Avishek Gupta's Blog
December 26, 2016
Giveaway Alert
Hello,
Want to have a chance to win a free copy of my upcoming title 15/1 Story Avenue?
Send me a personal message if interested.
The first person to contact me wins!
Want to have a chance to win a free copy of my upcoming title 15/1 Story Avenue?
Send me a personal message if interested.
The first person to contact me wins!
Decoding the Code - 15/1 Story Avenue
The title of my upcoming book is 15/1 Story Avenue. Why did I choose this name? What does it mean? What is the book all about? I want to answer all these questions through this blog post. Recently, I had kept a contest to find out the readers' interpretation of this name. I got a lot of interesting answers. Some of them were quite close to my own reasons for naming the book such. However, to understand the motive behind the name, it is important to understand a few facets of my life.
First, let me tell you a bit about my journey as a writer so far. My mother introduced me to the very best of world literature right from my childhood and I was a voracious reader. Also, I was born into a family of poets. Yes, my grandmother and father both are poets and I got a little of "writing gene" from them. So, I started writing at the age of seven. In those days, I mostly wrote poems and songs in my mother tongue Bengali. I delved into writing short stories, too, as I attained teenage. However, it was during my college days when I wrote my first love story in English, Weeds.
I completed my education, started working and wrote a couple more stories. Meanwhile, two important things happened in my life. My father published his book of Bengali poems. I had designed the cover of this book. It was released in the Kolkata Book Fair 2011 and got rave reviews. Secondly, we changed our address. We have to sell off the house where we used to live and started living in a rented apartment. This was the house where both me and my father was born and had lived all our lives. So, this change in address left a significant impact on my mind. Little did I know that I have to change addresses many more times in the coming years.
I was transferred to USA for two years by my office just a few days after my marriage. I traveled alone and stayed in Austin, Texas for a few months. This was the first time I was staying away from home. It was a life altering experience for me and helped me pen down a story about the different flavor of life I got in the USA. A few months later, my wife joined me and things were easier. We liked our home in Austin, but then, we moved on to a new home in New Jersey the next year, and liked this place even better. It was here, I experienced my first snowfall, made some good friends in the community, played tennis regularly in a local court. and traveled to a lot of lovely places.
We came back to Kolkata and became parents. Then we changed our address again. From the rented apartment we shifted to our own flat with my parents. In between, I have also stayed in UK alone for some time. So journeys and addresses are important to me. Each of the addresses I have lived in, have had some significant incident to add to the book of my life, experiences which have left a lasting impression on my mind.
After coming back from the USA, and after changing my job, I decided publishing my short stories as a collection. I had also written a novel but decided to increase my reader base first before bringing it out. I published my first Kindle e-book That Stupid Bug called Love and other Stories on April, 2016. The book was well liked, but many of my friends and relatives could not manage to read it since it was in electronic format. So, I decided to publish my own paperback.
I happened to meet Tushti on Facebook through my friend author Sourabh Mukherjee da. Her cheerful ways instantly made me her fan. Then I met Sandeep through Tushti and learnt about their venture Author Paradise. After interacting with Sandeep, the idea of publishing my own short story collection seemed feasible to me. I learnt a lot about book marketing from Sandeep and Tushti and I am learning new stuff even today!
I sent them the proposal for my book. Sandeep called me a few days later and said he likes my proposal! This was the first time a publisher had called me, and I was ecstatic. Sandeep gave me some very valuable editorial suggestions. I had thought of publishing a dozen stories but then he insisted I write more. The result was three more stories close to my heart. I made my friends Shiladitya, Prasenjit, and Soumava read the manuscript and took there valuable suggestions. I roped in editor Mrinaal Prem who did a handsome job to edit my stories.
Now that my 15 stories were ready to be printed, I wondered how to name my book. Well, it does not belong to a particular genre. It is a collection of love stories, thrillers, murder mysteries, travelogues, and tales about everyday lives. So, what to call this mixed salad of varying tastes?
I fiddled with a number of options and then decided that while the stories are diverse in genre, they are bound together by one common theme - they symbolize my journey through life, and the experiences I have gathered from various places - the lives I had seen in the journeys I made, and the lessons I had picked up while changing one address to another.
Yes, I decided my book title will reflect this common thread, an address, a home I aspire to be in, a destination of stories, a house of stories - a house where different lives live and each corner has a unique story to tell.
My book cover reflects these ideas. It is brilliantly designed by Ajitabha Bose, who shared my vision and gave me exactly what I wanted. I am very happy with the end result.
Somewhere in my dreams, there is an avenue, with stories hidden in each corner. I call it Story Avenue. And there is a particular house in this avenue which has plenty of stories to offer - it's number 15/1. It's a wordplay in reality as you can understand from my book blurb. 15/1 signifies 15 stories by one author, 15 tales from a single pen.
This is the house where my stories live, the house where the storyteller stays, or maybe the house where the characters come to life. The reader can interpret it in their own way.
So yes, you can think of my book as a house of stories. As you turn the cover, you are actually opening the main door to enter this house. Then, as you go through the stories, you are actually moving from one room to another, from one corner to another corner, taking the flight of staircases from the ground floor up to the terrace, and back again.
And when you leave this house, you will leave behind a part of your soul inside it, and carry some of the house inside your heart.
This January, gear up to enter 15/1 Story Avenue, the house of stories, and travel through 15 unique tales. See you there!
First, let me tell you a bit about my journey as a writer so far. My mother introduced me to the very best of world literature right from my childhood and I was a voracious reader. Also, I was born into a family of poets. Yes, my grandmother and father both are poets and I got a little of "writing gene" from them. So, I started writing at the age of seven. In those days, I mostly wrote poems and songs in my mother tongue Bengali. I delved into writing short stories, too, as I attained teenage. However, it was during my college days when I wrote my first love story in English, Weeds.
