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....