A Year in Self-Publishing and A Year in Age 30…Wicked Combo!

As bestselling author Jodi Picoult was quoted as saying in an article last week: “DO NOT SELF-PUBLISH.”

As my mother was quoted as saying right after my birthday last year: “DO NOT WAIT PAST THIRTY TO FIND A BOY.”

I would like to clarify that my mother does not encourage pedophilia, she is merely referring to the menu of grown Indian men, one of which should become my husband. They are not underage men by any means, but you see,  unmarried Indian adults are always referred to as “boys” and “girls” by matchmaking Indian ladies far and wide. I believe this title helps fuel the precious lie that unmarried Indian adults are like untouched innocent babes, until their hands first meet in that awkward first dance at their wedding reception.

Mmmkay.

Back to my original statement: I broke Jodi Picoult’s rule in these past twelve months, and, unless I get engaged in these final four hours before my birthday (anyone?…anyone?) , I broke my mother’s age-ist rule as well.

Here’s what happened this year instead:

-First I said goodbye to my twenties, not long after I’d said goodbye to the greatest inspiration, muse, and romantic adventure of my life. There was no death involved in this goodbye (unless you count the dying of a soul—emo!), but it was more the eventual return to reality, and all that society expects. I was not in agreement with this ”convenient path” cop-out, but would I spend age thirty keeled over from the loss of something? Or would I stand up straight and have the best year ever? Let’s see…

-A week after saying hello to age thirty, I self-published. This was a month after saying “bye bye!” to my  literary agent. It wasn’t the original book I’d submitted to her that I published, but instead a crazy parody, because…I’m crazy. This is the thing about self-publishing. You can publish crazy parodies that a “Random House” or any other publisher would never even sniff at, because…it’s crazy. Yet still you can carve out your own little space in “reader world” and find an audience, as long as you’re tough enough to know that for all the people who love it, some people will truly despise it. I am tough enough, and so finding an audience was and is…a glorious feeling. And to sell over a thousand copies of this title alone? Entirely unexpected and a bonus, since writing humorous essays is actually my side-note to the novelist dream.

-Two weeks after I self-published, I went to Florida and got a wicked tan. This was a true act of rebellion, when Indian mothers raise you to stay out of the sun so you can look as white as possible (but you’re not allowed to date white dudes…irony?). Once I returned all toasty and brown, my value on the marriageable market plummeted to almost zero. I was pleased.

-In an effort to avoid the burning of my glorious tan, I spent the next few weeks indoors, reading free screenplays online, as well as a couple of very helpful how-to books (Your Screenplay Sucks! and Coffee Break Screenwriter). A few short weeks after that, I’d written my very first screenplay, because sometimes, when something  pretty epic happens in your life…you simply have to make a story out of it (spoken like a true melodramatic artist). Over the next eight months, this screenplay would advance to the semi-finals or higher in eight screenplay competitions. I did this for no other reason than to say “haha, I can,” and the results that followed proved “check it out, I did.“

Feeling rather confident after the initial screenplay results, I dusted off the first novel I ever wrote, the one that had been rejected by all the major publishers. To me it was a blessing in disguise to wait a year and a half before reviewing this novel once again. A blessing because…anyone who studies the craft of writing understands that you only get better with time and practice, so to revise that novel with fresh eyes after all the things I’d learned was the right approach. This book, “Year of the Chick” has been out now for over five months, and as it slowly finds its audience, the response has been incredible. It never gets old to read a new person’s reaction on my Facebook author page, and every time that happens, I think about how that NEVER would’ve happened, if I’d kept on waiting and hoping for a  traditional publisher to pick me. And THAT…is glorious feeling number two .

-In January I was in-between projects, so I thought I should write a short story, a prequel to “Year of the Chick.” I published that story on Valentine’s Day, and to have readers buy it and enjoy it before or after picking up my full-length book has been…glorious (this is the post of the over-used adjective). In a world without self-publishing, how on earth would we be able to sell 10,000-word short stories for 99 cents, that readers could enjoy on various devices during a coffee break or commute ride home? We are in the midst of a revolution, and I’m sorry Jodi Picoult, but you should not be telling authors not to do something in ALL-CAPS without the logic to back it up, because that only means we will do it harder.

-In March, after almost a year of self-publishing, I didn’t want to lose my thunder, so I needed to buckle down and write a sequel to “Year of the Chick.” So…I took a week off work and wrote 58,000 words in six days. That was a crazy experience that I wrote about here, and because I focused everything on making that draft, I am now in the comfortable first-revision mode, and right on track with my deadline to release the sequel (June 7th! ).

