The Story Shelf — Wondersandtales

The form

What a Wondersandtales story is

Each instalment is a complete arc. It has a beginning, a turn and an ending, and it is written to be read in twelve to twenty minutes. I do not break a tale across weeks, and I do not ask you to wait for a resolution that arrives later. If you open the file on a Sunday evening and close it before the kettle cools a second time, you should feel that the shape has closed.

You do not need a recurring cast. Characters may return if a later story wants them, and when that happens I say so in the endnote, plainly, before you begin. Most weeks stand alone. A loose sequence is flagged in advance so that a new reader is never punished for arriving in March, or in October, or in the middle of a year already underway.

I work from folk-tale shapes, from harbour paperwork, and from things overheard in markets and on buses, then I rebuild them for adult readers. The language is unhurried. The strangeness sits inside ordinary rooms. Nothing is serialised for the sake of keeping you anxious until next week. If a story needs more room than a sitting, I write it as one of the two long pieces that go out each year to archive readers, and I still finish it before I send it.

Sample instalments, 2026

Six openings

These passages are from stories already sent in 2026. They are openings, not teasers: each tale that follows them is complete. Reading times are for the full instalment.

Island tale · January 2026 · 14 minutes

The Ferryman of Pulau Ubin Asks for Exact Change

The ferryman would not take a folded note. He sat in the stern with a biscuit tin of coins and a lamp that burned even at noon, and he waited until every passenger had counted the fare in tens and fives. I had come over from Changi with a satchel of paper and a question about a drowned cousin. The water under Pulau Ubin is not deep, but it is particular. He named each coin as it landed. When I was short two ten-cent pieces he asked whether I intended to pay in rumours instead. I said I had plenty of those. He took one rumour, wrote it on the lid in pencil, and let the boat kiss the planks. I have been trying, since that afternoon, to spend the rest of the story with the same exactness.

Folk retelling · February 2026 · 16 minutes

Nine Doors on Bussorah Street

Bussorah Street keeps nine doors that do not belong to the shops they sit in. Visitors photograph the first three and rarely notice the rest. I learned the count from a woman who sold attar and refused to name the eighth. Each door opens on a room the width of a prayer rug. In the fourth I found a table set for a meal that had been waiting since the night the street lost its original name. The fifth held only a radio tuned to a station that no longer exists, playing a song I knew from a kitchen I can no longer enter. I did not try the ninth on the first visit. The February instalment is the walk from one to eight, and the reason a reader should pause before the last handle. It is an older door-tale, rebuilt for a street that still smells of rosewater at dusk.

Domestic strange · March 2026 · 12 minutes

The Woman Who Sold Her Own Weather

She kept the weather in jam jars on a kitchen shelf above the rice. Monday was a pale drizzle that tasted of zinc. Thursday was a hard, bright heat that made the linoleum tick. Neighbours came with coins and complaints: a wedding that needed dry air, a funeral that wanted rain to look sincere. She never sold Sunday. I watched her unseal a jar with a teaspoon and I felt the room change temperature before the window did. The story is about a woman who had more climate than she could live in, and the quiet arithmetic of giving some of it away. When a jar cracked in April of the tale, the whole block woke to a wind that knew their names. I left the ending on her doorstep, which is where such bargains belong.

Port record · April 2026 · 18 minutes

The Night Clerk at Clifford Pier

The ledger from a harbour year lists arrivals the harbour master never signed. I found the copy in a box of tide tables, the ink still brown as tea. The night clerk wrote down boats that did not match any steamer schedule: a tongkang with no cargo, a launch that came in twice on the same tide, a passenger whose name is a blank ruled line. He added a column of his own, headed simply “remarks”, and filled it with weather that did not occur. I rebuilt the night as a complete tale, from the first unexplained hull to the dawn when the pier boards were dry and the clerk’s chair was empty. Nothing in the instalment waits for next week. The record ends. I have only given the ending a room to sit in, and a lamp, and the sound of water against the piles.

Domestic strange · July 2026 · 13 minutes

Salt on the Windowsill at Telok Ayer

Every morning the salt returned, a fine line along the inner sill, though the window faced a street and not the sea. The tenant swept it, cooked with it, wrote a letter to the town council, and still it came. I set the story in a two-room flat above a shop that sells clocks, and I let the salt be neither metaphor nor monster until the last page. Relatives visit with advice. A child tastes the grains and says they are older than the building. There is grief in it, which I flag at the top of the instalment, and there is also a very ordinary kettle and a very ordinary Tuesday. Readers who want a haunting will find one. Readers who want a house that cannot keep the sea out of a landlocked room will find that instead. Both are the same story, finished.

