Category: writing

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The jitters have started. Finally began packing last night. In another four days, I board a train to Dilli (which used to be the Other City of this blog, except that it’s my other city no longer); in a couple of days from there, I take two flights to Seattle for the Clarion West Writing Workshop. I fly in the direction opposite to the earth’s motion and across the international date line, so a very long flight schedule will still find me in Seattle on the same day. All these things are new.

I have to write six new stories in six weeks. I have been given a very prestigious and very humbling scholarship. I will meet a lot of interesting people, a number of smart and seriously talented people, some of them likely to be so famous that even people back home (where the awareness of contemporary international SFF is surprisingly low) would have heard of them. For a month, I haven’t come up with a single plot that holds beyond a few pages.

Raiding my old steel almirah to start packing has made me realise that I own more clothes than I know what to do with, more clothes than I even know.  I am not really a wardrobe girl, which is sometimes worse. I don’t look through my clothes often enough. So I pick up a nice bit of clothing somewhere and proceed to stuff it into my almirah, and soon I forget all about it. I wear the same five or six staples over and over again, and the nice new thing lies in there, untouched for years.

My long holiday at home is coming to an end. I don’t know if I appreciated it well enough — I recall long periods of being bored out of my mind and feeling stifled for the lack of company in the Home City, abandoned nest of all its children. I wrote more than I had done in years, and read a great deal too. I travelled and went to watch films with Ma, made so many trips into the city with her. I had a car and a driver at my disposal most of the time. I visited Bangalore, Jaipur, Lucknow, Benaras, Bombay, Ajanta-Ellorah-Aurangabad and London. I chilled around in air-conditioned bliss while the rest of the country blistered and sweated its way through what was one of the worst summers in years. Back now again to a life of living out of suitcases, bad cooking (my own), always keeping a budget, and so, so much of the world to see.

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Miminality1 Comment

Many good things have been happening, but my Internet connection hasn’t been strong enough to keep up with them. Firstly… well, I’m not yet allowed to talk about the ‘firstly’. (I’ll post about it and put a link here as soon as I am.)

So, secondly. PodCastle put up my story on the third day of February, narrated by Elizabeth Green Musselman, who was excellent with this multilingual universe I loved the way the story sounded. (All those horrors abated.) And everyone at PodCastle – and especially editor Dave Thompson, who bought the story in January – was very nice and very positive about the story. And now I’m diligently following the story’s discussion thread on the Escape Artists forum, where other people are saying other (largely) nice and accurate things about it.

I have been building and obsessing about the Johuree universe for so long (I started writing the first story in 2009 back in UG3; never finished it) that I keep needing to remind myself that this is the first Johuree story that has actually seen the light of day. If anyone wonders what the inside of my head looks like (though I cannot imagine why anyone would), do go and listen to the story!

Kindle illustration for 'Hip-Bone Butterfly'
Kindle illustration for ‘Hip-Bone Butterfly’

There was another publication, equally happy-making. On the second day of February Kindle published its latest poetry edition, and my very old poem ‘Hip-Bone Butterfly‘ finally came out in it. The poem is from 2011, but it is one of the last poems I’ve written (I hardly write poems any more), and it had won the first prize at the Poetry with Prakriti festival the winter when I was interning with Blaft in Chennai. I had this blog even then but I hadn’t mentioned it on the blog – although it was the first time I received a reasonably important prize for my writing, and I was super kicked – because back in college I was too cool for all that.

And now I’m too old to be cool, but I cannot for my life imagine that to be a bad thing. :)

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2014 was a long year in many ways, involving struggles with physical illness and depression, failing to study or work as much as I should, failing to talk or keep in touch with people, but also interspersed with stubborn faith and new love (which is now slightly old love, and has sent me a bouquet of roses nearly as tall as myself as a reminder).

It was perhaps fitting that I woke up with sudden, vehement fever on the morning of the 31st and couldn’t go out anywhere for the new year’s eve.

On the second day of 2015, by the time my fever- and social-seclusion-induced misery had pretty much hit rock bottom, however, I received an email from Podcastle informing me that a story I sent them has been selected for their ‘Artemis Rising’ event. The story will be recited, recorded and podcasted on their website sometime in February, I believe. This is going to be my favourite news of the year for quite a long time.

