Chinese Tea with Caz Goodwin

I recently promised our readers that I would try to interview every contributor to the Love and Lust in Singapore anthology for this blog. Caz Goodwin is part of the editorial team, and my gracious first victim.

FT            Can you tell us a little about your background?

CG            I was born in Melbourne and have also lived in Brisbane, Auckland and Singapore.  I worked for many years as an HR manager in financial services, but writing is my passion.

FT            When/how did you start to write?

CG            I have always written, but when I moved to Singapore 4 years ago, I decided to throw away my suits, take a break from the corporate world and write a book.  My first book was published in 2008 and I’ve also had many short stories and poems published.

FT            Where do you find inspiration?

CG            Ideas for my stories come from all over the place: memories, dreams, books, newspapers, conversations and things that happen to me or people I know. I always carry a notebook with me to write down my ideas so I don’t forget them.

FT            Who are your favourite writers?

CG            My favourite writers are Morris Gleitzman, Wendy Orr, Roald Dahl and A A Milne.  I love reading children’s fiction – both classic and contemporary.  I also enjoy Sonya Hartnett’s writing- it’s so evocative.

FT            What is your favorite book?

CG            Jane Eyre.  My parents gave me a beautiful leather embossed volume as a child, and I still treasure it.

FT            Can you give us a little teaser about your stories in the anthology?

CG            The night was sultry… (That will do).

Interview by Femke Tewari

LOVE and WRITING ABOUT IT.

I’m five days away from my wedding day. I’m in love with a very wonderful woman. You’d think that writing about love would be easy but sometimes it’s not.

How much of what I write is influenced by the impending celebration? What will you, the reader, draw from my work knowing I’m just about to be married? How do we separate fact from fiction?

The last thing I want to do is embarrass my fiancée by writing about our life together, even if it’s coded as fiction. Not good for the love life. However, life, or experience, is a powerful muse. Much of what I write comes from happenings around me. But there is a difference between my public life and my private life.

One of the concerns that the three of us discuss while working on this anthology is the possibility of embarrassing our families. “Would my parents blush if they read this, knowing I’ve written it?” is a common question we ask. “Should I publish under my own name?” is another. I’m not sure how to resolve these queries.

Fiction is not fact but it often has its basis in reality. Fiction depends on some kind of relationship with reality if it is to be embraced by readers. We may read to disconnect with the real world, but we still enjoy connecting with characters that we can identify with.

Whether we write about Singapore or Mars, the words do reflect some portion of the writer but the words are not us. I think it’s Neil Gaiman who notes that in his experience, humour writers are a miserable bunch while horror writers seem to be very well balanced, happy and sane individuals – not mass murderers as some would suspect.

What we write does in some way reflect the reality of our lives but not necessarily directly. You cannot expect to “know” someone from their works of fiction. There is a distinction to be made between what I write and who I am. And nothing I write is about my fiancée – except the notion of love and romance.

Joe.

TECHNOLOGICAL LOVE

In the dim and distant past, getting three people to meet regularly could be difficult. Particularly if those three people travelled around. Add in family crises, illness and minor disasters. Meetings could be such a mission. Thank goodness we have Skype.

This month I’m out of Singapore. In fact,  I’m back in NZ, attending a wedding. By great fortune (or perhaps by the great taste of a certain woman), the wedding is my own. I say fortunate not just because I’m marrying the woman I love but because the wedding coincides with the making of this anthology. Love is in the air, as the cliché goes.

Technology can play such an important role in writing. Many authors use laptops or desktops for writing and editing. There are gazillions (ok, that may not be a literary word) of applications that can help writers out, from word processing through time management and into mind mapping.

Sometimes, all this IT can swamp the vision writers have. Gadgets can be such a distraction and like most boys, I still lust after shiny things that click, buzz and whirr. I know I find it very easy when researching on the internet to lose myself, looking at “just one more page”. I’m not sure if there is a “trick” to getting around this problem, other than disciplining myself to stick to the subject or adhering to a strict time limit. Easier said than done for most of us.

