Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts

Wednesday, 1 January 2025

2024: A Year In Review

Here we are at the Year In Review again! In attempt at consistency, I shall use last year's headers as a format.


2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023

Blog Life

I haven't been maintaining the blog, despite some attempts. I also haven't been very consistent at blogging my reviews, so they've been a little haphazard. I don't know if this is a priority any longer, but it's just nice to have a little (permanent) space for longer pieces if I feel like it. 

The twelve-month stats DO show that people are still reading this little thing, though, so maybe I'll try to cross post reviews a little more often, and talk about my writing more.

I'm wondering about the July spike. WHAT did I do in July? HMM there was the AABA panel in KL on 29 June and I guess the PWW24 showcase on 6 July. OH I redid my overall website at the end of June and sent out an email about it, plus the Jurusihir links. I'm assuming that somehow sent traffic over, though I'm not sure how. Or why.


Top posts for the year aren't actually new posts, but old A to Z Challenge ones, which I guess goes to say that I should attempt A to Z again this year.


Hoookay. Digging further shows a strange number of hits from China, which probably means... that all that readership is suspect. lol. 

But at any rate, I only wrote 26 posts in 2024 (2023: 54) so I should try to be more consistent in 2025.


Reading Life

I read 57 books in 2024 (2023: 59), which means I did keep a relatively stable almost one book a week (not really, I just did several binges to catch up at various times during the year). Though I did 'cheat' and read a series of short stories that were each published as separate titles lol. I also tried transitioning to StoryGraph, so here's the Goodreads Year in Books vs the StoryGraph Reading Wrap Up.

Crossposting reviews to this blog is still easier via Goodreads but the stats from StoryGraph are more interesting, so I'll see if I can keep up this dual posting thing. 

I rated 17 books with 5 stars this year, but these are my top 5:

Really easy choices this year - the other 5 stars were good, but NOT AS GREAT.

The 2024 TBR goal was to DNF with prejudice, but I guess I got lucky and picked a bunch of books I actually liked so I only DNFed maybe 2 books? I do not have a TBR goal for this year yet, except maybe I'll target specific shelves/boxes to read so I can finally clear those spaces. 


Writing Life

I HAVE NOT BEEN WRITING. THIS IS ANNOYING. 2025 needs to be A Year of Writing because 2024 has not. 

Then again... I did write a whole novel (albeit a short one) in 1.5 months  that was published by Bookiut in May (omg those timelines were stupid, do not do this again) and we had a launch at the KL International Book Fair (!!) so I suppose I DID actually do something, even if half the time I forget that the book exists. I need to stop subconsciously meng-anak-tirikan this thing because it is actually the most commercially successful book I have written even if it's the weakest writing.

Glasgow 2024 (Worldcon) was a nice writerly thing I attended - after which Jaymee and I had a writing retreat where I finished a bunch of rewrites and edits on the Tea Novel. I was on a few sessions at Flights of Foundry in September!

So now I have started on that long, slow route of querying for the Tea Novel, but I am also thinking of... rewriting it again. At any rate, the goal for 2025 is to write something new so I might move on to a next thing before coming back to this one. (The next thing is a nebulous idea called Paskah, but which doesn't have a plot, only vibes.)


Publishing Life

Last year I merged the publishing stuff with the writing stuff, but I think this deserves a slot of its own, only because I realised that I slowed on the writing end because of the publishing end. This includes my editorial work, and possibly MYWriters stuff. SO!! In PUBLISHING (and here I am relying heavily on Instagram and my invoices because obviously I do not keep a viable log)...


June:


CLAP was launched in June! There's still some backend docs to finish editing, but the main bulk of it is up and accessible. 

July:

PWW24 had its showcase in July, which means a showcase zine! I do not know when the 2025 edition will be but it will... possibly be. 


August:

Petaling Street: Traditions in Transition finally launched after many setbacks. This has cemented my conviction NOT to apply for government-related grants, no matter how nice that money sounds. 

Two short stories from Home Groan (2020) were selected for the STPM Literature in English component.


