As a promotional event for my award winning novel, The Essence of Aptitude, I'm hosting a little amazon gift card sweepstakes, which you can find here.
The giveaway is open for 29 days, so go ahead and enter, and don't forget to tell your friends :-)
Good luck!
-Esha
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Tuesday, April 19, 2016
Book Awards!
It is my absolute honor to let you all know that The Essence of Aptitude received a finalist position in The Next Generation Indie Author Awards. This day was a total blur of shock, excitement, and immense gratitude. A huge thank you to everyone who supported me through the publishing process, and to my wonderful readers and reviewers for being so awesome.
The website is www.IndieBookAwards.com. The site will be updated within the next few weeks to display this year's winners.
Saturday, March 5, 2016
Book Review: Once Upon a Stolen Time by Samreen Ahsan
Once Upon a Stolen Time By Samreen Ahsan is an interesting take at a fairy tale inspired romance story. The protagonist, Myra Farrow, is a young woman obsessed with fairy tales and finding her own 'prince charming'. She has had bad luck with guys in the past, particularly the older brother of a friend she dated when she was in high school who turned out to be manipulative and exploitive. Her parents worry that she won't marry, so they set her up with one handsome, eligible bachelor after another, but none of them meet the fairy tale idea she has in her head. Finally, she meets the son of one of her family friends, and extremely rich and handsome man who is carrying a deep secret of his own from his family. He confides in her, and they become good platonic friends, and he asks her to model for a video game he is designing. The video game is set in a castle, a perfect setting for a woman who feels like she should have been born far in the past. Once upon a Stolen Time is a modern fairy tale that's a bit dark around the edges, perfect for fans of romance who love their stories with a few twists. 4/5 stars.
Thursday, February 18, 2016
New Novel Madness - Picking a new project
As a writer, there is nothing more awesome than finishing a novel. Recently, I completed the first draft of the last book of The Corpus Chronicles and am currently editing. If you haven't written a series before, take that amazing end-of-book feeling and multiply it by 1000. Seeing the last book printed out on my desk in physical form rather than on my computer screen was the most surreal thing I had ever experienced. My entire indie-author journey up to that point had been The Corpus Chronicles. The series had been my blood, sweat, and tears for the last two years. No matter what I was doing for all that time, the series was always, without fail, at the back of my mind. And then, suddenly, it was over.
Of course, I still have plenty of editing to get through, along with beta reading and cover art, but for the most part, the heavy-lifting is complete. I'm no longer expending the majority of my energy each day into pushing the characters to grow and evolve, in structuring the outlines of subplots and backstories, and putting down one new word in front of the other. In short, I'm no longer building anything new. Instead, all my time is going to marketing The Corpus Chronicles, reviewing new and awesome books from other indie authors, and my very (cough) studious student life.
However, as someone with a deep love for writing, without that building component, something feels horribly off. I've heard from others that this is something many people experience after finishing a major project, but for me it is a first. Before The Corpus Chronicles, the only books I wrote were for fun rather than publication. The stakes were much lower back then, and consequently, so was the mental blowback after finishing a project.
After finishing The Corpus Chronicles, everything in my life was thrown off, from my normal mental state of mulling over plot ideas to my daily schedule. My natural solution was to dive right into a new project. However, it proved to be much more difficult than I had imagined. Usually, my mind is constantly swimming with new plot ideas, and while I was writing The Corpus Chronicles, they came up so frequently that I came to resent the project I had chosen for its length and the consequent time commitment, and I was eager to finish. I wrote down all the brainstorms in a notebook when the ideas came and continued my work on The Corpus Chronicles.
After I finished the last book, I went back to that notebook and leafed through it. I picked one idea, wrote maybe a vague outline or a few pages, and then hopscotched to another, and then another... you get the picture. Nothing was grabbing me, and now that I had the time to write a new book, the new ideas stopped coming. Trying to force them was as agonizing as not doing anything at all. I read through article after article online on writing inspiration. I tried to think back to how I got the idea for The Corpus Chronicles. It was just like everything else I'd written thus far: It had just popped into my head one day and evolved into something feasible with time and patience.
So where was the disconnect? I had plenty of ideas in my notebook, but for some reason, I couldn't get them to grow. I also wasn't getting any new ideas for the first time in my memory, and I believe the two phenomenon were closely related. Maybe it's just a symptom of the postpartum depression us writers get after we finish projects, or maybe the mental block is stemming from somewhere completely different in my life. I don't think I'll end up figuring out what it is exactly. Maybe the only way is to keep working through the last book's editing and wait for that elusive little spark of inspiration to ignite. It certainly can't be forced.
Until next time.
