Expat Women in Asia Anthology: DEADLINE EXTENDED

Happy New Year! I wanted to let everyone know that the deadline for submissions to the Expat Women in Asia anthology has been extended to the 31st of March. We've received a lot of great submissions so far, but with so many people traveling during the Lunar New Year we'd like to give everyone a little more time to send in their work. Here are the details:

Expat Women in Asia: Call for Submissions

Editor Shannon Young is seeking contributions from expatriate women in East Asia for a new anthology from Signal 8 Press in Hong Kong. This collection will feature the writing of women who are currently expatriates or who previously lived in an East Asian country. For the purposes of this anthology, we construe East Asia to include Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and the ASEAN countries. All submissions should be creative non-fiction and/or travel memoir pieces that speak to the expat experience in modern East Asia. Potential topics include travel, work, relationships, gender roles, safety, family, and repatriation. We are looking for stories with a strong and personal narrative arc, not just travel guides or descriptions of the places you’ve lived. We hope to make this anthology as inclusive as possible, as well, and we welcome submissions from women from different parts of the world.

Contributions should be between approximately 2000 and 5000 words in length. Each writer will receive two copies of the completed anthology and a percentage of the royalties to be determined by the final number of contributors. Please send all submissions, with a brief paragraph about the author, to shannon [at] typhoon-media [dot] com. Submissions should be in Microsoft Word, .doc or .docx format, and in a standard font. The deadline for submissions is 31 March 2013. This title will be released in paperback and e-book formats in the spring of 2014.

Bookspotting and Shipspotting

MV Explorer at Ocean Terminal

The bookspotting was a bit sparse this week as I spent most of my commute with my nose buried in A Memory of Light, the long-awaited final installment in the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. I've been reading the series since I was 13, and the ending was quite moving. If you spotted me surreptitiously crying into a 909-page hardback book on the train this week, that's what was going on. I did spot a woman carrying an enormous law textbook through Central Station, and I saw a child on the train reading an English middle-grade book. There was also a man walking toward the ferry piers with an English book that had a bright yellow cover.

After work this afternoon I went down to TST to take a peek at the MV Explorer, the cruise vessel that hosts Semester at Sea and is currently carrying a group of entrepreneurs around the world. It is my newest ambition (along with one day being cool enough to speak at a TED event) to go on an Enrichment Voyage like Doug Mack, who was recently the travel-writer-in-residence aboard the Explorer. 

As some of you know, I am currently writing a book set on a post-apocalyptic cruise ship, so I've been taking every opportunity to go down to Ocean Terminal and spy on the big ships in the name of research (and inspiration). The MV Explorer's Open Ship event today was during my working hours, so I had to make do with the views of the ship from the harbor, terminal, and Star Ferry. I'm planning to do more thorough research aboard the Star Pisces, which does daily overnight cruises from Hong Kong.

Signal 8 Press $1.99 Sale

Just wanted to let you all know about a special $1.99 e-book sale that Signal 8 Press is holding this month. Full disclosure: I do editing work for Signal 8 Press, and it is the publisher of the Expat Women in East Asia anthology for which I have been gathering submissions over the last few months. Signal 8 Press is based in Hong Kong and specializes in books with some connection to the Asia-Pacific region, so I thought this would be relevant to the readers of A Kindle in Hong Kong.

Of these titles, I had some hand in proofreading or otherwise helping with River Dragon Sky, Watering Heaven, and Handover. I read Dispatches from the Peninsula before my affiliation with Signal 8 began, and you can find my review here. I've also written reviews of two novels by Hong Kong writer Xu Xi, who is the author of Access.

The Signal 8 book I am most excited about is The Gunners of Shenyang, a memoir which officially comes out in May. I had greater editorial input in this book, and I can promise you it's worth reading. It's like a Chinese version of the movie Three Idiots set at a university during Mao's Great Leap Forward. It's college-boy toilet humor meets desperate political resistance during some of China's darkest days.

Bookspotting and Focusing

This week's bookspotting was a little sparse. A young man on the train was reading a book called Be the Miracle. I spotted one of my students reading a Chinese kids' version of Sherlock Holmes (the title was in English). Yesterday I either saw two different women on two different trains reading Kindles, or I was inadvertently following the same woman. This morning a woman in Mong Kok station had a thick paperback bound in the brown paper kids use to cover their textbooks, but I don't know what language she was reading. What are you reading? What are people reading around you?

The month of January is notoriously quiet for me at work. My students study for and then take their exams, and my classes are temporarily suspended. I spend a fair bit of time planning my lessons and printing resources for the next few months, but I also end up with a reasonable amount of down time at the office. During that time, I can either focus or I can faff around on the Internet. This year, there was very little faffing. In addition to finishing the second draft of my Nanowrimo book and planning my lessons through March, I wrote a trio of articles for a new website about long distance dating, a group of contest submissions, a million wedding-related emails, and one long-shot pitch for a large publication. I also completed this interview for the ExpatFocus website about my expat experience. (There are several interviews with Hong Kong bloggers on the site at the moment, and it's well worth checking it out.) I was on such a roll that yesterday I wrote the first 2,000 words of the sequel to my Nano novel. It's amazing what a difference it makes when I start out the month focused on one thing.

What do you do to help yourself focus on a project?

