Tag: writing

#Ren3: Post One

For the next month I’ll be participating in the Rule of Three: a month-long fiction blogfest, where the sponsors have created a ‘world’, the town of Renaissance, and challenged participating writers to create a story that takes place there. The story will feature 3 characters of my creation, who will be showcased on this blog on 3 different Wednesdays, following the Rule of Three. The 4th Wednesday, will have the culminating scene.
Here’s the beginning of Sen’s story. You can still enter as posts have to be up by October 6th. So get to writing — 500 words is the limit — and join us in thickening plot of life in Renaissance.

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As the sun slid across the horizon and over the top of the tent, the Roundeli Mountains shimmered in the distance. The leaves on the trees remained still. Who do these foreigners think they are? Her father’s question rang in the air. Instead of answering him, Sen swallowed, trying to rid her mouth of the dust of the Schiavonan desert. She tried to push away thoughts of the long limbed leader of the scouts she had passed while searching for the logan berry that kept her father’s cough at bay. Filling our heads with the hope of better lands when we know rain is coming. Here a wracking cough punctured his diatribe. She thumped his back. Help, that’s all Sen seemed to do these days, whether her father, or the older members of their tribe. There was no more time for lingering against the trunk of a tree, rolling down hills deep in the forest, seeking out the Sawtee – a bird with a sweet cry, it reminded her of earlier days.

“None of our people has made it across that river since the days of our fathers’ fathers,” she murmured, saving him the exertion. She pressed his right shoulder so he reclined against the tent’s central pole. He sipped from a wooden spoon filled with a homemade remedy of red berries and leaves. As his eyes closed, Sen rubbed the spoon in a small pile of sand. It would have to do. There wasn’t enough water to drink, much less clean their implements, not to mention their bodies.

Her father’s breath rattled in his chest, sounding like a loose pebble at the bottom of a harvesting bag. But it had been months since a harvest of any kind. Instead of replenishing itself for planting, without rain the earth was drying up; even the verdant Culdees, in whose vales she had played as a child, were diminishing. Trees drooped their branches in surrender to the encroaching desert.

Sen needn’t dread the bittersweet feeling of a Sawtee’s cry because the blue and yellow bird was a rare sight. Wondering where all the birds, even wildlife had wandered to, she felt a fool for not feeling the tall one’s gaze. She had no way of knowing how long he had been watching her. As she crouched low, preparing to run on all fours where she would be fastest; he hadn’t spoken a word, remaining very still, and kept watching her. Instead of lunging for her, he extended a hand. She retreated a few steps. His vine like fingers unfurled, revealing a small oval disk, painted into the likeness of a woman’s face. It was unlike anything she had ever seen.

She drew closer, picked up the flat disk, attached to a rope of delicate, linked metal. He didn’t twitch a hair. The face smiling up at Sen was a dim memory from another life full of laughter; when they ate meat regularly, and she didn’t flatten her chest by winding long strips across it under her tunics. That smile could belong to one other person, the only other person in the tribe to have brown eyes. Sen shook her head, fingers involuntarily closing around the disk. When she looked up again the tall one was
gone.
Her back to the tent, she sat a few feet away against a tree, dangling the disk in the remaining rays of sunlight. There was no doubt who was winking back at her. Her father had told her mother was dead. How then, or why, did a tall one have an engraving of her likeness?

The One Where I Self-Publish an Ebook

 

I’m a writer. It took me nearly ten years from my first creative writing course during my Masters program at North Carolina State University to say this with any degree of confidence or understanding what being a writer meant. It doesn’t mean that I make a living from writing (though one day in the not too distant future I hope it will). What it does mean is that I write every day, something: an article for a journal or magazine, edit an academic piece, fiddle with parts of a story, or pitch up to this blog to say something. Anything.

The truth is that publishing is undergoing a seismic shift and has been feeling the reverberations of technology in the ten years since I finished my first short story collection. Perhaps they became as the rumbles of blogs turned into books; here were people with a demonstrated audience of a few thousand. With help of a major publishing house to catapult their small audience onto the national or international stage and perhaps become bestsellers or even movies like the Julie and Julia cooking blog. These Cinderella like stories about bloggers turned writers may have been the logical step to another intervention that rocked publishing: the e-book.

