, brings me a lot of joy. Not just simple happiness, but something deeper, knowing that you've found me on this infinite internet and stayed.

- To answer your question on book notes - my initial thoughts on a book is always analog, and usually within a month of reading a book or consuming that content. The notes are always more honest and I try to capture impressions and connections. In terms of what I capture, you may have already read it in this post [learning to be reflective about reading]. If I have a lot of thoughts about a book (that is worth sharing and not just blithely hateful without construct), those notes become curated as digital for the purpose of posting on dreamwidth. I have a thesis against taking digital notes -- I took most of my notes in university by hand and I believe creating and retaining that physical form is superior for memory retention.

- :) do feel open to tell me if you ever disagree with one of my ideas or did not like a book I've recced! perhaps I can understand you better and give another recomendation. the longer I live, the more I realise how subjective an experience of a book can be. Recently, a dreamwidth moot disliked tartt's secret history, which I loved, and in reading that review, I realise I probably idolise academia/latin & classics majors/rich kids more than I thought :)

- I've written both your recs down on my recs list! I'll be honest, I'm not good with thriller/horror but will keep an eye out for mr robot!

- thank you for the poem, I've read it out loud and will write it out in my notebook. I know you just shared it, but it feels like a gift!

- if there's a poem which could represent that manga for you, what would it be?

- I'm currently working on a story (for a non-svt fandom), but I've been keeping a diary as to the thoughts I've had throughout that brainstorming and drafting process. I'll keep you in mind when I revisit those notes to see if I can wrangle into a post (won't be an author's note, it will definitely go on this personal journal as a writer's reflection).

once again, thank you for saying hello <3

Re: Hello!

[(Anonymous)]

thank you for replying to me! i didn’t expect to see my comment published that quickly or to get a reply at that ahahah i guess the universe works in mysterious ways bc i felt compelled to check your page and i'm glad i managed to catch this within an appropriate time frame :]

- re: book notes / tl;dr - was wondering if you have a ritual to revisit all your notes when you start working on a story and if they’re all in one concentrated notebook? part of the reason i find myself moving away from analog / resistant to it is bc i feel like i keep losing track of the things i had written down. like where can i find that reference when i don’t recall which book/which author/who said it but i can only remember part of the phrase. which is much easier to ctrl +f on a digital doc and thus i'm swayed to house my notes in digital land unfortunately no matter how much i want to keep an analog copy sadly ahaha how do you go around that if you encounter that at all? i’ve heard some people use it as an opportunity to flip through all their notes in one sitting to find what they’re looking for bc you might never know what associations could come through. do you happen to do that too when you are cultivating a story / hitting a wall while brainstorming? i know you’ve mentioned previously in relation to ours for the moment where you read the short story and knew you wanted to play with the elements of the story somehow, so do you collect these stories/inspirations that you might want to use in the future in a separate page and notebook or do you keep it in the same page to the page where that specific book note is located (also curious if book notes also extend to your journalism readings & short stories! bc i find myself getting bogged down in writing my own reading notes sometimes). sorry if this is nosy i love looking through writers’ notebooks to inform my own practice and see what i can learn / not realize yet i can do when it’s staring me in the face.

- re: books/reading/recs - i confess i am not well versed in fantasy or sci-fi bc its convention usually means a Lot of names where i already have a hard time keeping track of names in a contained literary fiction & so i perceive the burden of reading sci-fi/fantasy to be much higher than say a thriller or a literary fiction where the characters tend to be constant/systems are similar or maybe a slight dystopian twist that is not as difficult to keep track of compared to a magical system with maps. i think one of the best parts as a writer or a reader being in conversation with other readers is seeing what resonates with them/the reader, what they take away, what impressions they leave while interacting with your work that comes from their own experience. i’ve plodded through secret history and while i like donna tartt's writing style, i have yet to finish it or the goldfinch (got halfway through with this one before i just left it cold. need to finish it at some point though bc it is good and solid, i think i put it down simply bc smthg else snagged my attention both times ._,) im currently reading through the poppy war… i’m not quite sure how i feel abt kuang yet & curious if you’ve read her other works!

- re: dtl / mr robot - not sure if this will assuage your worry of going into either of them if you do so but it’s not terrifying (i am a scaredy cat). well actually i find mr robot more terrifying than decision to leave bc it does have a substantial amount of gun violence baked into it. there are of course other tv that does the same if not even more horrifying amounts of deaths in it (e.g. game of thrones) but the way mr robot is filmed just gives you chills where each death matters (the framing of the scene, the angles of filming, the pacing, they all add that suspense to make it more horrifying at least to me) // sorry went on a tangent there. i look forward to your thoughts on them if you ever feel inclined to share or if you get to them (no pressure!). regardless, i’m already content that you would consider it. that feels special on its own to me. :]

- re: poetry/manga - this is a tough question & it feels like a cop out to think of either siken or vuong but the line by vuong on how being offered tenderness is the very proof you’ve been ruined or siken's the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it (snow and dirty rain) is what that book means to me. the main character though her story is pretty much encapsulated in taking it by vievee francis at least until line 13 or like 14.5 (i pulled out my poetry collection for this one).

