Open notes on the making

From the desk: five letters on how a week of fiction actually feels.

I keep these notes beside the stories, not instead of them. They are written in the same first person I use everywhere else on this site, because the work is mine and the desk is mine. Each one is dated 2026. None of them is a newsletter about writing in the abstract; each grew out of a particular week of reading, drafting, drawing and sending.

Start reading How I write

Ink and pen on the reading desk

Why these exist

A public drawer for the work behind the instalment

Readers sometimes write back asking how a tale arrived in the shape it did. I would rather answer in the open, at a pace that matches the subscription, than invent a separate voice for “behind the scenes”. These five notes are that answer, written at the desk after the Sunday send.

I do not keep a private diary of the week and then polish it for display. I write these the way I write the endnotes: after the story is finished, while the material is still warm, and with the same obligation to be exact. If a week was awkward, the note says so. If a record would not yield, the note says that too.

You do not need these letters in order to enjoy an instalment. The stories stand alone. I publish the notes for readers who like to see the grain of the work, and for myself, because a public sentence is harder to fudge than a private one. If you only want fiction, the Story Shelf and the plans page will serve you better.

Replies to these notes reach the same address as replies to the stories. I read them on weekdays at the desk. There is no separate “editorial team” waiting behind a form; there is one person, a kettle that is none of your concern, and a queue that I clear in working hours.

March 2026 · 6 minute read

On finishing a story before you know what it means

The Wednesday rule sounds severe until you have lived with it for a few months. I sit down with the notes from Monday, and I do not leave the draft until it has a beginning, a turn and an ending that I can read aloud without apology. That does not mean I understand the tale in the way a critic would. It means the shape is closed. Meaning, in my experience, arrives later, often on Thursday morning, when I am walking the same streets I walked to fetch the material and the story starts arguing with itself in my head.

I used to wait for understanding first. I would keep a file open for weeks, adding clauses that explained the image I had fallen in love with, until the image itself had been talked to death. Readers could feel the delay. An unfinished story is a debt. I grew tired of owing people an ending I had not yet earned, and tired of the private theatre in which I promised myself that next week would be the week of clarity. Clarity is a poor master for short fiction. A closed shape is a better one.

Finishing before I know what a story “is about” has a practical cost. Thursday’s three passes — sound, logic, cuts — sometimes reveal that the ending I wrote in heat will not bear the weight of the opening. Then I cut, or I recast a motive, or I let a secondary figure keep a secret I had planned to explain. I do not reopen the whole week. The sitting has already happened. What I practise on Thursday is stewardship of a finished object, not a second invention.

There is a gain that still surprises me. Because the tale is already whole, I can afford to be honest in the endnote about where the material came from. I am not protecting a sequel. I am not hiding a trick I intend to spring in instalment four. The story has spent its charge. The note can therefore name a port ledger, a rumour from a wet market, or a line overheard on a bus, without turning any of those sources into a cliffhanger. Readers who join in June are not punished for missing March.

If you write, you will recognise the fear that a finished page is a smaller thing than the shimmering almost-story you carried on Monday. I have made my peace with that smallness. Twelve to twenty minutes of reading is the size I promised, and it is the size I can honour every week. The meaning, if it is any good, will keep working after the file is sent. I do not need to have it all in hand before I write the last sentence.

Working papers — Notes taken from a stubborn record

April 2026 · 7 minute read

The port record that would not let go

In April I spent two Monday mornings on a single page of a shipping register: a lighter listed as arriving from the Riau islands with a cargo that did not match the tonnage, a skipper whose name was entered twice in two spellings, and a clerk’s mark in the margin that might have been a correction or a private joke. I copied the line into the notebook the way I always do, expecting it to become atmosphere. It refused. Every time I tried to turn it into weather for another tale, the page pulled me back to the discrepancy itself.

Archival records are not automatically stories. Most of them are competent bureaucracy, and I am grateful for that competence; it is how a port keeps from drowning in its own traffic. What catches me is the place where the competence slips — a weight that cannot be right, a date that collides with a public holiday, a woman listed as owner of a boat in a year when the printed form had no space for her. I do not treat those slips as puzzles to solve for a reader. I treat them as pressure. The story has to live beside the pressure without pretending to close the file.

