Archive for February, 2007

While I am in Malaysia in the next 10 days or so, I will be having a go at Phone Blogging. The player below will be updated with a new episode every time I report by phone on my Malaysian trip. This page will headline Fusion View until Monday 05 March 07.00 am GMT.

Why Phone Blogging? Because I will be staying with my parents and the most up to date technology they have is an electric typewriter… So, I will not be able to update this blog using text.

I won’t be able to do any editing to the phone blog so it will essentially be like a live podcast from my phone

Also, I won’t be able to add any written notes to my phone report so the player will show only Episode 4*, Episode 5* etc. You can listen to each episode by clicking on the relevant episode in the player below. I will aim to record a report every other day so check back from time to time to hear the latest episode.

I hope you enjoy this experiment!

Alternatively, to launch a standalone version of the player, click on the button below.

* It starts with Episode 4 - I used up the previous episodes with “testing, testing”!

Photo: thanks to makinasu from flickr.com

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been collaborating with another lawyer-turned-writer, Caro Fraser on a TV drama. While my books have been legal thrillers, Caro’s novels have focused more on human relationships and drama. I had never worked on a joint writing project before and at first, I was worried that with two strong-willed, highly creative people whose previous writings have little in common working together, we might end up in arguments and never speaking to each other again. I am pleased to report that we haven’t exchanged fisticuffs at all!

We have both in fact been invigorated by this collaboration. My action/ thriller approach to story brings thrills and spills and driving momentum to the pacing. Caro’s more detailed approach to relationships puts a brake on my more outlandish ideas, tempering them to fit the human drama. We’ve both also enjoyed talking over plot points and character motivation and trying out different angles and possibilities.

Writing a novel on your own can be a long, tortuous and isolating process. No-one knows your characters or story as well as you do so although you may discuss and explore certain aspects with a friend or another writer, their input is limited. Collaborating with another writer means you both own the project and we are both very keen to make sure the other person has a stake in each step of the process. We both have an in-depth knowledge of the characters and their motivations and a shared vision for the outcome of the story. We rely on each other’s focus and creativity as much as on our own input. It’s been a hugely refreshing process and I think, we’ve both learnt a lot that we can also carry on in our future individual writing projects.

Caro comes round to my place every other Friday morning and we work till lunch time, capturing our character sketches and story arc on a laptop. We both contribute mid-morning munchies – very important! – spring rolls, prawn toast, onion bhajis, quiche etc. We sit at my dining table or wander around the room going: How about this? What about if…? No, wait, scrap that, try this for an idea… Yes, yes, I like that… Mmmm, I’m not sure about this…

After Caro heads off home, I am usually completely shattered. This creativity business really is exhausting but I really feel a sense of achievement. I imagine that this must be how athletes feel after a good round of tennis or a marathon! We’ve now finished the character briefs and their story arcs, an outline for the six episodes and a rough sketch for the actual dialogue of the first episode. When I get back from KL in March, we’ll start work on polishing the script for the first episode and putting the treatment together to submit to the TV people.

Photo: thanks to accentinteractive.net

We have now passed the closing date for the prize draw to win a copy of James Wood’s The Theory of Everything. I am delighted to announce that the three winners picked at random from the Fusion View email subscriber list are:

lucy

ella

lenny

(The above are taken from their email addresses and edited to maintain their privacy.)

I have emailed the winners to let them know and to make arrangements for a copy of the book to be posted to them. Enjoy!

Thank you to everyone who has subsribed to Fusion View!

All the best
Yang-May

I will be flying out to KL at the end of this week. On Saturday morning 24 Feb at 11am – 12.30pm, I will be speaking at the LitBloggers Inaugural event with Sharanya Manivannan at MPH Bangsar Village Phase II.

Kenny Mah has created a great banner for the event – at the end of this post. Thanks, Kenny! Do copy it and put it on your blog or email it to your friends.

If you can’t make the Saturday event, I will be at MPH Midvalley on Sunday 25 Feb at 3pm – 4.30pm doing book signings and to chat informally.

If you have any specific questions or issues on blogging or writing you’d like me to discuss at either of these events, why not add a comment or email me this week. Please do so by Thursday 22 Feb 6pm Malaysian time – I will be offline after that travelling.

Hope to see you this coming weekend!

So you think you’re a decent, kind, upright person. The kind of person who would never hurt anyone or descend to sadistic, cruel actions. You watch the news with horror and incomprehension at the violence and evil in the world. I could never do that, you think. How could anyone do that?

A landmark psychology experiment in 1971 tore away our sense of of our civilised selves. The Stanford prison experiment was meant to last two weeks but was terminated after six days when violence, sadism, cruelty and psychological problems spread among the previously “normal” college students who had volunteered to take part in the experiment.

