Growing Up In a Book

I have just heard from my publisher in Singapore that the book version of Growing up in Trengganu is now back from the printers and will probably be in the shops in a couple of weeks.

The book has been my top secret project this year, and even my better half Kak Teh only knew about it when the editing work was nearly done. My regular readers will know that Growing Up has been a regular and eccentric feature in my blog and if numbers are to be believed, the series has gone through many hundred thousand parts. But fear not, it is not coming out in many volumes but in just one small collection with cover design by a talented lady in Ireland, published by a small but reputable (and no doubt talented) publishing house in Singapore, and a cartoon of me on the writer's bio page was drawn by a talented but no small cartoonist called Lat; and it is even embellished with photographs sent in by readers from as far away as New York and Canada. I am, needless to say, over the moon.

The idea of Growing Up in Trengganu being snuggled between covers was one that never really seriously crossed my mind, though I did — once or twice, in moments of fanciful thought — toy with publishing it myself. And then Monsoon books came in with an email asking if there's a book there: and of course there was, and so it now is.

I'd like to thank you all, my readers, for having been with me all along, and mostly for your contributions and encouragement. Your coming here was (is) indeed a boost. Writing Growing Up was an experience, and it has opened for me many facets of human life: life in Trengganu then and now, the solitary writer's life of endless cups of tea and shortbread and mind-stretching quests for words, and, to no small extent, my readers' own lives, some hilarious, some sad. You will read about all that in my introduction to the book.

For the book I have re-written, re-honed and expanded or contracted parts of the original Growing Ups, and I have also, of course, corrected not a few solecisms and inappropriate acts. There is also a guide for the perplexed in the form of a short vocabulary of Trengganuspeak in the back of the book, so fear not. I hope you will all go out and buy a copy or three, and recommend it to your teh tarik man, workmates, mother-in-law and the man/woman you exchange glances with at the traffic light. It will, if anything, keep an impoverished author in shortbread.

Thank you blogger.com for hosting the first draft of the book, and thank you Monsoon Books!

For more, go here:
* Bibliobibuli
* Choc-a-Blog
* Blooking Central
* MPH