Zen Cho

Just a brief note that my historical romance novella The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo is now available again on my website, and can be read for free online at the following link: The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo. I private-locked the posts on my website and took the ebook off Smashwords while Jade was enrolled in the KDP Select programme (I enrolled it so I could make it free on Amazon, as I explained in this post).

I have no complaint with KDP Select in respect of sales (one person borrowed the ebook! That was exciting). But it was always my intention that the story should be free to read online as well as available for purchase as an ebook, and the KDP Select terms don’t allow for that. Also I am opposed to monopolies and like myself to be able to buy EPUBs of ebooks I want to read, so here we are again.

Although it is the wrong time of the year for it*, I like this poem by Thich Nhat Hanh, posted on the Dreamwidth Poetry community: Fall Moon Festival.

What will happen when form collides with emptiness,
and what will happen when perception enters non-perception?
Come here with me, friend.
Let’s watch together.

*I know the OP says it’s especially for people in the southern hemisphere, but isn’t the Mid-Autumn Festival still celebrated at the same time of the year in the southern hemisphere?

Not Just Vast Armies Clashing on Dark Plains at Night: An Interview With Ken Liu

I’m sure this has been much-linked, but I really loved this interview with Ken Liu. There’s a ton of good stuff in it, like –

Children can be very hard and judgmental about their parents, and disappointment is often the result of misunderstanding. So how do I pass on my culture and experiences to my children in a meaningful way? How do I give them a sense of connectedness, of purpose and context, especially in a dominant culture that often devalues what I value, that is often ignorant about things that matter to me, that is often callous and dismissive to what I care about? The questions made me think about the experiences of my grandparents and parents, and my own process of gradual understanding and empathy with them. How to make the past meaningful for the future is both a big question—it’s the task of history—and a very personal, intimate one—it’s the narrative of family.

And so as I work through these issues, as I read and learn and think and write, I’m speaking both to my children and to my ancestors.

The line-up for Readings@Seksan this Saturday. I’m gonna go if I can wangle a ride — you should let me know if you’re going too.

I wrote this little intro to my list of Malaysian SFF writers in English, but decided to cut it out of the post itself so as not to distract from the list. I’m throwing it up ‘cos I really think this is a thing!

I’ve noticed before that what I might call Highlander syndrome is pervasive among Malaysian English-language genre writers (and to an extent, English-language genre writers from other Asian countries as well). I’ve only noticed this syndrome among writers in English, presumably because if you are writing in English you would’ve been brought up on books by Westerners — local writers in other languages appear to be more aware of their contexts and communities. (Also, I’m personally most familiar with the English-language writing scene. Once in a while I buy a Malay book and spend about six months getting through it. This is not the sort of experience which would qualify me to speak to the concerns of Malay-language writers.)

I call it Highlander syndrome because “there can be only one”. It’s this sense of being singular in writing science fiction and fantasy, accompanied by a sense that nobody is interested in your work because it is genre, that local publishers will ignore you for that reason, and the only stuff people will read in the region is self-help books or literary fiction (now that’s a blockbuster genre in the making – literary self-help. I suppose that’s what Alain Botton writes!).

My personal belief is that the reason one feels that way is not because there is no one else writing SFF in the local scene, or because there really is such enormous resistance to SFF from the reading public. Admittedly my friends and acquaintances are a self-selecting sample, but I don’t know a single Malaysian who would refuse to read a book on the grounds that it was genre. Everyone I knew at school liked the Hong Kong TVB adaptation of Journey to the West, and if monkey gods born out of rock who travel by cloud and visit the underworld as easily as the supermarket don’t count as fantasy to you, then you must be very hard to satisfy!

The reasons for Highlander syndrome are probably various, but IMO include:

• the issue I noted above about reading books by Westerners mostly (since that’s what’s available in English);
• the common geek experience of being the only person one knew growing up who got more excited over hobbits and spaceships than boybands. This is often ameliorated in the West when one grows up and finds out about cons and that sort of thing, but it’s slightly more difficult in Malaysia just because the community is smaller;
• the fact that the Asian writers best-known in the West are writers of literary fiction (and the best-known writers of Asian SFF are Westerners!); and
• perhaps most of all — the fact that often when you are a writer it is easy to feel that your whole life is one long sad story of no1curr. That’s a feeling every writer has, and isn’t particular to Asian genre writers.

I’m not denying that there’s a line of thinking that SFF doesn’t quite measure up to literary fiction in terms of literary value, mind you. I’m just not convinced that this mind-set is so much more ingrained in Malaysia than it is elsewhere. Admittedly there aren’t any dedicated venues for English-language SFF in Malaysia, but there aren’t that many venues for English-language fiction in Malaysia full-stop. English-language writing in Malaysia is still developing, and I’m personally very optimistic about it.

