Bubble Tea Report #5: Extremely Important Bubble Tea Findings
May Bubble Tea report findings
Here is May’s bubble tea report, because memory is fragile and some drinks are too important to leave to history’s weaker archivists. The ShinGen Jelly Green Plum Oolong from N25 Nitro Tea sounds like it was brewed by someone with secrets, which naturally made it my business.
This months posts (In case you missed them):
BICHOK (BUTT IN CHAIR HANDS ON KEYBOARD)
I wrote approximately 26,361 words across multiple project, not counting my survival job where I had to do technical writing for a training manual. This is not counting any of my substack articles. If we are being honest, it would closer to 40k, maybe 50k.
Tiny victories before the universe changes its mind
I started working on a new horror project about vampires
I refilled the writing well on purpose, with structure, play, music, food, and attention.
This month I did not just collect ideas like an anxious magpie with good taste. I turned them into actual craft angles, Substack concepts, and sharper ways of thinking about fiction
The part I loved writing
In May, I loved writing the sharp, strange, voice-heavy parts: the vampire suburban horror beats, the craft essays on structure and the places where humor and form got to share the same body.
The funniest thing I wrote
“Vampires do not sparkle. Nor should they ever. Not even the gay ones.”
Random quote I’m taping to my forehead
“Writing is the slow, stubborn art of turning private chaos into something another person can survive with you.”
— ChatGPT
Why it’s sticking: Well, Fuck me with a rusty steel baton, Ai can really take my job as a writer. I asked it to give me an inspirational quote about writing. I didn’t have one in mind this month. But it’s sticking because not how shocking it is to have an Ai learning machine inspire me to write better. It’s the fact that it’s a thousand percent right. Writing is not just self-expression dressed in fancy clothes. It is how I take confusion, longing, obsession, grief, humor all the strange unruliness of being alive, and make sense of it all. How writing gives way to shape. It is private at first, yes, but the real power is in its translation. The moment something messy becomes legible. The moment a reader finds themselves in it and feels less alone. That is what writing means to me. Not perfection, not performance, but the quiet miracle of making meaning out of disorder.
How am I refilling the writing well this month
Playing Hybrid Heaven on N64
Eating dumplings, listening to If Pink Floyd played the entire legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time soundtrack, and giving a shout out to Fractal Haze on Youtube.
Listening to writing Podcasts.
This month I’m refilling the writing well through curiosity with better taste. Through structure. Through play. Through music that reminds me weirdness still needs bones, through food and bubble tea that drag me back into the sensory world, and through craft questions that make me look at fiction harder instead of just producing more of it. Less passive inspiration, more deliberate refueling.
What it does to my writing: This month’s needed refill is going to make my writing stranger, sharper, more sensory and more structurally self-aware. The ideal condition for fiction that wants to be both playful and intentional. Fuck, Go play Hybrid Heaven. The controls are shit but, Its a game too strange to exist: part sci-fi thriller, part action RPG, part wrestling match conducted by people who may or may not be having a breakdown. Pure fever dream.
Next month’s intention
June is Pride, summer walks, and writing, of course. This month I want to write forward, edit without sentimentality, and keep researching craft in a way that actually reports back to the page.
Final Thoughts:
This month reminded me that the writing well does not refill itself. You feed it on purpose. With structure, with weirdness, with better taste, with the small obsessions that refuse to stay small.
And if you’d like to see what happens when those obsessions make it onto the page, Starforge by Alex Eos is on Barnes & Noble.
‘May’ the force be with you,
Alex Eos 🧋