September:

I really loved editing Sins of the Fire, which was released in September! 


November:

Launched two books for the Malaysian Writers Society.

NutMag is our flagship Penang zine, and this year's edition is special because it also includes the winners of GTLF's Muara Writing Prize! It's so hefty that I don't know if we should still call it a zine. It's like a proper book now. haha. 

Tapau is the Society's second reprint anthology! It's also wildly successful by our standards because we've already moved almost 200 copies in just one month (ie: I received 240 copies in Penang, I have like maybe 44 left)


I cannot think of anything else to add to this post, so I guess I'll end it here. In terms of goals, we already have Milestones in the works, so I'm considering pulling back on everything else to focus on actually writing new stuff. 

Maybe I'll actually blog more about Anna's Year of Writing, but I usually do one post and then forget, so no promises. At any rate, I'm slightly more active on BlueSky and Threads at this moment if you want to do the socmed thing. 

HAPPY 2025!

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Sunday, 31 December 2023

2023: A Year in Review

 I'm starting this at 4:22pm on 31 December 2023, let's see if I actually finish it before the new year. heh.

2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022

Right so on to this year. I seem to change my format with each year, so I guess I'll just start with some random something and see if I'll go with it again next year.

Blog Life

I haven't posted about blog stats for a while, so here's a graph from off the stats page.


I... did not know I passed a million views. But then again, this place is over a decade old. Not entirely sure what I did in 2021, though the 2021 review post suggests it was Amok-launch related. 

Readership for 2023 itself isn't half bad, though I haven't been half as consistent at posting as I used to be. 


I have also apparently gained a Singaporean audience. *waves from over the Causeway*


My top 5 posts for the year are all Very Old Posts, which is weird, and which is also why I don't really trust stats. lol. (All-time top post is still my Malaysian Englishes post, which I guess makes a bit more sense.)


Reading life

I read a total of 59 books (2022: 46) this year! Goodreads has my year in books... or you can check it out myyearinbooks for a snazzy new version.

I gave 14 books 5 stars this year, but if I were to select my top 5 reads for the year, they would be:

If you all remember, I tried to take part in the 2023 Booktempter's TBR Reduction Challenge. I started off pretty well, and then slacked off towards year end. It was a good challenge, though, and got me to pick up some books that have been on the shelf (whether physically or on the Kindle) for many, many  years!

My TBR goals for 2024 are going to be a bit more intense, because I have a few boxes of books I need to read/discard/etc. The limits for this challenge is to be mean enough to DNF any book that fails to really capture my interest by page 50, or by about 15% if it's an ebook. I may extend this limit because sometimes I try to be nice, but this is me giving me permission not to *have* to finish every single book.

Writing life

Actual writing has been slow this year, but I have finally, finally finished writing the Tea Novel. It's out with beta readers at this point, but once that's done and I do a final edit based on their feedback (probably by January), I'll be pitching this one to agents. 

But in writing-adjacent stuff (which includes publishing! and editing!), the highlight of the year would be A Spoonful of Malaysian Magic: An Anthology which launched at GTLF in November!


Oh, I also had launches for Absolution at Hikayat and Riwayat once the print book finally appeared in March.

Amok made it to the finals of the Anugerah Buku Malaysia 2023 but lost out to I think Muhammad Haji Salleh. 

We re-started Readings in Penang this year in collaboration with Dabble Dabble Jer Collective, and renamed it Readings@Tanjong! Give us a follow for updates about when and where we are. We had like 6? Maybe 7? events this year but we are absolutely slowing down for 2024 and probably only having 4. lol.


It's only 5:34pm so I guess I made good time on this post. I have this vague feeling I've glossed over many things, and that I should maybe do a top 5 teas section or something but I think I'm good with this. Honestly, the best way to get consistent-ish updates right now is on my Instagram, which I think has taken over the random-post portions of this blog.

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Saturday, 17 April 2021

#Flights2021 live tweet notes embed [closed 19/4]

Doing a mix of taking notes and tweeting, so am going to embed the start of my live tweets so I can find them again myself. 

