The next thing you know, he has received a letter from the publisher and is waving it around in his local bar, buying drinks for his friends to celebrate the publication of his book. In the next scene, he is swanning around at a swanky launch party, the toast of the town and on his way to becoming A Famous Writer.

All this happens within five minutes of film time!

The movie version of writers came to mind recently because I have been preparing the draft of my third book to send to the publishers. This is the book on New Trends in International Communications which I am co-authoring with Silvia Cambie and although it is not a novel like my last two books, the process of manuscript preparation is exactly the same. You have to keep drafting and redraft thing until you are absolutely happy with what you’ve written, checking and rechecking for typos, grammatical mistakes and errors in context and sense. You then had to make sure that the formatting is consistent e.g. that each paragraph is justified and consistently spaced, that key terms that recur are consistently spelt or capitalised alright italicised and that your page numbering is seamless from chapter to chapter. You need to check the word count of each chapter and add them all up together to see whether your total word count falls within the required thresholds. You need to make sure that the header and footer has the correct references to the book title, your author name and the relevant chapter. It is tedious, tedious, tedious…

We are due to deliver the manuscript at the end of November and Silvia and I have been having regular meetings to make sure that the sections that we are respectively writing work together. She is putting the finishing touches to her chapters and we then need to collaborate on the Foreword before the final bundle is ready to go. And the last thing we will need to do is to collate the hard copy into the correct order, prepare 2 copies to send to the publisher and further copies to retain ourselves. These days of course we also had to prepare the electronic version to send out at the same time.

Once it is with Kogan Page, our editor will no doubt come back with notes and there’ll be another period where we will have to do some further rewriting and re-crafting before the final version will be ready to go to print. The publication date has been set for July 2009, which is around nine months away to give us and Kogan Page sufficient time for the editorial process, the copyediting process, the print preparation process and also to fit in with their overall 2009 catalogue.

A lot longer than five minutes, wouldn’t you say?

I remember that as a teenager, one of the reasons I was inspired to be a writer was the way that the lives of writers are portrayed on screen. In the movies, it all seems so glamorous and intense — and easy. Well, now that I’ve actually become a writer, I have to laugh at my youthful innocence!

Photo: thanks to (waltzing) matilda from flickr.com (CCL)

There is a scene in a Woody Allen movie where he has taken his date to a Chinese restaurant. He is trying to impress her by showing of how much he knows about Chinese food and Chinese dining so he gives her a demonstration of how to eat with a bowl and chopsticks the “proper” Chinese way. He picks up the ball in one hand, bringing it to his mouth and starts to shovel rice and meet into his mouth while she is speaking and describing to her this skill that he is displaying. Of course, this being Woody Allen, he ends up with rice falling out of his mouth and grease all over his lips and chin, while his monologue is punctuated with slurping and sucking noises as he hoovers - or tries to hoover — the food into his mouth. Needless to say, his date is completely repulsed!

The brunt of the joke is the Woody Allen character and his pretentiousness rather than on the “proper” way of eating with a bowl and chopsticks. However, the comedy highlights how difficult it is to eat elegantly the Chinese way and how much real skill and training is needed to do it well. You are meant to sit up straight, bringing the bowl close to your lips but you aren’t meant to shovel it into your mouth like an animal but rather you should take delicate bites with controlled movements of your chopsticks. Also, you are not meant to cross your chopsticks and instead you should hold them so that they act in a pinching motion. You are definitely not meant to make whooshing or slurping noises!

I had to make a confession. As a Chinese person, I am an utter failure when it comes to eating with chopsticks. Growing up in Malaysia, we ate most meals with a fork and spoon, using a plate for our food. In Chinese restaurants, I always ask for a fork and spoon, which the waiters would bring with a look of disdain on their face. Once, at a food court in Darling Harbour in Sydney, when my mother and I asked for a fork and spoon to eat our Chinese meal, the lady behind the counter immediately identified us as Malaysians because from her experience of her customers, it was always the Malaysians who handed back the chopsticks in favour of the western implements!

Which is not to say that I can’t eat with chopsticks — it’s just that I’m very clumsy with them and I tend to cross them instead of using the pinching movement. I find it impossible to use them for rice and have to resort to the ceramic spoon, which is generally used for soup. At family dinners, if I use chopsticks, I cannot keep up with the rest of the gang as they adeptly and happily devour the feast while I am still fiddling around with my one increasingly pathetic looking piece of chicken and scattering rice all over myself. So if I am to survive in this Darwinian environment, I have to put my pride to one side and get the most suitable utensils to the job — a fork, spoon and plate - to be sure that I don’t starve.