I used my Aladdin bento box for the first time today! I’ve got the two-storey version, which comes with a top compartment for soups and a larger bottom compartment, into which you can slot a half moon-shaped container so you can keep your rice and cai separate. It claims to be able to keep your food warm for up to five hours (or cool if that is how you prefer it), which is convenient as we don’t have that many microwaves at work.

I put some edamame in the top compartment, along with a hardboiled egg, and filled up the bottom with kimchi fried rice, giving the rice a blitz in the microwave before I set off. It worked pretty well! The rice wasn’t quite hot, but it was warm, and edible enough. The things I will do differently tomorrow are:

• cook the edamame in advance and chill them, because when you put them into the lunchbox immediately after cooking they get a bit soggy
• put the spring onion for garnishing the rice in the edamame compartment and only add it to the rice just before eating, so it doesn’t get wilted by the heat
• heat up the rice until it is EVEN HOTTER before packing it
• put in less rice. Wah, very full after lunch today.
• (perhaps include a piece of delicious banana bread Cephas has just made, by way of dessert)

I am going to buy myself a bento cookbook. Perhaps the Just Bento one? Do let me know if you’ve got any recommendations.

***

You may enjoy these Notes on K. S. Maniam’s The New Diaspora in the New Village zine, discovered via hipsterbabas. (The original essay is here — I haven’t read it yet.) K. S. Maniam is a Malaysian Indian novelist and playwright, and the essay “explores the problems of internationalising community literatures, using the multicultural situation in Malaysia as a sort of model”.

I do not understand all of what Maniam is saying, and the notes seem scarcely shorter than the original essay itself lor. But what I have managed to grasp is interesting. I am doubtful about this idea of a new diaspora, an elite minority whose task is to make sense of the problems of multiculturalism and globalisation by somehow rising above its ethnic and cultural origins — but perhaps I misunderstand the argument. Anyway, it is comforting to see discussion of these issues one has been grappling with personally, feeling quite at sea.

***

Today I hit 50,000 words on the novel! My aim was to hit that word count by the end of 2012, so I am a couple of days late, but eh. \o/! I really made this post just to say this, but got distracted by lunchboxes and literature.

The first draft is growing alarmingly fragmented; I am run away with some subplots and don’t know what to do with others — and I think I have written one scene at least twice. But these are things that can be fixed on the next go-round, right? We soldier on.

I haven’t been keeping too close an eye on the sales figures for The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo ebook, but fairly recently I ventured into the jungle of Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing earnings reports and was intrigued by what I discovered.

As you probably noticed if you were reading my blog then, I self-published Jade as an ebook at the end of May this year and also published the novella for free as a web serial on this very blog, posting a new section a day for 20 days. Even though all the content was free on my blog, I set a price on the ebook of US$0.99 — I figured the different, more portable ebook form was worth something even if its innards were on display for all to see in blog posts.

What I thought would happen

What I figured would happen was that people would buy the ebook within the first week of publication — mostly my friends, and perhaps some people who didn’t know me personally but had read and liked my short stories. Sales might continue as long as I was posting new sections and tweeting about them, since that might draw more attention, and then sales would tail off and eventually peter out.

What actually happened

Contrary to my expectations, my sales haven’t yet died a natural death, and they haven’t been decreasing steadily as I expected. Sales went down after the first two months of publication — but then they went up again, to my great surprise. Apart from the first couple of months (when I sold about 60 copies), I’ve been selling about 20 copies per month, with the ratio being about 15 on Amazon and <5 on Smashwords per month.

I’ve now sold 140 copies in total — 47 via Smashwords (through which ebooks are available on Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc.), the remaining via Amazon. Now 140 is obviously rather a small number, but given that Booker shortlisted author Tan Twan Eng’s Garden of Evening Mists shifted a grand total of 174 copies before the Booker effect kicked in, I’m rather pleased about it!

The marketing

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Graceling author Kristin Cashore’s Pictures of a Book Being Made, wherein she chronicles the agonising process of writing her much-garlanded novel Bitterblue, made me feel better about the slow stop-and-start of being a writer on a day when I really needed it. I confess I’ve only read Cashore’s Fire*, but I really liked it, and I really like her blog. I admire her willingness to be vulnerable and her great sincerity.

My friend Katy posted an amusing description of a BBC News fluff piece about a dog adopting tiger cubs. I link to her post rather than directly to the video because I think her description makes the video all the funnier. The “I can’t be fucked”ness of the reporter’s voice is brilliant.

