Indian-American writer, physician, mother-of-three.
Feminist fangirl of badass women.
(Click on cover images below to buy the books)
AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD FEMINIST CALLED ME
So here I am, sitting quietly on the branch of a tree, hidden by leaves, with a noisy crow for company. The mango I was biting into was so sour, I had to squint my eyes.
Ok. Backtracking a bit. I was thinking back to when I figured out I was a feminist. I think I was eight or nine. Visiting my grandparents’ home. This was back in the day when helicopter parenting and tiger moms weren’t yet on the collective consciousness of the society. After breakfast, my brother and I were left to our own devices. As long as we told the old folks where we were going to be, they expected we’d show up at mealtime. One of my favorite places to seek refuge from the blinding hot sun of summertime India was the mango tree at the far end of the yard, right next to the wall. I don’t know if my little brother, five at the time, really liked the idea, but hey, he was five. He usually just followed along.
I wasn’t a good climber, but there was one particular spot where several branches took off, forming a sort of “U,” which made for a good resting place. You could easily take a nap there without fear of falling off.
The latest Phantom comic book gripped between my teeth, I scrambled my way up behind my baby brother. Compared to me, the little snot was practically Tarzan. Naturally, I had to act as though I was taking the scenic route, which meant climbing branch by frigging branch.
The bark was rough, with splinters projecting in places. Lines of fire burned across the scratches on my palms by the time I got to my spot. There was a nest of red ants swarming the leaves two branches down. One bite, and I’d be begging for God to come down and smite the… well, you get the point.
The aforementioned noisy crow was pecking at one of the mangoes hanging all around and eyed us balefully but didn’t fly away. It was probably held in thrall by the sight of the fruit, with skin so red and shiny, your teeth ached to sink in. Unfortunately, the color was a trick. Sourness of the magnitude not imagined by gummy makers exploded in my mouth. My eyes watered. Next to me, my baby brother was continuing to munch on the fruit, making hissing sounds between each bite. Between him and the crow, there was quite a symphony in progress.
“Hey,” I said. “I need to get some wate—”
A whoosh. Something flew by my nose, ripping through the leaves to disappear on the other side of the tree. I jerked back. With an alarmed squawk, the crow flapped its wings and flew away. The red ants on the next branch crawled in all directions.
Before I could say a word, there was another missile thrown our way. This time I saw what it was. A stone.
My brother stopped biting into the mango. Parting the leaves, I peeked outside. There. On the other side of the concrete wall were a group of boys. Three or four, maybe. I knew one of them. He lived a couple of streets down and was a class behind me in school.
“Hey,” I shouted. “Why are throwing stones at us? You have a tree in your house.”
My schoolmate grinned unrepentantly. “It’s too far to walk. We didn’t think your grandma would mind.”
Oh, wouldn’t she? The old lady kept an eagle eye on every random stick in the yard. She used to say I was just like her. “You should’ve asked, first,” I said, nose in the air.
“Okay,” said my schoolmate, “so can you ask her?”
I bit my lip and debated myself, silently. His house wasn’t too far from ours. He was doing it jus’ ‘cause. I wasn’t about to abandon the territory so he could plunder the riches and crow about to the other kids in school. But…
“Okay,” I said. “My brother is here. He’ll go and check while I wait right here.”
“Okay,” agreed my schoolmate.
I was mildly puzzled by the easy acquiescence, but perhaps, he’d been sufficiently cowed by my determined defense of the family property.
My brother scrambled down and took off in the direction of the house.
One second… two seconds… three…
Stones rained. I couldn’t even shout. All I could do was shield my face and head with my arms and hope one of the rocks didn’t hit me. My pulse pounded in fear. Mangoes fell onto the street. Guffaws, shouts, taunts. Running footsteps.
By the time my five-year-old brother arrived with my grandmother’s permission, the gang of thieves had long disappeared, but I was still in the tree, too scared to attempt climbing down.
That night, I lay in my twin bed and stared long into the darkness. The ceiling fan whirred above me, providing only mild respite from the muggy heat. I was only peripherally aware of the discomfort. Perhaps, my objection to the stone-throwing had been seen by the boys as a challenge. Perhaps, it was my right to challenge them. Perhaps, it was imprudent. But what I couldn’t forget was the fact that the boys were held back by the presence of my scrawny, five-year-old brother. I was older and bigger than him—than all of them, really—but my objection hadn’t mattered at all. Because I was a girl.