-Also in March, I got hit on by a young barista at Starbucks,  to the tune of an extra shot of espresso free of charge, proving that I may be thirty, but I’ve stilllll got it.

-As the first year of self-publishing draws to a close, I can easily say it was the best year ever. Each individual thing builds upon the other, and if not for that first scary step of self-publishing last April, I would have never followed it with a full-length novel, a crazy poetry collection, a short story, and an upcoming sequel. And all with a full-time job. People think I’m nuts when I describe this, and yes, I actually am.  

-As for age thirty almost drawing to a close, earlier today, after my father yet again asked to put my ad in the “arranged marriage classifeds,” I, for the first time ever, stated that I don’t believe in arranged marriage, and that I’m never going to take this approach. I have never seen both my parents look so disappointed and disgusted in me….ever. Something tells me I won’t be getting a birthday card tomorrow, but that’s okay, because my biggest goal of age thirty was to stop living a lie, and like a true procrastinator, I waited until eight hours before the deadline  to do it…but I finally did.

-So… how am I going to make the next year even more epic? Well here’s a short summary of my to-do list: release the sequel of “Year of the Chick on June 7th, have another blog tour, have another book-release party in the fall (Grey Goose and books, anyone?), learn how the eff one does audiobooks, record audiobooks, learn about podcasting (would you guys like to hear a podcast done by crazy me?), and have some more adventures that can inspire my future writing.

If there’s a final note I can add to any writers who stumble upon this: self-publishing is amazing but if you do go that route,  be amazing to IT in return. What I mean is, the only way to silence people like Jodi Picoult or to get new readers to support you, is to write the best damn books possible with the best damn editing possible. Otherwise, we’re screwing readers over, and they’ll screw us back by telling everyone we suck and with good reason. Think about it.   And ahem…that doesn’t mean you still won’t get bad reviews or be called a “bitch” in a review (yes, it happened to me…what fun!), but it means you can fix all the non-subjective reasons for people disliking your book.

Write on… 

PS: I’m trying to bring back the word “wicked” (used it once in the title and once in the post). Is it working?…

Regrets, I’ve Had A Few…

Regrets, they exist.

Maybe not in the late Frank Sinatra’s world, where regrets are too few to mention, but for the rest of us, they are apparent.

Why so glum, chum? You ask.

Well I wasn’t exactly feeling glum, but when I slipped and fell in a bathtub and bruised a couple ribs then watched a homeless man get hit by a garbage truck on an episode of Louis C. K. (and all within a twenty-four-hour period), my mortality sort of bitch-slapped me in the face.

It didn’t bitch-slap me in the positive “taking stock of my life and what would I like to do now?” kind of way, mostly because I’m not a wild-haired Jack Nicholson in a senior-citizen bromance called “The Bucket List.”

The truth is I believe in negative reinforcement; I believe that only when you punish yourself emotionally for past mistakes, can you live a better life for whatever days remain. It’s a stretch, I know, but without it I would be like those insufferable people who applaud all their choices as the ingredients for the recipe that “bakes” their current self. Because we all just wish we could enjoy a savoury bite of you, you’re so tasty and special! 

This kind of patting on the back is irresponsible and immature; it’s like fat-legged toddlers who wobble through the meadow unattended, then cry when they trip and scrape themselves on a rock. What did you think was going to happen, toddler? If those fat-legged toddlers criticized their wobbling in a safe training environment, never leaving until they graduated to long and confident fat-legged strides, many a scrapes would be avoided.

You know?

Of course you know.

So without further adieu, my top three regrets:

I never bought him in that auction: It was the year 2000, and Y2K was proven to be nothing more than an IT nerd’s wet dream. With a limitless future and a steady income from my job at Blockbuster Video, I should’ve purchased my shirtless, tanned and bow-tie wearing fellow classmate (and crush), during the high school charity auction to fight blindness or A.I.D.S. or speech impediments or something. Instead, as his abs glistened in the sunlight and I drooled, his pretty girlfriend bought him  (with her dad’s checkbook, no doubt) before I even had the chance to bid. That one forced-upon date between him and I could’ve changed the whole course of our future. Instead he married that girlfriend, and now they have two kids and live a stepford life in the suburbs. That should’ve been meeee…

