Ted Mahsun

2007 was not a bad year for me. Good stuff that happened in 2007 I Got Married .^_^ Married life has so far gone well and there are no little Teddies on the way, thanks for asking. I read 48 books. Quite a feat, although my initial target was 54. Oh well. The longest time it took me to read one book was one month, for Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan . Good book, but totally unsuited for reading on a crowded train during the rush hour. For the first time in the three years I've done NaNoWriMo, I actually won . The novel's still not done so I am still slogging my way through until I get to the end. I had wanted to finish it before the end of December, but that does not appear to be feasible at the moment. *grin* I had three reviews published in The Star this year. Doesn't sound like a lot, but consider this: the previous year I only had two book reviews published and both times I had to pay for the books myself. This year, the three books I reviewed were donated by Big Name Bo

This book review was published in The Star's Reads Monthly on 30 December 2007 . The print version comes with a 25% discount voucher for the book which can be used at any MPH bookstore and is valid until 13 January 2008. Don't Burn This Book! MISTER B. GONE Author: Clive Barker Publisher: HarperVoyager Hardcover: 250 pages ISBN: 978-0007262618 I HAD not read a Clive Barker book before I picked up Mister B. Gone . I was, however, familiar with the name, of course, as I am aware of his 1987 film, Hellraiser , and have also been acquainted with the computer game, Undying , which he helped create in 2001. I thought the movie was okay, and the game a fun experience to be had when you’re alone in the dark. This is all a roundabout way of saying that I know Mr Barker strictly as a horror writer kind of guy, and even then, not through his books. So when I read his latest book, Mister B. Gone , I was a little surprised that it veered more into the realm of fantasy even though it is

This blog has been mentioned on The Literary Saloon . I can now die happily.

I've just wrapped up on writing a book review that, if all goes well, will be published in the December issue of StarMag's Reads Monthly, coming out on December 30. (Don't miss it!) It took me almost three hours to write all 800 words of it. This makes me very concerned. That can't be good. I know I can do better. I can write faster, put down my thoughts more articulately in much less time. But whenever I sit in front of my word processor, my brain just cramps up, and all the nifty little sentences I had crafted while I was reading the book to be reviewed, all faded away or if still lingering around, didn't seem all that cool any more. I would have thought that writing book reviews would get easier the more I did them, but right now it all seems like a well-crafted video game: each level gets progressively harder. Which is all good; I don't mind a challenge. What strikes me as odd is why ? Why does it have to be harder every time? It's not exactly rocket sci

So you watched I Am Legend with Will Smith. (Actually I watched it with my wife but let's not bicker semantics now.) Perhaps, like me, you thought it was good for the first two-thirds of the movie. Then it all goes downhill. The ending? A pure WTF moment. Am I right or am I right? It goes without saying that the book was better. But if you're the sort of person who wants to know how the story should have ended without actually reading the book, there's always the option of watching the original movie made in 1964 starring Vincent Price. And thanks to the wonders of the Internets, you can actually download it at the Internet Archive . Or if you're too lazy to do that, here it is, embedded just for you! Now you can watch the ending as God The Flying Spagetti Monster Richard Dawkins Richard Matheson intended! The film though given the title of "The Last Man on Earth" and having had the protagonist's name changed from Robert Neville to Robert Morgan, keep

I'm gonna simply copy and paste everything from this announcement on Paul Kidby's website : Folks, I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news. I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early onset Alzheimer's, which lay behind this year's phantom "stroke". We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism. For now work is continuing on the completion of Nation and the basic notes are already being laid down for Unseen Academicals. All other things being equal, I expect to meet most current and, as far as possible, future commitments but will discuss things with the various organisers. Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there's time for at least a few more books yet :o) Terry Pratchett PS I would just like to draw attention t

1. w00t (interjection) expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay" w00t! I won the contest! Submitted by: Kat from Massachusetts on Nov. 30, 2005 23:18 My only complaint is that why only this year? I've been using w00t since the century began. Link .

