004: Nine Years Ago
I've got a few big things brewing—but I can't talk about any of them right now. So, in lieu of looking ahead, I thought I'd take this time to look back to the start of my career as an author.
But we'll get to that a little later. First things first...
Support my work
Work-Life Balance – the multi-award-winning prose/comics hybrid co-created with Benjamin Chee
You can also get the Work-Life Balance bundle, which comes with the book, a mug, washi tape and more
Worlds Apart: A Conversation About Mental Health – a comic co-created with Nurjannah Suhaimi
HANTU – Spotify channel for the award-winning narrative series, Ghost Maps, and the talk show, Dead Air, both of which were co-created with Kyle Ong
Radio ga ga
Ben and I were live on CNA938 this past Tuesday. We sat down with Melanie Oliveiro to talk about Work-Life Balance, the Singapore Book Awards, and Southeast Asian creatures and spirits.
If you tuned in, you could probably tell that we were pretty nervous at the start. Ben's never done anything on live radio before and the last time I was on air was at the tail end of my magazine-writing days.
Melanie, however, is clearly very, very good at her job. She put us at ease almost immediately and, within minutes, we went from anxiously checking our notes to just enjoying a really fun chat with a fellow Hellboy fan.
If you missed it live, you can listen to the full interview here.
Boo!niversity
This Halloween, I'll be joining the formidable Meihan Boey and NTU's School of Humanities for a chat about hantus, momoks and all the things that go bump in the night.
I'm pretty sure the event's only open to SOH's students though, so if you fit the bill, come on by.
Remembering the Tiny Room
I've rewritten this portion several times over the last couple of days. I've shifted it further down in this edition and, at one point, thought about removing it completely.
It's Friday evening now. I've got nothing else to hinge this edition on—and, honestly, I've wanted to write about this for some time, so you'll forgive me if this whole thing is a little unpolished and kinda raw.
September 2024 marks my tenth year as a published author. I've gone back and forth on whether I want to even acknowledge the occasion though. In case you haven't noticed, for a while now, if I even mention my first book, I'll only refer to it as such: "my first book."
But back in September 2014, I was excited as hell to tell everyone about my debut short story collection, Tales From a Tiny Room.
It was, after all, the realisation of a dream. There was a time when I thought, "If I could just publish one book, I could die happy." And it truly felt like that as I held my then-freshly printed copy in my hands: like I'd reached some kind of culmination of a long journey.
It was, of course, really just the beginning. The momentum from that book carried me through those early years, fuelling my drive to grow as a writer with each and every new project. By 2019, it even sold enough copies to warrant a second printing.
Because most of it was written around ten years ago though, it's very much a time capsule of who I was back then—and I'm sure most of you would agree that you wouldn't really want to spend too much time with the person you were a decade ago.
It's a problem I imagine most writers have—not wanting to relook at their earlier work. The thing is, because of who published Tiny Room, it's added another layer of complexity with how I look at it.
I won't get into the details. I think it's best to err on the side of caution and assume that the people who were directly affected by what happened would rather move on with their lives at this point.
I will say that what happened tainted the book completely for me. I could no longer look at something that had once filled me with such pride. I removed any mention of Tiny Room from my bios and, as much as possible, distanced myself from it.
In the time since, however, a few books from that publisher have been reprinted by other people, and it's got me thinking about Tiny Room again. I don't know if I'll ever give even some of those stories a new home. I certainly don't think now's the time for me to give them the attention that they might deserve.
At the very least though, I think I'm done letting that book be soiled by the actions of another person. I might not mark my tenth year as a published author when the time comes, but maybe—just maybe—I might quietly crack Tales From a Tiny Room open again for the first time in a very long time.
Morning breath
Just so you know, this is what greets me on many a morning.
Signing off
Another edition in the bag. As always, don't forget to support my work:
See you in November!