Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas 2007 and Happy New Year 2008 to all fashionista followers and aspiring writers in Taiwan and everywhere in the world.

I just returned from Singapore with a lot of good memories and a strong airconditioning-created cold, but still the trip was worth it.

The picture shows the Christmas mood at the classic Raffles Hotel. It may be 29 degrees outside, inside the Christmas mood is still present.

Heading for a Life of Crime

After completing the National Novel Writing Month competition, I've now found another contest to target my efforts at. Britain's Crime Writers Association holds a yearly event for unpublished writers known as the Debut Daggers.
The good thing about it is that you don't have to write the whole novel to enter the competition. All you need is the first chapter of your story, 3,000 words long, and that's about 8 or 9 pages as I learned during NaNoWriMo, and a 1,000-word synopsis. But you also have to pay about 1,000 NT dollars for the privilege of participating. However, that shouldn't be a barrier for any serious writer, since the prize include attendance at the awards ceremony next summer in London, 5,000 pounds or about 30,000 NT dollars, and a night for two at a London hotel.
It also needs mentioning that you don't have to be living in Britain or hold a UK passport to take part, writing in English is enough.
Publication of your novel - which of course might not have been completely written by the time of the awards' ceremony - is not included in the prizes, but the CWA web site says several previous winners and contenders have indeed moved on to published author status. And for those, there are other competitions altogether.
So I've decided on two story ideas to work into first chapters and synopses by the submission deadline of February 15, 2008. Even though my favorite writing genre is the international spy thriller, crime fiction also appeals to me, having read most Agatha Christie novels during my high-school period, and also favoring stories from P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Elizabeth George, and more modern offerings such as Michael Connelly.
While I am continue working on my Work In Progress, a spy thriller for publication in continental Europe, the two stories for the CWA Debut Daggers will also hold my attention over the next two months. A life of crime writing might be on the cards!

70,000

National Novel Writing Month is over.

You know, that's the U.S.-based competition where all you have to do is to write 50,000 words to 'win.' All the winner gets is the right to post the kind of logo you see on the left on his website or blog, like I'm doing right now.

Those 50,000 words don't even have to be a coherent story, and noone will find it on the Internet to read. Those were the main drawbacks when I considered competing more than a month ago.

In the end, I decided to go for it, and I started a novel, on November 1 precisely. After a while, it became great fun. Since unlike many other competitors, I don't have a fulltime job and I don't have children to take care of, I had lots of time to sit behind my laptop and write, write, write. At the end of the day, I would go to the NaNoWriMo website to get an official count on my new words total. This showed that each day, I was adding somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 words to the story.

The thing to do to advance to that 50,000 goal is not to look back, to refrain from editing and changing earlier chapters, and just continue forging ahead, damn the torpedoes. Of course I didn't want to write nonsense, and just reach 50,000 because that's the only rule. I wrote a relatively coherent thriller, a readable story.

I reached 50,000 on November 22, but instead of dropping everything, just like anyone might have done who only cared about getting a logo, I continued the story until the end, and I just managed to end it on the final day of the competition, November 30, reaching just over 70,000 words.

Is that a novel? Yes, because it is a long story. Is that a publishable novel? No, because books these days have to be around 100,000 words long. So what now? The obvious reply is to go back and remove the incoherent bits, the dangling story lines, the characters that appear but don't reappear, add details about technical processes and descriptions of the environment, make it logical.

The main thing I learned from NaNoWriMo is that I can write 70,000 words in one month if I maintain a certain rhythm, 2,000 to 4,000 words a day, while still taking the weekends off. If I continue this positive habit, I can really write publishable novels in two months, then do the necessary editing and work on second and third drafts before sending it off to publishers.

So, while many outsiders might reject NaNoWriMo as a competition about nothing with no use at all, I see it as a stepping stone to better writing habits. And yes, I hope to be back next year, in November, for my second NaNoWriMo.

For information about National Novel Writing Month and their other activities, visit www.nanowrimo.org.

Takashi Murakami, Rock Star

Takashi Murakami, artist, designer, painter, rock star.

He certainly looked like a rock star when he descended those stairs at the Taipei Arena last Friday night. For most of his two-hour performance, he had strobe lights focused on him, and they changed from blue to purple to green during the evening.

His audience numbered hundreds, if not thousands. Taiwanese love manga and Japanese cartoon culture, so for a star who uses the otaku culture as his base, it's not a surprise. Taiwanese also love Louis Vuitton and other Western luxury logo brands, so for a star whose LV bags are as famous as his art, it's not a surprise.

We didn't learn too much new about Murakami during his two-hour speech - which included translation from Japanese into Chinese by an interpreter, but not simultaneously. He talked about his views on money and art, already well known from his book, and gave the audience an overview of his career.

The most exciting parts came when he presented his cartoon movies, three in all. The first one was the famous Louis Vuitton ad, where a little girl waiting outside a Vuitton store is swallowed up by a monster creature and travels through a land full of logos to the sound of a catchy dance beat. The other shorts had a similar imagery, 'The Creatures from Planet 66' and Kaikai & Kiki, named after his company, and featuring watermelons and manure.

Instead of lots of Louis Vuitton, the omnipresent sponsors of the event were Mercedes, which had its new C-class bedecked with Murakami-style flowers outside and inside the arena, and Motorola, which had the artist mention his free phone.

The weirdest surprise was the present each member of the public received: a free ticket for the Murakami exhibition at the MOCA in ... Los Angeles, just ten hours flying from Taipei. Thank you, Takashi!

In the meantime, I think I'll stick closer to home, to the exhibition of plastic vinyl from Japan's Kaiyodo at the Museum of Fine Arts, right here in Taipei.