I was tagged by author Hiram Crespo who wrote the fascinating book ‘Tending the Epicurean Garden’, who asked me the following question:
What motivated you to write and then self publish your first book ‘The Kalarthri’?
All my life I have wanted to write books and stories. But I have never had the courage to actually pursue it. I had written a lot of stories and had a quite a few manuscripts under my belt – one of which was The Kalarthri. And then one day (well, a couple of days), I sat down and really thought about what I really wanted to do with it.
I thought long and hard about whether I wanted to be traditionally published or self-published and then thought about the pros and cons about what would happen to me if I did bring out my very own book. And here is what I came up with:
1) I don’t have to slave over my work until I have the next ‘War and Peace’. I am not writing to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I am writing because I have these stories running around in my head that want to come out. Stories that I would like to read and have other people read. And they can’t do that if it has not been published.
2) I don’t have to write to a ‘word count’ because the industry says so. I wanted to be able to write my stories to the length they need to be and no more. I have heard some editors and agents tell their clients that manuscripts need to be ‘bulked out’. I did not want to do this.
3) What if people do not like it? Then people do not have to read it. Simple – I could not use this excuse anymore for not publishing.
4) The time is not right. But then I ended up thinking ‘The time is never right’ and if I kept on thinking that then nothing will ever happen and my stories would languish in their dusty box forever.
5) And this was the decider for me to publish – If I don’t do it now, then most probably I would never do it and I did not want to look back on my life and regret that I didn’t do this when I had the chance. I already have a small list of things that I regret not doing (and doing) in my life – I did not want to add to them.
So, to answer Hiram’s question on what motivated me to publish ‘The Kalarthri’… To be honest, it was the fear that when I am near the end of my life, that I look back and regret that I did not conquer my fear and publish.
And with this post ends this round of BlogRoll Tag….
I hope you’ve all had fun ‘playing tag’ and seeing what everyone had to say!
The link for seeing all of the collected Tags!
-HMC
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