#CreativeWriting

Yellamma was a barren woman, her husband had died five years ago, leaving a piece of land near the sea for her where she lived all alone, grew her crops and did her breeding. never interfering with the village or with the villagers. 

What did Yellamma do while living on her land alone? How did her husband die? It's speculated he was lost in the vast sea or was it the poison that killed him? It was rumour that he planned to remarry for a child but Yellamma opposed it. Was she a barren woman? or didn't like children? Could it be that she was the one??? The Witch!

The book is available at notionpress.com, and Amazon. in Filpkart.com

Bizarre Tales is a collection of twelve short stories that delve into the complexities of human nature and the world we inhabit. Available at notionpress.com and Amazon. in and Flipkart.com

A collection of poetry and songs exploring life, beauty, joy, sorrow, heartbreak, pain, grief, war, pop, rock, and thoughts transformed into words. THE DESOLATE STRETCHES OF THE MIND. The book is available on these sites: notionpress.com, and Amazon. in, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and Flipkart.com

20TH CENTURY

Two murmurs and a point

Makes a pretty good riot

Girls over here, girls over there

It's girls, girls, everywhere

The world of TV the world of Videos

Who wants the damn old Radio?

Boys shout here, boys wink there

It’s just a boy, boys, whistling everywhere

Where is old Santa Merry?

In 20th Century

In its fight, in its loot

In its’ love, in its shoot

Days and hash rules

Presidents are just fools

Kissing is common

From Commies to the Romans

Just take your pick

Knives, guns, and bricks

Throw the hell around

From heaven to the ground

Where is old Santa Merry?

In the 20th century

In its’ dance, in its’ chance

 In its play, in its’ lay

Wars and Revolution

Are today’s solution

The sun gets hotter

Blood is cheaper than water

Liquor is for fun and gay

Let it be night or day

I say you, you say me

We just tell lies as we feel

We vote nuts to power

We stand in queues for hours

Do one thing for heaven's sake

Trust no one these days

₲

Hey there!

I'm excited to tell you about my latest project  "The Dance of the White Shadows". It's a collection of 110 poems that express different emotions through words and it's all about music.

I know you're passionate about music, just like me, so I thought you might enjoy checking out my songbook. I'd be thrilled to hear your thoughts on it!

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this, and I hope to hear from you soon! Available at notionpress.com

A SUMMER NIGHT NIGHTMARE

Lying awake in a warm bed

Blinking eyes in the dark

Trees whispering against the pane

Something is about to start

Terror clutches your heart

You feel the cold sweat run

Praying feverishly

Waiting for the rising sun

It is a summer night nightmare

There will be no tomorrow

The beginning of another horror

Shadows moving in your room

You feel faint about to swoon

You open your mouth to scream

This is for real no dream!

It is a summer night nightmare

The beginning of another horror

₲

Anguish is like a poison arrow that can destroy your dreams, hopes, body and soul.

Love is a four-letter word that sounds lovely and is wonderful to say. But don't take it as a weak word, for it has conquered the hearts of kings and even God.

Warfare is a private game by the human race to boost their hate and greed.

Distress is like a broken heartbeat in silence.

 Available In: Print Edition, ebook, @amazon.com @Flipkart

AND YOU

You make me feel so good

I never felt like this before

My mind goes numb

When you are around

You take me higher

I can never feel down

And you… ohm you

You move into my heart

Filling it with your love

And you… ohm, yes you

Made me feel so good

Now the dullest days of mine

Look so joyful bright

I feel like a King

Wearing a love Crown

Everything looks like Heaven

When you’re around

Baby, oh baby

Stay with me forever

Never leave me, ever

You know it’s you...

Made me feel so good

I can’t leave a moment without you

I want to be in your heart forever

You bring so much good in me

You turn the girl inside of me

Into a beautiful woman

With your tender touches

And you… ohm you

You move into my heart

Filling it with love

And you… ohm, yes you

Made me feel so good.

