A Birthday Wish

A Birthday Wish

Happy birthday to me!!

Exactly two years ago, when the date was 20/11/2011, Dream Pedlar was conceived in imagination.

I wrote a piece titled ‘Hello, Dreamer …’, a sort of a ‘Hello, here I am, hear me out’ piece, which was perhaps the first time I came really close to finding my writing voice. 

At the time, I only had a vague notion in my head of what I wanted Dream Pedlar to be like. Although actual work on it began only earlier this year, and it’s nowhere close to the concept that formed in my head during that winter of 2011, I am still proud of how far we have come. 

Although today is not a Dream Pedlar anniversary - well, it partly is, it partly isn’t - I am excited it’s my birthday (even after all the birthdays I’ve had, I love celebrating my existence!) and I am thrilled that I still love Dream Pedlar, the site, the stories, the art, the creation. 

So thank you for being with me all this while, for reading me on good days and bad, through happy tales and sad.

As we light the candles, I take in a huge gulp of air, puff out my cheeks, make a wish, and blow out. And all my hopes and yearnings mingle with the flames of the candles and the air and the wind and I grow more and more certain of this - I am one with the world, and the world is one with me.

A Birthday Wish

I want to be

… the crest of the wave that crashes on the shore and sweeps away all the seashells on its way out.

… the poetry that rides on the flutter of the breeze until the muse traps it on paper.

… the music that emanates from a hollow, broken piece of wood held together by strings.

… the melody that yields a new hidden note each time you replay it on the tape.

… the quiver in the singer’s voice as she lets a note linger a tad longer than you can hold your breath.

… the story you want to read over and over again until you have committed each exquisite word, each beautiful turn of phrase to memory.

… the colours that bleed from the artist’s brush on to the canvas, rich and resplendent at first, but fading away with the passage of time.

… the drop of water that glides down a wet lock of hair and hangs like a teardrop at the end.

… the memory that has lodged itself so deep into the recesses of your mind you know it exists but the more you try to retrieve it, the farther out of reach it slips.

… the heartbreak that sits at the base of your throat like a lump that won’t go away, no matter how many tears you shed.

… the hollow in your gut that your sorrow carves out, inch by hurting inch, as you realise your loss is irreconcilable.

… the slow, steady movement of the second hand that stretches your wait to eternity.

… the faint flicker of hope that tries to warm your lonely heart on a cold, winter day.

… your thoughts, your memories, your hopes, your fears, your desires, your dreams.

… everything that makes your heart beat, that makes the blood course through your veins faster and furiouser.

I want to be everything that makes you come alive.

A Girl's Gotta Do What A Girl's Gotta Do ... But The Magic Shall Continue ...

A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do ... But the magic shall continue ...

The Dream Pedlar turned four months old on Saturday. The first of the ‘tricks from my hat’ went up on the site on February 27, and Saturday’s story was the forty-third. 

43 is an odd number. It is also a prime number. It is just one level above the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything.

Not that any of the above has any bearing to the purpose of this post. But what is life without its element of madness? And right now, in my life, I feel as if I am caught up in a whirlwind. It is all good stuff, practical stuff. Matters essential to do this thing called living and to do it well. But this means there are too many demands on my time, and it appears as if this will be the case until early 2014. 

And so a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do ... 

Which means telling fewer tales, peddling fewer dreams ...

Making a little less magic than before ...

But the magic continues ...

One story with all my soul in it is not equal to two stories carrying half a heart each. 

The math may add up but the magic certainly doesn’t. 

And so going forward, the stories on Dream Pedlar will be posted only every Saturday. And this is only so as to give me some time to breathe, dream several other dreams and work on making them come true.

I thank you for being with me all this while, and I hope you will stay for as long as the madness and the magic continue.

A Post on Books and The Utterly Wonderful Things They Are

Have you ever found something that you adored so much you were torn between sharing your find and keeping the precious thing a secret all to yourself for just a wee bit longer? 

The last few books I read were so wonderful that although I wasn’t thinking of keeping them secret, I wanted to wallow for a long, long time in the emotions their endings brought in their wake before talking about the books with you all. 

Instead, what I did was jump from the end of one book headlong into the beginning of another, trying to fill the void created by the conclusion of one with the promise of another beautiful story.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

The first book I read in this phase of incessant reading was Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. Here is a brilliant review of the book, and I love how the reviewer says the novel is “a great big confidence trick - but one that invites the reader to take part in its deception.” 