Podcastle was the first podcast the Corvus made me listen, while he was initiating me to the joys of listening to a story instead of reading it. I had tried listening to audiobooks (novels) before but hadn’t had much success. But, as someone famous (TBA) once remarked and I remember, short stories are probably the precise length of the stories that were once transmitted by telling. And I love Podcastle – love their selection, love their presentation, love the way the website looks and the font they use for their posts. It’s all so neat and beautiful. Of course, it’s a different, more vivid kind of joy to see yourself be published at a venue you enjoy that much. Also, there’s storytelling to happen, and none of my writing has been performed by other people before (oh well, a poem I wrote was excerpted and recited in a very bad play many years ago, but let’s try to never revisit that horror!)… so I’m twice as nervous and excited about that.

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Passionate people are also boring people. Those with no specific interest or opinion are boring as well, so I suppose the only fun people are the ones with a healthy interest in a number of things, those who can switch effortlessly from one interest to the other. I am not one of them. I am the unhealthily passionate sort. I am writing a series of short stories, and if you try to have a conversation with me, all I do is talk about them, or try to make you read one. Or I talk about the books I am reading, or the publishing industry in general, or… *horror* *horror* of my notion of politics. Evidently, that makes me quite a droll conversationalist for most people.

In Calcutta, I had gone to university with a large number of people. Well, every university has a large number of people, but at mine the social scene was particularly active, so a large number of people knew other large numbers of people. Now I no longer keep track of most people I superficially knew, or the ones whose interests I did not share, which creates a particular impediment to gossip. Besides, new people are growing up into the social scene all the time, so my reactions to new gossip keep moving from ‘Oh, I see – they did that?’ to ‘Who?’. There are so many people in the world, every one of them of mild interest. I find it more profitable to know a few people to great depth than everyone just a little. I am more interested in minds than the surface repercussion of actions.

Above all, more than anything, I am trying to avoid any knowledge of that inhuman conglomerate called ‘society’. I have always been terrified by inhuman conglomerates – ‘school’, ‘college’, ‘office’ and so on. What ‘the school’ thinks is not what any individual in it thinks, and it’s meaner, more judgemental, more forbidding, reducing every individual that participates in it to their basest instincts. I don’t want to have anything to do with any of these. Much better this room, these books, these tireless hours of pondering and working upon a craft. They are so much more benevolent with their rewards.

And maybe the occasional coffee with someone who doesn’t gossip.

A story, a poem

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A poem I wrote in 2011 was recently published, in an online magazine called The Missing Slate. Here is a link. And here‘s a link to the original, which is one (punch)line longer than the version that was published. It is ever interesting to discover how people read your writing. I’d have thought that last line essential, but the editors of the magazine found it redundant to the poem.

Sometimes, these are lessons.

Of course, I no longer feel the bruise under which that poem was written. (Other scars have covered it.) Distancing is so often a blessing.

efiction

The other, the story, is one I originally called ‘Interview with a Bollywood Screen Goddess’, which was published in the November 2014 issue of eFiction India. I have not seen this one yet, since the magazine can be purchased either as a digital or a print edition, and I am waiting for my print copy to arrive.

‘Interview’ (which the magazine no longer calls ‘Interview’) was a great story to write; it cheered me up during a period of otherwise intense depression. The story starts out as a magazine interview with a famous Bollywood actress, which is something I always find fun to fictionalize. I think anyone who’s ever been an entertainment journalist has had that thought running through their head – what if you could make up all of this, rather than, let’s say, about 60% of it? What if the person you’re interviewing literally represented those adjectives like enchanting, mesmerising, unearthly… and then, in ‘Interview’, it turns out that they do! A very generic, easygoing fantasy story, set in Delhi (the Other City of this blog, whose habits and memories are still fresh in my mind) that made me very happy.

There is something to be said for this sudden surge of publications. It is that I have finally (I think) overcome my reluctance to publish. Of course, the transformation is less sudden than it seems. I had started writing ‘Death of a Widower’ in 2011, abandoned it, picked it up again in the summer of 2013, finished and send it in to Rupa, and An Atlas of Love was published in early 2014. That’s not quite sudden. I write maybe a poem or two a year. It’s hardly enough for a sustained publishing record, and as for fiction, for most of my life I have not been able to think in short stories. Any idea I had was always the length of a novel, and I’d start writing it, and of course, I am yet to complete a novel. I wish I was prolific, but I’m not. And while I never retouch my poems after I’ve written them, I find myself rewriting my stories most of the time, hopefully making them stronger and better with each version. It is a craft I am still learning. I hope one day I will be good.