Creating covers for ebooks, editing books, building apps ... It used to cost thousands to do this, but AI is making these services affordable. For creatives (those who do this as a hobby or for work), this opens up a so many exciting possibilities.

I find it hilarious that when I search for “working writer” on Pexel, they serve me numerous images of serious-looking people with typewriters. Honey, we’ve moved on from that, but I’ll use it because of the romanticism of it all. In truth, I work with two monitors, a mouse and a mechanical keyboard hooked up to a...

TL;DR: As professional writers, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring AI; it’s learn the skills or get left behind. Still, I’m excited because AI has genuinely made me more productive and work (personal and work-work) has become a lot more fun. However, I’m also exhausted because there’s so much to learn. However,...

A couple of weeks ago, Fabrizio of Passo.uno dropped me a message on LinkedIn and told me that my article, “Substack writers, you need a website!“, was No.2 on Hacker News. I thought he was pulling my leg. I checked Hacker News and indeed it was true: I was on the front page. By the time I checked, I had dropped to...

Reblogging this because it’s fascinating to see how this can be done. I probably personally won’t use it for my own personal workflows, as I prefer to be present during the formation of the draft, but I’m thinking of creating a system where, once I complete the draft it gets automatically proofread and parked in a...

A few years ago, a Malaysian friend told me during the Twitter meltdown that she’s carefully cultivated a Malaysian safe bubble for herself on Twitter and she’s leery of losing that. Back then, I wasn’t very active on social media; I hung out mostly to drop brief comments on Twitter to people who talk about personal...

So Substack just dropped an unwanted feature on us: “Going forward, you’ll be able to scan text to see how much of it was likely written by hand or with AI assistance,” says Chris Best in Against Claudefishing. Well thanks, Chris. Didn’t realise I needed to be harassed even moar by anti-AI trolls. Trolls, whom, I...

A few years ago, a Malaysian friend told me during the Twitter meltdown that she’s carefully cultivated a Malaysian safe bubble for herself on Twitter and she’s leery of losing that. Back then, I wasn’t very active on social media; I hung out mostly to drop brief comments on Twitter to people who talk about personal...

Let’s get to the point. These are the reasons why I was irritated by Chris Nolan’s Odyssey: It’s a cheap attempt at diversity. Hollywood has been giving me the impression that it’s not confident stories from other cultures would be “safe” (i.e., sell). So they decided to adapt a well-known, popular IP and throw in a...

I’m currently towards the tail end of my leave after a medical procedure. I cannot believe time has flown so quickly. When I first got the leave chit, I thought to myself: So many weeks! What in the world am I going do during this time? But now at week four of my leave, I’m feeling a mild tang of panic as my leave...

The English-educated Chinese in Malaysia are dying out, and that could be a good thing. I am what many Malaysians would call a banana: Chinese, but more proficient in English. To others, I’m not “banana” enough, because by some freak of geography and luck, I can converse badly in Mandarin and in a rare form of...

I depend on this daily/weekly routine to be as productive as I can be. This is an update from a previous workflow which used Trello. Now, I use Google Tasks in tandem with Gmail and Google Calendar. Tools I Use Google Calendar Gmail Google Chat Google Tasks Jira Trello (for personal tasks) Gemini and Google...