I have also found to my mortification that I am very ignorant when it comes to the finer points of chopsticks dining. I was at a Japanese restaurant with an English friend who spends a lot of time in Japan on business. He was very deft with his chopsticks and I was having a go with my feeble crossed style. As we were chatting, I paused and stuck my chopsticks into the bowl of sticky rice so that they stood up unaided and picked up my cup of tea. He cried out in horror at that was a very “bad luck “thing to do as it was reminiscent of tombstones or what you do when making an offering to the ancestors at the grave. I quickly plucked out the offending chopsticks, feeling very foolish!

Related posts

Dining Etiquette - Gender

Chinese Dining Etiquette

The English Dinner Party

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

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Back in the summer of 2007, I spotted that Obama had signed up for a Twitter account so that his fans and followers could keep up to date with his every movement. As of this week, you can see the “tweets” alerting his followers of the last frenetic activity on his campaign trail as he tried to squeeze as much face time with the public as possible.

The tweets link to live video on his very own social network my.barackobama.com, developed with the input of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Obama also has a Facebook page with over a million “friends” and a Facebook application as well as a presence on MySpace. TechPresident.com gives a good analysis of these three social networks in “You’ve Got a Friend in Barack Obama”.

There is an official Obama Blog on his website, run by staffers and with a range of multimedia content, including live video such as his victory speech streamed via social networking video site Ustream, as well as YouTube videos.

Beyond this handful of tools, you can see on his blog links to “Obama Everywhere” - other platforms where he has an online presence, including interactive opportunities via mobile phone.

But a bunch of social media tools in themselves are not going to make a president all by themselves. The key is how they were used by the Obama campaign. Supporters, fans and followers were encouraged to take an action to show their support for the campaign - whether by organising local events or giving a donation, however small or large, or raising funds. According to the BBC, Obama’s online campaign “attracted more than three million donors. They donated about $650m (£403m) - more than both presidential contenders in 2004 combined.” With an overflowing war chest, he could out-do McCain by buying more airtime in the traditional broadcast media and also extend his own on-the-ground real world contact through more local outreach offices than the Republican campaign.

The BBC also reports that “Mr Obama had an unprecedented level of support among young people and new voters in the 2008 election. He won the votes of those under 30 by an impressive 66% to 31%, much higher than in any previous election. He also has a huge majority of those who voted for the first time, who supported him by 68% to 31%.” The Washington Post comments that the Millenials (those under 30) “are migrating toward each other, regardless of race or ethnicity. … (They) may have found their first president — one who engages them in their own space.”

Obama’s success was not entirely due to social media but he used it smartly in conjunction with other communication tools. Broadcast media is still hugely influencial and there’s nothing that will replace face to face human contact whether it’s through speeches at rallies or simply walking amont the people and kissing babies. But social media broadened his reach to those people he might not have otherwise been able to connect with and it also enabled ordinary people to do small things which came together as a whole to contibute to an enormous win.

Picture: screenshot of the official Obama website

Tony writes:

A family connection

Les 3N et le Bouton d’argent (The 3N and the Silver Button) was written by my great aunt, Roberte Armand, as part of a series of children’s adventure stories which she wrote and which were published by Hachette in France between 1970 and 1978. Roberte Armand was my grandmother’s sister, the youngest of three daughters, all of whom were given boys names by my great grandfather who wanted a boy but never had one! She is now 91 and is still in fine fettle, living in the French Alps. An extremely active person all her life, with an amazing imagination, Roberte Armand grew up in Grenoble, France. An acclaimed science teacher (her father was himself a well known professor at Grenoble University) , she had four children, three sons followed by a daughter, upon whom the characters in her books are based. The beautiful countryside in which she grew up forms the setting for the stories, which are aimed at 9-12 year olds.

The Three N stands for Nathalie, Nick and Noel. Nathalie, at 9 the youngest of the trio, but nonetheless very perceptive represents her real life daughter. Nick, her brother is the aggressive one who teases his sister endlessly, and Noel, the cousin (Hachette insisted he be the cousin and not brother), who is the reasonable one, and kind to Nathalie, represents an amalgamation of her two eldest sons. Knowing the family, although those children are my mother’s generation, I can honestly see how the characters in the book represent real life people. I think that is really important because it makes the characters seem more real.

The 3N series

In total, 14 books in this series were published in the 1970s by Hachette, France, in the “Bilbliotheque Rose”. They have never been translated into English. When the 15th manuscript was submitted, a new person at Hachette decided he did not like the books any more, commenting that there were not enough “savoureux gouters” - “delicious teas”, as could be found in Enid Blyton books! No more were published, although there are 16 unpublished manuscripts, not to mention the most recent addition to the series, written last winter, some 30 years after last downing pens. The latest story is called Les 3N et L’Extra - Terrestre, and focusses topically on the problems of global warming.

