Book Marks: MYWritersFest2016, Robert Gottlieb, And Hard-Case Comics

"...depending on your commitment to your craft, she can be a miraculous guiding angel or a badgering nightmare." Meet Gina Yap Lai Yoong, the writer whisperer. based on my Twitter feed, I'm leaning a little towards "nightmare".

Also from Eksentrika: Tina Isaacs, "the go-getter of Malaysia’s literary scene". Gina and Tina are the founders of the Malaysian Writers' Society, who's organising a bunch of events this October for the MYWritersFest 2016 (it's late for this, I know).

The Fest kicked off on 01 October at Kedai Fixi at Jaya Shopping Centre - perhaps the last event the venue hosted before moving to new digs somewhere in Kuala Lumpur proper.


Also:

• Despite his dislike of writing, editor Robert Gottlieb released a memoir, Avid Reader. Singapore's Straits Times ran a piece from The New York Times about him.
• "...it almost feels as though we're entering into a fresh golden age of comics doing the job they were intended to – corrupting the innocent minds of young people." Crime fiction publisher Hard Case Crime and Titan Comics are coming up with a line of new comics "promising the 'gritty, sexy, violent' world of noir movies and novels".
• Is the Nobel Committee blackballing American authors, Malcolm Jones asks in The Daily beast. He makes a good case that it is, though it's hard to figure out why - a Eurocentric bent, perhaps? "The list of those who failed to win includes Tolstoy, Twain, Woolf, Borges, Proust, Nabokov, Chekhov, Joyce, Waugh, Greene, Welty, Auden, Updike, Stoppard, Pynchon, and Roth. That’s almost enough to make you want to lose."
  
  Well, guess what: 2016's Nobel Prize for literature went to an American: Bob Dylan.
• In Phys.org: How oral cultures memorise so much information. Are sites such as Stonehenge part of the ancient world's cloud storage?
• Here are some things authors need to stop doing on social media immediately, according to Digital Book World.