#Bloggers , you can Still sign up for the #atozchallenge !

Blogging from A to Z April Challenge

I’m hosting the A to Z April Blogging Challenge again this year, on Amlokiblogs. Daily (w)rite had participated in 2011 and I’ve entered it back again in 2013, and for the first time ever, I’ll be AZing on two blogs! Wish me luck.

The brainchild of Arlee Bird, at Tossing it Out, the A to Z Challenge basically requires 26 posts in 26 days based on 26 letters of the alphabet, one post beginning with each letter during the month of April, with Sundays off for good behavior.

If you haven’t signed up yet, you have till April 1 to join in the challenge, and then the epic journey would begin!

On April 1, blog about a topic that begins with the letter “A.” April 2 is “B,” April 3 is “C,” and so on. No posts on Sundays and we finish with Z on April 30.

You can use a theme for the month or go random – just as long as it matches the letter of the alphabet for the day. We recommend short posts – participants will be trying to visit as many as possible during the Challenge and will likely skip long posts.

Please turn off Word Verification! You won’t receive many comments or return visitors if it’s on. Check your settings, as it may be on without your knowledge. If you are really concerned about spam, set comments to no anonymous or blog owner approval.

Make it easy for people to follow you. Use Google Friends Connect, Feedburner or other RSS Feed, Linky Followers, Networked Blogs, etc., and be sure those widgets are located near the top of your sidebar. Time your posts well, so as to get a maximum audience.

Start with the blog after yours on list. We suggest visiting five blogs a day and you are welcome to visit more!

Make new friends. Visit those who visit you. Return the follows of blogs you enjoy.

Each host has a section of the list and will visit you several times during the month.

We also have minions (assistants) who will help us. It is our goal to make sure all blogs on the list are participating. Ad sites, non-participants, and bad links will be removed as we find them.

Visit the A to Z Blog for updates and daily words of encouragement.

Bottom line – have fun!

If you have any questions, please ask. You can still sign up, so if you’re not on the A to Z Blogging Challenge list, add your name on there, NOW!

My #atozchallenge Theme : Featuring Indie Authors this April

What is Your #atozchallenge Theme ?

Mina Lobo and David Macaulay have come up with The Big Reveal bloghop to celebrate the mother of all bloghops, the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge, and as a co-host of said challenge, I’m thrilled to take part.

This bloghop is for participants in the challenge, and if you haven’t signed up yet, what are you waiting for? This challenge will change your blog for the better, for all years to come. I should know, because that is what the A to Z Challenge did for this blog and Amlokiblogs.

As readers of this blog will tell you, I’m not a prolific blogger, and not that great at commenting either. Apart from the fact that our blogging community is very generous, the fact that I have blog-friends who visit both this blog and Amlokiblogs is due to the A to Z Challenge, and the awesome people I got to know through it.

For my A to Z Challenge on this blog I’ll feature mostly indie-published book excerpts for the 26 days of April. I love reading, and supporting author-friends, and this is a good way to do both.

Today, as a precursor, or foretaste, of my A to Z Challenge posts in April, I give you The Fall of Onagros, Book 1 of SAGE by Marian Allen.

The Fall of Ongaros by Marian Allen

Blurb (since this is a series): Usurper. Lost Heir. Runaway bride. Land on the brink of civil war. All so familiar, until Tortoise — the Divine Creature who ignores the rules of right and wrong — challenges his fellow divinities to meddle.

Suddenly, children targeted for murder are adopted, swordsmen turn into blacksmiths, and none are reliably who or what they seem. The four Divine Animals are afoot: Tortoise, Dragon, Unicorn, and Phoenix. Hold on tight.

Book 1: The Fall of Onagros
In the first book of the SAGE trilogy, a legacy is lost, a woman vanishes into thin air, wisdom is found in unexpected places, and a man hopes to defeat a tyrant with tall tales and gossip.

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Excerpt: They were shouting, intent upon it, so they heard no one approach. The door was only on the latch. It opened softly, and three armed Swords came in. Without a word, they drew their weapons.

