My first fan mail

 Some days back, Athila Nabin contacted me over gmail to let me know that she took out some time to read my book and that she liked it. She even put up her review on amazon.in. 

It was a marvellous gesture by her and it made me very happy. Much as I look forward to see my book become a bestseller, the sad fact is that the book's fate is to be ignored. After all, there are so many books being published every day. It is impossible to bring attention to a book written by a newcomer. So when she actually read the book and then let me know about it, it made me very happy.

We exchanged some emails and she told me that she is a budding writer too. She loves to write nano stories and they are really good. Her stories can be found at https://athilanabin.com/. Wishing the best of luck to her.

The interaction with her made me think a lot about my motivation in writing a story. For a long time, I was obsessed with writing an amazing story that would somehow make its mark. There were so many stories inside my head that wanted to be put down on paper but I would ignore them for I was in pursuit of that idea that would prove to be the ultimate blockbuster. I wrote the case of the missing brother in six months and then spent the next two years fixing the errors and revisiting it. My brother was the first one to read the draft and he liked it. He encouraged me to share it with others. After I got rejected by many publishing houses, I went for the safe option of self publishing because I wanted to see my work as a proper book. Everyone who has read the book till now has liked it and I am very grateful to them for their kind words.

But what about those ideas that are constantly shifting shapes in my head? I live mostly in my imaginary world. Real world does not hold much interest for me. And when these stories began to merge with each other, I knew that I had to get them out of my system or else I would never be able to think of writing another novel. These past six months I am totally focussed on writing short stories that I publish on storymirror.com. I believe I have written more than 10 stories in this time frame. Some of them are good while others are moderately tolerable. Almost all of them are set in a world where there is magic, where warriors use swords to fight, where kings rule and spies hide in shadows to collect information, the world of Abitsar and Tribhanga. Initially I had about three stories but then I kept on writing and more ideas began to pour forth. I believe I should be able to write four-five stories more before I would run out of the ideas. Then maybe I will pull the plug on it and go back to think about a new adventure of Andy.