The Liminal Margin

Finding a solution to a problem

I have far too many books to read in a very short time.

Right now, I have three categories of books I'm currently reading in and out of:

1. The Kusala Sastra 2026 Shortlist

Clear objective: What does a winning book look like? How do I write one?

2. The OTCOV

This woman is my personal hero and I want to write like her, so I read her books—five volumes and two unreleased—but holy fuck, she is heavy.

I find it hard to finish a few pages without taking a long breath in between and staring blankly at the floor.

Every single word has a weight.

My muscles are not trained for it yet.

Then I drift away and obsessively organise my calendar. The shred of reality that I can grasp, unlike the wandering OTCOV pages.

But I wouldn't trade that experience. I like difficult work.

3. The UWRF Squad

I will be attending the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival next month and I am very excited to meet Tiffany Tsao. I am reading her book now, along with the anthology from the 2025 emerging writers.

Clear objective: How do I write beautifully and vividly? And, hopefully, how do I make it onto the Emerging Writers shortlist for 2027?

I just haven't found the time.

Oh my god.

How infuriating of me!

Look, you know what? I think I need to invent a system in which the process of reading itself becomes an input to a concrete outcome within a bigger machinery, and not just an open-ended activity on its own.

Problem 1: Reading has an objective, but no operating system

Even though I already have clear objectives, I feel like the infrastructure around them is still leaving a lot of results and progress to chance.

It needs to have a structure.

And that structure needs to be alive.

God forbid, it needs to have an algorithm.

Problem 2: I have no scorecard

There is no clear scorecard I'm using to evaluate each book against its objective.

What I have right now is just a way of extracting observations and insights, but not a way of determining how valuable or insightful those observations actually are in the context of what I'm trying to figure out.

I guess we have to resurrect the spreadsheet demons.

Problem 3: I cannot read everything at once

Reading one book and another alternately does not work.

It may have worked in the past when I was reading for leisure, 30 minutes before work, or on trains.

But now I read for a living.

Even worse, I read for craft.

There needs to be a clear cadence and milestone.

And who am I kidding? I don't have a deadline for any of the books. The only thing I was fixating on was the October UWRF.

Which is an event, but not good enough grounds to spread the reading out and make an actual project timeline.

I need to treat this more like a series of Jira tickets than a standalone recreational activity.

I need to get very serious about it.

Not about the reading itself, but about treating it as a job.

So, recap of what I need to do:

  1. Build a structure around reading as an input.
  2. Make a scoring system to evaluate books against their objectives.
  3. One book = one Jira ticket.

Alright, that's it.

No more yapping.

Let's get to work.