Monthly Archives: September 2007

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Writers, write! Or something like that.

I am a writer. Agreed. But I want something more – I want publication – is that wrong? Given, I want it eventually, on my own terms and when I believe my work and I are ready for the commitment. Of course, writing in itself is a commitment.

But that’s not the point. Of course.

To this end, I’ve tried to do my research. There are options here, but not many – there’s your traditional Oxford University Press, who until recently had stopped their liaison with local authors – and then there’s Al-Hamra, which also runs it’s own literary journal but circulation and printing is just alright. I’ve bought a few books Al-Hamra’s reprinted and they’re passable – the grammar freak in me shudders and dies every time. But that’s beside the point.

So what else is there? The publication industry in itself is a relatively impossible one to break into in any country, but in Pakistan it seems a conglomerate of red tape. That Pakistani authors are published by non-locally affiliated publishing houses (Fabier, Bloomsbury, Penguin India etc) says they are publishable. So why doesn’t anyone pick them up locally? That, my friends, is the world’s biggest mystery.

We’ve got some very talented writers who aren’t branded or even publicized under the local banner. We do have playwrights associated with well known theater houses who write about socially tabooed subjects, but that’s not the same thing. There’s nothing in the mainstream, and it’s not for the lack of talent.

It’s extremely frustrating.

Why should local artists look outside the borders of their country to their neighbors, or cross the Atlantic in search for better opportunities? Why can’t there be a market for writers within our own? So yeah, DesiWritersLounge.net might seem a little ambitious in its goal for creating literary awareness and encouraging literary voices to be heard. It’s a slow process, absolutely but it needs to be done.

There’s been another update – our main section forums split into your traditional poetry, prose and non-fiction – have now branched into more specific sections. Non-fiction was more like creative rambling – well-written to be sure – but not groundbreaking or anything. So we’ve renamed one of our e-zine sections to The Rambler and taken the existing section The Abstract Thinker and given it a complete face lift, encouraging writers to write political rhetoric, creative commentaries or any other journalistic venture, where thinking outside the box and writing to set the world on fire (to spark a “hmm…s/he’s got a point”) are the definition. I’m hopeful. Our members seem to have responded well to the playwriting ordeal.

So there is a market for local writers – sure, it’s a small publication and we’re picky with who we choose to let in – but we’re a committed band of people. And chances are, our policies although in core values remain the same; will shift to incorporate a set of differently evolving, and opinionated set of writers. We want quality. That’s all we’re promoting.

Take a look, and if you like what you see then hey! Join.

You’ve got nothing to lose.

later.

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Because we might produce the next screenwriter

I’m waiting to hear from the HR department of my sister’s company asking me for some employee details, and I find myself here again.

A few days ago, I decided to add two new forums to our existing standard (poetry, prose, abstract non-fiction) – scripts. There was a bit of on site discussion on how well it would do, or whether or not we even needed the addition. The points raised were valid, primarily copyright issues. But here, I should mention that the pieces considered for the e-zine can always be vetoed by the author if he/she doesn’t want them put up and made public. The forums are currently members-only.

Because the community is Pakistan based, and copyright laws are practically non-existent here unless you have a plethora of contacts and the money to back you up, we could risk losing the creative material we so boldly put up. But since the e-zine’s already out there, there’s nothing we can really do. Besides, I’ve known former classmates rewriting O-level (high school) English assignments from young people’s magazines like Jang Group’s Us, so there goes the morality thing. However, thanks to a member’s research, our work is now licensed under Creative Commons – it can be reused as long as the original author is credited, or the link is pointed back towards DesiWritersLounge.net, it’s not put to commercial use and no derivative work from the original source is published. I am however, looking into creating a copyright for the site and all its contents in the US since that’s where our server’s based.

So once we’ve cleared the copyrights issue for the scripts, we’ve got another problem or so it seemed: because the jargon is entirely different from traditional prose, there will be added things to consider, so what if readers can’t move past that or don’t understand something or find it too distracting? My answer to that is: choice. They can choose to enter that forum, knowing that a screenwriter’s job is different from an ordinary writer’s and move past that or simply click on something else. Nobody’s force feeding them anything, here.

Those issues are now effectively out of the way. The next thing that hounds me is quality. Will this arena suffer as well? Will we be plagued by younger writers? We need an older set of people writing on the community – what we’ve got now are two very clearly defined age groups. The 15-20ers who all write in a particular way and the 21-35ers who have an entirely different take on things. Members from both sets are active, although I’m sad to say some of the more talented younger members from the Orkut community don’t seem to have made the transition with us. This can only be a failing on our part, so ideas and suggestions to improve would be very helpful.

Lastly, because I want the web version to be the first step to creating literary awareness in Pakistan (many of the South Asian countries are far ahead of us in this regard), I am very interested in taking this offline and into the real world as a print publication. However, knowing that that would take a lot of time, planning and smart marketing, I’m willing to let this be the beginning. To create the willingness to be published in our off-line magazine, whenever that comes to fruition, we need to have a serious literary online presence. People need to know that we take our work and what we publish very seriously, and in that respect I feel the polls are a hindrance, something that will inevitably bog us down rather than push us forward. They almost seem painfully amateurish.

