The Keeper
I am Cheryl. I keep this site the way some people keep annotated editions — fingerprints on the margins, dates pencilled small, nothing loaned without expectation of return. Tale Haven is not a company. It is a room with a window facing Strathmore Avenue and a table where I stack drafts until they behave.
I taught secondary school English for eleven years before leaving the classroom to care for my mother during her last illnesses. The grammar stayed. The habit of marking unclear sentences with a question mark in the margin also stayed. What changed is audience: instead of thirty faces at eight in the morning, I write for whoever finds the porch and chooses to stay.
I was born in Toa Payoh, moved to Queenstown in 2014 when my block was new enough to smell of fresh paint and unsettled soil. I know the bus routes by muscle, the market aunties by voice, the canal heron by posture. I do not know everything happening in my city and I refuse to perform otherwise. The Chin Swee memory on the home page is an example: dinner elsewhere, skyline visible, no claim to inside knowledge.
Technically I maintain these files myself — html saved with a php extension because hosting expects it, css written slowly, consent script tested in a private window until the banner stops nagging. I use local fonts and photographs that favour ordinary light. If something breaks, email me; I fix it between errands.
My politics are small and domestic: pick up litter you can reach, tip the cleaner at year end, do not forward unverified messages. My aesthetics favour linen colours and sentences that end before they grandstand. I read Khong and Lim and the occasional Nordic crime novel when the rain is long.
I am reachable at [email protected] and by post at the address on the postbox page. There is no form because forms attract spam and perform urgency I cannot honour. Write when you have time; I reply when I have truth worth sending back.
If you needed a logo team or a content calendar, you misread the room. If you wanted one person's unhurried notes from a fifth-floor flat in Queenstown, welcome. I am the keeper. The tales are the guests. The porch light is on.
People ask whether Cheryl is my full name. It is the name I publish under — sufficient for a personal site. People ask whether I accept guest posts. I do not. This shelf has one keeper. People ask about workshops. Not at present. The classroom years satisfied that impulse for a while.
My tools are modest: an ageing laptop, a plain-text draft folder, a camera phone used only when the light justifies it. I validate html by eye and by validator when I remember. Broken links shame me more than imperfect typography.
I mention Queenstown often because place anchors honesty. Strathmore Avenue is not picturesque by postcard standards. It is home by bus-stop standards — reliable, familiar, unphotogenic in the way real homes often are. Keeper is not curator of spectacle. Keeper is the person who dusts the shelf and checks the spine labels.
Thank you for reading this far. Return to the porch or the chapters when you are ready. The keeper will be here — not watching analytics, but living upstairs, writing when the light allows.