Yu-Mei Balasingamchow's Blog, page 6

#amwriting

I've been plugging away at the novel and I've written, ostensibly, half of it. Of course, it was only in the last few days that I think I've figured out how the overall structure is going to hold together and how it's going to end --- which means I've got to go back over everything I've written, and revise and rewrite. Oh boy.

This is not to say many of these details and plot points won't change further in the (re)writing as well.

It's very organic, this fiction-writing thing. When I reread "Li...

Unrecognisable

When I was a kid, I always found it rather unbelievable --- but certainly convenient --- that Clark Kent could put on a pair of glasses and immediately no one would recognise him as Superman. I mean, come on.

Since I started wearing glasses again, though, I've managed to take by surprise many friends who are used to seeing me spectacle-free in my online userpics. Never underestimate the transformative power of a slender black polymer frame, it seems.

At a family dinner yesterday, it was my cous...

New look

I had dinner earlier this week with a former-student-turned-friend. As soon as she saw me, she said, "Now you look just like you did when you taught us." That was more than 10 years ago. What she meant is: I'm wearing glasses again, not contacts, and my hair is super long again, after various flirtations with short hairstyles.

I was going to make new glasses anyway, but last week at the optician's, the woman who examined my eyes said my corneas aren't getting enough oxygen and maybe I'd want t...

What I did for Chinese New Year

It's been a pretty random week. In between writing more of the novel and getting psyched up for Chinese New Year:
 I interviewed two nine-year-olds separately for a work assignment --- an experience which drove home the fact that interviewing children, even very intelligent, lively and articulate children, is not the same game as interviewing adults. Also, that kids relate to apps and games in a whole different way than I do. Come to think of it, when I was their age, the only computer ga...

Standing by

Things I know people are on a standby/waiting list for in Singapore:
Registration at a certain kindergarten for a child who was born last week.Reservations at a certain hotel for a wedding dinner on a specific date this November.Seats at Immigrants - The Singapore Gastrobar for chef Damian's special pasta menu tomorrow night.Cray-cray, as the kids say-say these days.

In which I talk very fast on TV

About a week before Christmas, I did an on-camera interview with the producer for On the Red Dot, a local current affairs programme that was preparing an episode on Singapore culture and what makes one Singaporean. Because I'm a writer, we thought about doing the interview at a library or bookstore, but eventually, they decided to just shoot it in the Toa Payoh neighbourhood where I live.

All in all, the shoot took over two hours about various things Singaporean, but in the episode I appear fo...

Too old for this

I went Christmas shopping today: after 2 p.m., on Christmas Eve, in the Bugis/Raffles City area, which didn't seem as bad as the main Orchard Road strip but was definitely more crowded than I like it. By the time I got home at 7-something, my phone battery was almost entirely drained (due to gift consultations by phone), my legs were feeling crampy and even my back was starting to complain. The last time I did this, I was closer to the other end of thirty (or maybe I was thirty) and even had...

Coming and going

I wanted to see how many blog posts I've made this year, but I couldn't find a date-search function in Blogger. So I did it the old-fashioned way and paged through my archives and counted the posts.

The grand total for this year: 27.
The months with the lowest number of posts: March (1) and December so far (1, with this post)

I used to be a lot better at this.

I've been thinking lately about why I don't blog as much as before, and I think that other than not having that much time-to-blog, it's al...