Thanks Mary for this unexpected invitation to reflect on this blog challenge. Each question made me smile and think “huh, so that’s how it happened.”

How did you come up with your blog name? 

When I chose my pen name – S.J. Asher – it wasn’t about creating a new identity, but rather extending the one I already had. The initials held my story, my heritage, while Asher carried my hopes forward. It felt strange at first, straddling two worlds. By day, I wrote code, debugged systems, and spoke in the language of technology. By night, I crafted stories, letting imagination flow where logic usually reigned.

Then came the moment of truth – my first book was ready for publication. The publishing form asked for something I hadn’t considered: an author website.

I remember thinking, “I’ll just create something quick. A simple landing page.” Just somewhere to direct readers, somewhere to exist in the digital world. That was the plan, anyway.

If your blog was a person (fiction or real), who would it be?

Picture someone who lives in two worlds. In one, everything makes sense – mornings follow careful routines, tasks line up in neat rows. But then there’s that other world. The stranger one. My blog dances between these realities.

Much like Kafka on the Shore’s protagonist, but instead of running away to a library, I’m navigating between lines of code and lines of prose. In one world, I’m debugging systems, following logical paths. But like Murakami’s characters who find mysterious portals in mundane places, I often slip into that other reality, where nothing is quite what it seems.

A coffee cup forgotten during a late coding session might trigger a story about my childhood in Bessarabia, where summer evenings stretched like elastic and village tales mixed with reality. A midnight deploy turns into a meditation on parallel lives – the one where I stayed in that small town, and this one, where I craft stories between git commits.

My blog is a space where structured logic meets the uncertain territories of memory and imagination, where each debug log might lead to a door I never noticed before.

What helps you create new content if you feel like you need some inspiration?

WordPress daily prompts are my compass. They’re like morning coffee for my brain – wake up, read prompt, let mind wander, write. Simple as that. No content calendars. No strategic planning. Just raw, honest responses to whatever word or phrase appears on my screen that day.

Then there’s my technical mind, always running in the background. It turns bugs into metaphors and system architectures into stories. Sometimes my best ideas come while I’m deep in code or during those quiet moments when tests are running. It’s like having two languages constantly translating between each other – one speaking in logic, the other in narrative.

Do you have a specific style of blogging?

It’s as unplanned as this whole blogging adventure. I write like I think – sometimes in quick, excited bursts, sometimes in long, meandering passages. Being a fiction writer sneaks into everything – I can’t help but turn memories into mini-stories and observations into scenes.

Some days, I’ll start writing about a technical problem I solved at work, and suddenly I’m weaving a story about persistence and patience, with that stubborn bug cast as the antagonist. Other days, a childhood memory from my Bessarabian village surfaces while I’m debugging code, and the post becomes a bridge between past and present.

I let my posts breathe and find their own rhythm. Sometimes they’re structured like well-documented code – clean, precise, with each point building logically to the next. Other times they flow like dreams, jumping between moments and meanings, following their own strange logic.

Is there anyone you would like to collaborate with?

Looking ahead, I’m intrigued by the possibility of collaborating with other writers who understand this dance between storytelling and reflection. I’d love to explore how different minds interpret the same prompt, creating a dialogue of perspectives and experiences.

Is there anything more you wish you had or would like to learn as a blogger?

Like in Murakami’s stories, where questions often lead to more interesting questions rather than answers, I keep discovering new doors in this blogging journey. I wish I knew how to better capture those moments when reality shifts – when code becomes poetry, when memories surface in system logs, when debugging turns philosophical.

Maybe I should be more structured, plan things out like I plan my technical projects. But then again, my best writing comes from those unplanned midnight sessions, when the walls between worlds grow thin. Perhaps, like the strange pathways in the novels I love, not knowing where this blog is heading is exactly the point.

My nominees:

Adarsh , please take the button!