Share Your City Stories!

Here's a new website I think you are going to enjoy very much. It will feature stories all set in the city where many of you live, and best of all, those stories are going to be written by you!

(Roll of drums ...)

Launched today at The British Council - City of Shared Stories Kuala Lumpur.

As you can see, it is a map of the city, dotted with little red tags. Each tag is a very short story told in under 1600 characters. One is mine. (Look for the little tag stuck into Tropicana Golf and Country Resort!) Others in this first batch were written by Daphne Lee, Damyanti Ghosh, Liyana/Dizzy, Priya K, and Jerome Kugan. If you like what you read click on the I like this story button.

And ... if you think you can do better, go right ahead. Locate your story at a specific spot on the map and write or paste it into the space provided, and then it will be there for everyone else to visit. Your story can be in English or BM (or even, as we learned at the launch today in Chinese or Tamil).

The website is a part of the City of Stories creative writing project and is a sister site to the UK site, City of Shared Stories , run by the writers development organisation Spread The Word.

The project is intended to get Malaysians writing and enjoying short fiction, and I think it is going to be a lot of fun, so let's get that map covered!

Reporting From The Front Line

Sorry for not blogging earlier, I was at a place called Frideswide on the Western Front attending to the casualties and dodging fire in the trenches. And I'm only half joking.

Two of my great loves, poetry and Second Life come together with Oxford University's new virtual simulation which places the work of the war poets (including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Vera Brittain and Siegfried Sassoon) in a three dimensional, immersive environment that you can wander through and participate in. You can watch video, listen to readings of the poetry, read facimilies of documents, and watch video as you visit a training camp, communication trench, a casualty clearing station, and a front-line trench. You can wear (if you care to) the uniform of a soldier or nurse, and of course you can pose for and take pictures. I spent a couple of hours there and still have more to see and listen to.

It's a very relevant journey for me, as both my grandfathers fought in the First World War. One talked about the terrible things he'd seen all the time: the other couldn't bring himself to mention it at all.

One thing that made the experience special for me, last night, was having the opportunity to chat to one of the researchers behind the project who was able to explain how everything had come together. (Thanks Skanda!)

You can read all about the project here on Oxford University's website, and find out how you too can visit the battlefield and check out the possibilities of this new and exciting medium. Why Second Life? As the website explains :

Virtual worlds create opportunities to do things that are impossible in real museums. By simulating parts of the Western Front, the archive can embed an entire exhibition's worth of content within in the space. This can be further enhanced by placing digital versions of real archival materials and narratives along the paths that visitors take. The result is an immersive and personal experience. It's not 'real' but it does offer possibilities for understanding a part of history that is now beyond human memory.

Helpful Stuff for Writers

With the ultimate writing competition, the Nanowrimo, just round the corner, it's the right time to put up some links to the good stuff you can find online to help you write November's magnum opus.

(You don't know what I'm talking about? Go visit the website.)

First off, do you need an instant plot for your work of genre fiction (whether dragon-filled, neo-noir or dismally dystopian)? This hilarious generarator from Wondermark [found via]... well, it might not actually help you, but it is sure to raise a good chuckle.

Paperback Writer links to Ten Things for the NaNoWriMoer's including blog badges; a progress graph so you can chart your progress towards the 50,000 word target; a random name picker to help you name your hero or heroine; and advice to help you write the outline of your novel in 30 minutes.

Mashable also has a very useful toolkit for the writer with plenty more nice things to play with.

I'm finding Twitter enormously helpful as a blogger (since it enables me to scoop up interesting stories quickly, and I can tweet even when I haven't time to blog) and it is nice to discover about how it can also help writers. Debbie Ridpath Ohi lists ten ways, and has blogged A Writer's Guide to Twitter with lots of good advice.

