Hi! My name is Bailee Golden, and I am currently interning with NCLAC. This month, I caught up with Zeppy Cheng. He is a local college student and fiction author who loves to write about “strange ideas taken seriously”.
How have your abilities grown since you began writing books?
For one, my typing speed has increased to where, when I take an online typing speed test, I score in the top five percent. This helps a lot when writing fiction, as my hands are able to put out ideas and sentences as fast as I am able to think them, thus increasing the cohesiveness of my writing style. As well as this, I have gained an intuition for storytelling, a sort of guiding knowledge that helps me find my way through the infinite branches of a work of fiction.
What is your favorite book that you have written and why?
I like my book The Lassifia because it has the deepest themes of friendship and the power of working together to achieve goals.
How do you maintain staying creative when you are preoccupied with college work?
Sometimes, I just like to blow out steam by metaphorically spitting out random ideas, and those ideas often turn into something bigger. I'd say that coming up with interesting stories is akin to a sort of meditation. It really calms the mind and heals the soul.
What do you expect to gain from participating in this year's Holiday Art Crawl?
I want to increase my recognition in this town and among the people who I live near. Even though my ambition for the title of "famous author" has dimmed somewhat since I realized that the field is so competitive that I have more chance of winning the Powerball than becoming a New York Times Bestseller, I still want to be able to know that someone I pass on the street at the very least knows my name or likes one of my books.
What advice would you give to your younger self or to those pursuing writing?
I would advise my younger self to start writing sooner. I would have liked to start at age five, instead of age fifteen. Then I would have had that special form of learning and ability that picking something up during childhood would have gained me. Writing well is an extension of linguistic acrobatics, and starting young enables the engagement of those special language learning parts of the brain to get used to writing instead of just taking things in. I have no doubt that I would have been a much better writer had I gone to school for writing instead of for the clarinet.
Zeppy’s books are all available through Amazon.