Encyclopedia Britannica: A Mother’s Gift Honored in Time for Mother’s Day

 

In Borneo, I finally found a proper place for my Encyclopedia Britannica, a gift from my mother.  I was fifteen years old when I filled out one of those mail-in cards inserted inside magazines.  One evening a knock came at the door and a salesman from Encyclopedia Britannica appeared, saying they had received a request.  My mother and my stepfather were quite baffled until I meekly admitted that I was the guilty party.

I knew at the time that they couldn’t afford such a luxury item when no one, other than me (and occasionally a brother), read.  They did know that I had good grades and that I planned to go far.  They were not thinking in terms of geography so it never crossed their minds that I would travel to 36 countries and live in Malaysia for forty years (21 years in West Malaysia, Penang; 19 years in East Malaysia, Kuching).  They also knew that I planned to go to college, not that they could afford that either. 

They invited the salesman, who strategically didn’t call ahead of time, inside our house and sat with him at the dining table and listened to his sales pitch and how much this was going to cost them.  Trying to keep a low prolife, I circled behind them now and then, wondering how all this was going to play (or pay) out.  To my utter astonishment, my mother and stepfather agreed, and the entire set of Encyclopedia Britannica was mine.

Neither was I punished nor reprimanded, other than mildly—they did strongly advise me not to fill in any more of those cards inserted inside random magazines…

My mother, which I just rediscovered, had written inside the cover of Volume One: 

           The owner of all these books is Robert J. Raymer, June 1972

After attending Miami University and spending three months backpacking in Europe, I moved from Newark, Ohio to Boulder, Colorado, and the encyclopedias came with me.  They also followed me to Madison, Wisconsin where I began to write using a typewriter.  In those pre-computer, pre-Internet days, those encyclopedias did come in handy.

Then I moved to Penang, Malaysia, bringing my typewriter and encyclopedias with me.  I consulted them regularly.  It was part of my job as a writer—there was always something to investigate or research.  One child (two actually) was born in Penang and the other in Kuching, Sarawak on the island of Borneo.  Future users of my encyclopedias, which they mostly ignored.

Over the years the encyclopedias resided (or took up space) in various boarding rooms, apartments, condos, and houses.  If space was an issue, sometimes under my bed or in various offices upstairs and down, in storage boxes, and on a bookshelf nestled inside a storage closet for relatively easy access.  As my Encyclopedia Britannica began to age, some of the numbers and letters on the spine became too faint to see, so I used white-out.  I know, tacky. 

Recently, our second child graduated from secondary school, so after removing various school-related boxes out of the way, voilà, a space became available that I thought would be just perfect—perfectly suitable for my Encyclopedia Britannica.

Now all I had to do was convince my wife that these fifty-year-old encyclopedias that I hardly touch these days deserve a fitting location in honor of my mother who passed away in 2019.  Thankfully (perhaps reluctantly on her part), she agreed.  For how long, I don’t know.  For now, they are in place in time for Mother’s Day—for the mother who presented me that set of Encyclopedia Britannica when I was just a kid, obviously going places.  Thank you for investing in my future as a writer.                                                            

            —Borneo Expat Writer

Writing Excerpts and Entering James Jones First Novel Fellowship

 

After blogging about taking two years to rewrite six novels, I received some nice comments from an editor at Shenandoah about an excerpt I had submitted.  She suggested, however, that I submit an excerpt from the beginning of the novel—that way the reader could get acquainted with the characters and the setting as the ‘story’ develops.  Good advice, I thought.  Excerpts from the middle or near the end of the novel might be harder for them to stand on its own without the necessary character developments or backstories.  That would depend on the novel or its structure.

While contemplating the beginning of the novel as a stand-alone excerpt, I suddenly realized (or forgot) that the James Jones First Novel Fellowship deadline was near—for those who have not published or self-published a novel.  Since they require the first fifty pages of the novel and a synopsis/outline, I decided to take a closer look at those fifty pages (even going through each chapter three times, then those fifty pages three more times as I did before).  I figured since the first fifty pages (or the first three chapters) is what I normally submit to agents, I’ll benefit from that, too.

After submitting my entry, I then created that new excerpt for Shenandoah.  From chapters One-Four, I cut out the parts not relevant to the ‘story,’ though relevant to the novel, thus cutting the length down from 11,276 words to less than 8,000 words, their maximum length.  I titled the excerpt, “Ask Questions Later.”  By then, unfortunately, Shenandoah’s submission period had closed (they had reached their quota early and wouldn’t reopen for several more months.)  So, I had to find another market that accepted novel excerpts—so long as they could stand on their own.  Fortunately, I found several.