To explain the polling system, let me expound: there are two separate forums at this point. One catering for writers who want feedback but held back, who don’t want the brutality the desi writers have become almost known for. The other forum holds nothing back – ‘your balls for breakfast’ to quote the forum description – also known as the e-zine forum, so anything posted in this automatically becomes a potential consideration for the quarter’s e-zine. Polls are set up on every e-zine bound piece and select pieces from the regular forum, where members are encouraged to vote on their favorites. Deadlocked pieces – ie an equal number of votes for and against the piece – are set aside and judged by an independent jury of moderators. Since last quarter, I allowed pieces sent in by a few votes in, we now have a required minimum of votes before the piece can be voted in. Less than that, and it doesn’t qualify which I think, is only fair.

So yeah, the process was definitely more defined and organized this time around which I want to perfect when we bring out our next issue in December.

What I’m really looking for of course, are serious writers who share our goals and are willing to take the criticism we give and give theirs in return on other pieces. We thrive on community participation. Think of it as a daily writer’s workshop, 24/7, 365 days a year and a very thankless job.

That we’re now on 153 members has been solely on word of mouth although out of that number, less than 10% post which is the heartbreaking reality. So when I say “serious writers”, I’m referring to writers who actually post, who make our hard work mean something.

God! This is an impossible responsibility, but we’re still rallying forth, can’t give up yet can we?

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Policies, Reborn

Ahh…it’s nice to see the site’s header and color schemes here – it gives this place a touch of familiarity – it seems a little strange that I’m writing here instead of on the forums.

I mentioned the editorial policy yesterday, which I’m going to expound upon now. When we first brought out our e-zine in March 2007, there were some problems – formatting irregularities, how pieces were sent in, whether or not they were revised, and the entire brunt of the work aside from managing the site and the people within, seemed to fall on my shoulders. So going into the second issue, I knew something needed to be done about it.

Now, we have a little panel of people who effectively moderate the site and who’ve been there from its inception, so naturally the “policy” itself needed to be discussed in conjunction with them. End result being: editors (moderators) would work with the approved writers themselves to produce an edited version of what was up on the forums, which would only make it into the e-zine if it had been given the seal of approval by its assigned editor. All documents would then be sent to the assigned editor who would then forward them to me. Neat, huh? They would of course, need to stick to a preassigned format.

I must confess however, that although the process in itself is organized and an accomplishment, it doesn’t take away from the disappointment I felt when I reviewed the edited work. Somehow I thought my editors would come up with something better. Most especially the prose pieces. The poems assigned were truly something – especially those I thought were lost forever – reborn. It was a nice turnaround.

Eventually I would like, although my moderators disagree on this, to turn this into a more professionally run amateur literary journal, which would include editors more suited for the task. People who understand that with each new issue, the bar is being raised higher. Quality was better this time around, but still not up to the bar of some of our pieces. I must confess: at this point, the original members are still miles higher than the newer posters, although improvement is a two-way street.

It can get frustrating sometimes – knowing there’s so much potential out there – and yet, still not moving forward.

Somewhere down the line, I’d like to actually open up a physical Writer’s Lounge with impromptu and planned readings, book signings, workshops and general literary awareness in the capital. Something of a budding theatrical society seems on its way to being canonized. It just seems like we’re waking up, and it’s a slow process of reawakening, like a snake shedding it’s skin.

Now the problem is: do I have the patience to sit through the transformation?

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Desi Writing Forums?

I remember when the community first started – it found its home on an online networking community – more popularly called a “social network” – Google’s Orkut. It began a little slowly but then quickly grew to a modest size, although a very small faction of its 600+ members actually posted. I never understood the reason behind joining a community and not letting your voice be heard. It’s a problem we’re facing on the site now, and it becomes irritatingly acute when the moderators of the site are involved in the intensities of their own lives.

Although we’ve since moved off of Google’s servers and onto our own, establishing a dream we’d planned out for two years before it formalized and took concrete shape, thanks to yours truly. Yes, I am going to toot my own horn here, and frankly, I don’t see why I shouldn’t. We would still have been on Orkut because the other moderators, bless them, are brilliant writers but horrible implementers.

And that brings me to the site. A little marketing rumble, if you please. We’ve got a quarterly e-zine with a first of its kind polling system to determine which pieces should make it (remember that strange little thing called: democracy?), and we’ve got the forum where all of it “goes down”.

But, and here’s the catch, there don’t seem to be a lot of people aware of it. I mean, we’ve got a burgeoning mass of people keen to join the now, moderated Orkut group, but relatively fewer people flocking to its very prevalent successor. That community, for all purposes, is dead. Its forums are lifeless and people who do post aren’t, pardon the chauvinism, writers from any stretch of the imagination. And we like our writers – we have a system of approving requests based on a valid reason for joining – are you a serious writer? Looking for some serious criticism? Because you’re going to get it, and if you think you can handle it, that’s who we’re looking for.

We’re trying, in our own way, to encourage literary and creative thought in the desi population – a fast fading thought, it seems – but I rebel! There are people out there, who like us, are looking for an appropriate forum to voice their thoughts. And I’m here to tell you: there is hope.

And there is a lack of desi writing forums out there – I know, I checked – I searched intensely and found a lot of “desi forums” but nothing catering to readers and writers. Sure, there’s desilit.org and desiwriters.com which, by the way, was formed by a member of ours, but lacks our official seal of approval. Hey! The man stole our domain name, I think we have a right to be picky here!

So, we’re here for any interested. The blog’s here, the website’s here, the forums are there, the e-zine’s up and running with a newly created editorial policy but more on that tomorrow.

Lovely! I’ve got something to talk about tomorrow.

later.