Archive for the 'Books & Authors' Category

When I visit someone’s home, I can’t help but checkout the books on their shelves. Often, I find that with very good friends, we have many books and interests in common. But what is the most interesting is when I visit the home of someone that I get on pretty well with and like a lot but there’s just something that I can’t put my finger on - for some reason, we do not connect at a very deep level and I just have a sense that we’ll never be the best of friends. When I visit their home, it all becomes clear - they do not have a single book in their home, apart from maybe a few cookery books or travel guides. In my house, every single room, including the hallway is full of books - and I’ve just given a whole pile to Oxfam to make space for new books.

It’s not that I talk about books and writing very much with my friends, even with those who do have a lot of books nor is it that I am only interested in making friends with people who like books. I think it’s just the fact that I read a lot and with the friends who also enjoy reading, we have a connection that is about exploring ideas, analysis and arguments that books can give you. Books also offer a perspective on time, space and people in that they tell you about history, landscape, context, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics and just plain old human stories. People who don’t read miss out on that opportunity to travel beyond the immediate extent of their own experience and so I guess when we come together, we can laugh and enjoy each other’s company and give emotional support as friends would do - but we just do not have an overlapping breadth of interest.

Since I’ve been exploring ebooks and audio books in my Going Shelfless experiment, I have wondered what the future holds for us readers when we can no longer explore the full extent of each other’s libraries because everything is a digital file on a laptop or iPod or ebook reader. Will an aspect of friendship and social connection be lost?

Many book lovers have probably discovered this social network already but I’ve only just come across it. LibraryThing enables you to put a list of your books online - books you own, books you are currently reading, books you’d like to read etc - to show to the world and also to see who else has the same reading taste as you.

You sign up for a free account (which allows you to list up to 200 books - after that, you need to pay for an annual or a lifetime account at pretty cheap rates) and you can then list your books by finding them on various online bookstores which have been intergrated with LibraryThing - clicking on the book link automatically inserts them in your library. There’s a Talk forum where you can discuss a particular book. There are also different book Groups you can join sorted by genre eg there’s a Science Fiction group and a Crime, Thriller and Mystery group.

In true social media fashion, you can also put a widget on your blog that shows random books from your library. You can see mine below:

You can see my full library (or at least the books I’ve gotten round to listing) at: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/yangmayooi

You can also add other LibaryThing members as Friends, as you might add Friends on Facebook or MySpace. One way to make friends is that you can see how many other people have a book that you have in their library - you can discover who they are if they have a public profile by drilling down through the numbers to specific profiles, and you can invite them to be your friend that way. Or you can search for your friends using the Search function.

I don’t have the time to catalogue ALL the books I own but I may use it to log current books as they have a short cut button you can put on your browser bar to add books to your library as you purchase them from Amazon and I usually buy my books from there anyway.

I wonder if members of LibraryThing list all the books they own and have ever read or is there the temptation to omit the more soically unacceptable ones - the low brow bodice-ripper, say, or the more desperate sounding self-help books that you might hide behind another layer of more worthy titles or even keep under your bed….

If you’re a member of LibraryThing, add me as a Friend. Also, please share your experience of this network and how it may have added to your enjoyment of books and reading. And whether you “censor” your list for public consumption…!

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For ebooks to succeed, the creators of digital versions of books need to think about books in a new way.

I’ve been checking out the different ebook softwares that you can download to your PC to read ebooks, since my post the other day about ebooks generally. I professed then to be a fan of the MobiPocket reader and after testing out Adobe Digital Editions reader, my views have not changed - Adobe’s reader is miles behind in its concept and that shows in its lack of usability.

MobiPocket seems to have succeeded in thinking about books in a new way in order to offer a multi-faceted experience of reading books on a digital device. It uses reflowable text so you can control not just the font size but also the line spacing, the actual font itself and you can zoom in and out on both text and images. All of these functions are intuitively laid out on the navigation pane and you can also use the mouse to control the page movements - which means you can sit back at a distance with your laptop on a coffee table and use just the mouse on one arm of your armchair to control page turning and accessing the controls.

