The Raven Silvers blog

Guess what we found?

That’s right, Happiness at the End of the World is available in stores now!

So far it’s only been spotted at the main Kinokuniya store at Takashimaya, but we expect that the books will hit other Kino stores and other bookstores soon. :D

You can find it here in Kino:

With GST it’s S$19.26, but you can get it for S$18 (inclusive of shipping) at the publisher’s website!

Aaand what is Happiness at the End of the World about? It’s a collection of eight sci-fi short stories centering around the theme of, well, happiness at the end of the world.

There are all sorts of genres in the book, ranging from romance to crime to fantasy. Everyone has their favorite, so go pick up your copy and find yours ;)

All In! Young Writers' Seminar: Writing and the New Media

The All In! Young Writers’ Seminar is the first seminar-conference I’ve heard about that specifically targets post-secondary students from JCs, polys, and universities. I’d go, but I have exams that week so unfortunately I can’t ):

Quick details:

All In! Young Writers’ Seminar: Writing and the New Media
Venue: The Arts House (1 Old Parliament Lane)
Date: 20 Feb 2010, Sat
Time: 9.30am to 6pm
Admission is free

It’s organised by the National Book Development Council, the Arts House and the NUS Literary Society, with NUS being the National University of Singapore.

Here’s a rundown of what the gist of the seminar is all about:

This seminar will provide an insight into:

How the Internet and web technologies have evolved and are evolving

How has the traditional publishing value chain been affected by IT and the new media

Writing in the larger context of Digital Media

How to keep up to date with new developments

Future trends like e-books, e-readers, interactive and multimedia content

Responsible blogging

Things like comics and online journalism will also be covered during the session, so go forth and register! The flyer with the registration info can be found here.

Tally-Ho: The Great Jungle Adventure

Tally-Ho is a semi-regular column of my adventures with the Adventure Crew (and sometimes other people). We figured that Singapore can’t be all that boring, and are determined to show other folks how fun Singapore can be… if you know where to look.

Saturdays are usually my days to recover from the previous school week, which means sleeping in.

But not two Saturdays ago. Instead of experiencing the simple joy of unconsciousness, I found myself climbing a mountain hill and attempting to save a prince(ss) from the dragon keep up with everyone else.

Along for the hike up Bukit Timah Hill were most of the Adventure Crew: Joelyn Alexandra, Avariel and Seriously Sarah. Mintea joined us later, for Part 2 of the adventure.

Joelyn, Avariel, Sarah

So it was early on a Saturday morning that I found myself climbing up Bukit Timah Hill, learning about local flora and fuana, running away from butterflies, and pretending that I was an explorer in a never-before-discovered jungle. (Read more)

24seven Bloggers Hat-Py Party

I’m not exactly big on celebrating new years, so technically I wasn’t really celebrating New Year’s Eve when I went to the Blogger’s Hat-py Party at the Singapore Art Museum a few days ago ;)

An aside: Maybe it’s because I’ve been playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed II lately, but when we went into SAM — which is housed in a colonial-era convent school that had monks and everything — my mind went something like this:

Look for the building’s highest point, which is where the viewpoint would be located: a mini-dome with a cross
Look for possible feather and glyph locations on the way: rooftop, around the cross
Identify the fastest routes for Ezio to make it up to possible feather and glyph locations

I did actually figure out all of that, and before long I was looking out for bales of hay to jump into in case enemy guards spotted me. I think I’m experiencing the bleeding effect! /aside

At any rate, I went with my minions cronies usual gang of suspects, but with new additions! I’d met Lysistarielle (of Tiramisue.com) before at STGCC — some of you might remember her as Poison Ivy. But Arrch I’d never met before, so if you’re reading this, hi Arrch! :D And of course the wonderful Seriously Sarah, Joelyn Alexandra and Avariel were along for the fun.

Arrch, Lysistarielle, Sarah, Joelyn, and Avariel

The theme: hats! Everyone had to wear a hat or headgear of some kind, hence the rather amusing name of the party. (Arrch had a Scribblenauts hat, which makes him a ton of awesome.) I wore a Mario hat, mainly because I could. Hahaha.