“Put up your swords,” Karol commanded. “What do you want? How dare you walk –”

Cameron blocked the first cut with a chair, and knocked the second aside with a fist to the Sword’s forearm.

“Put up your weapons!” Karol shouted. “This man is not to be harmed!”

“We don’t answer to you,” said one of the Swords, “but to Landry Oliva, Kinninger by right of merit.”

“Go back to Landry Oliva and tell him I’m coming. I expect a thorough explanation – Stand back! What are you doing?”

“They’re assassins, you fool!” cried Cameron. “Run!”

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Buy the The Fall of Onagros, Book 1 of SAGE on Smashwords and Amazon. I’ve already got my copy and am losing myself in Allen’s wonderful world.

Marian Allen

Marian Allen‘s writing reflects her love of network. She tries to remember, in her books and stories, that no one exists in total isolation, but in a web of connections to family, friends, colleagues, self at former stages of maturity, perceptions and self-images. Most of her work is fantasy, science fiction and/or mystery, though she writes horror, humor, romance, mainstream or anything else that suits the story and character. Feel free to connect her on her Twitter feed or her Facebook Author Page.

Are you taking part in the A to Z Challenge this April? What is Your A to Z April Blogging Challenge Theme? What work by Indie Authors have you read? Any favorites?

What did you feel like when you finished writing your first novel?

Thanks to Alex J. Cavanaugh for organizing and hosting the Insecure Writers Support Group every month. Go to his blog to see the other participants, and understand what the group is all about.

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I’ve been away the past two weeks, traveling, writing, offline. I wrote the last two chapters of my novel. They came easily, but also gave me a lot of anguish. I don’t know how much of myself I’ve put in the novel, in the characters, or the plot, but it is clear that parts of it upset me. The darkness of the subject matter, I suppose. Nearly all my writing has dark undertones. Though I almost always end on a note of hope, it is definitely painful for me and those who live with me!

The view outside my window in Malaysia

This time, I had a beautiful horizon to gaze at while I wrote (thanks to a very kind Malaysian friend who lives in front of this view), so the words came easier. Something about gazing at the open seas makes me feel small, unimportant, and with little responsibility. That’s how I want to feel sometimes — because then the onus of finishing, say, a 91,000-word manuscript, is not so much on me. The sunsets were gorgeous, and made me think not-so-sadly of the sunset of my characters.

Sunset from my Malaysian window

I lay down and did not get up for four days after I finished, flattened out by a series of backaches and headaches after I came back home. No amount of stretching and medication helped, so I went into hibernation. I’ve emerged after the weekend, shaky, sore, and ready to take on the world. I’m not sure what caused the systemic breakdown, but I’m glad it’s over.

Now, a break while I brush my blogs (namely, the A to Z Challenge — sign up now, if you haven’t already!), short stories, my reading, and my life. Then it is back to the novel — the grind of revisions, of edits, re-writes, more revisions.

What have You been up to in the last month?

Of Blue Whales and Turtles: A Slow Hourglass in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is a well-kept secret. In the space of a few days, I helped a baby turtle hatch, watched some of the most venomous snakes in the world up close, (without a glass pane in between!), and got to see not only a a huge pod of dolphins, but also the planet’s largest animal– a blue whale.

Mirissa Sunset snapshot, taken from my Balcony at the Mandara Resort

We stayed at Mirissa over the weekend, and if you ever find yourself there, I recommend the Mandara resort. After you get over the slightly run-down rooms and slow service (they do try hard to make your stay comfy, but at a holiday pace), you’ll enjoy the gorgeous views (the sunsets are incredible), the quiet beach, and local cuisine catered to your taste.

Holding a baby turtle, just hatched

The staff also takes care of the night-time guests on its stretch of the beach– turtles.

If a turtle lays eggs on the Mandara beach, the eggs are protected for 45 days, and then once they hatch, the baby turtles are sent off to the sea, thus protecting them from various predators.

I got to pick up the babies, and watch them scramble into the sea!