It should be noted that these are my interpretations of what has been said (as processed and condensed at time of tweeting) & not verbatim notes. Hopefully, I do not misrepresent what any of them said! 

The Ingredients of a Breakthrough Short Story:

Publishing outside the US

Beyond the Western Lens

Short Stories are Not Baby Novels

Sensitivity Reading as Developmental Editing

How to Give and Receive Critiques Like the Best

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Sunday, 14 March 2021

On Publishing: How do you do it?

I met up with a secondary school classmate last Sunday for high tea. Meeting up was great, the high tea was so-so (real British high tea has spoilt me, sigh). 

We talked about various things, but one of the things that came up, as it tends to do nowadays, was the question "how do you do it?" in relation to the confidence of getting your work out there, and self-publishing - or at least that's how I've been thinking about it this past week. 

And the answer is... 

I don't. 

I don't have confidence.

I just do it because I am tired of waiting, and tired of begging, and dammit it's time, and THIS THING IS GOING OUT SCREAMING AND YELLING. 

And then I hide in my room because I'm 100% sure that everyone will hate it, but it's out there, and it's DONE. And I just want it done. 

Is it the best reason to self-publish?

Probably not. 

But this thing is as ready as it will ever be. 

Absolution series banner
Click image for more info! 

Oh God, grant me the confidence of the mediocre white man.

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Friday, 30 August 2019

#Dublin2019 #AnIrishWorldCon in tweet threads

I was looking up my own notes for the panels I attended at Worldcon 2019, so here's a listing of the threads I made. Also so I can find it later on. lol. I dunno how this embedding thing works, I'm assuming you can click it to open the full thread.

We'll see.

























Why did I attend so many panels. hahaha.
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Thursday, 4 July 2019

Why Your England So Bad? World Englishes and the way forward for Malaysian writers

So. In the light of all the nasty debates over proper grammar and How English Standards Are Going Down The Drain in Malaysia, I figured I should post this online.

Now, to clarify, I used to be quite pedantic about my English and how perfect it has to be. It took reading a lot more local stuff that worked instead of the super-stilted Proper English Written by Malaysians (grammatically correct, but ugh) for me to figure out that no, actually...there is a rhythm and a beauty to the way we speak that actually makes sense. Malaysian English isn't quite standardised across races/states to be a proper creole, but there ARE rules to how we phrase things, which sometimes deviates a little depending on whether you're more influenced by Chinese, Malay, Tamil, or dll. Even pure bananas like me pick it up second-hand. And I don't speak any Chinese and my Malay is abysmal. haha.

It took me coming to study Creative Writing in London to figure this out. Who knew World Englishes is a Thing? They don't talk about it back home. BUT THEY SHOULD.

Anyway, I performed this at the The Decolonial Earth event in Goldsmiths, talking about my linguistic heritage. It starts with the monologue, titled 'Banana', and then continues with the rest of the essay.

DOWNLOAD MONOLOGUE

When I first started writing ‘Banana’, I had no idea what I wanted to say. It was something of a mishmash of thoughts and frustrations interspersed with some sort of a story. In a way, this monologue is a showcase of my ongoing confusion over who I’m supposed to be.

Technically, I know who I’m supposed to be. I’m ethnically Chinese, of Malaysian nationality. But it’s not quite that simple.

Like Karen, I often describe myself as a 100% Banana. Like, you would probably never find a less Chinese-speaking Chinese in Malaysia. And it’s a question I’ve been asked all through my life.

“Why don’t you speak Chinese?” 


I blame my father’s side of the family. (My dad is the one on the left.) My grandfather lost his parents to the Japanese occupation in Johor as a teen and my grandmother came to Malaysia alone also as a teen. Without family and community, both of them fell out of touch with their cultural heritage. They spoke Cantonese at home whilst living in Ipoh, but my dad 'forgot' how to speak Cantonese when he moved to Penang as a teen.

So, I grew up in an English-speaking Christian household (which means you don’t practice Chinese customs which are inherently Buddhist or Taoist) and attended a Sekolah Kebangsaan, or national school—but it was a Methodist school, which counted as “English-Ed”.



