The Art of Small Things

At home in a world crowded with agenda.

// THE NOVEL

The thing I have feared most is to show myself in public as I am building and making mistakes whilst doing it. I've left projects hanging. Many of them. For want of a perfect product, a perfect website, a perfect design. These projects were personal, ones I believe in and not paid to do. Over the many years, a part of me died along with the rot of these unfinished projects.

I started writing in my notes app. On scraps of paper. Diagrams, paragraphs. A sentence or even 4 words. They came from the most recent interactions. And then deeper. From dreams I had, to themes I kept returning to. I kept doing it. It was the smallest thing I could do to make sense of this tangled web of thought and releasing the kinks.

Much of the Black Cat are those exact notes.

// BLACK CAT TIMELINE Every scene title is a door. Tap one to walk in.

2025
1 Create from Nothing1: On attention, exile, and returning to what is already yours
2 A Place Where No One Performs2: And No One Needs To
3 Walk With Me3: Depth without performance
4 The Bars — Lie 14: A lie. On self-abandonmentLIE
5 I Didn't Look Down — Lie 25. A Lie. I just never noticed someone was holding it.LIE
2012
6 Body6. Before the floor
7 GuangZhou7. Where the squeezing stopped
8 Four Days More8. You haven't solved anything. You've just been somewhere else.
9 I know you did9. He was present, warm, and somewhere else entirely.
10 The Studio Floor10. The week had been ordinary. That was the thing about it.
11 Without Looking11. The table stays the same. You don't.
12 Sometime in the Future12. A kitchen tells the truth before the people in it do.
13 The Week Before13. What the Heart Records When No One's Watching
14 The Room is There14. A meditation on space and sensation
15 Not Enough Room15. A Man Who Has Never Spent a Saturday in His Own Apartment
16 The Garden Won't Do Itself16. Twelve Days of Being Nobody in Particular
17 Neither of you is Lying - Lie 3Lie 17: Enough honest doors, built from True materials, add up to a house you can live in with integrity.LIE
18 The Return18. He only knew his part.
19 Enough: another lie about love19. Lie. She asked the right question. I was answering mine.LIE
2013
20 Kunming20. 昆明 — Bright Clarity
22 Two Lines21. He left the notebook on the desk. The phone was enough.
23 Not the Margin, but the person first23. It is enough to have done today's part.
2014
24 Burn out is what you call it24. HCMC - 2014
25 Sixty-Thirty-Ten25. The ease of something exact
26 Not in the way you mean26. KL, December 2014
2024
27 What Was Owed27. Dec 2024 - He Was Fifty-One. He Had Been, By Every Account, Very Busy.
28 The Borrowed Coat28. She had been looking. Just not only at dogs.
2025
29 Four Hours Is More Than Enough29. On stopping before you're wrecked
30 The Handle Sits30. A morning in Spottiswoode
31 The Uncommon Kitchen31. She had made this dish close to the way her mother had made it and not close at all
32 The Right Number32. A lie. The knowledge lives in the correction.
33 The Live33. You think watching is safer. It isn't.
34 The Right Height34. Things had been surfacing. She wasn't sure when they started.
35 Still Landing35. The current runs differently than the script assumed it would.
36 The Longer Walk36. He had been in other people's questions all day.
37 The Architecture of Nothing37. A Lie. What are you the gravity of?LIE
38 What Holds38. Saying it had become less effort than not saying it.
39 The Writing Night39. The love was in the not-needing-to-look.
40 What the survival was forLie 40. The instruction was given in good faith.LIE
41 The Apple41. She wasn't closing any doors. She just wasn't opening them either.
42 Start Small42. The first time you've said that out loud.
43 Uncomfortable QuestionsA Sunday brunch in Singapore. Two neighbours ask each other about marriage, wanting, and who they’d grow old beside - questions they can’t ask themselves.
44 Something came LooseA phone call with David about hiring his mother’s caregiver turns into real advice about dignity over competence. Walking home, Amandha faces down a marriage built on staying rather than wanting, and decides to keep her own flat unfinished, on purpose.
45 Never TwiceA dog’s thirteen years of reading a body versus a screen. When she finally trusts the first signal instead of waiting for a second one, something between them settles differently.LIE
46 The Hollow DreamThursday in Singapore. She walks the dream backwards to keep it, reads the journal, collects keys to a flat she won't move into, and answers David.
·
2026
Where the writing is up to →

// OTHER POSTS

Until You See It

To break the structure, someone must see the structure first.

The Art of · 22 Jul 2026

Style Guide

Every text element on the site, in one place, for tuning sizes and spacing

ux · 18 Jul 2026

// WHOAMI

Claire

I write the novel in public and the essays underneath it.

This is a home for my projects, built in the spirit of the tiny house movement. Not because it's cheap. Or temporary. But to build just what is needed. And go from there.

About Unfinished, on Substack