Folk retelling · September 2026 · 15 minutes

The Last Kite over Kampong Gelam

The kite was not meant to come down. Its owner had died in the night and the string was still tied to the window latch, humming. Children in the lane argued over who should cut it. An auntie said a kite that outlives its maker must be invited in, not pulled. I took that fragment from a conversation outside a textile shop and ran it through an older tale about messages that refuse the ground. The instalment follows the kite from the latch to the padang to a roof where a tailor is waiting for silk the colour of late afternoon. No one in the story is a hero. The ending is a pair of scissors and a decision that belongs to the reader only in the sense that you close the file when it is done. I do not continue it the following Sunday.

Sources

The three kinds of material I use

Archival records give me stubborn facts: a name spelled three ways, a boat that should not have been at the pier, a quantity of rice that does not match the receipt. I do not pretend the paperwork is the story. I sit with it until a human pressure appears — someone waiting, someone counting, someone refusing to sign — and then I write a tale that can stand if the box of papers were lost. The record remains in the endnote, so you can see what I started from.

Oral fragments arrive without a filing number. A sentence at a bus stop, a bargaining joke in a wet market, a warning about a particular stretch of water: these are lighter and more perishable. I treat them with the same care I give a ledger, which means I do not inflate them into folklore they never claimed to be. If I only had a line, I say I only had a line. The story that grows from it is mine, and I keep the fragment visible so the growth is honest.

Pure invention is the third kind, and I use it without apology. Some weeks nothing in the files or the street will hold a shape, and then I build one from furniture, weather and a problem that feels true. Invention still has to close in a sitting. It still gets an endnote, even if the provenance is simply that I made it at the desk. Readers who want only retellings can skip those weeks; the subject line and the opening note will tell you what you are receiving before you spend the quarter-hour.

Before you subscribe

Content notes

Some stories contain grief, drowning, or a quiet strain of horror. I do not write gore for its own sake, and I do not chase shock in the subject line. When a tale turns toward a death, a lost child, a body of water that keeps what it takes, or a house that will not stay ordinary, I put a short note at the very top of the instalment, before the first sentence of fiction.

The note names the territory in plain words so you can decide whether this is a Sunday for that story. Sampler readers see the same notes as paid readers. If you would rather skip a week, you skip it; the next Sunday arrives with a different shape, and nothing in the subscription punishes a gap. I would rather lose a reading than send someone into a drowning unprepared.

If a later letter from the desk discusses a difficult instalment, I flag that too. Replies that say a story sat too close are read by me, and they change how I label future work. They do not change the fact that folk material and harbour records often carry sorrow. I keep the notes brief, specific, and at the top, where they can do their job.

How it arrives

Formats

I send the same story in more than one form so that a reading desk, a phone, or a plain-text habit can all carry it. Paid archive readers also receive a file they can keep.

Web page

Each instalment is posted as a clean page for readers who prefer a browser to an inbox. Type is set for long lines and short sittings. The illustration sits with its caption and a full text description underneath, so the plate is not the only way to receive that part of the work. Sampler stories appear here once a month; weekly stories appear for readers on a paid plan.

E-mail HTML

Sunday at 07:00 SGT the story leaves my desk as an HTML letter: title, content note if there is one, the tale, the plate, and the endnote. It is designed to be readable in ordinary mail software without a tracking pixel or a plea to open in a browser. If your software strips pictures, the written description of the illustration still travels with the letter.

Plain text

A plain-text version goes out to anyone who asks, and it is the fallback when HTML is unwelcome. Emphasis is marked lightly. The illustration is described in a short paragraph rather than attached as a file. This is also the version I recommend if instalments have been landing in spam: it travels more quietly, and it still contains the whole story.

EPUB for the archive

Readers on the annotated archive plan receive the back catalogue as EPUB, one file per instalment and a gathered volume that updates as the year proceeds. Annotated drafts sit beside the finished tales so you can see what changed between Wednesday and Sunday. The two longer stories of the year are included in the same library. Sampler readers do not receive the archive; that line is drawn on purpose, and it is written on the plans page without small print.

If the openings held you

The next story leaves on Sunday

The sampler is free and arrives once a month. The weekly plans send every Sunday at 07:00 SGT. You can cancel from a link in any letter; I do not make that difficult.

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