I haven’t written long-form content for a very long time so I guess today’s as good a day as any and today I would like to talk about an indirect lesson I learnt. My day was quite good and prepared me for the hectic days of the upcoming week.
I got home from an improv workshop to find a book waiting for me. This book, “Take a Seat at the Cosmic Campfire” is written by Dhara Parekh who also has a novel called “Unearthing Idyll” out which is book one of the “Asymptote Universe” saga. Dhara asked me to beta read for her and I gladly did, although I maintain that I was not very helpful and she disagrees. Either way I am on the third story right now and having a ball with how refreshing these stories are! I should add here that I am a science fiction junkie and have unabashedly grown up cutting my teeth on Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke and Douglas Adams, whose works have enabled me in recent times to read books by Gene Wolfe and Ursula K LeGuin and having consumed these books have made me curious to explore the works of Adrian Tchaikovsky.
I will be posting a review of Dhara’s book on Instagram and Goodreads very shortly as I am confident that the book will be fully read by Tuesday. I just want to tell Dhara that so far it has been a wonderful journey!
But let’s now go into the past for a brief moment. All the science fiction I’ve read as a kid and all the science fiction I’m reading now and all the science fiction I will read as an older man deal with one thing at the core of each story- the future and I suppose what I’ve realised so late in my journey into the worlds of Asimov and Clarke or my upcoming journeys into Tchaikovsky is about the future, a future worth looking forward to, not a past to remain angry about.
That was the lesson I learnt today while I played Tekken 7 with my friend who had dropped in spontaneously and stayed for quite a while. It was a treat hosting her and reading short stories out to her in what she terms my “narrative voice”.
As for the improv workshop, I saw growth in me. I also observed growth in a lot of the people I’ve been participating in these workshops with, and I realised that here is a part of me to work on, a new skill to build; yet another future to look ahead to.
And then of course,I saw that a friend in my book club wrote the next installment of a serialized travel story he’s writing and I glimpsed another future, one where I get to the other end of the rainbow that is his travel story’s conclusion.
Had you told last week’s Ashesh that this week he would churn out this article, or if I were to call last week’s Ashesh past Ashesh, I really and firmly believe he would have whined about how he was unable to write long form articles just now.
But hey, look! Here’s a long-form article from Ashesh.
Lesson? Look ahead, I guess ‘coz try as you might you won’t go back to the past.
But you will have a future!
The Bilge Master
Links
1. Dhara’s book