I lived in a very white-presenting bubble. Technically, we had all races—Malay, Chinese, Indian—but we spoke English to each other. And of course, enjoyed our banana leaf rice.

It wasn’t until I was in the US for a work thing that two things became very clear. For all I’m immersed in White culture, I’m too Asian to be White. Fair enough. And then I visited a Chinese-speaking church in San Jose and realised how un-Chinese I was, even though I was actually from and based in Asia.


Now, this is the hard thing—at least for me. If you are diaspora who grew up in Britain, or in Australia, or in North America, it’s easier to reconcile some of that dissonance. You’ve chosen the cultural affiliations associated with the country you or your parents migrated to.

I am very firmly rooted in Malaysia. What excuse do I have?

“Why don’t you speak Malay?”

This is where the bubble comes in—for all that the Chinese diaspora is so thoroughly Malaysian (and quite proud of it), it’s usually the food and celebrations that are highlighted. Not the language. Instead of Bahasa Malaysia being the common ground, we often just revert to English, especially in church bubbles.


I mean, technically, I’m bilingual. I learnt Malay for eleven years in school. I read the language better than I speak it. Yet for all practical purposes, I’m monolingual.



As a writer—and even before I started writing—language has formed a very core part of my identity. I count myself as a native speaker, English as my mother tongue, even though it won’t be officially recognised anywhere. Without it, I don’t know who I am. It’s a poor excuse, I know.

But honestly, I’m afraid. I’m one of those terribly timid people who won’t do a thing because of fear of embarrassment. And besides change, language is my biggest fear.

I only have one trick: my words, in English.

I’ve been reading books by people of colour recently—written in English, not translations—and I’ve come to realise this. English, as written by the whites, has become quite sterile. It’s dead, rooted in Shakespeare and the Bible, even if they’re not quite aware of it.

These books aren’t.

My reviews can be found under this tag: https://blog.annatsp.com/search/label/WNDB

They’re unapologetic about the words they use, about the cultural ideas they represent, and the languages they slip in. (Take notes! Read These Books!)

There is a level of acceptance of dialect and slang in literature, a sort of hierarchy of languages. As long as it’s a White dialect (Yorkshire, Irish, Midwest, Shakespearean) or Euro-centric (Latin, French, Italian)—maybe a little Spanish, but not too much—it’s okay. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot is allowed his quaint sayings. Huckleberry Finn is “natural”.

But add in some Tamil or Malay or Chinese and it’s like oh my God, why do you have all these weird foreign words? It’s so unrelatable.

But diversity is what people are looking for now. People of colour are looking to see themselves represented in fiction—and it can’t just be the colour of their skin. Not just being the token brown guy. It has to also be the way they speak, the way they mix languages, the thoughts and feelings that cannot be divorced from who they are.

We read to make sense of the world, to discover who we are. But even more, we write to discover who we are, who we are becoming. Even if it’s only to say that we’re leaving parts of our heritage behind. It happens.

Language has always evolved. English is one of the stupidest, most annoying languages to learn whether spoken or written because it has absorbed and Anglicised so many 'foreign' words that they’re not even aware of it. There are many native Englishes because it’s spoken all around the world thanks to colonisation.

What we should be working towards now is to recognise the beauty of these variants and use them in fiction—to create works of art instead of upholding this so-called hierarchy of languages.

Stolen from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Englishes
Malaysia is part of the Outer Circle.

There’s a difference between a heart language and one that you’re using solely for communication. We need to allow the diaspora—they need to allow themselves—to write in their heart language, the one that comes out of them in their comfort zone, even if it’s a creole that only their community gets. To be empowered to tell their stories in their languages—even if it isn’t “proper” English!

When I think about a decolonial future, I think about these voices in Malaysia who switch from English to Malay to Chinese to Tamil with ease, who bask in bilingual puns, and poke fun at their own cultures, yet are united because of their security in their national identity, no matter what language they speak.


Oh yeah, and that one token white guy because we can.
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Thursday, 20 December 2018

The Painted Hall Collection releases today!

