Kuala Lampur, Oct. 28 -- Sometimes you have to embrace cliches.

A columnist getting cancer writing a book about it? Ah, how predictable, how mundane.

That didn't stop me from writing one though.

I'll let you know the writing part was easy.

What I did was dictate my book to my phone and thanks to the free Voice Memos on iOS it was not only recorded but with a click of a button, auto-transcribed.

Thus it took me just a week to "write" the book but the effort still took a toll on me physically; I was sick for two weeks after I was done.

The main reason I decided to talk my book into existing was to avoid straining my hands. I still need to work, after all.

What dictating a book, much like authors of yore used to do, adds to the writin...