publishing – Page 2 – Mimi Mondal

Announcing the Table of Contents for Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler!

This went up on the website of Twelfth Planet Press a while ago, but I also wanted to put it up on my blog, because this has been a truly great set of works to edit, by writers who are friends, writers I didn’t know personally but admired, as well as writers who were complete strangers. No better opportunity than this to put their names on my blog.

Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler
Edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal

ISBN: 978-1-922101-42-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-922101-43-3 (ebk)
To be published in August 2017

Continue reading “Announcing the Table of Contents for Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler!” →

I have a review! – On File 770

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Do you regularly Google yourselves? I still find it awkward to do that, so the only times I end up doing it is on the occasional end-of-the-night/early-morning when I can’t fall asleep but am too tired to do something else more fun. (This doesn’t happen often. There are always more Buzzfeed quizzes to do, which is always more fun than Googling myself.) And that’s how I found out that there was a little one-paragraph review of my Harry Potter essay on File 770 back in December.

This is cool, because File 770 is cool. This also feels more reasonable than the five or so comments that the article got on the original site, all at different points of the scale between splaining and trolling. Online abuse still manages to make me flinch, probably because I haven’t often “put myself out there” in the truest sense of the term, even though I have existed on the Internet for more than a decade. (I existed in networks and communities that were accountable, and in which online identities often led to real-life people.) In the public sense, I am not easily trolled, partly because I absolutely disappear from the site of trollage, refusing to engage. But in the private sense, I also end up wasting an unnecessary amount of time wondering about the kind of human beings who spend most of their life saying unpleasant things to people on the Internet, and what evolutionary turn has brought us to this.

Anyway, here’s a screenshot of the File 770 review, because I would like to keep a record:

I hope I am not beginning to seem like the obnoxious celebrity who retweets every praise, which is apparently a stereotype, someone pointed out to me recently. This may be helped by the fact that I’m not, in fact, a celebrity. That essay was my only non-fiction publication last year, and this probably my only review. That’s totally okay to feel great about.

The Clarion West 2016 Write-a-thon and Me: Part 3 (Unfinished)

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The Clarion West 2016 workshop is ending today as I write (in one of the westernmost time zones of the world, so there are a few hours), two days before it had ended last year, and there’s the end of the Write-a-thon.

I feel a little disappointed in myself.

The imposter syndrome is strong in me. I often write very little, and panic that maybe I’ve run out of imagination; and when I do write a lot, I convince myself that the quality of something written in such bulk can possibly not be very high.

I did write a lot in these 1.5 months. I didn’t write 40k words, like I declared on my Write-a-thon page, but I never actually believed I’d write 40k words – that was just to aim as high as I could, so that I got somewhere in the middle. I think I wrote about 25–30k words, and some of them are never going to be published, but that’s not a bad word count. That’s definitely a higher word count than what I’d churned out at the actual workshop last year.

I wrote through days of depression and frequent panic attacks, through a barely trickling Internet connection, and an MS Office crash between Week 4 and Week 5.

Except that I keep thinking I could do better.

Anyway, now I should put up an update for the last two weeks, because sometimes listing out the things you’ve done reminds you that you’ve done enough:

Week 5 (July 16–22):

My essay on Indian fantasy fiction from Week 1 got published in Scroll.in! This should actually be a Week 4 update, but I didn’t notice the publication until later. The title of the essay isn’t mine (obviously!), and also obviously you don’t see 2,582 words there, since Scroll.in decided to publish only a section of the original essay. I will probably publish all of it somewhere else – or on this blog – after the Write-a-thon is done.
My (older) short story “The Sea Sings at Night” got reprinted in Digital Fiction Pub! Once again, should be a Week 4 update – both of these were published on the same day, in fact – but once again, I didn’t notice until later. This had a remarkably quick turnaround. I think I’d made the submission during the Write-a-thon period itself, although it’s 3.19 a.m. and I’m half-asleep and all these words are too generic and I can’t find the email confirmation for submission now.
Received EXTREMELY POSITIVE response from the editor of TBA2 publication about the 842-word first part of Essay 3 (this being an essay on Harry Potter), which I had submitted in Week 4.
Proceeded to write complete first draft of the Harry Potter essay, currently at around 4,000 words.
Received one more approval from TBA2 publication about said first draft, which I didn’t read until this week, because my Internet connection started being problematic.

Week 6 (July 23–29):

[Ugh, it’s very late, so I’ll finish this post tomorrow. Or something. Just want to publish it already, this being the last day of the Write-a-thon, and all.]

The Clarion West 2016 Write-a-thon and Me: Part 2

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I always tell myself that I should be writing, instead of writing about writing, i.e. posts like this. I intended to do a week-by-week update of my Clarion West Write-a-thon, as many others are doing, but we’re already in Week 4 and obviously I haven’t. I also haven’t quite kept to my originally declared writing goals, but I’m happy with myself, since I did write a lot these past three weeks, probably more than I’ve written in a whole year since Clarion West, MFA submissions included. I’ve thought more actively about what I want my writing to accomplish, the perspectives I want to embrace or abandon, and did a little bit of necessary cathartic writing that was blocking my creativity otherwise. I made some writing-related contacts, and I always feel triumphant when I manage to reach out to people, especially strangers, because it never stops being difficult.

