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| Photo by Nicole Kong |
Hello! This blog is overdue for an update, and I have quite a few things to share. Actually, there are a couple of extra big news items and some pretty awesome books I want to tell you about, so I'm going to spread them over a few posts.
First: life. I still like Hong Kong. I love being married. My writing is taking on a life of its own. There are now three writing groups in my life: Tuesday meet-ups at Holly Brown for writing-with-company, once a month reading-wine-food salons, and most recently a critique-and-polish group that is helping me get through serious revisions of my post-apocalyptic series-in-progress. I'm so grateful to live in a city with so much writing energy all over the place.
Second: links. Recently I had a chance to participate in a podcast interview on Snipits of Time called Creative Habits. It's about my writing habits and inspirations and includes the story of how I got the idea for SEABOUND. Next up is the recap of the recent Women in Publishing Society event of the year: the IMPRINT Launch. The event demonstrated the literary energy that seems to be gathering steam around Hong Kong. We had the added pleasure of launching the novel that won the inaugural Saphira Prize: Ghost Cave: a novel of Sarawak by Elsie Sze. I helped manage the publication of this novel and formatted the ebook (part of why I haven't had time for blogging), and it was exciting to celebrate its official release. I had the opportunity to interview the lovely author when she came to Hong Kong, and you can watch the video here.
Third: Literary Death Match! The third episode of Literary Death Match in Hong Kong took place a few weeks ago, and I was one of the competitors! I read a true story about my family in Arizona and a certain pet boa constrictor. It was lots of fun, and the judges said some really nice things. The highlight was when the one and only Nury Vittachi looked straight at me and said, "Shannon, you're a real writer." In the final round, we played a game where we had to guess the famous novel based on one-star Amazon reviews. My husband and I teamed up to claim the victory! Here's the recap from the LDM blog.
In my next post there will be some exciting stuff about the expat women anthology, and then I'll post my big news!
What are you guys excited about lately? Any reports of growing literary enthusiasm in your town?
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of support groups. I am so thankful for my writing group in Shenzhen. I have also joined the Women in Publishing group in HK and the Hong Kong Writers Circle. Groups like these are essential to writers. We just had a poetry workshop yesterday and I wrote a couple of decent poems when I haven't written a poem in probably 7 years. Glad you are finding encouragement and support in your groups too.
ReplyDelete~ Amanda R.
www.twoamericansinchina.com