I never ate different kinds of food: I had a very bad experience with vegetarian sushi in 1997, and from then on I shunned all unfamiliar food.  To this day, the mere sight of pink and bloody steak makes me gag, I run for the hills whenever I see a cocktail of slimy shrimp, I don’t even know what part of oysters is considered “food”, and I don’t care how rich it makes me look, caviar in my eyes, are little black bullets of death. In other words, I will never have the balls to be a guest judge on Top Chef (’cause obviously they would ask me). When I get sad about this fact, I usually eat a lot of cookies…

I never got into a cat-fight: As a teenager, there were so many opportunities to brawl “girly style”. Over boys, over clothing, over trendy fashion accessories (i.e. heart-shaped pendants on choker faux-velvet chains, which were the height of mid-nineties glam), over registered and accurate boob-sizes…the cat-fight potential was endless. I witnessed my share of cat-fights in the girls’ locker room, and what struck me more than the fistfuls of ripped-out hair was the lasting impact a pointy-nailed claw could have. The blood-red four-pronged scratch on a forearm grew into a frightening scar, and those  who wore it were survivors. It was brave and bad-ass.  I certainly wasn’t brave enough, in my paranoid and self-conscious youth, but I comforted myself with expectations of grown-up cat-fights. But…the thing about grown-up life is…unless you’re a guest on Maury Povich screaming out “Nah, you skank, he is MY man!“, cat-fights become obsolete.  And so I roam the streets with my scar-free dainty forearms, and everyone thinks I’m a weak-ass little bitch. As Rodney Dangerfield says: “I don’t get no respect!“

And so I reach the end of Regret-Highway, and even though I can’t ever fix those ancient wrongs, my failures make me all the more committed, to make the rest of my days before the inevitable garbage-truck-collision turn out right…

Be Lucky For the Skin You’re In

Long sleeves, pants, spray-on sunblock, and glorious protective shade.

I’ve been conditioned to hide from the sun.

It started with the Indian community, whose favourite ambassador is my loud and screaming mother:  “Don’t get dark! Stay out of the sun!”

But don’t people want tans? Isn’t that cool?

Not when you’re writing up an arranged-marriage profile, where the second-best stat is to speak of your “fair-skinned” goodness (and the number-one stat? Being slim. Sweet, twiggy slimness).

It’s kind of surprising that a culture which is…brown, fails to embrace its universal trait. I mean aren’t brown people supposed to be…brown? Why would being what you are preclude you from finding a match? Perhaps it’s all explained by an era in historic India, when my ancestors were obsessed with Kabuki theater.

Aside from the cultural brainwash, I am also inflicted with the Hollywood brainwash.

The sun makes you old, and being old means “Yo! Get outta the way! These hot-ass-smooth-skinned bitches need to pass.”

(can’t I be a hot-ass-smooth-skinned bitch as well?)

But the Hollywood damsels still spend hours and days at exclusive beaches soaking up the sun. So what gives?

It’s cosmetolo-worship baby.

Good for them, but I can’t afford to fix my face from all the perils of the fire-breathing sun.

So that’s why I stay away, remembering that the sun is any organism’s greatest enemy.

Or at least I thought it was, until I learned a bit about…bananas.

It happened in a flash, when I retrieved a banana from my bag at nine a.m.  It had only been in there for my ninety-minute commute, so imagine my surprise when I was faced with the foreign creature: black, mushy, bruised and broken.

My banana died!

I’d always sensed some banana denigration on my journeys to work, but nothing ever quite so fatal. After spending the morning consulting with banana experts (or Facebook friends who left their comments in my status thread), I learned that bananas actually do this to themselves!

Apparently bananas are rich with bastard chemicals that turn on each other, any time they’re trapped in dark and cuddly quarters.

Allow me to say…that sucks!

Here I thought the sun was the skin’s greatest enemy, but what if  I turned into blackened mush just from huddling beneath a blanket?! Or from hiding in my closet in the fetal position? (what?)

Bananas have it bad, and if the worst thing that can happen to me is wrinkles because of the sun? Or being bitch-slapped by marriage websites because of the sun? Well I’m kind of okay with that.

And I’m more than okay with never being bludgeoned and converted into bread or fresh-baked muffins…

Voyage to India: Welcome to the Village…

[For the month of April I'll be writing a series of posts on my first family trip to India in '95.  I was fourteen.  I was there for five weeks.  I saw a lot.  This is the first installment...]

So how did India look through my fourteen-year-old eyes?

