I am a 63 year old New Zealander who has spent most of my life in academic writing but now turned to fiction. Like my main character in the project likely to figure here, I'm a genre-bender not a gender-bender. I don't know how to classify my novel, New Little Princess: it's a science fiction-future-fantasy (in the contrary-to-fact sense, not dungeons-and-dragons sense) -political/intelligence drama-music/entertainment/internet-young adult/new adult-environmental-etc.etc. Anyway, like you, I like to write and I like to learn more about writing. So that is why I am here.
Pull up a keyboard and start tapping away in the Critiques section. May as well let the rest of your 20-posts requirement be constructive. I am in Character Chatroom and Lounge, as well as Creative Writing sections. Occasionally I post a Workshop piece. See you around the place!
What academic areas you have been inhabiting? (Always good to know if we have experts to exploit, common interests or people with inside knowledge of some area.)
Thank you, Some Guy. I put my main character in Character Chatroom today. Alan, I was teaching in Australasian and Asian Universities in 1987-1999 and published then. I taught and wrote in Social Science: Law, Public and Commercial Management, International Business, International Area Studies, Strategic Management.
Ok... Now we know where to exploit you. About law.... National or international areas or both? (With connection to international business I suppose there must have been some level of international law included.) What are international area studies?
I know enough law to prevent getting exploited . . . ! I have read international law and could have taught it but never did. I taught and wrote about the common law systems mostly, one country's or comparatively. International area studies was new when I got into it for the Korea University of International Studies. It means taking a given area (examples: East Asia, Central Africa, Eastern Europe or North America) and studying the interaction of the social systems there: political, economic, anthropological, sociological, historical, legal, etc. I did not continue that after I finished my Visiting Lectureship there to design their M.A.I.R. course. and they did it badly (18 papers in one year all examined at the end of the year!). At my next post, I was needed to do other things mostly about international business. International law is the law of States although it is moving into criminal law (e.g. crimes against humanity, fundamental human rights). There is no real international law of business: that is fundamentally the law of arbitration, marine law or conflict of laws to enforce foreign court decisions or sue in foreign courts.
Cheers, Maverick! Which story do you mean: my life story which seems the subject of this thread or the novel briefly mentioned in my initial post? If it's my life story, I'm not writing that, just answering readers' questions. As a writer, how can one logically write a story and still, at the end, have no idea what the ending is? Bad writing, isn't it? So, I'll only consider writing my life story posthumously. In a forum used to 1500 word snippets, I doubt you'll get to see much of my novel, which I calculate to be about 600 Microsoft Word pages (400 already in Word, 200 in notebooks being entered into the manuscript in Word as a final draft). However, if you're quite keen, I am happy to send the manuscript, or as many pages as you want to read of it, to you by e-mail.
Huh? I’m writing a memoir and last I checked I wasn’t dead yet. There are some fantastic autos and memoirs out there written by living, breathing persons! The premise of your novel sounds interesting.
Yes, it's true. I have even read some. I read the memoirs of the American Presidents of the 1940s and 1950s, enjoyed and learned a lot. And one of the first books I ever read was Julius Caesar's Veni, Vidi, Vici ("I Came, I Saw It, I Conquered It) memoir about his conquest of Gaul and Britain, in Latin. Memoirs are a very sensible concept because they are what you remember (the French translation of "memoir"). They are stories about your life, which certainly need not have ended. Au contraire, if you were dead, you could not be remembering anything. I certainly wish you a long and happy life which far exceeds the writing of your memoirs! "Autobiography" or "life story" is not logical because you cannot write the ending of the story of your whole life. Or am I just playing lawyer's/writer's games with the meaning of words? Has legal education destroyed my ability to think clearly? I don't know . . . they are observations . . . take them for what they are worth . . . and, if nothing, for seeing them you are still sixpence none the poorer. Thank you for the compliment.