Newly Hatched Baby Turtles

Dewmini’s Roti Shop

If you eat at only one place in Mirissa, make it the Dewmini Roti Shop. Despite their rather unglamorous name, their food is definitely something to write home about.

The range of their scrumptious roti is simply amazing. Lonely Planet and Tripadvisor know what they’re talking about when they recommend this tiny place.

We also went to a snake farm: and here are some of the occupants we met:

The video is shaky because I kept running away– the snakes were not defanged (the handler showed us the fangs on a Russel’s Viper), and I’m not brave.

An angry white cobra at Mirissa, one of the most beautiful snakes I’ve ever seen.

I’m not a fan of snakes kept in captivity, but it is better than killing them outright — which is what most people around the world do. The farm is in a village on a hilltop, where tiny farms and homes jostle against each other– snakes are so plentiful that I saw one on the way up, and another came swirling by as the handler was showing us the regulars. Both were non-venomous, thank God!

But the best was for the last: the blue whales. We could see the spouts at a distance of almost a kilometer, and as we drew closer, we could see their glistening blue-black bodies ease gently into the sea and the humongous tail followed right after. The blue whales are shy creatures, not curious like greys — but the thought that something so huge, intelligent, and alive was right next to our boat brought tears to my eyes. It is amazing that they do not overturn even the smallest of fishing boats by accident.

This Blue whale was within 30 feet of our boat!

Our captain was a whale-lover, and if you go to Mirissa, I recommend you go with Raja and the Whales– knowledgeable crew, who did not harass the whales like I saw the other boats do, but still got us as close as 30 feet to the planet’s largest animal. Blue whales get easily stressed, are endangered because they were hunted to near-extinction, and reproduce at a slow rate. They need all the consideration they can get.

Sri Lanka definitely makes the hourglass turn slow. I was so dazed and awed most of the time, I took very few pictures. All the pics above are from my husband’s camera. If you live in Asia, or are planning on traveling here, please don’t miss Sri Lanka. It has so much more to offer, in terms of beautiful beaches and jungles, awesome fauna, gastronomy, ease of travel, and friendly, smiling hosts, we plan to visit Sri Lanka again.

Can You Invent a City?

The Urban Utopia in Honduras

I’m not talking about Monopoly here , or any other board game. This is a real-time experiment Honduras is planning to undertake for the sake of economic development. Sounds like a fiction scenario, but it isn’t.

I recently came across this article, and it made me wonder about the possibilities of such an ambitious, unapologetic social experiment in creating an urban utopia:

The Honduran initiative was inspired by Paul Romer, a New York University economist who promoted what he calls “charter cities” at a TED talk in 2011. Rather than experimenting on existing cities, which could provoke resistance, Romer proposed building new urban areas on vacant land with room for several million residents who choose to live there.

The cities would remain Honduran but would enjoy a high degree of autonomy. They would be governed through charters made up of tried-and-tested political, economic and social regulations gleaned from around the world. Partner nations would provide guidance and oversight on troublesome issues like law enforcement and the courts.

For example, the Honduran judicial system is widely viewed as slow and corrupt, a factor that concerns foreign investors. To provide legal stability, the island nation of Mauritius has agreed to allow its Supreme Court to serve as the court of appeals for a future Honduran charter city.

Another proposal is to ban physical currency in the new cities and rely on debit cards and electronic payments to reduce crime and corruption. It sounds radical, but Nigeria has already placed limits on bank withdrawals and deposits to discourage cash transactions in Lagos, Abuja and other cities….

…The plan’s many skeptics warn that Honduras could become a laboratory animal for foreign social scientists. Angel Orellana, a former lawmaker and attorney general, calls the plan 21st-century colonialism. Hondurans, he said, would be giving up a piece of national territory that would become a virtual foreign protectorate.

I can see a novel set in this city. A thriller, or a period piece, or even science fiction. As writers, we sometimes create cities from our imagination. In this case, people with the right amount of money would be building a city from scratch, and decide the political, economical, social and perhaps even cultural rules by which it would run.

