More Awang Goneng

I tried to capture the rhythm of the language, the lifestyle we had back then. Writing the blog liberated me from my rigid, structured background as a journalist. I was always neurotic about writing the first paragraph! But the blog was free-flow. I wasn’t writing for anyone; I was essentially writing for myself. I could write whenever I wanted.

Awang Goneng tells fellow Terengganu-ite Dina Zaman in Starmag today. It's a very nice piece but how I wish more space had been given for it. (And I wish it hadn't been padded out with words Dina did not write!

My review of Growing up in Trengganu which I was asked weeks ago to write to go with her article, doesn't appear. Perhaps by now with so much publicity for the book already in the other newspapers, it has rather timed out.

Having to stick to the meager word limit means that all almost the examples I so wanted to include had to be cut out (making it a piece that I am less than satisfied with myself).

Here 'tis though, for your eyes only:

There is a delicious irony about the fact that a book as distilled from memory and marinated in the rich spice of nostalgia as Awang Goneng’s Growing up in Trengganu actually owes its existence to the electronic media. For this is one of Malaysia’s first “blooks” (as books based on a blogs or websites are known).

Awang Goneng is actually the nick of London-based veteran journalist Wan Ahmad Hulaimi who began Kecek-Kecek (which means “just chatting” in the dialect of Terengganu) as a way of recording what his childhood was like for his children who have grown up in Britain. The blog (which can still be read online at http://k ecek-kecek.blogspot.com) would probably have remained online had it not been for proactive publisher Philip Tatham of Singapore-based Monsoon Books who contacted Hulaimi and asked him whether he thought there was a book there.

There was. And while the material has been re-editing and reorganized for print, the book retains many of the characteristics of the blog and I’d say is enhanced by this, rather than otherwise.

Just as the online reader drops by a blog casually and may read posts out of sequence, this is a book that can be dipped into at any point since each short piece is self-contained and satisfying, often flowing in stream-of-consciousness style from a thought or a photograph. This is not a book to be hurried through, but rather sipped slowly and relished.

Interaction with readers plays a very important part in shaping a blog, and Pak Awang (for so I shall call him) soon acquired a following of readers whom he credits with filling in gaps in his own recollection.

Not that he seems to have too many of those, for although he protests at one point that “The light of the present has limited recall when you open the door slightly to the dark back room of your past”, what amazes the reader is the detail in which he is able to render each scene, bringing vividly alive the sights, scents and tastes of his childhood.

Whether he’s describing listening to storyteller by lamplight, talking about how Trengganu-ites coped with the monsoon season, letting us in on the secrets of making the infamous anchovy sauce budu, ruminating on the role of chickens in kampong society, or describing a family Hari Raya, Awang Goneng proves himself an erudite and gently humourous companion, weaving personal recollection into the rich tapestry of everyday life of Terengganu of the period.

It is, though, the recollections of ordinary people, shopkeepers, hawkers, kampong folk, imams and teachers, each of them described with respect and love, none of them are too humble to be noticed, that most strikes a chord.

Another of the great delights of the book is the insights it gives into the “Trengganu speak”, a dialect (which I’ve always found impenetrable and mysterious) which has a word for everything, for “There are as many ways to speak as there are chairs for cats to scratch” as Pak Awang says.

While Growing Up in Trengganu is a book which is intensely personal it is also a stunning cultural record of a time and place greatly changed, and not necessarily improved, by “progress”. The crowds flocking to the launch of the book in Kuala Terengganu and to author events in KL have clearly taken the book and its author to their hearts. The book is now into its second reprint, just a few weeks after publication.

That’s not bad going for a writer who hadn’t even thought about making a book from his blog!

I nicked the lovely photo above from Kak Teh's blog. It shows Awang Goneng with the son of one of his old teachers.

Kak Teh wasn't only Awang Goneng's bag carrier on their recent trip back to Malaysia, she also put together a documentary account for RTM's Galeri Perdana. The first part of her Jejak Awang Goneng is here**, and even if you don't understand the Malay, it gives a wonderful flavour of the place and personalities the book is based on, and the sound of the dialect:


*And I wish it hadn't been padded out with a paragraph Dina did not write! There has to be some integrity with what material goes out in your name, doesn't there?
**The links to other parts of the programme can be found on Kak Teh's blog and on Youtube.

I nicked the lovely photo above from Kak Teh's blog. It shows Awang Goneng with the son of one of his old teachers.

Blogs Help Develop Writers

People say lots of things about bloggers, most of them uncomplimentary, but I’m very upset about that. ... Blogs are very special tools for honing your writing skills or to get you started on writing, and I used my blog as my notebook, for rough notes which would one day form the substance for this book.

Wan Ahmad Hulaimi a.k.a. Awang Goneng is interviewed by Meera Murugesan in today's Malay Mail about the writing of nation-wide bestseller Growing up in Terengganu.

