{"id":1002,"date":"2015-01-30T09:28:20","date_gmt":"2015-01-30T09:28:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/?p=1002"},"modified":"2015-01-30T09:45:50","modified_gmt":"2015-01-30T09:45:50","slug":"alumnus-wins-the-guardians-self-published-book-of-the-month-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/2015\/01\/30\/alumnus-wins-the-guardians-self-published-book-of-the-month-award\/","title":{"rendered":"Alumnus wins the Guardian’s self-published book of the month award"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mike Stoner, who graduated from Kent in 2011 with an MA in Creative Writing, has recently won the Guardian<\/em>\u2019s self-published book of the month<\/a>\u00a0award for\u00a0his novel Jalan Jalan<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The book, which Mike began to write as part of his creative writing dissertation at Kent, tells the story of a man who travels to Indonesia to start a new life and overcome the loss of his girlfriend, but who is still haunted by her ghost and memories. \u2018I had spent a year in Indonesia which gave me some of the most interesting memories of my life, so I used these as the basis for the fictional story. It\u2019s about adapting to a new environment, the concept of time, and an insight into life on Sumatra\u2019 he explains.<\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/em>\u2019s review credits the novel as being \u2018an interesting, involving tale of self-transformation, and a welcome blast of heat and spice in this cold, grey British December.\u2019<\/p>\n

Since graduating from Kent, Mike has worked as a manager in a language school and has combined working life with writing Jalan Jalan<\/em>, which he subsequently self-published. \u2018Finding time to write whilst doing a full-time job can be very difficult\u2019 he says. \u2018I found the best way around this was to try and write between 10pm and 1am the next morning.\u2019<\/p>\n

He acknowledges that spending a day or more writing a scene and then realising it was no good was a great challenge. \u2018I had to learn not to be scared of the delete button. In the early stages, I found that the main thing was to get stuck in and involved in your work, without worrying too much about the quality, typos and mistakes. Write, write and write, and try not to keep re-reading what you\u2019ve already done \u2013 although that\u2019s very difficult!\u00a0Re-drafting is the hard part, but also the most satisfying.\u2019<\/p>\n

Mike, who is currently in talks with a publisher, hopes to get Jalan Jalan<\/em> on bookshop shelves and to write more novels in the future.<\/p>\n

Jalan Jalan<\/em>\u00a0by Mike Stoner is available now on Amazon Kindle<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mike Stoner, who graduated from Kent in 2011 with an MA in Creative Writing, has recently won the Guardian\u2019s self-published book of the month\u00a0award for\u00a0his … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34788,"featured_media":1003,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[118124],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34788"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1002"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1016,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions\/1016"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}