Write Concepts #25

People have the things that they turn to for recreation. For me those things are stories whether they be in form of  short stories, novels or comic books and graphic novels. I'm not much into movies anymore except comic book movies and only watch movies when I'm bored or they are really big movies like Nolan's Odyssey or Spielberg's Disclosure Day and I'm especially not into Bollywood movies of the present times. It's been a long time I have read a good modern short stories, last I read good short stories was the short story collection The Baum Plan for Financial Independence by John Kessel and there is not much happening in the comic book scene in India. I'm a fan of old American and British short story writers and of people in comic books like Alan Moore and Frank Miller and there are many more in the comic book scene. When I was in my late teens and early twenties I wanted to be a writer, mostly a fiction writer though I wrote blogs for practice and read voraciously both online and offline to have raw material for writing. In the big 2020s writing became redundant and I still write, a lot of political nonfiction about deep politics of India, some surrealistic prose and prose poetry and when the writing block allows some flash fiction and short stories, I don't have the bandwidth for writing a novel or even novella. Reading and writing are my recreation but it's hard to find good literature now-a-days and especially the kind of literature I like, literary quality pulp fiction. Top three writers I love are Kafka, Conan Doyle and Lovecraft while my role model has always been Chekhov because he was a physician-writer and so a lot of my writing is stream of consciousness. My kind of good stories are rare and I say this because I'm not interested in stories about social relationships, I'm interested in the atmosphere, the cosmic and either extremes both good and bad or warmth and I especially appreciate the artists who portray extremes with warmth. I'm working on a novella at present and it might turn into a 70000 to 80000 words novel, it is a magical realism psychological thriller and it is going at a slow pace because I want it to be just right. In my opinion good writing entertains, educates and either provides warmth or tells truth and I hope to achieve this ideal with my writing.