A book at bedtime

I started on this project after reading a couple of the books to my eldest son. He was 8 at the time and although I was having to translate as I went along, he was fascinated by the stories. After reading the second one to him, I thought the story was so good that I decided more children should know about them and began the long and daunting process of translating. As a busy lawyer with 2 young boys , time is at a premium, but after 9 months the draft was finished! I was lucky enough to live in France for a few years as a child, and with a French grandmother and having spent alot of time among French people, I have a good grasp of the language. My A level and degree level French skills came into their own. Translating is an art because there is not always a perfect translation possible, particularly where you have a play on words or a pun which simply does not work in English. The French have an obsession with food, which comes through, but then Enid Blyton was also very keen on her lashings of ginger beer etc!

The translation process

I was fortunate to have the author on the other end of the phone if clarification was required but luckily this was not needed too often. There was one passage which involved the children visiting a mink farm which I advised might not be politically correct nowadays. Two weeks later I received through the post a revised extract from my great aunt where she had re - typed one entire page of the book (probably with her original 1970s typewriter!), changing the reference from mink to exotic fish, with associated changes in the dialogue! She did admit to being stumped by this request but came up with the idea after several trips to her local library in France!

As the work continued I got more and more into the characters, and began to understand how they themselves thought, picturing the real life characters when they were themselves children. It was a very rewarding experience.

I am also delighted that the whole process has rejuvenated my great aunt. To go away and write another book at 91 is proof of that! She has been so excited about the renewed interest in her stories and it would mean so much to her if they were to be published again. Her children are also thrilled that her mother has reacted in this way.

My boys are now 9 and 7 and into Enid Blyton in a big way, as I was, Secret Seven, Famous 5 etc. Those stories are still selling very well even though they were written in the 1950s. Well here is something to match them, but with subtle differences (only one of the stories has a secret passage!). I think children just love a good story, from whatever era, and this is what these books provide. Being a mathemetician/ scientist, the author leaves no unanswered questions and all the plots end neatly with all loose ends tied up, just how children like it.

The feedback I have had from children who have read my translation has been 100% positive. These are mainly children in my son’s class at school and that of my goddaughter. Adults too have enjoyed it. “When’s the next one coming out?” they say.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tony is looking for an agent/ publisher in the UK to take on The 3N and The Silver Button so that more children can have the pleasure of reading the adventures of Nathalie, Nick and Noel. So if anyone can help with suggestions or recommendations as to what he can do next to bring Tante Bob’s book to a wider English-speaking audience, please do get in touch by leaving a comment and emailing me via the Contact Form and I’ll pass on your email to Tony.

You can read the first chapter in English by downloading the pdf from the box below, or via this link to The 3N and The Silver Button

Photo: of Tony and Tante Bob (with permission)

Back in the old days, before women’s lib, it was the expectation and duty that the man paid, if a man and a woman went out to a meal together. (I am thinking here of Western culture from around the 1930s through to the 1960s, which would be my parents and grandparents generation. I am not clear as to what would have happened in East — whether it would have been acceptable for a single woman to go out for a meal with a single man during that period in Asian culture. If anyone can share their experience of that from an Asian perspective, that would be great!) My parents completed their higher education in the UK in the 1950s, which is where they met and dated, so the Western tradition played its part in their courtship. Growing up in that context in the 1960s, that was certainly the etiquette that I absorbed.

However, I came of age in the 1980s, when the women’s lib of the lates 60s and 70s had evolved into out-and-out feminism and young women now fully expected to have careers of their own. That was the era of women’s power suits and I remember an ad for Charlie perfume that featured a beautiful woman striding into a stuffy gentlemen’s club dressed in a sleek three-piece trousersuit with a tie. At university, I had long discussions with my girl friends about the etiquette of paying for a meal. Should we offer to pay for our half of a meal when we went out with a young man? Should we pay for the whole meal? Or should we play the demure young lady and let the man pay, just like in the old days?

It was generally agreed that if we paid for the whole meal, it would threaten the manhood of our date, framing us as a scary/ ballsy feminist types who would emasculate him and so frighten him away forever. But if we let him pay the whole tab, we agonised, would that mean that we would be seen as weak little women who would feel obliged to sleep with him - because the implication was that we would have surrendered all our power to him by surrendering to his greater masculine wallet?

