I’ve been having my love of reading since in one of the earliest memories when an adult acquaintance read a book for me, but I started my writing journey when I was ten years old. My first story was a short story about a family figure stole the sardine bones from my lunch plate secretly. A based-on-true story which I retold it in dramatic voice like a mystery case that needed to be solved.

Since then, I grew fond of storytelling; as an only child with busy both parents, it was kind of solitary escapism for me if I wasn’t playing with the neighbor children. The trial of writing a complete novel was born when I read these two Indonesian literatures: ‘Lupus’ by Hilman Hariwijaya and ‘Delisa’s Salah Recitation (Hafalan Shalat Delisa)’ by Tere Liye.

In sixth grade (12 y.o.), approximately in 2008, I self-published my first novel, called ‘Herli: Save the World’. Mixing Hariwijaya’s ‘Lupus’ and a book about collection of ridiculous riddles, it told about the silly life of an elementary school pupil, Herli, with her classmates and her ambitious big brother in junior high, Herlambang, who wanted to save the world and easily got asthmatic against chicken feather. Due to a lot of moving out in the past, the book unfortunately no longer exists (not even the soft copy).

During my junior and senior high, between 2010 and 2013, I wrote another novel in the same genre: a YA contemporary about a life of a school kid. It got rejected when I sent to a publisher in that day. But after the whole decade and changing laptops, the soft copy still survives. This novel is my Indonesian webnovel ‘Aviator Impian’ (English self-translation: The Dream Aviator).