I wish I could tell you I picked up Sexual Politics or Wonder Woman comics after that, but I didn’t. Frankly, I don’t remember what I did. But from that day, I knew the world believed I mattered less. My “no” didn’t matter as long as I was alone and unprotected by a male member of the family. I remember the outrage that surged through me. The incredible need to roar at the sky in fury. Even today, as a woman well-established in my career, I have instances where I’ve had stones (metaphorical) thrown at me, with the expectation I will not be able to fight back. Thankfully, I’m no longer the eight-year-old caught by surprise. Today, I expect it. Today, I know how to avoid getting hit. Today, I know how to throw right back.
Feminism is never front and center in my writings, but my main characters are all feminists in deed. I try to make my male characters comfortable in their masculinity and their sexuality (whatever it might be) and not feel threatened by the strong-willed women they encounter. I like to see them laugh together, cry together, grow old together. I hope you enjoy reading about them.
MY JOURNEY AS A WRITER
My writing journey started years ago, but I never took it seriously until around 2014. After an argument with fellow fans of a mythology adaptation, some of us were challenged to do better if I could. So be warned: more books will be forthcoming from the group. 😀 I started on my own mythology retelling only to realize the research involved was enormous. Not only that I didn’t know the original language in which the story was composed, I didn’t have a clue what regular people were like in the Iron Age… what they wore, what they ate, their diseases, the weather. Adaptation to modern times was a possibility, but when a story is moved temporally, cultural shifts have to be accommodated. For ex., a king-like figure in modern-day America, say a corporate titan, cannot exactly have two consorts (unless he were a Mormon, I guess), and kidnapping yourself a wife wouldn’t be considered the height of romance. 😛 It was great fun trying to figure it all out. In the space of three months, I had a ninety-thousand-word manuscript ready. Yeah, you heard it right. In three months.
Ego is a strange thing. It drives us to do better (re: my decision to write professionally), and it blinds us to our own faults. Confident the world was going to absolutely adore my writing, I went to Goodreads to get myself a couple of beta readers who were, of course, going to lose their mind in ecstasy over this new writer they just discovered.
Er… not exactly what happened. There was a paid beta business who did sing praises, but I was sane enough to know I wasn’t that good. After a couple of days of hurt feelings, I decided to take their advice. One of them (Michael Lewis), a writer himself, told me fiction needs three essential elements to be readable—setting, character, dialogue. Setting needed to be described with sensory detail… at least three out of five senses need to be used. The main characters needed full psychological profiles. No, not the personality tests you take on the Interweb (I love that word!). What was the main hero’s life like before the story started? What did she want to do going forward? Her peeves, her faults, her strengths… so on and so forth. I took it forward myself and decided each character needed a color profile. For ex., my hero had a thing for reds, and she loved a particular perfume. There were certain kinds of books she liked to read (horror), certain music she listened to (Eagles). My dialogue was stiff and formal, with no abbreviations. The last part proved the easiest to fix. I just put myself in the situation and wrote dialogue as though people I know were speaking.
There was another beta reader/editor I feel deserves special mention and not in a good way. She insisted that readers expect more romance in a book by a female author. It put me off, but it also scared me to the point that I adopted a male pen name for a while in my communications with potential betas/editors. Those reading this, please don’t do this. There may be legit marketing reasons to adopt a male-ish name (see: Rowling, JK), but women writers are not automatically slotted into the romance genre.
Then, there was editing to be done. I found two wonderful people.
The first was on a writers’ forum (Absolute Write). Those are great places to hang out. Your posts are judged by others such as yourself, some of who are industry professionals. I learned a lot there. I also noted one particular member (Chase Nottingham) who consistently gave excellent advice on writing structure. Since he had the tag editor in his profile, I asked if he would consider taking my project on. Sigh. I learned my dialect was a hopeless mishmash of New York, American Midwest, and convent school India. Punctuation was illogical… basically, a comma anywhere I paused to take a breath. Oh. Don’t get me wrong. Chase was super nice in pointing things out, but it was clear I had a lot to learn. With his help, I polished it up.
