past, present, future: a history of my newsletters
It's been a journey
Hi, hello! It’s been a while. I’m back with a brand new newsletter. ✨ Learn more about past, present, future.
This may come as a surprise to no one or everyone, but this is not my first newsletter. If you’re still on this mailing list already (hi, and thank you for sticking around!), you have been here for many iterations of this thing. What started out as Between the Lines (where I shared links and books I was reading) turned into The Slow Simmer (my love letter to food, design, and writing). I’d do them for a while, but they didn’t stick. I alternated between Mailchimp and TinyLetter and Substack, weighing the pros and cons of each, thinking there was one right answer and everything would fall into place.
Fast forward a year and I present to you past, present, future, where I share a mixed bag of topics and how they’ve evolved over time. This is meant to be explorative and sometimes thought-provoking; bite-sized ideas to chew on. This newsletter aligns more with who I am and what I write about now. We’re constantly evolving as humans. If our newsletters are some sort of extension of us, then isn’t it natural for them to evolve just the same?
Since my last newsletter, The Slow Simmer, I sold a couple of books (I can’t wait to tell you more about them!), the first of which will be publishing in winter 2023 (exact date to be announced at some point in the future). The past, present, and future of myths, superstitions, and how ideas, beliefs, traditions, and stories change over time are topics in my books, so it’s only fitting that my novels make appearances here every now and then.
I am someone who likes to plan, and I do have a running list of ideas for topics for past, present, future. But I’ve also learned that having too much planned sometimes leaves little room for spontaneity. That’s what I want to make space for in 2022.
As I learn new ideas, read more books, and write about new themes, these will inevitably inspire topics that might edge out a pre-planned topic by a week or two. Of course, I don’t have a crystal ball to see too far into the future, but what I can tell you is that there will be one more newsletter coming at the end of this week.
Generally, past, present, future will be sent out every other week, but sometimes weekly if inspiration strikes or there’s book news that just can’t wait.
✨ If you want to stay in the loop, you can do so with this newsletter. I’m also on Twitter and Instagram.
Just read: 🌸 Win Me Something by Kyle Lucia Wu: I couldn’t put this one down. Parts of this book felt like a mirror where I saw some of my own similar inner thoughts, struggles, and experiences reflected back at me, including assumptions put upon me and not knowing whether or not to correct people, only knowing how to speak some Mandarin, and the desire and longing to belong and to fit in somewhere. It’s not often that I get to see parts of myself in books in this way. I lingered in this story.
A few lines that stuck out:
“I felt like Li [her Mandarin tutor] distrusted me immediately because I was one of those American-born Chinese kids who wasn’t really Chinese enough.”
“I’d glanced into the bars I’d passed on my walk home from the subway, looking at the groups of people huddled over wineglasses and candles, feet dangling off barstools, wrists and elbows colliding, speaking without thinking, laughing without swallowing, like it was nothing, like it was easy to find somewhere to belong.”
“I guessed what I wanted more than anything was for someone to share my view of the universe, to step inside what things were like for me, and say it was real.”
Win Me Something features Willa Chen, a biracial Chinese American girl who grew up in New Jersey. Per the back copy, "Willa felt both hypervisible and unseen, too Asian to fit in at her mostly white school, and too white to speak to the few Asian kids around." When her parents divorce, remarry, and start new families, Willa feels left outside of those newly formed lives, too. Later, Willa takes a job nannying for a wealthy white family in Tribeca and is confronted with all of the things she never had.
Reading now: ❄️ Always, in December by Emily Stone: So far I am really enjoying this story about Josie, who mails a letter every December to her parents she lost as a child on Christmas. After a run-in (literally) with a handsome stranger, they decide to keep meeting. I’m only a quarter of the way through, but am already bracing myself for life to knock these strangers off course and away from each other. Until, of course, they are brought back together again.
Reading next: ☃️ A Season for Second Chances by Jenny Bayliss: I enjoyed Jenny Bayliss’ The Twelve Dates of Christmas, so her newest book made it to the top of my list this holiday season. In this book, Annie Sharpe’s kids are grown, her marriage is over, and her restaurant is doing well. She leaves her city life behind to take a winter guardian position in a historic seaside home. Everyone’s great, except for the grumpy nephew of the homeowner, who has other plans for the property she happens to be residing in. I think this one will be cute!
From me to you, in the present,
Lauren