I wrote a novel

This post is taken from my personal blog. I did seek a discussion on publishing help here at Rodinhoods couple months ago and it was helpful to hear the comments and get some connections. Now that I have finished the manuscript and am deep in the process of getting it published, just wanted to update the Rodinhoods. Hopefully, the book will see daylight and that I can be of help to budding authors here. I am also putting up a website for the book and will share it soon. Thanks for reading.

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
– Toni Morrison

 

At some point in life, few years ago, I realized that I really liked writing. Once so much so that I called up my Dad and told him that I want to write a book and that I enjoy it even more than my regular work (I was a developer at Citi in those days). And he said, “People normally write about their experiences or some insights they gathered from life. Even fiction is someone’s colorful reality, some thought born in the real world. What would you write about?”

I had no answer to that. Yes, I could blog but that was far from the discipline of writing an actual book. So, I put down the phone and somewhere that thought of writing seriously got pushed back. My job continued, my life continued. I was writing more software lines than my thoughts. Time passed by.

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
– Henry David Thoreau

 

Fast forward five years. Last October (which makes me realize that its almost a year now), I was writing a diary entry – I was writing how restless I felt. Without realizing, I wrote something borne out of my feelings that became the seed for a book. My thoughts went to that old conversation with Dad. Last two years had witnessed my life going through an eventful tide and I was no longer the inexperienced dreamer. Along with the pains and anxieties, life had given me something else – a story. So, I decided to write that story down in my own eccentric way. I had started but I didn’t know where it will go. One thing led to another and chapters followed into a rough skeleton. The draft started taking shape just as a fetus develops its limbs and organs. With invaluable inputs from my mentor and a close friend, I polished the story into a palatable read (I hope). Last month, I finished the first version of the manuscript.

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
– Anaïs Nin

 

What happens now? Hopefully, I get a publisher else will need to figure some way to get it out – may be kickstarter or self-publishing? And being the pessimistic soul that I am, I usually refrain from talking about incomplete projects but then I thought that just the fact that I was able to complete the story and write the book to a finish line needs to be appreciated. I don’t know what its destined to be but I am kinda proud that I could write something (that I obviously think is) beautiful. Since the first tough part was done (of finishing the writing), I decided to go for the second impossible thing – trying to get it published. So, I started the whole grill of ‘how do you get something published in India’. I just sent out a couple of hard copy query submissions today and will update if and when a good news arrives.

I realize that I have undertaken a highly ambitious venture to say the least (especially with no contacts whatsoever in this god forsaken publishing industry) but what’s the fun in doing something mundane?

P.S. I haven’t quit my entrepreneurial passion (for I feel this is equally entrepreneurial) and my work goes on. I enjoy it more because I do it at my terms now. I wrote the book at odd hours every night because as they say-

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
– Saul Bellow