The making of ‘A City Full of Stories’: Part 1
I wrote my first story in blogpost on August 11, 2011. I remember the date because, a person close to me turned out to be my inspiration, and her birthday fell close to that date.
My blogs were random in topics, on what I saw, heard or felt. One thing led to another. I started becoming creative, imagining things beyond what I had experienced.
My blackberry camera had clicked some pictures as I saw weird, quirky or interesting things at my work and on my runs, and then my mind would weave a story around it.
The stories were shorter at first; then meandered into longer ones, as my creativity tangled, twisted and untangled the knots, and connected the dots. Each short story was a blog. The longer stories then emerged as a series of blogs.
The picture from my blackberry and the text of my blogs made a creative cocktail. I wrote fiction, non-fiction, blogs and commentaries — running 3 blogs. Some were narratives from my runs. Everything stopped around August 2016, just about when I started my investment banking business.
I became an entrepreneur. Priorities changed. I never visited the blogs since then. I still wrote, but in LinkedIn and medium, with an objective of building an ecosystem for my personal brand.
COVID19 had other plans. It opened the proverbial Pandora’s box, and that turned out to be my blogs. Reorganizing them, I found that I had a set of writings that could make sense as manuscripts.
I culled out 5 manuscripts from the old blogs and have added at least 3 more since then. On the other side, my poetry series, Poetarrati has also taken shape. More on that in a separate blog.
The first of those older manuscripts was about 50% complete. But, to review, edit and then add two long form stories, it took almost 4 months for me, and to make a proper manuscript out of the book.
I shared an update on my Instagram account today. Hope you all follow it and support. https://www.instagram.com/tv/CILfZd-lw9S/
We got the title too for the manuscript after some serious debate. ‘ A City Full of Stories’.
I will write about the making of the book in my next blog. Look forward to connecting with all soon. Till then, back to the laptop.
With Love,
Ashok Subramanian,
Chennai, November 29, 2020.
