Blog Reflections

In a piece called Of Blogs and Reflections in the Malay Mail today - Gabby Goh asks three litbloggers, myself, horror king Tunku Halim and Eli James of Novelr about our favourite web discoveries this year and our hopes for next. Here's what I said (with a couple of bits bolded so you will take note of them). Sorry if I've gone all nerdy on you - I'm surprised myself! :

For me, 2008, has really been the year of Facebook - the application has put me in touch with old friends and made me new ones, been a useful place to pick up news and share ideas, but most of all it has been the best avenue to reach a large potential audience for the events I organise. I have set up a group for readings@seksan and look forward to another exciting year of live literature!

This has also been the year I really started to find my feet in the vast virtual world Second Life (which I initially heard about from librarian friends who have established a strong base there). Now that I can fly and teleport and have a good wardrobe of pixelated clothes, I'm busy looking around for ways the metaverse can be used to promote reading and writing activities and making connections with others from around the world interested in the same. (For a taste of what's possible take a look at http://www.writtenword.org.uk.). I've been attending poetry readings and writing workshops and see so much potential for bringing practitioners of all the arts into this very creative space. The complete beginner can avoid the traps I fell into by reading Second Life for Dummies. But the best book to help you understand the history and evolving culture of this community is The Making of Second Life by Wagner James Au. Au reckons, by the way that virtual worlds like Second Life will, in time, become our interface with the internet.

I'd like to send my thanks to all my readers for sticking with me for yet another year, and for helping to make bibliobibuli such an interactive blog by commenting on posts and emailing me links and feedback. The bookshops, local publishers and distributors have also been a tremendous support, passing me copies of free books and sending me hot items of news. I am inviting anyone who feels they would like to contribute a post on any aspect of books or writing to guestblog for me. (Get in touch with me at sharonbakar@yahoo.com). September 2009 will mark my 5th blogiversary, so I am thinking of ways to celebrate this in style!

A very Happy New Year to all of you!!!

E-Fiction is Eli

It was a nice surprise to see that my blog buddy Eli James was grabbed for interview by Sheila Rahman today. Eli as you know is the amazing (don't blush, Eli!) young chap from Sarawak behind Novelr pioneering, as Sheila says, the interface between fiction and the digital world.

It’s really only through community that you can raise the bar of quality in a medium.

says Eli (and that strikes me as a very wise observation). And he talks about why he started the blog :

I originally wanted to explore the medium of blog storytelling. There are actually people who blog their novels first, gain reader feedback, and then publish them through Printing-On-Demand publishers like Lulu. There are others still who blog and are then approached by publishing houses to turn their blogs into books. I found this interesting. I’d done a blook before so I leveraged Novelr to be a starting platform for new authors looking for an alternative to the traditional publishing industry.

We need blooks of significant literary merit so now Novelr has a forum. I also encourage and help set up quality filters for online fiction, plus whenever I can, highlight works of merit.

And how has blogging changed his life? :

My work in Novelr has put me in contact with a lot of really amazing professionals – SharonBakar, who writes Bibliobibuli for instance*. I’m mostly gobsmacked to be even in touch with these people.

I’ve also met a number of writers and editors.

A few of the ideas and the articles in Novelr have also been referenced in a PhD thesis on blog fiction – which was really very flattering. I suppose blogging has done wonders for my analytical ability.

I’m being quoted now, so I better make sure each and every post I write is well thought-out, well argued, and clearly presented… or else!

His immediate plans? :

Sometime next year, I’m starting up a digital publishing house (for want of a better name) – where we promote, redesign and highlight online fiction. ... I’ve started prelim discussions with several other writers, editors and programmers.

You see just what you start when young people get internet access and start communicating with others across the world?

* Nope, it's me who'd humbled, Eli. I believe you are going to go very far, and if there is anyone who has a spare scholarship to a top-notch university hidden about their person, please send it Eli's way.