William Golding made up a story along the same lines in his chilling novel “The Lord of the Flies” - where a group of schoolboys stranded on an island literally revert to trival savagery and human sacrifice. We might discount that as fiction. But the Stanford experiment exposes that our primeval human nature is just beneath the surface, just as Golding imagined for us. And it took only six days for it to emerge in these otherwise normal, decent college students.

Ever since I learnt about the experiment in psychology books, I’ve been horrifyingly fascinated by what it reveals. A documentary about it is now available on YouTube, uploaded in 5 parts.

Part One - introduction and background to the experiment; Day One

Part Two - a rebellion on Day Two

Part Three - “Prisoner 819 did a bad thing”

Part Four - Sadism and authority

Part Five - Debrief: “I started to get so abusive… but no-one said anything to stop me”

You can find out more at the Stanford Prison Experiment website - click here

The BBC repeated the experiment for a reality TV programme in 2002, which also had to be aborted early (although the BBC denied that the early termination was due to psychological issues):

This is the report in the Guardian.

This is the report on BBC News

There’ve been some terrific comments over the last few weeks. I don’t have space to highlight all of them but here are some that you might enjoy.

The podcast interview with James Wood drew a number of comments from poets and poetry fans, O’Shea Jackson, Rob and Calvin Broadus. James’s remark about Scottish poets lacking ambition prompted a quick retort from Rob. Calvin gently mocked James’s way of adding multi-textual references in his manner of speech but also cheered James on, saying that everyone MUST read James’s poems.

My post on the joys of malt loaf awhile back drew a recipe request from Kim Lewis. Yeeton has kindly responded and posted up a recipe for malt loaf in his comment – I hope Kim will come back and let us know how she gets on if she uses that recipe. Pedro defends the loaf as being healthy – especially if you are a runner or cyclist. I definitely agree that it’s great for an energy boost when you’re outdoors doing vigorous exercise.

Jennifer comments that she always checks out guys whom she sees knitting and she is clearly familiar with the film about guys knitting that I posted up. The pics of knitted cupcakes brought comments from émigré and Annegret, who marvelled at the skills of the creators. I laughed out loud at Wei’s response to the cupcakes: “like men… cute, but pointless.”

Rj gave me a link to a Singaporean online radion station in response to my post on listening to the wireless. Thanks for that!

Ted Mahsun, whom I mentioned in my post on where to submit your manuscript, has complemented that post with some advice on how to submit short stories to US magazines on his blog. Thanks for adding to the community of knowledge, Ted.

Vandana is a Daphne du Maurier fan and will be visiting the du Maurier festival in Cornwall this year. She asked me to recommend a place to stay and I emailed her to say that I Googled for a self-catering cottage and suggested she could Google for a B&B. I’ve asked her to write up a short report of her tour of the festival if she does go and to submit it to Fusion View – I hope she will as it would be great to have an “our reporter from Cornwall” piece on all things du Maurier on this site.

You may remember Nicky Harman, the translator whose first-person piece I featured awhile back. She was looking for an agent for her translations of a Chinese novel into English. Her article about the translation process posted on Fusion View was spotted by a publisher in China who contacted me, wanting to get in touch with Nicky. Nicky emailed me a few weeks ago to say that that publisher has now invited her to discuss a possible translation project and she is also in discussions with a literary agent in the UK who checked her out on Fusion View. Rock on, Nicky!

The discussion about how the Japanese occupation on Malaya is written continues with a comment from jack who tells how his Japanese friend in college did not know about the past of his own country.

Rosaline Ting adds a comment to tell Fusion View readers about her play Journeys at the Wimbledon Theatre in London. Let me know if you go to see it and would like to contribute a review to Fusion View.

Kenny Mah, a Malaysian writer, has created a cool banner for the sidebar of his blog displaying details of the LitBlogger event that I will be taking part in on Saturday 24 February in Kuala Lumpur - he shares the link to it in his comment that he posted here. Thanks, Kenny!

Tunku Halim makes a good point that people who use obscenities too much in their daily speech just makes them boring rather than shocking. He also queried where he can buy my books - Tunku, you can get them from www.amazon.co.uk, or click on the links in the sidebar of this blog. Or you can order them at a good bookshop in your area.

Peter added a thought-provoking comment on a previous comments roundup, highlighting the differences between different Chinese communities in the UK. His picture of the diversity within the Chinese overseas groups makes me think laughingly of the recent case when a Scottish judge let off a Chinese person from a driving offence because we all look alike and it couldn’t be ascertained without a doubt that the accused was the person driving the car in the traffic camera photo. We don’t look alike, really we don’t, your honour.

Finally, my post on maintaining an authentic image prompted some musings from yeeton on blogs and blogging and also some advice from Sandy Dumont encouraging me to try some light lipstick instead of throwing out make-up altogether!

Photo of cattle round up thanks to boss lady ranch.com

The Creative Commons Licence is a protocol on the net whereby creative types can licence their creations to be used by others freely, subject to various restrictions that you might specify. It is commonly used by people who upload photograhps to flickr.com to allow others to use their photos elsewhere without fear of being sued for breach of copyright.

