Birthday celebrations
A birthday couldn't get better. Especially when the anthology of short stories, which you are a part of, releases on the same day.
The idea of penning down stories revolving around the lockdown period was conceptualized by the core team of Did you read today (DYRT), sometime in April. They encouraged members to submit their contributions. When the founder Bijay Nair asked me to edit the stories, I gladly obliged.
Now I have done some editing for my website as a part of my job. However editing an entire collection of short stories by different authors was a challenge. The entire month of May and half of June turned out to be quite hectic. I was juggling multiple things which left feeling quite drained at the end of the day.
I was attending my classes at Stanford albeit through zoom. I had tons of reading assigned besides writing for all those word prompts. I had my own book-a memoir titled 'A Turbulent Mind' which I was editing and proof reading. I was in constant touch with my publishing team with regards to that. I was also a part of another anthology of ghost stories and an academic journal of essays. In short, I was swamped with work.
It was also a challenge with the lockdown. Family was home and the libraries were shut. I was used to having some solitude and quiet time, which is essential when you are in the reading and writing space. That disrupted my space and concentration, especially when you have a six year old constantly demanding your attention.
By mid June, the editing and proof reading was done. I realized that it was a different experience to edit stories written by 30 different authors. The writing styles and theme of the stories are quite different. So it takes a while to adapt yourself to these distinctive writing styles, correct the grammar, punctuation and alter certain phrases. Each story easily took me about 2 hours in a day. It was tiring, exhausting but a good learning experience.
It gave me an opportunity to hone my editing skills and also work with rest of the team-Bijay, Prabha who was in charge of proof-reading and uploading it on Amazon as an e book. Reji for designing the beautiful cover and coming up with the title.Sachin for getting the foreword done by Terence Lewis. We were hoping to release it by end of June. So it turned out to be a pleasant surprise when it was released on my birthday-June 27th. Good things come when you least expect it. It was even more wonderful to have a zoom meeting with the team and all the 30 authors this morning.
My story is titled 'The Flight to Nowhere' and the book is available on kindle.It can be downloaded by clicking on either of the links.
The birthday started out with a bang with a book meet with Alka Joshi (author of The Henna Artist) on Friday night. Calls and wishes poured in along with the cake cutting with family. Saturday was spent in hiking amidst the redwoods.
It seems to be a start of a good year. My book 'A Turbulent Mind' which is a memoir about my triathlon journey is slated to release sometime end of July or latest by August first week. 2020 is the year of me becoming an author and also an editor. So far so good. There is definitely a silver lining amidst the dark cloud of the lockdown period.
Comments