Pamela Jeong
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pamelaelaela.bsky.social
Pamela Jeong
@pamelaelaela.bsky.social
650 followers 490 following 3.5K posts
Lifelong writer, aspiring author, mom of two.

Bibliophile, cinephile, serial hobbyist. I'm talking graveyards of crochet needles & ukuleles.
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pamelaelaela.bsky.social
Danbi and her two best friends, Chloe and Mundy, discuss their options when they find a glowing tree ✨🌲✨

#WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #AmQuerying
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“Different idea,” Chloe says dreamily. “We should touch it.” Mundy squeezes his eyes shut. “Seriously, Leva? Why?” “There’s a gigantic, magic, glowing tree here.” Chloe looks at him like he has three heads. “What else is there to do?” “Magic, Chlo? Really? Son of a biscuit, did you take something? Wait. Did you put something in the food?!” “Are you seriously asking me if I drugged you right now? Of course not, Robert!” She gestures to the tree. “If this isn’t magic, what is it?” “Some kind of…maybe like a…” Mundy’s face contorts. “You know what, this is something for one brave dude in a hazmat suit to figure out.” “Orrrr it’s for us,” Chloe counters. “My parents are just pretentious enough to have made me read The Iliad and The Odyssey every year since I was thirteen, so I recognize a call to adventure when I see one. Listen to your instincts for once! Are they really telling you that this radiant meteor lantern tree is going to hurt you?” “Do you feel that?” It comes out in a whisper, and they turn to me, staring at the tree. Chloe angles her head inquisitively, and Mundy’s eyes plead with me for support. “It’s like…” I close my eyes. “Like stepping into the sun after spending all day inside. Like something inevitable.” Mundy lets out a groan, but Chloe shuts her eyes. She inhales deeply. She opens them slowly, and nods. “I feel it.” Mundy’s arms fly up. “You’ve both lost it! What’s gotten into you, D? You’re supposed to help be the voice of reason. This dynamic doesn’t work with two reckless nutjobs.” Chloe curtsies before flipping him off.
November 17, 2025 at 1:17 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
Danbi meets a very special lynx.

#WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #AmQuerying
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There’s a faint rustle, and my eyes open. Did I actually hear it? I scan the clearing and the thicket beyond the sunwater pond. I’m about to get up when I see it. Two yellow eyes, handsomely framed in curves of white. Two triangular ears above them, tipped with tufts of black fur aimed at the sky. And below, broad feet ensconced in dense blue-gray fur. A lynx. Our eyes meet. The contact is galvanic, yet curiously stable. Decisive. Like the moment when you figure out the answer to a riddle, it is jolting and grounding all at once. The lynx stands, gazing at me. It’s large for its kind, likely a male. I try to read his expression. He doesn’t seem alarmed, but uncertain. I sit forward, but the lynx steps back. It’s okay, I think, hoping he will somehow understand. But the lynx makes a sound, a strange sort of wail, and trots away. Still, he doesn’t run, and I consider following him. But something tells me I must be patient. Something tells me he doesn’t like to feel chased down any more than I do. So I’ll wait. I’ll return and see him again. I know that I will. He is my animus.
November 16, 2025 at 12:22 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
It isn’t easy for Danbi to open up, but there are one or two people she meets who are willing to help her.

#WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #AmQuerying
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“That’s…a lot to take,” Cyrus says quietly. “And tragic.” My heart clenches. “Not really. You can’t miss what you never had.” “No, I mean, for them.” He looks at me. “They missed out on something big.” I swallow and glance about, but there are only trees. Before the silence goes on too long, he says, “Second question. How’s kindling going?” “Oof. Sore subject.” “Worse than my family’s flight from political persecution?” “You’re playing the persecution card? Already? Shameless.” His smile ticks. “You should know that about me.” “Well, I am a very bad kindler. You should know that about me.” “It’s notoriously difficult magic.” “So they say.” “You’ve only been at it a few months.” “A few months with almost zero progress.” “Almost zero? Or zero?” I sigh. My fingers skim across the bark of an alder tree. “I get a sort of…sensation. That’s all.” “Progress is progress. Call it what it is. Don’t give yourself an excuse to check out.” I treat him to a surly look. “Figures you’d be fond of giving unsolicited advice, Cheap Shot.” He laughs. “That’s not it. I’m just not fond of defeat.” He marches ahead as we reach the edge of the woods, then turns and steps backward to brandish that crooked smile at me. “So don’t be defeated,” he says.
November 15, 2025 at 12:35 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
I love this, and it’s so wonderful you’re teaching younguns this stuff. When I taught HS, the unit I started my freshmen with every year was literally called Literature as a Window and a Mirror 😂 We read Plato’s allegory of the cave, watched the film Examined Life, and looked at Picasso & Magritte.
The Human Condition by Rene Magritte Girl Before a Mirror by Pablo Picasso
November 14, 2025 at 7:34 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
🐶🍁❤️
A brown and white dog outside with a red leaf on his head
November 14, 2025 at 5:13 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
I drew some inspiration from these - Alberto Giacometti's sculptures and Egon Schiele's self-portraits.
November 14, 2025 at 4:32 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
Sometimes you delve deep into your character’s psyche, and sometimes you need a little frivolous fun for them. I remember this truth or dare scene being such fun to write.

#WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #AmQuerying
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Eye contact is deadly in this game, but I can’t resist peeking, and, true to form, there’s the crooked smile. The dimple too. “Dare.” My heart thumps inexplicably when [REDACTED]’s eyes flash to mine, so quickly that I convince myself I imagined it. The light in this ice cave plays tricks. “I dare you…” Elio begins, then after an appropriately dramatic pause, “to go for a swim in that hot spring. Naked.” There are whistles and cat-calls, and a very loosened-up Brooke shouts, “Woo! Take it off!” But [REDACTED]’s smirk doesn’t waver. Elio’s smile stretches ear to ear as he bounces his legs up and down in excitement. “Little do you know,” [REDACTED] says, standing, “undress is my preferred state of being.” He pulls his shirt up over his head and tosses it. It lands on Elio’s face, much to his delight. Don’t look, my brain commands. But my mutinous eyes skim the indentations of his hip bones, just above the waistband of his jeans, and up the defined lines of his stomach as he brushes by. I blame the party punch entirely.
November 12, 2025 at 12:45 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
Here’s me at a student fashion show in college. My friend was a fashion major and displaying her work in the show and in desperate need of another model bc someone dropped out. I was the last tall friend she had at 5’8” 😂

Everyone else in the photo did serious model faces, but this was me. 😭😂
A line of college girls in dresses, faces covered with stickers, except one silly person
November 11, 2025 at 4:15 AM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
You should! I mean, just look at Frasca there 🤩 I’d love to see more of your art.

I’m gonna share my favorite horseback pic I have myself to hopefully motivate you…
A view of some mountains from horseback. The horse is chestnut and the rider is wearing a Canadian tuxedo.
November 9, 2025 at 5:36 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
Forgive me for the extra four seconds - I got a little too wrapped up in drawing that tree! 😅 (And yes, my phone is balanced on top of my SPAM mug for this high-end video.)

#Novmemeber
November 9, 2025 at 1:18 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
I almost went with an Oscar Wilde or a James Baldwin here, but I think about Fun Home by Alison Bechdel so often, I had to go with it. I’d never read graphic memoir before and loved this marrying of form and genre. The sensitivity that comes through her dark humor… it’s all fantastic.

#Bookvember
Cover of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
November 9, 2025 at 1:11 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
Danbi considers what she knows and what she still needs to know.

#WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #AmQuerying
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I tug out the folded photograph I use as a bookmark and open it. A picture of me, my mom, and my father, taken himself with the camera turned around. An analog selfie. My mom and baby-me are blurry around the edges, as if underwater, shoved up against the fuzzy white line of the crease bisecting the photograph. My father’s face looms large in the lower left foreground, his young face rendered with exceptional clarity, tauntingly oversized. The irony of it never sat well with me. The more accurate visual metaphor for his presence in my life would probably be the smash of his arm in the corner, a pixelated wash of taupe marring the border. I know only four facts about my father: (1) Insu Shin was from a well-to-do family in Korea but left home as a teenager. (2) He and my mom met in their twenties, then immigrated to New Jersey when she was pregnant with me. (3) His mental health sharply declined, and he left us before I turned one, ranting that he had to return home. (4) He loved poetry. And maybe now I could add: (5) He died in Alaska trying to find his way back to Kardia. Maybe.
November 9, 2025 at 12:39 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
Ok, a true college snapshot. I’m doing my roommate’s hair and my friend is sitting at my desk behind me. I brought most of those books with me to college bc I was a dork, and my roommates made fun of me for the rest of the year with “you know they make you buy books here, right?”
College students in a dorm room, including a young lady in an outfit she’d never wear today.
November 9, 2025 at 5:22 AM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
I’m a huge fan of V. E. Schwab. Gorgeous prose, thoughtful plotting, unforgettable characters. Her Shades of Magic series brought me out of a long reading slump (postpartum depression hit me hard), but this is my favorite of hers. She captures the defiance of the female spirit so well.
Cover of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab
November 8, 2025 at 3:21 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
Danbi having a conversation with her best friend’s grandfather, one of the few adults in her life who cares to give her advice.

#WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #AmQuerying
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Instead, I opt for a convenient, marginally related truth. “I don’t know what I want to do. We’re about to be seniors, applying to colleges…everyone else knows what they want already. But I don’t have a clue. Never have.” “Nobody knows!” Mr. Connolly declares. “Nobody ever knows.” I give him an incredulous look before tossing Dublin’s ball again. Mr. Connolly sighs. “Listen, missy—no one knows how to do life right. You just go, and try, and screw up. That’s the good stuff.” Scoot reemerges to sniff around, and Mr. Connolly strokes his tiny head. “Remember that maze I had for Scoot? All the odd things that tripped him up, but he made it through? It’s like that. We’re all just feelin’ our way through.” “We’re all just”—I pause and smirk at the image—“little hamsters?” “Mm-hm. But there’s no cheese at the end. The maze is the cheese. Squeak squeak.” I laugh. “Squeak squeak.”
November 8, 2025 at 2:07 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
Context: There’s some magicky stuff happening for Danbi at this point. Oh, and there’s a lynx.

#WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #AmQuerying
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But then I stop short. No less than a body’s length away, beside a tall hemlock, the lynx stands in full view. His pale-yellow eyes are unflinching as they lock with mine. Their color reminds me so much of honeysuckles, I can almost smell them. The muscles in his long legs are tensed. The lynx leaps. He leaps straight up, landing halfway up the hemlock’s trunk, and climbs up to the nearest limb, at least twenty feet up from the ground. But I know he isn’t trying to escape. He wants me to follow him. He climbs higher and pauses at the next limb. I walk to the tree and gaze up at him. I close my eyes. Behind my eyelids, I see the gleaming trail of the path we wove together. I see the radiant mass of wires in a feline shape with pricked ears, a ripple of color pulsing out from his chest in invitation. I jump. And suddenly I am scaling the tree, with feet that are not mine, with claws that I don’t have. The lynx bounds up the tree, a blue-gray cloud ascending above me, and I follow like I am also made of dust and water. Like I belong to its air, and it belongs to mine. And then the world is blue.
November 5, 2025 at 12:25 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
The DK books are awesome! My kids also have this one which is really lovely.
A book titled Children Just Like Me
November 4, 2025 at 5:49 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
There’s a series for kids these days called “I Survived” that you would’ve eaten up!
Covers of the “I Survived” graphic novel series showing eight different books
November 4, 2025 at 1:53 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
I’m realizing I’ve always been very fiction-wired. Nothing non-fiction is sticking out in my memory, but I did LOVE a certain reference book…

My big sister’s Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. It has every word inside! It has little labeled tabs on the edges! Genuinely thought it was so cool. 🤓
An image of a red Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary with speckled edges and letter tabs along the side
November 4, 2025 at 1:44 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
The name Danbi means “sweet rain,” so Cyrus (possible LI) of course calls her Storm Cloud the whole book.

