Ted Mahsun

The Starship Aprilis was a common and unremarkable transport ship built on Earth, back when humans were still bipedal and mostly organic creatures. The ship travelled between the many human colonies that were established at the time throughout the galaxy and served as both a cargo carrier and passenger transporter. The ship finally met its end when it was stuck in a crushing gravity field off of Taurus Baqara C, which killed all who were aboard and destroyed all the on-board data and most importantly, the ship’s log. Of the ship only a small section survived, which was discovered quite recently several million light years away, in a slow decaying orbit around a black hole. The remains of the ship offers no clue as to what really happened to consign the ship to its fate. The only document that could be salvaged from the remains is a travelogue, believed to be written by an unknown crewmember. The travelogue offers a glimpse of what life was like for a traveller of the stars in those...

I was reading The Malaysian Reader , a really good local book blog which celebrates its second birthday today. That made me wonder when my blog's birthday was. Turns out its today as well . Oops. Totally forgot! I made a promise to myself in that first blog post (get a story published in an American magazine) and I've still to deliver on that. Probably because over the years I forgot what I started this blog for... it started out as a blog to document my writing and over time it slowly became a blog about books and writing in general. Well, I'm still young (or so many people tell me) so I've still got time. But I'd better work harder because the competition is so much more tougher and crazier than it was in 2006. I really want to make 2012 a year where I write more than I've written before, and so far I've been more productive in my fiction than I've ever been in the past six years. Hopefully I will be able to show the fruits of my efforts before...

From Galleycat comes word that the Royal Mail issued Roald Dahl stamps featuring Quentin Blake's artwork . They're beautiful. The stamps were issued on 10th January though and I guess that means I missed out on buying the First Day Cover. *sadface* And in case you didn't know, I've blogged quite a bit about Roald Dahl in the past, do check out my older posts . P/S Also can somebody tell me why my rant post about commemorative covers suddenly became the second most popular post? Did someone on a philatelic forum say I was being dumb on the internet or something?

Wow. This is big news. J.K. Rowling has announced she will be publishing a book for adults with Little, Brown later this year: "Although I’ve enjoyed writing it every bit as much, my next book will be very different to the Harry Potter series, which has been published so brilliantly by Bloomsbury and my other publishers around the world. The freedom to explore new territory is a gift that Harry's success has brought me, and with that new territory it seemed a logical progression to have a new publisher.  I am delighted to have a second publishing home in Little, Brown, and a publishing team that will be a great partner in this new phase of my writing life."

Apologies for the constantly changing look and feel of this blog. I'm currently experimenting with the look and feel and messing about with Blogger's template editor. I've yet to settle on something I truly feel reflects what this blog should look like so more changes in the coming days are likely. For the longest time this blog looked very generic and I've always been wanting to change that and I now feel it is time to do something about it.

One other thing I did not mention in my Kindle Touch review was that I liked how it simplified things and made me concentrate purely on reading, compared to the iPad where I'd read for a bit, then wonder what's going in the Twitterverse or would suddenly feel the compulsion to check the history of instant noodles in Europe on Wikipedia. That doesn't happen when I'm reading on the Kindle. The device disappears and I'm lost in the book, which is how it should be. Librarian Bohyun Kim seems to agree : The greatest problem I had with an iPad ‘as an e-reader’ was that aside from its weight and the eye-straining screen, I could not really concentrate on reading for a long time. I don’t know if this is a non-issue for others with stronger willpower. But for me, this was certainly a big problem. While reading, I would get easily distracted into web surfing, checking e-mails, and reading tweets and Facebook updates.  On the other hand, on this single-purpose de...

Ah, the e-ink reader. For years I've been wanting to try one out but never knew anyone who owned one. Then when I actually bought one for myself, all sorts of people (including my best friend who never thought it pertinent to tell me he bought one) came out of the woodwork and told me how they were enjoying their own e-ink readers. In any case, for the longest time I was skeptical over the idea of reading e-books because reading them on a computer was uncomfortable both for my back and for my eyes and reading them on an e-reader was out of the question for me because they were being sold for outrageous prices. I had read about e-readers that used e-ink which used digital screens that were supposed to have the clarity and the sharpness of print on paper and how they were supposed to be comfortable to read on while having the benefits of being digital. But alas, e-ink e-readers were expensive and I didn't know anyone who owned one. So for the longest time I stayed away fro...