Well to give you the truest answer, I can’t really start until the plane touched down in Delhi.  And hey, look at that, the seatbelt sign is off.  So here we go…

***

…October ’95 in Delhi.  It’s one of the nicest times to visit to India, as there’s zero rain, the sun is bright, and the temperature climbs to twenty-eight degrees every day.  This didn’t mean  “short short” weather (since slutty shorts would draw its share of  gasps in conservative India), but it was over-sized t-shirts and slim-fit jeans all the way, yahoo!

…We circled around the luggage belt at 1am, my senses now awash with all things “India”.  The mugginess of the terminal was the one that hit me fast, right in the spot where my dampened “Vegas” t-shirt clung to my bony shoulder blades.

Once we had our piles of luggage, it was time to find my uncle who was waiting with his caravan.  There was eleven of us to accomodate:  my family of five (my older brother had not made the trip), my grandmother, my aunt and her family of four, and finally my other uncle, the family’s remaining bachelor.  But if this trip was as successful as we hoped, he wouldn’t be a bachelor for long…

…We hauled our luggage to the parking lot, where I took my first deep breath of Indian air.  The air I have to say…was interesting.  It smelled a little smoky, but not in that delicious barbecue way.  It smelled like last year’s burning of a sacrifical goat, mixed with an eighteen-wheeler’s fresh exhaust.  It was still a relief from the muggy terminal, so I breathed in and out with all my might.  Only later would I know that this Indian air was in fact some pretty harsh pollution.  So harsh that after multiple hours on the road, you’d finish the day with a nose full of blackened “crusties”.  I don’t believe this happens anymore (at least it didn’t on my visit in 2006), but for 1995, it was the trip of the blackish boogers…

…My Indian uncle waved from the pair of cream-coloured vans.  He was the owner of a driving/tourist company, so he and a fellow driver would take us to his home in the village.  My siblings and my mother piled into the back of the van, four of us crammed onto a single bench.  And that’s how the journey began, with my brother’s left leg resting nicely on my lap…

***

…Before we could even get to the supposed “highway” (read: two-lane road with lots of trucks and cows), we had to drive our way through downtown Delhi.  And this was an amazing sight.  The streets were lined with incredible shops and restaurants (some of which were still sitting open for business), and off in the distance I could spot the “India Gate”.  To me the gate appeared just as grand as the “Arc de Triomphe” which I had seen in my geography books.  I asked my dad why we were driving past…there was so much to see.  My father assured me we’d be stopping at Delhi near the end of our trip, to visit some cousins and take in the sights.

I was mildly appeased as my neck leaned awkwardly against the bouncing van.  Six more hours and we’d be at the village…

…At approximately 5am I jolted into consciousness.  The left of my face was shiny with drool, and as I peered out the window I could see that we were sitting at a rest stop.  We’d be stopping for some tea and a light morning snack, announced my mother.  It was still very dark outside, and my appetite had not yet recovered from the strange foiled-packages claiming to be food on the airplane (“But mom,  that’s not what fruit salad normally looks like…”).

I did however need to use the bathroom.  For this my mother’s face became professional, as she stuffed a roll of toilet paper into my bag, explaining something very important:  “The toilets at these rest-stops…are in the ground.  It’s perfectly normal, just make sure you’re squatting straight, so it doesn’t run down your leg.”

Uhh…what?

This may not have been a shocking concern for a “normal” teen who’s done her share of camping, but you’ve met me right?  Right.

Without getting into (too many) details, I squatted there for a good ten minutes, far too nervous to pee.  I was half-afraid that a snake would leap from the hole in the ground, and half-afraid that this “toilet” had recently seen a lot of action, an imagery complete with ”poo fumes” floating up my bottom.

I finally managed a trickle and bolted, hoping I could sweat out all my pee for the remainder of the trip…

***

…For the next three hours of driving, amidst all the honking, passing cows and dangerous levels of fog, we finally puttered our way down a long dirt road.  The sun was shining bright by now, lighting our way to another dirt road, splitting up a field of vegetation.

A final turn later and a big iron gate was before us.  It opened from inside, revealing a brown solid path, that led to a looming tree.  Chained to the tree was  a big black cow, flies buzzing fast around its head.  To the right was a tiny barn, sitting next to a stone-cut house.  There in the doorway stood a wide-eyed aunt, and my equally wide-eyed cousins, ranging from the ages of thirteen to two.

I was so intrigued by these Indian versions of me.  Would we have a lot in common?  Were we almost the same besides geography?  I wasn’t sure, but I was now in the heart of a Punjabi village, and the Indian vacation had officially begun..

[Oh, and here is the next installment]

8th Grade Graduation: Get it On!