The story revolves around Ursula Todd (among a plethora of characters) right from the day she is born, at first she is still-born, then in another chapter the catastrophe of still-birth is avoided by the timely arrival of the family doctor on the scene, through her childhood where she is once a victim of a drowning accident but then again is not when she is given a chance to relive her life, to her sixteenth birthday when she is a victim of rape and she is with child as a result of the episode and her mother turns cold against her and her life is reduced to a series of wrong choices made out of guilt and misery, and yet again to her sixteenth birthday, only this time she is able to kick her attacker in the balls and escape becoming a victim and goes on to lead different lives altogether, once as a friend of Hitler’s mistress, in another path of life she helps in the war efforts. And so much more. Each time she is given a fresh chance at life, a chance at walking a different path, at choosing the other path in the fork. 

As Atkinson makes one of her characters say towards the end of the book: “What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?”

It took me two weeks of reading after work and two days of incessant all-day reading while on a holiday to finish the book. At first I felt it moved very slowly, but once the book had me in its grip I could not let go. Every time something bad happened to Ursula, I knew she would have a chance to do it again and better this time. And that kept me going.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

This is a Gothic suspense novel although I did not know that when I first picked up the book. It is the story of a bookshop owner’s daughter and author - Margaret Lea - who is called upon by a famous novelist Vida Winter to write the latter’s biography. Winter has secrets in her past that have so far eluded journalists and now she wants to bare all to Lea. There is an element of the supernatural in this, and since I have a habit of reading until I am asleep, I spent many a sleepless night while reading this book.

The prose is beautiful, like music. 

Like the passage below.

“Words I can understand. Give me a torn or damaged fragment of text and I can divine what must have come before and what must come after. Or if not, I can at least reduce the number of possibilities to the most likely option. But music is not my language. Were these five notes the opening of a lullaby? Or the dying fall of a lament? It was impossible to say. With no beginning and no ending to frame them, no melody to hold them in place, whatever it was that bound them together seemed precariously insecure. Every time the first note struck up its call there was a moment of anxiety while it waited to find out whether its companion was still there, or had drifted off, lost for good, blown away by the wind. And so with the third and the fourth. And with the fifth, no resolution, only the feeling that sooner or later the fragile bonds that linked this random set of notes would give way as the links with the rest of the tune had given way, and even this last, empty fragment would be gone for good, scattered to the wind like the last leaves from a winter tree.”

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn 

This one got right into my head. It is a thriller and is narrated from the point of view of Nick - whose wife disappears on the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary - and his wife Amy through her entries in a diary until the day of her disappearance. Right at the outset the author makes it evident that Nick has been withholding information from the police and from the readers as well. Halfway through the novel it becomes clear that Amy has been deceitful in her narration too.

Flynn has a way of voicing her characters’ thoughts so well you might as well be right in their heads where it is all happening, all the thoughts and the thinking, the planning the plotting, the cheating and the conniving. I didn’t quite like how the story ended when I finished reading - but now that I have had time to think about it a little more, I suppose it couldn’t have ended any other way. I can’t say more without giving away the plot.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

I finished reading this only yesterday so I can’t quite talk about it without something inside me shifting at the thought of the book and the memory of the emotions it stirred in me as I read it. 

The book follows the journey of Harold Fry who is walking a 600-mile route from Kingsbridge in the south of England to Berwick-upon-Tweed from where an old colleague of his (from more than 20 years ago) has written to him to say she is dying of cancer. Somehow he believes that by walking to her, he will save her. He will keep walking, and she will go on living. The book is a story of his remarkable journey on foot, the places he traverses, the people he meets, his introspections and reflections en route, his memories, his regrets, his doubts alternating with confidence, moments of desperation to give up interspersed with wretched determination to stay on course. It is also narrated from the point of view of his wife Maureen, who swings from indignation at his having walked out on her to doubt and regret at having let the past twenty years of marriage slip away in quiet rage to remembering and rediscovering the man Harold was when they had first met.

If Setterfield’s narration was music, Joyce’s prose is like listening to the compositions of Beethoven or Bach. 

Sublime. 

“Late in the afternoon, the rain stopped so abruptly it was hard to credit there had been any at all. To the east, the cloud tore open and a low belt of polished silver light broke through. Harold stood and watched as the mass of grey split again and again, revealing new colours: blue, burnt umber, peach, green and crimson, then the clouds became suffused with a dulled pink, as if those vibrant colours had bled through, merging as they met. He could’t move. He wanted to witness every change. The light on the land was gold; even his skin was warm with it. At his feet the earth creaked and whispered. The air smelt green and full of beginnings. A soft mist rose, like wisps of smoke. 

Harold was so tired he could barely lift his feet, and yet he felt such hope, he was giddy with it. If he kept looking at the things that were bigger than himself, he knew he would make it to Berwick.”