Nevertheless, technology does have an important part to play in the life of a writer. It really can make the writing life simpler and faster – up to a point. It can never replace our talent, creativity or drive.

Skype has been a real boon for us in the past six weeks, allowing us to work in real time while separated by thousands of kilometres. I’d love to hear of any other applications that writers enjoy using.

Joe.

Go Easy on the Writers!

Some of our contributors have written pretty erotic stuff. Great for you readers but is it easy for the writers? The answer is no, not really.

One of my stories is a little sexy – not sexy enough according to my critique group. They found I was teasing the reader too much and wanted more detailed description of the erotic scene. Right, I said, and thought about my parents. What are they going to think?

We Love and Lust writers like sexy, that’s why we’re doing this. But as an author, you do find yourself wondering about the future readers of your stories. Not the ones you don’t know, you’re OK with them, but the ones that are close to you. What is my husband going to think of this, or my kids, my kids’ friends, my IN-LAWS??

As a fiction writer, you basically print your mind and soul on a page. It’s like opening your head and heart, for everyone to see. That is why I have toyed with the idea of using a different name. Just so that people wouldn’t know it was me. But what good would it be to pour your heart out over a story, not get paid (all proceeds go to charity) AND not get the credit? Exactly.

Why then do we push our boundaries and write down such intimate moments? Because it’s part of life. Because readers like to read it. Because we enjoy writing it.

Now you know. Please go easy on the writers.

Femke Tewari

LESSONS LEARNED 1

For those brave souls who may choose to put together an anthology  at some time, here’s a few tips I’ve learned from our Love and Lust in Singapore anthology so far.

Make sure you’re working with a fantastic group of people. 

Then…

Create a document listing all the requirement for submissions. Simple things that you assume everyone knows.

1. A clear theme
2. Minimum and maximum word counts
3. Expected audience
4. Formatting. Requires title, author name, page numbering, line spacing, written in Word, font, font size

Themes, audience and word counts give writers some ideas on who they’re writing for, what to write about and how to pace it.

Formatting makes your job easier, meaning you’re going to be less antagonistic to the writer. PDFs are no good. Editors want to control the copy: print it double space or single; make corrections to spelling and grammar; change font for ease of reading on a screen or hard copy. Trust me, bad formatting can crush an editor’s day!

As for working with a great team, I’m really lucky. Caz and Femke are, quite simply, brilliant to work with.

Joe.

Lusty Diversity

After reading all the submissions for the Love and Lust anthology, the two things that amazed and thrilled me most were the quality of the writing, and the way every single story reflects a completely different aspect of Singapore. There are stories written from the viewpoint of middle class Singaporeans, expats, domestic helpers, tai-tais, tourists, immigrant Indians, foreign students, hookers, etc. Every single one of those brings out our beloved city-state in a distinctive way, which means that the book will become a gorgeous multi-faceted account of life here.

The diversity is not just in the stories, but also in the writers, who are a truly multicultural mix. To give our future readers an idea of our authors and their backgrounds, I will start a series of interviews, which I will post to this blog on a regular basis. In these conversations, I hope to persuade the writers to give the public a little glimpse of themselves and their stories, so stay tuned and I’ll wet your appetite…..

Femke Tewari

Publicity 1

I’m not going to blow my own trumpet. (Well, not yet). I do want to go on the record for this statement, though: the stories collected for this anthology are some of the best to come out of Singapore in a long time.

Having spent yesterday going through the submissions with Caz and Femke, I have to say that Singapore writers are extremely talented and creative and perhaps more than a little crazy.

Sure, our theme has been about love and lust, but the way each author has responded is awesome. Romance and steamy scenes have been mixed up with horror, noir, revenge, coffee, bedwetting, escapism and all sorts of other twists. If we were to publish today, we’d be short-listed for the Booker-Man. I kid you not.

So when are we going to publish? You’ll just have to stay tuned to find out.

Joe.

