Malay Mail, 5 November 2008

Revisiting tales
By GABEY GOH November 05, 2008 Categories: Blogspot

When expatriate Robert Raymer (during a moment of weakness) did a Google search on himself last year to gauge the buzz surrounding his book, what he discovered was a unique take on the old adage: "Never judge a book by its cover".

"A blog entry caught my eye and caught me by surprise, so that's what people are thinking about my book!" writes the American-born author of Lovers and Strangers Revisited, a collection of short stories set in Malaysia.

The post in question, was that of a student who shared a conversation with the book store cashier, about the misconstrued stigma attached to book titles – while picking up a copy of Raymer's book.

"After reading this blog entry, I had to smile – so that's why the book wasn’t selling well at USM bookstore! People were too embarrassed by the title. Sounds like others would stare or glare at them for even picking up the book, let alone trying to buy it," he continued.

The biggest boon of blogging for writers has been its role, not only as a launching pad to promote their works, but also as an evolving workbook and diary for their ideas. Along with his musings about the craft of writing and the business of publishing, visitors to his blog will get to delve into his current project.

"Now I’m doing a series of posts, as part of my writing blog, called The Story Behind the Story: Lovers and Strangers Revisited , whereby I blog about how the various stories came to be written," says Raymer, who noted it would be interesting for readers to see how much the stories, over a span of 20 years, have evolved.

How and when did you start your blog?

When blogging was first recommended to me by several writers, it didn’t make any sense, plus it sounded like it would eat into my limited writing time, since I teach full time and have small children at home. Then Krista Goon, whom I taught creative writing to at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), kept sending me links to various writers, mostly Malaysian, who have blogs. One was Lydia Teh, she was reacting to a blog post by Sharon Bakar, about the realities of publishing books in Malaysia. It struck a chord with me and I shot off a reply to Lydia’s blog, which turned out to be a rather lengthy comment. In fact, it was a full length article because I had a lot to say on the matter based on my years of experience publishing books in Malaysia and Singapore.

Having written this article, I thought, why not start my own blog on writing with the same article (and on the same day), which I did on May 19, 2007. The hardest decision was deciding what to call it. I came up with BorneoExpatWriter: Borneo, since I was moving there, Expat, since that is what I am, and Writer, because that is what I do.

Has your blogging changed your life?

Blogging hasn’t changed my life, just my writing life, or how I view writing. Before, I would write or pitch articles for publications, but now I write posts on writing to help inspire other writers. Then later, I think some of these would make pretty good articles, so I would rewrite them and submit them for publication. This is a recent development, but so far one has already been published. So blogging in this sense serves a new purpose for me, it gets me to write articles that I may not have written in the first place, plus they become fodder for paying articles and workshops.

It’s also nice when readers of my stories and former writing students stumble across my website or blog and contact me. Also the website/blog is invaluable for editors, agents, publishers and reviewers to get more information about me and to read samples of my writing. So far I’ve got one US$500 writing assignment from the US, one full page interview and book review ( Borneo Post ), and one workshop presentation (in Miri) from strangers who came across my website.

Any regrets?

I only wished I had started blogging sooner, before there were a billion other bloggers out there.

What in "Cybersphere" amazes you?

How quickly unfounded rumors can spread and how much damage one person with a perceived grievance or a grudge (or just because he can), can humiliate or destroy someone’s life by posting malicious gossip or doctored photographs or stealing their identity and their money! Scary!

If you really had to choose one website to interact with?

Your Success Store and its weekly Your Achievement Ezine because of all the great advice that you get from leading success experts on all aspects of your life, from people like Jim Rohn, Denis Waitley, John Gray, Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, you name it. It’s not just one person’s point of view; it’s dozens of the most successful people on this planet, those who’ve walked the walk for years, for decades, before they begin to talk.

What would you really like to achieve through Cyberspace communication?

I would like to find an agent who then finds an international publisher for my novels, someone who has the wisdom and the persistence to attract readers from all over the globe so I can stop teaching and write full time to achieve my goal of publishing 20 bestselling books in 20 years.

