Dr Catherine Lim, whom I met in the mid-1980s through a colleague, is well-known in Singapore and overseas for the fiction she writes.

Less well-known about her, except to those who have the pleasure and privilege of calling her a friend, is her generosity with her rich story ideas, her always-interesting conversation and her reluctance to bad-mouth anyone.

An example of her generosity is her readiness to let me pick one (or more) of her stories from a then-unpublished collection when I asked her last year (1999) to let me have something for a website I was planning to set up.

Those stories have since been published by Horizon Books under the title, The Howling Silence, Tales of the Dead & Their Return.

My website is coming to life, pixel by pixel. My choice from that collection gives an interesting read, with an ending that testifies to Catherine's genuis in surprising her reader -- every time!

Dr Lim can be contacted at her website where more information concerning her illustrious career can also be found.

Ow Wei Mei is currently a copy-editor with the powerful media group, Singapore Press Holdings, whose newspapers dominate the publishing scene in Singapore.

I've known Wei Mei from the time when I, too, was a staff of SPH but lost touch with her after she left for the different pastures of London.

Then she returned to Singapore to work with SPH in 1996 and made quite a name for herself writing a regular and much-followed column for The Straits Times, the SPH flagship.

As I also wrote columns for newspapers, we met up occasionally to share a meal and a yarn or two. And quite naturally, I scrounged material from her too for this website.

In her never-before published story, The Magic Phoenix, Wei Mei shows another side of her facility with words, capturing the ethos of an era (and landscape) long gone from Singapore.

Another former colleague and longtime friend, Teo Ee Sim, has, like Catherine, generously allowed me to raid her creative writing portfolio.

I'm tapping a selection from her sold-out volume of poems called "But is it art?" that is as witty as it is urbane and reflects in no small way the industry she works in.

Ee Sim runs her own advertising agency, JM Associates, in Kuala Lumpur.

Like Ee Sim, Robert Yeo has been a friend of many years and like her, he has allowed me to nick a couple of poems from his collection published by Flame of The Forest which besides being well known for popularising the Singapore ghost story and making it a unique genre, is also often saluted for encouraging Singaporean writers to write about Singapore.

The two poems I've picked from the volume, Leaving Home, Mother are: Coming Home, Baby and One Side of the Seventies. Like Wei Mei's Magic Phoenix, both are very evocative of a period gone by. Yet both are also evergreens because the sentiments they express are still current, if not eternal.

A friend of a newer vintage is Kucinta Leong who is also from a different vintage from me and my group of older (in both senses of the word) friends.

I first got to know Ku, or Pauline as she is known to me, through her online diary.While her adventures gave me a glimpse of both what's eternal and ephemeral about the human condition, they weren't the reason I singled her out to contact.

Or perhaps they were, in a subtle way. Her account of her daily life made me feel as though I know her so I felt comfortable enough to contact her when I became desperate to learn web-designing and development.

She didn't fail me. We met up at Suntec City outside Times the Bookshop and she gave me her copy of David Taylor's Creating Cool HTML 3.2 which set me on the road to acquiring a modicum of web-designing skills.

In gratitude to Pauline, I'm reproducing one page from her diary -- with her permission of course -- which beautifully encapsulates what humankind best loves and most fears.

Then of course there is Lucy Tan, who, blush, blush, is yours truly. Yup, the very person who developed this site. I am using this platform to gain more exposure for