Years ago, I used to do this with my first Penang-set novel.  Parts of the five chapters have been published fourteen times in six countries, including the US, UK, and Australia.  I had less success with excerpts from other novels.  Maybe I hadn’t tried hard enough to market them or gave up too soon or failed to update them after a rewrite…

I’m now considering rewriting the first fifty pages of all six novels before the year is out (half way through, actually) and seeing what I can fashion into excerpts that can stand alone. Hopefully the excerpts can attract interest in the novel itself as I continue submit to agents.  So far, I’ve resisted self-publishing, despite some amazing success stories, or co-publishing, despite one enticing offer.  (That first novel could’ve been published twenty odd years ago in Singapore!  Regrets, maybe.)

Plenty of novels, of course, have grown from published short stories (and plenty of unwritten novels have died after that first chapter since it had nowhere to go, even though it worked as a short story).  Plenty of novels have also spawned excerpts or short stories as well.  It goes both ways.  As I writer, you got to do what you can with your fiction, take those necessary steps that can lead to publication and move you closer to where you want to be.

              —Borneo Expat Writer

 My interviews with Malaysian writers:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize. 

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey

Preeta Samarasan, author of Evening is the Whole Day, finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2009. 

Chuah Guat Eng, author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change.

Malachi Edwin Vethamani, author of Complicated Lives and Life Happens. 

 

Catching Up: Reading a Backlog of Short Stories…

I admit I had been putting off reading several collections of short stories.  I kept them on a separate shelf divided by those I’ve read, those I haven’t.  A couple of months before the end of last year, I committed myself to plowing through them once and for all.  I began with Nadine Gordimer’s anthology, Telling Tales with award-winning writers like Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and Arthur Miller. 

Then came Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shilo and Other Stories; Joanne Greenberg’s Rites of Passage (read the first story a couple of decades ago, liked it, but never got around to reading the rest); Isaac Asimov’s Nine Tomorrows (signed copy, though second hand.  “The Last Question” blew me away—never saw that great ending coming!)  Later, I came across an interview where Asimov stated that was his favorite story.

Next, I read Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America (I sort of met her in Madison, Wisconsin before I knew who she was, other than a writer making photocopies, before I began writing my own stories.  Never on a first name basis, though; a missed connection).  Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (loved her first collection so don’t know why it took me years to read this.); Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman; The Stories of John Cheever (the big red hard cover that won the Pulitzer Prize); The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (another Pulitzer Prize winner); and Thomas Pynchon’s Slow Learner (his early work).      

I was just getting warmed up.  I then read three anthologies:  American Short Story Masterpieces edited by Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks; Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, third edition, R.V. Cassill; and Anthology of American Short Stories edited by James Nagel.  These last three alone had combined pages of 3,038, which may explain why I kept putting them off.  Some of the stories were repeats of what I had read earlier or years before.  Many of those, I reread.  Others I had never heard of, nor the writers (some brilliant stories, too).  I enjoyed the sheer variety of great, well-written short stories, some dating back 170 years.

Some stories you read once and stays with you a lifetime like an Edgar Allan Poe story, or Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.”  Haunting stories about life and death and survival, like escaping capture in the desert and finding yourself sharing a cave with a panther as in Honoré de Balzac’s “A Passion in the Desert.”

So, the next time you have the urge to pick up a collection or an anthology of short stories, do so.  You won’t regret it.  In fact, it may inspire you to write one of your own, even set in your own country like Malaysia—a great story, no matter where it is set, is a great story…. I began writing my own set-in-Malaysia stories a couple of years before I decided to move here for good.  One of the stories, “On Fridays,” after rewriting it (rewriting all my stories), is appearing this summer, as a reprint, in Thema (USA).

Next up, or maybe next decade, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare which I bought four decades ago when I was still a bachelor living in America before I began to write...

        —Borneo Expat Writer

 My interviews with Malaysian writers:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize. 

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey

Preeta Samarasan, author of Evening is the Whole Day, finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2009. 

Chuah Guat Eng, author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change.

Malachi Edwin Vethamani, author of Complicated Lives and Life Happens. 

So, is your novel Literary? Commercial? Upmarket? Book Club?

Whenever I submit one of the six novels that I recently rewrote in trusting the process to an agent, I’m often asked, via online, what is the category?  This in not so much about genre (romance, horror, sci-fi), but about marketability.  Is it Literary?  Commercial?  Upmarket?  How about Book Club?  Well, that depends (and depends on which book)… One day I’d say, literary, then the next time I’d lean more toward commercial, or I’d think (wishful thinking, perhaps) maybe it’s upmarket… 

I used to know, but a lot has changed in the marketplace in the last ten to twenty years.  Even within Malaysia/Singapore.  Suddenly, I’m not so sure of today’s distinctions between literary, commercial, upmarket, book club.  Some seem to overlap.

