Photo: Matese Fields
A stranger changed my life. Someone whose identity I’ve forgotten. I don’t remember the byline, neither do I remember his face in the pictures, but he’d single-handedly set me on a path I didn’t know I would take.
I was a hairdresser, going through the motions every day just to pay the bills. On a particularly quiet day, while I was flipping through all the FHM magazines, I came across this story about an unfit writer’s journey to fighting an amateur boxing match.
Photo: Simone Pellegrini
It takes 80,000 words to make a novel, about 10,000 words to be fluent in another language, and 52 kilometres of running to complete a marathon.
These are daunting figures in their own right, but perhaps less intimidating when viewed from this perspective: writing 250 words, learning one sentence, and running for 15 minutes each day.
Photo: Nicolas Ladino Silva
“Yeah, it took me two tries to quit smoking.”
That’s my usual reply to: “You used to smoke? You?”
And what leads up to this is other people talking about smoking. The best cigarette is always the first one of the day, they’d say. The next best times are after a meal, or while taking a dump.
Your Friendly Malaysian Writer 