Ted Mahsun

Pretty good news for Malaysian writers writing in English! From Eric : (27 October 2008 - 31 March 2009) In Support of Malaysian Writing in English MPH Group of Companies has collaborated with Alliance Bank Malaysia Bhd as our main sponsor and the Malay Mail as our official media partner to create a national short story prize in support of the arts and to encourage Malaysian writers to showcase their literary talents. The Prize is also supported by the Reader’s Digest , Seventeen Malaysia , Discovery Channel Magazine , The British Council , the National Library of Malaysia and the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage . We aim to promote the following objectives through the administering of the Prize: To encourage reading and writing in the English language; To recognise new writers and give them increased confidence to pursue writing as a career; To make more widely known the work of rising literary talents; To encourage more people to write about their lives in Malay...

Lydia Teh, author of Honk! If You're Malaysian and Life's Like That is having a book cover design contest for her new book, Do You Wear Suspenders? – The Wordy Tales Eh Poh Nim , a collection of her vocabularistic column in The Star. Check it out ! You could win a RM100 worth of book vouchers which I assume can be used at MPH Bookstores.

Jess Nevins has posted up his defense of Bulwer-Lytton's prose over at No Fear of the Future , saying that the Victorian writer wasn't all that bad : But Bulwer-Lytton deserves better. Never mind that he wrote in the style of his era, and that to single him out for writing like his contemporaries is unjust. Never mind that other writers who are his stylistic inferiors are not targeted so; no sober critic would read Walter Scott or Fenimore Cooper, and then read Bulwer-Lytton, and declare that Bulwer-Lytton is more deserving of derision. Never mind that, as Jaime Weinman says, "It was a dark and stormy night" isn’t really that bad. (I can find several opening lines in Dickens that are worse). Bulwer-Lytton is of course the inspiration for the infamous contest of bad (made-up) first lines for novels with his " It was a dark and stormy night " leading the way for other terrible prose-stylists. It looks like they've also announced this year's winners f...

Ah. The most rejection slips I've ever got for a single story has been two. That's three less than the required number of rejection slips to enter the first ever Rejected Fiction Writing Contest , hosted by The Rejection Quarterly: Guidelines: Fiction to 8,000 words. $10 entry fee per manuscript. Up to two entries per person. Five rejection slips (or copies thereof) must accompany each entry. 1st Prize: $200 2nd Prize: $100 3rd Prize: $50 Each winning story will also be published in The Rejected Quarterly. An honorable mention award may be added at the discretion of the editors. Entries will be accepted and read from December 1st, 2006 until June 30th of 2007. Anyone interested?