I started the usual querying route: cold queries, twitter contests, the like. I did get some full/partial requests when I mentioned what it was based on, but the unanimous verdict seemed to be that though the writing was good (thanks to Chase’s help), the story itself was not ready. My ego disagreed vehemently. Then, I met Elizabeth Roderick at a pitch contest. She liked my entry, and I checked out her website. I asked her to take a look at my work, fully expecting her to commiserate with me on literary agents who didn’t get how fabulous I was. She went through it chapter by chapter and told me where it needed more emotional heft.
The problem was adding emotional heft led to increased physical heft. The manuscript was now about one-hundred-and-fifty thousand words long! Hold on before you roll your eyes. The source material was about two million words long! Both my editors advised me to make the adaptation a series instead of the trilogy I originally planned.
By this time, it was the year 2018. I was getting sick of the constant rewriting and querying process. More to the point, I’d already queried and been rejected by agents who would’ve picked up the work if it were done well. I was beginning to wonder if the previous four years were wasted effort. To rub salt in the wound, I happened upon a book with lines blatantly plagiarized from a well-known work. This copied work surely went through an agent and an acquisition editor at the major publisher who bought it (we’re talking one of the Big Five), before going on to be a bestseller in India.
I had myself a little pity party with a friend who said, “Well, why don’t you try something similar? Not plagiarized. Something with mass appeal. Publish it under a different name and see what happens.”
I thought to myself, Why not? I’d do a ‘practice book’ to learn the publishing process. Strange thing was the more I kept writing, the more possessive I got about the story. It was no longer a practice book. There were a couple of great friends I’d found in various writing groups who critiqued it, and they seemed to enjoy the tale. This was a very educational process for me as I critted their works in return. I learned a lot. I also turned to the same people who’d helped with the mythology adaptation (Michael, Liz, and Chase). This time, they had good things to say. And this time, agents requested to see my work. Problem was I found myself annoyed by the glacial pace at which the business moved. In my day job, things are expected to be done yesterday. I’d also been around enough publishing types by then to realize I’d have little to no control over important stuff such as cover. Nor could I expect much in terms of marketing help unless my book happened to be one of the lucky works picked each year by publishing houses to push hard. I wrote out a list of pros and cons. Basically, the main thing a traditional publisher would do for me was get the book into stores. They could do marketing, yeah… if they felt so inclined. I was afraid they wouldn’t since this was not an ‘issues’ work. Nor was I a known name.
The biggest factor holding me back was fear. What if everyone hated it? What if someone said I shouldn’t have inflicted my writing on the world? I mean, the universe had enough problems even without putting up with my scribblings.
Back and forth I went until my child came to me one day (yikes, did I forget to mention I have three?) with a poem which got accepted to a contest or something. It was about her thoughts on our washing machine. A ten-year-old apparently had more you-know-what than me!
So I decided I was going to let my book baby out into the world. One Monsoon in Mumbai was released in June 2019, followed by A Goan Holiday in November 2019. I plan to finish out the series in 2021 with the third book (title undecided, but I’m leaning toward Dilli Times).
If any budding writers happening by would like to know what I did, there is an ebook you can get for FREE which details my experiences. Click on the link below to access the page where you can download the PDF. You can also buy it from Amazon (why would you when you can get it for free?) for USD 3.99.
A Step by Step Guide to Self Publishing: Or a DIY Checklist for Writers
P.S. This same intro chapter is included, so you might want to skip ahead to chapter 2.
Also, here’s the obligatory disclaimer.
While I address the reader, none of the following is whole or part of a publishing blueprint. These are only what worked for me and may or may not work for anyone else. Also, I do only genre fiction (except for this book, ha!), so none of the following info may be applicable to non-fiction. In addition, while certain things in publishing are worldwide (such as ISBNs), most of my info deals with the self-publishing process in the United States. Finally, please don’t mistake me for a marketing guru. Another point to remember is that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this book belong solely to me and not to any entity with which I have been, am now, or will ever be affiliated.
BEHIND THE SCENES
Click on the pic of the photography equipment, please.
TRAVEL THE WORLD AND THE SEVEN SEAS…
Click on the pic of the plane, please.