Adobe has its main strength in creating pdfs of print documents - what you get on screen with a pdf is a copy or replica of the print document. Its Digital Editions readers shows that heritage. You can increase the font size but not to such a great degree as in MobiPocket. And you cannot zoom. At all. You cannot choose the font and you cannot change line spacing. Essentially, you get a glorified replica of a print page. There is no easy way to get a full screen - you have to click a few times through a menu to get there - whereas on MobiPocket, a simple button gets you to full screen mode and you can easily get back to the dashboard by hovering your cursor at the top of the screen.

Unfortunately, there appear to be many more digital books in Adobe format than in MobiPocket format. This is bad news for the reputation of ebooks - if it’s clunky and awkward to read and maneovre round an ebook because of ill-thoughtout software, then people are not going to take to ebooks as readily as if the digital reading experience is a joy. For me, MobiPocket reading is a joy - because of the control I as reader have on the formatting of the text to make it the most ergonomically suitable for my personal comfort and of the ease of usability of the dashboard. Publishers of ebooks need to think in a new way about books - forget the old paper version and focus on how the content of the books can best be delivered to the consumer in a new medium.

We as consumers are becoming increasingly used to controlling our user experience. Think about movies, television and radio. At one time, it was expected that we had to go to the movie theatre at the specific time the movie was being shown, or organise our evenings around a TV show we wanted to watch at a certain time, or tune in to listen to our favourite radio program when the broadcaster decided to put it on. Now, we can choose where and when to watch via DVDs which we can pause, rewind and also personalise in terms of sound and colour etc. We can download podcasts of radio shows to listen to whenever we please.

With ebooks, we can be freed from the constraints of the font size, the layout, weight of paper, and choice of binding selected by the publisher and the reading experience can be transformed into a much more user-centred one, especially if embedded links and other additonal electronic data are included in the digital version of the book. For example, I was reading a physical book (p-book) the other day and it mentioned the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem - there was no accompanying photo and I could not remember what it looked like. Imagine if I had been reading an ebook version which enabled me to go online with a click on the phrase to see some photos and also to find out any other background information. As we all get used to reading blogs and online newspapers etc, that active way of reading - to follow links or go online to search for more information - is going to become an increasingly instinctive and natural response. If publishers want to tap into the digital book market, that is the way to go - rather than trying to replicate the experience of reading a p-book.

Photo: thanks to trishalyn.com

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Continuing my experiment to “go shelfless”, I’ve been checking out ebooks, inspired by one of my readers Nicola, who left a comment about Mobipocket books. I blogged about listening to audiobooks which don’t take up any shelf space and which allow me to multi-task a few weeks ago. So it made sense to check out this other option for non-physical books, especially as my house is already brimming full with books and I’m going to have to move to a mansion if I continue my current rate of book-buying - or at any rate a giant warehouse.

Mobipocket offers ebooks for download which you can read on your PC and also PDA/ mobile phone via their MobiReader software. At first, I wasn’t convinced - yes, I would save shelf space by converting to electronic books but surely, it would be very uncomfortable reading tiny print on my mobile phone or tiring on the eyes reading on a computer screen. Well, I was in for a surprise.

More ergonomic than a paper book

The MobiReader allows you to increase the size of the book font and also zoom in so that the text is huge on the screen. Reading an ebook this way on my desktop or laptop means I can sit back in the chair, my head and neck straight (instead of hunched over a paper book) and turn the pages by clicking the arrow key on the keyboard. The page changes rather than scrolls down so the experience is closer to that of non-computer based reading.

You also don’t have the problem of trying to keep the pages open that you have with a paper book - and worrying about cracking the spine if you try to get the physical book to open at more than a 90 degree angle. I set the font to a huge size on my laptop, place the laptop on the coffee table a little bit at a distance, sit back in my armchair with the wireless keyboard nearby. My hands and arms are free until the moment I need to click the arrow to turn the page.

So no more cramped hands and arms or crook neck and shoulders.