Good Things on Other Blogs

The latest literary gossip from local bloggers:

Is Kafka Austrian or Czech? Raman recounts a diplomatic tug of war and writes about Milan Kundera's new book The Curtain (which I was tempted to buy when I slipped into Silverfish yesterday ... such is the power of blog reviews.)

MPH Bookstores blog Redwhitespot has sadly gone under just as it was beginning to get interesting with some of May Lee's posts. I think the name had bad feng-shui and wanted to warn them, as it always made me think of a pimple. (So sorry!) May Lee and Rodney and the rest - if you feel the need for a space to blog, feel free to tumpang a space here.

Talking of MPH though, super-editor Eric Forbes has a nice post which talks about how book reviewers are developing in Malaysia - and I have to agree with him and he ties this to reviews of James Wood's essays which now I have to buy. (Expensive business, reading other book blogs.)

Eli James of Novelr wrestles valiantly with the question of purple prose.

I've not been very good at turning up for events organised by other people, much to my shame. I sincerely apologise to the folks who would like to have seen me there. I'm grateful to those who give me a vicarious glimpse of what went on, including Ted (left) who posted pictures of last months Katasuara at Raja Ahmad's gallery. Jordan Macvay (spelt right!) writes about being part of Bernice's Ceritaku storytelling event.

I've always has a great phobia of dentists, and when I can avoid 'em I do. Deepika had a very special "dentist" take a look at her teeth during a panel discussion which she was moderating at the Galle Literary festival in Sri Lanka: it was none other that Vikram Seth! (See photo right.) In his round up of festival events, Nury Vittachi tells the story :

At one point, he (Vikram) told an entertaining story about a relative who was a one-armed dentist. To illustrate the challenges involved, he put his arm around the head of moderator Deepika Shetty and duly inspected her back molars. ... What the author didn’t know – but many of the rest of us did – was that Singapore journalist Ms Shetty has just completed a lengthy dental treatment which involved carrying around a quarter of a ton of metal in her mouth for more than a year. Thus his good reports about her dentition carried great weight.

Postscript :

Oops. How did I forget to say welcome to the new Kakiseni blog?

Hybrid Fictions

I had an epiphanous moment a few weeks ago reading Eli James post about digital fiction and the examples of Dreaming Method's interactive stories, and this is what occurred to me:

We've had a lot of talk (on this blog and elsewhere) about whether ebooks will take off or not. I now believe that yes, they will be fine for text books, reference books, and some people may use them to read a novel (though the buzz is clearly that most of us wouldn't want to).

And I believe that if the only way to access books was through an electronic device, it would be the end of novels as we know them.

Why? Because if you are going to use these clever hand-held thingies, which over time are going to get cleverer, then why stick to just words-on-a-page when other media can be integrated and the act of reading can become so excitingly interactive?

I think print books will go on being around for a very long time, but I think that along side them we will see new hybrid forms of ebooks.

This thinking also got further nudged along this morning by reading about thriller writer James Patterson's venture into writing computer games. (He isn't the first author to take this route - other early-adopters of this medium include Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum.) Lindesay Irvine posts a luddite response on the Guardian blog and wonders:

Should I look forward to the Iris Murdoch quest where players race to collect symbols and Jungian archetypes, and the first Martin Amis first-person shooter? To the Henry James adventure where you attempt to escape from inside 3-D versions of his sentences? The Crime and Punishment actioner where you must get away with murder; to rescue fantasies where you can save Tess or Anna Karenina?

(Please do feel free to add your own - I think this is fun!)

But Alasdair Harper reckons:

We need more real writers getting involved in making video games, not fewer. The results could be astounding. It will happen. Elitist suspicion of a new way of storytelling will only last so long, and I doubt the next generation of writers, who grew up on the likes of Beneath A Steel Sky, would have so many prejudices. Heaven only knows what a great writer could do with this new format. I can't wait.

I'm an old fashioned paper book loving grouch who will never mend her ways, but I do find the possibilities of these hybrid forms of fiction very exciting indeed.

Now what's an X-box?

Postscript :

Zedeck has some interesting things to say about this post on the Kakiseni blog.