Is it possible to create an ideal urban utopia? Do you think this city would become a shining example of a technologically advanced metropolis or get mired in drugs, gambling, and prostitution? Can you really invent an actual city?

Five Weird OCD Twitter Rituals You Should Consider Trying

Twitter is my favorite social media platform, but I have to confess I am a little OCD and ritualistic when it comes to my Twitter experience.  Most of these processes involve ways to clean up my tweet stream, but others are the ways I engage and interact. It might seem a little odd to some people, but it works out well for me.

Here are five of my weird OCD Twitter rituals:

1. TwitCleaner

On the first of every month, I religiously run TwitCleaner to clear the noise from my stream. It’s the quickest way to unfollow suspected bots, people who post too many duplicate links, people who post only links, and people who have little or no interaction with their followers.

2. ManageFlitter

Every Monday morning I run Manage Flitter to see who unfollowed me so I can return the gesture and  unfollow those who have inactive Twitter accounts. I’m always able to weed out between 30-60 followers that way. Perhaps it seems petty to unfollow those who’ve done the same to me, but I am a strong believer in two-way interaction.

3. Morning Tweets

I tweet every morning from 7:30am-8:30 am with my morning coffee (excepting weekends and vacation). I like to be able to to catch up with anyone who personally interacted with me since bedtime the night before and allows me to keep  a strong level of engagement with my most active followers.

4. Evening Tweets

I tweet every night from 8:45pm-9:45 pm (excepting weekends and vacation), because I work a regular 9-5 job during the day and my “mom” job after school, and this allows me to catch all the tweets I might have missed earlier in the day. I don’t like my tweets to go unnoticed, and I know my followers appreciate a reply. Sometimes I miss a few people, because I have a lot of activity in my mentions feed, but I try to be diligent in catching up with everyone.

5. Retweets

During my morning and evening tweet sessions, I make sure to retweet at least 20 followers each during both times from my main Tweet stream. I specifically select followers I haven’t had recent interaction with in awhile to let them know I haven’t forgotten them and to show a little extra love to the followers who have helped me with retweets and website visits. I also spend this time reaching out and interacting with people I might not have tweeted with in awhile.

Of course, there are times I am able to tweet a little during the day, but it’s not often.  With my weird OCD Twitter rituals in place, I feel like I’m on top of things most of the time. I have different routines for Facebook, G+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc., but those are posts for another time.

How about you? Do you have any OCD Twitter rituals? Assure me I’m not too crazy by sharing them in the comments!

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This post by Amberr Meadows has been syndicated with permission from her and Jim Dougherty , on whose blog the post first appeared.

Have You Kissed a Mountaintop Without Trudging Up Its Slopes? #IWSG

Trudging Up the Mountain

The following post is for Insecure Writers Support Group hosted by Alex J. Cavanaugh.

This is a picture taken by my dad, somewhere upwards of Nepal, on some off-the-map stretch of Tibet during his trek in the Himalayas, where the hourglass turns at a different pace, and the air is rare and thin. The Yaks make those bundles look small, but I’m sure they feel the weight just the same. Just as I do, writing chapter after chapter of my WIP. A lot of writers I meet online and off say that they enjoy writing. For me, I enjoy having written. And right now I feel the weight of all those unwritten chapters, and the air around me seems thin.

Prayer flags in the Himalayas

What I need, is to let go. Not of the writing, no; but of my ingrained instinct for perfection. I’ve been studying rewrites and editing for fiction classes I do with kids, and that seems to have rubbed off on me. I can let my inner perfectionist loose when I do rewrites. Not now, during the first draft.

Right now is the time to let my soul take flight, like these prayer flags from my Dad’s camera on that same trip. They seem to reach for that obscured peak, losing none of their colorful exuberance in the process. There is more than one way to climb a mountain, they seem to whisper to the winds. On some days,  you can kiss a mountain’s top without trudging up its slopes. Let the breeze bear you up, all you have to do is let yourself float.

Have You Kissed a Mountaintop Without Trudging Up Its Slopes?