$

MIKE TYSON PUNCH Is a songbook of 30 songs that speak about freedom in love, freedom from selfish love, freedom from a cheated heart and freedom from being a puppet in love and living one’s own life as a Master and not as a Slave because the heart is not a roulette wheel to play. The book is available on notionpress.com

CHAINS OF EGOS

Unbound me from these chains

These chains of your egos

I'm not your slave

I'm your lover

You can't force me

To do things your way

You have the full right

To hate me

And I have the full right

To fall out of love

So, why does your ego hurt 

If, I say,

I don't want to stay with you

Why can't I lead my life?

Just as you are leading yours

You can't buy my love

But don't be foolish to force me

To love you

Unbound me from these chains

Chains of egos

$

We live in a world full of constant digital noise and constant distraction, there’s something profoundly comforting about losing yourself in a good book or pouring your thoughts onto a blank page. Writing and reading are more than just pastimes; they’re fundamental human activities that have the power to heal, inspire, and connect us. Let’s explore the cathartic nature of storytelling and why humans have been creating and sharing stories since time immemorial.

The Catharsis of Writing

Writing, whether it’s fiction, non-fiction, or simply journaling, can be an incredibly cathartic experience. Here’s why:

1. Emotional Release: Writing allows us to express and process complex emotions in a safe, controlled environment. It’s a way to give voice to feelings that might otherwise remain bottled up inside.

2. Gaining Perspective: As we write, we often gain new insights into our experiences and emotions. The act of putting thoughts into words can help us see situations from different angles.

3. Creating Order from Chaos: Writing helps us organise our thoughts and experiences, giving structure to the often chaotic nature of life.

4. Sense of Accomplishment: Completing a piece of writing, whether it’s a short story or a full-length novel, provides a tangible sense of achievement.

The Therapeutic Power of Reading

Reading, too, offers its own form of catharsis:

1. Escape and Relaxation: Books provide a temporary escape from the stresses of daily life, allowing our minds to relax and recharge.

2. Empathy and Understanding: Through reading, we can experience lives and perspectives vastly different from our own, fostering empathy and broadening our understanding of the world.

3. Emotional Resonance: Finding characters or situations that resonate with our own experiences can make us feel less alone in our struggles.

4. Inspiration and Hope: Stories can inspire us, showing us possibilities we might not have considered and giving us hope in difficult times.

Why Humans Create and Share Stories

Storytelling is a universal human trait, found in every culture throughout history. But why do we feel this need to create and share stories?

1. Making Sense of the World: Stories help us understand and navigate the complexities of life, offering frameworks for interpreting our experiences.

2. Preserving Culture and History: Through stories, we pass down cultural values, traditions, and historical knowledge from one generation to the next.

3. Building Connections: Sharing stories creates bonds between individuals and communities, fostering a sense of belonging and shared experience.

4. Exploring Possibilities: Stories allow us to imagine different realities, pushing the boundaries of what we believe is possible.

5. Teaching and Learning: From childhood fables to complex novels, stories are powerful tools for imparting knowledge and life lessons.

Conclusion

In a world that often feels fragmented and isolating, the act of writing and reading stories reminds us of our shared humanity. It allows us to process our own experiences, connect with others, and imagine new possibilities. Whether you’re a writer pouring your heart onto the page or a reader losing yourself in a new world, remember that you’re participating in one of the most fundamental and healing of human activities.

So the next time you pick up a pen or open a book, know that you’re not just entertaining yourself — you’re engaging in an act of catharsis, connection, and creativity that has been central to the human experience for thousands of years.

Whenever I look at my body of work of ten books, the underlying human possibility intrigues me no end, and why not. I was born into a land-owning family in a remote village of Andhra Pradesh in India that is after the British had folded their colonial tents from there, but much before the rural education mechanism was geared up. It was thus the circumstances of my birth enabled me to escape from the tiresome chores of the primary schooling till I had a nine-year fill of an unbridled childhood, embellished by village plays and grandma’s tales, made all the more interesting by her uncanny ability for storytelling. As my maternal grandfather’s grandfather happened to be a poet laureate at the court of a princeling of yore, maybe their genes together strived to infuse the muses in me their progeny. 