Also, being at the age where I need reading glasses, I am finding some small print in physical books a drag. Being able to increase the font size and zoom has minimized the squinting and headaches that can come with poring over tiny print.

Moving about the ebook

You can also move about the book by using the “go to page XX” function. Embedded chapter links mean you can go to the contents page and click on the chapter you want to be taken straight to that chapter. You can search the book by keyword as well. And there is a cute function where you can add bookmarks which are little page creases in the top right of the virtual page, just as you would turn the corner down in a real book.

Being used to moving about Word and Excel documents using “search” and moving about the internet by clicking on links, I found that it was quite intuitive moving about the ebook using similar techniques.

Active reading

The other great thing I’ve been enjoying is the note taking function. You can select a word or phrase and click “add a note” - a dialogue box will open up for you to type your note (and on my touch screen phone, I can even add the text as a handwritten note using the “draw” function). You can then see all your notes for that book collated together and clicking on a note will take you to the selected word or phrase in the book. I’ve used this function to remind myself of other books and authors referred to in the book I am reading so that I can check them out later.

Alternatively, if I am online at the time and feel like taking a break from reading the book, I can immediately check out Amazon or Mobipocket or other online bookstore for the books and authors mentioned. Or I can google to find out more about a topic mentioned in the book.

If you had an e-dictionary installed, you can also select a word or phrase you did not understand and look up the word. I am thinking about getting a French/ English dictionary to help me out as I read Le Monde and other French magazines.

All this seems quite natural to me as I am now so used to active reading online - when I read blogs or newspapers online, I may follow links or google to find out more about a topic or look up words or information on Wikipedia or I may bookmark an item to return to later.

Software for ebook reading

I like MobiReader but there are also other formats - Adobe Reader, Microsoft Reader and eReader are some of them. From what I can tell, MobiReader has more of the active reading options as I’ve described above than the others and can be used on a variety of devices including dedicated ebook readers.

Range of books

There are not as many ebooks out there as physical books at the moment but the range seems to be growing. A number of bookshops in the UK are reportedly going to be pushing ebooks this year. WH Smith already has an ebooks store online. Borders is revamping its website and the new one will apparently include ebooks and also trumpet the dedicated ebook reader the iRex Iliad. Waterstones has a few ebooks and is apparently going to be selling the Sony Reader. Blackwells, the academic bookshop, has a ebook store that focuses mainly on academic books. There are also online stores that sell only ebooks - check out BooksOnBoard, MobiPocket itself and also eBooks.com.

You can also get out of copyright books for free download from a number of specialist online websites like ManyBooks.net and Feedbooks.com.

What ebooks am I reading?

I downloaded “1968: the year that rocked the world” - about the revolutionary year 1968 - from Mobipocket.com for around £5. It seemed appropriate to be reading that on the 40th anniversary of the May 1968 riots in Paris.

From Blackwells, I discovered “The Internet - A Philosophical Inquiry” on special offer for only £1.

From ManyBooks.net, I’ve downloaded for free Walden by Henry David Thoreau, The Prince by Machiavelli, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (in English, though the French version is also available) and The Art of War by Sun Tzu.

Limited sharing

The only thing about ebooks that are digitally rights protected is that you can’t share them or give them away as easily as you might with a physical book. You can read them on up to 4 devices (ie PC and other device) so if you want to share them with someone, that other person will have to be given access to your main library/ account to access all your books via their PC/ device which would become one of the four that you are allowed to have. Not being able to share or give away ebooks is not a problem in my book (ha ha) because I don’t like to lend or give away my books unless they are not ones that I’ve enjoyed and are taking up too much shelf space. With ebooks, I can just leave such books in my digital library without their inconveniencing me by taking up too much room - or delete them altogether.

Conclusion

I’ve been quite taken by ebooks, I have to say. My first choice is likely to be audiobooks, still, for the reasons discussed in my blog post about audiobooks but the choice of books available in audio is even more limited than the choice of ebooks. If I must read a book with my eyes, then I like the active reading opportunities for ebooks and also the ergonomic aspects. I will definitely be adding to my eLibrary and may even consider buying a dedicated eReader (another gadget!). Unfortunately, I cannot switch entirely to ebooks yet and there are still some books that I will have to buy in paper form as they have not yet been made available digitally but I am hoping that that will start to change and that publishers will start to release books in multiformats in the near future.

