A Cure For Writer's Block

Yes, we all have walked down that road some time or the other. And boy, is Writer's Block frustrating! Nothing comes in your mind, not a single word, forget about a structuring a complete sentence. And then we start searching for solutions. Unfortunately, most of the times we are unable to come up with a satisfied answer. So today I thought about writing on how to cure your writer's block, with the aid of technology. Yes, you heard it right, the solution to your writer's block lies with technology. The solution has a name too, Skribit.

Skribit provides a content suggestion service helping bloggers discover relevant topics to write about from their readers. Launched in November 2007 at the Atlanta Startup Weekend, Skribit has grown steadily since then, all the while adding new features. Skribit is pretty easy to install and works on almost all the blogging platforms including Blogger, Wordpress and TypePad. With their widget, you would be able to receive real-time, user-generated suggestions directly from your readers.

Once you have registered with Skribit, which is quite an easy thing to do and takes only about a minutes or so and is completely free, you need to setup your blog account with them so that you can create your own Skribit widget for your blog. The Skribit widget comes in 3 flavors, an older ver 1 widget, a regular sidebar widget and a suggestion tab. Although I would suggest you to choose between the regular sidebar widget or the suggestion tab. The regular sidebar widget sits there on your sidebar like an intent listener. Your readers would be able to write in suggestions over there on what would they like to see on your blog. And you would be able to see that, in real-time. And in case you want to save on screen real-estate then you should go for the suggestion tab. The suggestions tab would float around on one of the sides of your blog, and when clicked it would bring about a suggestion box where your readers would be able to input their valuable suggestions on what you should write on. The tab is styled with your settings of course.

But wait, this is not all. Skribit also has it's own community where you get to see the popular suggestions, recently blogged suggestions, popular people, groups and a lot more. Through this you would be able to gauge the latest trend and voila! You know what you should be writing about. So, simply register with Skribit, and cure your writer's block, forever. But don't forget to subscribe to The Chronicles of R to remain notified when it is updated.

[P.S. Picture courtesy : LOLCats]

What am I reading now?

Do you remember Tarun Tejpal? The Editor-in-Chief of the revolutionary newspaper Tehelka? Very recently he has published a novel. The name of the book is The Alchemy of Desire. Last week I bought it from The Starmark on Lord Sinha Road. I would not mind saying that it is a nice fiction inspite of the fact that I have not finished even half of it yet. He sets the mood with the powerful starting line which says Love is not the greatest glue between two people. Sex is. How true! Being a person who loves to call himself impulsive, I would still say that emotional bondings attached with physical attraction are much more stronger compared to the platonic love of old Hindi flicks. And I can say that from my personal experience of being a person who have been in and out of love quite a number of times.

The story revolves around an impecunious young couple from a small town in India who are madly in love with eachother, move to the big city. The man works hard on a novel while caring only about his endless desire for his beautiful wife. In time they leave the city and moves to an old house in the Himalayas. While renovating their new home the husband discovers a chest full of diaries maintained by the previous owner of the house. In those diaries he slowly uncovers a dark secret, a forbidden secret.

It a nice buy and is worth every penny And once you start reading it, it's pretty difficult to put it down. It is published by Picador India and the cover price is Rs325. Now while I was at the bookstore I also found another book of interest. It is CSS - The Definitive Guide by Eric A. Meyer. The publisher is O'Reilley. It's a book which would easily make a place on the technology section of your personal library if you are interested in learning the art behind Cascading Style Sheets. Moreover, if you are a serious blogger and is determined to give your blog a new look and feel, I would say that this is a must buy for you. It would start from the basics of what CSS is and how would it help you to change the look and feel of your webpage, then it would slowly move on to advanced topics which includes CSS-2. Although I don't think Eric did justice by putting away only a single chapter on CSS-2, but for beginners to intermediary readers of CSS this is a must buy.

For the time being I am busy reading these two books while at times reading a few short stories of Lovecraft, you can get those from the Gutenberg Project of Australia if you love to read an ebook. Else you can gift yourself a collection of books and novels by the master of horror.

Kafkaesque

The word Kafkaesque is an auctorial descriptive. It means that Kafkaesque is an adjective based on author's name, other examples of auctorial descriptives are Draconian, Lovecraftian, Cartesian, Borgesian, Dickensian et al. The word Kafkaesque is used to describe the surreal concept, ideas or situations which evokes a similarity with the works of the Prague writer Franz Kafka, especially with his novels The Trial and The Metamorphosis.