-Your friendly neighborhood coffee zombie
Of course, I still have plenty of editing to get through, along with beta reading and cover art, but for the most part, the heavy-lifting is complete. I'm no longer expending the majority of my energy each day into pushing the characters to grow and evolve, in structuring the outlines of subplots and backstories, and putting down one new word in front of the other. In short, I'm no longer building anything new. Instead, all my time is going to marketing The Corpus Chronicles, reviewing new and awesome books from other indie authors, and my very (cough) studious student life.
However, as someone with a deep love for writing, without that building component, something feels horribly off. I've heard from others that this is something many people experience after finishing a major project, but for me it is a first. Before The Corpus Chronicles, the only books I wrote were for fun rather than publication. The stakes were much lower back then, and consequently, so was the mental blowback after finishing a project.
After finishing The Corpus Chronicles, everything in my life was thrown off, from my normal mental state of mulling over plot ideas to my daily schedule. My natural solution was to dive right into a new project. However, it proved to be much more difficult than I had imagined. Usually, my mind is constantly swimming with new plot ideas, and while I was writing The Corpus Chronicles, they came up so frequently that I came to resent the project I had chosen for its length and the consequent time commitment, and I was eager to finish. I wrote down all the brainstorms in a notebook when the ideas came and continued my work on The Corpus Chronicles.
After I finished the last book, I went back to that notebook and leafed through it. I picked one idea, wrote maybe a vague outline or a few pages, and then hopscotched to another, and then another... you get the picture. Nothing was grabbing me, and now that I had the time to write a new book, the new ideas stopped coming. Trying to force them was as agonizing as not doing anything at all. I read through article after article online on writing inspiration. I tried to think back to how I got the idea for The Corpus Chronicles. It was just like everything else I'd written thus far: It had just popped into my head one day and evolved into something feasible with time and patience.
So where was the disconnect? I had plenty of ideas in my notebook, but for some reason, I couldn't get them to grow. I also wasn't getting any new ideas for the first time in my memory, and I believe the two phenomenon were closely related. Maybe it's just a symptom of the postpartum depression us writers get after we finish projects, or maybe the mental block is stemming from somewhere completely different in my life. I don't think I'll end up figuring out what it is exactly. Maybe the only way is to keep working through the last book's editing and wait for that elusive little spark of inspiration to ignite. It certainly can't be forced.
Until next time.
-Your friendly neighborhood coffee zombie
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Monday, January 11, 2016
So Much For Happy, a novel by E.P. McGill
Daring, imaginative, ambitious, and insightful, So Much For Happy is a much needed wakeup call for the American people. McGill exposes the reality of race, education, and mass incarceration through the eyes of a child in an eloquent, yet chilling, debut.
When I started out my writing journey, one of the first people I met through the indie author community was writer E.P. McGill. At the time, his novel So Much For Happy was in its initial stages and I beta read for him. I received the draft in the evening and read through most of the night.
I was blown away.
So Much For Happy is the story of a young boy named Christopher Michael in a despotic society not so different from our own. The novel frames a society that consists of three main cities, Happy, Unhappy, and Hope. There are also only three races that exist in this world, and those are Red, White, and Blue. The Red people represent the lower class, the Blue the middle class, and the White the upper class.
Christopher Michael is a young boy who grows up in Unhappy. Like all the people in Unhappy, he is Red. Most of the people in Unhappy have given up on life and spend quite a bit of their money from their awful jobs buying "candy" and "soda", which they consume to try and forget about their awful jobs.
Sound familiar?
Continuing on...
Christopher Michael lives in constant fear of being sent to Kamp, a place where most of the Red people end up sooner or later. His brother was sent to Kamp years before, and Christopher Michael hasn't seen him since. He doesn't want to end up in Kamp, but his perspective on life has made him believe that Kamp is an inevitable future for him. The school doesn't teach the children properly, and although Christopher Michael teaches himself as much as he can, he knows it isn't enough. Because the schools don't teach the children properly, most of them have to resort to crime in order to survive, and when they commit crimes, they are sent to Kamp. Once they are in Kamp, they can be released, but they can never truly escape Kamp.
McGill frames the prison industrial complex in terms simple enough for a child to understand with a fresh, raw voice that will touch the hearts of adults.
This isn't a story about politics. It is the story of a little boy who misses his big brother.
Christopher Michael loves to read, but his school doesn't have access to many books or supplies. Some of his teachers even go as far as to discourage him from reading as it makes their jobs easier if he flunks. However, there is one teacher who thinks differently.
