How was I to know that the series would be a bestselling hit? I just had to see how long Ben kept at his misery, it was like forever. He was always that child in the uncool crowd, the bottom half of class, whose idea of tragedy was getting a pimple that oozed pus, and what’s worse, always facing outright rejection from girls. “To be honest, it was only after becoming a mother that I discovered the interest to write.”
That incident gave me the idea to write The Diary of Amos Lee, as I felt that my son, as a cross between Adrian Mole and Greg Heffley, would be proud to take ownership of a book that was inspired by his growing pains. “Yeah, my mother wrote Harry Potter!” the kid told him. When he was 9, he came home from school after almost getting into a fight because a kid wouldn’t believe him when he said his mother was an author. This, despite knowing that I absolutely abhor and am terrified of reptiles. When Ben was 6, he had this little secret he kept, seeing to a changeable lizard that morphed from baby to an intimidating size.
He was curious about everything, but terrified of rubber ‘hands’. When Ben was 2, I had to tie blown-up rubber gloves and stick them all over the house, as the toddler wouldn’t stop ransacking cupboards and hurting himself. My first boy was one of those kids that you’d read about, where trouble would always find them. To be honest, it was only after becoming a mother that I discovered the interest to write. Have I always loved writing? No, not really. My storybook characters have morphed from garden critters to a feisty Peranakan girl to a boy writing in the toilet, to a boy born out of wedlock looking for a father he never knew.
Twelve years and 28 books later, I am still writing for kids. It was a story for a writing contest, managed by the Singapore Book Council and the Media Development Authority (Infocomn Media Development Authority today), with an aim to nurture local stories for print, animation and film. “I wrote my first children’s book in 2006.
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