Bloggers in Malaysia have suffered every kind of insult (what were we called? liars? monkeys?* bored housewives?) and it's lovely to see someone provide the evidence for the likes of Tourism minister Tunku Adnan that blogs are a very positive force, which the government should be supporting and embracing rather than denigrating.

Pak Awang says that the most important lesson about writing he's learning is this:

Do not worry about what you’re writing. Do the best you can at that moment. Go on with it and then come back to it if you have a fresher insight.

On the local literary scene he says that many local authors rarely, if ever, get support despite their talent:

I blame the local infrastructure, the publishers, distributors and editors for not promoting local books. Many good local writers are being ignored. They’re simply not being given the exposure they deserve and yet, when such authors thrive overseas, we want to hail them back and claim them as our own. There’s something wrong here and those responsible have a lot to answer for.

I missed the links to last week's coverage of the book launch in the New Straits Times, so here's Su Aziz's very nice piece.

You're feeling like a superstar yet, Pak Awang?

*It's worth noting that Hulaimi's wife, Zahara Othman (who blogs as Kak Teh) was singled out by Khairy Jamalludin as one of the monkeys. It shows how much (or rather how little) not-too-clued up son-in-law-in -waiting actually understands about blogs and the people who write them.

** Hulaimi was quite amused by the fact that one politician who has been most vociferous in his condemnation of bloggers was right at the front of the queue to get his copy of GUiT signed at the launch!

The Rise and Fall of the Blog Book?

Is the blook on the way out?

Perhaps, says Karen Warner on the amNewYork website, talking about how publishers are beginning to realise that the transition from website to blook doesn't necessarily translate into great sales figures and plenty of examples to prove it.

Motoko Rich in the New York Times, while acknowledging that:

... there is no clear alchemy that turns a popular Web site into a best seller, and several books based on blogs or other Internet material have flopped ...

points to some impressive web-to-book success stories, including that of Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney, a children's novel illustrated with cartoons. It can be read online for free but it has sold 147,000 copies in its printed form and spent 33 weeks on the top of the New York Times best seller list.

That a book derived from free online content has sold so well may allay some fears that giving something away means nobody will want to pay for it. It also encourages publishers who increasingly scour the Internet for talent, hoping to capitalize on the audiences that a popular Web site can deliver.

This is a message about blogging still being one of the best ways for writers to get noticed comes through in Warner's piece too. She quotes Chuck Shelton, an editor for Kirkus Reviews and The Book Standard:

(Blogs are) visible to agents and publishers, therefore their online popularity is easy to gauge, the quality of their writing is evident, and checking them out is easier than slogging through the slush pile.

Trengganu - Blooked!

I predicted way back that with some of the freshest, most interesting Malaysian writing emerging on the blogs, and it was only a matter of time before publishers noticed.

Biggest congratulations to Awang Goneng whose forthcoming Growing Up in Trengganu (due to be released in a couple of weeks) is Malaysia's first blook (book based on a blog). Congrats to to Philip Tatham of Monsoon Books in Singapore for being so proactive and not waiting for printed manuscripts to hit his desk.

Pak Awang writes:

The book has been my top secret project this year, and even my better half Kak Teh only knew about it when the editing work was nearly done. My regular readers will know that Growing Up has been a regular and eccentric feature in my blog and if numbers are to be believed, the series has gone through many hundred thousand parts. But fear not, it is not coming out in many volumes but in just one small collection with cover design by a talented lady in Ireland, published by a small but reputable (and no doubt talented) publishing house in Singapore, and a cartoon of me on the writer's bio page was drawn by a talented but no small cartoonist called Lat; and it is even embellished with photographs sent in by readers from as far away as New York and Canada. I am, needless to say, over the moon.

The idea of Growing Up in Trengganu being snuggled between covers was one that never really seriously crossed my mind, though I did — once or twice, in moments of fanciful thought — toy with publishing it myself. And then Monsoon books came in with an email asking if there's a book there: and of course there was, and so it now is.

And I can't wait to have a copy.

Postscript:

Cheryl Hagedorn of the excellent blog Blooking Central has put up an excellent post about this book/blook. Amazing that such a buzz is created even before the book is out.

Of Machine-Guns, Doorbells and Cancer: The 2007 Blooker Prize

The 2007 Lulu Blooker Prize, awarded for a book blook based on a blog, has been won by a former American machine gunner with My War: Killing Time in Iraq. Colby Buzzell based his memoir on the blog he began while in Mosul, in northern Iraq, in 2004, about eight months into his deployment.

According to the Guardian:

... he portrayed the texture of daily life ... from listening to Metallica on his iPod to watching his fellow "grunts" surf the web for pornography.

Within weeks his blog was receiving thousands of hits a day, and he was contacted by literary agents wanting to sign him up.