This teacher is Blue, like all the teachers at Christopher Michael's school, except there is something different about him. His color seems slightly purple, and the teacher explains that he used to be Red, but he got to transfer to Blue and live in Hope withe the rest of the middle class people. Although he is now Blue and lives in Hope, the people there always look at him differently because of where he came from. By sharing his story with Christopher Michael, the teacher gives the boy a small piece of the Hope he has. Christopher Michael realizes that he has a chance to get to Happy despite the immense institutionalized roadblocks in his path.
Christopher Michael begins his journey towards Happy. While he is trying to work out how to get there, the people in Happy run an experiment on the children in Unhappy. They show them the true colors of their skin. The children automatically form groups of people like themselves. Children who had once been friends now do not speak. Everyone insists on staying with 'their own kind', everyone, that is, except Christopher Michael.
Through a tenuous friendship with a White boy from Happy, Christopher Michael begins to see the truth about the divisions in his society. He has two choices, to make the easy choice and accept them for what they are and fall into the "candy" and "soda" life, or to be brave and to run to Happy. Christopher Michael runs, and he never stops.
So Much for Happy is incapable of disappointing. This is an incredible book by a fantastic new author. It is something everyone should read at least once. It deserves to be seen.
Please, check out the So Much for Happy webpage here, share, and help support Christopher Michael's journey to Happy.
A wonderful teaching guide also exists if you wish to bring So Much for Happy into your classroom, which can be found here.
Thank you all,
-Esha
When I started out my writing journey, one of the first people I met through the indie author community was writer E.P. McGill. At the time, his novel So Much For Happy was in its initial stages and I beta read for him. I received the draft in the evening and read through most of the night.
I was blown away.
So Much For Happy is the story of a young boy named Christopher Michael in a despotic society not so different from our own. The novel frames a society that consists of three main cities, Happy, Unhappy, and Hope. There are also only three races that exist in this world, and those are Red, White, and Blue. The Red people represent the lower class, the Blue the middle class, and the White the upper class.
Christopher Michael is a young boy who grows up in Unhappy. Like all the people in Unhappy, he is Red. Most of the people in Unhappy have given up on life and spend quite a bit of their money from their awful jobs buying "candy" and "soda", which they consume to try and forget about their awful jobs.
Sound familiar?
Continuing on...
Christopher Michael lives in constant fear of being sent to Kamp, a place where most of the Red people end up sooner or later. His brother was sent to Kamp years before, and Christopher Michael hasn't seen him since. He doesn't want to end up in Kamp, but his perspective on life has made him believe that Kamp is an inevitable future for him. The school doesn't teach the children properly, and although Christopher Michael teaches himself as much as he can, he knows it isn't enough. Because the schools don't teach the children properly, most of them have to resort to crime in order to survive, and when they commit crimes, they are sent to Kamp. Once they are in Kamp, they can be released, but they can never truly escape Kamp.
McGill frames the prison industrial complex in terms simple enough for a child to understand with a fresh, raw voice that will touch the hearts of adults.
This isn't a story about politics. It is the story of a little boy who misses his big brother.
Christopher Michael loves to read, but his school doesn't have access to many books or supplies. Some of his teachers even go as far as to discourage him from reading as it makes their jobs easier if he flunks. However, there is one teacher who thinks differently.
This teacher is Blue, like all the teachers at Christopher Michael's school, except there is something different about him. His color seems slightly purple, and the teacher explains that he used to be Red, but he got to transfer to Blue and live in Hope withe the rest of the middle class people. Although he is now Blue and lives in Hope, the people there always look at him differently because of where he came from. By sharing his story with Christopher Michael, the teacher gives the boy a small piece of the Hope he has. Christopher Michael realizes that he has a chance to get to Happy despite the immense institutionalized roadblocks in his path.
Christopher Michael begins his journey towards Happy. While he is trying to work out how to get there, the people in Happy run an experiment on the children in Unhappy. They show them the true colors of their skin. The children automatically form groups of people like themselves. Children who had once been friends now do not speak. Everyone insists on staying with 'their own kind', everyone, that is, except Christopher Michael.
Through a tenuous friendship with a White boy from Happy, Christopher Michael begins to see the truth about the divisions in his society. He has two choices, to make the easy choice and accept them for what they are and fall into the "candy" and "soda" life, or to be brave and to run to Happy. Christopher Michael runs, and he never stops.
So Much for Happy is incapable of disappointing. This is an incredible book by a fantastic new author. It is something everyone should read at least once. It deserves to be seen.
Please, check out the So Much for Happy webpage here, share, and help support Christopher Michael's journey to Happy.
A wonderful teaching guide also exists if you wish to bring So Much for Happy into your classroom, which can be found here.
Thank you all,
-Esha
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