To re-educate myself I did some digging and found this informative article by Louise Tondeur of Jerico Writers:  “Upmarket Fiction: Everything You Need To Know.”  She did a great job defining what upmarket means (comparing it to literary and commercial); gives some examples, and shows how to achieve that in your own writing, and offers tips.  Her other links seem useful, too.

The next time someone (an agent, a friend) asks about the book you’re working on (not just the genre or the plot, but its market), you’ll feel more confident in your answer.  If in doubt, get educated!  Education is ongoing no matter how long you’ve been writing or how many books you’ve written.  Markets change, so does the marketability of your book.  In fact, might be a good idea to think about your market before you write your next book.  Ask yourself:  Who am I writing this book for?  Who do I see reading it?  If it’s just you (and others like you) or for someone special—great, start there.  Later, you can add readers along the way…

            —Borneo Expat Writer

“On Fridays” to be published in Thema (USA)

As I wrote in a recent blog, every few years I get this urge to rewrite the 17 stories from Lovers and Strangers Revisit­ed.  The first story, “On Fridays” has just been accepted by Thema as a reprint in their A New Routine issue (summer 2025).

After submitting another story, I thought, why not try “On Fridays” as a reprint since it fit the theme?  I didn’t know if they accepted reprints—it was previously published in The Literary Review in 2003, which I acknowledged in the cover letter.  Figured I had nothing to lose.

When I received an email from Thema, the subject line stated, “Acceptance,” so I knew that it contained good news.  I forgot which story I had sent them.  I was even more surprised when it was “On Fridays.”  I had completely forgotten I had sent it as a reprint.  I double checked to make sure that I had in­formed them.  As a reprint, the story will earn less than it would have as an original story, but I’m not com­plaining.

So now the stories from Lovers and Strangers Revisit­ed have been (or will be) published 83 times in 12 coun­tries (12 stories in USA and UK).  Not bad, which is exactly why I get this urge every few years to rewrite these stories, because you just never know when another one will be published.

This is also the reason I spent two years rewriting six novels (and two collections of stories and a play), because you just never know.  You must trust the writing process and keep submitting your work and keep your fingers crossed that an agent or an editor will say, hey, this is not bad…in fact, it is quite suitable for our present needs…

            —Borneo Expat Writer

Faulkner-Wisdom Novel Awards—2024 Finalist for Novel: One Day Among the Ruins: A Lesson in Love and Friendship

 

  

One Day Among the Ruins:  A Lesson in Love and Friendship, one of the six novels that I re­wrote between 2022 and 2024 and blogged about, was named a finalist by The Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society’s The William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.

 

            

This was also my COVID-19 pandemic project that I finished in 2022 then rewrote this year for the competition.  Here is the pitch I’ve been sending to agents:

One Day Among the Ruins:  A Lesson in Love and Friendship (111,985)

An American backpacker and a British expatriate widow experience a lifetime in one day at Pompeii and a night in Naples.  Eat, Pray, Love meets The Graduate meets Indecent Proposal

One autumn day in 1978, between college and career, Mad­dox, an Ameri­can back­­pack­er in a funk about missing a love-interest in Rome, meets Alexis, a middle-aged British widow teach­­ing literature in Malaysia.  Their unlikely, cross-gen­­erational friend­­­ship is forged among the ruins of Pompeii as they share their per­son­al trage­dies and troubled fami­lies, fill­ing a void in each other’s lives.  Yet who is the teacher…who is the stu­dent?  Eag­er to learn more about her near-death ex­peri­ence, Maddox dares Alexis to join him for pizza in Na­ples.  Later he dares her to dance and dares her to ac­cept an un­usual birth­day present, teach­ing him about love.  For Alexis, the dare feels like an opportunity to re­cov­er some love­less years, if on­ly she could for­get about the gut-wrench­ing di­lem­ma that she had to face in the waning days of her son’s life.

Alexis and Maddox came from different generations, different worlds:  Alexis, born in India, the pam­pered daughter of British Raj officer, mar­ried off young on­ly to be­come a wid­owed war bride at eigh­teen, then a survivor of the London Blitz, while Mad­­dox hails from a dys­func­tional, blue-collar Midwestern family with multiple divorces and para­sitic step­sib­lings.  One thing they do share, other than their company, is their brutal honesty.