Self publishing has existed for a long time; but these ‘vanity’ presses as they were known would charge a writer to provide several hundred copies of a book that likely languished in a garage — for those lucky enough to have space — or found themselves spilled on in the family den. Often this type of book didn’t work because it didn’t have the heft of the big publishers to market, distribute, and reach a wider audience. Nonetheless a few intrepid storytellers went the self published route as the budgets of major houses tightened and fewer marketing departments were willing to take a risk on new writers. These soldiers were the tail wagging the dog and one of the most famous examples is The Lace Reader which eventually went to an auction (where multiple publishers bid on a book) and then onto the bestsellers list.

The e-book is challenging the step-child nature of self publishing in relation to the commercial market. Because now readers can find new authors and new authors are often much cheaper than the established ones. As the John Locke — not of the LOST t.v. series fame — the first writer to sell a million copies on Amazon.com is (in)famous for saying: “When famous authors sell at $9.95 and my books are at 99c, I no longer have to prove my books are as good as theirs. They have to prove their books are ten times better than mine!” Royalties are also much better for authors in digital sales than on print books, mainly because digital books are significantly less expensive to produce.

After hearing about this for years, this summer I decided to think about all the content I’ve had piling up since that very first class in 2002. Many of the pieces have been placed in literary magazines around the United States but were turned away by agents for one reason or another. The collection seemed the perfect place to start an experiment on whether or not the e-book hype was something to get excited about.

Download a copy of Coloured and Other Stories and see for yourself. Do I deserve to be in print?

What are your thoughts on the self publishing industry? Have you read other self published authors or are you considering either print or digital self publishing?

 

10, 33, 60 — Nothing But Numbers

Photo by Mykl Roventine

This month I had an event that comes only once a year —  my birthday.

As a Hind child growing up in the west, December 25th came and went in our house like most other days. Friends would call and ask what I got. While I fumbled for an answer, the conversation would move on to their substantial gifts. My birthday however was the one day in our house that we were able to choose a present, a cake, even on rare occasion, plan a party funded by our parents. As a child (and later as a college student) I learned to let my birthday slide because it was so early in the American school year that those kids who came to my birthday parties were not those I was friends with by that other great gift giving time: Christmas.

Moving to Qatar had somewhat the opposite effect as there was a national day that was celebrated on September 3rd. This holiday meant a three day weekend during which I’d dash to Bahrain for some festivities. Now we celebrate National Day on December 18th so it appeared I was robbed of the Labor Day like weekend in Doha. Except for this year: Eid Al Fitr came a few days just before, so we packed our bags, snatched up the baby, and went for a weekend getaway to Santorini, Greece.

I promised myself a digital fast as a way to clear my head, enjoy the trip, and also being with my family. I did what many thought would be impossible: left my Blackberry at home. All the flights for this trip were early morning, making my vow to stay away from the Internet relatively easy. The morning we flew out, I did scan my email as the nefarious Cyclopistic blinking red light beckoned me even at dawn.

Congrats on winning the SheWrites New Novelist competition, Mohana!!!!

Incredibly, there it was. One of those messages that you keep your antennae up for but I had to brush my teeth and get on with the more normal parts of real life.

Needless to say, getting into the airport lounge and onto a computer was immediately the next order of business. I read with astonishment that my project, the one that had been rejected 10 times by agents and editors because they “weren’t compelled by it,” or didn’t feel they could do it justice. While the no’s were increasing from polite to reverse compliments (you have a wealth of material) they were still dismissive.

Of course, being no rookie, I knew all about not taking rejection to heart and writing on. And I did — saving this manuscript that is a semi-autobiographical first novel onto the hard drive — starting a second novel based on questions I was thinking about life in Qatar and how people fall in love. Yet when SheWrites reminded me on Twitter that they were doing a contest for the first chapters of unpublished novels. Winners would have their material in front of agents and editors with critiques. I downloaded the chapter, sent it in with my photo, and there my husband was in Greece, reading my synposis and first 2000 words as one of five finalists.

The Help a book that purportedly was rejected sixty times is now opening as a film all around the United States. J.K. Rowling is perhaps one of the most lucrative examples of never giving up on your work or yourself but there are many, many others including Stephen King, whose wife fished out that nail bitter, Carrie, from the trashcan and said she’d help with writing the teenage girlishness he was unsure of.

A contest breathes life back into a story and indeed this writer. A good lesson in writing close to my birthday or indeed any time of year. If you’re an aspiring writer or a writer who need encouragement, dust off the keyboard, notebook, desk and get back in there.

After all, no one can read you if your work isn’t finished.