I am currently (actively) reading these books: At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson I loved Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything and when I discovered he had written a book that's the exact opposite of that one, I pounced upon it. Instead of a macro view of history like the previous book, Bryson instead takes us on a journey that documents the history of normal and mundane household objects, ones we usually take for granted. What follows is an epic journey across most of the Victorian era with the occasional trip to the height of the Roman Empire and some other notable periods of time in human history. A good read, even if you have only enjoyed Bryson's numerous travelogues. The Technologists by Matthew Pearl Matthew Pearl's latest historical fiction will only be released on 21st February but I managed to get my hands on a preview copy. The book is set in the mid-Ninteenth Century, during the initial years of the Massa...

Give the love of your life the gift of zombies! Muslim-eating zombies! My short story e-book Zombies Ate My Muslim is free only on Valentine's Day and can be downloaded from Amazon's Kindle Store . UPDATE: Offer has ended. Thanks to everyone who downloaded the e-book! Hope you enjoy it!

I've noticed a lot of talk about crowdsourcing in the past week, especially with projects funded using Kickstarter . There has also been several threads about crowdsourcing novels on the Kindle Boards lately. Today, an indie author I admire, Lindsay Buroker, wrote a blog post about the whole crowdsourcing thing . She explains a little about what crowdsourcing actually is and how you can use it to fund your own novel as well as how she plans to use it to fund her podiobooks. (Podiobooks are audiobooks delivered as free podcasts.) A very good read, especially if you're an aspiring author wanting to self-publish and wondering where you could get some money to fund it. I would like to add a caveat for those thinking to use Kickstarter to fund their projects. If you're outside the US, you won't be able to use it. (People outside the US can give money towards projects, but can't create projects themselves.) Instead, consider Indiegogo.com , which does allows p...

Goodbye, Goddess by Breanna Teintze is a beautiful and well-written collection of high fantasy short stories that I would not hesitate to recommend to my friends. I loved how even though the stories were self-contained, the world described in them seemed to be larger than it appeared and while the stories had a small element of "sensawunda" they really focused more on the characters rather than the fantastic. One of my favourite stories in this collection was about a rogue mage who is reluctantly asked by some villagers to investigate a recent murder. It's at once a fantasy story, a Western story, a whodunnit, rolled into one and even has a big showdown in the end. Brilliant! My other favourite story is about a village idiot who is asked to slay a dragon. The story is simple, but the loving care in which it is written and the humourous but logical way in which the dragon is ultimately vanquished makes this one memorable. That's not to say the other stories in...

I stopped at Chapter 13 of Book 1.

Steampunk. Time travel. Dinosaurs. These three things make Robert Appleton's Prehistoric Clock a book after my heart. And does it capture it? Does the book provide a fun and engaging story along with its interesting premise? Yes. Yes it does. And thank goodness for that. When I read the synopsis, I so wanted to like the book, but I worried it wouldn't live up to its potential. Set in 1908, Prehistoric Clock is told from the perspectives of three main characters, Verity Champlain, an acting captain of an airship, Lord Garret Embrey, an aristocrat wrongly accused in a conspiratorial trial, and Cecil Reardon, the inventor who creates the time machine that drives the plot behind the novel. Though Reardon's scientific experiments are sponsored by a shady organisation called the Leviacrum (which we are given to suspect also controls the British empire), he secretly builds a time machine which he intends to use to go back in time to save his wife and son from dying s...

Was reading a local litblog of some repute today and at first I thought he would be reviewing a particular fantasy book but it turned out he just wanted to rant about the state of today's fantasy. About how today's fantasy novels seemed to be written for teens and young adults and none of them seemed to be written for middle-aged dads. Well, the answer to that is, well... yes . Fantasy is written for teens and young adults. From Conan to Tolkien to Martin. But then again, fantasy novels have always targeted teens and young adults. Sure, some of them have involved adult themes and imagery but let's not kid (heh) ourselves here, fantasy is, and has always been, largely a domain for the young and young at heart. The message of the rant implied that just because modern fantasy is for mere children , as it were, it automatically fails to challenge, intrigue, entertain, grab by the collars or refuse any reprieve. And the writer condemned this sweeping judgement upon modern ...