There is an irony about the timing of the prize as the US military high command is clamping down on blogs written by its personnel - ostensibly for security reasons.

The winner in the Fiction category is The Doorbells of Florence by British blogger Andrew Losowsky based in Madrid. His book of short stories was based on photographs he had posted on Flickr (which makes the genre he's writing in "fliction", it seems).

The Comics section was won by Brian Flies with a true-life account of his mother's struggle with lung cancer. The blook is called simply Mom's Cancer and is based on an Eisner Award-winning webcomic. The original blog has had to be removed from the internet now that the book has been published, but you can see some of the graphics here.

There were more blooks shortlisted, and I do hope that you will take a look and come away inspired. Blooks are certainly a very interesting route to publication. But first find the right concept for your blog.

Now before I end this post, I'd like to make mention of an excellent litblog:

... about fiction - both online and offline. It deals with the way the Internet is changing the way we read - whether it is books we’re dealing with or not. What is the future of the book? Can blooks make a lasting impact in the publishing industry?

I'd landed up at Novelr a few times after googling stuff about blooks and having been much informed by the posts. Then one day I checked to see who the blogger is. American? British? Someone in the publishing industry?

Nope. Eli James is a student in Kucing, Sarawak. And I don't even dare ask how young he is ...

(Picture of Colby Buzzell from the Guardian)

Blooking Hell!

I blogged. Someone read it. Someone else read it. Someone else passed it on. The political bloggers linked to me and the world went mad. I blogged some more. Someone read it. Someone liked it. Someone passed it on. A publisher e-mailed me. A book was mentioned. Money was mentioned. I tucked my skirt into my knickers, said "Ok then" and looked for hidden cameras.

The Sunday Times reports how Judith O'Reilly started her blog, Wife in the North, following a move to Northumberland with her family, and how she was discovered by Viking Penguin and offered a lucrative publishing contract. 'Tis the stuff of dreams!

And I particularly like this:

My book deal isn't so much about money, it is more to do with the fact that blogging is a force to be reckoned with. Ultimately blogging is people willing to commit time, effort and emotion. How cool is that?

Blooking's Bliterary Blast!

More about blooks? Just to tell you that the results of the Lulu Blooker Prize (the world's first literary award for bloggers) have been announced and this lovely headline (from Press Release Newswire) tells you everything you need to know about the result:

Cooker Beats Hooker to Win Blooker!

Related Posts:

The Blooker Prize 4/12/05
Cooking the Blooks 13/3/06
Blooking Baghdad and Bad Girl Blogs 29/3/06
Let's Hear it Again for Blooks 4/4/06

Let's Hear it (Again) for Blooks

Another nice article on blooks, this time by USA Today's Janet Kornblum who dropped me a note after reading the entry I wrote on them the other day.

She quotes Jeff Jarvis, a former editor and publisher who writes the blog BuzzMachine. He says that he growing popularity of blooks shows that blogs are:

the new means to discover talent and new voices that couldn't break into the world of publishing before ... You can go create a property and a voice and an audience without having to go through the publishing meat grinder.

I also liked the quote from Julie Powell who wrote Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen:

The blog readers were almost in a way co-writers — certainly inspirations ...

Because I think that this what makes blogs special - that they are a dialogue, and that your readers influence what you write about and how you write it. (I've learned this - and yes, it surprised me!)

In the normal run of things writing is a lonely occupation, but blogging is extremely social. You can gauge the effect of your words on your audience very quickly.

And of course blogs contribute to the whole dialogue on issues, drawing from the mainstream press and in turn contributing to the discourse of the mainstream press.

I'm always happy to read articles like this which underline the validity of blogging and which for a little while at least counterbalance all those sneery voices which tell you blogging isn't something you should be wasting your time on.

Blooking Baghdad and Bad Girl Blogs

Thanks =] for picking up this story first.

You know I wrote the other day about blooks - books based on blogs, and how they are now becoming not just respectable, but in some cases, best sellers?

Well, now a blook has been listed for a major literary prize in Britain.

Baghdad Burning, by an anonymous author who blogs under the pen name Riverbend:

I'm female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That's all you need to know. It's all that matters these days anyway.

She has been longlisted for the £30,000 Samuel Johnson award fon non-fiction. You can read her blog here. (Add to her average of 6,000 hits a day, why not?)

I think it's quite incredible to be able to have a glimpse into how it felt to be an ordinary Iraqi living through the war and its aftermath, and will be looking out for this book. (Sorry, blook.)

On the subject of blogs, the Independent had an interesting piece the other day on sex-blogs as the new chick-lit. Racy online journals are now being snapped up by publishers in the wake of the success of Belle de Jour.

Disclaimer:

Just don't follow any of the links from that article or you won't get any work done today!

Afterthought:

Has anyone offered Sarong Party Girl aka MissIzzy a publishing contract yet? Would anyone in this part of the world dare?