I caught The Golden Compass on Sunday morning. It was a midnight show, and by the time the lights had dimmed and the beer ads were rolling 1 , I was already nursing a slight headache. Now I'm not sure if the reason for me not liking the movie was because of the headache or because it just wasn't any good. I read the book nearly five years ago, and I remember liking it very much. But it was five years ago, so my memory of reading it is far from fresh. I looked forward to reacquainting myself with Philip Pullman's characters in the movie and I was glad they were the same as I had left them so many years ago... except that I don't really find their company all that enjoyable any more. Was it just me, or was the movie just incomprehensible? I mean, I read the book, but even then half the time I was struggling to understand what was going on and what the motivations of each character was. Example: Mr. Lee Scoresby, the cowboy captain of an airship 2 . It felt too easy for

Yikes. Looks like the Author might soon be an oddity of the past. (Hah! As if). Software gurus in Russia have whipped up a piece of computer software that can write a fully readable novel . The good thing is that readers will be receiving version 2.0 of the novel: The first version of the novel did not seem interesting to the publishing house, so the initial data was revised and the program generated the second version in three days. After that the manuscript like any other novel to be published went through the editorial corrections. Astrel SPb chief editor highly appreciates the final version of the novel, ‘all the rest will be charged by the readers’, - he says. He continues 10 thousand copies of the novel will be issued. If the experiment proves a success, then other ‘computer novels’ will be published. What's eye-brow raising to me is that the novel is written in the style of Haruki Murakami. Hey! What's that supposed to mean? That Murakami writes like a robot? Anyway, sur

"Still, getting a penis to erect itself is not the sole purpose of life. That much I understood when I read Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma years ago." -- Haruki Murakami, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Make it look like a shelf full of... oh, books , perhaps? Via Deputydog .

A few months ago, I had read that Haruki Murakami had a new book out in Japan . The book is about his experience running in marathons. He's quite the accomplished runner, having run in the Boston, New York and Tokyo marathons, amongst others. I didn't think it would get translated into English since a lot of Murakami's non-fiction which have been published in Japan gets ignored by his translators. And rightly too. If you've read the unofficial fan translations of his essays, they're mostly insubstantial or ephemeral. Sometimes even laughable, in a bad sort of way, and I don't think it's the fault of the translations. Murakami likes to surprise me even outside his fiction, I guess. Soon the new book will be his first non-fiction book to be published in English since Underground , which tells the accounts of the survivors of Aum Shinrikyo gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. The new book is called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and is translat

Vernor Vinge's sf novel, Rainbows End won a Hugo for Best Novel in Japan this year. I had heard about it even before but haven't really had the time (or even the money) to check it out. I guess I have no excuse now? Vernor's gone out and released the whole novel for free on the Internet . Here's the writeup of the book from Pubs Weekly: Set in San Diego, Calif., this hard SF novel from Hugo-winner Vinge (A Deepness in the Sky) offers dazzling computer technology but lacks dramatic tension. Circa 2025, people use high-tech contact lenses to interface with computers in their clothes. "Silent messaging" is so automatic that it feels like telepathy. Robert Gu, a talented Chinese-American poet, has missed much of this revolution due to Alzheimer's, but now the wonders of modern medicine have rehabilitated his mind. Installed in remedial classes at the local high school, he tries to adjust to this brave new world, but soon finds himself enmeshed in a somewhat

Pfft. 50,000 words? Piece of cake. Hah! Actually though? It was torture. On hindsight, I don't know why I went through it and I wonder how I managed to. But I made it! I made it! Now to actually finish my novel. At 50k words, my story's only half told... I envy those who can call themselves novelists at 50k. Right. So now December is officially Novel Finishing Month. 31 days for another 50k words! I can't wait! My heartfelt thanks go to my wife, L, who was patient enough to tolerate my absences (and sometimes, even dogged me to reach my daily word count) as well as Chet and Shark who cheered for me to go on! Woot! Cartoon by Inkygirl nicked without permission.

Almost as much as cities, I also love trains in fiction. Andrew Martin, author of The Necropolis Railway , writes in the Guardian of the railway settings that have appeared throughout English literature . What tickled my fancy was this paragraph about Charles Dickens: Dickens, like many early Victorians, was horrified by trains: there was "even railway time observed in clocks", he wrote, "as if the sun itself had given in". In Dombey and Son, conceived in the second great railway boom of the 1840s, he has the speculator Carker run down by a "red-eyed", monstrous express, which "licked up his stream of life with its fiery heat". In 1865 Dickens was himself involved in a train crash at Staplehurst, in which 10 people were killed. He continued to travel on trains, although he would grip the arms of the seat, and always felt the carriage was "down" on one side. More railway in literature here .

