Archive for October, 2006

The story so far: A couple of weeks ago, you got a call from your agent saying that your manuscript has been accepted by a publisher.

It’s your dream come true! You’re a real writer - it’s official! You ring round and tell all your friends. Your mum is so proud of you.

And then they start asking you: “So, how much is your advance?”; “I bet you can retire now, huh?”; “When are you going to buy your own Lear jet like Patricia Cornwell?”

The sensationalist stories in the press about authors being paid millions do the rest of us a huge disservice. Most writers don’t find themselves in the thick of a bidding war; most writers are lucky to get into five figures. In the moment of your crowning glory - you’re going to published, for god’s sake! - you are deflated by your well-meaning friends whose questions only serve to emphasise what you CAN’T buy with the money you’re being paid.

Some big name authors started with £500 for their first book and worked their way up the same way you might do in your day job - with long hours, commitment and striving for excellence. The more books you write, the more you become known and the more you become known, the more valuable you are - so your fee can go up.

What was my advance? For a two book deal from a first-time novelist, I was pretty lucky - I got into five figures - but not high up enough in those figures to keep me in the style I’d imagined (a ranch in Montana or some other vast American landscape a la John Grisham…)

How does an advance work? It’s an advance against royalties. Essentially, the publisher is taking a punt on you and your book and giving you some money up front. When your book hits the bookshelves, you get a royalty ie a percentage of the sale price. The publisher recoups the advance they’ve paid you by keeping your royalties until it breaks even and pays back what they’ve advanced you. The good thing for you is that if the royalties don’t break even, they don’t ask for the difference back from you.

So the financial risk lies entirely with the publisher and you can see why they tend to be cautious when doling out lump sum payments. They have no way of knowing if your book will make them anything back on their investment. All they know is that subjective gut feeling that your editor and her team has that they loved your book and they think it could sell.

Which is why in these competitive times, publishers prefer to take a punt on sure-fire successes like celebrity books. It’s like if you’re investing in the stock market - you’re more likely to invest in a strong well-known brand name multinational that’s safe like Boots or M&S than One Man and His Van Plc.

Here we are, we writers, thinking we’re creating literature and art. And at one level, we are - and those in the publishing industry do get excited and passionate when they come across great writing. Yet, at another level, it’s just economics.

So, don’t take it personally - whatever your advance is. There’s one thing that’s certain, at any given moment, somewhere in the world, there is a writer who’s just got a book deal and been told the sum of their advance and in that writer’s mind, it won’t be enough!

It’s not every day that we have a poem dedicated to us so Angie and I are very thrilled that poet James Wood has dedicated a pearl - or even a raindrop - of his wisdom to us.

James Wood is a dynamic young poet who also has a talent for kick-boxing and tai chi. He worked in a high-flying role in communications in the City before downshifting to Edinburgh to devote more time to his great passion - poetry. James’s first collection of poetry “The Theory of Everything” is coming out on 4th November, published by Happenstance press. You can find out more about him and his work here - http://www.happenstancepress.com/The%20Theory%20of%20Everything.htm.

The poem he dedicated to us, Raindrop, is here - http://www.happenstancepress.com/Sample%20poems/TheTheory%20of%20Everything%20sample%20poem.htm

James is donating the proceeds from the sale of the book are going to the Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund, which is seeking to fund research into the early detection and better treatment of pancreatic cancer.

The collection is available to order from amazon.co.uk at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Theory-Everything-James-Wood/dp/0955028094/sr=1-1/qid=1161245702/ref=sr_1_1/202-5461869-0605422?ie=UTF8&s=books

It’s also available from the publisher here: http://www.happenstancepress.com/Order%20online.htm , though please note that this is PayPal or cheque only. Direct orders from the publisher do not get bookseller mark-ups, i.e. they are two pounds cheaper.

I will be interviewing James for a Fusion View podcast soon and asking him about the poetry scene in Edinburgh where he is based, what drives him to write poetry, how one gets published as a poet in the UK and testing him to see if he really has a theory of everything…. If there are questions you would like to ask James about his work or the poetry scene in Edinburgh or the UK, please add a comment or email me and I will choose the best/ most relevant questions to put to him.

At the request of DG, who asked for more pratfalls to cheer us up as winter gets colder and darker, here is a film that made us laugh loud at the office the other day.

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A while back, I wrote about the First Ancestor, the story that my family tells of where we came from. I found a tape recording of an interview that I did with my grandfather on my mother’s side 30 years ago, asking him to tell us the story of our family. I was thirteen at the time - and I guess in a way I was doing a podcast even before podcasts were invented!

The family gathered round one evening just before Christmas 1976 and I taped the story that my grandfather told. This is the last and only recording we have of his voice as he died a year later so it is a recording that is treasured in our family.

I have transferred it to digital format without any expert or fancy technology so the sound quality is not perfect. However, I hope that you can still enjoy the story he tells…

Listen Now:

 A Voice from the Past (Family Story): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1849)

I was listening to The Food Programme on Radio 4 the other day and they had two experts on who were debating heatedly about the date when the potato first came to England. They also featured a Slovenian group of Chefs called The Association for the Recognition of Saute Potatoes and Onions as a Main Dish, who travelled round Europe to Potato Festivals cooking up their signature dish. Having a preference for rice generally, I had no idea that people could get so passionate about potatoes.

