This novella is, down to the core, very queer, food-based, and Taiwanese. So, A Milky Way Home is essentially this: my need for queer romances to feature two characters of color and my love for homemade food. But I had an amazing support system: friends who would read snippets-usually my best paragraphs-and react the way I’d hoped my readers would react. It horrifies me to do the math and think about how many hours I’ve spent writing the first draft of A Milky Way Home.

It takes hours for me to spew just one thousand words. But I told myself that I was ready to tackle a novella of 30–39k. “Island Burnt by History” (about 11,600 words) had been one of my longest finished works to date the other one was a fantasy novella I’d written in middle school. scriv files were named exactly that-was a dream come true. The Clover Hill project-for the longest time, this was what I had called A Milky Way Home, so many notes and. A week went by as I toyed with the idea of being a contributor. My first novelette “Island Burnt by History” (in Awakenings: A Cute Mutants Anthology ) had just been released earlier that month, and I had been writing regularly due to this creative writing class I was taking at the time. It had felt like an opportunity too good to miss.

I hadn’t planned for any of this, but it was spring break of 2022, and I was in Seattle with all the time in the world. It all started when the Clover Hill Romance series was recruiting. A Milky Way Home is now out in the world!

A Milky Way Home by Hsinju Chen