I thought this article about Malaysia’s forgotten Jewish community was very interesting. Thousands of Jewish people! Apparently they are mostly Arab and Chinese (the latter is so unexpected that the Malaysian friend I was talking to about the article initially thought I meant Chinese people who marry white Jewish people, like Amy Chua and her husband).

New Malaysian small press Ianslip books is seeking English-language submissions for publication. They’re interested in “fiction/nonfiction/poetry … dude, whatever it may be”.

*I always start series at some inconvenient middle point — my very first introduction to the wonderful sprawling Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian, a 20-book epic which I profoundly love, was the tenth book, The Far Side of the World (great introduction). The first Discworld book I read was The Last Continent (terrible introduction). My first Tori Amos album was From the Choirgirl Hotel — rather challenging; Little Earthquakes would probably have been easier. I basically only got into Tori Amos because I wanted to make full use of the cassette I’d paid good money for, never mind whether I enjoyed the music or not. (I listened to it religiously, frowning in perplexity, until I started enjoying it. I imagine you could train yourself similarly to enjoy opera, or Tibetan throat singing.)

Rather belated, but urban fantasy anthology about fashion Bloody Fabulous, ed. Ekaterina Sedia, was out in October. My story is in it! You can get a copy from Amazon or Book Depository, and there’s an ebook version as well. My story THE FIRST WITCH OF DAMANSARA is about annoying family members and pretty dresses.

Vivian’s late grandmother was a witch–which is just a way of saying she was a woman of unusual insight. Vivian, in contrast, had a mind like a hi-tech blender. She was sharp and purposeful, but she did not understand magic.

This used to be a problem. Magic ran in the family. Even her mother’s second cousin who was adopted did small spells on the side. She sold these from a stall in Kota Bharu. Her main wares were various types of fruit fried in batter, but if you bought five pisang or cempedak goreng, she threw in a jampi for free.

Vivian is an accountant. I’ve realised I use accountants too often in my stories, as a sort of symbol of order and rationality. I must diversify. Why should accountants take on all the fictive burden of championing order? Why not plumbers, transfer pricing specialists, fish feed salespeople, corporate communications executives?

***

I am trying to decide what I would call a collection of short stories by me. Awesome Title of Awesomeness is the current working title, but it probably won’t do. What proposed title do you like best?

1) Here, There and Elsewhere (I think this is a bit boring, but Cephas likes it. It’s because the collection would be organised according to setting, with stories set in Malaysia, overseas, and in other places (e.g. the Moon) grouped accordingly.)

2) Between Worlds

3) The House of Aunts

4) One-Day Travelcard for Fairyland

5) First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia

They are none of them too good, are they? I would like something quite hip, but not offensively so. I am open to suggestions! My stories are mostly about sensible girls or women dealing with a puzzling world. Maybe I should call it The Book of Accountants.

I’m trying to get back on the writing-for-publication bandwagon (not to mention the just-plain-writing bandwagon). Since mid-2010 I’ve tried to write something every day — even if it’s just a sentence; even if it’s just a terrible sentence — because I knew productivity was the main thing for me. I do measure my writing achievements in word count, and I try to focus on that. The other sorts of rewards or recognitions of progress — sales, feedback, award nominations — are too much out of my control, and to be honest they are too random. All you can do is keep plodding on.

The daily writing habit has fallen by the wayside this year, twice — once when I had three months off my job and was travelling and having a generally lovely time, and more recently as I got closer to my wedding(s). I did have my wedding blog writing gig to keep me honest, but I don’t really count non-fiction writing since it’s less difficult for me than fiction.

Vengeance for falling off the bandwagon has been swift. It’s been kind of a hard year for me in terms of writing confidence. One always has wobbles, but I’ve only sold one thing this year (not counting Jade Yeo, since that’s self-published) and only completed two stories. Admittedly one of these stories was a novel, but it was a really bad novel!

I’m now working on an outline for a new novel and am going to go through my submissions log and edit and submit, self-publish or kill the various stories that have been hanging around waiting for something to be done with them. I’ve also been planning to query publishers in Asia — preferably Malaysia or Singapore — about whether they’d be interested in putting out a collection of my short stories, so I ought to go through my contracts and put together a query. (I know short story collections don’t sell all that well and lots of publishers won’t take them from anyone as obscure as me, but I think the scene is a little different locally since we don’t at the moment have as many novelists as short story writers. At any rate, one can but try!)

