Authors Electric

It can’t be the New Year already! Looking back on last year’s post, which I swear I wrote about five minutes ago, I can’t help but be grateful that we are still here. Still here and still writing.     So much changes and so much stays the same. Last year I was taking a few hours out of a big family Christmas to cobble together, or rather, share my profound reflections on the meaning of life, with a cup of coffee in chilly London, this time I am in a holistic vegan cafe in Bali with a glass of coconut water, but the world in my head is much the same. As Neil Gaiman says ‘ wherever you go you take your self with you.’   Even for the most solipstic of writers, travel brings emotional as well as physical distance from the patterns of everyday life. In among the pleasures of new tastes, smells, conversations and experiences, it is a huge reminder of privilege.      A few days ago, as I sat under a thatched canopy, drinking Bintang and laughing with my f...

By the time I reached Bali on October 22nd, I was mentally and physically drained.  I had been travelling and been out of my home in Chicago for over two months, and although I was to deliver a keynote at the Asia Pacific Writers and Translators Annual Conference in two days, I hadn’t written anything at all in months. My keynote, titled Contests and Prizes: The Advantage of the (Global) Asian Writer , was becoming impossible to write. I felt the imposter syndrome growing toxic in my brain. Despite being surrounded by the beauty of Bali, I was unable to relax. There were a Ganesha at every turn – the APWT conference was hosted by the   Ganesha University of Education  and there was a beautiful Ganesha right outside my hotel door – but it seemed clear that the God of Scribes and Beginnings was concerned with weightier matters than my silly writerly angst. The Asia Pacific Writers and Translators community has been in existence for 10 years now, and this was ...

It’s easy to forget how storytelling in our own culture tends to obey particular sets of rules, which we take for granted. There’s usually a cause and effect story arc, and on the whole good triumphs over evil. Characters are explained for the benefit of those in the audience/readership who may not have the same background, and you’re left with a sense of completion, which is the culmination of a plot with a beginning, a middle and a conventional ending. That’s not the way it is everywhere, though!             I’ve recently returned from a holiday in Indonesia, part of which was spent on Bali. We were told we were going to see some traditional dancing, but this turned out to be a sort of play with an authentic gamelan band. Sadly, the Balinese youth of today are more interested in rock music, and it’s reckoned that this event will die out in five years as the performers become too elderly to continue. I reproduce below the han...