There's nothing like advice from the master, and Kurt Vonnegut gives us some excellent advice about how to write with style, which he nicely distills into 7 principles (Finally someone who doesn't feel the need to have as many points as they have fingers!) :

1. Find a subject you care about

2. Do not ramble, though

3. Keep it simple

4. Have guts to cut

5. Sound like yourself

6. Say what you mean

7. Pity the readers

The Library Books That Time Forgot

Sometimes libraries need a bit of friendly persuasion to let go of some of the outdated books on their shelves, the ones nobody borrows any more - if indeed they did in the first place.

The Guardian links a blog set up by two public spirited librarians from Detroit which provides plentiful examples of the worst books on library shelves, to encourage librarians to cull their shelves. Awful Library Books has become an unexpected hit, turning some very quirky titles, any of which reflect the way that attitudes, as a well as technology has changed.

And I'm sure Malaysian libraries can provide some equally odd titles! Let us know if you find any.

Thinking Space

Where do you do your best thinking? Gorgeous creative spaces are pictured on a truly amazing three dimensional webpage at The Economist's Thinking Spaces. (Have you seen anything like this before?)

And you are invited to submit a photo of your own room to add to the site.

(Thanks, Umapagan, for the link.)

Shining a Flashlight on Good Reads

You know how I love throwing lists of books in your direction? Well, now I think I've found the ultimate book lists website - Flashlight Worthy. Do go check it out - but make sure you have plenty of time first because it will just suck you in for hours!

One of the lists I found today - 33 of the Best Books About Writing Fiction which is based on the recommendations of the finalists of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards competition.

There are lots of fiction lists, and I love the ones that are organised thematically. Novels set in schools, anyone? Glimpses of the afterlife? The Best of P.G. Wodehouse?

You can of course, contribute a list of your own.

The site is partly funded by clicks through to Amazon, and it doesn't take more than a minute to oblige.

Complete Review at 10

The Complete Review hits its tenth anniversary, and M.A. Orthofer comes clean about the fact that it isn't written by a whole team of people ... 95% of the reviews are his own, as are nearly all the posts at Literary Saloon. This has long been one of my favourite sites, and I did wonder how many folks were behind it. Now I feel put to shame.

Orthofer says that he has always tried to stay very much in the background :

...disappearing completely unrecognized behind the scenes ...

but a definite voice emerges, and it's one I like very much.

I also really appreciate the fact that the picks up news from all over the planet - gleaning fascinating literary pickings ... sometimes from the obscurest of sources. Because literature isn't only about what happens in the western centres of publishing.

So yes, a really big thank you, and here's to the next ten years.

Rainforest Tears : The Website

Rainforest Tears author Paul Leslie Smith has created one of the best author sites for his book that I've seen ... anywhere on the web. (Go visit and tell me if it isn't!) You can read a synopsis, find out about Paul and how he wrote the book, and learn something about the background. There are also useful links if you want to uncover more of the history behind the fiction.

There is apparently a whizzier international version of the site in the pipeline (no pun intended) that opens up with a Google Earth type fly in to Sarawak from Europe since a lot of people know nothing of Sarawak.

The book is now being promoted by Marshall Cavendish Singapore which Paul feels is much more proactive than the KL counterpart and will soon appear on Amazon.co.uk, while Penguin Australia is also ready to take it. Paul is looking for a UK publisher, but says he is not sure how to go about finding one. (If anyone is passing by looking for a highly publishable manuscript, let me put you in touch with Paul.)

He is working on the sequel now :

Plot scratched out on paper, starting to fill in the gaps. Looking at my hopes for R. Tears at a similar, embryonic stage I am more hopeful for the sequel.

A Writer in Residence ... Inside Your Computer

Novels, even short stories, eat ideas like forest fires eat trees. If you’re setting out on an epic novel with just one idea, you’re probably going to peter out. What I do is take an idea that interests me, that I can feel an emotional response to, and then chuck it into my head to stew for a day or a week or a year, and then see if another idea sticks to it.

Author Patrick Ness will be offering regular advice to the wannabe-publisheds [via] in his new role as writer-in-residence for the UK organisation Booktrust. (This could be the first time that the such a residence has an online address rather than a location in the location in the physical world - and that's great because we can all get to share!).