These novels mostly concerns troubled individuals in a nightmarishly surreal and bureaucratic world. Most of his short stories were unfinished works which were released posthumously. He used long sentences which was a typical German influence and those could take up the entire page.

Coming back to where we started from, The New Yorker describes the word Kafkaesque "marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger: Kafkaesque fantasies of the impassive interrogation, the false trial, the confiscated passport... haunt his innocence". Whereas Dictionary.com refers to the same as "marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity: Kafkaesque bureaucracies". In The New Yorker, John Updikes says "Self-loathing and self-distrust lurk in his work with somatic unease; he is the forbear of modern man's sense of dread".

So we can say that the word Kafkaesque is a synonym for magic realism, where the protagonist experiences bizarre situations under the influence of a modern day world. For example in his work The Metamorphosis, Kafka depicts Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman who wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant monstrous vermin.

Now the reason I started writing about the word Kafkaesque is that I was reading The Metamorphosis in the past few days and was attracted by the portrayal of the Kafkaesque world. There is a hell and heaven difference between a Kafkaesque and a Lovecraftian world. Although to me the Lovecraftian world seems more real, yet I must say that Kafka's views were very powerful and sometimes disturbing. For the benefit of my readers I have made a copy of The Metamorphosis available which you can download here. You can read it for free, but before redistributing it I would request you to go through the Copyright pages.

Finding Forrester

Out of sight
[Written by Paridhi Sharma]

Flames of oil lamp flickered
drop of oil trickles down
there was little left, for the flames to burn
she knew there would be darkness again
sitting in the corner, a faint shadow was quivering and wandering wall to wall
it was hers may be.

A window on the corner left
faintly visible
for it was covered with web and dust..
dust all over - walls, ceiling, floor.
names were written all over
were they conspiring against her ?
No clue.
She was dying
losing the continuity of her breath
she skipped a beat of her heart

Three

Two

One

tick...tick..tick...

a sound.

time.

clock.

" what was it ? " - she thought

it's from that world outside.

"Not this time ! " - she decided

perceiver and perceived will merge this time.

" It can't decide on her fate - again".

The Light won't subjugate the Darkness within.

It was fake, she knew.

A shadow she was.

Ignorance couldn't creep in

Flames were flickering rapidly

It can't keep on burning.

Light would be shed away.

She could hear the trees whistling

it was the wind, after all.


she knew it

the lamp falls, glass breaks into pieces

another blow of the wind carries it away.

a faint smile crosses her face.




There is Darkness

yet again.

She is Created

yet again


These are not the mindless drone of a senseless soul. These few couplets have an interesting story related to them. A movie was released titled Finding Forrester starring Sean Connery. Now there the protagonist put in front of them a challenge, he asked his companion to write. But the catch is that he would not think while writing. Surprising! Yes it is. The concept was not to let the words corrupt the thoughts of a virgin mind. And the movie continued on its own course. A very good friend of mine, Paridhi once took the challenge herself and went on to write something similar. The challenge was the same. To write without thinking. So that the words do not interfere with the thought process. And this was the end result. Now if you knew Paridhi, as I know her today you would know that these words were not quite incoherent in their own ways. They have their own meaning. Why? Well, these words came to her spontaneously and thus were a result of her subconscious mind. We all might look at a particular thing in all possible ways, but when it comes to spontaneity the word that will best describe a thing would be the one which our subconscious would designate it with. Now its upto the reader to deciper it in their own ways.

I tried something similar. And here is the result. These might also seem to be someone mindless drone but I know what they mean to me. Now if you read them and feel that they mean something to you or that you could get a sneak peek into my mind’s eyes I would appreciate if you could write the same as a comment.

Night

Night
Lights
Cars
Fast moving cars

Life
Cycle
Going down
Street lamp glaring with all might
Girls. Girls on a selling spree
Neons, busy.

Dogs from the other car looking at me
People busy to go
Ambitions, fulfillment.
People going far away
Where are they going?
Saw Anna, long time no see!
Why?
Busses,
Miscarriage.
Peace.
Where are thou?

Phone, talking endless gibberish
No point talking!
Sarees, mela of colours.
All of us,
Moving.