Ramblings and Musings

A long one

Hi dear reader! Prepare to face one of the longest blogs in history of weblogging! I am faced with the unusual prospect of writing nearly 7000 words in two days and this blog is an attempt by me to do just that!

You have the right to not read it and I won't blame you. As you read on, you will realise, my dear reader, that more than half of this log is inconsequential and you are not going to learn anything about life from it. However, the remaining half does hold promise. Perhaps, if nothing else, you will at least discover the secret of how to be verbose and say nothing of importance.

Seven thousand words, you ask. Why in heavens should I want to write that many words in just two days? Am I crazy or what, you might well wonder.

You would be not far off the mark if you applied the "loon" label to me. I am the ONE who committed himself to writing Ten Thousand Words to SherrasQ, one of this site's very endearing Preferred author, who is currently running the "March NoWriMo".

"No Wri Mo" is short for "Novel Writing Month". It is supposed to be similar to the National NoWriMo that is run in the month of November in the United States of America ... but here, there are no cash gifts, just merit badges, loads of encouragement and fun, and an oblique sort of recognition that one can do it! I mean, look at this: In the last year's July NoWriMo, run by the same kind individual, I wrote "The Great Downpour", an adventure story set in a Wildlife Reserve in Central India, to wit, Pench National Park, Madhya Pradesh, India. Can you believe it if I tell you that I did a lot of research in the days leading up to the start of the NoWriMo - and finally churned out something that I haven't read or edited till date!

As a medical person, some of my writing contains a lot of clinical stuff that others have to research on, but otoh, (Oh, sorry!) ... on the other hand, I have to research EVERYTHING else but medical stuff. And, actually, I do have to do research at times EVEN on the medical stuff, so that's that, I think.

If you read my "With a Cherry on the Top" which is within the folder "Awarded Items" in my Port, you will see what I mean when I say that even medical stuff is not always easy for me.

I decided to continue my work on a novel that had been lying idle in my port since the past two years. It is called "The Price of Friendship" and it is within the folder "My Books" in the main port ... which is where this Blog too resides on Writing.com.

This novel is based on the interrelationships between the majority Hindu and minority Muslim communities in a small town in central India - a town I have called "Afzalpur" - a town that has been peaceful through the past ten or fifteen years - years that have seen a lot of Hindu-Muslim fighting and killing all over the land. However, this fictitious city had so far been more or less unaffected - but all that is about to change now, with the story's focus on this fragile peace.

The setting is the house of a middle-class small, motherless, loving Muslim family comprising a father and his two teenaged children who are a 14 year old boy called Zaheer and a 13 year old girl called Munira. The third angle is provided by Laila, the best friend of Munira and the "object of admiration" of Zaheer.

My story begins on a typical school day after Munira has returned home. It winds its way through the way in which Muslim families live, goes past slippery love tales, encounters misunderstandings, mystery, retribution and so on, till one fine day, the problems reach a head and there is high drama all around. The police, the executive and the judiciary are all involved. Deaths do occur (I am not going to tell you who ... it will be a nice exercise for you all), as do break-ups of friendships, double-crossing and what not.

I have taken pains to use easy-to-read language in the novel as well as in this blog so that everyone can enjoy the blog as well as my novel. In fact, at present, I have not updated my Novel on the net. It lies with me as a MS Word Document in the hard disk of my drive ... Whatever I have written as a novelist, I have at least checked once for grammatical errors, syntax mistakes and problems of memory causing serious narrative mistakes.

In spite of this, I am sure that there must be at least a hundred small to intermediate errors scattered all over the document.

Why is it not on wdc?

It is too tedious to transfer from the HD to the web-site. Also, it contains over 28 chapters, so that its size is quite large. Compared to the last attempt to write a novel (in July 2005), this is a much better effort. The story is coherent, reasonably interesting and funny, but serious at times too.

I have described a lovely game in the story: Munira loves to play it when she is alone. It is something that involves peanut pods which are roasted and sold all over the country in open carts by hawkers. You can purchase these peanuts at real down to earth prices and costs - even take large quantities - then you sit down and open a pod, remove the peanuts nestling inside, hold them one by one between the thumb and the first finger and throw them up in a small arc so that they come down directly in our mouths. This is a really enjoyable pass-time and I urge bloggers and readers to definitely try it once - that is, if they can get their hands to nice, roasted peanuts!

From this very innocent activity, Munira and her father are introduced, as is their home and their simple and lovely lifestyle - a lifestyle marked by good precepts, good teaching and good morals, marked by the setting up of a good example by Mufazzal, Munira and Zaheer's father. We learn, over the next two or three chapters about how modern day Muslims preserve the faith by observing fasts, praying Namaaz etc and at the same time succumbing to the celebration of birthdays of their children in a typical Western way.

In fact, the first three or four chapters are some of the best chapters in the book, not only because the story is fresh and the characters are well-etched, but also because I have had these chapters looked at by some of the senior members of wdc, who have painstakingly gone over each word and suggested so many ways to improve the narrative. Among these stalwarts are Kim Marie and Andrea - both friends and great authors and very good critics. Their constructive criticism has been of invaluable help to me.

I wrote three more chapters after those four and then just got bored of it. Over the next one and a half to two years, the story remained inactive in my port, except that some more readers read it and offered their ratings and their comments. Earlier, this book was in the form of static items with two chapters per item, and all the three or four static items within a folder called "The Price of Friendship".

Later on, when wdc started a new type of item called "Books", I converted these seven chapters into the chapters of a book, but in reality, I did nothing else to them and just forgot about them.

I feel as if destiny wanted me to complete the novel. So along comes SherrasQ, the most amazing woman here on wdc and starts pushing the limits! I had initially planned on writing something in some other genre, romance and sci-fi being my two options, but then, I thought to myself - why not re-open my incomplete book and try to complete that?

Thus it came to pass that on the first of March 2005, at precisely 12:00 midnight EST, I restarted work on my novel, "The Price of Friendship". Over the next 29 days, I took it from just 9269 words to 59271 words - adding 50002 words and achieving my target of 50K words in a month or less.

Hurray!