Would You write outside your comfort zone?

Would you write outside your comfort zone? This is one of my curiosities with all fiction writers I meet. I ask that and other questions to Sucharita Dutta-Asane, one of my co-writers on the African-Asian short story anthology Behind The Shadows, and now a blog-and-writer-buddy.

Behind the Shadows

1.     What has your writing journey been like?

It’s too early to speak of this, but yes, it has been a meandering road. With all the ups and downs involved in a between-two-pressure-cooker-whistles kind of writing. It has also been a journey that has brought me my greatest wealth—two fantastic mentor-writers and a strong support group of writers who’ve believed in me.

2.     Tell us about the genre you write in, and what inspired you to choose it. What is a genre that you find intriguing enough to try which is currently outside your comfort zone?

I have been writing short stories for a long time and am currently working on a novel and a short story collection. So the short story is a comfort zone. I like the brevity and terseness this genre necessitates. In a lighter vein, it is also the genre that is possible in the kind of time crunch one deals with around two young kids.

Drama is completely outside of my comfort zone right now but a genre I look forward to in the future, what I long to do.

3.     How important has your online presence been in the publication and sales of your work?

I used to write for online magazines—short stories, articles, book reviews—and the readership these brought me proved to be fulfilling and fruitful in the long run. They gave me a reader base I could always go to without having to prove myself over and over again.

4.     What are your views on self-publishing vs traditional publishing?

That’s a conundrum for our times. While self publishing has its merits in terms of time taken and control over the finished manuscript, I still root for traditional publishing. As a writer, I’d rather concentrate on writing than on the kind of energy required for self publishing. There’s also some satisfaction in knowing that a respected publishing house has liked and accepted my effort and finds it publishing-worthy. At this point of time, in traditional reading societies like ours, books seem to acquire much more credibility and respect when published this way. Of course, that says nothing about future possibilities.

5.     What is the last book you loved reading? Why?

It’s difficult to pinpoint any one book, but yes, I loved Jerry Pinto’s ‘Em and the Big Hoom’ and Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s wonderfully restrained novel ‘Between Clay and Dust,’** Ambai’s ‘Fish in a Dwindling Lake,’ Julian Barnes’ ‘The Sense of an Ending,’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘The Thing around my Neck,’ and many more.

Pinto and Barnes’ books deal with memory in different ways, and this is a recurrent theme for me too, something of an obsession that I frequently explore.

6.     If you had the chance to speak directly to your ideal reader, what would you say to them?

Read me. What else would a writer want?

7.     Tell us about the books you have published, and anything you have forthcoming.

For a long time I published my short stories and a novella on a now defunct site called http://www.4indianwomen.com. I also write book reviews for various sites including Open Space and Asian Cha. My print publications include:

• ‘Deliverance’ in Vanilla Desires, from Unisun Publications, Bangalore (2012).
• ‘Sine Die’ and ‘Balance of Love’ in Ripples: An Anthology of Short Stories by Indian Women Writers, APK Publishers, Pune (2010).
• ‘From Sita to Vaidehi—Another Journey,’ a magic realist story in ‘Breaking the Bow,’ an anthology of speculative fiction based on the Ramayana, Zubaan, New Delhi. Editors: Anil Menon and Vandana Singh (2012).
• ‘Cast Out’ in ‘Behind the Shadows,’ an anthology of short stories from Asia and Africa. Editors: Rohini Chowdhury and Zukiswa Wanner (2012).

Sucharita Dutta-Asane for Daily write

Sucharita Dutta-Asane juggles writing and editing with motherhood, 24 hour profiles that interrupt, facilitate, and balance one another in ways she had never imagined. With online and print publications to her credit, she is forever excited about writing and getting published, but burning the midnight oil is never enough; in between changing diapers, feeding, and managing homework and house help, writing often takes the backseat. When writing seeps through the cracks and dreams to predominate, the supportive family is kept at bay while she pounds the keyboard and lets imagination and language take care of the rest.

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Having heard Sucharita and learned about her writing, would you like to talk about yours? What is your comfort zone? Would you write outside of it?