I’m trying to remind myself of something I’ve talked about before and do basically believe in, which is the importance of failure. I’m not going to write good stories all the time because most people don’t — and even if they do, I’m not one of those people. I’m not going to be able to sell all of my stories because most people don’t — and again, even if they do, see previous statement. People who succeed are people who fail more than other people. (There’s a lot of “people”s in that sentence, aren’t there? Bit cheeky me trying to pass myself off as a writer.)

That’s a thought about writing for publication — and also about external success generally. The other thought I had recently is more about writing in itself. I’ve been thinking about how, in writing stories, you need to focus on the concrete, the particular. Stories shouldn’t be about the abstract because then they become manifestos, cartoons. I do strongly believe in stories having meaning, but not in their having particular messages, because if you wanted to be preached at you would read a self-help book or a sermon. Also shaping a story around one message limits it — any good story should be able to have lots of different meanings in it, so that you can draw out a different moral (or state of confusion, depending on what the story is like!) every time.

I don’t mean to decry cartoons; sometimes that’s what you want. But you should be aware that they are nothing more than that. One of the things I look for in my reading material is truth — and truth can come in many forms and be told in many ways, but the truth adheres most strongly (and most interestingly) to the concrete and the specific, to the details as you live them.

In my head all this links to writing about different cultures — the pitfalls thereof, and why I’m both more forgiving and unforgiving about people writing the Other than others. But perhaps that’s for another post!

Rather dull all this navel-gazing, but I am a believer in writers writing about their struggles — provided they don’t moan too much, which maybe I am! It’s a thin line: you don’t want to whinge and be a bore, but I know I’ve been comforted by reading frank accounts of self-doubt etc. in writers I admire. Anyway, let’s keep trying our best!

Photograph by Panorama Media/PanoramaStock/Getty Images

How to self-publish an ebook

1) Write an unsellably self-indulgent story at an awkward length. (The jabs at colonialism were as much self-indulgence as the swoony romance.)

2) Fail to sell story to romance e-publishers.

3) Self-publish as web serial and ebook.

4) ????

5) PROFIT!!! –> Note: I haven’t actually profited.

Why I did it

I wanted a “proper website” mostly because my bibliography was getting too crowded and messy on my blog sticky post. Also, I’d self-published a couple of short stories which I wanted to make available as ebooks, and I thought having an FTP I could keep ‘em on would probably look slightly better than using a free file-sharing site. I figured there was no real reason for people to visit the new website unless I offered something new to look at, and Bloomsbury Girl (previous title of The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo) was just sitting around on my hard drive doing nothing, so why not publish that as a web serial?

I also decided to publish the novella as an ebook, on the basis that in the current publishing environment “knowing how to self-publish an ebook” is probably quite a good skill for a writer to have, like taking constructive criticism and refusing to comment on reviews.

I decided to charge for the ebook instead of giving it away for free just to see if anyone would pay for it. I thought people might, because there’s actual value in having an ebook even if the story is free to read online — I mean, I’d pay US$0.99 to be able to carry a story around in my Kindle.

I set the price at US$0.99 because my aim was to get new readers. I’ve seen arguments that books are undervalued at US$0.99, but if you think about it from the perspective of a reader in a world bursting at the seams with books, an unknown book by an unknown author is worth less than US$0.99. Heck, even if it was free I’m not sure it’d be worth the effort of hitting a button so it’ll download direct to my Kindle. That would mean I’d have get up and turn the wireless setting on my Kindle back on! I haven’t even started reading the book I bought yesterday by a massively well-known author whose stories I know for certain will give me pleasure!

So I set it at US$0.99 based on what I’d do if I’d never heard of me.

How I did it

I prioritised a) decent formatting and b) a cover I found aesthetically pleasing. I succeeded on the second point and think I succeeded on the first, but do let me know if you notice anything wonky with the formatting or typos or anything like that.

The formatting

Producing an ebook was no more difficult than uploading a story to ff.net. [...]

Here is an afterword for The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo! Thank you for buying the ebook, reading, reviewing, linking, retweeting and sending feedback if you’ve done any of that, and thanks for your patience with the daily spam if you haven’t. *g*

If you’ve read the story and have a couple of minutes to spare, I’d super appreciate it if you’d add a review to its page on Smashwords, Amazon or GoodReads. I’d appreciate it whether the review was good or bad — candid reviews are the best, right? I generally find reviews pretty useful when trying out an unknown author and you never know, somebody might be looking for cheap Kindle books or something like that and decide to take a punt on Jade.

Anyway, I wanted to do an afterword after the whole thing was posted, so here it is! It will contain spoilers and so it is going under the tag. Oh, and I’m gonna do a separate post about my experience self-publishing an ebook, so look for that tomorrow.

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