K.S. Augustin's Blog

[Over at the Sandal Press blog, I'm talking about how I felt after signing the Carina Press contract. The saga continues.]

I was talking to J about books over breakfast. We used to discuss politics over our morning coffee, but that topic has now moved to the evening. With Sandal Press now live, we start the day by going over our plans for the business, what’s left to do (lots!), what’s already doing, and how things are doing once they’re done. And yes, no matter that, even in self-publishing, books take time to release, there’s still enough dynamic information to warrant a daily catch-up.

J is currently reading a book written by Tomasz Lem, Stanislaw Lem’s son, and his reminiscences about his father. And he included, in his book, a short letter from Lem regarding popularity of books. In a nutshell, Lem admitted that he didn’t get it, did not know why one book takes off and another languishes.

And, as I listened, it occurred to me that readers are a writer’s Solaris.

Lem’s most famous novel is, of course, SOLARIS, the story of a psychologist coming to a derelict space station where scientists have been spending more than a century attempting to decode Solaris, the entity that is the size of a planet. By the end of the novel, the protagonist Kelvin is no closer to solving the mystery of Solaris’s sentience than at the beginning.

To a writer, readers are like that. In our heads, when we think of readers, we think of a monolithic artifact. We might be aware of particular groups, just as the scientists aboard the station are aware of individualistic manifestations of the ocean-entity, but when we sit and pose questions, “readers” coalesce again into a single mass. “Will readers like the ending?” “Will readers relate to this character?” “What will readers think when they come across this scene?”

And, just as Solaris remains incomprehensible to human science, readers ultimately remain incomprehensible to writers, no matter that we are readers ourselves.

The problem is that there is an alien gestalt within that group we call “readers”. You and I know that we are all individuals, that what Jo prefers to read is different to what Sam likes, and that what you would lose a couple of hours with is something neither of the other two would touch with a barge-pole. So yes, individual. And yet, how to explain the phenomenal wave of sales that a particular book generates? And the beauty of it is, the book doesn’t even need to be well-written! As a writer, I am constantly admonished to strive for Quality. As a reader, frequent language mistakes and sloppy continuity turn me off. And yet, books one would think would sink into swampy obscurity end up with massive publishing and even movie deals. The author didn’t make that book so popular, no it was the “readers”. It was us, who appear to demand quality, consistency, a plot, on one hand, and yet apparently discard all of those in a nanosecond on the other.

In light of this, I often sit and attempt to analyse my own reading habits. Why did I like this book? What appealed? Was the world-building important to me? The character motivations? The beginning? The ending? And eventually I give up in disgust because I can’t generalise one person’s preferences to an entire population. And yet it happens. Something grabs a part of that Universal Reader and doesn’t let go, and that part appears to be far more complex than trite advice to write “compelling characters” or “incorporate drama”.

This whole Reader Phenomenon, let’s call it, may even be time-based, geopolitically-based, economically-based, in which case a bank of super-computers may not be up to the task of analysing each fragment that constitutes a runaway bestseller.

Which brings me back to the beginning and a slight amendment. Readers are even worse than a writer’s Solaris because, at least Solaris comforts you with the fact of its alienness. We may not understand Solaris but that is all right because Solaris is completely alien. But we are all readers and, as a writer, I am condemned to not understanding ourselves.

[I'm talking about the "negotiations" that led up to me signing the Carina Press contract over at the Sandal Press blog. I know nobody is going to comment, but you can at least have an entertaining read.]

The reviews are starting to trickle (and I mean “trickle”) in for QUINTEN’S STORY and I’m very happy with them. One reader in particular (Bob) picked up on an experimental aspect of the novel and I’m glad to say he liked it:

The story in some part is written in flashback so that you can understand why Quinten feels and acts as he does now. This is a technique that can go badly wrong if you lose track of where or when you are but the author uses a method of keeping on track that I have not seen before and that is by a countdown, or up, timer at the beginning of each chapter so you know if it is present or past.

Yes, he’s talking about a countdown. In a novel.

You see, this was my problem. I wanted to put some backstory into the book, but didn’t want to spend too much time on it, and I certainly didn’t want a giant info-dump somewhere, completely derailing the current plot. At the same time, I needed to ensure that the reader wouldn’t get too disoriented, tackling the chopped up, chapter-sized flashback scenes.

