Alright :)

Finished “Queueing Theory” (an e-novel of 3 chapters; 55,534 words and 106 pages according to my word count) and was told I were one of the God-Knows-How-Many-Thousands-Of-Them-Are-Out-There National Novel Writing Month 2008 Winners.

Winner Goodies included:

• A Badge
• A Certificate and, don’t laugh now,
• A Donation Request

Herebelow is something no winning would be complete without:

My Acceptance Speech:

.. Now that I won, I hope to go back to blogging and giving the rest of my life the attention it deserves. I will also try to use my talent to abolish Famine, Global Warming and Shama Publishers; sparing no effort to achieve … World Peace.

Courage, child, courage!

Finally did it! I sat down at my laptop and typed away. The first evening I wrote 7 pages. The second 20. Just like that! Still, writing on a laptop and on wordpress refreshing the page and hitting the “save” button every other minute didn’t feel the same. While writing in wordpress, I knew there was a distant, kind of, sort of, not really possibility of being read. On my laptop, there was none. Atleast for another two days and a night!

That put a dumper to my feelings of finally breaking the ice. Waiting for feelings to come back, experiences remembered, new truths realized felt ridiculous. But only for a moment! “No regrets, no surrender”. I kept typing on.

At around 4:01 a.m., almost three hours later, I heard hesitant footsteps underneath my window. (I live on the first floor, footsteps has a tendency of echoing in the dark). I run to it, eager to see another human being up and about at such an hour (been more than 4 hours since I heard a man, a dog or a car pass by). The guy was trying to stand steadily on his feet and looking up. The strange light must have made him stop and wonder. “Anchi?!“, he said in a tone that both wondered and accused, “Ategnim ende?!”. (aren’t you going to sleep?)

I laughed. He laughed. I closed the window, drew the curtains, and went back to my laptop. Wondering what I was trying to get out of all this. Then I remembered, perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything! It was too late, or too early, to remember.

Now, sitted infront of my PC, waiting for the page to publish, I know.

“Sister Act II” was a lowly imitation of “Sister Act I”, as is the reality with all sequels (except “The Dark Knight”, which defied all expectations, I’d like to think). But it has one line I keep remembering every time my heart is faint and feel like giving up (such a rotten feeling, knowing you are the only one who gives a shit!). It’s a scene between Whoopie Goldberg’s character and of that gorgeous golden-voiced singer, Laureyn Hill’s. “I read somewhere,” I think Whoopie’s character says “if, when you wake up first thing in the morning ‘writing’ is what comes to your mind, then you are meant to be a writer”.

Does it mean that’s what I’m called for? Writing?! Seeing I’d be staring at the screen trying to put thoughts into words, and then into a language that is foreign to my senses, when the sun dawns?! Is that why I’m still typing away, without even pausing to edit; laboring (albeit a labor of love) over something that will perhaps never be felt by anybody else and is unlikely to see the light of day?

My friends, you bow to no one!