- re: story - i'm looking forward to it <3 if that post ever comes to be, i’ll be on the lookout. ty for wanting to think of me. it’s very kind of you to do so.

i hope you have a good weekend!

Re: Hello!

[hwarium]

our fates truly lined up well in October, I feel like I barely lived through November and now we are crashing into December and you've been waiting! I am literally writing this on an intercity train as we speak

book notes / tl;dr

• the direct answer to your question is no, I don't have a ritual to revisit my notes when I start writing a story, and I do have all my notes in one notebook (or more correctly, a series of notebooks that was all the One Notebook once) - but what an interesting question, and thank you for asking because I'll be happy to share how my mind + notetaking works regarding writing


• When I start writing a story, or reach a scene, I instinctly know which reference materials to reach for, so I don't "need" to flip through all my notes. I know which texts I admire for unrequited love, homesickness, or the particular description of a quiet classroom after school hours.


• I do have a good memory of my notes & my library, which consists of physical and digital books, as well as fics or articles I've printed, but it's not a pinpoint memory. I often remember "where" is the thing I'm looking for rather than "what" - e.g. I recently had to find a quote about grieving a frienship and just knew it was on a moot's dreamwidth. Or a certain play had a great dialogue for arguments, and it was on the top of a left-hand page somwhere after the middle-point. Because I also scrapbook and journal, sometimes I remember my book notes like "the page with the blue ticket" or "after the map" or "somewhere near the entry the green box with recipes". This is one reason I can never fully pivot to digital notes. The static physicality of a notebook allows me to become more and more familiar with it every time I reference it


• I do want to caveat the above with the following qualificiations - (1) I find myself revisiting similar themes across my works, so some reference texts just become touchstones and I become ultra-familiar with their content (siken's crush and ondaatje's english patient are two) (2) I rarely start writing with a mental blank slate, I take note of the ideas I want to write, and as I walk through life, I make connections and file things away to be used later. When I'm actively writing, I perceive every creative work with the greed of a cannibal. So when I sit down to write, I don't need to flick through my notes for inspiration, because past-hwa had already curated the inspiration.


• As to what I do when I hit a wall - I hope to do an extended talk about that in the same post that I mentioned earlier about what I think about when writing.
  

Difference between analog and digital notes

• I also want to talk to your comment about feeling "bogged down" in writing notes because I absolutely feel that as well, and it's a problem exarcerbated by analog. It feels like a sisyphean curse where, the more you consume (and the more meaningful works you consume), the more work you've generated for yourself. [Example - I've yet to start my 2024 media rewind]


• 3 points
  
  
  • (1) I find that convenience degrades longevity. The easier it is to 'take notes', the less likely I will revisit and find utility in those notes. It's because low-quality notetaking (such as taking screenshots of a video or bookmarking links) result in an amalgamation of unstructured and unprocessed ideas which are exhausting and lengthy to filter through. Notes which take effort and time inevitability have better quality and I find myself using it again and again. So the mission becomes, how do I take notes which are informative and usable, but also sustainable to my reading process. The answer is understanding what I 'need' notes of
  
  
  • (2) In the convenience of the information age, I'm buoyed by the hope that I can find anything I want again if I know what I'm looking for. Everyone is a targeted search away, whether it is a book or an interview. Even if it's in a library book, I trust that if I need to, I can borrow it again. Therefore, the point of my notes is to identify 'what' is found 'where'.
  
  
  • (3) As to the information that is noted, I've moved away from simply copying information because of the two points above. I've realised what is precious to me, is the "idea" and the "connections" spawned by engaging with material deepy, as those synergies are the building blocks of a good story. I capture what I like in a story, as well as why I like it. Those ideas are unique to me. I don't summarise a story because summaries can be found online, but I may note the part of it that resonated with me, and what other texts I'm reminded of when I read it.
  
  
• Therefore, I take digital notes differently to analog notes. Digital notes are much more of an 'archival' process, and I make sure it's supplemented with an analog note that logs why I archived that thing digitally.
  
• For me, the ultimate use of an idea is to create something out of it, whether it is a dreamwdith post or a story. I try to remember this, as I don't think it's enough (as a life experience) to simply take notes for the sake of having notes.
  

books/reading/recs

• I haven't read rfk's works other than the poppy war -- I don't think she's a good writer unfortunately (at this stage of her career), and knowing her flaws distracts me when I read her works. After reading poppy war 3, I think I've lost the ability to 'trust' her as an author and engage deeply with her works because of how disappointed I was with the book. Funnily enough, there are a lot of rfk haters in my life who are determined to read every book to critique them with the authority of lived expereince so I do live out the haterism life via osmosis!

Thank you for being interested in my thoughts and reading this lengthy reply. I hope 2025 finishes off beautifully for you!