The traditional way to handle flashbacks is to give them a different kind of formatting, and that usually entails italics. I used this device in WAR GAMES and IN ENEMY HANDS and even used it sporadically in QUINTEN’S STORY. But reading around 11,000 words in italics is a bit much to ask of any reader.

Another way to handle flashbacks is to have a little time indicator at the start of some/all chapters, to help the reader orient herself before she dives into the action, but I had already done a timeline in WAR GAMES and didn’t want to do it again. I had to think of something else and, being a geek, I settled on the concept of a countdown.

(Incidentally, the countdown as we know it, was originally an artistic device, not a scientific one. The director, Fritz Lang, used it in BY ROCKET TO THE MOON (1928), in order to build suspense. Later, it was adopted by actual aeronautical engineers.)

But, back to the story. Quite simply, the major narrative flow in the book follows as you’d expect, from Chapter One to Two to Three and so on. BUT, the backstory (involving Quinten Tamlan and Kiel Souiad’s romance) occurs in reverse order, beginning from (Chapter) Minus Three and finishing at Zero.

I was anxious that it might not work. What would a reader think, paging through and coming across One – Two – Three – Minus Three – Four … wait! Hold on! “Minus Three”???? WTFBBQ?!

My other problem is that I like to make my readers work a little. Whether it’s reconciling oneself to the fate of certain minor characters in WAR GAMES, or having to tackle (top-level) physics concepts in IN ENEMY HANDS, I’m probably doing myself a disservice, but I like to throw in something a bit unexpected. With QUINTEN’S STORY, it’s the romance. At the beginning, you have an idea that something’s not quite right. Then you hit the first flashback chapter (Minus Three). The plot progresses and you come across the second flashback chapter (Minus Two). And by that time, you know that something’s going to happen, and you don’t really want it to happen but you have no choice. As the chapters click their way to Zero, you are clamped tight to them for the ride.

Bob, who has obviously read many many books, says he’s never come across the countdown method for handling flashbacks before. And, for the other reviewers, the use of such a device didn’t inhibit the story flow. All of which gives me a big, fat WHEW!

Rocket science and flashback scenes. Who knew they were so close?

Have a good weekend and I’ll catch you next week.

[On the Sandal blog, I talk about what I tried to do before signing the Carina Press contract.]

This week, I’m touching briefly on the topic of dual monitors. With Chakra, this is a breeze to set up.

1. Install nvidia-settings; i.e. as super-user/root, “pacman -S nvidia-settings”

2. As root, run nvidia-settings, enabling your second monitor and its position.

3. Save configuration.

4. Reboot.

5. Enjoy!

Okay, onto backups. I’m not going to get into it because I use Crashplan across my machines (I like the nagging emails) and there are heaps of Linux backup tools out there. But here’s a tip if you’ve got a wonky machine and more recent data that you absolutely NEED to get before you reformat the sucker.

Use Knoppix.

That’s it. Boot your system from CD/DVD/USB with the Knoppix distribution as I mentioned last week. Knoppix will give you a view of your entire system, whether Windows or Linux. Stick in a removable USB external drive, mount whatever machine disk your data is on and just copy it across. For Linux users, it’ll also copy your hidden directories, such as .thunderbird and .akregator, so your mails and feeds are safe. This is what I did after the OpenSUSE upgrade crapped out on me — and before I did a full disk reformat — and it worked a treat.

If your hard disk is old and has died (“clicky” sounds while running is the best candidate for this treatment), try freezing it. No, it’s true. Here’s what you do:

1. Buy a hard disk enclosure for your drive.

2. Remove the old hard disk from your machine.

3. Put it in a ziplock bag.

4. Stick it and the hard disk enclosure in your freezer for 12 to 48 hours.

Now, if you have a friend with a running machine nearby (like, on the dining table):

5hf. When utterly cold, put the drive in the enclosure and connect to your friend’s machine.

6hf. You should get at least 15 minutes life out of the drive, enough to get critical data off if you’re quick.

If you don’t have a friend with a running machine nearby:

5nf. Put the drive into the enclosure and stick the whole thing back in your freezer with a long USB cable snaking out.

6nf. Connect the USB cable to a laptop you’ve borrowed from somebody and get your data off.

