A lesson in love

Sometimes it takes a heartbreak to recognise your biggest dreams, writes

Ong's early manuscripts of Midnight Monologues. when I was 12. I was a comedic writer but it’s quite sad that nobody read it-lah!” she remarks with a laugh.

Still, what’s worth noting is the fact that heartbreak didn’t get Ong down for long. Instead, it served as a catapult to aim her focus at a different goal, one that was far removed from weeping over tubs of icecream.

She confides that with the encouragement of friends and Internet fans, she wanted to publish her work. “There’s nothing like publishing a book to make you feel really ‘legit’,” she remarks tongue-in-cheek. “I was fresh from my break-up, and I wanted to reinvent myself again. To get back on my feet and be my own person.”

It’s not that easy to publish a book, she soon discovered.

“The first person I had to convince was my mother!” she recalls with a grin. “I had to do a business presentation, complete with PowerPoint slides, to convince her.”

Still, her dream of getting published almost got derailed as most publishers were skewed towards education and not keen on publishing books on the genre she was writing on.

“There were a lot of doubts raised. They told me nobody reads this kind of genre in this country and that people wouldn’t buy my books,” she remarks with a visible cringe before adding indignantly: “They were wrong! Malaysians do read!”

She was also told that with no prior writing experience, it wouldn’t make any sense to publish a book. “Well that didn’t stop me,” she says with a smile.

Finally, it was another publisher friend who suggested that she open up her own company and self-publish instead.

In January last year, Penwings Publication was created and in July, Ong finally got herself "legit" as she laughingly put it, when was launched in a major bookstore here.

“It took me two years to manifest this dream. It was hard work but worth it,” she says, pride evident in her voice.

PROLOGUE

She’s a juxtaposition of self-doubt (“I only wanted to print 200 copies initially —