I completed my education, started working and wrote a couple more stories. Meanwhile, two important things happened in my life. My father published his book of Bengali poems. I had designed the cover of this book. It was released in the Kolkata Book Fair 2011 and got rave reviews. Secondly, we changed our address. We have to sell off the house where we used to live and started living in a rented apartment. This was the house where both me and my father was born and had lived all our lives. So, this change in address left a significant impact on my mind. Little did I know that I have to change addresses many more times in the coming years.
I was transferred to USA for two years by my office just a few days after my marriage. I traveled alone and stayed in Austin, Texas for a few months. This was the first time I was staying away from home. It was a life altering experience for me and helped me pen down a story about the different flavor of life I got in the USA. A few months later, my wife joined me and things were easier. We liked our home in Austin, but then, we moved on to a new home in New Jersey the next year, and liked this place even better. It was here, I experienced my first snowfall, made some good friends in the community, played tennis regularly in a local court. and traveled to a lot of lovely places.
We came back to Kolkata and became parents. Then we changed our address again. From the rented apartment we shifted to our own flat with my parents. In between, I have also stayed in UK alone for some time. So journeys and addresses are important to me. Each of the addresses I have lived in, have had some significant incident to add to the book of my life, experiences which have left a lasting impression on my mind.
After coming back from the USA, and after changing my job, I decided publishing my short stories as a collection. I had also written a novel but decided to increase my reader base first before bringing it out. I published my first Kindle e-book That Stupid Bug called Love and other Stories on April, 2016. The book was well liked, but many of my friends and relatives could not manage to read it since it was in electronic format. So, I decided to publish my own paperback.
I happened to meet Tushti on Facebook through my friend author Sourabh Mukherjee da. Her cheerful ways instantly made me her fan. Then I met Sandeep through Tushti and learnt about their venture Author Paradise. After interacting with Sandeep, the idea of publishing my own short story collection seemed feasible to me. I learnt a lot about book marketing from Sandeep and Tushti and I am learning new stuff even today!
I sent them the proposal for my book. Sandeep called me a few days later and said he likes my proposal! This was the first time a publisher had called me, and I was ecstatic. Sandeep gave me some very valuable editorial suggestions. I had thought of publishing a dozen stories but then he insisted I write more. The result was three more stories close to my heart. I made my friends Shiladitya, Prasenjit, and Soumava read the manuscript and took there valuable suggestions. I roped in editor Mrinaal Prem who did a handsome job to edit my stories.
Now that my 15 stories were ready to be printed, I wondered how to name my book. Well, it does not belong to a particular genre. It is a collection of love stories, thrillers, murder mysteries, travelogues, and tales about everyday lives. So, what to call this mixed salad of varying tastes?
I fiddled with a number of options and then decided that while the stories are diverse in genre, they are bound together by one common theme - they symbolize my journey through life, and the experiences I have gathered from various places - the lives I had seen in the journeys I made, and the lessons I had picked up while changing one address to another.
Yes, I decided my book title will reflect this common thread, an address, a home I aspire to be in, a destination of stories, a house of stories - a house where different lives live and each corner has a unique story to tell.
My book cover reflects these ideas. It is brilliantly designed by Ajitabha Bose, who shared my vision and gave me exactly what I wanted. I am very happy with the end result.
Somewhere in my dreams, there is an avenue, with stories hidden in each corner. I call it Story Avenue. And there is a particular house in this avenue which has plenty of stories to offer - it's number 15/1. It's a wordplay in reality as you can understand from my book blurb. 15/1 signifies 15 stories by one author, 15 tales from a single pen.
This is the house where my stories live, the house where the storyteller stays, or maybe the house where the characters come to life. The reader can interpret it in their own way.
So yes, you can think of my book as a house of stories. As you turn the cover, you are actually opening the main door to enter this house. Then, as you go through the stories, you are actually moving from one room to another, from one corner to another corner, taking the flight of staircases from the ground floor up to the terrace, and back again.
And when you leave this house, you will leave behind a part of your soul inside it, and carry some of the house inside your heart.
This January, gear up to enter 15/1 Story Avenue, the house of stories, and travel through 15 unique tales. See you there!
December 10, 2016
15/3/9 Story Avenue
My new book 15/1 Story Avenue will be published by Author Paradise publishers. Pre-order links will be available on Amazon soon. Watch this space for more updates on the book.
Each address has a unique story to tell. I have lived across quite a few homes and changed addresses multiple times. While I have left a part of my soul in each of these addresses, I have picked up stories and memories as I trudged along the journey of life.
A few such stories will be included in my upcoming book. Eager to share with you all!
Each address has a unique story to tell. I have lived across quite a few homes and changed addresses multiple times. While I have left a part of my soul in each of these addresses, I have picked up stories and memories as I trudged along the journey of life.
A few such stories will be included in my upcoming book. Eager to share with you all!
April 19, 2016
My First Book
Hi all,
My short story collection "That Stupid Bug called Love and other stories" has been published in Amazon. It's available as a Kindle e-book.
Here are the links to the book:
http://www.amazon.in/That-Stupid-Bug-...
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01DU412QI?r...
Please read and spread the word. Hope you like it!
My short story collection "That Stupid Bug called Love and other stories" has been published in Amazon. It's available as a Kindle e-book.
Here are the links to the book:
http://www.amazon.in/That-Stupid-Bug-...
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01DU412QI?r...
Please read and spread the word. Hope you like it!
