To anyone who missed it yesterday, I posted the winning post in the poll: an extract from one of my novels. It's the opening to TEA WITH DEATH, DESIRE AND RAGE and I would love to know what people think of it, whether you've got any suggestions to make it better, etc.
And, as I promised in said post, because it won by such a close margin, I thought I'd post the other popular ones over the next few days. So today we have the runner-up: a childhood anecdote involving an elephant, an anecdote which, incidentally, has enormous writerly bearing as the event in question led to my writing my very first story ever.
I was four. And yes, the story is hilarious and awful looking back on it now, but we'll come to that in a bit.
The first thing I should mention is that my father owns a coffee estate a few hours from Bangalore, in a place called Coorg where, actually, most of TEA WITH DEATH, DESIRE AND RAGE is set. This place is surrounded by forest, a forest full of the loveliest things, like tigers, wild elephants, and deer. And not the fat little deer you see in England, either. Proper slender, spotted Bambi-like deer with their gorgeous brown eyes.
Anyway, we must have been staying on the estate for a bit, as we often did. On one of our little trips into the forest to see if we could spot some game, we happened across a rather large elephant. And, let's face it, when you're four, even the smaller elephants are pretty darn huge. We were in my father's white Jeep, I think, and if there's one thing wild animals don't like, it's bright white things (it's strange to them, and so, a threat). So the elephant, no doubt protecting a calf hidden somewhere in the trees, chased us.
You wouldn't think they can run fast, but holy cow, they can. Fortunately, my dad has excellent reflexes, and he jammed the accelerator the moment he saw her start to move. She stopped chasing us after about thirty seconds. Which doesn't seem long, but if you're sitting in an open Jeep and watching an elephant bear down on you, thirty seconds is a long, long time.
Being four, my memory of this incident is slightly blurred, especially since I get confused between this time and the other few times we've been chased by elephants.
The point of this, however, is that when we went back to the house that night, I sat down and decided to write a story about it. I think it ran something along the lines of 'we were chasd by an elefit and I was sked'. It was, dear readers, the moment the writer in me awoke, electrocuted by drama and nostalgia. It was my very first story, and I think my dad still has it, kept safe and folded in his desk drawer in his estate study. It's, quite frankly, somewhat embarrassing for me to look at.
I think I'm a better writer these days. But, hey, we have to start somewhere, don't we?
*I can't remember who took each of the photos, but they're all from various times we've been to the forest/estate. And yes, the elephant is real. No, it's not the one(s) that chased us.
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in which I decide that a flying motorcycle will do. For anyone who's perplexed, this is an update on my previous post, discussing writing stories for young children and flying motorcycles. Or, better yet, flying bicycles, because let's face it, a motorcycle might not be on a young child's wish-list!
And another update, generally: I'm dispensing with the 'writing' label. It's getting ridiculous. This is what the blog was supposed to be about, at its core, so I guess that, by default, my posts will be about writing and books, unless I deliberately label them otherwise.
I've been giving a lot of thought to what I'm going to do after I graduate in June/July of this year. Obviously, the ideal would be to write full-time, for my novels to get somewhere, etc. Of course, this is unlikely and my chances are slim. Still, I'm persisting. But while ECHOES is out on submission with agents and I work on first drafts of CLOCKWORK and HALF, something's got to pay my rent, right?
So, I thought, I could do several things:
I could hang every single hope on the manuscripts, and not consider that practically, nothing but me is going to pay rent, bills etc over the next few months. Erm, no.
I could pretend that I'm going to have the sanctuary of university life forever. Sadly, I no longer do this kind of pretending very well. I used to be an excellent pretender as a child. I wove the most elaborate and wonderful lies out of nothing. The prize of my collection is probably when, at the age of nine, I invented for myself a magnificent purple motorcycle that could fly, and made my best friend cry when I told her I took an overnight trip to Africa without her. I was, in every sense of the word, a "dreadful little storyteller". It's not really surprising, then, that writing fiction is to me what tea is to the English.
I could apply for every possible summer job available. Of course, while this is a great idea, doing it is impossible until these jobs actually start being advertised, so I'm going to have to wait a while for that.
Or, I could find freelance work as a writer. What better way to do what I love, while making some money and working flexible hours? (Fixed hours, with exams on the horizon, are just impossible) So I've applied for some freelance writing work, notably a job writing stories for very young children. While writing a 50 to 70-word story may not sound difficult at all, let me just say, writing for young children is hard. Every single word has to count, and you have to choose every single one carefully. You have to be witty and yet not ironic, you have to be simple without patronizing them, and so forth.
I recently got back an email from a lady in charge of the work, and she asked me to send her an outline and a few sentences of a possible story, for the editors to look over. Then they'll decide if they want me to write a few of these stories.
Now the question remains: what story shall I tell? Will flying motorcycles do?