I’ve read that this also works if you submerge a ziplocked hard drive in an ice/frozen-CO2 mixture but then, if you know to do that, you probably already know this trick. And, besides, it’s such an incredibly geeky thing to do, I’m embarrassed to even mention it.

Lifehacker has an article on it, and being the paranoid geeks that they are, they suggest double-wrapping the drive before freezing. Sometimes a freeze of only 12 hours doesn’t work. I’d leave it a full 24, just to be on the safe side.

[Sorry for the late posting. You see...I finished writing BALANCE OF TERROR and have now officially entered the dreaded "Editing Phase"! I had a green tea at lunch to celebrate. Over at the Sandal blog, I talk about Carina Press and the reversion clause as it's represented in my contract.]

My darling desktop machine (Monster Machine, or MM) runs Linux. I love Linux because I love both the idea behind Linux (open-source, freedom of information, responsiveness of developers to suggestions) and I love an architecture that fully utilises the hardware to such an extent that a machine running Linux is always, but always, faster and more robust than a machine running Windows.

However, problems do occur and, on MM, I faced several of them that I’m going to tackle here for any nascent geek following in my footsteps.

OpenSUSE. Not recommended for people who see no harm in upgrading their machines from one version to another. I had problems with a point upgrade and there were even people in SUSE-world wondering whether the complete and utter failure to properly render graphics (I’m an NVIDIA user) after a similar upgrade reboot is even a bug! When geeks start talking like that, you know they have lost touch with reality and whatever compassion they may have been born with but which has been kicked out of them because they know how to create bash scripts in their sleep. (For the masochists who want to read some user pain, try Gerry Gavigan’s comment and the Linux Tweaking blog. (And I heard through the grapevine of another software lab in the UK that has OpenSUSE 10.x running just fine and absolutely! refuses! to even countenance upgrading because it is too dire a fate to contemplate.))

Unlike either of those previous twothree users, I have no stake in OpenSUSE. I was just trying it out as a Mandriva refugee (Mandriva never gave me such trauma, even during major upgrades), so it was easy for me to kick OpenSUSE to the curb. BUT, it hardened my Linux strategy moving forward, which is now: one base install, infinite patches.

Green disks. Good grief, talk about no good deed going unpunished. I bought a 1TB green Western Digital hard disk for our media centre and nothing seemed to stick. No matter what Linux I put on it, I would have major disk issues within two days. Then I stumbled across the secret. Taking the WD Green disk as an example, WD implemented a “power-saving” feature of parking the disk heads every 8000 milliseconds. WD call this “Intellipark”. To reactivate the disk from park? How about 1000 milliseconds? Unfortunately, Linux — especially with the journalling file systems that take frequent “snapshots” of your system — writes to the hard disk every 15000 or 20000 milliseconds or so. You can see what happens when a service needs to write to disk and the disk head takes a second to reactivate, can’t you? Oy! Not to mention the fact that you’ll end up going through a lifetime’s worth of head parks in less than a year. If I wanted that kind of unreliability, I would have gone with an SSHD (Solid State Hard Drive). Or Windows. Snerk.

Interestingly, WD do have a workaround (stop the frickin’ “Intellipark”!) but, stupidly, it’s only available on DOS. (Windows doesn’t have an issue with the “Intellipark” feature as it only writes to disk every x minutes and Western Digital don’t have a problem with it either. Their official response is that their Green Caviars are manufactured for Windows and the problems with Linux are not bugs.) If you’re interested in reading up on this problem, try Audio Preacher or the guys on the Arch Linux forum. I am now a dedicated Seagate user and screw Western Digital and the environment! If you are a Linux user and have such a green WD drive, the most reasonable suggestion is to use it to store multimedia (music, movies) and buy a non-green disk for installing the actual Linux kernel on. The heads will thank you.

Hard disks. A one terabyte hard disk poses no problem to a Linux installation. Move to two terabytes, however, and you may have issues. From Debian to the *buntus, Sabayon, CentOS and even Fedora, nothing seemed to work. If you have this problem, here’s what you can do:

1. Download Knoppix.

2. Burn it to a CD/DVD or install it on a USB stick.

3. Boot your system using Knoppix. Because you’re booting from the optical drive/USB stick, your hard disk will remain unmounted. This is good, because….