I love the concept of city as character. China Mieville's New Crobuzon, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, Terry Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork, heck, even Xeus's original Dark City . I love 'em all. So I was delighted to find that Catherynne Valente, author of In the Cities of Coin and Spice , had written an article on Jeff Vandermeer's (creator of Ambergris, another cool fictional urban setting) blog about city-settings in fiction: The city is the political unit of fantasy literature, probably because of the ostensibly medieval setting. Cities offered protection, shelter, commerce–and ideas about the countries which contained these cities were vague at best for the entry level peasant. When fantasy writers talk about worldbuilding, what they often mean is citybuilding–creating consecutive cities that might be plausibly part of the same region one after the other. But there isn’t a lot of Federalism among dwarves, if you catch my meaning. The city-state is the dominant mode

Good question. One that author S.L. Farrell tries to answer : The skills you learn in short fiction don’t necessarily translate into equal skills for writing long fiction. The pacing is different: a short story needs to start as close to the end as possible while a novel may start much further back from the climax. The way you build a novel is often not something that you can duplicate in short fiction, as novels use a more intricate structure (and on the flip side, short stories can often use wildly experimental methods that work within the confinement of a short story, but which would get deadly tiresome to the reader in a novel). Scope is different, since short stories tend to use a microscope while a novel uses a wide-angle lens: you can tell the tale of a battle in short fiction, but you can’t give us the whole five-year long war. Setting is different: you generally have one or two setting in short fiction; in a novel you might have dozens — which means that the worldbuilding has

My pal, John Ling , is interviewed by Xeus on her blog about his short story, Zero Sum, that appears in the new short story collection, Dark City 2 : What are your writing habits? Why do you write? I tend to write in terms of 'scenes', not necessarily 'chapters'. Once a 'scene' is completed, I'm done for the day, and I will spend the remainder of my time polishing up what I have written. I don't usually find it productive to simply bang out thousands of words at one go, because two-thirds are likely to be eliminated anyway. Admittedly, I am fussy. I tend to under-write, rather than over-write. My reasoning is: it's better to leave readers wanting more, instead of wanting less. Writing for me has always been less of a choice, and more of an compulsion. John Ling ends with a quote that sounds like it came out of Galaxy Quest (Shows how much of a nerd I am, huh!): Keep pushing on, keep persevering, don't give up. I haven't gotten round to read

40,000 words! I never knew I had it in me. I've never seen so many words that I wrote myself in one place at the same time. How did these words connect together to form a single coherent story * ? It's magic, I tell you! Right, only 10,000 words to go. Listen to me... only 10,000 words to go. Hah! Madness. A month ago, 10,000 words was like a gajillion bajillion words. Writing so much was nigh impossible. * a matter of one's opinion Also! Check out Chet's blog where she reflects on what lessons NaNoWriMo taught her this year .

Not sure what to make of this : With its creamy paper and embossed fabric covers, the hardback has always been the elite format for literary fiction. Now Picador, an imprint of Pan MacMillan, the 8th largest publisher in the UK, which has authors such as Helen Fielding, Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy on its books, has called time on what it describes as "a moribund market". From next year it will launch almost every new novel as a £7.99 paperback, with other large publishers expected to follow. I've always preferred buying paperbacks because they're cheaper. But then again, I have to admit the experience of reading a hardcover book is incomparable to reading a cheap paperback. The smooth, thick paper, the feeling of substantial weight in your hands... holding and smelling the book, carrying it around with the dust cover off... reading a hardcover isn't just about enjoying the actual contents printed within. After all, you're paying a premium for this edition.

