HILANG yang bakal menjelma

Surprise! Oh, I hope you're surprised. ;). 

So many of my friends, colleagues and Malay novel fans have been asking about my second novel. So, here it is. It's simply titled HILANG (MISSING). 

This is the novel I mentioned in one of my earlier blog entry. I wrote this using pen and paper. Probably 90% of the manuscript was produced using that method. The story was transferred to soft copy using the same software I used for JERAT - yWriter5. It's not automatic transfer, I still had to type every single letter on my computer.  

I exported the manuscript to MS Word format for editing purpose. I have to admit that self editing is the hardest part in writing books. What I did was, I left the manuscript untouched for about 3 weeks before starting self editing. At least I have forgotten some of the words and sentences. So, it was almost like editing another author's work. (I sometimes suffer short term memory lost, so that helped a lot!)

This novel is different from JERAT. I used a lot of short sentences in this novel. Well, I used pen and paper, remember? Writing long sentences would have killed me. 50% of writing was done either at the airport on on the plane. I was doing a project in Pasir Gudang earlier this year and I spent a lot of time travelling. Rather than just playing Bejewelled at the airport, I decided to grab a pen and started scribbling on a thin note pad. From a sentence, it became a paragraph and slowly it grew into a full chapter. 

Narration was minimized in HILANG as I was trying to avoid inconsistency. Writing in public places pose the risk of getting way too many distractions. When I'm distracted, my writing tend to become inconsistent. So, I decided to put in more dialogues. 

Here's the cover:

Cool sangat kan, tulisan tajuk HILANG tu? 

Full cover. Sungguhlah romantik warnanya, kaaan?

About

Shaziman sedang mencari kembarnya yang HILANG secara misteri. Kunci jawapannya ada dengan Khairani, yang datang mencari cinta dan wang mudah.

Description

Shaziman -- seorang jurulatih peribadi happy-go-lucky tiba-tiba buntu bila adik kembarnya HILANG secara misteri. Nota ugutan yang diterima membuatkannya cuba menjejak tanpa melaporkan kepada polis. Dengan bantuan Jo, seorang penyiasat peribadi, Shaziman mencari adiknya berdasarkan beberapa catatan buku nota...

Khairani -- seorang gadis kampung yang berhijrah ke Selangor untuk mencari rezeki dan mengejar cinta. Dia perlukan banyak wang untuk mengubat kakaknya yang diserang penyakit ganjil. Setelah dia berjaya memenangi hati Zed, lelaki yang diminatinya, Khairani diperkenalkan olehnya kepada dunia baru di mana wang boleh diperolehi dengan mudah...

Shaziman dan Khairani ditakdirkan bertemu dalam satu situasi yang janggal. Shaziman tidak menyedari bahawa Khairani menyimpan kunci tentang misteri kehilangan kembarnya.

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So, the book will be launched Insya-Allah on 29th June 2012. Meanwhile, feel free to LIKE the fan page here: HILANG.