4. Using GParted, partition your 2TB disk into smaller, more manageable chunks. For me, that meant an 8GB swap partition at the front, followed by an 800GB ext4 partition, followed by another ext4 partition of the rest.

5. Go through the formatting.

6. Shutdown and reboot with your desired distribution.

7. Tell your distro to use the existing partitions. (*) You’ll save time by skipping formatting as you already got Knoppix to do that.

8. The distro should install okay.

(*) This strategy did NOT work with PCLinuxOS, which wanted to use my swap space as my /home directory!! PCLinuxOS managed a re-partition with no problems but I had problems with installing NVIDIA drivers, so I dropped that distro and kept looking.

This pre-formatting strategy worked a treat with Chakra Linux, which is good as Chakra’s installer, Tribe, is a heap of flaky crap and it kept bumming out on me when I tried doing partition management. Do persist if you’re a KDE fan, however, and pre-prepare your partitions using something like Knoppix. The actual Chakra system itself appears to be quite stable, despite the warning about hamster termination at the beginning! Chakra is based on Arch Linux, which I know absolutely nothing about. Having used Mandriva for the past six or so years, Chakra is also rather sparse, although I’m coming to admire that strategy. All I’m waiting for now is for the developers to get a unified GUI together for all their packages, bundles, etc. and we’ll be sweet, although there’s also something very satisfying in using pacman at the command-line and seeing all those lines of text whizz by. It convinces you that your machine is actually Doing Something.

Oops, this post has gone on long enough. Next week, I talk dual monitors, back-ups, and freezing disks.

[I talk about the cover of BALANCE OF TERROR at the Sandal Press blog, so if you're not sick of looking at it here, you can go over and look at it over there.]

This cover debuted at Heather Massey’s The Galaxy Express on Sunday and was surrounded by much lurve. (Thank you all!) But it also emphasised something, and that is that the average reader and I don’t have as much in common as we should.



Many many many people have expressed their, um, surprise with the ending of IN ENEMY HANDS, the first book featuring Dr. Moon Thadin and Srin Flerovs. Many people also asked me when the sequel was coming out.

Um, folks? There was never meant to be a sequel. You see, I thought I had left the story at a logical break point that hinted of future doings and didn’t think that those future doings needed to be spelt out. At the time, I thought to myself, “Would I be satisfied if I was watching this book as a movie and it ended here?” And the answer to that question was, “Yes.” So I thought I was done and dusted when I finished.

Imagine my surprise (and consternation) when I (very nicely) got hit over the head by several people, all complaining about the abrupt ending! Oh dear. I really didn’t mean to annoy everyone like that but I see I’m going to have to adjust my Ending Tolerance so the next time I ask That Question of myself, I’ll get an answer more in line with reader expectations. I hope it won’t happen again.

In any case, BALANCE OF TERROR is the conclusion of Moon and Srin’s adventures in their escape from the Republic and search for some peace for themselves. It’s about to enter the editing phase and I hope to get it released in July.

And thanks to everyone and their kind words. I hope the sequel doesn’t disappoint.

[This week at the Sandal Press blog, I talk about not understanding Amazon's latest Kindle decision. It's a puzzle!]

I don’t have much news for you today, stalwart reader, so I thought I’d just do a few links.

First, there’s author Melissa Conway with “Indie Author – THE GAME“. An excerpt for your enjoyment:

Land on the Book Promotion square: Your endless marketing efforts have sucked every last drop of joy out of the thought of writing another book and your muse is actively trying to convince you to take up pottery. Go back three spaces.

Land on the Amazon Discussion square: Whoop! Whoop! Warning, Warning. You stumble into an Amazon Discussion titled ‘Badly Behaving Authors’ and are horrified at how much venom is directed your way. Leave with your tail tucked firmly between your legs and seriously consider changing your user name. Lose a turn.

I laughed, I cried, I related. If you’re a writer, so will you.

My most favouritest indie game developer, Amanita Design released what must be the cutest game in history. I’m talking, of course, about Botanicula. Within a day of its release, I bought it, downloaded it and the whole family used our projector and PC to play it communally. If you are wondering what Botanicula is about, you can go to the game’s website, where you can chuckle and squeal to your heart’s content.

If you want to buy all of Amanita’s games using name-your-own-price go to the Humble Bundle (I’ve been a Humble supporter for a while now) and have a read. As the website says:

Pay what you want for Botanicula and save the rainforest.

