Finally, after months of wait­ing… the book is out! I recently inter­viewed the mas­ter­mind behind it all — Xeus. And yes, as a sur­prise to read­ers who thought I only did the cover, I did the inside illus­tra­tions too!

KENNY: What was your orig­i­nal inspi­ra­tion for Dark City?

XEUS: Actu­ally, I was inter­view­ing 4 women authors for ‘Her World’. And then it hit me, hey, I want to write a book too!

Dark City is largely inspired by ‘Sin City’, about all the things that can go ter­ri­bly wrong with city life. KL is an intensely inter­est­ing city with so many lay­ers any­way, you can vir­tu­ally find any sit­u­a­tion in it.

Why the change of for­mat for its sequel (i.e. an anthol­ogy of dif­fer­ent writers)?

Truth? I couldn’t fin­ish writ­ing it myself! I’m involved in writ­ing too many simul­ta­ne­ous books and projects, on top of hav­ing a full­time job. So I thought — why not get other peo­ple to write in as well? Give every­one a plat­form, espe­cially first time writ­ers. It would be an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence to edit conceptually.

And I’m glad I did. I mean, we now have such gems like Lou Joon Yee’s crit­i­cally acclaimed ‘Till Death’. We have Chua Kok Yee who is such a great sto­ry­teller with a sense of pac­ing and tim­ing. We have Ahmad Azrai who is so lyri­cal, and we have Bissme, who spe­cialises in the shock­ing twist. And on top of that, Lydia Teh got to pub­lish her first fic­tion story, John Ling got to explore the ‘I’ for­mat and Tunku Halim gave me a story that would be the first new one to go into his book ‘Gravedigger’s Kiss’.

And we have Kenny Mah design­ing the cover!

What would you say would be your most iden­ti­fi­able style (char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion, genre, plot­ting, etc.)?

Plot­ting.

I love plot­ting. That’s why I write. I have lit­tle notes all over to tell me where the plot is head­ing. Some­times, I’m so impa­tient to get to my plot point or big reveal that I actu­ally dread hav­ing to write so much to get there! I think I’d do bet­ter at screen­writ­ing if that were the case, only I suck at dialogue.

Even when I read books or watch movies/TV, I go essen­tially for the plot.

How­ever, many crit­ics have pointed out that my most iden­ti­fi­able fea­ture is ‘detailed writ­ing’. And it’s funny, because when I used to write roman­tic fic­tion on the net, the feed­back was my most iden­ti­fi­able fea­ture is ‘char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion’. (Hey, it’s romance, there’s not much plot!)

I would say I’m really into char­ac­ters as well, except in a short story, it’s very dif­fi­cult to delve fully into char­ac­ter as you won’t have enough pages to go too deep into any­thing that does not ser­vice your plot. I’m not good enough a char­ac­ter writer to fully do that in a short story.

But in a novel, you are fully expected to delve com­pletely into your char­ac­ters. And you’ll have no excuse because you’ll have plenty of pages for that.

Your sto­ries always comes with a twist in the tale. How do you come up with them?

By mis­di­rect­ing the reader in one direc­tion, only to serve up the twist in the other direc­tion. It’s actu­ally a clas­sic mis­di­rect, with all the char­ac­ters doing dou­ble­s­peak and dou­ble­think (which means they will not say or think any­thing that will give the end­ing away, and yet, what they say and think is per­fectly in line with the situation).

If this sounds like gob­bledy­gook, I did promise some­one I will blog more about it some­day. It actu­ally requires quite a detailed explanation!

What are your future plans? Another sequel? Or some other project?

I’m cur­rently in my 3rd write of my children’s book, which is part of a series. This is the one I’m really hop­ing will be picked up by UK/US. That’s why I’ve taken over 1 1/2 years for it, because I want to make it as good as pos­si­ble. No, I’m embar­rassed to say (hangs head in shame) the char­ac­ters in it are not Malaysian. (But they are mul­tira­cial! That’s gotta count for something!)

If it doesn’t get picked up by UK/US, it’s okay. I have tried. But this is really what I want to do — be a main­stream writer for the world mar­ket. And I want to write fulltime.

At the same time, I’m halfway through a book for MPH. It’s non-fiction. I sub­mit one anecdote/chapter a week. This book will prob­a­bly be fin­ished next April. Beware writ­ers, you might be shown an advanced copy and be asked for quotes!

And as a bonus, I was inter­viewed too, for my role as designer/illustrator. Read it here.