An Interview with C.T. Au-Yang: Author of Entanglement

C.T. Au-Yang is an entrepreneur, a coder as well as an analyst. He never imagined to be an author of novels, but films crafted by him, along with 2 novellas and 1 novel based upon, represent the fourth of his eight projects.

Tell us about your book.

Entanglement is the novella that one can finish reading in 2 hours and may find loveful for a lifetime, the first of three of the series Understanding & Endeavour. So many quotations, songs, novels, movies and tears after, there is still no definitive answer to the almost perpetual mystery, what is love? Can love be explained by neurotransmitters, their prioritization, memories, decision trees and human logic? The answer is for readers to find out, and this book (with the touch of a coder and twist of a drunk) of rarest supply may save them a lot of trouble.

This book is a jigsaw puzzle in two senses, love is a solvable problem, and it takes, after reading, at least 5 to 10 hours of research to form a complete picture in mind, some intelligence and life experience required. It is a bit like “When Harry Met Sally” (more precisely, it is a semi-antagonist, and was supposed to be a screenplay) of the 21st-century, only smarter and a lot wiser.

Why did you want to write a book?

It is my deployment of some benevolent ideas that are long overdue, something humans will need before the advent of artificial intelligence. It also represents my complaint to some of the classics that just cannot solve any problem.

Why did you choose to self-publish?

It was on 3 December 2019, I was amazed after watching an online video about a fiction (that I tend to be grateful to, after all, my decision tree has been affected in a positive way). Some research on the Internet led me to the conclusion that self-publishing at first and movie-making later should be the most cost-effective and effective way to deploy my ideas.

What tools or companies did you use, and what experience did you have?

It was all DIY. For the first edition, I used Scrivener to prepare the docx for eBook and the pdf for the paperback. The formatting was straightforward and trouble-free, and I got the job done easily with this usable writing tool. But Grammarly did not do a thorough job when it came to grammar checking, and no editing service was used. For the graphic design, I utilized the free and impeccable GIMP, which got all the desired details and effects fulfilled. Even the jigsaw effect that I am going to incorporate into the front cover of the second edition.

For the second edition, I switched to Microsoft Word for better compatibility with the self-publishing software/systems and outsourced editing (Kirkus’s copyediting or similar services will be used to make the manuscript more presentable). But Word is a disappointment, I cannot get some of the basic tasks done with ease. It took me four months, from December 2019 to March 2020, to come up with the first edition. And it is going to take about a week or two, sometime in July 2020, to add a reading guide and rewrite some of the chapters.

How do you deal with writer’s block?

There is no such thing as writer’s block to me because I am not exactly a writer. I am a coder of information systems. There was an outline at the beginning, and it represented a subset of ideas accumulated over the years, I just linked these ideas (like quotations) together (Does anyone notice that ‘Love’ is the topic that has the most quotes at goodreads.com, 78k as at 13 July 2020, compared with ‘Life’, 61k which comes in second, ‘Inspirational’, 58k third, and ‘Humour’ 37k fourth?). The problem was with the expansion, how to explain more vividly and convincingly the stuff I was trying to deploy.

Tell us about the genre you wrote in, and why you chose to write this sort of book.

It may look like fiction of romance, but it is a book about self-help in disguise (explained partly by science). What makes this novella different from other romances/science fictions is that it is not a product of imagination, every sentence in it makes sense but, can readers understand?

What is love?

It is my understanding that love is about entanglement, felicity is about Oxytocin and a continuous stream of fond memories uninterrupted.

Why do neurotransmitters have anything to do with love?

Mutual respect, insistence, selfless giving and will power by Oxytocin, intelligence and wisdom by Acetylcholine, devotion by Dopamine, they make all the differences in relationship, love and marriage.

Who are your biggest writing inspirations and why?

Life experience and some space to be undisturbed. Alcohol really helped especially when it came to expansion (I came up with the outline sober, and I wrote sober), those interesting points just popped up and got fused together during consumption of spirits/beer and during sedated sleep. I had to jot them down immediately during drinking, and after wakeup, just in case I forgot. Quite a lot of authors, in different civilizations and throughout history, have an unquenchable thirst for alcohol.

What are your plans now your book is published?

To come up with the second edition (available in August 2020) which is more readable (as long as it is more deployable, and with all the ideas intact, I do not mind making it more acceptable to general readers) and more understandable (reading guide provided).