Seven Years as a Full-Time Writer, four of which I have spent on the road
On My Canvas turned seven in August. I couldn’t publish a post on its anniversary. As I’ve repeated in my newsletter Looking Inwards, a big project kept me busy. Soon that project will be out in the world and see the sun. Until then, I’m here to write about these seven years of full-time writing.
Along with the blog, I’ve freelanced, written poems, penned down stories, and so on. I’ve been on the road for four of those years, with all my things in the car. Yeah, my partner has been with me, too. I’m sure you have read about our itinerant journey in this massive post.
So how about the seven years? What has mattered the most? Or gone wrong? Would I go back and do it again? Do I repent something? Are blogging and writing working out? Am I able to get the message across to my readers? Would I rather be doing something else? Am I a successful blogger? Do I make enough money? How do I keep this lifestyle going: writing and traveling constantly and not having a home? Where is On My Canvas heading?
I’ll share everything but in seven succinct points,
1. For me, creation is the focal stream in which I pour all my learning, energy, and positivity. Everything I read, see, and receive is channeled towards creating. That’s my purpose, on a micro level. On a macro level, being a human is my purpose. I’m here, and I look at this sky and feel this wind in my own unique way. That’s enough meaning. I don’t know what I would have done if I wasn’t creating. Just reading and traveling and making money by some means? No. I want to share. Writing is the best way to do that, for me.
2. The world is such a wonderful, complicated, colorful, joyous, harassing, polluted, verdant, rich, and unbelievable place. I try to find its pulsating veins, what keeps it beating and thriving and rising. What does a walker say to a cyclist when she pushes past, how does a leaf tremble as it falls, and how does the earth begin when the sky ends. Everything I want to know. Traveling puts me in streets and situations where I wouldn’t have been if I was at home. My journeys enable me to see, listen, and laugh. My pen helps me record everything. Put together, my adventures and my writing are like shades of grass. My experiences when fresh are green. I think about them, let them ripen, and process them into narratives I publish. By then, all of them have turned copper and bronze, like the grass ready to be cut here in the Himalayas where I am now.
I’m able to get across the intent.
3. I wish I had more readers. Maybe I would have called myself successful then. Or, if my blog paid all my bills consistently, I would have considered On My Canvas successful. That’s the traditional way of thinking about things.
Am I not successful for going on? Am I not successful for being proud of what I write? Am I not honest?
I am proud, content, and truthful. As long as I am happy with what I create and write what I want to write, readers will come. On My Canvas will continue to be that source of inspiration and joy which anyone can dip into when they like. That’s the hope.
I usually run many projects in parallel. On My Canvas is not the only thing I do. Concomitantly I don’t publish on it as much as I want to and as much as I have to say. At least a hundred drafts are waiting for me to be polished and put online. But I can’t sit for a hundred days and push them all out. For sure I have done so in the past. For the recent project, too, I let go of everything else to focus on it. But I can’t do that right now for I have other work as well.
Life is not a linear incline. It is a tree. A tree grows through its branches, tiny leaves come, the trunk rises, more branches shoot out. Everything grows together. At some point, there are fruits everywhere. All my projects will shine. My writing will nurture along with all these buds and leaves. When we will look at this tree, we will feel it’s rising slowly. We won’t see fruit on one branch just because that one is getting more sun. All of them are connected to the ground through the root and are under the same sky. All I do is rooted through me. I have to nourish myself, and my work will fruit, in the season, at the appropriate time.
Money is important, to live, eat, commute, and pay for services. I freelance, and my blog creates money too. I also invest what I already have. Make money with money. All good.
4. The years have been hectic but also relaxing. I can’t use one single word for this complex period. Can we ever for any of our time? As many shades have colored the years as the sun throws at the sky. As many as are splattered on a paint tray of an artist. As many as are in the scarf hand-knitted by an old mountain woman.
I do try to define my evenings and days in terms of how much I could do, or rather how much I could not. That’s a very complicated way of analyzing time. The easier is to plan your day and do your best. The years have been, how they should have been, like all life, a bit less a bit more, a little happy a little sad, a pinch busy a pinch free, like a pot of khichri.
5. Writing while traveling has been hard. A college senior recently asked me on Linkedin. “Is this life of traveling and writing as cool as it sounds? Must have many tradeoffs.” I told him it’s cool for the one who wants to do it. If you are in it for show and to look cool, you will be doomed. I replied that it works out for me because I want these things.
I didn’t take enough time to tell my senior that this is not a life of traveling and writing. This is my life, regardless of how much I doubt my decisions, how many times I want to run back to a home, or how I wish I had a stove on Diwali to make mathri, the fried snack my partner loves. Beyond all cravings, difficulties, and inertia, I am here doing it. I’m here.