However, as the English plants that Lord Macaulay planted in the Indian soil hadn’t taken roots in its hinterland till then, it’s the native tongues that ruled the roost in the best part of the vast land, and in Andhra it was Telugu, the Italian of the East that held the sway.  No wonder then, leave alone constructing a sentence on my own in English, whenever I had to read one, I used to be afflicted by stammer. Maybe, it was at the behest of the unseen hand of human possibility or owing to his own foresight that my father in time had shifted our family base to the cosmopolitan town of Kakinada to put me into the missionary McLaren High School in Class X. With that began my tryst with English, which, courtesy one of my maternal uncles, eventually led me to the continental fiction in translation that engaged me more, far more than the technical subjects I had to pursue for a career as a mechanical engineer.

While the Penguin classics inculcated in me a love for English language that is besides broadening my outlook of life, my nature enabled me to explore the possibilities of youth, and given that letter-writing was still in vogue then, I was wont to embellish my letters to friends and loved-ones with insights the former induced and emotions the latter infused. Clearly, all those letters that my novels carry owe more to my impulse to write them than to my muse’s need to express itself through them. Even as the fiction enabled me to handle the facts of life with fortitude, as life, for its part, chose to subject me to more of its vicissitudes, I continued tending my family and attending my job.

Fortuitously, when I was thirty-three, my mind and matter combined to explore the effect of the led on the leader, and when the resultant “Organizational ethos and good Leadership” was published in The Hindu, I experienced the thrill of, what is called, seeing one’s name in print. Encouraged, I continued to apply my mind on varied topics such as general management, materials management, general insurance, politics, and, not to speak of, life and literature resulting in some thirty published articles. But fiction was nowhere in the sight, nor I had any idea to turn into a novelist for Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Emily Zola, Gustav Flaubert et al are literary deities (I hadn’t read Marcel Proust and Robert Musil by then), and where was the question of a devotee envisioning himself as a deity.

But when I was forty-four, having been fascinated by the manuscript of satirical novel penned by one Bhibhas Sen, an Adman, with whom I had been on the same intellectual page for the past four years then, it occurred to me, ‘when he could, I can for sure’. It was as if Bhibhas had driven away the ghosts of the masters that came to shadow my muse but as life would have it, it was another matter that as he didn’t want to foul his novel by dragging it to ‘publishable length’, it remained in the limbo.

With my muse thus unshackled, I set to work on the skeletal idea of Benign Flame with the conviction that for fiction to impact readers, it should be the soulful rendering of characters rooted in their native soil, not the hotchpotch of local and foreign caricatures sketched on a hybrid canvas, the then norm of the Indian writing in English. Yet it took me a fortnight to get the inspiring opening sentence - “That winter night in the mid-seventies, the Janata Express was racing rhythmically on its tracks towards the coast of Andhra Pradesh. As its headlight pierced the darkness of the fertile plains, the driver honked the horn as though to awake the sleepy environs to the spectacle of the speeding train.”  

From there on, it was as though a ‘novel’ chemistry had developed between my muse and my characters’ psyche that shaped its fictional course, and soon, I came to believe that I had something unique to offer to the world; so, not wanting to die till I gave it to it, I used to go to lengths to safeguard my life till I finished it with a ‘top of the world’ feeling. What one Spencer Critchley, an American critic, thought about my contribution – “It’s a refreshing surprise to discover that the story will not trace a fall into disaster for Roopa, given that many writers might have habitually followed that course with a wife who strays into extramarital affairs” - made me feel vindicated, though there were no takers to it among the Indian publishers and the Western agents.

So, I had no heart to bring my pen to any more paper (those were the pre-keyboard days) though my head was swirling with novel ideas, triggered by an examined life lived in an eventful manner.  Sometime later, that was after I read a book of short stories presented to me; I had resumed writing due to a holistic reason.  While it was the quality of Bhibhas’ satire that set me on a fictional track from which I was derailed by the publishers’ indifference, strangely, it was the lack of it in that book that once again spurred me onto the novel track to pursue the joy of writing for its own sake, and that led me to the literary stations of Crossing the Mirage and Jewel-less Crown. But in the wake of the hotly debated but poorly analyzed Godhra-Gujarat communal rioting in 2002, as I was impelled to examine the role religions play in social disharmony, my fictional course had taken a non-fiction turn with Puppets of Faith.