What has Your Reading Journey Been Like?

Reading is a part of my everyday routine, I couldn’t live without it. Last year I wrote a post on Amlokiblogs where we discussed my reading and I asked other bloggers about theirs. Posting it again today, because I’m bound to the wheelchair and my e-reader these days, and would like to discuss reading and get a few reading suggestions.

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The reading journey

I read my first book at two (or three, but not older, I don’t think): a picture book of course, but one that was meant for much older kids, able to read. My parents did not have access to the sort of books geared towards toward toddlers these days, so they bought me what they could—a comic book with a storyline and characters far beyond the reach of a two-year old.

I remember sitting on my grandmother’s lap in the afternoons when she would read out loud the dialogues in the book, and explain what was going on. With the sort of whim that can be expected of a toddler, I decided that was the only book I liked, and there soon came a time when I could narrate the story by myself when the book was put before me, pointing at each scene in its individual square and babbling the story, much to the amusement of my family and our visitors.

                              I grew up devouring books: those suitable for my age, and not. I read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary at 12, and rapidly followed it up with the collected works of Bernard Shaw, all the Russian masters, Shakespeare—in short, anything I could steal from my father’s collection. When I turned 18, I went for an Honors in English literature, where I mostly read books outside the syllabus in my spare time, because I now had access to the British Council and the American Center libraries, in a bigger city.

                                   But in studying for the exams I lost some of the love I had for books. I was expected to dissect poems instead of merely enjoying them, analyze novels instead of getting carried away by the stories and characters—it turned me off reading for a good five years before I turned to my old love, and second-hand bookshops became my second home again. From then onwards, I’ve taken to reading with a renewed vigor…I read as a break from life, as an exercise in thought, as a supplement to my writing—because sometimes I also have to read like a writer. It is nearly as big a part of my life as my writing, and sometimes I struggle between the two—because there is not enough time for me to read, write and do everything else we call ‘living life’.

                                        To me, I live the most when I’m reading, especially certain books that have made me fall in love with them. But more about that in another post, because I think it would need another post to talk about what reading means to me today.

How about you? What has your reading journey been like? What books would you recommend?

In Which I Confess I’m Insecure

Thanks to Alex J. Cavanaugh for organizing and hosting this event every month. Go to his blog to see the other participants.

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I signed up on this group when it started, and got kicked out due to non-participation. I simply didn’t post, so the kicking was justified. Somehow, after the first post, I lost steam. I try not to whine on my blog, and this group seemed to require me to whine.

A few months down the line, I’ve realized that if there is one thing about writers, it is that they’re insecure. Even the best writers are– and a look at some of the writers in the 200-0dd IWSG list validates this.

So maybe, it is okay to let my insecurities show once a month. After all, accepting that I have a problem is the first step towards solving it. (I’m well aware that insecurity in a writer is like vanity in a model, it will never quite go away.)

My current fear is I won’t be able to finish my first ever novel. I’ve been afraid of novels for as long as I’ve been writing. I’ve had several short stories published, dozens of them finished, and hundreds of pieces of flash fiction written, but I never quite gathered the courage to commit to a novel.

Well, now I have. And now that I’m in the twelfth chapter, I sometimes find myself paralyzed with panic. This book can’t possibly land on its feet after its gargantuan leap of faith. It is going to plummet into that abyss full of half-formed, shapeless things that perish without seeing the light of day. Unseen, unheard. Only I’ll mourn its aborted attempt at life.

I’m using this panic to jump-start my writing each morning, and hoping it would fuel the neurotic dash to the end of the next scene, the next chapter. By noon, I’ve calmed myself to a certain extent, and written 500 words or so. Sometimes that takes evening, or even night. At night the panic begins again: what if morning brings no new words, what if my characters pull a fast one again?

Swimming against the odds

So far, I’ve given up once at 5 chapters– junked it all, and begun again. Now despite the panic, I have to hit the finish line.

I managed to learn swimming after more than three decades of being afraid of water.  I can do this. Amen.