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I’m not reading books anymore - I’m trying to “go shelfless”. With the technology available these days, it seemed to us likely that you could abandon all shelving with the consequential enlargement of your living space. That’s an attractive idea, especially if, like me, your home is already jam-packed with books, CDS and papers that have taken up all the shelving space available already - what do you do as you buy new items?

One friend is very efficient at monetizing her acquisitions - once she’s finished reading her books, she sells them off again on Ebay. She used to rip the music of CDS and then sell the discs on Ebay too. She also gets rid of old clothes and other items the same way.

I’ve been wondering if one could minimise the clutter at an earlier point ie at the acquisition point - by going virtual or electronic.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about taking virtual notes using Evernote, which has so far been a great way to cut back on the bits of paper and physical notebooks that I would normally use. I “write” notes on my mobile phone-PDA using the letter recognizer function so it feels just like scribbling in a physical notebook or on the back of an envelope and zap it across to my online account.

I’ve recently discovered audiobooks via Audible.co.uk, which is a subsidiary of the US-based company Audible.com. So I’m not reading books but I’m listening to them. With Audible, you pay for each book you download just like you might if you bought a physical book from Amazon. But you can also sign up an account and pay a monthly fee of around £8 - each month you can download one title. The latter option is good value as you can download a book that otherwise costs more at that £8 price. Once you’ve downloaded it, the audiobook is yours forever and you can stream it from the online site or download it as many times as you like. The only limitation is that you can only play it on up to 4 computers/ devices that you register with your account - this is to stop you sending an e-version to all your friends and doing Audible out of business.

I’m really enjoying my first two audiobooks. I can listen to them while gardening or sitting on the bus. It’s so much more time efficient being able to listen to a book and do something else at the same time. And activities that used to be boring and painful to do are now quite pleasurable. Also, lying in the garden staring up at the blue sky while someone reads to me in my ears is just delightful - I don’t have to strain my arms lifting the book to read it as I lie down or crick my neck to get the reading angle right. And the books don’t take up any physical space - although you can burn CD versions of them if you want to.

My only complaint about Audible UK is that they have only 18,000 titles compared to the US company which has 40,000 titles. Many of the UK titles are older titles and / or of the WH Smith variety ie non-intellectual easy reading (though there are a few exceptions). I tend to prefer Waterstones or Blackwells which have more academic selections - or Amazon where you can get the most obscure books so long as they are in print. I was very excited when I first discovered Audible.com, the US site, as it had loads of books I wanted. For example, the US company has Naomi Klein’s latest book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Stephen Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature and Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. My excitement fizzled out when I came to the UK site - where none of these books are available. The UK site has lots on Churchill, how to make a million, chick lit and the latest popular non-fiction, which is fine if your tastes are limited to those topics.

So why don’t I just sign up for the US site? The frustrating thing is that if you try that from the UK, it refuses to allow you to do that and shoots you over to the UK site. Their support team explained to me, “The availability of certain book titles is linked the geographic digital download rights set by the publishers. A title can have different publishers in different countries and the rights are set on a country by country basis. Where possible, we try and secure rights on a world wide basis (for our US, UK, French and German sites) but there are times when this is either not possible or discussions are currently ongoing to secure the rights.” So I have to keep checking back to the UK site in the hope that the UK publishers will at some point issue the UK version of the audiobook.

Still, I have found a few books on the UK site that will keep me going for the next few months - hopefully as time passes more of the kinds of books that interest me will find their way onto the UK site and I won’t have to terminate my experiment with virtual books anytime soon.

