Photo by Girl with red hat on Unsplash

Okay, Let’s see just how good Medium is.

The backstory behind this post is at the end. If you like the rest of the post, please take some time to go through that as well. Some music while you’re reading, perhaps?

I’d recommend opening another tab to listen to this song while reading the stuff below. Hopefully you’ll like at least of one of them!

This is a newsletter issue that I’ve been working on for a long time. It’s not really that complex, or long, but it still took a while. Anyways, enjoy !

Issue #2: Finally.

To everyone who is reading, welcome to the second issue of my newsletter! I am so very grateful that you’ve decided to be here, as a believer and a supporter at the very beginning.

The reason I call this the “second” issue is because I’ve been focusing on creating the best first issue since the last YEAR. This “second” issue is to give myself a breather and allow for mistakes to happen- as making one and finally starting is better than delaying something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

“One of the strangest thoughts that help me cheer up is that however shit my life looks at a moment, if one were to make a painting of it then, it would probably sell for millions.”

~Utkarsh Koul

It’s been a year of living on my own for the first time, and it’s mostly been good. Although my job takes a lot of the day and leaves me with hardly any of it at the end, I like the silence afterwards.

Obviously, there are also many occasions where these silences have been restricting; painful.

But I’m still here.

This is my room. No, it’s not usually so clean.

Once someone touched my jaw so softly I cried.

Once someone held my hand so lightly I wept-

- “Meditation” from My Grief, the Sun. By Sanna Wani

I have a few things in mind; things I want to do after I get back from office everyday . It’ll be a miracle if I’m able to do it all, and completely impossible to fit it all in what already hopes to be a clunky, chaotic newsletter. But, it’s mine. And I already love it like my own.

I can be such a softie sometimes.

August’s highlight definitely goes to a very close friend’s birthday that i was finally able to attend. It was fun watching their shocked face when I actually managed to reach their place(since we live pretty far apart , and our schedules are always clashing).

The view while coming back from the party was really nice.

“If there is a God, He’ll have to beg for my forgiveness.”

~found on the walls of a WW2 concentration camp

September was filled with a lot of travelling. I actually wanted to release this issue before October began, but no matter. My sister’s left for UK for her postgrad in September, and I won’t get to see her for a while. I miss her, but she’s not hearing that from me.

When our house was being renovated earlier this year :) .

“i am
afraid
that if i
open
myself i will not
stop pouring. (why do i fear
becoming a river. what mountain
gave me such shame.)”
― Jamie Oliveira

As I’m writing this, I feel scared .

“This isn’t good enough. This is not the way authors write their newsletters. I don’t know how to market this, I don’t want to show this to anyone that knows me.”

But I want to grow; to improve. And this is how I want to reach out to people, with words and music. And then walk away to find more of myself.

Maybe this allows me to be just that. Or maybe I turn into something even better than I think I can.

The Backstory 💙

Hello! Thanks for reading this! I’ve been wanting to start writing seriously for a while, and have had a lot of stops in doing that in this year. I’ve loved Medium for years, but I’ve been a little skeptical if this place is a good platform for an aspiring fiction writer, and whether it’ll even have a good audience for it.(I swear, I’m not bashing it. It’s just something I always thought is mostly used for informative/research articles, not stories.)

And yet, I can’t help but be impressed by it: the quality and wealth of knowledge , the help it’s given me in the genres that I’ve used it for , and the people I personally know praising it for the source of income it can become if one is regular and able to generate decent content on it.

So I decided to try it out with my first ever newsletter issue. I’m an unpublished author working on his first story, and I wanted to see if I can actually hold a person’s interest by my work in general. If you’re still reading this, then I probably can to some extent( self-five!), and there’s some hope for me.

As I start this journey of writing here and exploring everything this platform has to offer, I hope I only improve in the ways I reach out and in the content I reach out to you with.

Much Love!

Utkarsh.