 “People—all of us, I suppose—tend to see the world in black and white,” Alexis in­forms him.  “Most of life falls in­to a gray realm.  Rarely are there right an­swers.”  She later adds, “For both of us, this was our journey that we had to make…to find our­selves in Pom­­peii—one the teacher, the other, the student.  Only God knows which is which.  In life, as you will dis­cover, each of us teaches and learns, often at the same time.”

Having backpacked three months in Europe in 1978 (and a month in Italy in 1985), hav­ing visited Pompeii (with journal, guidebook, and Bulwer-Lytton intact), having lived for twen­­ty years in Pe­­nang as an expatriate (like Alexis), I have tried to show how that one day—a time cap­sule, real­ly—can resonate in unexpected ways in world events being played out to­day.

              —Borneo Expat Writer

My interviews with other Malaysian writers:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize. 

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey

Preeta Samarasan, author of Evening is the Whole Day, finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2009. 
Chuah Guat Eng, author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change.

MalachiEdwin Vethamani, author of Complicated Lives and Life Happens.

Trust the Novel Writing (and Rewriting) Process

 

Two years ago, in March of 2022, after finally completing a sixth novel (set in Pompeii about an unusual friendship be­tween an American backpacker and a British expatriate widow re­siding in Malay­­sia), I got the idea to rewrite a couple of my other novels (to give them a fighting chance in a tight US/UK market).  While I was at it, I did all five novels, plus two col­lections of short stories (in­clud­ing Lovers and Strangers Revisit­ed that I blogged about), and a play, a comedy based on the short story “Neigh­bors”. 

I knew that a quick read wasn’t going to do them justice, so I decided to give each novel what I came to call the 9X treatment.  First, after printing them out, I would line edit each manu­script 3X (three times)—in black, in blue, and in red.  Then on the com­puter, I would go through each chapter 3X—making additional corrections and tightening the writing by cutting and rearranging sen­tences, paragraphs.  (Never assume your writing is good; assume you can make it better!)

Then for the final 3X, I would go through each manuscript beginning to end.  The first pass is straight forward and gives me a good feel for pacing, structure, chronological order, inter­nal logic—is it working or not?  For the second pass I would start with the last chapter, then the next to last chapter, working my way to the first chapter.  Editing chapters out of sequence is power­ful.  It makes you think…wait, did I mention this detail earlier; then double check those early chapters and make the necessary changes.  A good way of catching those errors of omissions!

If I add new details at this stage, I would immediately go back and reference those details, if neces­sary, in the earlier chapters (lest I forget later).  Of course, I would do the same while editing the manu­scripts in var­ious colors, scribbling in my notes and reminders to add in or move around various para­graphs or a shift a scene to a more effective lo­ca­tion.  Then I would go through the manu­script one more time from beginning to end to com­plete the 9X process.  For the short stories, since each story is complete within itself, I would stop at 6X. 

Early during this novel rewriting process, I got a great idea for a seventh novel.  Not want­ing to be distracted, I began shoveling notes (and eventually note­books) into a loose folder.  By mid-2023, I added my Pompeii novel back into the mix to help cut the length and improve it with fresh eyes, impressed by what I had accomplished thus far with the other novel re­writes.

I also created a progress chart for all eight manuscripts since their progress ov­er­lapped, and would then check off each completed step in the 9X process.  No skipping steps along the way just because no one is look­ing!

True, it was a lot of work.  It's also a nice feeling knowing that I followed through the entire proc­ess, thus keeping my commitment to myself.  When I started, I didn’t think it would take two years!  Nor had I planned to do all five novels, let alone redo that sixth novel, plus both collection of stories and that play that had been sitting idle for nearly a dec­ade.  I kept think­ing, while I’m at it…

And while I’m at it, I’ve started a new progress chart for 2024 and the remainder of this decade (and the next—I’m being ambitious!) for future novels, beginning with that seventh novel, having accumulated over 400 pages of notes these last two years.  Plus, I have several previous novels on hold for one reason or another, some with com­plete rough drafts; others, a third of the way through the first draft; or with hundreds of pages of notes already in the computer, including sequels to the other six novels.

Itching to get started, I’ve already begun writing that novel number seven.  In the meantime, I’m hoping one of these six re­written novels will open the door for the others, making all the hard work pay off.  Or maybe it will be this seventh novel… You have to trust the novel writing (and rewriting) process.

       —Borneo Expat Writer

 My interviews with other Malaysian writers:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize. 

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey

Preeta Samarasan, author of Evening is the Whole Day, finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2009. 

Chuah Guat Eng, author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change.

Malachi Edwin Vethamani, author of Complicated Lives and Life Happens.