Writing, me and an odd book review

I am quite chuffed up these days...

One of my longest projects as a ghostwriter and one that really taught me to sit down and hammer away at words every day is finally getting published!(for the record it took me 2 years to write around 900 pages)

And though I can't say anything more about it other than  the fact that it deals with the part of astrology we all find interesting...the one thing we identify ourselves as... the book also has a very different and controversial (for some traditionalists) take on it...

Well, it also has my name in the acknowledgements...so there that's the end of hints..

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Being me... I have been trying my hand at more kinds of writing. So have added financial copywriting to my list of 'write-things-I-can-do'. Yes, it is interesting...and let's see what we make of each other.

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Had pre ordered Terry Pratchett's Shepherd's Crown and just finished reading it. Tiffany Aching is my  2nd most loved protagonist of Sir Terry's books after Sam Vimes (and Granny Weatherwax  and Vetinari and ...)

Ok let's just say she is my 2nd most loved protagonist and leave it at that.

But and this is a big But...

I read The Truth by Terry Pratchett just before reading this. And though Sam Vimes is almost a passing reference in it and Granny Weatherwax is not there, but the Patrician and all the others made up for it.

For people who have never read Terry Pratchett the most misleading  thing you can ever say is that he writes fantasy. Long ago he learnt the art of writing fantasy in such a way that the wars between mythical looking creatures is just a backdrop to its 'intrinsic humanity'. I call it humanity because I just don't know what else to describe it as. Sir Terry shows the mirror to so many human frailties, foibles, prejudices, rank bull headedness, stupidity, love, generosity and everything I left out...
Its an education in humanity just to read it...

And as is inevitable some of them shine more than others for me.

The Truth shone far, far more than the Shepherd's Crown.

sample some-

“The public thinks big, sensible, measured thoughts while people run around doing silly things” 

“I have certainly noticed that groups of clever and intelligent people are capable of really stupid ideas.”

“But too much reading had taken its toll. William found that he now thought of prayer as a sophisticated way of pleading with thunderstorms.”

“There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. 
The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who's been pinching my beer?
And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass) or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman's eye. ”

"Ah," said Mr. Pin. "Right. You are concerned citizens." He knew all about concerned citizens. wherever they were, they all spoke the same language, where 'traditional values' meant 'hang someone.'"

"everything about the man could be prefaced by the word "badly," as in "-spoken," "-educated," and "-in need of a drink." 

Taste of Life

Today I realized how much I love gooseberries. I miss them too. They remind me of my childhood. 

You won't like them if you like sweet fruits. My children surely don’t….they even expect sweet oranges every time. The sour ones get a yucky face thrown at them. 

Tell me do you remember always having sweet oranges? I don’t … yet blame it on (my) bad parenting. My kids expect them to be sweet all the time. That’s the reason they don’t like gooseberries. Gooseberries are sweet some times but most times they are sour and slightly bitter with a sweet aftertaste. They taste like life.

Like life…. 

No one ever promised that life would be sweet and always to your taste but seems that’s what we end up teaching our kids now or maybe they learn it from watching us.

Kids who jump off buildings when they are shouted at in front of the whole class, kids who kill themselves if they fail an exam, kids who prefer death to the ignominy of being singled out for punishment. I remember my dad laughing about the caning he got as a child from his teachers, he looked back with little resentment and a lot of pride at proving the teachers wrong when he achieved degrees higher than them. 

Is it the fruits we feed our kids…sweet apples though out the year, sweeter grapes and sweet mangoes? Or does it go deeper than that? Do we tell them that it’s fine to fail? Do we tell them our failures with pride and show them what we learnt from them? Do we even allow them to fail?

Hug them, talk to them when they cry. Say it's ok to fail.Say you don't think any less of them because they failed; that tomorrow is another day and ...coz you and everyone before you failed too..many times.

Show them your hurts and wounds so that they learn that wounds heal, hurts seem to wane… with time. Everything goes with time. 

So that they don’t leave before time.