Ness is the winner of both the Booktrust Teenage Prize and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize with The Knife of Never Letting Go, described as a very contemporary coming-of-age story.

Weaving the Wovel

We know the nature of reading is changing due to the technology. Well, are you ready for ... the wovel?

Web+novel: you must have guessed the semantic origins, even as the naffness of the term made you groan. (It's as bad, if not worse than blook!)

Where the wovel differs from its more traditional linear counterpart is with its interactivity.

Programmer Jesse Pollack who works for Underland Press declares it has :

...the technical functionality of Web 2.0, the creativity of fiction and the pace of print journalism ...

The wovel is serialised fiction, and works like those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books you may remember from your childhood. It allows the readers to choose the direction the plot will take ... which, of course, demands great flexibility on the part of the author. (Go and read some of the fiction on Underland Press' website to see this genre in action.)

Of course Dickens was the master of the serialised novel, and more Alexander McCall-Smith has embraced it more recently. Closer to home, isn't this exactly what Nizam Zakaria has been doing with his Malay novels on his blogs? (Though his site seems to have disappeared now.)

Nizam the wovelist has a nice ring, come to think of it!

Poking Jane, Throwing Sheep at Darcy

Daphne sent me this Facebook Austenbook link which I think just lovely! And with it, a great question - which fictional character would you add on Facebook?

(The photo above and much more Austen merriment found here.)

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!!!

Interactive Lessing

Apologies to Chet, who sent me a link to The Golden Notebook Project some weeks ago, and which I forgot to follow up until reading this enthusiatic entry on Eli James blog.

The project is a remarkable exercise in collaborative reading, centered on Doris Lessing's novel. Seven women, including novelists Naomi Alderman and Helen Oyeyemi are reading the book and conducting a conversation in the margins. The project went live on Monday 10 November 2008 and is about halfway through.

As I told you some time back, I read The Golden Notebook in the '80s (*sigh* decades ago!), but it has remained with me ever since, in a way that most books don't (Harriet Rubin has a very interesting post on the project's blog about this phenomena), but browsing the notes makes me want to pick the book up again.

Write or Die!

This is a link for the writers among you and I found it at Dragon Writing Prompts, which has a ton of good stuff including ideas for writing exercises and inspiring quotations to keep your nose to the grindstone.

Write or Die : Dr Wicked's Writing Lab allows you to set your word limit - to be reached within a limited period of time. And if you fail to do so there are penalties. You can choose :

• Gentle Mode: A certain amount of time after you stop writing, a box will pop up, gently reminding you to continue writing.
• Normal Mode: If you persistently avoid writing, you will be played a most unpleasant sound. The sound will stop if and only if you continue to write.
• Kamikaze Mode: Keep Writing or Your Work Will Unwrite Itself

Yikes!

Luckily the fourth option Electric Shock Mode seems not to be enabled!!

Alone with an Eggplant

A recommendation from Preeta :

If you're looking for more good nonfiction to read, consider this collection of essays called Alone In The Kitchen With An Eggplant-- I'll come clean and confess that a good friend edited it and that another has an essay in the book, but I still wouldn't be telling you to read it if I thought you wouldn't love it. It has essays by Murakami, Ann Patchett, plus a bunch of other lesser-known but equally talented writers, all on the subject of cooking and eating alone -- in the end it is more a book about solitude than about food, though food provides the perfect lens through which to study solitude. It isn't a cookbook (though there are a couple of recipes here and there) -- the essays are thought-provoking and literary and many of them manage to be fun as well.

And I do think many of your readers would enjoy the book. If you want more background information or a brief description of the book, you can find it at Jenni's lovely website .

*Sigh* I've done a lot of cooking and eating alone in my life, so I have to read this. (Delia - thanks for being my savior!)

Preeta also pointed me in the direction of an excellent website she thinks you will enjoy : Fiction Writers Review run by :

... a community of emerging writers dedicated to reviewing, recommending, and discussing quality fiction—how it works and why it matters

There are reviews, essays, interviews and a blog.

