This one was a fun piece to do. I was asked to guest post at Book Stacks about books, writing and life. Here’s a short excerpt of that posting with link to full text:
I am a fool, a heartbroken lover, a goddess of inner beauty and outer glow. I am balanced, I am tipsy. I am and then I am not.
On paper and in my mind’s eye, I am this and much more.
I am inside the plot. It thickens and thins out. It pulsates, it throbs. It weakens, it strengthens.
My fingers have a life of their own as they type. I am amazed at what appears on the screen in front of me. I am giddy with the power that words give me.
I seek refuge in the magic of the written word. I type with two fingers because I never learned to type. For the initial twenty-three years of my life in Karachi, computers and typewriters had no presence. I can still type with a certain speed, my gaze fixed not on the screen but on the keyboard. In the early part of my writing career, I went through draft after draft written in long hand. When inspiration hit, I hid in a corner and wrote furiously. I was fourteen then.