And then I started thinking about all the recipes that I knew for different types of potato dishes and realised that, for someone who claims to be not so fond of potatoes, I knew quite a number dishes involving the spud. So here is the first in a series of posts all to do with potatoes.

This is a recipe I invented one frosty November lunchtime. It was a Saturday and I was reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, revelling in the heat and atmosphere of the Deep South, while outside, it was grey and chilly. By lunchtime, I was starving and longing for something hot and warming that I could cook and eat quickly so I could get back to my book.

We looked in the fridge and there was very little food. Damn. I needed to go to the supermarket later that afternoon. In the meantime, there was some cheese, a few peppers and onions, a few slices of ham and frozen chips. Everything apart from the frozen chips were ideal for pizza - but I couldn’t be bothered to get the flour out and make the base.

Wait. What about chip-pizza?

1. Lay out the frozen chips on a baking tray as you would normally
2. Sprinkle on top of the chips chopped peppers and onions (and in fact, any vegetable that would go well on pizza) - and garlic
3. Tear up and sprinkle the pieces of ham on top (or any other meat that you might put on pizza eg salami, pepperoni etc)
4. Grate the cheese (cheddar works well) and spread evenly over the top of it all
5. Bake in a medium oven for 30-40 mins

When you take it out, you will have melted bubbling cheese over the chips and pizza ingredients. Serve with tomato ketchup a la Jackson Pollock squirted all over the tasty pile.

You could bake the chips bare for 20 mins first to get them a bit browner and then take them out and action items 2-4 above. Then put it all back in for another 10-15 mins.

Either way, you end up with a quick, yummy dish that’s great to eat on your own or for sharing with friends (especially while watching a DVD at home) - but hideously naughty if you are worried about your figure…!

Is it stop-motion camera work? Is it special effects? Or is it magic?

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My father has recently been inspired into a spate of creative activity. He submitted a Fusion Story a little while back, about his first experience of coming to study in England. He is of that generation of men - particularly in the Chinese tradition - who were never encouraged to share personal moments publicly. And he has never been known to write much creatively. So I am really touched that recently, he has been sharing his personal reminiscences with us in writing - and really proud of him.

This piece about his grandmother also gives us a flavour of a Malaya of a different time - before the freeways and high rise buildings and Starbucks.

He writes:

My earliest memory of Grandmother was when I was four or five when we moved to Cheras. I had gone with her to clean the house before the family moved in. Some day she would buy durians from the Malay vendors who came with a huge basket of the fruits stacked on the back of his bicycle. We would eat them squatting at the front door. She was very fond of durians.

In the little garden in the front of the Cheras house there was a pomegranate tree to which she seemed very attached. She would water it with water which had been used to clean fish and would hang empty crab-shells on the branches because they would help the tree. It seldom bore fruit and when it did she was very pleased with it.

She doted on his grandsons and I think particularly me. She would make sure to buy Nyonya kuih from the Indian vendor who would come around with his 2 huge baskets on a pole across his shoulder hawking his wares. And very often he had a pot containing assam curry with a charcoal stove underneath it - for making assam laksa. A word about this Indian gentleman. He was already quite old then, I would say at a guess about 50 years. He would carry these two baskets and the pot and walked many miles a day to sell his food. It must really be a very hard life. I still remember his gaunt but cheerful face wearing a brown felt hat like an inverted flower pot. He would disappear every now and then for 3 months or so and then he would appear again saying that he had gone back to India.

There are two things which Grandmother wanted me to do which caused me some pain - as little boys would have when they are asked to do things which caused them to stand out amongst their peers. The first was to part my hair on the right side because she said that if I used the left side all the time, the hair along the line would drop out. The second was to wear braces to hold up my shorts. It was, of course, a sensible thing to do but little boys did not do sensible things when the others do not do it. I can’t remember how I got her to allow me to revert back to normal. May be I complained to Mother who must have stepped in.

She would tell very earthy stories to AHC and I heard some of them which I can still remember but it is not suitable for re-telling as my secretary types all my letters.

When Mother went out with Father she would bring back Hokkien mee about 11.00 at night and Grandmother would eat the mee with me in the bedroom. As far as I can remember my brother BT never joined in the eating. Was it because of my known greedy nature that I was that she woke me up. Grandmother was full of common sense and it was she who told us that Queen Victoria had lots of children whom she married off to all the royal houses in Europe and thus she was related to them making the likelihood of disputes or war less likely. (Although it did not prevent the First World War.)

I had always thought she had a noble face with good cheekbones and bone structure. She did not chew betel nut but she smoked self-rolled cigarettes but did not have the dirty habits of the smoker. I remember using up my savings of Japanese paper money to buy her, just before the Japanese surrender, tobacco in packets and the cigarette paper.

Later on when we were in secondary school she lived in the Imbi Road temple and we would see her when we visited the temple on the first and fifteenth day of the Chinese month and other feast days of the Gods. Still later on when she lived on top of the dispensary we would see her on Friday evenings after going to the Rex and Madras cinemas.

