Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Bookspotting and Boating


This weekend I spent the day on a junk boat near Turtle Cove, the same spot where my friends and I saw a whale shark at the beginning of the summer. No sea creatures appeared this time, so we spent the whole time swimming, chatting and barbecuing on the boat. One of my friends was reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking on the roof deck. Earlier in the week, I spotted someone reading The Hunger Games, and just yesterday a woman on the train was deeply immersed in Three Cups of Tea. At my writers' group last night, I got to see a freshly printed copy of a novel one of our writers is launching on October 27th. More on that later. I spotted two Kindles this week, one with a keyboard and one without. A travel guide, three textbooks, and four Chinese books rounded out my bookspotting for the week.

National Novel Writing Month starts in two weeks. I got a killer idea for a story when our junk passed a big cruise ship in Victoria Harbour on Saturday. It's unlike anything I've written so far, but I've been taking notes and researching like crazy to get ready to start writing. Are you participating in NaNo this year? Where do you get your inspiration and ideas? If you're based in Hong Kong, we'll be kicking off Nano with an afternoon of writing at Holly Brown in Central on Saturday the 3rd, probably followed by dinner. Let me know if you want to join us!

4 comments:

  1. I was looking forward to your bookspotting post this week just so I could report that in an elevator today I spotted a woman with a hardcover book, "100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories." And I think this is the first time I had read every title you mentioned in your blog post. Win-win!

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  2. Great post! I was just telling my kids your shark story again the other night; it's one of their favorites! Just before I read your post, I saw that HKWiPS is going to have a junk trip. It looks like so much fun. Meeting for NaNo at Holly Brown will be wonderful. I'm very curious to read more about your new idea! I'm heading out of town tomorrow, so hope to report on books I've spotted on my trip. Like your mom, it's something I think about during my week, but I spend way too much time in the car. :(

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  3. +JMJ+

    I'm feeling very inspired to participate in NaNoWriMo this year! I even have an idea. ;-)

    Yesterday, I was on the bus next to a man who had The Idiot by Fyodor Dotoyevsky on his iPhone. And after I arrived at the office, a colleague showed off his trusty Kindle and encouraged me to get one of my own. I can't remember what his current read was, though.

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  4. I was in Korea this week and although I saw a great number of books, I have no idea what they were. I stopped by a bookstore at the airport and the Englsh section was predictable: "Room", various Grisham, rom-coms galore, but come to think of it no "Fifty" Wonder if it is banned in Korea? Today at our pool here in HK, which is shared with the Regency Hyatt hotel, a hotel guest (You can always tell them, they are the ones in the white robes and slippers) was reading what looked like "Strunpel Ur Talgeheid". It wasn't German, that much I know as I speak passable German, but maybe some Scandic language?

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