On sale

"..that there's nothing that a little black tape cannot fix... ...and that when there's really something that black tape cannot fix, you need to mark it with white tape"..

I am very chuffed about my first book being on sale from today "at major bookstores". I don't know how other authors do it, or what they do, walking into bookshops and seeing their own work on the shelves.

What I’m going to do, is go to Kino and Bor­ders, find the shelf “In My Time” sits on, bring a cou­ple of copies to the best­sellers’ shelves and put them there. You know? So that peo­ple think it’s a best­seller? And will also buy? It works you know?

From today’s Straits Times Life!:

Blog­ger Mr Miyagi pens NS book

From water parades to ‘ele­phants’ in rifles, Ben­jamin Lee’s comic book chron­i­cles the ins and outs of national service

by Stephanie Yap, Arts Reporter

IN Novem­ber 2005, blog­ger Ben­jamin Lee, bet­ter known as Mr Miyagi, wrote a series of posts about his expe­ri­ences dur­ing a Sin­ga­pore Armed Forces exer­cise in Queens­land, Aus­tralia, which his national ser­vice (NS) unit was a part of.

He took the posts down from his pop­u­lar blog at miyagi.sg, how­ever, after The Sun­day Times asked the Min­istry of Defence (Min­def) what its pol­icy on blog­ging about mil­i­tary exer­cises was, lead­ing the min­istry to con­duct an investigation.

In the end, Lee was given the go-ahead to blog about his national ser­vice (NS) expe­ri­ences, though Min­def did ask him to refrain from re-posting one or two pho­tographs due to secu­rity concerns.

Almost two years later, Lee has pub­lished a book about NS – with the full knowl­edge and sup­port of Mindef.

In My Time, a 120-page comic book pub­lished by Mar­shall Cavendish with Min­def, presents NS in a humor­ous and nos­tal­gic light. The title refers to how for­mer NS men like to boast that things were much tougher back in their day.

The book, which has an ini­tial print run of 2,000 copies, was launched at the Army Open House on Sept 1, and is avail­able at major book­stores from today at $9.30 with­out GST.

“I enjoy telling army sto­ries, and I thought it would be a good time to put a comic book of anec­dotes together since it’s the 40th anniver­sary of NS,” says Lee, 37, who holds the rank of cor­po­ral and serves in the 433rd Bat­tal­ion, Sin­ga­pore Armoured Regiment.

Organ­ised as a guide to com­mon char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions that NS men encounter dur­ing their years of ser­vice, the book makes inside ref­er­ences to water parades, ele­phants in rifles and the var­i­ous
“kings” that one finds in a pla­toon — keng, bobo and topo, given respec­tively to malin­ger­ers, poor shots and bad navigators.

The book’s copy­right is held by Min­def, and Lee says that the min­istry helped him by sup­ply­ing military-related pho­tographs, which he used to guide illus­tra­tor Chua Jon Depp, a Malaysian artist based in Kuala Lumpur who was rec­om­mended to Lee by Mar­shall Cavendish after no suit­able local illus­tra­tor could be found.

“He was really help­ful… he saved some pan­els by inject­ing his own humour and style into the scenes,” says the free­lance writer.

Mean­while, read­ers of Lee’s blog should not expect to see as much of his trade­mark irrev­er­ence and sar­casm on the printed page. Lee says that the deci­sion to leave out the more neg­a­tive aspects of
NS was a per­sonal choice.

“I do have darker sto­ries about NS, but I intended for this to be a com­mem­o­ra­tive book. There are other forums for other NS sto­ries,” he says.

Tech­no­rati Tags: army, national ser­vice, sin­ga­pore, Mr Miyagi, In My Time