So “going Dutch” would seem to be the most sensible option but there were still worries about what message this signalled: would we be saying that we were “just friends” and lose any opportunity of the relationship developing into something more intimate in the future? For some of my girlfriends, sharing the tab with a man still felt too forcefully as if they were asserting equal rights with men and therefore pushing our “feminist values “on him. And no one wanted to be seen as a feminist — because feminists were all men-hating, shorthaired, hairy-legged, angry, unreasonable lunatics, weren’t they? And so these tricky questions occupied us late into our student nights.

These days, 20 years on, I don’t think about the issue very much at all. Sometimes I pay for the whole meal, sometimes I share the bill and at other times, I gracefully accept a meal paid for by someone else. This is partly because the whole dating issue is no longer on the table, so to speak, so that particular aspect doesn’t come into play. Amongst my friends and close family, there is no game-playing or status-flexing needed, so if someone pays this time, someone else offers to pay next time and it all comes out in the wash. And gender no longer seems relevant in any of it.

I wonder, however, whether the dilemmas we had back in the 80s arose because we were all young and uncertain at that time of our lives or whether we were living through a transition time for women. Did young men at that time really feel threatened if a woman paid for part or all of the bill, as we girls worried so much about? Did they really expect to get into bed with us more easily if they paid the bill or was that just an anxiety on our part? Similarly, do I feel more relaxed about these things now because I am older or because I don’t have to date anymore or because women have reached greater economic parity with men in our modern times? I am not sure. Maybe it’s a combination of all the above?

What are your thoughts? I hope you will add a comment…

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

I am guessing that this is a common experience for many people. All the discomfort that comes from having to sit and type in order to communicate on the computer takes the joy out of surfing the net and connecting with friends, doesn’t it? Well, for those of you who are fed up with typing, salvation is at hand!

I have just installed the latest speech to text software from Dragon Naturally Speaking and I am dictating this blog post while wandering around my study, occasionally standing by the window to watch the world go by. I hardly have to touch the keyboard as the program types out everything that I dictate and if I want to make an amendment, I can give it voice commands to do so for me. The version that I am using is the “Preferred” version 10 which comes with a wireless headset. It is very intuitive to use and has a huge vocabulary — it has recognised place names like Dulwich and Norwood, proper names like Joan Baez and John Steinbeck and unusual words like chorizo. I can give it voice commands to move around web pages and also control the keyboard. One of the other functions I like about it is that if I am away from my study, I can dictate into a digital recorder and then later, can next be recorded to my computer and Dragon will transcribe the audio file into text.

When you first install the program, you have to spend about 10 — 15 minutes training it to get used to your voice. Initially, it felt a bit strange “talking to” the computer and I was a bit shy! However, after a few minutes I got quite into it and now it seems the most natural thing in the world — in particular, because I use the wireless headset and tend to do my dictating while looking out of the window, it does not feel as if I am “talking to” the computer. The great thing is that I can speak at more or less a conversational pace and it is accurate upwards of 95% of the time, provided I enunciate clearly. In fact, it is much quicker for me now — one week in — to dictate than to touch type because the program is so much more accurate than my typing e.g. it doesn’t transpose letters or hit two keys at the same time!

I think to make the best use of this program, it is a good idea to have an outline in your mind of the structure and flow of your article, blog post or e-mail so that you do not have to spend much time afterwards editing and/or moving text around. Normally, I would have to do some minimal editing and rewriting just to tidy up anything that I have typed anyway, so having to do that at the end of a dictated text isn’t such a big problem — it only becomes a pain if you have to do substantial rewriting on your dictated text.

Being able to dictate text easily and accurately has really made blogging and e-mailing so much more fluid and less physically tiring. I am also more inclined to flesh out my e-mails to my friends because it doesn’t involve tiresome typing. As for blogging, it is helping me stay prolific and engaged.

So, if you are tempted to try Dragon Naturally Speaking, please do come back and let me know how you get on. (I have no association with the program or company and get no benefit from this review.)

I thought it would be apt to be reminded of what happened leading up to the Wall Street Crash and also, think about what happened afterwards in terms of social upheaval as well as some of the institutional legacies that came out of that period. The following is a link to the podcast of a history lecture by Prof Jennifer Burns of the University of California Berkeley on the Wall Street crash and the Depression.

   Podcast: The Great Depression and New Deal

The podcast is part of her lecture series on American History which was recorded in 2006. It is an excellent podcast series and although part of a university course, very easy to follow as a layperson. I have found it a fascinating introduction to American social and economic history from the American Civil War up through to the present day.

For more information about the Great Depression, you can also check out thegreatdepression.co.uk, where I found the photo to illustrate this post.