But you only have a week left to do it. (And, needless to say, Linux users (ahem!) are the most generous out of all the platform users.)

In personal geek news, a minor upgrade on my monster machine from OpenSUSE 11.3 to 11.4 late last week unleashed the hordes of Hell, maliciously joined by a suddenly defunct BIOS battery and an annoying 2am electricity blackout. I was forced to completely reformat my hard disk and now have Chakra Linux running on my machine and it. Is. Beautiful. (Cue angelic chorus) What’s that? Did I have backups? You poor misguided creature, I didn’t need backups. It was a LINUX system! (I did have them, but didn’t need to use them.)

Am hitting the Linux books so I can learn a little more about my favourite operating system in a more systematic fashion and there’s a post brewing about large hard disks, rescuing data and Linux. Maybe I’ll get that ready for next week.

And lastly, in writing news, I missed my personal deadline for beginning edits on BALANCE OF TERROR, due to Life intervening. At this point, release of the book may slip to early July. Them’s the breaks. What about you? Any tides you’re struggling to hold back?

Three years ago, upon invitation to an anthology, I sat down and wrote an erotic short story. STEEL & SKIN (the story I released this week) isn’t it! Due to the economic climate, plans for the anthology didn’t proceed and the rights were returned to me. But, the publisher for that anthology (Publisher A), over a drink with another publisher (Publisher B), (and unbeknownst to me) graciously mentioned my name as someone who could string a few words together.



Publisher B contacted his editor, Editor B, and asked him to get in touch with me and ask if I had a story for their anthology. Editor B and I exchanged a handful of emails. I thanked him very much for the invite (HUGE squeeing at my end, as you can imagine) asked about deadlines and word count and managed to get a story to him just shy of the deadline date. Now, I sent the story to First Email Address. Editor B acknowledged receipt of the story but asked me to send the story to Second Email Address. This I did. (And I have the email headers and receipts to prove it.)

Well, as is usual in publishing, some months went by and I heard nothing. After about three months, I emailed Editor B, enquiring after the progress of the story and whether it had even made it into the anthology. (You can never be too sure.) His reply was that as I hadn’t bothered to send my story to Second Email Address, I had completely missed the boat and maybe I might stand a chance next year if Publisher B ever decided to release a similar volume.

I’ll admit it, I was crushed. And I just put the story from my mind because, for many months afterwards, it was just too painful to relive. Just after that rather brusque and offhanded reply from Editor B, I went through all the emails again, wondering if I had inadvertently offended him but, honestly, every communication was focused on the work I had to do. Having owned several businesses, I knew how to be courteous and professional, but there was obviously something Editor B didn’t like. Maybe he thought his publisher was trying to cram another writer down his throat?

In any case, it was J who brought up the topic over breakfast one morning. “Remember those two short stories you wrote for those anthologies?” he asked. “Whatever happened to them?”

And the question fell on fertile ground, took root and…well, the first of those stories (which was actually the second I wrote) is now out. It’s called STEEL & SKIN, is a touch over 5,000 words long, costs US$1.99, and is straight erotica. You can find an excerpt at my website. The blurb is as follows:

Shanti is a dedicated student…or so everyone thinks.

Shanti’s family consider her a hard-working student, always ready to head to university and get her assignments done. What they don’t know is that the sight and smell of books does more to Shanti than arouse her scholarly instincts, and she depends on her study partners to help scratch her erotic itch.

A steamy tale of exhibitionist sex set in south-east Asia.

If readers like it, I have a bit of an idea for a sequel although, to be honest, there’s more than enough on my writing plate right now. I’m reworking the other short story I wrote, in between bouts on BALANCE OF TERROR, and it should be out next month sometime. (The short story, not BALANCE OF TERROR. That one’s due out in June/July.)

And that’s my traditional publishing anecdote for this week. Stay strong, stalwart reader, and I’ll catch you next week.

(At the Sandal Press blog this week, I discuss China, time travel romances and repression. If that piques your interest, why not go over, have a read and make a comment?)

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the publication of my first piece of adult fiction, the erotic sf romance, THE COMMMANDER'S SLAVE. In the ensuing years, a lot of things have happened that are the exact opposite of how I thought things worked. From yearning for a traditional publishing deal, I've now deliberately turned my back on them for the next few years. From wanting to be part of a successful publisher's stable of writers, I'm back to running my own business. And loving it.

