Highs and Lows

Riding high on the success of completing my first ever blogging challenge I am ready to make a confession. But first a big ‘thank you’ to all of you who dropped in and made the challenge so much fun. And for any of you planning to take up the challenge next year, here is some very sound advice – always make sure to pre-schedule your challenge posts. I for one would never have been able to manage otherwise, what with a medical emergency in the family. In fact that’s why I was unable to carry on with the Moonshine updates. These will be up shortly, please bear with me. In the meanwhile, if you remember, I did promise you some short stories (and the story behind these stories 😉 ).

I have only recently ventured into the fictitious arena although I have always dreamed of writing short stories for as long as I can remember. But when I did start writing, I somehow ended up getting entangled in the long, never ending versions. First it was Silver Streaks and then Moonshine. It always starts off well with me in the driver’s seat but then the characters take over and I am left with no choice but to follow them and their dictates.

It’s true – take Biji (of Moonshine) I just mentioned her and she just muscled her way in and wrestled the whole story away to her village You have no idea what a struggle it has been to extract Rajani and company from her clutches

See that! She did it again

Back to topic at hand – short stories were once again relegated to the background. Then came the Write India campaign by the Times of India – 11 months, 11 author prompts and voila here was my chance to pen brilliant, shocking, incredible, gut wrenching tearjerkers – and of course, my stories would be the best of the best.

I couldn’t wait to get started. But then life happened. I was otherwise preoccupied in the first month – in any case the prompt drew a blank (err actually even now it’s a blank) as did the next one.

Just when I was resigned not to write any short story ever, I cracked the third prompt – I mean I managed to draft a story and send it in.  Of course that didn’t make it to the coveted list, and now the competition is all but over and none of the others have either

But, yet I am not really unhappy or heartbroken for I had a blast cooking up the stories. Just the fact that I could come up with something that was readable (okay fine you be the judge of that) was a huge achievement in itself. Here I must acknowledge and give full credit to Bhargavi and smr for being so patient and encouraging (not to mention meticulous, critical, nit-picking, fastidious and generally quite impossible to please) – thank you

So, here I am ready to unleash the short stories (until stocks last) every Monday. Hope you will read, like (or unlike) and comment.

Just a few words about the competition – the author of the month would provide a passage and participants had to spin a story in 1500 to 2500 words (while including the prompt anywhere in the story). Each author had certain rules as well (must admit to being guilty of overlooking most of these – after all there is only so much restrictions creativity can take, don’t you agree? Oh well sour grapes I suppose). You can read more about it here and in fact the last prompt is due on 7^th of May. And entries for this month can still be submitted by the 6th. Who knows you may be the next big winner?

So get reading (click here for the first story) and start spinning your own special yarn. How about practicing your writing skills in the comment box?

But first let Calvin set the stage, poor thing has been feeling pretty neglected…

Quote of the day: “Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.” ― Alain de Botton