Illustration: thanks to Drylcon from Flickr.com (CCL)

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I got a new mobile phone a few months ago and I’ve been slowly exploring all its functions - and in the process, I’m discovering a whole new mobilesphere (I have no idea if there is such a word but it seems an apt way to describe the world of mobile media in the way that blogosphere describes the world of blogs!). My new phone is also a mobile computer, running Windows Mobile and 80% of its front face is given over to the screen - the phone part of it has a virtual keypad for me to touch-type the phone number. It runs a mobile version of Word, Excel, Outlook and Internet Explorer. It has WiFi so so I can surf the internet as well as send and receive emails if there’s a WiFi service available - but I also splashed out and signed up for a monthly data plan so I could be connected wherever I am. With unlimited texting and a huge number of talk minutes on top of all that, the way I relate to my mobile phone has completely changed.

I used my old mobile phone solely for voice calls - and I did not use it a great deal as I don’t like shouting out my part of the conversation in public while I’m on the bus or in the street. I hated texting as I am not very nimble on using the telephone number keys to type out words. My new phone has a Qwerty keyboard (ie like a PC keyboard) as well as letter recognition on a touch-sensitive screen. Now I can email or SMS to my heart’s content in public - an excellent way to pass the time on the bus or wherever I am in transit!

Being a writer with this new writing tool to play with, naturally, I was curious when I came across an article about mobile phone novels. These are apparently huge in Japan. According to Wired magazine: “A mobile phone novel typically contains between 200 and 500 pages, with each page containing about 500 Japanese characters. The novels are read on a cell phone screen page by page, the way one would surf the web, and are downloadable for around $10 each.” The novelists tend to be young twenty-somethings or even teenagers who type their novels via their own cellphones. According to the writer interviewed by Wired, she can type faster on her phone than on a standard keyboard. There’s even a first mobile phone novel award - sponsored by the premier site that hosts these novels Magic iLand: might you call it the MoBooker?

There has been one author in the West who has written a novel on his mobile phone. According to a news report, “Italian writer Robert Bernocco took advantage of his idle time while commuting to and from work by train, writing his 384-page science fiction novel, Compagni di Viaggo (Fellow Travelers is the English translation), on his Nokia 6630 phone, using the phone’s T9 typing system.” The book has been published in traditional book form by Lulu.com.

I have to say, I admire the abilities of these two writers to master the mobile phone keypad. Even with the mini Qwerty keyboard and letter-recognition function of my new phone, I do not have the patience to write more than a few short text messages or emails on the fiddly thing!

It seems to me, in the West, there has not been any novel specially written for the mobile phone, as far as I know. I don’t think that the reason is necessarily the difficulty of writing on a mobile phone keypad - presumably, one could write it on a PC, blog-style, and then post it to whatever mobile phone novel site there is around. I wonder if Wester writers shouldn’t try this potential new genre. It would be a great way for a new writer starting out to write 500 words at a time. It’s great for readers as most of us have our mobile phones with us at all times - it’s a handy way to read short bite-sized chunks. Writing short, gripping prose is pretty hard, to be sure, and reading a lot of text on a tiny screen can be hard on the eyes. But I think these are excellent challenges for a writer to evolve a writing style exactly suited to this new medium - rather like writing poetry to the constraints of the sonnet form rather than just sticking a few lines together in the modern free-form style.

Would you read a novel on your mobile phone? Do you know of any writers in English who have a written mobile phone novel? Would you, as a writer, be tempted to try writing one? Add a comment or email me and share your views.

Photo: thanks to europe.htc.com

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Carol Major and Hilda Tam Hio Man are co-authoring a historical novel set in Hong Kong, inspired by a true love story in Carol’s family. Carol’s husband’s grandfather, a white Australian, secretly married a Chinese woman in the 1960s - but her existence did not come to light until after he died, although she had lived in his flat since the late 1960s. She must have been in her late teens or early twenties when they married. The grandfather would have been over 65. Following her discovery she disappeared.

Carol has been haunted by this story ever since - Who was this woman? Why did she agree to be hidden from the family for all of those years? And what became of her?

To answer these questions she turned to fiction, although a fiction that would be based on historical facts. She wanted to imagine the sorts of situations that would lead to such choices. Carol asked Hilda if she could assist from a Chinese point of view.

