Original short fiction, sent to you
Each instalment is a complete tale — beginning, turn and ending — never a serial cliffhanger and never a newsletter about writing. I work from folk material, port records and Singapore street hearsay, then rebuild it into something that stands on its own in twelve to twenty minutes of reading.
Written in Singapore · Complete stories, never serials · Reply to any instalment and it reaches me
The instalment
Sunday morning, Singapore time, a finished piece of fiction arrives. There is no preamble about my week, no request to click, and no half-told plot waiting for next Sunday. Four things travel together.
Each tale runs between 1,800 and 3,400 words. That is long enough for a turn and a landing, short enough to read with a cup of tea before the rest of the day begins. I do not split a plot across weeks. If a piece wants more room, I hold it back and write a long story for the archive instead of stretching a short one thin.
One plate accompanies every instalment, drawn in ink and wash. I send it as an image in the letter and I describe it in plain sentences underneath, so a reader who cannot see the plate still has the picture. I keep to one image because a story this length should not be asked to carry a gallery.
After the last line I add a paragraph of provenance: a port record, a rumour from a market street, a sentence overheard on the bus. The note is not a lecture. It is a way of saying where the material sat before I rebuilt it, and of keeping me honest about what I invented.
Paid readers keep a door into everything sent before they arrived. The sampler does not include that door, which is why it can stay free. If you later move to a weekly plan, the earlier instalments wait in the archive rather than arriving as a flood in a single morning.
A change of habit
An unfinished story is a debt. I would rather send you a whole shape than ask you to wait for the rest of one.
I used to leave a hook at the end of the week and tell myself that suspense was part of the pleasure. It was not. Readers who missed a Sunday came back to a half-remembered corridor and a character whose name had slipped. I was writing as if attention were a renewable lease, and it is not.
A week is exactly long enough to build a complete arc if I protect Wednesday for the draft and refuse to start a tale I cannot finish in one sitting. The pressure is useful. It stops me from decorating a plot that has not yet earned its ending, and it gives the Sunday letter a clean edge: here is a story, it begins, it turns, it stops.
If you fall behind, you may join on any Sunday without being lost. There is no required order and no cast you must already know. Occasional loose sequences are flagged in the endnote well in advance, and even those can be read alone. I would rather you arrive mid-year and find a door that opens than a corridor that only makes sense from January.
From 2026
These are sample instalments, sent as complete letters in 2026. The openings below are the openings I sent. The rest of each tale lives on the Story Shelf.
Island tale · 16 minutes · sample, 2026
The boatman would not take my ten-dollar note. He held out a palm already wet with spray and named a fare that existed only in coins I did not have. Behind him the island sat in a heat haze, and the jetty boards ticked as they dried. I offered twice the sum. He shook his head, patient as a tide chart, and said the crossing required exact change because the dead on the far side were particular about accounts. The engine idled. A heron lifted off the piling and did not come back.
Domestic strange · 14 minutes · sample, 2026
I counted them twice before dusk and arrived at nine, though the shophouse had been built with five. The extra doors stood between the spice sacks and the stair, painted the same peeled green, each with a brass plate too worn to read. A woman selling attar told me not to knock unless I already knew which room I meant to leave. I chose the third. The corridor behind it smelled of rain on canvas, and the city noise fell away as if someone had closed a ledger.
Port record · 18 minutes · sample, 2026
She kept the weather in stoppered bottles along a shelf above the sink, labelled in a hand so small I had to borrow her spectacles. Monday’s haze. A squall she had not used. The dry week in March. She sold me a mild evening for the price of a cup of tea and warned me not to open it on the bus. I did, of course, between Lavender and Bugis, and the windows pearled over while a man in a hard hat swore at a sun that was no longer there.
The reading week
I keep the same four stations every week so that Sunday does not depend on a burst of luck. The hours below are Singapore time. If a week breaks, I skip rather than send a thin story; I would rather a gap than a half-made ending.
I return to the fragment I have been carrying: a line from a shipping register, a market rumour, a motif from a tale that will not sit still. I write by hand until the shape of the week’s story is visible, including the ending, even if the wording of that ending is still clumsy.
The whole draft is written in a single sitting. If it will not close, I put it aside and take up a different fragment rather than leave you a debt. The cost is that some promising openings are abandoned. The gain is that Sunday always carries a finished piece.
I draw one plate and write the provenance paragraph. The picture is allowed to contradict the prose a little; it is a second reading, not a caption. The endnote names the source without explaining the story away.
The letter goes at seven in the morning. You can read it with breakfast or leave it until evening; nothing in it expires. Replies come back to this desk, not to a queue, and I answer in the reading-desk hours that follow.
Choose a rhythm
Three ways in. The sampler is free and stays free. The weekly plans are billed in Singapore dollars, monthly or yearly, and you can leave from a link in every letter.
Free
One complete story a month, by web and e-mail. No archive, no annotated drafts. A way to see the form before you decide on a weekly rhythm.
Most readers choose this
SGD 9 / month or SGD 88 / year
Every Sunday instalment, the illustration, the endnote, and a reply that reaches me. The week’s story arrives whether you are current or catching up.
SGD 16 / month or SGD 156 / year
Everything in the weekly plan, plus the back catalogue as EPUB, the annotated drafts, and two long stories a year that never go out as Sunday letters.
Sunday, 07:00 SGT
I send one complete tale a week, or one a month if you prefer the sampler. You can leave at any time from a link in the letter; the next period simply does not start. I do not pass your address on, and I read the replies myself.