SHARK'S FIN AND SICHUAN PEPPER by Fuchsia Dunlop

THE GIST:

Stories of eating and cooking from an authentic Chinese food connoisseur.

THE VERDICT:

Subtitled A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, British author Fuchsia Dunlop's memoir details her lifelong love affair with Chinese food. She first lived in China in the early 90s, where she found herself becoming so obsessed with the local cuisine that she enrolled as the only foreigner in a Sichuanese cooking school. She went on to write several cookbooks (in English) exploring the complexities and joys of Chinese food. The memoir details her evolution as a cooking student and her career as an ambassador for Chinese food in the West and (of course) includes recipes.

Dunlop does not shy away from some of the more unusual ingredients and nose-to-tail eating practices of Chinese cuisine, but she also doesn't make a point of emphasizing dishes that Westerners might consider "gross". She writes candidly about the tendency of travel writers to focus on innards and chicken's feet and dog when Chinese food culture is much more intricate, varied and sophisticated than a sensationalist article can portray. She writes eloquently about the intimate connection between the food and its source in traditional Chinese cooking, a connection that has largely been lost in Western kitchens.

The thing that sets this memoir apart from other odes to food is that Dunlop approaches her subject as both an academic and a fanatic. She describes each dish and cooking practice in meticulous detail, but she also reveals her unbridled passion for eating, savoring, smelling and otherwise enjoying Chinese food. I particularly enjoyed Dunlop's stories of her friendships with various Chinese cooks and foodies. She was able to build entire relationships around memorable meals thanks to the intensity of their shared passions. This is a thorough account of her life's work and, as a true expert, she acknowledges how much more there is to learn about Chinese food.
THE LINK:

Fuchsia Dunlop's website has many food-related blog posts and information about her cookbooks.

THE COST:

I purchased the paperback version at Dunlop's HK Literary Festival workshop. The e-book edition apparently doesn't exist, which is, frankly, inexcusable (on the part of the publisher) for a book that came out less than 5 years ago.

THE QUESTION:

What's your favorite Chinese food dish? Would you describe your relationship with food as intensely passionate? How does food affect the way you relate to people?

Bookspotting and Finishing

Bookspotting is back this week with a George RR Martin sighting on the MTR. The battered paperback had a red cover, so I believe that means it was A Feast for Crows. I also spotted a schoolboy reading Rick Riordan's Son of Neptune on the train. In a coffee shop this weekend, two women were poring over notepads and a book about getting out of debt. A young man nearby was reading Eating Smoke, Chris Thrall's memoir of drug addiction and triads in 90s Hong Kong. On my way home from work today, a man walking in front of me was carrying Justin Cronin's The Twelve. My friends are getting into the whole bookspotting thing, too. One reported that she just finished reading First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung and she's about to start The Happiness Project. My fiance is listening to The Stand by Stephen King on his iPhone. I spotted two Hong Kong guidebooks this week, one in English and one in Chinese.

I've spent a fair bit of time haunting bookstores over the past few weeks waiting to get my copy of A Memory of Light, the final installment in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. The is a series of hefty epic fantasy novels that I've been reading since my dad introduced them to me in junior high. Think the entire Harry Potter series if all the books were as long as #7. Then multiply it by two. The 14th book came out two weeks ago, but the only two bookstores that had it on release day were sold out by the time I got there. I'm looking forward to finally finishing this journey that has, among other things, made it through the death of its original author (for whom I am still in mourning).

Speaking of finishing things, today I completed the second draft of the novel I wrote during National Novel Writing Month. I'm getting ready to send it off to beta readers and then start the second book in what I hope will be a 3-book series. I'm feeling rather optimistic today...

What are people reading in your town this week? Have you finished any big projects recently?

Forgot to mention that I also have a guest post about Marina Bay in Singapore over at Pens on a World Map.

Expat Women in Asia: Call for Submissions - Deadline: 28 Feb

This is a reminder that the deadline for the anthology I'm editing for Signal 8 Press is approaching. You have six weeks to send me your stories of modern expat life in East Asia. See the call for submissions below for the full details, and feel free to email me with any questions.

Expat Women in Asia: Call for Submissions

Editor Shannon Young is seeking contributions from expatriate women in East Asia for a new anthology from Signal 8 Press in Hong Kong. This collection will feature the writing of women who are currently expatriates or who previously lived in an East Asian country. For the purposes of this anthology, we construe East Asia to include Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and the ASEAN countries. All submissions should be creative non-fiction and/or travel memoir pieces that speak to the expat experience in modern East Asia. Potential topics include travel, work, relationships, gender roles, safety, family, and repatriation. We are looking for stories with a strong and personal narrative arc, not just travel guides or descriptions of the places you’ve lived. We hope to make this anthology as inclusive as possible, as well, and we welcome submissions from women from different parts of the world.

Contributions should be between approximately 2000 and 5000 words in length. Each writer will receive two copies of the completed anthology and a percentage of the royalties to be determined by the final number of contributors. Please send all submissions, with a brief paragraph about the author, to shannon [at] typhoon-media [dot] com. Submissions should be in Microsoft Word, .doc or .docx format, and in a standard font. The deadline for submissions is 28 February 2013. This title will be released in paperback and e-book formats in the spring of 2014.