What a wonderful story! I found myself rereading it pretty much as soon as I finished. As a short story, this has such a magnificent scale, and yet it’s also deeply personal and full of surprises. Wonderfully done. I would love to hear more about how you weave these together.

Thank you, David! That means a lot to me. Especially because I wrote “Moon Rabbit Song” as a side story for my epic fantasy novel that’s been rejected by Big Five publishers. My “space fantasy wuxia” style of worldbuilding is mainly inspired by Taiwanese aesthetics, and I’d already done all the groundwork for it, so when writing “Moon Rabbit Song,” I could focus on crafting my sick and twisted characters.

I like princesses, but I love them even more in their depraved and murderous states. I just really wanted to write in the perspective of a gross princess character, and I wanted her to be unapologetically messy. Generally speaking, East Asian culture tends to celebrate this dainty, pristine image of a woman. It is suffocating.

All that said, I’m extremely grateful to Wendy and the Nightmare team for picking up my story. It is, as you say, deeply personal.

I understand your background is both Filipino and Taiwanese. I’m Welsh, so I often draw on that mythology and history. How much do you look to each place? When you’re drawing inspiration, what do you look for in a myth or a legend?

For starters, some of my favorite sources for inspiration are The Aswang Project (Filipino), and Island Folklore (Taiwanese). I don’t look for anything specific; I just love exploring these myths and folklore whenever I can. The moon rabbit is quite popular. I ended up gravitating to a far less traditional take, and I had a lot of fun with it.

Growing up, most of my books and TV came from the West. I read exclusively in English—never Tagalog or Mandarin. My schooling in particular was rather USAmerican Christian in flavor, not by my choice. And I didn’t pay much attention to either of my roots, despite living in Manila my whole life. So, now I’m trying to make up for lost time, and hopefully share my tales with a broader audience.

The story has the feel of constant movement, both in time and place, with a rich descriptive quality. How do you go about balancing the physicality of battle scenes with the underlying themes?

I usually try to keep the battle scenes as clear and straightforward as possible, and let the reader do the rest. For this story, the repetitive nature of a time loop served me well, I believe. It felt a bit like writing poetry. Or a song, hence the title. In my head, there is a rhythm to the words. My process is very intuitive and probably doesn’t make sense to everyone.

I noticed you’ve been published a few times recently in places such as Strange Horizons and Flash Fiction Online. What else are you currently working on? What can we expect from you in the future?

Plenty! Not that I have a publisher right now, and I need a new agent, too. I did just finish a bunch of nasty works. “Asylum for Saints” is a full-length poetry book of religious horrors. “Kosmiko” is a novella about being trapped in a supermarket hellscape with eldritch monstrosities. “Ghost Bride” is another novella wherein a dying woman cons a fox demon into a sick marriage to terrorize her abusive family. Plus some other bizarre manuscripts in my folder, like a Backrooms-inspired nightmare adventure with a talking menstrual clot.

I can be reached through X and also via email: authorlyhung(at)gmail(dot)com. If you’d like, please feel free to say hi!