His dad is strict about cursing, so Mundy has a bunch of substitute expletives that are sort of a running joke.

And here’s a line with the most direct references I have… recognize them? 😁
Text: Is this what it feels like, falling down the rabbit hole, creeping through the wardrobe, coming unstuck with time?
November 4, 2025 at 1:17 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
How do I choose 😩

Aside from the books I mentioned yesterday, I'm going with The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. This was the first book I read that was translated from another language, and I think that made me realize how transcendent and universal books can be.

#Bookvember
Cover of The Little Prince
November 2, 2025 at 3:01 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
Danbi’s mentor has explained that their type of magic requires self-trust, “like being in your bedroom in the dark and knowing where the light is.” Danbi has mommy issues that have been making this very difficult, but she’s close to making a breakthrough.

#WIPSnips #WritingCommunity #AmQuerying
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I think about Chloe. I think about sleepovers at her mom’s house, using flashlights to read. Chloe on her back with her nose buried in Holes, me bent over my tattered copy of The Outsiders. The feeling of doing something together separately, being able to tell when she’d read something funny or sad by the angle of her mouth or the gleam in her eye. Chattering about whether we’d rather marry this boy or that, and the simple, unguarded way she told me that sometimes she thought it might be a girl she wanted. That implicit trust that felt bigger to me than anything. “Reach out and turn on the light. You already know where it is.” I think about Mundy. I remember when we were fourteen and he helped me research fake names for my ancestors for a family tree project at school. How thankful I was that he just let me laugh through it instead of asking why I needed to make up a family. How I taught him to use an iron because he wanted to wear his mom’s old bowling shirts but was too embarrassed to ask his dad for help and too scared of ruining them on his own. Joking about how he’d built a robot in his garage but needed me to teach him how to move a hunk of hot metal back and forth. We’ve been friends for so long that I can’t remember if it was always so easy between us. I don’t remember ever having to try with Chloe or Mundy. Somehow, opening myself up to them felt more natural and more secure than reaching up to hold my own mother’s hand.
November 1, 2025 at 11:41 AM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
A brown and white dog wearing a triceratops head piece and looking betrayed
October 31, 2025 at 4:38 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
#PlotTober 30

I made a little poster. 😋

Props to Canva for the 7-day free pro trial (you’re responsible for all my procrastination in the last week) and Pexels for the perfect photo.
A poster with a rear view of four teenage girls in school uniforms sitting on top of a desk in front of a chalkboard. The two girls in center are making a heart with their arms. Title reads “The Mistreated Heroines Alliance” in pink script and the subtitle at top reads “CAREFUL NOW. THEY’RE NOT ALONE.” There are icons of an open book with stars coming out of it and a heart with a knife through it displayed.
October 30, 2025 at 12:22 PM
pamelaelaela.bsky.social
#PlotTober 29

Do I start making a playlist as soon as I start figuring out vibes? Yes, yes I do. Are my music tastes all over the place? Yes, yes they are.

This snippet is a pretty good representation of Mistreated Heroines Alliance - nostalgia, girlhood, womanhood, angst, rebellion, friendship.
Playlist screenshot with: Do You Remember by Chance the Rapper & Death Cab for Cutie The Wire by HAIM Just a Girl by No Doubt VIEWS by Noga Erez Rebel Rebel by David Bowie ***Flawless by Beyoncé Fast as You Can by Fiona Apple Man! I Feel Like a Woman! by Shania Twain Pretty Savage by BLACKPINK Vigilante Shit by Taylor Swift Ain’t No Man by The Avett Brothers I’ll Be There by Jess Glynne
October 29, 2025 at 2:49 PM