So I hit 25k today! What a great feeling it is to reach halfway through the novel! It's true what they say: you begin to start hating the novel, you start to think that the novel is crap. I've been tempted many times to just give up the whole damned thing. Many a time I stared at the empty page, mocking me with my inability to go on. Many a time there was when I pulled my hair in despair when I wrote my characters into a corner. (Don't be surprised when next you see me, I have less hair!) I mean, seriously. My protagonist lands up in a hospital after he knocks into an elephant god by mistake when he gets lost in the city. He then proceeds to get the living daylights beaten out of him, but because he's the hero, he survives. But then no matter how many times I give him a chance to escape from the hospital (so that he can continue the damn plot), he just refuses and stays in the hospital! The nerve! I've finally got him out, but not without some coaxing and navel-ga

I live on a house that's on a hill that overlooks most of Puchong, and on a clear day you can see all the way to Shah Alam and bits of Sunway. It's midnight. It's clear. Puchong literally exploded. Fireworks blew up all over the place and luckily I have a good view of everything. The crazy thing is I can see even the furthest explosions, ones that I think are all the way in Klang! The way things are going right now, you'd think the Indians discovered fireworks. It's never this festive during CNY over here. Happy deepavali, peeps! Also! 15k words! Wootles!

Whoop! Past the 10,000 mark! I got distracted during the weekend (no thanks to pesky, meddling relatives, grr!) so I'm relieved I managed to catch up.

7578 words so far. Added 2501 words today. I couldn't keep up the pace I had yesterday because I think I zonked out my brain last night. I think it got quite a shock to write so much in so little time! I've had to take it more slowly today; my thought processes don't seem to be matching up or something. Or maybe I just need more exercise. Anyway! The story continues and so far it's good. A bit slower paced than yesterday, because the protagonist started reflecting on himself before he got on the train, and then the plot just started to drag slower than molasses stuck on turtles. But at least he got on the damn train to his destiny. Finally. And now to take this story to The City.

The stage is set, the green flag drops! I've just finished writing my quota of words for today. My mind seems so numb, and my eyes can't seem to focus on anything right now. I managed to finish one chapter of the novel and my word count so far is 5077 words. Yay me! *clap clap* I'm feeling good about myself right now but this year I don't want to brag about it too much like I did last year . The enthusiasm only lasts for a few days, then it's downhill all the way, until something good happens, which is not often, if ever. The outline idea seems to have worked for me... so far. Also, unlike last year when I used Google Docs to write my novel, this year my noveling software of choice is the awesome Scrivener . (However, I am using only the free, unsupported and outdated Scrivener Gold .) This particular software is like a project manager for novel writing. It keeps and sorts all your research and data you've collected while researching your novel in one place and

Okay... I'm almost ready! Still writing the outline for my novel and am hoping to finish it by today. I'm also hoping that by writing an outline first instead of simply winging it like I did in previous years might actually help. Perhaps. I have a good feeling about this year's effort... but that could be the stale vegetables from the mamak's I had for lunch.

Where do writers write? And what do these mysterious places look like? The Guardian will show you , but those are for the famous ones. For lesser known writers, Martin Livings has a good selection of pictures . I think they're mostly Australian-based. UPDATED: Fixed link. My bad.

I've always been fascinated by Sabah. I like the fact that as a state, it's history is separate from that of Peninsular Malaysia. Most Malaysians, when they speak of Malaysian history, they're really just referring to the history of Peninsular Malaysia, and even then it's mostly a revisionist version of history, which I think dates from 1970. Malaysian history, in general, really just gives a cursory glance towards Sabah, merely skimming over the details. It's the same with Sarawak as well. But I dunno. Maybe I'm just seeing this from a West Malaysian point of view. I really have no idea what Sabahans make of Malaysian history. Maybe they just take in stride that Malaysian history is skewed to the Peninsular since that's where the Federal Government is. I was pondering this because today me and L went to the Sabah State Museum. I learned a lot today, from the Kaamatan Festival to the Dragon of Kinabalu (I didn't know these Sabahans kept a dragon! Very se

I'll be leaving for Sabah for my honeymoon tonight. A friend asked me whether it's a bit late to consider this a honeymoon but I say any vacation with my wife is a honeymoon in my books! Anyways, see you when I get back! I'll write! I'm off now to buy an English-Sabahan Dictionary so I can communicate with the locals.

