2026-02-07 Edition: A New Year, Vision and Hope (Copy)

Rough Starts

2026 has started off with a bang. At least that's how I've felt. Maybe I'm just comparing it to how 2025 ended, which was me basically in stasis mode due to financial and personal reasons. Having 2026 basically be in 5th gear almost immediately is a lot to get used to.

On top of my current workload of ghostwriting projects, I started teaching again. While I've had positions that require me to interact with children, stepping back into the shoes of an educator is not something I could have predicted myself doing. Especially not after nearly two decades.

While kids are pretty much the same from one generation to another, one can't help but worry about the repercussions of the growing number of platforms that are designed to steal away the attention of our children. This is before we even consider the effects of a world on the verge of a major upheaval. Children require stability and consistency to thrive and not a world that's moving faster than even we adults can grasp much less comprehend.

A View of the Future

On Sunday, I had the pleasure of sitting in on a fellow Malaysian author's book tour. It was held at one of the more upscale bookstores here in Kuala Lumpur and I'm led to believe that having authors showcase their books there isn't a one-off occurrence.

I've personally not longed for the spotlight or a desire to stand shoulder to shoulder with celebrities. But one can't deny a certain level of credibility and prestige that comes from having one of your works being immortalized and sent out into the world in the hopes that it will find an audience. And seeing a fellow author achieve a feat most would consider difficult does create a sense of possibility in one's mind. You start to imagine yourself in that person's shoes and perhaps one day you will walk the same path.

It'll still be a ways off for me and even with the advent of artificial intelligence, it's not a goal that I'm rushing towards. There is a craft and care that I believe comes from effort and effort is the price that I must pay.

On a side note, while I am interested in going to more book launches and tours. I don't feel any more closer to the writing community. It's not that I feel like these places don't provide me with any support or that they are beneath me. I just feel that I will always be the outcast, expecting something that I will never truly find.

Shifting Focus

It'll be a little presumptuous of me to say that I will have free time to focus on my own projects especially with Chinese New Year and Hari Raya just around the corner. But regardless if I were to have a lot of free time or none at all, it'll be a fool's errand to rely on a schedule that has not been set in stone yet.

With that in mind, I've decided that the best course of action would be to take the bull by the horns and try my best to slot in my own personal writing projects wherever I can. And thus, two separate but small projects have emerged. The first is what you're currently reading right now which is a weekly newsletter and the other a platform for me to publish my fiction work. The hope is that for both of these projects, I can squeeze in some writing time wherever I can instead of committing large chunks of unoccupied time that may or may not appear.

I won't go into my decision to have a newsletter and a fiction project on-going at the same time for now. But it's a schism that I've had since childhood and would continue to live within me indefinitely.

My hope is that it won't take too long before the other project gets kickstarted and that you will continue supporting me whether it's on this newsletter or when I'm writing fiction.