A few weeks ago, I was on Greatbong’s podcast, talking about Indian Matchmaking. One thing I realized was I hadn’t made it clear why I was on that show. Priyanka, who was the other guest on that podcast, was on there as a professional matchmaker. Several people who listened to that podcast were wondering what qualified me to be on there sounding off.
I had spent most of my twenties extensively dating, off of both the traditional sites like Shaadi.com, as well as all the swiping apps. I find a lot more people doing so now, both men and women…
Karthik refreshed Tinder for the tenth time in fifteen minutes. The last message from Emily was still ‘On my way, see you soon!’, at 5:30. It was 5:55 now. She wasn’t due until six, but he’d been too anxious to stay at his desk after that text. He’d bounded out at 5:33. The Flying Pig was right downstairs from his office.
As he fidgeted in his booth, he caught a glimpse of his reflection on the shiny metal vase. Oh, crap. He hadn’t even looked in the mirror. He made a beeline for the restroom.
He combed his hair, and…
I came across the Twenty Best Essays On Writing. As I went over them one by one, I found some practical advice, but what stood out to me was the self-importance, the mutual admiration, the feeling of being so unique and interesting. Usually you read each of these essays in isolation, and it doesn’t really hit you that hard, but seeing twenty of them in a row makes certain patterns clear.
Why do we never come across essays like “Why Do I Write Code In Java” or “Why I Like Selling Cars”? How come my mother has gone so long…
Bossypants — The Beginning
It was quite a flutter when I came across 30 Rock in 2009. Shows with female professional leads set in NYC weren’t new to me; I loved and adored Just Shoot Me! and Caroline In The City. But this show was different. Liz Lemon was somehow so much more relatable, and very real. Like about a few thousand others, I too was instantly a fan of Tina Fey.
I bootlegged her memoir Bossypants when it came out in 2011, and read it cover to cover late at night instead of finishing my Introduction to Graphical Models homework. There was something…
My writing group, TL;DR Press always has interesting discussions happening on Slack. One of the recurring topics is about the disappearing, diminishing market for fiction, especially short fiction.
Every time a small press or a magazine closes, we wonder if fiction as we know it is doomed in the future. We know lesser and lesser people who buy magazines, and everyone likes to talk about how the new generation is buying books less.
It’s no longer the world of Gen Xers who just walked in to a magazine’s office and walked out with a well-paying job with benefits. Diminishing revenue…
Why I Care About Long Hours
With the New Year, I’ve been wondering about how to use my time better, as is everyone else. I want to write my novels faster, and I want to be better at my work. Time management has never really figured in my top 10 skills. Or even my top 50.
With NaNoWriMo, I realized it’s all about focus and hours. Focus matters, but hours do too. If I spend more time on something, I obtain better outcomes. …
Origin Story
I have always wanted to be a writer. I’ve always written stories, starting from stories where my first-grade teacher died multiple horrible deaths. But somewhere down the line, my fiction just didn’t work, though everyone who read it said they liked how I wrote.
Sometime in 2014, I had a burst of inspiration, and wrote a 5000-word long short story. Somehow, finishing that made me feel confident enough to call myself a writer. I remember sharing it with my husband, who I had just started dating, and he thought I was so cool.
Well, after we married in 2017, I…
The Remarkable Premise
I came across this AMA yesterday morning on Reddit, and, it was a ‘remarkable’ premise, as Cal Newport calls it — It’s a premise a lot of people with remark on. And we did. Oh we did. In fact, I am remarking to you about it right now.
The AMA is from Marissa Orr, who worked in marketing at Google for 13 years, quit to join Facebook, where she got fired because her (female) manager had bad beef with her, because she was seen as cosying up to Sheryl Sandberg, and her manager hated that.
And then she wrote a…
The Show
Modern Love is an Amazon Prime show now, and I’m the target audience, I suppose, as an overeducated, overthinking millennial woman. I couldn’t make it past four episodes, and that, I withstood only because I wanted to make it all the way through to the Tina Fey episode.
As a writer, it’s simply amazing how it has worked. It started off as a crowdsourced New York Times column. Then they made it into a podcast with celebrities reading out the columns, and a ‘where are they now’ interview tacked on about the writers of the piece. And now, it’s a…
I found this paper titled When To Sell Your Idea — Theory And Evidence From The Movie Industry, and I simply had to read it. You can too [PDF link].
I’m always interested in learning more about the ideas economy and pathways to success in open marketplaces, and I’m curious about how research is actually done on topics like this, so it was a pretty interesting read. It was an analysis of spec script and pitch sales in Hollywood, so who isn’t interested in learning how it works :)
TL;DR
- Most specs get written either by rookie writers with no writing…
Lila Krishna
Writer of short stories. Programmer. Desi.
