JA PAK

My Books

Seal Skin One night Lily wakes and finds a woman in her bedroom. The woman is Ula. Waiting for daybreak, she tells Lily the story of how she lost her skin. Love, revenge and redemption—a wondrous retelling of the selkie myth. Available at Amazon and Smashwords.

Seal Skin is also available at Smashwords, iTunes and Barnes & Noble.

Act of Creation A mini short story collection. Three stories about food, obsessions and heartbreak.

Act of Creation is also available at Smashwords, iTunes and Barnes & Noble.

An Assortment of Facts About Me

Relationships are all I seem to write about. I can't describe the world without them.

I once lived on a farm. In England, right outside Oxford. The rabbits outnumbered people 1,000 to 1. Almost every winter, the fields would flood and a married pair of swans would come and swim under the frozen willow tree.

Reading the "Once Seen/Would Love To Meet Again" ads make me laugh. People are so wonderfully flirtatious and hopeful.

I almost got a job as Anna Wintour's assistant. My mind boggles at the thought.

My first job out of college was at at a very large publishing conglomerate in NYC. I was an editorial assistant. After six months, I was promoted to assistant editor — turnover was that bad. People used to cry at their desks. At lunch, I used to read the copies of Fortune magazine that were lying around. One day, I thought, "Gee, that seems like a fun place to work." Strangely, a couple of months later, through a total fluke, I got a job there as a reporter. It turned out to be mostly a fact-checking job, which totally blew me away because I was terrified of fact-checking. As a matter of fact, just a few weeks before, a very nice lady at The New Yorker tried to get me to apply for the fact-checking job there, and I said, "Oh, no. I don't think that's for me at all!" Sometimes, you simply can't fight the Universe. As it turned out, fact-checking was very good for me because it taught me to be very detail oriented. But I still have nightmares about having to fact-check.

My feet are absurdly small.

The first time I fell in love, I was five years old. The object of my affection was a piano. A large black lacquered baby grand, cramped in a small room, a neighborhood girl parading a gang of us all around the giant thing, none of us knowing what a piano was. It was so mysterious. In a fit of pride, the girl lifted the piano lid and ran her fingers quickly down the keyboard, hoping her parents wouldn't hear her. The sound filled my heart and I pestered my mother for days until she enrolled me in a local piano school. If I'd been immediately shipped off to a piano boot camp where the piano was on the menu morning, noon and night, I'd have been blissfully happy. Alas, the reverse happened. Within a few months, we moved across the ocean and the piano and I would not meet again for another seven years. By then a thick and sinewy wall had grown between us, but there was still love.

I used to be a card-carrying CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) member — yes, I sometimes enjoy a warm, flat beer.

I want radical tax reform now.

I once met Bill Gates.

I love ice hockey.

I did the HTML for this page.

I was once a genius for a day.

Some Facts About My Writing

The incredibly generous Michael Kimball thought I'd invented a new form of writing, which threw me for loop since I'm usually a lagging indicator. I must have lagged so far behind that I'd inadvertently swung back ahead.

The most memorable story rejection I ever got was from an editor who said he absolutely loved my story — until he found out the protagonists were not gay. For years I pondered this, and then one day, I realized he'd probably been smoking weed and it all suddenly made sense.

Usually, my writing gets criticized for being too spare, but lately, it's being criticized for having too many stories in a single work. But, you know, I sorta like that. More bang for the buck. And I hate being bored.

I love the fact that one of my pieces of flash fiction was on the outside of a coffee can.