My writing journey

I didn’t start out wanting to be a professor. When I was in high school, I was set on becoming a novelist. That ambition didn’t get far. The only goal that mattered, in the environment I grew up in, was getting into university. At eighteen, I entered a literary competition—nothing came of it. Life moved on. Writing fiction was set aside.

Instead, I took the well-trodden path into academia. Over the next two decades, I worked through the academic ranks: post-doc, lecturer, senior lecturer, and eventually professor. Research and publication became my job— making sense of the data, writing papers, securing grants, joining the long conversation that is academia. I spent years learning how to connect dots, build arguments, and communicate complex ideas with precision. My writing evolved—what I do now is unrecognisable from what I attempted at eighteen.

For a long time, fiction was dormant—buried under deadlines, teaching and research. It never quite vanished, but it was never in the foreground either.

Then, in my late forties, after I got my chair, that early ambition started to reassert itself. I decided to do what I never managed at eighteen: write a novel. Like I once told my PhD supervisor: I may be late, but I’ll get there. But this time, it's different, as I wouldn’t do it alone. I set out to make it a project with my son, E Chang. The premise was simple: combine the kinds of questions that interested me as a child—about time, fate, and the limits of choice—with everything I’d learnt since.

We finished The 7th Disciple together and agreed it wouldn’t be the last. Writing now isn’t just about the act of creation but about seeing how decades of academic training can shape and sharpen a narrative.

With that in mind, I’m not content to stick to a single genre. The 7th Disciple series will continue, but I’m also exploring new territory—a crime thriller, for example. That’s where things stand. The writing journey never really ends. It simply changes shape.