I've admired fantasy author Glenda Larke 's work for some time and I have her blog subscribed in Google Reader so I can always read her latest posts. But I never knew she just lived down the road from me! I randomly met her on Friday evening in a restaurant near where we lived and recognised her from her pictures on her blog, so I went over and said hello. We had a short chat and then she asks me, "Would you like some reading matter?" Turns out Glenda's cleaning her house out and is culling some of her books from her personal library. Well, obviously, I'd be happy to help! The next day, I was over at her house with four shopping bags and look what happened: Cataloguing this will be very interesting, to say the least. 188 books. 10 books in each stack, except for one stack which has 8 books. That's altogether 188 books, mostly fantasy but there are some science fiction (finally, I have a copy of Frederick Pohl's elusive Gateway !) and ...

Anne Lamont's wonderful book for writers, Bird by Bird , isn't a how-to book for writers. Rather, it is a book about the joys of writing as well as being an inspirational guide on the life of writing. The book opens with an anecdote that retells a childhood story of Ms. Lamont's brother who has to write an assignment for school. The assignment requires him to write about birds but when finally the day before the assignment has to be submitted, he cries in frustration that the task is impossible because there are just too many birds to write about. The father comes over, takes a look at the assignment, then gives one small but important piece of advice: "Take it Bird by Bird, son. Bird by Bird." (I haven't read the book for years, so forgive me if this isn't exactly verbatim.) It goes without saying that this is excellent advice. Recently, I met with fellow writer, Elizabeth Tai , and we chitchatted about books, reading and writing. After a whil...

This short story Kindle e-book started out as a generic hard-boiled detective novel with a broad asking a shamus to investigate her apparently lecherous husband. But then the broad dies, and the story turns into something altogether different. Shipp writes gritty dialogue worthy of the hard-boiled genre. In fact, I downloaded the story on the basis of the dialogue on the first page alone. The story is pretty weird and throws curve balls at the reader a lot of times. I kept wondering what the heck was going on, and I didn't see the ending coming. Probably because I had no idea where the story was going most of the time! I did not know anything about the story beforehand and I downloaded it on the basis of reading the first page. I didn't know it was a bizarro story, but if I did, that would have probably spoiled half the fun. On the whole, I enjoyed reading this--I love bizarro--and am now interested in checking out the author's other work. Attic Clowns looks int...

Bookaholics who tend to stay up late at night reading but have a partner who shares the room must surely understand the all-too-common dilemma of having to switch off the lights so your partner can sleep, but dammit you're just about to get to the good part in your novel but you don't want to get out of bed and continue reading in the living room. The solution would of course be to get a nice book light, one that illuminates enough for you to enjoy your reading, but not pervasive enough to bother your pesky non-reading partner. I've been married quite a while now. So it goes without saying I've been wanting a really good book light for some time. Getting a book light had become more crucial after little Sophie was born. I wanted to read in bed but neither the wife nor the baby would shut up and go to sleep when the lights were on. I scoured the internet for a solution and discovered the LightWedge , a really nifty device that, like it's name suggests, is shape...

You don't really expect a fast-paced action thriller to take place in the sleepy antipodean nation of New Zealand, and yet John Ling , a Malaysian-born Kiwi, has made it work. In The Blasphemer, a Muslim author named Abraham Khan has written a very controversial book very much akin to Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses . But Khan is no Rushdie. I won't tell you why (spoilers!) but even the author himself claims the main inspiration for the character is the feminist writer, Taslima Nasrin, who is a far cry from Salman Rushdie. It goes without saying that Khan is then targeted by extremists. Enter Maya Raines, who is assigned by the New Zealand police to protect Khan and his wife, Belinda Freeman, after a failed suicide attack almost kills them both. John Ling then goes on to weave a fast-placed story that includes drugs, thrall-like Somalis, two hired assassins (with the names Devlin and Emmerich; see if you can catch the reference ) and a mysterious man with an aim to ...

And has nice things to say about it as well : I’ve recently read a bit of bizarro and have to say even the one with freshly birthed wolves being shot out of a bears mouth isn’t as strange as this book. It’s stupid but funny. I was like wtf! while reading it. This book is weird, wacky and funny.  Thanks, Jessica! This is exactly the kind of reaction I was going for with the story and was glad to see it worked. That makes me feel glad.