Well, it's that crazy time of year again, my friends! Early mornings and late nights, typing and/or scribbling away like nobody's business. Checking incessantly the word processor's word count; despairing that the daily word target hasn't been reached; despairing that ideas have all but dried out. Yes, the month of November is nigh, and that means it's National Novel Writing Month once again! We all know the drill but here's the lowdown: A participant of NaNoWriMo should write a novel in a month, or at the very least, 50,000 words of prose. Within 30 days. I failed to complete last year's NaNoWriMo challenge (managed only about 15,000 words)... or even the previous year. I wonder if I'll be able to make it this year? No idea, but I'm giving it a shot anyway! Last year, I tried writing a fantasy (with sf elements) novel , but this year I'll be attempting a young adult book instead. My idea concerns a bookish, nerdish and completely anti-social bo

Kate Elliot over at DeepGenre has this to say for budding SFF novelists: First, if you’re not willing to work hard at writing, don’t bother. I am sure we can find the exception that proves the rule, but every writer I know who has been successful - however we are defining that term today, and I tend to be ecumenical in my inclusiveness, so let’s just assume that I mean in a pretty broad sense not limited to the pots-of-money sense and frankly just about every working writer I know will laugh sadly or even perhaps a tad hysterically when you ask her or him about the average annual earnings of working freelance writers - has worked immensely hard, turned or churned out a lot of pages in the journey through apprenticeship toward some level of mastery, and kept writing despite setbacks, rejection, cold feet, and those soul-sucking periods of doubt. By that I don’t mean quit writing for enjoyment. Anyone who wants to write because it pleases them or soothes them or excites them, should ab

Definitely one of the most memorable reactions ever.

Creator of Calvin and Hobbes , Bill Watterson, reviews the new Charles Schulz biography in the Wall Street Journal : It's a strange and interesting story, and Mr. Michaelis, the author of a 1998 biography of artist N.C. Wyeth, paces the narrative well, offering many insights and surprising events from Schulz's life. Undoubtedly the most fascinating part of the book is the juxtaposition of biographical information and reproduced "Peanuts" strips. Here we see how literally Schulz sometimes depicted actual situations and events. The strips used as illustrations in "Schulz and Peanuts" are reproduced at eye-straining reduction and are often removed from the context of their stories, but they vividly demonstrate how Schulz used his cartoons to work through private concerns. We discover, for example, that in the recurring scenes of Lucy annoying Schroeder at the piano, the crabby and bossy Lucy stands in for Joyce [Schulz's first wife], and the obsessive and t

Lat's Town Boy , my favourite Lat book ever, has now been launched in the US , following what I can only assume is the successful launch of its prequel, Kampung Boy . While Kampung Boy is fun and all, I am more attached to Town Boy because it takes place in Sungai Rokam (where I went to primary school) and Ipoh (where Lat went to secondary school). Sungai Rokam was (and still is, actually) a Malay housing estate developed in the '60s on the outskirts of Ipoh. I hope those Americans enjoy it; they seemed to have liked Kampung Boy quite a bit. That's all very well. Lat's books are probably some of the very, very few things from this nation we can truly be proud of.

Hoho. It's not always I get to reference Charles Dickens and the Transformers movie (the original movie, not the recent live-action monstrosity) in one sentence. So you may have heard that there's some sort of festive celebration that's going to happen this Saturday. Personally I can't wait for it. I'm not looking forward to the day itself, though I guess the rendang daging my mother might make (my brother doesn't eat beef) should make for some good eating. No, what I'm really looking forward to is the ability to drink coffee again. Whenever I feel like it. Oh, sweet, heavenly coffee. Manna from the gods! I miss you so!

If only I had one of these when I was a bachelor. Would've helped a lot. Via Urban Planning Blog .

Alike for those who To-day prepare, And for those that after a To-morrow stare, A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries, "Fools! Your Reward is neither Here nor There!" --Omar Khayyam; translated by Edward Fitzgerald I keep wanting to write a fantasy story inspired by this. Perhaps one day.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of mankind's ascent into the Space Age. We owe a lot to you, Sputnik .

The Bloke in Bangsar has announced that Silverfish New Writing is no more after the seventh book rolls out. Say what you will about Raman, but the New Writing series has been a large contribution to the local literary scene and its discontinuation will be a major loss. On the other hand, it's a perfect chance for another publisher to pick up the reins and fill in the vacuum left by Silverfish. A chance to start anew, with less politics and perhaps more focused on local writers, like what Amir Muhammad says on his blog : I feel the series should have stayed as a focus on Malaysian and Singaporean writers. It could have then become a reference point for writers and readers interested in this area. From the third issue on, it started to lack a distinctive character when too many foreigners started pouring in. But then again... who reads all this literary nonsense anyway? Surely not Malaysians!