That April tale took its turn from the double spelling of the skipper’s name. I let both names stand in the fiction, belonging to one man who answered to whichever version the listener preferred, and I let the cargo remain slightly wrong. A friend who reads history would have wanted me to chase the true lading through another archive. I did chase it, on the Tuesday, far enough to know that the true lading was ordinary rice and ordinary timber. Ordinary facts are allowed to disappoint the novelist. I put the rice in the endnote and kept the wrong tonnage in the tale, because the wrongness was what had kept me at the desk.

I mention this because readers sometimes assume that “based on a record” means the fiction is a decoding. It is not. I rebuild. I invent motives the clerk never wrote down. I move a jetty, I change a tide, I give a night watchman a private errand. The obligation I accept is narrower: I will not pretend the record said something it did not, and I will say in the endnote how far I strayed. The April story strayed a good distance. The register is still in the library, unbothered, and the tale is in the archive for anyone who wants both.

If a document will not let go, I now give it the week. I used to hoard such pages for a season, hoping a longer form would appear. Longer forms are not what I sell. A week is long enough to honour a stubborn line without turning it into a research project that never sends. The subscription has taught me that appetite. Sunday still comes.

June 2026 · 5 minute read

Why the illustration comes last

Friday is for the plate and the endnote, in that order, after the prose has survived Thursday. I draw in ink and wash, one image per instalment, never a sequence and never a comic panel. The plate is not a poster for the story. It is a second entrance: a harbour stair, a shopfront at an hour when the shutters are wrong, a pair of hands counting coins that the tale never describes in close-up. I choose the image after I know what the sentences have already done, so that the drawing does not repeat them.

I used to sketch first, hoping a picture would tell me what the week wanted. The sketches were pleasant and they lied. They pushed me toward the picturesque — lanterns, rain on tiles, a boat in nice fog — which is a poor diet for adult folk material. Coming last, the illustration has to answer a finished piece of prose. If the story is dry, the plate is allowed to be dry. If the story has already spent its weather, the plate looks elsewhere, at a hinge or a ledger or a bowl left in a sink.

There is also a practical honesty in drawing after the cuts. Thursday often removes a figure I had loved. If I had already inked that figure, I would be tempted to keep the paragraph that justified the ink. Sequence protects me from that vanity. The story is the master of Friday, not the other way round. One plate is enough because the instalment is short; a second image would start to narrate, and narration belongs to the sentences.

Every plate goes out with alt text written as prose, not as a string of tags. I describe what is actually on the page — the objects, the light, the position of a hand — so that a reader who cannot see the file still receives the second entrance. I do not hide jokes in the alt text. I do not use it as a second endnote. The description should be usable by itself, the way a caption in a well-made book is usable by itself.

People ask whether I will ever hire someone to draw while I write more stories. I will not, for as long as this remains a one-person subscription. The Friday work is part of the week’s shape. If I handed it away, I would start to treat the tale as copy to be decorated, and I have already explained, in March, what I think of unfinished debts. The drawing is how I prove to myself that the week is over.

The sound pass

The empty room is the only audience I trust before Sunday. If a sentence cannot stand the air, it cannot stand an inbox.

I read standing, because sitting lets me mumble. The notebook stays closed. If I have to look down to remember a name, the name is wrong or the sentence is overcrowded.

August 2026 · 6 minute read

Reading aloud to the empty room

Thursday’s first pass is sound. I print the draft and read it in the room with the window, at a pace close to the twelve or twenty minutes I have promised. There is no recording and no witness. I am listening for the places where my own breath snags: a clause that trips, a run of names that turns into a list, a piece of dialogue that could only exist on a page. Folk-shaped stories are oral cousins even when they are built for adult readers. If I cannot say the turn without hurrying, the turn is not ready.

The empty room is useful because it does not laugh on cue. A line that seemed sly on Wednesday often dies in the air on Thursday, and I let it die. I am not performing for a crowd. I am checking whether the tale has a spoken spine. Singapore English in the street is not the English I put on the page; I write in British spelling and a slightly bookish register on purpose, so that the subscription has one voice from Telok Ayer to wherever the mail lands. Reading aloud tells me when that register has become costume. Costume is a kind of twee, and I have no patience for it.

The second pass, logic, happens at the desk with a pencil. Does the ferryman’s coin make sense given the earlier fare. Does a door that was locked stay locked. Are there two moons in one night because I liked the phrase. Short fiction forgives strangeness and does not forgive sloppiness dressed as strangeness. I keep a margin for the uncanny — weather that has a vendor, a street that gains a door — but the ordinary physics around those inventions has to hold, or the invention becomes a shrug.