If there were someone you could influence to take up blogging, who would it be?

I would like to see a joint blog with Moses, Jesus and Muhammad (with Buddha as a special guest), so they can tell us in their own words what they really said, what they really meant, how we got it all wrong (assuming we did), and how we can start to make it all right before it’s too late. There’s too much anger, hate, wars in this world, and most of it caused by misunderstanding or misinterpreting what those original words really mean.

Memorable incidents?

Blogging from Borneo proves that the world is smaller. A French woman visiting her son in Australia stumbled on my blog and as it turns out she lives 15 minutes from us here in Sarawak, so she invited us over to her lovely house for some appetizers, one of which was smoked salmon from a Dutch man, who does this as a hobby. Oh, that salmon was unbelievable good!

Then a man from Canada contacted me and said he used to take ballroom dancing lessons from this woman in her house in the Bidayuh village, Quop, here in Sarawak. As it turns out, that woman is my wife’s mother. And I didn’t even know that she taught dancing! Maybe I should ask her to teach me, it’s been a while since I last danced the tango.


*Update, the 20^th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

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. 

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

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

Networking to a New Book

I just networked myself to a new book. OK, the idea for the book wasn’t new. It had been on the backburner for about ten years, one of those one-of-these-days-I-want-to-compile-my-articles-into-a-book-but-never-found-the-time-nor-the-inclination-to-get-around-to-it. Sound familiar? This could apply to any creative endeavor including starting your own business, or taking an exotic vacation, or…

Two things need to happen when you network. One is you have to listen. We can all talk and share our ideas with others – that’s the easy part. But how well do we listen? How well do we act upon what we hear? That’s the second part of network­ing, the most critical part, too – action. Or as Jim Rohn, the success guru for an entire generation of world class speakers and self-help motivators would say, “take massive action”. Ideas are as common as clichés about ideas, starting with “they’re a dime a dozen”. But without action, they’re just that – ideas that can sit on the back burner of your life and follow you to your grave.

A sad thought.

I didn’t want that to happen to this book, nor to all the other novels, narratives, and screenplays that I have written and rewritten over the last twenty-two years. A ton of work, but little to show for it other than a collection of short stories.

When networking with others, sometimes fate can give you a nudge. Having made the move to Sarawak in order to shake up the complacency of my writing life (and to make my wife happy), I was starting to feel restless, and found myself procrastinating on a number of writing projects. So when Krista Goon, my blog­ging men­tor, ex-student, and website designer (along with her husband Nic) sent me a link to a blog by Lydia Teh, whom I haven’t met but whose book Honk! If You’re Malaysian was climbing the best­sellers list in Malaysia, I decided to check it out.

Lydia wrote in “What Sells Books” (April 30, 2007) the three things you need to sell a book and the most important, it seems, is having a good book distributor. You can have great ideas, great publicity (even great book launches), but if the books aren’t in the stores they won’t sell (not in the quantities you’d like). Lydia’s blog was inspired by a blog that a friend of mine, Sharon Bakar, had written “What We Need” (April 29, 2007), which I also checked out. Both blogs struck a chord with me, so I wrote on Lydia’s blog a rather lengthy comment-cum-article “Publishing Books in Malaysia/Singapore” based on my twenty years of publishing experience in Malaysia. I then started my own blog on writing with the same article, something else I had been meaning to get around to.

In the article I wrote about my frustration of getting my book Lovers and Strangers Revisited into bookstores in Kuching (mainly a distribution problem because of the additional expenses for getting the books shipped to Sarawak from Peninsular Malaysia). The publisher Silverfish was willing, but its distributor who would incur the additional expenses, was not. Lydia wrote in response to my article that she felt that her publisher MPH was doing a great job of getting her books into bookstores. (The fact that they have a lot of bookstores help; but sadly, at the time of this writing, none in Kuching.)

Either way, I listened.

