E.L. Chen's Blog

Some time ago I read a series of social media posts from an author on how they manage writing while holding down a day job. They said they wrote only on weekends, as their Monday to Friday job left them too tired in the evening to even cook dinner, and they ate takeout on those nights.

Reader, my thrifty Chinese single mom self recoiled. Takeout five nights a week, in this economy?? 

To be fair, I don’t know what this person’s day job is, or when they get off of work. When I worked 12-hou...

I built my first website after I graduated university in 1998, using basic HTML. (Not even CSS!) On Geocities, of course. I knew a bit of Photoshop from my time designing ads at the Queen’s University Journal, but I don’t remember where I learned HTML. Probably from a boyfriend, and a nascent internet. 

(Note the printout of RGB codes in the image above. I found a bunch of HTML reference printouts in my bedroom closet at my parents’ house a while ago. Yes...