I turned into a Christian Missionary, changed people’s cultures
Thank you, AI. You helped me in my mission!
Okay, don’t get scared! I am talking about a few characters in my novel.
My fiction writing journey started five decades ago in my mother tongue, Tamil. I wrote mostly short stories, and they got published in Tamil weekly magazines.
After forty years, I wrote my second novelette in Tamil. I published it in my first paperback as part of a collection of all my short stories and novelettes. I was particularly attached to a story titled ‘Nee Vendum Athu Vendame’ — “I want you, but not ‘that’.”
It had some real-life incidents involving people I knew, a few fictional characters, and of course lots of imagination added to make it a wholesome story.
The outline of the story is this: A Hindu girl living in Chennai (India) marries a Bangalore boy — a typical arranged marriage of the 1980s. She marries him willingly, though the man is essentially her parents’ choice. But on the wedding night, she avoids physical intimacy. Not that night alone, but on subsequent nights too.
Her caring husband suspects some psychological complication in her. He takes her to a lady psychiatrist. Upon counseling, the psychiatrist locates a possible cause — childhood physical abuse. She thinks it may indeed be the cause of the woman’s reluctance to engage in physical intimacy.
But the woman is not convinced. She has other reasons. She had a divine vision in her childhood. She believes she has to ‘keep her physical purity’, and that was the message from her beloved Lord Rama.
Her faith has been strengthened by what she read in the biography of a famous saintly and divine couple of Bengal — Ramakrishna and Saradadevi. What happens to her marital life in the end forms the crux of the story.
As I said earlier, I felt this story was one of my best writings. As a bilingual author, I wanted to bring out the story in English too. But I had the urge to make it appeal to a global audience, and hence I did not want to do a simple translation from Tamil to English.
I was pondering — what if I made the story happen in some small city in the USA? How about making the characters Christians with deep faith and a strong affinity to traditional values? What if I made all the re-adjustments needed to align the story with Christian ethos?
So I decided to make use of ChatGPT to help me in this transition. What followed was an interesting and long conversation with the AI. I spelt out in detail what I needed. ChatGPT started giving me suggestions — probable cities in the USA, rural places where incidents in the heroine’s childhood might take place, character names, and cultural aspects relatable to Christians.
We also located some Christian saints of the bygone era who could be quoted as inspiration for the heroine’s wish to lead a family life without indulging in conjugal pleasures. There was a lot of brainstorming, arguments, changes, and refinements that took place with ChatGPT.
We even went to the extent of locating specific streets, churches, and restaurants that actually exist in the chosen cities to ensure genuine storytelling.
ChatGPT also helped me fine-tune my translation so that an authentic American style in writing and conversations was reflected in the narration.
It was indeed a very interesting and productive exercise that kept me hooked to the project for about 4–5 days. Within a week, the whole English novelette — When Love Waits — was ready.
It gave me a lot of satisfaction when I read the final output. I published it both in ebook format and paperback. As I preferred to avoid the overcrowded Amazon marketplace and concentrate on other book distribution channels, including ebook lending libraries, I published the book through Draft2Digital.com (popularly called D2D).
Thanks to D2D’s extremely user-friendly and cost-free publishing interface, my book is now available globally through Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Everand, Tolino, OverDrive, CloudLibrary, Hoopla, Vivlio, BorrowBox, Smashwords, Gardners, Bookshop.org, and Fable.
One of the greatest advantages of D2D is their distribution to ebook lending libraries. It was indeed a great surprise for me that within a month of publishing it, an ebook library subscriber downloaded my book and read it somewhere in the USA.
Ah! Real global reach without spending a cent!
Link to my ebook in Apple Books:
https://books.apple.com/us/book/when-love-waits-a-novel-of-faith-psychology/id6759310914