And what if you didn’t have a hat? 24seven.sg had a solution to that… (Read more)

Hat-py Party preview!

P1000462

Aheh. Full post to come soon!

Nanowrimo Singapore TGIO

This post comes a little late, but I got caught up with school! But here it is.

Last Saturday was Nanowrimo Singapore’s Thank Goodness It’s Over party!

We had a sign and everything!

We had catering, so Earshot cafe was mostly ours for the afternoon :D But yess.

Sign-in area: stickers, Vicious the Ninja Bunny, sign-in sheet, assorted condiments

So I arrived early and set up for the arrival, then Sarah of Seriously Sarah arrived with more stuff! Awesome stuff of the prizey sort.

Have a funny story: she came into the cafe with her bags and no cake. I thought the cake had met with some sort of mishap, and I experienced a moment of panic. All I could think of was “THE CAKE WAS A LIE!”.

It turns out the (extremely large and heavy) cake was in the car. She went back to get it. And this was right after I’d been joking with a Wrimo about the cake not being a lie.

More and more Wrimos started arriving so we could really get the party started.

Wrimos galore

There were quiz questions, and we gave out all sorts of prizes. There were prizes for Highest Wordcount (200,000+ words – amazing), Best Last Line, Earliest New Wrimo of 2009, among others.

It was all rather fun, even from the ML side of things. After all the prizes and quizzes, there was cake! :D

The cake isn't a lie

It was an awesome cake. The ‘50′ was, of course, for Nanowrimo’s 50,000-word goal. The coins were chocolate Euros, which was amusing because I didn’t even know they made chocolate coins in Euros.

The yellow stuff next to the coins are meant to be gold bars, I think. They were made out of white chocolate colored yellow. Everybody was wondering what the heck they were, until someone cut them up into little cubes and passed it around. They were quite nice, even if the color was a bit off-putting.

The cake in all its yummy glory!

Cake cutting

After the cake, we had the refreshments catered by the Arts House: muffins (with chocolate cores), assorted mini-cakes, puffs, and beverages. Lots of sugar meant a lot of interesting conversations were had :D

While we ate some of us did readings! Mostly from Happiness At The End of The World, a collection of short stories that I’m in ($18 from the publisher, hinthintnudgenudge) but also from our Nanovels. I read the Phail Whale bits from my Nanovel :D

Sarah Coldheart reading

It was good. I had some extremely entertaining conversations, cake, and other sugary baked goods. And as we all know, cake and assorted sugary baked goods are always good.

Happy MLs are happy

Til next year! :D

Nanowrimo Validator Problem

If it’s Nov 30 in wherever you are, you might notice that you can’t validate your wordcount because the site thinks that Nov is over.

Don’t panic!

It’s a site bug that was just discovered by the folks in Australia and NZ. HQ is working on fixing it.

Currently, the only workaround is to change your timezone to something further back.

More updates as we get them.

Nanowrimo: Singapore Write-Ins

We’ll be at The Arts House again!

This week
Dates: 21 Nov (Sat) and 22 Nov (Sun)
Venue: Earshot Cafe, The Arts House, 1 Old Parliament Lane
Time: 2pm to 4pm

Bring your brolly! It’s been raining like mad these past few days, so hopefully we wouldn’t be flooded in.

Here’s a map from City Hall mrt station:

View Larger Map

[Nanowrimo] Preview: Phail Whales – Part 2

Here’s the continuation of the preview from yesterday. The first part can be found here.

Again: don’t own Twitter or any of its trademarks, won’t be making money off the novel, and Fail Whales are adorable.

Preview under the jump.

[Nanowrimo] Preview: Phail Whales – Part 1

I’m doing Nanowrimo, and I promised a few people I’d put up a preview of my favorite part so far.

‘Informata’ is based on the premise that things on the Internet exist in a dimension that certain people can access and maintain, so it was a natural choice that the Fail Whales of Twitter fame should make an appearance.

Plus they are so ridiculously cute.

Disclaimer: I don’t own, and don’t claim to own, any of Twitter’s trademarks. The Fail Whale belongs to Twitter. I’m not making any money off Informata, because I fully intend to bury it in my hard drive forever after November.

That being said, have Part 1 of a preview! Click through for the preview.

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