Cooking the Blooks

Marisa very kindly forwarded a press release a couple of days ago regarding the shortlist for the Blooker Prize.

Now if the idea of blooks (self-published books based on blogs) seemed a little ... self-indulgent ... when I first mentioned the idea some time ago, the quality of contenders for the prize has certainly made me think again.

Belle du Jour is, of course, up for the award. (Who could not want to read a memoir written by an intelligent, articulate hooker?) Apparently a film (or should that be a flook - film of the blook?) is in the pipeline.

And so is a book that I've been looking forward to reading since I first heard about it. Julie and Julia:365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen - part cookbook, part memoir, it's the story of Julie Powell's personal cuisinery journey through every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and how in the process she saved her soul. The book which has garnered excellent reviews grew from a blog on the salon.com website.

Another contender for the Blooker include Egg, Bacon, Chips And Beans, a quirky tribute to greasy spoon caffs by US-based Brit, Russell Davies. And here's his blog.

The landscape of publishing is changing for sure, becoming through initiatives like this more democratic, more meritocratic, more ground up. And of course all the time my mind is working (as I hope yours is too, dear reader) ... might I also have it in me to be a blauthor?

If the answer could be yes, start here.

Thumbs Up for Self-Publishing

Judging by the number of self-publishing websites, it may not be long before we reach the tipping point of mass adoption.

Victor Keegan road-tests self-publishing websites in the Guardian and declares that the mainstream publishing companies could be "in line for a much needed shock". He is impressed with Lulu, and Publish and Be Damned. He also mentions the all-inclusive package offered by Grosvenor House.

Closer to home, we have Gary Gan and his G&L Solutions, of course.

Related posts:

MPH Writer's Circle (16/1/05)
Self-Publishing (31/3/05)
The Underground Route to Self-Publishing (14/6/05)
The Blooker Prize (4/12/05)
The Power to Publish (21/12/05)

The Blooker Prize

On paper it is a terrible idea: let every have-a-go writer on the planet publish whatever they fancy and give it all away free. No editors, no agents, no fees, no quality control. ... But a new generation of diarists, satirists, polemicists and poets have made the idea work precisely because they dispensed with paper.

That's us, of course, the 19 million bloggers rampaging across the wilderness of cyberspace.

A new book 2005 - Blogged: Dispatches from the Blogosphere edited by Tim Worstall brings together extracts from some of the best British blogs in "a decent attempt to box the unruly new medium in the trusted packaging of an old one". Read the Observer review here.

Incidentally, books based on blogs are called blooks, and there is even a newly created Blooker Prize.

Litterati Bloggerati Susah Hati

Dina Zaman forwarded this article to me today and I thought I'd share it. It describes how many bloggers have won lucrative publishing deals with major publishing houses in the US.

Blogging means exposure for writers:

"Anything that helps someone who is writing come to the attention of the public is going to help them on their road to being published," says Robert Miller, president of Hyperion ..."

It also allows writers "to really hone a voice, and that's something that, to me as an editor, is very important to find," says associate editor of Riverhead Books, Megan Lynch.

I also think one of the greatest values of a blog for those-who-would-be-published is that because of it's interactive nature, you can gauge just how interested (or not!) readers are in your material, and what touches them, makes 'em angry, and so on.

If anyone's blog should find a home between the pages of a book it's Dina's Gongkapas Times which I miss very much indeed for it's humour, charm and wisdom. (It was her blog that made my fingers itch to start one too.) Am feeling not a little sad also to see that Shakeel Abedi has stopped blogging recently - really miss his intelligent and thought-provoking entries. Then the Hustler - entertaining naughty guy has been harrassed from the blogosphere perhaps by those who would like to see only thoughts more sanitised. (Shock horror, the guy actually had the nerve to write about sex!) I'm not too sure what goes on behind the scenes, but sincerely hope that all of these bloggers will come back to share their words with us again before too long.

A New Forum (Blogging) Inspires the Old (Books)

If you want your writing to be noticed - write a blog! Interesting article about how bloggers such as Salam Pax commenting on the invasion of Iraq and Belle de Jour writing about the life of a callgirl in London (both blogs I have read and enjoyed greatly) landed publishing deals based on their blogs.

The New York Times > Books > A New Forum (Blogging) Inspires the Old (Books)

I enjoy reading blogs very much - have a whole list of them bookmarked and dip in and out of the soap opera of other people's lives. I especially love the voices that come through - the way that character and personality, gender and personality are revealed through the words people use and sometimes hide behind. It would be an interesting writing exercise (not one I've tried myself yet though) to read a blog for a while and then see if you could construct an imaginary entry keeping the voice consistent.

Where else but the pages of a novel or in a film can you enter the head of someone so very different from yourself and whose life experiences are as far removed from your own as it is possible to get?