ELISA ENGLISH's Blog 英語園地

A recent copyright violation incident prompted me to look into book publishing again.  My blogging history is short.  It started March 2008.  My blog entries touch various topics, encompassing several different themes.  I have been pondering on the idea of publishing my own books for some time.  However, I don’t think that I have written enough articles to publish a book.  I am not a career writer.  I work full time and have two little children and a family to care for.  After work and picking up our kids from school, I have to cook for the family.  After the meal, I have to either work with my son on his homework or play with my daughter to sway her away from disrupting her brother’s study.  After the study time is over, usually half an hour, it is family time again.  We either watch TV or play games or read books.  Time flies quickly.  Then it is time to wash the kids and prepare them to sleep.  Our work with the kids doesn’t end with tugging them in bed.  They are afraid to sleep alone, so one of the parents has to stay with one of our kids.  My daughter prefers her dad so I am the one staying with my son.  We have to wait until they fall asleep to have our own personal time and that is usually after 10pm.  The only time I have to write articles is to sacrifice my sleep.  Sometimes, I slept less than 2 hours a day, reading books, so I can write a book review.  Sometimes, I spent precious sleep time researching the meaning of a Chinese poem, so I can more truly reflect the essence of that Chinese poem when I translate it into English.  At times, it is exhausting to me.  Yet, I get the sense of satisfaction and achievement when I finished writing one article.  It is easy to imagine my anger towards people who copy and paste my creation if you understand the time and effort I put in each creation. 

I have always thought about publishing a book, not for making a profit, but for my own personal satisfaction and as a keepsake for my children.  With this incident, I thought about publishing my own books again.  I started to do some more research about it and found some pretty good information.  Createspace is a cheap solution to publish your own books.  Signing up as a standard member is free unless you request professional services such as designing or marketing your books.  See more details at the link below https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/  Book on Demand is a media I would suggest for self publishing and distributing your own books.  You earn royalties for the sale of your books.  You can also order books on your own behalf, for which you pay only the fixed and per-page charges plus shipping and handling fees.  It is approximately $3 for an order of your own book before tax and shipping and handling.  You don’t earn royalty for the book you order on your own behalf.  There is however a restriction on the number of pages required to publish a book, which is between 24 and 828 pages.  In addition, you must obtain all applicable copyright licenses for artwork used in your book.  You can register your work electronically at the website of United States Copyright Office.  http://www.copyright.gov/.  The cost is $35 to register your unpublished work online.

Now, I am really mad.  It was a coincidence that I found someone posting some of my poem translations on his blog without my permission.  At a social networking site, he asked to be my friend.  Out of curiosity, I checked out his blog entries and found out that he had posted my poem translations without my permission and taking credit for my work.  All my articles are copyrighted.  I would like to state for the last time.  Please do not copy and paste any of my articles.  Please remove all my articles from any of your blog.  If you trully like my articles and want to share with everyone, please just provide link to my blog.  My blog address is http://elisaenglish.pixnet.net/blog.  I will take legal actions if necessary. 

I do not appreciate people copying and pasting my articles.    

We went to Ridgedale Shopping Center today for lunch and to buy boxers for our son.  The boxers were sold out and I ended up buying more Hello Kitty clothes for my daughter.  After that, we were thinking of hitting the mall’s playground if our kids behaved.  Instead, we ran into a Wii Games: Summer 2010 event.  It was pretty interesting.

There were free plays and competitions.  A lot of people lined up for the free plays so I registered my son and I in group competition as well to get more chances to play.  There were a lot of game terminals where you could play from Wii Fit Plus, Wii Sports Resort, Just Dance, Super Mario Bros. Wii, Mario Kart Wii, to Super Mario Galaxy 2.  You can get a coin sticker after each play. The prizes were as follows:

換湯不換藥 – Old wine in a new bottle.

For example:

My review of THE WOMAN IN WHITE by Wilkie Collins

Written by: Elisa English (Copyrighted)

I couldn’t recall what prompted me to purchase the book “The Woman in White” by “Wilkie Collins” sixteen years ago.  Maybe I was sold on the deeply discounted price of $1.  This book could have sat on my bookshelf for another eighteen years if not for my son’s meddling with the books on the bookshelf.  He was trying to find a book to read.  This book, like many others, was sitting there alone, quietly, covered with dust.  I have the impulse of buying books whenever I am in a bookstore.  After the purchase, the books will sit on my bookshelves, waiting for my mood to strike.  For this one, it had sat there for over sixteen years before I finally picked it up.  There are still numerous books on the bookshelves waiting for me to devour. 

“As follows” or “As follow”?

No matter what follows, the phrase is always “as (it) follows” because “as follows” means “as what is listed next” or “as in the list that follows”.

A pig in a poke

A poke means a sack or a bag.  A pig in a poke is something unknown because the sack is sealed from revealing its true content. 

Why going through surgery?

A surgery is nonetheless a surgery, no matter what type of surgery it is.  Be it a laser eye surgery or a C-section, there is always risk involved.  So many people jump on the bandwagon of getting a laser eye surgery for the myth of a risk free surgery that will cure myopia.  The most common laser eye surgery performed in the US is LASIK which surgically alter the cornea without pain.  To claim it risk free and safe proven when the fibrils holding the cornea are cut through and the thickness of the cornea is scrapped off is false advertisement.  Laser eye surgery has the potential of leaving your eyeballs at risk of disintegration and your cornea dislocation in addition to an entire cornea transplant.  Its complication and side-effects are often muted.

Last night, we went for buffet for the only reason that my son wanted to eat sugar bread and my idea of going to a decent Chinese restaurant to have decent Chinese food went down the drain.  I don’t like to dine at restaurants offering Chinese buffet for their poor quality of food.  Though plenty of seafood was served, the freshness of the food was questionable.  In addition, they are good at selling a pig in a poke.  A so-called ginger-and-scallion crab is nonetheless just a crab shell stuffed with watery fish slurry.  I hated the meal until I got to the dessert portion.  I was pleasantly surprised to find “longan”, a fruit I have not tasted for more than two decades.  I filled my plate with about two dozen of them.  After pigging out on half of them, I realized that I might have been swallowing worms without noticing them.  I took off my glasses and started examining each longan before I put it in my mouth.  Suddenly my mind wandered back to the time when I was still a single living in an apartment.  At that time, I was very close to an old lady who lived right above me.  We often dined together.  Somehow, I was puzzled by her oblivion of the ants on her utensils and the leftover scraps stuck on her clean plates when she served the dishes at home.  It is probably hard to understand it until you get to the age when you develop presbyopia.  The closer you get to an object, the blurrier it gets.  I suppose that I am somewhat lucky to have shortsightedness.  All I need to do now is to take off my glasses and everything will look crystal clear even with the fine prints. 

Written by Elisa English

This is another poem that I was asked to translate, also by 李清照.  The poem is 如夢令.  As I said earlier and as always, it is extremely difficult to translate her poems or any of the Chinese poems.  It is never easy to capture the essence of the poem and to portray the beauty of the original poem through translation.  My translation is based on the interpretation from the link below. 

http://tw.knowledge.yahoo.com/question/question?qid=1009090407383