Authors Electric

Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. Thus intones the website mindfulness.org . Google the word mindfulness and you’ll find a world of coaches and retreats, a series of TED Talks and even The Mindfulness App . It all sounds pretty goofy to me. I’m here, aren’t I? What more do you want from me? But lately I’ve been thinking about how much my life has changed over the past 7 years. How much I’ve changed. Was it quitting my law practice or starting to write that did the trick? Somewhere, somehow, along the line, mindfulness entered my life. hibernation Marcel Proust. Image source: https://www.poetrychangeslives.com/ways-of-writing/ In the winter, I spend most of my time in bed. Some of that is sleep but most of it is reading and writing. I like to write with my papers and books and photographs spread out around me, the cat curled ...

Eighteen months, I gave a master class on novel writing at the International Writers’ Collective. Because my debut novel is set in Shanghai 1937, we spent a little time talking about the historical research that went into The Dancing Girl and the Turtle . Out of fear of disappearing into the research rabbit hole, I decided to write the story first and figure out the facts later. That seemed to make a lot of people in the audience happy. I think I made writing historical fiction sound easy. Did I mention all the rewriting? a slow learner I made some major historical mistakes in that first draft of The Dancing Girl and the Turtle . They ranged from setting my novel during the wrong Sino-Japanese War to misusing the term for those body-hugging dresses worn in 1930s Shanghai. Fixing all those gaffes required a full-on, page 1 rewrite. In fact, if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that 90% of what I wrote for The Dancing Girl and the Turtle , I threw away. And what was l...

By the time you read this blog post, my husband and I will have embarked on our round-the-world journey. Oddly enough, China is not one of our destinations. We're looking for the unknown, something well outside our comfort zone. Since maps and mapping are on my mind right now, this seems like the perfect opportunity to republish a post that appeared on my blog Shanghai Noir . My mind map of Shanghai. Photo credit: Karen Kao This is the map into my interlocking novels, The Shanghai Quartet . It’s a bulletin board my husband made for me, 6 feet wide and 4 feet tall. The backdrop is a map of modern Shanghai, enlarged many times over, onto which I’ve pasted the street names in use when this was Old Shanghai. Onto that map, I’ve tacked on Stuff: photos, postcards, lanyards and clippings. Welcome to my Shanghai. Sailors and Strumpets Let’s start in the northeastern quadrant of the city, the port of entry for most newcomers to Old Shanghai. This was (and still...

I like to wander. To travel without any clear sense of a destination. I call myself a wanderer in my new Instagram account. The photos there all come from a recent trip to Germany. Hence the title of this blog post. Originally coined in German during the 19th century, wanderlust means an urge, an impulse, a longing to travel. Maybe this craze for the new is a Shanghainese trait. As Lynn Pan documents in Shanghai Style , early 20th century Shanghai was crazy about anything new, be it film or fashion, chandeliers or flush toilets. When I wander, I try to go back in time or place, go deep, understand. Feed my imagination. So here’s an account of our travel through Germany and how it’s about to affect my writing. Moving Pictures We went to Germany because of two major art events: documenta 14 in Kassel and the Skulptur Projekt in Münster. The former takes place every 5 years; the latter only once in a decade. So I mapped out a route that would take us to both. An...