When Carol told me about this story, I wondered if the readers of Fusion View may be able to help her. I know that many of you love books and stories and have connections with the Hong Kong, China, Malaysia and Singapore. So I suggested to Carol that we might put a call for help up here on Fusion View and maybe some of you could help with this great project.

The authors need your help with the texture and detail of life in Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s to help them flesh out the historical details of their novel, inspired by this haunting love story.

Carol writes:

The story is about two little girls, Chloe and Yun, who emigrate from the mainland to Hong Kong in 1950. Chloe is an orphaned Eurasian. She is taken in by a British couple in Hong Kong and attends an Anglican school. Yun is Chinese. Her family had hoped to have a better life in Hong Kong but end up depending on the Triads for their livelihood.

Chloe hopes to make a successful life through hard work. Yun sees no way out of her situation but to marry a westerner who will take her overseas. Events come to a climax when a British official who has been involved in corruption becomes an embarrassment for both the Triads and the British administration. He is banished to Australia with a minder to ensure that he does not tell his story. The minder is Yun.

The women continue to correspond with one another as they try to make sense of where fortune has taken them.

What help we need

We are looking for texture and detail. Did any of our readers live on the Peak in the late 1950s, early 1960s? Did their parents? What would be the response to a little Eurasian girl attending an Anglican school? How would she be treated by the other girls?

We will create a fictional school but need historical details to colour it. Can our readers describe the layout of classrooms, the daily routine, the food in the cafeteria, clique behaviour, summer vacations and so on?

Most of the dwellings that existed on the Peak during that time have been torn down and replaced by high rises. Does anyone have photos of the smaller bungalows? What were the interiors like and so on?

How did people travel up and down to the city in those days? I took the peak tram and also walked up using the escalator. Might Chloe have taken the same route to visit Yun?

Does anyone know what the border at Shenzhen looked like in the 1950s, and the entry process? It has been completely done over now.

Are their any stories or thoughts that run parallel with the plotline that might inform it and add colour? We would love to hear them.

Research so far

We have read much history from general sources and spent time in the Museum of History in Hong Kong gathering information about the time period in question. Articles appearing in the Royal Asiatic Society Journals have also helped. We have also read Elsie Tu’s books about Colonial Hong Kong. A contact who worked with an intelligence service is providing de-identified material on the operations of the Triads and the British Administration. Another contact whose father was involved with the Colonial Office is providing additional detail.

We have found that it is the personal experiences of real people that make the difference. Hilda has asked students to collect stories from their parents and grandparents. It would be fantastic to have more stories about those who came from the mainland in the 1950s—their dreams and what they left behind.

If you can help, please contact Carol (carol.major[at]advancednarrative.com) or Hilda (da_tam[at]yahoo.com). Please also mention Fusion View in your email to them.

More about the Authors

Carol Major was born in Scotland, immigrated to Canada as a girl and settled in Australia in her late twenties. She has been a professional writer for over twenty years with numerous articles published in the health care and social policy field. She is a principal of Advanced Narrative www.advancednarrative.com, a company that specialises in using story telling techniques. She completed both a Master and Doctorate of Arts Degree (Creative Writing) at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, during which time she completed two novels. Her short stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies in Canada and Australia, and on the performance website 1001 Nights Cast.

Hilda Tam Hio Man lives in Macau. Her first novel Ah Xun¡’s 5 Destinies was published by Association of Stories in Macao (ASM) in 2006. Hilda’s poetry and translations have recently appeared in Jacket, Segue, Cipher Journal, Poesia Sino-Occidental and The Drunken Boat. A collaborative volume of translations of the Tang poet Meng Jiao was published by ASM last year. Hilda is now working on the translations of classical poems by women poets of the Song dynasty and writing a novel with Carol. She holds a Master of Arts in English Studies from the University of Macau.

Cheryl Snell left a comment on one of my posts, mentioning her cross-cultural Canadian and Hindu experiences. I was intrigued so I followed the link to her blog and website and found that she had written a novel about a Westerner’s experience of marrying into a Hindu family. Naturally, I had to find out more! So I invited Cheryl to write a guest piece of Fusion View.