Two months later, at the end of July, I was attending a conference in Penang to give a creative writing workshop, and while autographing books, I heard a passing comment from one of the book distributors that MPH was opening a new bookstore in Kuching. I listened and asked for more details.

Then while standing in the food line, Lee Su Kim introduced herself. Having written three books, including the very successful Malaysian Flavours, she had nothing but praise for Eric Forbes at MPH whom she worked with at her previous publisher, I believe, and urged me to contact him.

Again, I listened.

Since I was in Penang I met up with several Penang Players friends including Mary Schneider, the columnist for The Star who mentioned that Eric Forbes expressed an interest in turning the articles from her popular column into a book, but at the time she was unsure whether or not to do this – it would require sifting through over 500 articles and organizing them into various categories, a massive amount of work.

I listened and also offered some advice. Fortunately, ten years ago I had already organized about a 100 articles into various potential categories, so I had a head start.

That evening Mary and I and a few Penang Players friends had dinner with Joelle Saint-Arnoult and the subject of The Secret came up, so we all went to her place and watched it. That really got us thinking about our lives. The possibilities seemed endless, if only we learned how to ask, how to be grateful for what we do have, and to have faith in the universe by using the Law of Attraction. I listened very carefully – my whole future was at stake!

While in Penang, I attended the Little Penang Street Market to sell the remainder of my books so I wouldn’t have to carry them back to Kuching. As fate would have it, Penang Players was involved in reading some work by Beth Yahp, who also happened to be in Penang to conduct a workshop of her own. Although we had never met, as the fiction editor of Off The Edge, she had accepted my short story “Following the Cat” for their July 2006 issue. I attended the reading along with Mary and Krista (who decided to join me at the last minute since I was in Penang). After­wards, Beth mentioned in passing that MPH is bringing out her novel Crocodile Fury, which was originally published in 1992, a year before my own collection of short stories.

Again I listened.

The following day, back in Kuching, I took action. I googled Eric Forbes, read his blog, and emailed him about the idea for this book Twenty-Two Years in Malaysia: Movie Magic, Mysterious Musings and Melodramatic Moments. Being familiar with my work, he seemed eager to see it (or maybe he was just being polite.) Suddenly I had taken this ten-year-back-burner idea and moved it to the front burner. This now required massive action on my part since half of the articles needed to be retyped (written in my pre-computer days), and the other half needed some serious editing, plus some new articles that I had meant to write a long time ago needed to be written.

Had I waited until I rewrote, reedited, rethought the placement of the articles in the various categories (and wrote the new ones, too), I may have given up on the idea, or something else may have come up – life often gets in the way of action, not to mention success. Then once again on the back burner the book would go, and for how long? Another ten years?

Instead, I forced my own hand. Having committed myself to this book (and not wanting MPH to change their minds), I put everything else aside and made the time to complete the project, which took me two months of working in the evenings and on the weekends (sorry, no TV). For my efforts, I’ll have something to show and hold onto, and it all began by networking with some writers. So thank you Krista, Lydia, Sharon, Su Kim, Mary, Beth, Eric and even Joelle for sharing The Secret. If I hadn’t listened nor taken swift action, I wouldn’t have this new book coming out.

Oh, by the way, I managed to turn this into a two-book deal, an additional idea sparked by listening to Beth. Lovers and Strangers Revisited, featuring a couple of new stories and possibly a play based on the story “Neighbors”, will be reissued in 2008 by MPH. There’s even a possibility of a third book, a novel set in Penang, which again will take some more massive action on my part to take it off the back burner and whip it into shape.

Yes, networking with other writers does pay off. But it involves more than just talking about writing. You must listen, and more importantly, you must be willing to take action – massive action – and that will necessitate some actual writing. But isn’t that what we all want? Our projects being completed? Our work being published? So start networking and put your ideas to action! That’s what I did and so can you. Just let me know when your new book comes out.
    --Borneo Expat Writer

*Update, the 20^th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

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. 

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

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I