Eric gets Tanya on the Couch!

Among the mighty good stuff on Eric Forbes Good Book Guide blog is this interview with award winning short story writer Tania Hershman who seems to have some very original scenarios in her fiction :

... a woman sets up a roadside cafe on the way to the South Pole, a grieving widow bakes science cakes, a girl is paralysed when it rains, another talks to her knees.

Tanya's debut collection, The White Road and Other Stories, was published by Salt Publishing in September. She has also set up a website devoted to reviewing short-story collections called The Short Review which I'm sure the fiction writers among you (and aficionados of the form) will enjoy reading. She is currently doing a blog book-tour (great way for authors to promote their work!) and Eric's blog is one of the stops along the way. There's plenty more interesting content on Eric's blog, much of which finds itself into copies of Quill. Eric and May Lee interview another short story writer, Claire Wigfall, who won the BBC National Short Story award.

Experimenting with Brevity

Gabby Goh picked up the story about the six word memoirs in the Malay Mail today, and also finds three other very interesting "microfiction" sites you might like :

One Sentence

"Most of the best stories that we tell from our lives have one really, really good part that make the rest of the boring story worth it. This is about that one line. This is about telling the most interesting or poignant story possible in the least amount of words. This is about small bite-sized pieces of extraordinary lives and ordinary lives alike... the happy, the sad, the funny, the depressing."

"When the brain tumor failed to kill her, we were convinced that it’s because evil doesn’t die." — fancy spatula

Four Word Film Review (FWFR)

"When the FWFR was first conceived, the idea was to accept four word reviews of films. The domain was paid for, the logo designed and the name had a kinda’ catchy ring to it. Over time the site and its aims have evolved, however, as it became increasingly more obvious four words was great fun for summing up films also.

These days, the FWFR offers a mixed bag of content – some summaries, some reviews, some a bit of both, but all of them valid comments in one way or another of the film in question." — benj clews

Micro Horror

Founded and edited by Nathan Rosen, the site is a free online archive for horror microfiction – in 666 words or less.

Microfiction is also referred to as flash fiction or short-short stories. The general goal of a microfiction author is to tell a story, set a mood or depict a scene in as few words as possible.

"Horror, I’ve come to believe, is particularly well suited to the microfiction form, and the best horror microfiction can be as brief and shocking as a punch to the stomach," writes Rosen.

Budding horror writers are welcome to submit their articles.

20 Places for Bookworms

This guide on The Education Portal to 20 places where bookworms go to read and socialise online contains some great links you might like to check out.

Wordle's Beautiful Word Clouds

I feel terribly guilty in advance. If you check out this website (found via the New York Times Paper Cuts blog) I doubt you will get much work done today.

Wordle generates word clouds from the text you feed in, and then you can play around with colours and fonts and so on.

This is what happened when I fed it a couple of short short stories I'd written. (Click to enlarge and admire fully.) :




You can try it with a whole book. This is Moby Dick :


If you make an extra nice one, please link it in the comments!

A "Real" Bookstore Online

Buying books with an Amazon click provides nowhere near the fun of browsing a real bookshop. Now there's a website (found via The Bookseller) that seeks to replicate that experience.

Visit Zoomii and you find yourself able to browse shelves of books, organised as they would be in a real shop. You can zoom in on covers and titles that catch your eye, open the book to see what's inside and read about it, and then, if you so wish, order via Amazon.

Chris Thiessen says he set up the site:

Because I love bookstores. Spending afternoons wandering the shelves. Happening across great books I didn't even know existed. But it's an experience I never found online. Online bookstores are wonderful. They've got amazing prices, huge selections, and they're open all the time. If you know exactly what you want, they're perfect. But somehow I kept coming back to the bookstore just to browse. Zoomii is my attempt to bring online as much of the real bookstore experience as possible.

It's certainly a nicer interface than Amazon's, though I'm scared of how much time I might "waste" here. Amazon, incidentally, may be buying the site.