Deadlines

Wow, our deadline for submissions has come and gone. We have the stories. Now we have to sift through them and decide yea, nay or tweak. This is the hard part because we’ve received a lot of good short stories. A few just don’t fit with our vision but I’m happy to say that most do.

Any writers eagerly waiting to find out if you’ve been accepted, please be patient. We need to do justice to each piece by looking at style, theme and old-fashioned storytelling abilities. Femke, Carolyn and I are committed to creating the best anthology possible. As they say, good things take time.

Joe.

Cardinal Sins

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A guy brings out an anthology. He’s invited to talk about it at a writer’s festival. He starts off by reading a poem… then proceeds to explain it. Line by line. Explanations come after each line. Poem is not in the anthology.

The guy doesn’t prepare his talk. Rambles on and off topic. Answers questions without actually answering them. Reads another poem… and explains it while reading.

Then says “buy my book, or at least read it!” Discussion ends. People mill around to buy book, get it signed and ask a few more questions in the half hour before next session starts… except!… guy nowhere to be found.

“Where is he?” people ask. “Will he sign my book?”

The punchline? Not unless you’re three hundred metres down the road having a smoke.

Important reminder of the day: respect your fans and readers.

Dear fans and readers. We love you guys and will do all in our power to keep the faith with you.

Joe.

Becoming Angie and the Business of Books

Ever heard of Framing Angie? Yes, I’m talking about that annoying little lady who runs a picture framing business in Holland Village and whose face you see everywhere. Personally I’ve hated her since I arrived in Singapore. Once I saw her sitting in her store and felt like walking up to her and pulling her hair real hard, just like three-year-olds do when they don’t like someone.

But even though I don’t ever wish to see another of Angie’s smiles pasted on a wall or magazine page again, I have immense respect for her. Why? Because she is the Singapore Queen of self-marketing. She has made sure that everyone knows her, and judging from her regular full-page ads in many magazines that are found in doctor’s practices around the island, her business of providing ridiculously overpriced framing services is thriving. However…. today I found that Angie is in danger of losing her title to a young and pretty new marketing talent named Lee Jin Pyn.

On the first day of a Singapore’s Writers Festival symposium called “The Business of Books”, there was much talk about marketing, because, as you probably know, the sad fact is that whether or not you sell books or any other creative product depends for seventy to eighty percent on marketing.

Nowadays many writers think, oh well, if the publishers don’t recognize my talent, I’ll just self-publish (wasn’t J.K. Rowling rejected by 86 publishers before she was discovered?). Today I found out that it’s easy to self-publish, but it is very hard to self-sell. But it is still possible. You just need to be willing to put in a lot of money, time and effort. Jin Pyn told us all about her journey. She made sure press releases and articles on her children’s book The Elephant and the Tree found their way into about 7 or 8 different newspapers (I didn’t even know there were that many in Singapore), into over 15 different magazines, she went on 9 or so different radio and tv programs, and did talks in every single bookstore and school in the country. Ms. Lee also did some good work in the shape of performances for the disabled/ disadvantaged, and even posed as a cosmetics model for an environmentally friendly brand, because her book had a green theme (this lady-writer also happened to be drop-dead gorgeous). On top of all this, Jin Pyn produced a variety of merchandise, ranging from bags, to magnets and t-shirts, all with the book’s logo of course. She basically turned herself into every single publisher’s wet dream. And that’s how, apart from no doubt having written a wonderful book, she found herself an international agent, who in turn had her book accepted by a number of international publishers and The Elephant and the Tree will now be published in the US, and translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish.

The Love and Lust team has discussed the anthology’s marketing plan at length. We want to become the new marketing queens of Singapore (yes, even Joe). Expect to see us everywhere and be in your face, so you will become more annoyed with us than I ever was with Angie. We will Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, blog, and e-mail the crap out of you. But please understand why we do it. It’s for a good cause. And please don’t behave like three year-olds when you happen to run into us in a cafe or bookstore.

Femke Tewari