By way of background, Cheryl Snell is a Washington DC writer, and the author of four books, including the poetry collections Flower Half Blown (Finishing Line Press, 02), Epithalamion (Little Poem Press, 04) and Samsara (Pudding House Publications, 07). She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times, and is the book reviews editor for Alsop Review. She can be reached at cherylsnell3 [at] gmail.com.

Cheryl keeps two blogs, one devoted to poetry and her sister’s art at http://www.snellsisters.blogspot.com; the other an author’s blog built around her debut novel at http://www.shivasarms.blogspot.com . The novel, Shiva’s Arms (The Writer’s Lair Books) explores the relationship between an American woman and her Hindu Brahmin in-laws.

She writes:

When I first met my new family, this passage from Wonderland’s Alice popped into my head– “What if I should fall right through the center of the earth…oh, and come out the other side, where people walk upside down?” I knew the basics—don’t touch the men, no shoes in the house, have a fry pan uncontaminated by meat handy. But there were an overwhelming number of ambiguities to sift through, from the comic head-shaking that looked like No but meant Yes, to the serious conflict between freedom and family.

I had been pulled into samsara, the important householder stage. The word conjured up images of drowning in the domestic sea, and I had read many novels by Indians—Narayan, Desai, Mukerjee—who touched on its complications. I began to imagine my own project, a new novel built on the swirl of relationships around me. Always drawn to the stories with characters belonging to two cultures, I wanted to know which part of a divided self goes and which part stays.

To pit a fictional family with the weight of ancient traditions behind them against the quintessential unsuitable bride would help me to delve into an immigrant’s liminal state, from both points of view. Thresholds are so alive, with the way dualities merge, overlap and intrude on one another, I knew the intersection of cultures would afford me ample imagery. As a poet, I appreciated that.

Writing poetry transcends the personal, for me, whereas fiction relies on empathy. For both forms, I start with an image, a phrase, or an idea. Both forms distill language and meaning–in a poem every word counts, sound and syllable. In fiction, the sentences must advance plot or reveal character. With a novel, revisions are more rigorous, more of a juggle. With so much to take into consideration—characters, scenes, and points of view—it seems counter-intuitive that a novel is more forgiving. But I find that its sprawl makes it more tolerant . “In the novel or short story you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival,” May Sarton once wrote.

That’s not to say that it’s an orderly progression. When characters run amok, and suddenly have their own plans, it’s hard to force them back into the author’s. Mary Lee Settle advised that empathy without identity is one way to keep control of a character, but it’s difficult to maintain that distance. Transformation, the way the characters change, what conclusion the narrator comes to, are born out of writing one’s way into the piece again and again, trying on different plots, tone, voice. I feel my way.

Sometimes, when all is said and done, a character has more to say. My new novel follows Nela from Shiva’s Arms, back to India. The woman who has spent her life resisting samsara finds meaning by rescuing a little girl from child marriage, at great personal cost to herself. I imagine I can hear them talking together in my poem “Veranda.”

Above sounds of a sunset world
whoops of children rise. We lean
against verdigris, watch the streetlight evolve
like some star buzzing blue to white,
then a steady nostalgic amber.

lamplighters lit my village gaslights with a hook;
old men rocking on verandas nodded off

The widow in white climbs our hill, secrets
folded in her apron. She naps here
like your auntie, one eye open to the world,
sandals dangling off her toes.

The man next door pedals his bicycle so slow,
we worry for his balance. He waves to us
like laundry on a line, half-hearted surrender.

the veranda became a sleeping-porch on hot nights;
a place for cricket games during monsoon

Houses tuck themselves in. Lamps flicker on,
rising story by story. Silence blooms, holding
its breath. I sweep the pots of flag-striped flowers
from our porch, crockery from the table.

You need more room in this place.
I will make room for you.

