The Act of Theft – Finalist for 2014 Faulkner-Wisdom for Novella!

The Act of Theft has been named one of the finalist in the 2014 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for the Novella.  (In 2013 it was a short list finalist.)

Also my novels A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit (finalist 2012) and The Lonely Affair (The Resurrection of Jonathan Brady) were short list finalist for the 2014 Novel category.  

Plus I had "three" more novels in the 2014 semi-finals, including The Resurrection of Jonathan Brady (short list finalist above and in 2012), An Unexpected Gift for a Growling Fool (short list finalist in 2013) and The Girl in the Bathtub, (a finalist in 2012, short list finalist 2013 Novel-in-Progress, and a sequel to A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit set in Malaysia).

This is the fourth time that one of my works has made it the Faulkner-Wisdom finals in four different categories:  novel, novel-in-progress, novella and short story (“Malaysian Games”,  runner up in 2007).

All finalists for the Novella will be sent to the finals judge Moira Crone, a previous Faulkner-Wisdom Novella winner, who has published two novels and three books of stories.

Let’s hope The Act of Theft can pull off a winner.

Update: Winners of Novella and Novel

                  —Borneo Expat Writer

*Reading out loud to improve your results. 

**Six lessons I learned from joining Amazon competition. 

Here are links to four 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 

Faulkner-Wisdom: Two Novels Short List Finalist 2014!

Two of my novels A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit and The Lonely Affair  (The Resurrection of Jonathan Brady) were named as short list finalist for the 2014 Faulkner-Wisdom Novel Competition.

The sequel to A Perfect Day for an Expat Expat (finalist in 2012), The Girl in the Bathtub was named a semi-finalist in only its second full draft.  The Girl in the Bathtub, however, was a finalist for the 2012 Novel-in-Pro­gress (and a short list finalist in 2013).  Both novels are set in Malaysia, famous this year for its missing flight MH370 and then MH17 shot down flying over Ukraine.

This year I was determined to send in the early draft of The Girl in the Bathtub so I would be forced to revise it in time for the competition.  Since then, I had been continually revising the novel draft after draft, cutting the 493 page manuscript down to 419 pages determined to make this my best novel ever.  I hope to get it down to 400 pages by mid-September before I send it to a writer friend for a complete reading, then after further revisions, if necessary, start submitting it to agents, my first new novel in a while, which I find exciting.

My novel An Unexpected Gift from a Growling Fool was a semi-finalist this year too, dis­appointing since it was named a short list finalist in 2013 as was The Resurrection of Jonathan Brady (the revised version of The Lonely Affair) also a previous short list finalist in 2012 (and a Quarter-finalist in the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards).  I had actually submitted The Lonely Affair in 2013 along with my other four entries and somehow this got overlooked so they carried it over for 2014, a pleasant surprise and an extra short list finalist, giving me five entries instead of four for the novel (two short list finalist and three semi-finalist for 2014!).

I’m still waiting for the Novella results for my entry The Act of Theft, a short-list finalist in 2013.

                      —Borneo Expat Writer

Update: The Act of Theft was named one of the a finalist for 2014.

Update: Winners of Novella and Novel

*Reading out loud to improve your results.

**Six lessons I learned from joining Amazon competition.

Here are links to four 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 

Suzi Wong and the Spirits, a Graphic Novel in English

Editions GOPE, a French publisher who does books with an Asian flavour, has launched a graphic novel in English, Suzi Wong and the Spirits.

Suzy Wong and the Spirits

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Born in Hong Kong on the fifteenth day of the fourth lunar month in the year of the Tiger, Suzy might be an incarnation of Chang’e, the Moon Goddess. All she knows for sure is that since her birth, she has been protected by three age-old invisible and mischievous spirits: Godmother Qing Yi, learned Godfather Wen Chou and rough Uncle Jia Zi. As a child Suzy was spoiled rotten by everybody at the brothel managed by her grandmother Wong Su Xi, who had once been famous under the name of Suzie Wong. Our Suzy had a blissful childhood until a mysterious fire killed her mother and destroyed the floating brothel. Sent away to a boarding school, Suzy found she had a gift for feng shui. After graduating summa cum laude, she decided to reconcile with her six uncles and aunts. It would not be easy; they were scattered all over the globe, and each of them involved in either a sleazy business, a dark occult science, or both. But what really happened that fateful night? What drove the Wong family into exile? Will Suzy dare to return to her roots in Hong Kong, in the Aberdeen harbour, where Grandma Su Xi, abandoned by her family and only a shadow of her former self, is waiting?

Virginie Broquet is a French artist who writes and draws comic books and travel sketchbooks. She also works for the press, as well as for the advertising and fashion industries. She has been awarded a prize at the prestigious Angoulême festival, the second-largest comics festival in the world.

Steve Rosse (English text) has been a journalist and editor in Asia and the United States. 

Suzy Wong and the Spirits is a graphic novel for adults dedicated with love to some of Asia’s most fascinating cities. It is a fusion between an artist’s very personal travel sketchbook and a comic book. Giving free reign to her imagination, it is the author’s hope that the work is still firmly grounded in the sensibility of real life.  
 
The graphic novel will appeal to women/art/erotica lovers...For more information, excerpts and orders please go here.

Steve Rosse is also the author of Trois Autres Thailande, a collection of short stories, part of the Southeast Asia series that includes Trois Autres Malaisie, the French translation of Loversand Strangers Revisited. 

Previously, Editions GOPE gave new life to Richard Mason’s The World of Suzie Wong by launching a new revised, unabridged French translation.  Chapter two, for those of us familiar with Malaysia, takes place in Malaya, in a rubber plantation.  The World of Suzie Wong was not only an international best seller, it ran for many years as a play on Broadway and in London, and the movie version won Nancy Kwan a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in the role of Suzie.

