For six months, Diari Maryam existed mostly inside my head.
Well, technically inside several places.
My Notes app.
Google Docs.
Random screenshots.
Voice notes.
Late-night conversations.
And an embarrassing number of tabs I kept promising myself I would organise later.
For the longest time, it didn’t feel like a book.
It felt like an idea I couldn’t let go of.
The funny thing is, I never set out to become an author.
Diari Maryam wasn’t born because I had always dreamed of writing children’s books.
It started because of my daughter.
Maryam loves reading.
Give her an English middle-grade novel and she can disappear into it for hours.
But when it came to Malay books, I noticed something.
She struggled to connect with many of them.
Not because the books were bad.
They simply weren’t the kind of stories she naturally reached for.
The humour felt different.
The characters didn’t always sound like the children she knew.
The situations didn’t always feel familiar.
And as a mother, I found myself wishing someone would write a Malay middle-grade series that felt a little closer to the world my children actually lived in.
For a while, I kept waiting.
Waiting for someone else to write it.
Waiting for someone else to create the book I wished existed.
Then one day I realised something.
What if nobody was coming?
What if the person waiting for that book had to be the person who wrote it?
So I did.
I wrote the story I thought my daughter would actually want to read.
A story filled with sibling chaos.
School drama.
Family life.
Embarrassing moments.
Cats.
Friendships.
The little everyday things that make up childhood.
A story where Malay and English naturally mixed together the way many families actually speak.
The kind of conversations my children recognise immediately.
The kind of situations that make them laugh because they’ve lived through something similar themselves.
I wasn’t trying to teach Malay through worksheets.
I wasn’t trying to force language learning.
I was trying to create something more powerful.
A reason to keep turning the page.
Because if Maryam loved the story enough, maybe she would become a little more accepting of Malay along the way.
Of course, writing the book turned out to be much harder than simply having the idea.
Life kept happening in between.
School runs.
Laundry.
Cooking.
Appointments.
Children needing snacks every fifteen minutes.
The usual.
Some days I wrote hundreds of words.
Other days I stared at the document and achieved absolutely nothing.
There were moments I genuinely wondered if I would ever finish it.
And honestly?
I didn’t finish it alone.
This project became one of the biggest examples of how I learned to work with AI instead of being afraid of it.
I would throw ideas into ChatGPT.
Refine sections in Gemini.
Use NotebookLM to keep track of continuity and story details.
Jump back and forth between platforms.
Rewrite scenes.
Fix plot holes.
Strengthen dialogue.
Catch mistakes.
Then do it all over again.
People often imagine AI replacing creativity.
For me, it felt more like having a team of assistants helping me organise the chaos in my head.
The ideas were still mine.
The memories were still mine.
The characters were still mine.
The heart was still mine.
But suddenly I had help.
And one day, without really planning for it, I looked at the manuscript.
The chapters.
The story arc.
The mini kamus sections.
The character profiles.
The cover concepts.
The thousands of words that hadn’t existed six months earlier.
And I realised something.
This wasn’t an idea anymore.
This was a manuscript.
A real one.
The illustrations are still being worked on.
There are details left to refine.
A hundred little things still waiting to be completed.
But the hardest part is no longer ahead of me.
The hardest part was believing I could do it in the first place.
Maybe that’s why this moment feels bigger than I expected.
Not because Diari Maryam is published.
Not because it is selling.
Not because anyone has reviewed it.
But because a stay-at-home mother saw a gap, stopped waiting for someone else to fill it, and spent six months building the thing she wished existed.
Six months ago, Diari Maryam was just an idea.
Today, it’s a manuscript waiting for its illustrations.
And maybe one day, it will become the Malay book that makes a child want to keep reading just one more chapter.
Even if that child happens to be my own daughter.
Ummi Noi