Anyone who's grown up with Roald Dahl would know Quentin Blake's wonderful illustrations. The Guardian interviews him : Is there anything he can't draw? "I stay away from motor cars. And I can't do architectural drawings, really. What I want to convey is movement and gesture and atmosphere. I like drawing anything that is doing something. Dragons are good because you can arrange them in interesting ways across the page, get people to ride on them. I can't seem to keep birds out of my books." You can see them not only in his edition of Aristophanes' The Birds and his book with John Yeoman called Featherbrains, but in a grinning self-portrait featuring him dangling from a ceiling fan, pencils stuffed in his pockets, papers and birds flapping round. His grin is the still centre to the chaos.

This book review was published in The Star on 30 September 2007 . Th e print version comes with a 25% discount voucher for the book which can be us ed at Kinokuniya KLCC. Authors: Eileen Chang, Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus Publisher: Pantheon Books Hardcover: 311 pages ISBN: 978-0375425240 WHEN I read a while back that Taiwanese director Ang Lee was making a movie that had some of its scenes shot in Penang and Ipoh (and being an Ipoh guy myself), I made a mental note to find out exactly what movie he was making – then, like the forgetful dolt I am, I proceeded to forget all about it. Much later, I chanced upon the movie trailer online, and realised this must be the movie that Lee had shot on our shores. The trailer looked interesting, promising an intriguing cinema experience and it played to my fancy with its period setting and sensuous scenes. The movie, Lust, Caution, stars Tony Leung, Joan Chen and Wang Leehom and features the debut of mainland China actress Tang Wei. Based

Yes! I've got my mits on these two awesome newly-released books: Looks like I'll be overdosing myself on fantasy these coming weeks. Plus! You might want to check out tomorrow's StarMag ;)

I'm not sure if this book even needs an introduction. With all the fanfare the book's been getting, I think anyone with a decent Internet connection and/or reads Off the Edge should know what this book's all about. Heck, even the title's a dead giveaway. But here I go anyway. Malaysian Politicians Say the Darndest Things presents to its readers various quotes by Malaysian politicians that were said between the late 70s to earlier this year. Compiled by the incomparable Amir Muhammad, director of the infamous Last Communist that got banned last year, the quotes obviously aren't just any old random quote but are what Amir calls "Outrageous Quotes". Amir describes the Outrageous Quote as " something undiplomatic about gender or race, or it might smack of a certain ignorance of due process and rule of law. It would get civil libertarians in a twist, or a funk, or some other dance music-like word. Outrage would be expressed; a befitting response, you wo

From the Guardian : "Otters are not trainable," [Gaiman] explains. "Dogs are trainable - if you want them to sit you train them and give them rewards and they sit each time. But otters... if they do something cool and you give them a fish, the next time they'll do something even cooler. Or they'll try to do something completely different. I think that most writers - or at least a lot of us - are otters."

Now that we're sending Muslims up into space, the West seems to be amused with the fact that our very own Muslim scientists have drafted up guides on worshipping procedures in space. Wired's got an article worth reading about the problems in facing the kiblat and how to find Mecca from space: Dr. Kamal Abdali, a cartographer who is also Muslim and who has written (.pdf) extensively on determining the qibla, favors the great circle route, but adds, "Prayer is not supposed to be a gymnastic exercise. One is supposed to concentrate on the prayer rather the exact orientation." He points out that in a train or plane, it's customary to start in the qibla direction but then continue the prayer without worrying about possible changes in position. But how does that work in space? Mathematically, Shukor would need to place both ISS and Mecca on the same imaginary sphere -- by either comparing the place on Earth directly beneath ISS with the real Ka'aba, or by project

It's old news now, but I guess I was a little shocked that Robert Jordan passed away. I'm not even a fan but I do have friends who are, and I empathise. It sure would suck being a fan, knowing he was already writing the final book of an already too drawn out fantasy epic, but didn't manage to finish. The best write-up I've seen online on all this has to be on The Wertzone .