Photo: of Cheryl and her husband Krisha - thanks to Cheryl Snell

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A while back, translator Nicky Harman wrote a guest blog piece for Fusion View about the book she was translating from Chinese to English, Striking Root. She was looking for a publisher at that time and we put a plea out via Fusion View to anyone who might be able to help her.

A little later, I received an email from an editor asking to contact to Nicky and naturally, I forwarded the email on. Nicky also reported that she had made contact with a literary agent who had checked out her credentials online and the Fusion View article had been helpful in adding to Nicky’s credentials in that context.

Recently, I received this email from Nicky:

Dear Yang-May

I thought you’d like to know that I have finally found a publisher for Striking Root! University of Hawaii Press have accepted it, and so it will come out in the US before here. I am delighted ….. now I get on with what I’m best at - translating.

Thanks very much for your encouragement, and I do hope all is well with you

best wishes

Nicky

Wow! I am thrilled for Nicky and equally thrilled that Fusion View played a small part in her path to publishing success!

Congratulations, Nicky!

This is a cross-post from my social media blog ZenGuide

I set up my International Public Relations bookproject wiki a few weeks back but I’ve been hesitating about announcing it on my blogs. I finally blogged about it a few days ago and invited comments and input - and I hope very much that you will help me with my research by getting involved in this project. But the reason I hesitated is that having set up the wiki online, I found that I have a strong streak of “command and control” in my character.

I wrote my two novels all by myself and did not show them to anyone until I had finished typing “The End” on the last page. I did invite input from experts on some of the background information that I needed to create a real world for my characters to inhabit and I did occasionally discuss motivation and plot points with my writer friends. But I kept the bulk of the story and text to myself during the 18 months or so that each book took to write. And I felt very much in control as the author and creator.

So while the “social media”, open and transparent part of me is all for having a go with writing a book via a wiki online, the old-fashioned author in me has been feeling somewhat uncomfortable about this new way of doing things. Will people nick my ideas/ thesis? Will people give me unsupportive criticism? Will I feel pushed and pulled by others’ input? Will I no longer feel like the author of the work?

My worries took me by surprise as I had always considered myself an open and trusting sort of person. (Though perhaps my years of training as a lawyer has overlayed that with an armoury of suspicion…?) Friends and colleagues gave me differing views. Some advised, no way should I put it up online as people might steal my work. Others were more of the attitude: well, try it and see. The advantage is that I can invite the help of others who may have more expertise of a particular issue than I have and I always liked the saying, “two (or more) heads are better than one”. And since I may be approaching experts with whom I have no personal connection, I can refer them to the work online for them to get a sense of what the book is about and whether they feel comfortable contributing to it. Also, as I would like to include a strong cross-cultural focus, having an online presence accessible from all over the world can only be a good thing.

A number of much more well-known authors than me have shared their books online while they’ve been work in progress. Chris Anderson blogged his book The Long Tail and developed it with readers’ input. Marc Wright over at simply-communicate.com is also using a wiki for his book Handbook for Internal Communication, due for publication in March 2008. So I reckon, if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.

So far, I’ve put out a few feelers to a number of experts and I hope to have spoken to an Italian writer this week and also a Korean social media / tech CEO based in Japan.

Do go and check out the bookproject wiki - and let me know if you have any thoughts on any of the issues I’m researching. Drop me an email via the Contact form above or add a comment.

Photo: thanks to smackfu from flickr.com (CCL)

Earlier this summer, I had dinner with Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng and blogger Kak Teh in a restaurant near Queensway. We had first met in February this year when he came along to the LitBloggers Event I was speaking at in Kuala Lumpur. This time, Twan was over in the UK for a book tour promoting his first novel The Gift of Rain. We chatted about the state of Malaysian literature and compared notes on our experiences of having to do the circuit promoting our respective books. He confessed to being disappointed by the level of publicity he had been getting in the UK - although I tried to reassure him that being featured on Radio 3 is pretty prestigious.

Twan’s novel has recently been long-listed for the Booker, which is fantastic news. I’m thrilled for him personally and also, it’s great to see a Malaysian author recognised for this prestigious prize. From a publicity point of view, I don’t think Twan will have any problems in the future!