Meet Our New Intern: SINDUS Kim

My first work of presentable quality was written in 10th grade, fresh after a devastating breakup with my Discord girlfriend of six months, and published on a well-known fanfiction website in a fever dream of heartache. 

I had explicitly tagged my piece as “Breakup Self-Insert,” because I recognized halfway through the draft that this was a thinly veiled projection of my own angst. A personalized hell of Hurt/No Comfort. Pieces taken from the still-burning house fire that was our mutually blocked DMs, then slapped onto an innocent Google Doc—fourteen thousand words written & proofread in the span of three days. This piece was the final nail in the coffin, my own special closure, and writing it was perhaps the most painful experience in my life: second-place only to admitting on my “Meet Our New Intern” post that I actively wrote fanfiction. 

Be it dissociation or healing, soon after I published the fic, I got over the girl. But I’ll never forget: I woke up the morning after that first chapter and saw that my notifications had exploded overnight. Comments sung praise after praise about a “fresh take on the character” and “a beautiful interpretation.” Every few hours, I’d receive some variation of “I don’t know how you wrote him so correctly!,” and think to myself: thanks, I just pretended he was my ex-girlfriend. I remember being confused, that nobody recognized the deception. Then, one day, the obvious hit me. 

If you squint hard enough, real characters look just like real people. 

Like characters, a real person exists within an ambiguous mishmash of ideals, morality, and history, to fluctuating yet paradoxically static degrees of importance, that influence their decision in any number of ways. These facets layer and collide to form the loose concept we call “self,” whether anthropocentric or otherwise. Similarly, like people, a real character is malleable—so we like to observe this self as it experiences a “thing.” Authors put an extraordinary amount of care into ensuring this happens. Consider everything the self is at this present moment, and why it is that way. Now, here’s a thing. Will the self change? Will it stay the same? Should it? Why, or why not? Or, my favorite—doggone with the character. Will you, the self reading this thing, change as a result of having read it? At the center of literature, there is a push-pull of human reaction; the process of evoking these reactions is what I call art. 

Between real things, the line dividing them is only a matter of semantics. The pravus opus of my career blended a teen lesbian situationship, an adult gay situationship, & every real thing’s real history together until I had something fresh. In the wake of a four-way projection, all of us imposed onto each other, I was left with a sadomasochistic mess of a story—in which every breathtaking reaction was brand spankin’ new. My readers were so compelled by my characters working out their abandonment issues over Spotify playlist descriptions that they could, graciously, overlook the fact that I clearly didn’t know what a semicolon was. 

All this to say: since then, I’ve loved real characters & people everywhere, and I’m elated to continue doing so as an editorial intern for Sundress Publications. I hope this was obvious from the piece, but I got back together with the girl. Please don’t go looking for my fic—I might have to quit my internship if you find it.

---

SINDUS Kim (any/all) is a writer & fan of the odd, off-putting, and preternatural. Though they have a penchant for fiction and CNF/essays, their Word document dedicated to bad poems about their ex-girlfriend well-exceeds fifty pages. You can find him at his completely empty Instagram and Twitter @sinducated, or her website, where she’s open to all kinds of small talk and inquiries.