By Kalyani Kurup
Excerpt from the personal narrative ‘A Journey to Self-Publishing’ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DJWDQVG
Meanwhile, while I was writing facts for others and fiction
for myself, my personal life had taken some unexpected detours. After a life
that had taken me through every corner of India and given me experiences of
scorching summers, bone-freezing winters, billowing dust storms, and
earth-drowning rains, I found myself catapulted onto a new continent. Courtesy
of my daughter, I ended up in the USA, and found myself trying to fathom the
esotericisms of a new country.
Near the apartment in which I live in Fairfax, there is a
library called Chantilly Regional Library, one of the many Fairfax County
library branches. I had been there now and then to take books and to
participate in book discussions, but it was only in the middle of 2012 that I
stumbled into a writers’ organization called ‘Writers of Chantilly’ which meets
there twice a month.
‘Writers of Chantilly’ is a motley crew of people who are in
love with words and sentences. I found that some of them were established
writers glowing in the happiness of the checks they regularly received. Some had
just managed to leapfrog into the world of published authors and were exploring
the wonders of their new world. Some others probably had, like me, the
experiences of chasing agents or sweating it out in post office queues with
their manuscripts on their head. The important thing was that they understood
each other’s hopes, dreams, fears, dreads, needs, and yearnings.
I asked if I could join their group and they readily let me
in. There was no formal interview and no filling up of forms to declare my
age-gender-height-weight-sugar-cholesterol-father’s name and records of
lawbreaking. They accepted me as if they were expecting me to drop down from
heavens into the library’s conference room in the spring of 2012, even though I
am visibly incompatible with the rest in height, weight, accent, and skin
color.
Empathy is the true union on which ‘Writers of Chantilly’
revolves. Exchange of ideas and constructive criticism are the fabrics that hold
the members together. They turned out to be the support system that I had
always yearned for but had not found till then.
For anyone who is interested in writing, there is an
indefinable ease and comfort in being part of a writer’s group. When I joined, WOC
was on its way to publishing an anthology on grandmothers, and as a member I
was eligible to contribute. I was hesitant in the beginning because I was not
sure of their selection criteria.
I did, however, try. And they did, instantly accept. I felt
almost as if I was back in those early days of freelancing in the mid-1980s
when I just wrote what I liked and sent it to magazines and they published it.
Life seemed to have come full circle.
‘Writers of Chantilly’ introduced me into the world of
self-publishing. I had heard about the alternative world of self-publishing
even before I became a part of WOC. But I had then believed it to be a sort of
shadowy underworld where anemic souls rejected by publishing companies went to
build their nests. But the new company made me wiser on the nitty-gritty of
self-publishing. I realized that it was no longer an inferior world populated
by discarded souls. Self-published authors were apparently giving big
publishing companies a run for their money. Self-publishing had introduced a
new world order where you were doomed only if readers handed out a negative
verdict and not if established publishers rejected you.
All that information was a fresh gust of wind for me. I decided
to publish my accumulated material – two novels and many collections of stories
nestling in attics and lofts and hibernating CDs and thumb drives….
Self-publishing is no easy trapeze, and does not in itself solve
all of a writer’s problems. It is still a long road ahead, but every journey
has to start with a small step. I am ever grateful that ‘Writers of Chantilly’
helped me take this tiny first step.