Over the past half a decade, I've — of course — done a lot of reading about writing, writing success, bestsellers, and so on. And it's struck me that, on average, it takes ten years for a writer to rise to prominence from the time of her first sale/publication. In the words of Dilbert, when we're taking about fiction, attendance really does seem to equate to 90% of one's success.

Don't believe me? Okay, let's try a few writers. And I swear I'm picking these at random and looking them up as I write this post.

My Check Your Luck books have been likened to Alexander McCall Smith's "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series. Let's dig into Smith's bio. No. 1 was published in 1999 and turned into a movie in 2007, but I'm not talking about that. How long had Smith been publishing before the phenomenal success of No. 1? How about 1980, with a children's book called "The White Hippo"? So it took Smith 19 years to reach worldwide fame. Whoops, that's a little more than even I had been expecting. Let's try someone else.

How about my favourite sf short story writer, James Tiptree, jr.? Alice Sheldon began submitting short stories to magazines in 1967 and nailed acclaim in 1969 with "The Last Flight of Doctor Ain". The wonderful anthology "Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home" was published in 1973. So, two to three years. Wow! But short fiction only, which is not what I write. Let's move on.

One of my favourite long-form sf writers is Roger Zelazny. His claim to fame is the "Chronicles of Amber" series, the first book of which was published in 1970. He had begun writing short stories in 1962. So, eight years.

Judith Tarr, that well-known fantasy writer and horse-lover? She was nominated in 1994 for the World Fantasy Award for "Lord of the Two Lands". But her first release was in 1985 for "The Golden Horn". What do you say? Will you give me ten years for that one?

What about one of the current stars of the firmament, UK writer Alastair Reynolds? His first published sale was via Interzone magazine in 1990, for a story he'd written in 1989. The first of his acclaimed "Revelation Space" series was published in 2000. So a perfect ten years, which is the kind of precision you'd expect from a physicist.

Okay, maybe science-fiction is aberrant in some way. What about a different genre? Nora Roberts? She began writing in 1979, scored her first sale (category romance) in 1980, and reached hardcover bestseller status in 1996. Sixteen years! Not exactly an overnight success, was she?

Right, I really don't know where the next name is going to lead, but let's try it. Stephen King. In 1973, King sold "Carrie" to Doubleday. Before that? He began writing while still at school in the 1960s and his first short story was independently published in 1965. So, a slightly shorter time-line for King at, say, eight to nine years.

Let's go for one more. How about…Salman Rushdie? His literary debut was — would you believe? — a 1975 fantasy novel called "Grimus". Never heard of that one, huh? He wishes that too, from the sounds of things. He won a Booker Prize six years later. Now that's quick. Bet you never thought of Rushdie as a writing fast-tracker before! In case you were wondering, "The Satanic Verses" came out in 1988, so if you'd rather use that as your yardstick, it comes to around thirteen years.

Oh, and one more, because Rushdie brought up an intriguing possibility. How about Gabriel García Márquez? He wrote "Five Ice Ages One Hundred Years of Solitude". Márquez's first publication, after seven years of rejection, was in 1955 (the novella, "Leaf Storm"). The success of "One Hundred Years" wasn't to come until 1967. Twelve to thirteen years.

So what's the takeaway point from this? Well, it appears that my initial supposition has been vindicated. If you're a writer of longer fiction, and you'd like to make your mark and be what is termed a "commercial success", then you essentially need to buckle under and work at it for around a decade, give or take. I think this is true of both traditionally- and self-published authors who are (a) professionals, (b) willing to work at their craft, (c) open to criticism from such people as editors and agents. But don't take my word for it. Try it yourself and see what you come up with. Put your results in the Comments if you like.

And, see you in 2017!

I'm writing this early in the week, just back from a grocery trip.

When you see documentaries on Asia, the hosts always tell you what wonderfully fresh produce you can get in Asia. Look at all the wet markets! Aren't those women sitting in the middle of piles of vegetables straight from the farm? Look, look how shiny the aubergines are, how erect the broccoli, how green the spinach!