I realize that I don’t look like someone who has difficulty initiating conversation with strangers, especially when you judge by my years of living away from home, but I’m actually always winging it. Nearly 95% of the people I know were introduced to me by someone else I knew, or circumstances, e.g. I happened to be in the same office or classroom as them. At almost 29, I feel as terrified of saying “Hi, I am…” as I did when I was 15, if I don’t have the convenient wall of “XYZ asked me to go talk to you” to hide behind. I have zero small-talk skills, so I often lose touch with people when I don’t have anything immediately to do with them. High-functioning anxiety is usually invisible, or gets blatantly called lying, which is the line I’ve got all my life from everyone who doesn’t actually know me closely enough see how I live from day to day.

So for me, every act of initiating contact is an achievement, and I achieved some of those in the last three weeks too, which I hadn’t in nearly a year now, more so because the past year had also been an all-time emotional low. So here’s a list of things that I did for the Write-a-thon till now:

Week 1 (June 19–25):

Wrote an essay in defence of fantasy fiction written in India, originally of 2582 words, for a specific publication (TBA) but without a specific pitch or word limit, because said publication doesn’t have them
Sent essay to publication
Did my final revision on the third story from Other People
Sent story to my editor, R. Sivapriya, at Juggernaut Books

Week 2 (June 26–July 1):

Wrote a flash/short story
Got story beta-read, and edited it
Submitted the final version of story for publication
Read and critiqued a story by a friend
Wrote a grant (well, con membership) application, which has now been achieved! Hat-tip to Con or Bust for their incredible generosity to me. If nothing goes wrong (give an anxious person a break, right?), I may be encountered at the World Fantasy Con in October.

Week 3 (July 2–8):

Participated in a Write-a-thon sprint, during which I wrote the beginning of a second essay, intended for a specific publication
Completed the first draft of this essay, currently at 1634 words
Wrote a semi-personal blog post about an emotional crisis I have been suffering for a while now, 2187 words. (I’m not sure if I should be counting this under Write-a-thon writing, since I am not even seeking to publish it anywhere else, but I had started thinking up a story that involved a traumatizing relationship, and I realized that I could not write that story until I wrote out my own.)
Reconnected with an ex-employer who sometimes publishes SFF (there are no dedicated SFF publishers in India), and who may have some freelance writing work for me
Wrote a query to a publication (TBA2) asking if they’ll be interested in a third essay I’m hoping to write.

Week 4 (July 9–15):

Received response and edited version from editor of TBA publication about the essay from Week 1
Did minor rewriting to essay from Week 1 and sent it back

And now we’re halfway through Week 4, and TBA2 publication has written back saying they may be interested in the idea (but not sure, since they’ve never seen my writing before), so I will get on with trying to write that essay. Thinking of it, it hasn’t been such an unproductive Write-a-thon, overall.

OTHER PEOPLE has started publishing from Juggernaut Books!

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Earlier this year (on 29 February, specifically, because what other more appropriate date for a book about weirdoes?), I signed a contract with Juggernaut Books for my short story collection Other People. Last week, along with the rest of the first list of Juggernaut Books, the first two stories came out in India.

Other People is a collection I’ve been writing for a long time. I started writing “Other People”, the first story, for my creative writing class at Jadavpur University in 2009. It was supposed to be just one story, but it expanded into a whole world and a cast of characters I loved, and I was so lost in exploring them that I never finished writing the story for the deadline that was breathing down my neck. I wrote another story in that world – a simpler but anachronistic story – for a later submission, but then I kept the project aside for a later time when I could develop it more fully.

Life happened. MA happened. Working at Penguin India happened, followed by Scotland, London, many other thoughts, places, people.

In late 2014 I picked up that world again, dusted it off a little, and started writing more stories in it. I loved it still. Older by five years and made a little wiser by life, unleashed into the world from my cloistered existence at home, I felt like I understood this world better, could see the characters clearly, why they were unlike the people who surrounded them, where they were coming from. In 2009 I was only looking at these people from the outside, observing like a visitor; in 2014 I was finally in the midst of them. Inside their heads – where I wanted to be.

I wrote two stories at home in Calcutta – the first two stories that you can read now. I wrote another at Clarion West, Seattle in the summer of 2015, and two more at Rutgers University–Camden, where I enrolled for an MFA now. I am writing another story as I write this post. Other People is a work in progress. The stories will keep appearing from Juggernaut as I write them, and after a while we will have a whole book.

The reason why Juggernaut Books can publish Other People as a serial is that their primary platform is an app. The Android app is out in India already, and the iOS app is soon to follow. (My mother, who has an ancient Windows phone from Nokia, feels a little excluded from the party.) They are new, and they have a fantastic team – probably the best team in India I could publish with right now. Chiki Sarkar, who is the publisher, was my employer back at Penguin India; and R. Sivapriya, who is now my editor, was a senior colleague I was always too much in awe of. (She used to curate the literary classics and translations list back at Penguin India. How many languages does Sivapriya read in? We junior copy editors back at the office could never stop speculating.) They enjoy literary fantasy, which not many publishers in India do yet. The monsters and other outcasts of Other People feel like they’re in safe hands with them.