Fellow writers! Here’s a wonderful opportunity to free your muse. The very talented Jason of The Clarity of Night is hosting this interesting contest in which you have to write a story of 250 words or less using a spectacular photograph he has posted on his blog as inspiration. The deadline is 8:00 p.m. (eastern time), Thursday April 27th. There are prizes to be won too, so get writing! This is the link for the contest. Do check it out :).

UPDATE: The contest entries are pouring in. You can read them here and post comments as well. Enjoy!

That image doesn’t really have a connection to the content of this post. I just put it because I like images in blog posts.

Well, as the title suggests, I am in submission mode these days. Now that the book is past me, I am back to writing some fiction now and then. I am also looking to submit the stories that are already stored in my hard drive. So I have decided to do the needful–searching for markets, polishing the stories, and dispatching them. Then pick another one from the hard drive and do the same.

So about a week back, I sent off the first to-be-submitted story to a couple of writer friends to get their views. They were pretty diligent and got back to me soon enough. And then what happened? Did I incorporate changes based on their suggestions and send the story off to the desired mag? No. In keeping with my superb procrastinating track record, I, well, procrastinated on it! Until I got a nudge from a terrific blog post called Submit to Submission (do read it if you can) from author J A Konrath. He wrote quite a motivating post encouraging writers to submit their work, and even dished out the incentive of including the names of the first five people who did that and reported back to him as characters in his new book. Wow! Just reading that post did the needful to wake me up. I made the changes needed, wrote the small bio note the said magazine asked for and composed the email. Then, I pressed the send button.

The mag’s policy says I may have to wait for two months before I hear from them. What do I do in the meantime? Why, pick up another story from the reserve folder, fine tune it, and send it off!

Simple eh? I tell you, it is. I even tried it myself 😉 Why don’t you do too and we all have fun together?

As you grow up, a few things emerge as your friends for expressing yourself. For some it is art, for others, sport, and for yet others, cooking, stitching, or some sort of craft. For me it was music. From the moment it was discovered my voice could sing in tune, I started loving music. To be able to let my voice dance with the notes of the octave was amongst my greatest pleasures as a child. It still is.

So no, I wasn’t the prodigious toddler who started scribbling amazing poems or stories. Writing emerged as a love much later–only in middle school. And this too, because my English teacher, easily the best I have come across so far (from school to master’s education), started writing notes such as “good” and “well written” at the end of my essays. Now these were compliments to treasure. Our teacher, as good as she was in her job, was a strict taskmaster and wouldn’t dish out compliments that easily. It was primarily because of her encouragement and wonderful teaching style that I began putting in a bit of extra effort in my writing. I was already a voracious reader, thanks to my upbringing at the hands of my grandma (a terrific writer herself), and the newfound joy in writing seemed to harmonize quite naturally.

And that simple joy is the reason behind the title of this blog. As a freelance writer, I do work from home, so the title may be stating the obvious. But there’s a bit more to it. Writing is one of those dimensions of my life that flow with a natural ease. When I write, I am at home. It’s like a song.