After half a decade of living in south-east Asia, the reality does not meet such lofty statements. First of all, you have China. Yeah sure, you want erect broccoli or carrots, you can buy them cheap. Problem is, they come from China, and I don't trust anything from China. So, if I go to a supermarket, and see "China" on the labels, I don't buy it. That essentially cuts out Western-style broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, nicer-looking potatoes, apples, pears, oranges, mandarins, peaches, plums and carrots, to name a few.

The alternatives are: Australian carrots? Expensive. US potatoes? Riddled with black holes and scars from the harvesting machines. Also limp. Broccoli? Can't get it, have to depend on local (or Hong Kong) kai lan instead. Cauliflower? Forget it. Cabbage? Have to wait until a load arrives from the Malaysian highlands. And, as you can guess, all these are more expensive due to their relative scarcity.

I can go to a wet market but if I ask where something is from, they'll lie to me and tell me everything's local, which I know they're not because the damn boxes the vegetables came in are still under the tables, clearly specifying their origins.

So that's vegetables. Try to stray from a very narrow range that the locals buy, and you're in trouble.

Let's go to meat, because I'm a carnivore and so is the rest of the family. Imagine you're an average Malaysian, earning $3,500/month. That works out to $833/week for a family of four to six (parents + kids +/- grandparent +/- servant). Take away mortgage payments, car payments, utilities, clothes, and so on, and you're probably left with $250/week for groceries. What can that buy and, more importantly, what is the quality of what it buys?

Chicken is the cheapest at around $6.80/kilogram for a whole bird. Parts are obviously more expensive. At Tesco, you will see shipments of chicken parts. Average price is around $8 to $8.50/kg. Tesco's wonderful hygiene policies mean that chicken that is a couple of days old (and resting on beds of ice) is mixed with chicken that just came in that morning. What this gives you is a wonderful technicolour display — pink, green, yellow — for you to pick through, together with dead flies and strands of woven nylon packaging. How appetising! Frozen tripe is $13/kilogram, frozen beef lung (don't ask) is $13/kilogram. Average Australian steak begins at $40/kilogram and is guaranteed not to be tender. Eight slices of Gouda or Edam cheese will set you back $17 and, as a bonus, will be past its expiry date.

At Carrefour, they don't mix meats like that. Oh no, in Carrefour, they follow the policy of their parsimonious temperate-climate parent company and have no air-conditioning whatsoever in the entire store! This also extends to the meat section. We have been caught out with shrink-wrapped meat that, once unwrapped at home, has proven to be…oh, how shall I put this?…rotten.

Jusco, the Japanese chain, is best for meats, but you're paying a premium of $2.00/kilogram over market price. I only buy fresh salmon from Jusco (at $50 – $70/kilogram). You think that's expensive? Cod is $110/kilogram! Lamb is cheaper than Tesco (frozen only) at $50/kilogram. There's no chance in hell I'm getting any veal because nobody sells any.

Giant is good and cheap for non-perishables but, like Tesco, they try to sell you green vegetables that have disintegrated, rotten onions, and food past their due date. They also sell defrosted meat that they've chucked into the freezer section to refreeze.

Mydin is the cheaper, Malay-based supermarket chain. Being Malay-based, don't expect to find blocks of cheese, cream, alcohol, pork products or, in fact, anything of quality. (The processed cheese slices are a mix of cheese with palm oil, the "ghee" is a mix of butter and palm oil, the chocolates are a mix of chocolate flavouring and palm oil, the butter bricks for baking are a mix of butter and palm oil, the cooking oil is palm oil…you get the drift.) The vegetables are nice and fresh but anything not grown locally is from…you guessed it…China, and the variety available fluctuates alarmingly.

Once chicken on ice starts to go off, it gets shrink-wrapped, put in another section and sold at the original price. Carcasses of local beef are hung up in the meat section and get cut off the bone with a medium-sized general-purpose knife or dagger (I'm not kidding you). There is no concept of "cuts"; you just point to a section that looks kinda meaty and the guy heaves into it with his knife. If you're lucky, this costs you $24/kilogram. When only the skeleton is left, someone goes through it again in the back room, scraping together the small scraps of meat and fat that are left, shrink wraps it and sells it for $18/kilogram. On the upside, the store is air-conditioned so, at one degree north of the Equator, let's be thankful for small mercies.

