Literature can never be as healing as pills or vaccines or as deadly as viruses or loneliness, but we all know it can be a tool to survive and pay the bills. J.K. Rowling might be one of the typical examples of these cases. Apart from her hard work, she is lucky indeed to enjoy such popularity even after her transexual discourse-related backlash.
Living in a small house with her family in Kulonprogo, Deni Riyaningsih is just like Rowling in a sense that they are both fiction writers. But Riyaningsih might be different in terms of luck. The woman’s son, Ananda Yue Riastanto, was bitten by a malayan krait (bungarus candidus) in 2017. After a treatment at a local hospital, the son showed a hope of recovery but what happened was entirely the opposite. He was paralyzed even though he survived, which was even more psychologically and emotionally exhausting than instant death after the snake bite. For 9 years, Riyaningsih has no choice but to take care of her one and only 16-year old bed-ridden son every day without any rest day. The son is still alive but he cannot survive without his mother’s assistance. It’s a full-time job without any regular salary. And I guess there is nothing more heart shattering than witnessing your lovely child to live a miserable life like that. I am imagining her and the husband spend many days praying for miracles to happen.
And somehow Riyaningsih finds solace and consolation and a source of income in the world of literature. She dedicates some time at home to type drafts of online novels on her phone (she has no decent laptop or PC to write novels with) and sends the drafts to an online novel platform goodnovel.com and gets paid for it.
As she talked with a reporter of harianjogja.com, Wednesday February 11th, 2026 she said writing novels at home on her phone serves as a tool to stay sane while makin money for the family. She is not the breadwinner in the family, I assume, which is why she takes care of her son at home all day long, as her husband still works hard out there.
The hardest part is indeed accepting what her son has gone through. As a mother, she admitted that after the ill-fated incident, she spent much time weeping over her son’s current fate. She at times suddenly cries but in the recent 5 years she learned a lot on how to be more accepting and patient.
What is interesting is they way she turns to literature to save herself as a caretaker. She found some online platform to publish her novel drafts. She publishes novels on Good Novel, Noveltoon, and Tivizo. As I checked three of them, they are specifically designed for online writers. Despite having a website, one cannot write and publish novels on the web but one has to download and write on the smartphone instead.
She said, “I have done this side hustle of writing online novels on online platforms via app and websites for 5 years. I write to destress and let all my burden go away.”
Riyaningsih is a natural storyteller. She started with full of punctuation errors. But despite that at the first attempt, she published her draft and generated 300,000 rupiahs. Her husband definitely approved of her side hustle at home especially after he has seen his income decreasing. Who doesn’t? The pastime can help with the family finance and save some money that can be otherwise spent for a therapy. Her life is hard and she could have used some therapy to ease her unseen pain.
She said she is capable of writing a chapter every day. This chapter contains 800 up to 1,000 words. The word count might be reaching 2,500 words per chapter if she needs to write longer. Amazingly, she managed to finish a novel usually in 2-6 months. For the recent 5 years, Riyaningsih has published 32 novels on various platforms. To achieve this mastery, it took her 2 years to practice, seh acknowledged.
Thanks to her grit and writing skills, the family now owns a second-hand motorbike. She plans to buy a laptop to help her with the writing process.
It feels painful to live a life that is not going the way you plan. Literature and writing cannot give us a miracle but they can offer us a miraculous way to get by in the most dire life circumstances.(*/)
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