i wish i could say hello guys, i'm back from my fabulous vacation/sabbatical with the tigers of kumaon/scholarly holiday in the US/gastronomic enquiry of southeast asia/doing good works in the back alleys of bombay and have written my second novel too in the meanwhile.
But no. none of the above. i just got scattered into parts of this household - dogs, maids, food, fathers, visiting friends and relatives, bread-butter work, changing over to laptop (disgusting), negotiating bills, ducking taxes legally, and attending to late (very late) 40s health hazards. in short the minutiae and mundanities of mankind.
but hell, i'm learning not to bitch and moan about those. at least i'm alive and well to attend to them, unlike people stopped in their tracks by terrorists, speeding cars, galloping diseases, depression and a hundred other grotesque things that can separate you from your life as you knew it and complained incessantly about.
i'm sporadically writing my second novel. and here's my dilemma - which i will lob into public space and hope will get me some advice. i am thoda through with publishers and agents. or perhaps i am through with one particular publisher and one particular agent who seems to be trying hard. i dont know. i only know, that publishing 3 zakia mansion was a bit of a non sequiter (if thats how its spelt), and i dont want to repeat the same little story of running around doing my own publicity, and not getting called to any literary fairs because perhaps i dont look the part, or no one has bothered to put up my name, or because oh well maybe 3 zakia m is not that good a book...i dont know. so, to cut a long story short, i am so tempted not to go to any publisher with the second book, but to serialize it on my blog over 52 weeks. a chapter for every week. it would be so much more interactive, and not as dead and sterile a process as publishing in india has been for me.
idea che? or no?
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
scattering and regathering
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3 comments:
Gauri, much as I love your blog, a book is a book is a book! And how would one survive between one chapter and the next?
Those are my purely selfish reasons as a reader.
Give this one another shot- see how it goes with the publishers this time around.
And, by the by, Ms.Dange, 3Zakia Mansion was an excellent book. It covered so many issues in such a slender volume.And it was fun. And I read a lot:)
i like the idea if only because it frees you from the tyranny of publishers and you still get the readers you want anyway. but maybe like dipali says try the conventional route just this time keeping in mind the many lessons u learnt the last time.
This is a swell idea. Did you know that Paulo Coelho did that for the Witch of Portobello?
http://en.paulocoelhoblog.com/witch-of-portobello/
(at least the first few chapters if not the whole book!)
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