Wednesday 29 June 2016

june updates: changming's lit endeavours

1/ since we were back home on may 31 from our medical trip to china (beijing message hospital, and 301 hospital), i have been supervising the translation project more closely. on june 27, the project was officially completed - the book create abundance, written by highly influential chinese  body-mind-spirit author ms Zhang Xinyue, has been translated by china's best or most prestigious translation company (based in beijing) from chinese into six foreign languages: german, hindi, arabic, italian, portugese, and russian. to my great relief, the job was properly done by the best team i could find in china, and all the fees were received (only after several 'pushes' as usual), and paid fully on time. the project was not easy for me, since it had been so difficult to find the translators who were not only interested and qualified but also available.

2/ immediately after the translation project was finished, the author/representative requested me on june 27 to begin the publishing/printing process. these days, i have been trying hard to find the printers. as all the copies (10,000 copies for each edition of the six languages) are to be printed and transported to local destinations in shenzhen this time, i have to work with c&c offset printing, one of the best printing companies in china, to find a solution to the problem: according to the chinese government policies, books published by foreign publishers (like my press) have to be transported abroad right after they are printed in china. if we cannot work it out, i will have to use the other much smaller company to do the job, which i worked with to publish another book by the same author last year. it can be much 'braver' or more flexible, but it has a lower professional standard, and an even lower 'business practice/personality.'

3/ so in the next few months or even nearly a whole year's time period, i will be fully occupied with these 6 publishing/printing projects, editing, proofreading, or supervising the printing processes of the book.

4/ to my own great disappointment, i have not been able to write much poetry for the past two months. as always, whenever in china, i have no poetic inspiration, nor can i write any poetry, or even speak any english, especially in my hometown. literally 'tired', i seem to be losing my enthusiasm to make poetry submissions. not surprisingly, i got only only 9 poetry acceptances in may, 5 in june - the fewest in a month for the past 10 years or so, though i did get 23 in april.

the problem with me is: without being able to find any 'good' poetry to read either in chinese or english, i cannot write anything really good.