Here’s a little update. I was going to talk about it here first but Twitter was closer to hand so I posted a couple of tweets earlier today:
Tom Cho 曹勵善 on X (formerly Twitter): “Will be submitting my latest short story to 2 mags soon. Excited about this and also v happy to be back in the world of sending to lit mags / X”
Will be submitting my latest short story to 2 mags soon. Excited about this and also v happy to be back in the world of sending to lit mags
Tom Cho 曹勵善 on X (formerly Twitter): “But the most exciting news of all: I got an Australia Council grant to work on my second book! / X”
But the most exciting news of all: I got an Australia Council grant to work on my second book!
I feel very grateful that the funding bodies – Arts Victoria and now the Australia Council – have been willing to support my ambitious book – a book which has the working title The Meaning of Life and Other Fictions. The project is so ambitious that my funding proposals have read a bit like parodies of funding proposals. While writing them, I was seriously hoping that the assessment panels would at least enjoy reading them.
Anyway, for now at least, I am feeling pretty good about my writing. I’ve had a difficult time this year working on my second book. Over and over again, I’ve been humbled by this undertaking. But, in the last few months, I have started to make some headway. Until recently, everything I’ve done has felt hopelessly preliminary.
And yet such is the nature of this project that maybe it will always feel like a preliminary investigation – a prelude to a work that no one can ever write.
That book sounds very very interesting… looking forwards to reading it.
Thank you. If my previous book is anything to go by, I take a long time to write books (and this one is, as I mentioned, very ambitious). But I reckon it will be worth the wait!