This post was originally published on murderiseverywhere.substack.com.
… After losing the first draft of this post because I switched to photos instead of opening a new tab
Yes, I’ve sent in the current WIP to my agent almost on / a little before schedule but all the things I was going to do once this was done—like read and write down all the ideas buzzing around my head that I’ve been swatting away—are on pause my now because my body’s revolting.
Because taking off the writing armour feels like I’d been stabbed in the middle of the battle but not realised it till now. And taking off the breastplate that was acting like a tourniquet has triggered the bleeding…
And now my eyes are red veined, painful and barely able to open and I’m sneezing and sniffing and aching… though this might be due as much to the haze outside as the document inside.
Thankfully it’s raining now and the air will be cleaner after, though my Sophia isn’t happy about that. She’s been a little angel by my side—if not for having to feed and walk her, I might not have left the house at all!
But that brings me to the other thing I wanted to talk about—Singapore has started to pay us for reading. Singapore’s new ReadSG programme rewards people for logging a reading session of at least fifteen minutes. Why 15 minutes? Because apparently 15 min is the point at which scrolling becomes sustained reading. And hopefully, once we’ve put in our 15 minutes worth of reading, we’ll be hooked and continue reading. Unfortunately, only one session a day counts towards our $ reward.
That means that if I read for 15 minutes every single day for one year, I will earn $7.30 for roughly 90 hours of reading. (Okay 91 hours and 15 min for $7.30 or roughly 8 cents an hour. I am a Singaporean. Precision is in my system).
It’s not a lot—but possibly, just possibly I could earn more from reading than from writing.
But it’s not going to buy very many books, is it? Yes, there are the public libraries. But also, there’s the SG Culture Pass. Eligible Singaporeans get $100 in credits that can be used for performances, exhibitions, workshops and, since March this year, Singapore books.
I actually love the emphasis on local work, though it makes me sound parochial. I remember, when I first started out writing in the theatre, I was talking to another playwright and we discovered that both Haresh and I had brothers who had bought tickets for their families to watch the imported stage production of Cats… though neither of them (or their families) had ever been to a single of our homegrown plays. I’m not saying this to diss brothers of writers (mine’s actually pretty decent) but to say that imported productions feel like Events. You paid for expensive tickets and dressed up in expensive clothes and bought exorbitantly priced memorabilia… whereas local productions would always been there. Thankfully that’s changed in the years since.
And these vouchers are going to help attendance because Singaporeans don’t like wasting anything that’s been given to us—especially vouchers. I know I always do my best to use up my food and grocery vouchers before they expire.
My vouchers are worth $800 each because I’m over 60, if I were younger with (presumably) more earning ability, I would only get $600.
And this is my ‘free’ lunch (paid for with food vouchers) today—
So despite my bad mood at the start of this (second attempt, remember) post, life is pretty good here.
I have finished my draft. I have successfully fended off sweet young people trying to enrol me into programmes like ‘Seniors Go Digital’ and SkillsFuture AI courses. I have my loving little dog with me. And I have finished my draft (yes, I’m saying it again).
I am grateful that if I had to lose something it was a draft of a blog post rather than a draft of the manuscript. And now, until my eyes recover, I am going to listen to podcasts and audio books (yes, it ‘counts’ towards my ReadSG quota) until my eyes recover and then I get to plunge into all the reading and writing I want to do.
Happy life, everybody!