Okay…so I didn’t really “get it on” at my eighth grade graduation, but how exciting is a fourteen-year-old’s eighth grade graduation?!?!

First time for wearing a fancy dress, first time for flowered corsages, first time for serious slow-dance time, and if other “first times” were applicable to you back then, then the first time for those as well!

In 1995 I was seriously ready for my first sexy dress, but fate it seemed would have a slightly different plan…

***

…We were sitting there in English class, ignoring the proper use of adverbs, and doodling on our notebooks.  No one was writing out their future “married names”, but instead it was fashion sketch-fest, as the girls drew the dresses they’d be wearing to graduation.

I had no idea what my dress would be, but I thought of my sister’s dress from a couple of years ago.  My mother had made it herself, exactly to my sister’s specs.  So I put in my request that night.

Things didn’t go as planned, since apparently my mom had “gotten over” sewing.  So she told me to wear my sister’s dress.  I’d have no problem fitting in my tall and lanky sister’s dress, but that wasn’t really the issue.  The issue was floral prints. My sister’s dress looked like an English garden on a heavy dose of crack, plus an added shot of “puffy”.  While this had somehow been in style in 1993, things had changed a lot.

From the classroom sketches alone, I could see that the coolest ones were subdued and a whole lot sexier.  Dresses hiked high to the knee, in plain dark colours and spaghetti straps…the entire room would be full of lip-glossed girls who were growing up fast.

I needed to get that too.

A lot of challenges awaited though.  Like the challenge of not wearing a bra, not wearing make-up, and not being allowed to shave my legs just yet.

But still I would conquer; like maybe a clingy dress that ran down long and sleek, with a built-in bra that my mom wouldn’t even see.

I could do it!

At first my mom said no to the “new dress” plan, and instead suggested that I wear a glittered Indian suit.

What!?!?

An Indian dress with “leggings” at a party full of white people?!?!?!  All I could envision was getting beat up and having everyone call me “samosa” for the next three years.  So I stayed firm…NO Indian stuff.

My mother then decided that the best dressy outfit could be found at the local Farmer’s Market. 

No, I didn’t mis-type that. 

I acknowledge the inherent oddity of buying a dress at the Farmer’s Market, but my parents were on an obsessive “Farmer’s Market” kick.  They would go there twice a week, as they got all high off of shopping outside and paying in cash and striking a deal.

So off we went to the Farmer’s Market…

***

…After walking around through several aisles and filling our arms with vegetables and fruit, we had arrived in the “clothing section”…or the Southwest side of the parking lot.  We strode our way past too many stalls with tie-dyed shirts and leather belts, but eventually came across it..the formal wear.

And that’s when my mom said: “There they are!  I saw these last week; they’re perfect!”

And there they were.  Out of the back of a van, various hanging flowy vests with flowy bell-bottom pants.  The material was light and airy, and the colours were dark.  They were also printed, but with muted floral prints, to keep with the times.

So they fit the overall theme, except…it was a vest with matching flowy bell-bottom pants.

Somehow this god-awful trend had slipped through the cracks of 1995, and I do admit that the combo was a little “in”.  But I should also mention that the combo was a little “in” for teachers who liked to dress up, or for mothers who would wear the flowy vest/pant combo on a night out to dinner, glamming it up with a string of pearls.

I was horrified, but somehow in my sick deficient brain, I thought this outfit would be less offensive than a beautiful shimmered Indian dress.

So we picked it up, and threw it in the back of the van with all the fruits.  I had my graduation outfit…

***

…If the outfit itself wasn’t horrid enough, of course I’d have to wear a shirt underneath the vest.  I envisioned a spandex shirt with fancy flair, but what my mother brought home was  a cream-coloured t-shirt.

Okay then.

But I still had the hair to glam it up with.  And for that my mother took me out to a real salon!

As it turned out the girls in my class hadn’t sketched any hairstyles, so I didn’t know what was “in”.  And so…a thick French braid tucked under with a hundred pins it was (oh and some baby’s breath flowers too…right)…

***

…Looking back, I can’t believe how dazzling I would’ve looked in an Indian dress, but how afraid I was to even try it, because of my own neuroses towards my culture.  These days I would wear a saree to the bar each and every time, if it wasn’t so much frickin’ effort.

So if there’s anything to end with that leaves me on a higher note, it’s that the (only) boy who slow-danced with me got all ”rigid” during Bon Jovi’s “This Ain’t a Love Song”.

Hmm…I guess that big French braid was sexier than I thought…