How to… Or rather How I blog

This year amongst the few resolutions I try and make (and desperately try to keep doing), I promised to try the WordPress app more. And boy what a big deal it has been. My blogging experience has been superb since.

Before, this way before the advent of data and smartphones, I used to jot down thoughts and topics in a notebook. Then I would sit at the PC and compose a draft on Word. Then copy paste into the editor on Blogspot and then format. Then finally publish the post. The same was the routine for WordPress. A few years later came my laptop. The only difference was I could draft my post on the go. The ideas and thoughts I still jotted down in a book.

This year I started using the WordPress app as best as I can. I still have the habit of jotting down things, but that has now become a secondary checklist of sorts. Here’s what I really do.

• I compose a blog post on the WordPress app. It really doesn’t matter what I’m writing about. I simply tap the orange plus button and voila drafting begins.
• I write as much as I can in full sentences. I also include little points with the bulleting option to make notes. These are for when I want to include a certain element that requires a little bit of research.
• Tagging is best when I use the app. I just use the space bar once and it gives me the entire list of tags I have used. I can pick and choose as many or as few as I need.
• So the draft sits on my phone for a while since I may or may not have used mobile data/WiFi thus far. Therefore the draft may just be a local bit of data stored on my phone. I make it a point to upload it (or sync) at the end of the day. I usually do it over WiFi. Now I can use it on my laptop as well.
• Next comes the research if any that I need to do for the post. And then formatting. For this, I use the normal version of WordPress. I use Grammarly which I think everyone should use. And I also use the Hemmingway app, the free version of course. The Hemmingway app lets me edit my sentence structures and makes me feel like an errant child who can’t write anything that’s beyond grade 8! Grammarly is for the serious errors in spelling and left out articles. I sometimes also do a copy-paste on to Word, because the spell check is great as well. But this is happening in lesser frequency these days.
• Then, of course, there is the random searching the images for images and using Canva or Giphy.
• Finally, the post is done and scheduled.

This is how I have been doing it for the past few weeks now. I did try and use only the app, but that didn’t work for me. This is now my go-to method. And what’s best is at any time I have at least four posts sitting in the drafts folder. If only I could not be the lazy person I was, I’d probably be posting more often.

Book Review – Kissing the Demon by Amrita Kumar

Writing a book is like sailing through unchartered waters – you never know what might show up.

I have been putting off reviewing this book for a while now. I began reading Kissing the Demon and quickly realised it was not to be read lightly. So I picked up a red pen and read it from the start again; Making notes, underlining and highlighting as I read.

There may be a few many different books on the topic of how to write, but Kissing the Demon by Amrita Kumar stands out amongst the lot. Primarily, I would say, because it is for the Indian market.

It is hardly surprising that Amrita Kumar manages to give us such in-depth knowledge of the industry and the process of publishing, but what really mattered, to me, were the sections on writing. The technicality of it, understanding and underlining all that went into getting an idea into the format of a book.

I would say this book is not just for those looking for a how-to on writing fiction, but anyone who wants to write blogs/articles/reviews would be greatly benefitted by Kissing the Demon .

For writing to exist, it has to get written down.

Honestly though, Kissing the Demon has been a bit hard for me to review. I could write about the language, research, detail etc in the book, but then it is a given that these are to be found in near perfection in this book. And to say it is a guide to writing is an understatement as well. What then should I say the book is?

Well, I think it is beyond a guide for writers. It is a collection – of experiences and quotes from authors and a massive collection of books that one needs to read to understand the different ways in which words make a world come alive.

Kissing the Demon is perhaps a book that can coax out a book from anyone willing to succumb to the urge.

Highly Recommend It.

Goodreads

Kissing the Demon: The Creative Writer’s Handbook by Amrita Kumar

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

View all my reviews

 

Reading for a writer is as demanding as writing.

I know I said Kissing the Demon has some amazing books listed in it, I made the effort to list them out here. Just so I can also have a future reference and share it with the world. Of course, most of the books have already been read by seasoned readers. Here goes (in alphabetical order)…