If you've been following my instagram, facebook page or twitter, you'll kind of be aware that I've put together a new book. Well, not a new new book, but a boxset collection of the short stories in the Painted Hall series, which was formally just called the North series, because I'm unimaginative at titles like that. (If you're on my mailing list, check your email!)

AT ANY RATE!


Since I've put them all into a single book, plus a bonus short story (brand new! yay!), I decided to also make it a print book that you can purchase off Amazon.

If you want them as an ebook, you'll find all the links here!

Around the Web

The Painted Hall Collection has been reviewed by Leon Wing here.

Also, check out my interview with Laura on Unicorn Quester!

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Monday, 24 September 2018

A Still, Small Voice launches today!


On her eighteenth birthday, Hono is to be crowned Queen of the City of Winter but the Dragon disrupts the coronation ceremony with a peculiar cry: 
Listen. Listen. Listen!

There is one more task to free the City of Winter of all enchantment—and Hono must listen carefully for it.

A Still, Small Voice (North #4) is the final instalment of the North Short Story Series.

A STILL, SMALL VOICE releases today! Get your copy now!


Add to your GoodReads shelf:
A Still Small Voice (North, #4)
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Friday, 8 December 2017

#fridayflash: Beneath the Rumbling Earth excerpt... and a Cover Reveal!


Mica had always loved the Painted Hall. In the dark, cold year he spent in the castle, when everyone assumed he was the heir, the Painted Hall had been his only solace. It was the only place in the North where he could be with the sea and the creatures he loved, even if they were not real; even if they were just two-dimensional drawings on a cold wall, he was with them. In spirit. When his grandfather's spirit had been released and the Yuki-Onna disappeared, Mica feared the enchantment would wipe away all evidence of the sea from the Castle of Winter. He was glad it hadn’t.

Now, with Hono’s strange words lingering in his thoughts, he entered the hall cautiously. It was as he left it eleven months ago. There was the Kraken in the deep, tentacles outstretched. The whale swum ponderously at eye-level, dark and heavy. The deserted ship still rocked in the storm. In his father’s time, there had been people—his mother’s unlucky suitors—but they’d disappeared from the walls when the curse broke. He hoped they’d been returned to their lives and to their families, but no one knew for sure. Far above, the dolphins leapt, half out of the water, as if aiming for the sun. Mica’s hand hovered over the mural.

“You are here.”

Mica snatched his hand away. “Who is speaking?”

“Us. The monsters on your wall.”

Mica stared at the great whale before him, for no reason other than it was the easiest to look at. “Who said you are monsters?”

“Does not this realm consider us monsters from the deep?”

“This realm, maybe, but not mine. You are my friends.” He paused. “You have not spoken to me before. Who gave you the power of speech?”

A chuckle filled the air. “Did you not know that this castle is enchanted?”

“But Grandfather—”

“Is dead. He has left, yes. And who remains to keep us at bay?”

Who? Mica gulped. “Hono, Flame of the North.”

“Hah. She is too young. She has not grown into her powers.”

“The Steward, then.”

“The former prince is old and weak. His powers wane.”

“My mother will fight you.”

“Ah, Hana, Blossom of the Snow, the Ever Young. She has no more power here. The crown has passed from her hands.”

“Father—”

“Danis of the Sun and Sea has never ruled over us. He conquered the Yuki-Onna and broke her curse, yes. But he was not our enemy.”

Mica stared the whale in the eye. “What do you want of me?”

“Nothing. Nothing but our freedom.”

“How?”

“Come to us, son of the Sun and Snow. Fall into our embrace. Dive deep. You’ve heard your father’s stories, have you not? About how the paintings in this hall came alive for him?”

“Yes,” Mica replied cautiously.

“We give you the chance now to do the same. Come and join us. Dive into the deep waters you crave...”

---

I'm figuring out a new way to publish my stories now that Pronoun is going away. While I do that, here's the cover for Beneath the Rumbling Earth!


It's the third in the North Series and will be online sometime this month! Promise!
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