Then it was as if my muse, wanting me to lend my hand to other literary genres led me into the arena of translation, pushed me onto the ‘unknown’ stage, put me on a stream of consciousness, took me to crime scenes, and dragged me into the by-lanes of short stories. However, it was Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, who lent his e-hand to my books in search of readers. Who would have thought that life held such literary possibilities in English language for a rustic Telugu lad in rural Andhra even in post-colonial India? The possibilities of life are indeed novel, and seemingly my life has crystallized itself in my body of work before death could dissipate it.

My body of work of twelve free ebooks, in varied genres, is in the public domain:  https://g.co/kgs/sFRxS4

Be careful what you wish for...

To bad Abigail Stewart didn't heed those words. Her wish to be beautiful sends her back in time to 1852 to a harsh mining town where she in now in the body of Lolita, a beautiful but deadly woman who, legend has it, drowns her children.  

 Determined to save the two children, who will die before the blue moon, with the help of heartthrob Wyatt Beaufort, they set out to prove the legend is wrong. 

Their struggle to save the children tests the power of a mother's love and the true meaning of inner beauty.

***** 5.0 out of 5 stars A captivating time travel romance sprinkled with mystery and suspense

Reviewed in the United States on May 23, 2020

Verified Purchase

Abigail (Abby) Stewart is a caring, smart, and courageous girl, but she lacks confidence in her looks and can’t get over Wyatt Beaufort—the football star and most popular guy in school who stood her up on prom night.
Even though she keeps a low profile, this feisty redhead with the emerald eyes has a secret…she can communicate with ghosts. It seems that this ability and her obsession with the local legend of Lolita—the Weeping Woman—somehow sweep her back in time to the gold rush era.
Abby finds herself trapped in the sexy body of Lolita while trying to prevent a gruesome crime. As if she didn’t have enough problems, the man who broke her heart and shattered her confidence is stuck back in 1852 with her.
I enjoyed the way the characters evolved, facing unthinkable and dangerous situations while discovering strengths and qualities they didn’t know they possessed.
Timeless River is a captivating time travel romance sprinkled with mystery and suspense. I enjoyed it immensely.

reviewed by Angel

Loved it! 😍

Join two twins on an unusual journey of discovery in this lithe and lively read set in the Shetland Islands.

Living at the edge of the world is… “different,” as two twelve year-old siblings find out in this heartwarming story of adventure, courage, friendship, and self-discovery.

When Tabitha and her brother Timothy arrive on the remote Shetland Islands of Scotland while their parents go on a world cruise, the twelve year-old twins aren’t exactly turning cartwheels. The prospect of spending the winter with a great uncle they’ve never met isn’t exactly spinning their fins, either.

Tabitha is out of sorts because the island’s remote location means limited WIFI. It’s a place where hashtags, TikSnap and social media aren’t really a thing. But Timothy is delighted to uncover the island’s natural secrets. When they start school on the island, the twins soon realize they are not the only newcomers.

This a well-written, sturdy story with solid writing and an engaging plot. You can almost feel the chill wind and taste the Atlantic sea spray. The action skims along briskly as readers join twins Tabitha and Timothy for explorations into the history, culture, customs, and language of Shetland. Readers are also introduced to the local dialect as well as the history of Shetland and Scotland dating back to the 15th century. Tucked into the story are fascinating tidbits about the island’s customs, culture, terrain, food, festivals, flora and fauna. Much more.

Perhaps the best part of this lithe and supple read is watching Tabitha grow. She slowly sheds her self-absorbed, prima donna persona like a wizened old snakeskin and becomes a more nature and sensitive person. Whereas prior to her arrival on the island Tabitha was all about herself and her TikSnap account, she slowly learns to broaden her horizons, especially after meeting another new kid at school, Omar. When Tabitha's videos of life on the remote island start gaining traction on social media, Tabitha uses her camera to foil…. Oh, wait. You’ll have to read the book yourself to find out what happens next.

Maps of the island drawn by both Tabitha and Timothy are included. So is a glossary of Useful Shetland Vocabulary so you don’t get lost.

This is a lively story that will appeal to its target audience of children ages nine to twelve. Cheers enoo!

REVIEWED BY  Kristine L.