I did it! I surpassed my reading challenge for this year! If I am honest, I didn't expect to. But with all the chaos of this year, and all the study, I surpassed my goal! It was 15 and I managed 17! Wooop! Okay. Okay. Let me confess something. Frequently, I deliberately selected a book I knew to be short. But hey, needs must when you are a reader like me—slow and forever falling asleep after a few pages. I think I have now associated reading with bedtime that my brain going i

Do you ever disconnect from Wifi and let your mind empty? I’ve realised that I don’t. Not really. In the few minutes I have to spare, I am reaching for my phone to pass time with a game, add items to my online grocery cart, jot down ideas or items on my to do list. Rarely do I sit with a cup of tea or coffee and just gaze out the window or at the bug-splattered walls of my house. As soon as I wake up, the first thing I do is checking my messages, pop the kettle on, and spend

I am a fan of Sarah J. Maas. She knows exactly how to hook readers in. But when adding House of Earth and Blood to my TBR pile, I browsed through reviews and noticed recurring warnings from readers that it is not for the YA audience—it is a new adult book and contains cursing and sex. I personally don’t like to read stories that contain too much profanity or sex, but each to their own, right? As an author of YA, I am also a reader of YA to see what’s trending and because the

In today's blog I am going to keep things light and simple. I am, at times, quite heavy in my posts. And life today feels super heavy at the moment. So I thought I'd step away from that a dive into something a bit silly: Book Boyfriends!! Do you have a book crush? Did you have one growing up? Hands down, when I was a teenager, Ponyboy Curtis from The Outsiders was my crush. I was obsessed with the outsiders in high school. I loved that S. E. Hinton was only seventeen when she

The idea for this blog came to me while I was back home visiting friends and family. I met an old manager of mine and in passing she mentioned that thought she stayed in her job longer than she should have. I responded that had she left early, she and I may never have met. She thanked me for my kind words, and I hope she went away feeling better over her decision. For you see, our meeting shaped the decisions I made in the year that followed. She planted the seed in my mind

If I think back to my early childhood, my book pickings were based on whatever I found in the school or local library. Once I started working my first part-time job, I began to buy books. But I am a child of the 80s, so in my teens, the internet was still developing and my purchases of books were limited to brick and mortar stores. At that time, I think I mostly read books that I found in second-hand stores. Prior to Kindle, there was no way I could afford as many books as I

I have a confession. I am a slow reader. My reading habit is to go to bed with the book, by which point I am falling asleep from a full day of writing, marketing and teaching and can barely finish a chapter. Occasionally, I have some time on the weekends to sit on my sofa with a book, but more often than not, I am just busy meeting friends or working on my projects. If I remember rightly, I did not meet my Goodreads challenge of 2018. I managed eight books out of my target of

Caged Birds is a short story I wrote as a submission for an anthology in Korea. They rejected the story with a letter expressing that they liked my poetic style, but didn’t think the story was right for their anthology. I understood. They wanted more of a foreigner’s perception or experience in Korea. I didn’t want to write that. I didn’t want it to become a piece containing all the things that bother me—which I feared it would be. We foreigners will always be outsiders here,