 
And now the Suzie Wong legend continues through Suzy Wong and the Spirits.

For more information, excerpts and orders please go here. 

  --BorneoExpatWriter

             

*Update, the 20th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited, my collection of short stories set in Malaysia

**Update: Book orders for Trois autres Malaisie.   E-book orders.  Or recommend it to your friends, especially those who would like to know more about Malaysia or have an interest in Southeast Asia.

  

Here's a link to the intro and excerpts, and to four reviews of Trois Autres Malaisie in eurasie.net, Malaisie.org, easyvoyage.com, and Petit Futé mag.

***Here’s an update to the French blog about Trois autres Malaisie and my meeting the French translator Jerome Bouchaud in Kuching, and my involvement in a French documentary for Arte (June 2017) on The Sensual Malaysia of Somerset Maugham.

Here the link for Trois autres Malaisie.

Here are links to four 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 

A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit—Round Two of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards

A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit has made Round Two of the 2014 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award under the Mystery/Thriller category.  This is based solely on the 300-word pitch, which is what agents and editors see first when you pitch them, as I wrote in my Six Lessons Learned from entering the Amazon contest last year.

Round Two is based on the 5000-word excerpt and a shot at the Quarter-Finals (14 April).  A different novel, The Resurrection of Jonathan Brady made the Amazon Quarter-finals in 2012, beating out 95% of the completion.   

An earlier draft of A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit made the finals of the 2012 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Novel Competition, so I have some hope here, too.  One of the significant changes I made since then was turning this third person, present tense story into a first person, past tense novel, plus a ton of rewriting while reading the novel out loud.

While waiting for Quarter-Final announcements, it’ll back to rewriting A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit’s sequel, The Girl in the Bathtub, which was also a novel-in-progress finalist for Faulkner-Wisdom back in 2012. 

I’m hoping all the work I’ve done these last two years on these two novels will finally pay off.

Here’s the 300-word pitch (287 words actually) that got the novel through to Round Two:

A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit

Having your fate hinged on the erratic behavior of a manipulative

American expatriate who has nothing left to live for cannot be good…

          “When living overseas as long as I have,” Michael Graver said from the com­forts of his decaying bungalow, “the question that you always have to ask yourself . . . is today a perfect day for an expat exit?”

Distraught over catching his wife making love to an ex-boyfriend, American business­man Steve Boston flees from his former life to the tropical island of Penang.  En route to the Eastern & Oriental Hotel, a colonial holdover, Boston comes to the aid of a mysterious Eura­sian whose com­plicated life has been made messier by her father’s body washing ashore.  His death is not only linked to the enigmatic expatriate Michael Graver, who seems to know ev­ery­body’s personal secrets, but also his anti-American, opium-addicted British wife, Amanda.

Until he met Graver, Boston had only read about expatriates as if they were some kind of mystical creature—a shapeshifter capa­ble of abandoning one culture for another or living in the shadows for the sake of survival; either hiding from their troubled past, seeking some self-indul­gent pleasure, or search­ing for a mythical treasure.  Or a little of each as in Michael Graver’s case.

Graver’s life, however, starts to unravel when his own well-kept secrets are uncovered. With little left to live for except an elusive treasure buried by the Japanese at the end of World War Two, Graver gamely manipulates those around him, including Steve Boston who keeps finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time until he’s caught smack in the middle with a gun aimed at his head. 

—Borneo Expat Writer  

Here are links to four 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 

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award is Back for 2014!

It’s time again for Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.  At stake is the $50,000 Grand Prize, plus four $15,000 First Prizes and Amazon Publishing Contracts.

Feb 15-March 2: Round 1 (Pitch) – Amazon-selected editors will read and rate a pitch (up to 300 words) from each entrant. The top 400 entries in each of the five categories will advance to the second round. (Note that the entry period will end as soon as they receive the maximum number of entries—10,000 for General Fiction, Romance, Mystery & Thriller, Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror and Young Adult Fiction combined.)

March 18: Round 2 (Excerpt) – Amazon expert reviewers will read and rate excerpts (3,000 to 5,000 words) and provide feedback to the entrants. The top 100 entries in each of the five categories will advance to the Quarter-Finals.

April 14:  Quarter-Finals (Full Manuscript) – Reviewers from Publishers Weekly will read and rate full manuscripts and provide feedback to the entrants. The top five entries in each of the five categories will advance to the Semi-Finals.

June 13:  Semi-Finals – The Amazon Publishing judging panel, consisting of qualified representatives selected by Amazon Publishing, will review the manuscript and the accompanying reviews of each Semi-Finalist’s entry to select a Finalist in each category (each, a “Finalist”) using the judging criteria.

July 8:  Finals – Amazon customers will vote to determine the Grand Prize winner. All remaining Finalists will receive a First Prize.

July 21:  Grand Prize winner is announced.

TIPS for preparing your entry

• Select the genre that best fits your book.
• Stay within the word count limits: pitch (up to 300 words); excerpt (3,000 to 5,000 words); manuscript (50,000 to 125,000 words).
• Remove all identifying information from your pitch, excerpt and manuscript, including your name and/or pen name, contact information, author bio/resume, and any awards received for your book.
• Submit all your material in English.

Here are six lessons that I learned as a Quarter-Finalist in 2012 for one of my novels, The Resurrection of Jonathan Brady, which will also useful when submitting your work to agents and publishers. 

Good Luck!

                 —Borneo Expat Writer  

*Update:  A Perfect Day for an Expat's Exit advances to Round Two for mystery/thriller. Here's the 300-word pitch that got it through.

Here are links to four 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