Happy Monday, dear readers!
It’s been forever since I addressed you thus, and I have missed it.
A few updates and thoughts before I show you treasures from around the Internet.
I have been selected for the Rooted & Written Fellowship at the San Francisco Writers Grotto. It’s a workshop for writers from underrepresented backgrounds. I would have liked to have been chosen for the fiction track, but I’m thrilled to be part of the nonfiction workshop. I’m going to be workshopping the nonfiction version of India House. If you remember, I wrote it for a summary to write my novel off of, and then it turned into its own 20,000-word animal. I’m excited to be doing it in this setting - it’s a lot of Asian-American and Latin-American writers at the workshop. I would like to write this story for an Indian audience while still having it be accessible for a global audience. People in those diasporas seem to have figured that out better than we Indians have, and I hope to evolve my own style with their inputs.
India House, the novel is at 70,000 words! I’m frustrated at how slow it is going, but progress is progress. It’s likely going to be another 40,000 words to finish. I’m in the middle of escalating tension in the plot - Our revolutionaries have managed to sneak some bomb tech from the Russians back into India, and now they are going to make things go boom. I keep expecting it to go faster than it is, but there’s just so much detail to cover. I really wish I somehow could split this book into smaller parts I could individually release. But the way it’s going, it feels like I’ll only really understand my characters when it’s all done, and the plot and inner plot will come out more clearly in the second draft (which I hope will progress much faster).
Now on Substack, you can have sub-substacks. A mailing list within your mailing list. I tried making one for daily updates about the novel. I didn’t add any of you to that list, because I wanted to be sure I could keep it up at first. It was incredibly motivating for about two weeks. My issue with this kind of public accountability is it’s great when I have stuff to show, but when I don’t, it’s incredibly demotivating and depressing. I would honestly like to keep it going in some way, but there’s no way I can take it off my Substack front page, and I’d rather it not be there as it’s a lot of visual clutter. I’m going to be deleting the posts I did make as well. I think it’s better to just talk with you folks once or twice a week.
And so, Monday Cup Of Links is coming back! As is Thursday Long Read! It was fun doing it for about 60-odd weeks. I couldn’t do it anymore while balancing a baby, a job, and ADHD, and had to stop; my time was better used actually writing the novel. But now, I have a whole bunch of cool links up my sleeve I’m dying to talk about. And I have 70k words, which I can line-edit and share a little at a time.
Alrighty then, let’s do our links!
The History Of California’s Punjabi-Mexican Communities. Indian women weren’t allowed to immigrate to California for a long time, so the immigrant farmers in the Central Valley, mainly from Punjab, ended up marrying Mexican women. Udham Singh, the Gadarite famous for avenging Jallianwala Bagh, was part of this community, having been married to a Mexican woman in his short time in the US in the 1920s. Click through to the link for a beautiful picture of a Punjabi-Mexican wedding. There’s even a book about this community!
How did people talk in the Stone Age? Not extremely informative, but a nice read nonetheless.
In 1857, A Play in London Dramatized The War Of Indian Independence With Action, Comedy and Romance. In my novel, the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the 1857 rebellion is a big turning point. Essentially, the summer of 1907 was an awful time to be Indian in London. Newspapers, plays, church events, events in the park… everything was commemorating the British taking over Delhi. Which meant they were demonizing Indians willy-nilly in art and in real life. This pushes our characters over the edge, and they organize a commemoration of the martyrs of 1857 as a counterforce. Which leads to getting the attention of Scotland Yard, and that leads to events with escalating stakes.
I wanted to know what depictions the British had of the war of 1857 back then. I was surprised to find that they had had this play selling out an entire amphitheater, right in 1857, even as the war was ongoing. It had everything - soldiers on horseback, war sequences with bayonets and stuff, exotic animals, including a zebra, buffalo, and even elephants, comedy sequences with men in women’s clothes, and music and dance.
Wartime propaganda seems like a great way to make quick money.Or just anything set in a war, as the war still rages. Some too-clever-by-half Indian folks made a movie named Love In Ukraine that they claim was shot completely in Ukraine. When Indians in Ukraine were battling violence and racism and had to do 4D diplomacy to get out of the country, these folks somehow came in with a whole crew, wrote a screenplay, shot a movie, and managed to release it too. It seems awful in a lot of ways, but I have to hand it to them for completing stuff on a tight deadline.
Artifact of the week: This bottle from 2nd century Peru that’s shaped like a seated man with a cat headdress. Apparently it’s structured like this to prevent the contents from evaporating. Now it’s at the Met in NYC.
Yeah, publicly mentioning your daily progress isn't fun unless you're writing the last few scenes. If progress is slow -- and for people looking forward to reading your work it is always slow -- then you risk your audience losing interest and filtering everything out.