Mark Coggins takes a look at Raymond Chandler's writing process for The Long Goodbye : Chandler’s method of rewriting was radical. Rather than keeping most of what was in his current draft and making accretive changes to it, he started nearly from scratch, saving only the few words or phrases that resonated from the previous draft. Returning to the movie making metaphor, Chandler’s rewrites were truly more akin to alternative takes where the director encouraged the actors to take a different line through the scene.

Gah! I actually missed Roald Dahl Day yesterday! I think it's high time I got around to using Google Calendar... or any calendar for that matter. Anyway! To mark Roald Dahl Day this year, I thought I'd show you a book of his which has special meaning to me-- Rhyme Stew . Long-time readers of my blog would know why this particular Roald Dahl book is special (though of course all Dahl books are equally special to me, Rhyme Stew being a little more equal than the others); I have a first edition of the book which was personally signed by the man himself, as detailed in last year's Roald Dahl Day post . Here is the state of the cover as it is now: And if you take a peek inside, you'll see Roald Dahl's scrawl in black marker pen: He almost misspelled my name!

This picture was taken by the Voyager I spacecraft on 5 March 1979. It reminds me very much of Van Gogh's Starry Night . I'm still in a bit of a daze but if I wasn't in the cloud I am in right now, I'd probably right a quirky little story inspired by it. Via Wired .

I'm sure there are some of you dying to know what happened at the wedding, and want to see some pics of the event, but I'll have to leave you hanging for a little while longer. I might be able to post up some pics on Flickr tomorrow. Perhaps. In the meantime, enjoy this writerly video from The Family Guy :

Well, I'm off to Kluang to get hitched. Will blog again a week after the wedding, with hopefully good pics and possibly rants about meddlesome relatives. Kinokuniya also gave me a new book to review yesterday, so I suppose you can expect a new review soon* as well! Have a happy 50th merdeka, my friends! *As soon as The Star possibly can, that is. Feh.

Looks like PTS wants translators to translate the works of Jules Verne into Malay. Interested? Go sign up . I personally would love to see this project come to fruition, as long as the works are translated with complete and utter care. (There's also a Sherlock Holmes translation project ongoing of which I am keen on as well.) But I have to wonder. Will these translators translate Jules Verne's works from English? I doubt PTS will be able to find enough good translators to translate from the original French. If this is so, how true will the translations be to the originals? It's bad enough that some of the original English translations--which I assume PTS will work from since they are out of copyright and therefore free--are considered not up to snuff . Even Jules Verne lamented about the translations of his time, saying, "I’m not surprised that the translations you’ve been speaking to me about are bad ... But we can do nothing about it, absolutely nothing." Bu

The New York Times profiles Nobel Prize Winner Jose Saramago . I particularly liked the factoid about how he got his surname: “When I showed up, aged 7, for my first day of school in Lisbon, I had to present my identity papers,” [Saramago] told me. It was only then his parents discovered that the last name printed on his birth certificate was not their family name, de Sousa. The village clerk had instead registered the baby as “Saramago,” or “wild radish.” “It was an insulting nickname villagers gave my father,” Saramago explained. “The clerk wrote it perhaps because he was drunk, perhaps as a prank. My father wasn’t very happy, but if that was his son’s official name, well, then, he had to take it, too. I think never before in history has a son named his father.”

On this day next week, I'll be a married man! Gee willikers! I am so nervous...

From Amir Muhammad's blog : Malaysian Politicians Say the Darndest Things will be launched on Sunday, 16 September 3-5pm Gallery One, The Annexe, Central Market Kuala Lumpur. The book will be on sale for RM20. Murah je bang . All are welcome. More details when you click on the link .

It rained heavily yesterday afternoon. I was jogging naked as usual, when the skies split open and vomited a voluminous amount of water upon me. The water droplets fell heavy and hard and my face and shoulders and private parts hurt. I stopped for a moment to decide whether to seek for shelter or to continue jogging. I didn't want to stop jogging just because it was raining. I was on a roll and I was about to achieve my daily target. But if I continued I would have risked bumping into a tree or falling down a drain because the downpour was so heavy, visibility of my surroundings was minimal at best. As I stood in the rain, braving the pounding of the constant dropping of water upon me, a small cloud fell out from the skies and descended towards me. I would like to describe this particular cloud as being made out of billions of droplets of condensed water vapour but it was not at all like that. It was not a normal cloud at all, though who am I to say what a normal cloud looks like o