Hello friends! Today was a good writing day! I managed to get down twice as many words as anticipated, thus making up for Friday which I sort of lost, writing-wise. We have had a lot going on here in Jakarta. Muslim New Year’s celebrations all over town, the girls’ activities, my husband’s travels…

Hello friends! I am overwhelmed by the amazing support after announcing my upcoming memoir The Cicadas, to be published by She Writes Press in 2015. People have been calling, e-mailing, texting, chatting, congratulating me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and twitter. I even received various statu…

Hello friends! I feel much better now, did I tell you I had some sort of Asian virus that completely knocked me out? Well — it was interesting to see the inside of a Jakarta hospital emergency unit. The doctors and the nurses were amazing, I loved them all and after they gave me morphine for the…

“Writers fish for the right words like fishermen fish for, um, whatever those aquatic creatures with fins and gills are called.” — Jarod Kintz  

I was sitting in the couch close to my youngest daughter. We were browsing the internet for a school project and we ended up in WikiHow. Wow — once you’re trapped in there, it’s almost impossible to get out. 🙂 Or how about interesting articles such as: How to spin a pencil around your thumb, How…

Hello dear friends, Vacation is over and this week I have been diving into my Work-In-Progress manuscript. Thought I might come up to the surface and give you a sneakpeak into what will be my imaginary home this fall. Part of my manuscript takes place in the Javanese Jungle, complete with demons a…

We are back in Jakarta from Singapore, arrived late last evening. Soul and mind rejuvenated by sights like this one: the Science Museum at Marina Bay. Have you ever seen such a building? Like a giant waterlily, rising above its pond. To further enhance the effect there is an actual pond of purple…