Some writers post up downloadable pdf versions of their books or writings under the Creative Commons Licence. Their intention is to distribute their work freely to others. But what’s to stop someone else downloading your book and then sending it off to a printer and then selling it on their own behalf, keeping the profits themselves?

Nothing it seems. Bestselling author and marketing guru Seth Godin found his downloadable free book “Everyone’s an Expert” being sold on Amazon by someone else. There’s some heated debate in the comments and trackbacks to his post about this on his blog. It seems that the Creative Commons Licence doesn’t prohibit others distributing the work in print form and profiting from it. So Seth does not appear to have any legal recourse to stop this profiteering.

So, if you are a writer who has or who is thinking about distributing your books or writings electronically via the Creative Commons Licence, do check out the fine print before you do so. It would be sensible to think about what additional conditions and restrictions you might want to include for downloading your work and state that clearly on your site.

But bear in mind that at the end of the day, you may have nice legal wording on your site that protects others profiteering from your work but it’s a whole different story trying to enforce it in the event that some scoundrel does in fact rip you off. The music industry is spending millions of dollars trying to stop their music being ripped off and pursuing international court cases to protect their rights - how much time or money can you as an individual spend to try and shut down your thief?

Photo: thanks to oldwest brew.com

In the last couple of months, I’ve been collaborating on a TV drama with the other lawyer-turned-writer, Caro Fraser. We’ve been keeping things under wraps so we could hot-house the project and not dissipate our creative energy talking about it to others. We are now about half-way through and it’s going pretty well. So I got the OK from Caro to mention it on the blog.

We are still keeping the subject matter and storyline confidential – again, so that we don’t dilute what gets written down on the page with having talked about it endlessly to anyone and everyone. I have found this approach really helpful – it was how I tackled writing The Flame Tree: no-one knew the whole story but me and I didn’t express it anywhere but onto the pages I wrote. Since that time, I’ve realised that part of the difficulty I’ve had in making progress with Novel No. 3 is that I’ve talked to people about it and it’s as if, in telling others what the book is about, there’s no urgency or impetus anymore in actually writing it down.

Towards the end of this month, I’ll be in Malaysia for a week and I’ve been invited to a number of book events at MPH and also at Sharon Bakar’s “Readings” group for writers. I’m really excited about having the opportunity to read some of my work at Readings. I’ve been following the various events there on Sharon’s blog over the last year and thinking: writers in KL are so lucky to have that support network to read and discuss writing, I really would love to go along if I could. And now, Sharon has generously invited me along to the meeting on Saturday 24 February and I’m thrilled.

But now I have a dilemma. Having realised that hot-housing seems to be an integral part of my personal writing process and that I’ve dissipated my creative energy on Novel No. 3 by talking about it, including discussing it for The Star magazine profile about me and writing about it here on Fusion View, should I read an extract from the novel at Readings while the book is still a work in progress? Will reading it out aloud diffuse the energy even more? Or will having some feedback from Malaysian writers inspire me to get on with it with greater vigour?

I have a short story that I wrote in one sitting a few months ago. It doesn’t have a Malaysian theme and the ending needs to be beefed up. But it’s pretty much completed and it’s a story that is personal for me, about a turning point in my life. It’s called The Canyon, about a camping trip and trek in the Grand Canyon – perhaps I’ll read that instead.

Photo: thanks to fozylet from flickr.com

My invitation to submit pics of your gardens prompted Lucy in South London to send in this photo. She explains that the pic was not taken during January this year but is from the summer of last year. No matter. It’s a great view through the open door, hinting of the warmth that awaits us in the UK, come spring and summer later this year – and her little doggy Claude is just too cute to ignore. (Maybe someone will be inspired to knit a woolly version of him….?)

You can also compare this with pics of Di’s South African garden, here.

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I’m a thriller writer, after all, and my second novel Mindgame is populated with spies and counter-spies. Ever since I was a kid, I loved the old TV series Mission: Impossible and these days, I’ve been a great fan of Alias - and of course, seen all 3 Tom Cruise Missions.

My surname, Ooi, is a common surname in Malaysia but it’s unusual in the UK. It can look like 001 if printed in capitals (OOI) and people sometimes laugh when they see it for the first time and joke that I am Double-O-One.

So when the CIA posts up a recruitment ad on YouTube, looking for clandestine operatives, I took notice.

Watch the ad here:

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The Agency also has a page on Facebook.com, a social networking site (like MySpace) for college students. You need to register to access the CIA page there..

An article on Wired News gives more detail - read it here.

I was about to type “Do come back and add a comment if you apply to the CIA” but of course, if you did, you wouldn’t be able to tell us about it!

Or, if you fancy yourself more James Bond than Felix Leiter, then you could sign up to the British Secret Service ….