Just a couple of hours earlier, my partner and I were climbing up a stone-paved gulley in a small mountainous town of Uttarakhand. We had visited an old temple. As we trudged upwards, we were overwhelmed by the fragrance of food being fried. We thought it was mathri. Further up, a man was frying something in a wok. I climbed up a step to his shop and peeped into the wok. He was making pakoris. Glistening yellow batter-wrapped potatoes were sizzling.
“Do you have mathri?” I asked.
“No, only pakoris.” He smiled.
“How much?”
“Thirty rupees a plate.”
Wow! Looks delicious too. “Please give us one plate.”
The pakoris were the best I have had in a while. They were crisp and hot. I dipped them one by one quickly into the fresh mint and coriander spicy chutney and shoved them into my mouth.
“And he has made fresh chutney too.” Mouthful, I turned to my partner.
He nodded. “Unlike being a thick layer of batter and no potatoes, like most people make them, potatoes are thinly wrapped.”
I nodded. “It’s very tasty, like homemade,” I said to the shopkeeper.
“Really? Thank you.”
“No one gives chutney these days, you know. They give ketch up,” I told him. I grew up in a good time. A time when fresh hot snacks were always served with fragrant hand-pounded or mixer-grounded chutney made with fresh mint, coriander, raw mango, lemon, chilly, salt, ginger, garlic, etc. I lament about that chutney more than I complain about the rising prices of petrol or that even international flights now show no baggage fares.
“Yeah.” He was smiling profusely by now. “Or they give that green chutney.” He was talking about the bottled chili sauce popular with noodles in India.
“People take shortcuts these days.” I should have been born a hundred years ago.
He continued smiling. “It takes less time.”
“Yeah. I used to get samosa for two rupees which was so good and now it’s fifteen but not good.”
He nodded and knew exactly what I was talking about: the quality of things being compromised though prices are soaring.
After two plates of pakoris with two plates of chutney, we were back on the street. My eyes sparkling, I said to my partner, “How many rewards do we get from this life! There are trade-offs, yes. We can’t cook on this festival but what we receive is worth much more than the sacrifices.” He agreed. He knew it all along.
I am not standing with a weighing balance. This is our life. Our way of living is not the conventional, society-accepted way. One doesn’t naturally leave a home and shift into a car, staying in guesthouses every day. I might have chosen this lifestyle while I was lost admiring the nomadic travelers of the world. Over time, we have customized it enough to say how we operate is exactly how it should have been for us. Whatever life gives I take, and whatever it needs, it draws from me. I can’t have it easy or harder. This is it.
6. I am thinking about what kind of space I want to make On My Canvas. As it is now, more narratives, or more bullet lists on growth ideas? More travel tips or more stories? How frequently shall I write and publish? Should I post more on social media or keep going like this?
I haven’t been punctual with social media. I can’t be because I don’t like social media. Once I wrote a long post on how social platforms could be addictive. Today, I say I don’t have a natural tendency to share things online. I might be having the best crispy dosa in the cold mountains or the best rajma chawal I have ever had but I won’t go online and post it. Flowers on rocks, great books, bright markets, and wrinkled old faces, I see and read many every day. I won’t tweet about them. That’s neither work for me nor fun. Picking up the phone to post a photo or thought online for a virtual audience who might or might not be listening is just something blah, meh. I rather stay in the present moment and soak it all in. That’s the crazy me. Because while I try to put something on Twitter, a bird flies by, and I miss it. Or when I open the Instagram app to see how many likes I got, I lose track and find myself on a celebrity or ex-boyfriend page. A one-year-old can control herself better. Now I am burdened by the ex’s pregnancy and the shimmer of a celebrity’s dress who is drinking twelve-year-old Rothschild wine. Meanwhile another bird flutters by, and I miss it too.
This is a very blunt way of looking at things. I can always log in, do my thing, and leave. People love to read short-form writing, and I’m always told to keep posting on Instagram. Sadly, I can’t ever just get in and get out. So, I’ll accept my limitations and do the best I can. Post on Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin on and off, and more regularly on Twitter. My newsletter will always be the best way to get my ideas and new articles.
On My Canvas will grow along its current trajectory. I’ll be organic. What I think, feel, observe, and practice myself will go on the website. Nothing forced. More stories and more inspirations. Please expect a few posts every month going ahead.
7. The road runs on. It has its ups and downs. One must go on.
Right?
What do you keep walking for? Let me know in the comments.
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