Thank you! I'm definitely having fun. Most of my reading has been piecemeal but there's a bunch of things I'm reading from and I'll get through everything eventually. In the reading list I have: Peasant Life in China by Fei Xiaotong, The Chinese Conquer China by Anna Louise Strong (and I'm probably going to read some of Strong's other works on China too, like The Rise of the Chinese People's Communes and One Fifth of Mankind), Fanshen by William Hinton, Guerrilla Warfare by Guevara, and a whole lot of Mao. My other big reading plan this year is to finally read Capital.

I listened to an audiobook of Red Star Over China last year and that really influenced the direction I decided to take the story. The basic idea of an anticapitalist fantasy seires was already in my head before then but I got really inspired by Snow's descriptions of the Chinese revolution in Yan'an. CGTN documentaries also helped (and my mom has been trying to get me to watch a TV series about the Long March for a while, which I haven't gotten around to yet, lol.)

Le Guin is awesome, I keep starting her books and not finishing them though (which is my worst reading habit, I have a tendency to forget to pick a book back up if I get distracted from it.) Glad you're volunteering too!