The only other way you can get beef chunks is to buy buffalo meat from India. They are available in most supermarkets, come in 900g (two pound) blocks, cost about $9-10/block, and most of it, defrosted, is nothing more than sinew and ribbons of tough skin. I have also found buffalo hair, human hair and pieces of wood mixed in with the meat. Available mutton is Australian, frozen, cleaner, $25/kilogram, almost 50% fat, and needs to be sliced thinly, then boiled for an hour, before you can start cooking with it.

Let's go to pork products. The "bacon" you get here (whether in Malaysia or Singapore) is waterlogged. In fact, I warrant that more than half the weight of meat is actually water. It's also been "fiddled with". By that, I mean to say that there's something nasty added to the chemical bath that produces a sharp, over-salty, chemical taste to the meat. I don't buy it any more because I'm convinced there's bad stuff in there. If I want imported Western bacon, then I have to pay $30 for 250g of bacon rashers that's mostly fat. It tastes better, but there's not much left of it at all once it's been on the grill and shrinks to less than half its size.

Let's pause for a wallet check. For a family of four looking forward to a weekend fry-up, expect to pay $60 just for the bacon, $20 for two punnets of mushrooms, $7 for eight nice-looking tomatoes, $5 for one small loaf of non-sweet bread, and $2 for six eggs. So that's Sunday breakfast for $94 at home, not including beverages (double the prices for Singapore), and just that one meal consumes almost half the weekly grocery budget!

The local pork is tough and mostly sold in strips. Be prepared to pay $30/kilogram at Jusco if you want something that even superficially resembles a chop, but it'll either be tough or dry.

Quite simply, there is no local butcher shop as I'm used to because there's no need. There isn't an understanding of meat that most Westerners take for granted and even the green-hued chicken thighs get bought up (then washed, cooked and served up by unsuspecting grandmothers, is my reckoning). I'm convinced that if more people were educated about food quality, the supermarkets wouldn't be able to exploit the consumer market like this but, as long as people are willing to cook with sub-standard primary ingredients (and they are, oh gods, they are), such a change will not occur.

So you see, all that crap about fresh quality produce in Asia? It's a lie. It's like saying that everyone in Europe eats well because you found one farmer's market outside Lyons. I'm sure there are some decent (rural) wet markets around but, for the average Asian urbanite, that's simply not the case. And I'm sitting here writing this because every grocery trip is, ultimately, an episode in depression as I circle the aisles, not buying anything. As the family says on occasion, "Chicken? Again?"

Yep. Sorry.

Following on from last week, I think I've found a WordPress theme I can live with at my website. It follows a major reorganisation of my releases as well. While I prefer dark themes, I know it bugs the hell out of a lot of readers, so I think the theme I chose is a nice compromise.

I read the hilarious What Your Kindle Cover Says About You this week and, in the spirit of mutual embarrassment, have decided to share my own ereader cover. What you should know is that it's handmade because I couldn't find a cover that had the features I wanted in it. Also, being a true geek, I have the strangely-proportioned Archos 70, which is just perfect for someone like me who can never rest until she sees a proper Linux (not this Android shit) on every device she owns. (The A70 runs Android but because Archos co. made the architecture open, you can now multi-boot across Angstrom (yeah yeah, I know I omitted the little accent marks…just deal with it, m'kay?), Android and even *sigh* Bodhi, if you so wish. Does life get any better?)

Anyway, back to my A70. Behold, the cover.

And, on the inside….

What I like about this cover is:

I can add cloth-based features to it as I see fit.
I think the elastic grid is a brilliant idea for holding items of varying sizes. (This idea came from the Grid-It range of organisers.) Currently, it's holding a small notebook.
I can put a pen in it!
There's an extra pocket behind the business card holder for additional micro-SD cards.
It was cheap.

How cheap? Well, if you exclude my own labour, it came to MYR15.00 (US$4.90), mostly because I used material I had lying around from other projects. Why I can never do stuff like this on Etsy, however, is because there are so many goofs. Like the blurring of a transfer on the front. And the untidy stitching that you thankfully can't see. And the business card holder that's not parallel to the bottom edge. J, in that European praise-you-with-damnation way he has, describes it as "cute" and "rustic". (Any time I'm in danger of developing an oversized ego, all I have to do is go talk to my husband about something.)

So there you go. That's what I've been doing this week when I should have been writing. What about you? Got up to any critical distractions?