She was so effacing that she would not stay with anyone of us for fear of disturbing our lives. I remember saying to myself on her death which occurred on a Saturday that she is so understanding that she would not want to inconvenience anyone and have them to take leave to come to her funeral.

Written by Guestblogger: Ooi Boon-Leong

Last week, in Waiting for Publication (Part 1), we were interrupted by a phone call that may or may not have been from your literary agent and which may or may not change your life…. The story continues.

It turns out the call is from your agent. But it’s good news and bad news. The five publishers she sent your manuscirpt to all loved it, she tells you. They all gave such lovely feedback. “That writer can really write.” “Some lyrical passage of prose.” “I laughed, I cried. It was beautiful.” And all these from those mythical names that you see on your bookshelf - Random House, Penguin, HarperCollins… These giants of the book world loved your book!

But.

“But it’s just not for us.” “But we’re not looking for rural romances right now.” “But the main character isn’t quite convincing enough.”

You’ll do anything, you say. You’ll fix it. You’ll make the main character convincing. You’ll change the Dorset farmyard location to New York. Whatever it takes. You’re so close!

But a but is a but.

Your agent resolves to send it out to five more publishers. “They all say they are confident that you will be published and they will live to regret the day they turned you away.”

So you go back to your nail-biting and waiting. They’ll regret it, you think. Yes, they will. You are suddenly Eliza Dolittle marching around your living room imagining all manner of doom for those fools who rejected you. “Just you wait, ‘Enry ‘Iggins, just you wait, I’ll be published and famous one day!”

I know a number of writers who have reached this stage and not got any further. Most put aside the dream of being a novelist and pursue writing in some other way - through poetry or writing creatively for pure pleasure or working on short stories. One writer has reached this stage with five different novels. And he has re-worked each one several times and they’ve submitted them to further rounds of publishers a year after the initial failed stage. Still nothing. And still he perseveres. I think he is on novel number seven now. And it’s about fifteen years on from the day he first started on novel number one.

I remember those phone conversatons with my agent. I remember standing at the window with the phone to my ear and feeling an icy chill creep all over me. I had come so far and now, we had received some beautifully generous let-downs from a number of publishers. How could this be happening? Things had gone so well. I couldn’t believe that I had come so close and it could all just fizzle out.

In my case, I had panicked before the last few answers had come back. Hodder & Stoughton was among them. And they offered me a contract.

There is something mad and tragic about being a writer sometimes, I think. Writer/ blogger Mark Pettus described it as being like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, waiting for the bridegroom who will never come amid the cobwebs and mouldering wedding cake. For me, my “prince” did come and saved me from being a mad old maid and I shall forever be grateful.

If you are a writer and you’d like to share your story of waiting for publication - whether your experiences have been good, bad or ugly - please add a comment or email me. I’d love to hear from you.

Following on from last week’s film, this is another film made by another elderly gent, talking about life after the death of his wife.

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He has posted a series of these “What Next” monologues - if you want to follow them, go to his YouTube page at http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=jimsan1.

If you have been inspired by this film to post one of your own up on YouTube (whether you are are grey or otherwise!) please do come back and let me know!

The Cornish Pasty is the iconic food of Cornwall. Everywhere we went during our holiday there a few weeks back, the delicious smell of pasties wafted out at us from bakeries and whole shops devoted to the speciality. They are savoury portable meat pies in a distinctive half moon shape. To my Eastern eye, they look like giant curry puffs.

The outer case of the pasty is made of golden brown pastry that crackles and flakes as you bite into it. Its shape comes from folding a large circle of pastry over the filling and braiding the resulting curved edge. The traditional filling is steak and potatoes but these days, there’s lamb and mint and steak & stilton and a whole range more. They have a satisfying, heavy feel in your hand, about the size and weighty book.

Curry puffs are much smaller. They can be the same handbag shape as a pasty or sometimes can look like a fatter and shorter sausage roll. Inside, the filling is made of minced pork, chicken or beef, onions, vegetables and potatoes fried in dry spicy curry. You can get fried puffs with crispy oily pastry or baked ones with flaky puff pastry. Even describing it now makes me drool…. Bizarrely, the best curry puff I’ve had was at the canteen in Singapore General Hospital some years back.

Pasties are really yum on a blustery Cornish day. We shared one in Falmouth as Hurricane Gordon blew itself in across the Atlantic, the sky glowering darkly and the sea sharp and choppy in the bay. The light drizzle was like a sheet of pins thrown at us by the wind. A hot pasty in our hands, steaming in the cold, was just what we needed.

But there is always a slight disappointment in the back of my mind. Tasty as pasties are, they strongly retain their ancient British identity as solid, rather bland but nourishing food. They aren’t - and never will be nor should be - spicy, meaty curry puffs wafting of garlic and coriander and burning your mouth with the more pugnacious taste of the East. Sigh. I do miss a good curry puff eaten in the sweltering heat of a street market…

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Can you tell which is the pic of Cornish Pasties and which of Curry Puffs?

Picture A

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Picture B

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Answer: A = Curry Puffs; B = Cornish Pasties