Book	Author
A Beautiful Mind	Sylvia Nasar
A Brief History of Seven Killings	Marlon James
A Clockwork Orange	Anthony Burgess
A Farewell to Arms	Ernest Hemingway
A Fine Balance	Rohinton Mistry
A House for Mr Biswas	V S Naipaul
A Moveable Feast	Ernest Hemingway
A Suitable Boy	Vikram Seth
A Time to Kill	John Grisham
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland	Lewis Caroll
Americanah	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
An Atlas of Impossible Longing	Anuradha Roy
Angela’s Ashes	Frank McCourt
Animal Farm	George Orwell
Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy
As I Lay Dying	William Faulkner
Atonement	Ian McEwan
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter	Mario Vargas Llosa
Back When We Were Grownups	Anne Tyler
Behind the Beautiful Forevers	Katherine Boo
Beloved	Toni Morrison
Blood Meridian	Cormac McCarthy
Bonfire of the Vanities	Tom Wolfe
Brick Lane	Monica Ali
Bridget Jones’ Diary	Helen Fielding
Can you Wave Bye Bye Baby	Elyse Gasco
Carrie	Stephen King
Chronicle of a Death Foretold	Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Crane’s Morning	Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen
Crime and Punishment	Fyodor Dostoevsky
Cry, The Peacock	Anita Desai
Curfewed Night	Basharat Peer
Disgrace	J M Coetzee
English, August	Upamanyu Chatterjee
Finnegan’s Wake	James Joyce
Five Point Someone	Chetan Bhagat
Flight Behaviour	Barbara Kingsolver
For Whom the Bell Tolls	Ernest Hemingway
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe	Fannie Flagg
Gertrude and Claudius	John Updike
Go Set a Watchman	Harper Lee
Gone with the Wind	Margaret Mitchell
Good Earth	Pearl Buck
Hamlet	Shakespeare
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone	J K Rowling
He’s Just Not That Into You	Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo
How to Be Both	Ali Smith
In Cold Blood	Truman Capote
Intimacy	Hanif Kureishi
Jane Eyre	Charlotte Bronte
Jonathan Livingston Seagull	Richard Bach
Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov
Maximum City	Suketu Mehta
Midnight’s Children	Salman Rushdie
Money	Martin Amis
Odysseus Abroad	Amit Chauduri
Oliver Twist	Charles Dickens
One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Orpheus and Eurydice
Paradise	Toni Morrison
Past Continous	Neel Mukherjee
Pickwick Papers	Charles Dickens
Plot and Structure	James Scott Bell
Possession	A S Byatt
Pride and Prejudice	Jane Austen
Red Earth and Pouring Rain	Vikram Chandra
Red Riding Hood
Rules of the Game	Amy Tan
Sense and Sensibility	Jane Austen
Serious Men	Manu Joseph
Sleeping on Jupiter	Anuradha Roy
Snow	Orhan Pamuk
Snow White and Rose Red
Solo	Rana Dasgupta
Sula	Toni Morrison
Sun after Dark	Pico Iyer
Tender Morsels	Margo Lanagan
The Art of Fiction	John Gardner
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian	Nirad Choudari
The Bell Jar	Sylvia Plath
The Big Sleep	Raymond Chandler
The Bridges of Madison County	Robert James Waller
The Catcher in the Rye	J D Salinger
The Chicago Manual of Style
The Color Purple	Alice Walker
The Diary of a Young Girl	Anne Frank
The Elements of Style	William Strunk, E B White
The English Patient	Michael Ondaatje
The Everest Hotel	Allan Sealy
The Exorcist	W P Blatty
The Far Pavilions	M M Kaye
The Gathering	Anne Enright
The God of Small Things	Arundhati Roy
The Godfather	Mario Puzo
The Great Gatsby	Scott Fitzgerald
The Green Road	Anne Enright
The Ground Beneath Her Feet	Salman Rushdie
The Help	Kathryn Stockett
The Inheritance of Loss	Kiran Desai
The Lord of the Rings	J R R Tolkien
The Lowland	Jhumpa Lahiri
The Mayor of Casterbridge	Thomas Hardy
The Narrow Road to the Deep North	Richard Flanagan
The Poisonwood Bible	Barbara Kingsolver
The Reader	Bernhard Schlink
The Reluctant Fundamentalist	Mohsin Hamid
The Rosemary Tree	Elizabeth Goudge
The Seven Basic Plots: Why we tell stories	Christopher Booker
The Torrents of Spring	Ernest Hemingway
The Unbearable Lightness of Being	Milan Kundera
The White Tiger	Aravind Adiga
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle	Haruki Murakami
The Year of Magical Thinking	Joan Didion
Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse	Nirad Choudari
Thy Hand, Great Anarch!	Nirad Choudari
To kill a MockingBird	Harper Lee
True History of the Kelly Gang	Peter Carey
Vardiwala Goonda	Ved Prakash Sharma
Vernon God Little	D B C Pierre
Waiting	Ha Jin
Waiting for Godot	Samuel Beckett
War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down	Richard Adams
What I Talk About When I Talk About Runninh	Haruki Murakami
Wide Sargasso Sea	Jean Rhys
Wolf Hall	Hilary Mantel
Writing Down the Bones	Natalie Goldberg
Wuthering Heights	Emily Bronte

I received a copy from Writersmelon in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.