Cuts are the third pass and the unkindest. I have a private ceiling near three thousand four hundred words. Above that, I am usually repeating a gesture that already worked. Cutting is easier after the sound pass because I have heard which paragraphs were only throat-clearing. I do not cut the ending to create hunger for next week. Hunger of that sort is a serial trick, and I have stopped writing serials. If a reader wants more, there will be another complete tale on Sunday. That is the only sequel I am willing to sell.

By Friday the pages have been heard, checked and shortened. Then I can draw. Then I can write the endnote without using it as a place to store the sentences I was too fond of to cut. The empty room, by then, has done its work. I do not read the published version aloud again. Once it has left, it belongs to whoever opens it, in whatever room they have.

October 2026 · 7 minute read

What a week of stories does to a year

A weekly tale sounds, from January, like a neat grid: fifty-two closed shapes, fifty-two plates, fifty-two endnotes. By October the grid has a human sag in it. Some Mondays the libraries are closed for a holiday I failed to notice. Some Wednesdays the sitting runs long because a character will not leave a room. Some Fridays the wash on the plate dries too dark and I start again, still sending on Sunday at 07:00 SGT because that hour is the one promise I do not renegotiate. The year is not a programme of themes. It is a pile of finished weeks.

What the pile does to me is quieter than inspiration. I become more willing to use ordinary rooms. I become less willing to keep a glittering fragment in reserve “for later”, because later is already booked. I learn the true size of twenty minutes of attention, which is smaller than a novelist hopes and larger than a social post. I also learn how many times I can return to the harbour, the five-foot way, the wet market and the island without repeating myself, provided I change the pressure each time. Recurring streets are allowed. Recurring casts are not required. When a loose sequence does appear, I flag it in advance so that a new reader is not locked out.

For the reader, a year of weeks is a different object. You can miss a month and still arrive in the middle of a complete tale. You can read only the sampler and still know the voice. Paid readers keep the archive, which means October contains March if you want it to. I designed it that way after years of serials that punished absence. Absence is a normal part of a reading life. A subscription that cannot survive a fortnight of silence is a poor companion.

I will not pretend the year has a hidden curriculum. There is no ladder of difficulty, no planned journey from light to dark. Grief appears when the material carries grief. A comic coin-counting ferryman appears when the week belongs to him. Content notes sit at the top of any instalment that needs them, so you can decide before you begin. That is the whole of my pedagogy: finish the thing, name the source, warn when the water is cold, and send it while it is still itself.

By December I will have a stack I can hold. Some of those stories will later sit in the annotated archive with their drafts showing. Two longer pieces in the year, for the highest plan, are the only place I allow myself a broader breath, and even those are complete on arrival. The weekly work remains the spine. If you are still reading in October, you already know the rhythm. If you are arriving now, you are not late. Sunday will have a beginning, a turn and an ending, and I will still be at the same desk.

After you read

Reply to any of these

If a note here snags, write to me the same way you would answer an instalment: a plain message to the desk. I am not collecting praise and I am not running a workshop. I am reachable.

Replies to stories and to these letters arrive at hello@WondersAndTales.eu and at the form on the contact page. I read them Monday to Friday, 10:00–18:00 SGT, and I usually answer within two working days. I do not correspond at the weekend, because Sunday morning is for sending, not for conversation, and Saturday is how I keep the week from eating the person who writes it.

I can help with plans, delivery, permissions and the occasional factual question about a source named in an endnote. I cannot read manuscripts, join collaborations, or host guest posts. If you want to read a story aloud to a private group, the terms page sets out how; attribution is enough, republication is not. If you are writing about billing, say so in the subject line so I do not treat it as a literary letter and take a day longer than I should.

The desk address will take paper if you prefer paper. Stories themselves are never posted; the subscription is digital on purpose. A letter about a tale, though, is welcome at 27 Boon Tat Street, #04-02, Telok Ayer, Singapore 069623. I keep those envelopes. I do not publish them, and I do not invent a chorus of named readers to stand behind the work. The work has to stand on its own, the way each Sunday tale does.

Write to me The Story Shelf

The week still sends

If you would rather have the stories than the notes

I write one complete tale a week and send it on Sunday morning. The sampler is free and arrives once a month. You can cancel from a link in every e-mail. Nothing here is a serial, and nothing requires you to have read these letters first.

Look at the reading plans