To be, or not to be: that is the question.

Actually, the question for Ella is usually, ‘How much can I write today?’ She has just begun the second draft of her novel and is finding that her characters have acquired a strange tendency to play with words and speak in iambic pentameter. She suspects that this may be a side effect of reading Hamlet four or five times this year. She loves to read good literature, particularly Shakespeare and Vergil’s Aeneid (in Latin, of course). She plans to become a cruel empress–wait, a Latin teacher–and read Vergil for the rest of her life. For the present, her tyrannical rule is confined to her blog, where she imposes her passion for language and literature on unwary passers-by. She also despises incorrect grammar from the very depths of her being, and has Opinions on poetry.

When Ella is happy, she skips with an imaginary rope. She lives in an eleventh-floor flat in Singapore, with her family, two shelves of books, and a stuffed-animal moose. She is obsessed with organisation and can’t bear to leave home without her trusty backpack. If you agree to chop six cups of apples, she will make you an apple pie.