(All images courtesy of Goodreads)

Ramblings, because it is a beautiful Sunday afternoon and we needed to talk, my thoughts and I

I never intended for this site to contain anything other than my picture-story pairs (I was about to say ‘combo’ but it reminded me of popcorn and coke, which also I love but not on an afternoon like this). 

But it rained a good deal today. (There is a connection between the rains and this blog post, I promise.)

And the world I see from my window is still grey and cloudy as if it intends on remaining like this until the end of time. I don’t mind it at all. In fact, I quite like it. I like the impression of permanence it gives, no dark fleeting clouds but a sombre, overcast sky. It also feels as if time has finally tired of progressing with monotonic precision and is stretching over the day, because it is only about two in the afternoon and a while ago I thought the day had almost come to an end, but to be honest I really couldn’t tell what time it is without the aid of a clock. 

Anyhoo, I spent most of the morning and early afternoon browsing through Facebook and twitter and tumblr and Pinterest, assaulting my senses with the multitude of social networking/bookmarking sites out there that could potentially be used as promotional tools for Dream Pedlar. 

I do have accounts on all these sites but the only thing I do after posting a new tale is share a link to it on Facebook and if I remember to, on Twitter as well. I mainly use my Twitter account to follow and retweet interesting posts on writing and sundry other matters that other users share. A silent stalker, if you please. Off late I have spent hours debating whether or not to send tweets to my favourite authors on Twitter, I did send a couple of those in the past month, and both times I kept checking my feed every five minutes to see if they had responded (they never did), feeling dejected (in the manner of a schoolgirl nursing the woes of an unrequited crush), and wondering who the other people were to whom these authors responded and whose tweets these authors shared. Then back to silent stalker mode. 

As for Tumblr and Pinterest, I strayed that way this morning after ages and was immediately lost.

No doubt, I think it is incredibly amazing how many artists and businesses use these sites to promote their works and to interact with their audience. But at the end of my hour or two of meandering on these sites, I snapped my laptop shut feeling overwhelmed. 

I couldn’t help but worry that were I to attempt building a meaningful online presence on all these sites, I probably would be left with little time for the very thing I set out to do in the first place. 

I am a painstaking writer. I mull over story ideas almost all the time. When I cook, when I am out for a run, in the shower, when I wake up in the morning, before I drift sleepwards, even in my dreams, on my way to work, on my way back from work,. Even in office when I have some time to spare I start to scour the Internet for heart-stopping images. 

But there are also moments when I take the time to stand and stare, to look around me, to take in the sights and sounds and smells and feelings. At the grocery store, on the sidewalk, en route to some place else, I often take a moment to pause living in my head and look, really look at all the people and things around me. In a cafe I strain my ears for the lyrics accompanying a catchy tune wafting from the speakers above the din of coffee and chatter and canoodling. 

It is like living in two places at the same time, in the here and now and also in my head, transcending time and space. And I am beginning to feel as if the lines are blurring, the two worlds are coalescing, the thin film of aether that separates the two realms is fast disappearing, dreams and reality rushing towards each other in a frenzy, colliding in some sort of a mystical fusion, like the ecstatic dance of a whirling dervish. 

And I feel and experience all of this, and I put all of my soul into each tale. And when I have penned the ending of each story, I am convinced that this is it, that I have no more to say, no more yarns to spin, no more dreams to peddle. Until the next tale comes along, and the dance begins all over again. A new tune, new steps, perhaps slow, perhaps fast, I have long stopped guessing what’s in store.

And when I have finished, I wait for the applause. It gives me some kind of closure, and I can exit the stage with the certainty of having executed each performance to the best of my abilities at that point in time. 

I wondered last week if I’d ever get even a hundred Likes on my Facebook page, several Likes and comments on each post there. I wondered this morning if I ought to promote Dream Pedlar more actively on different avenues.

But now I know I don’t want to. (A solution that KrA arrived at for me, as always, shortly before I started to type this out.) 

At least for another half a year or perhaps more, the only thing I want to do is tell my tales and work alongside on a longer piece of fantasy fiction that I intend to complete by the end of this year. These were the only two things I had in mind when I set up the site more than two years ago; these were the only two things I had in mind when I decided to post the picture-story pairs regularly; and it’s only been two months now and I am in it for the long haul, so there is clearly no reason why I should deviate from this path, certainly not now for I have only just started on this route. And I want to savour every moment of the journey, from the start to the end.

As for the applause? I have already received it. The look on KrA’s face each time he reads a new story of mine, anticipation suspended over his features, as if his world has come to a halt to make way for the Dream Pedlar’s story to unfold. And you my dear friends, the one and two and three friends I have, you who said my stories made you feel happy or sad, you who permitted my tales to permeate your thoughts and dreams, you who allowed me to leave an impression on your lives, you who let me share a part of my soul with you. I thank you.