My first book has come out. Today I want to talk about how I got the idea of writing a travel memoir while I was traveling with my partner in our car with all our stuff in it (now four years and counting).
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.
36 Months as an Itinerant Writer: What It Means to Live On The Go Table of Content [TOC] Introduction January 5′ 2024 Bangalore Here I’m in a hotel in Bangalore, writing this narrative and wondering why I feel so cold and why am I so uninterested and unenthusiastic about everything. I have stayed in hotel rooms …
Six Years of Running My Personal Growth and Travel Blog On My Canvas The past six years have been important to me in many ways. In them, I not only wrote on this blog and brought it to where it is today: an infinite source of inspiration, hope, and ideas for me and, hopefully, a …
5 Years of My Personal Growth and Travel Blog On My Canvas Thank you for coming along on this journey with me and supporting me always. If I have learned one thing in these five years, it is that the joy of creating should be enough. When we work hard and persist, we arrive at …
Letters From Van Gogh The celebrated painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) regularly wrote to his brother Theo, his ardent supporter and friend. Out of the hundreds of letters by Vincent van Gogh, the Vincent van Gogh organization has put about hundred on their website. The book Ever Yours: The Essential Letters contains a broad selection of …
Best Articles Published During On My Canvas’s Fourth Year (August 2020 — August 2021) My blog On My Canvas just turned four. Congratulations to me and to all you brilliant readers who give me a reason to write every day. Read the above link to know about the indefinite travel journey I’m on, another big news, …
Phew!
It has been four years since I published the first article on On My Canvas. From then on, these four years have been a non-stop roller-coaster ride. From the first year of impenetrable determination but absolute ignorance to helping out other bloggers from my two years of blogging journey, and the third year of accomplishments, I’ve come a long way.
The journey started with writing. But every artist needs an audience. I want to thank you all — my beloved readers — who have helped me make the blog the meaningful resource it is. Though I know On My Canvas has to reach a lot more people, I really appreciate the love and support I’ve received so far. At least, I have not been hit by spoiled tomatoes or stinky eggs.
So thank you!
This piece is different from usual travel guides. I wrote this narrative while exploring Mashobra, Shimla. In the write-up, I speak freely about my writing journey. You are taken to the nooks and corners of an itinerant writer’s life who manages her work on the go.
Hope you enjoy the reality.
Oh, I have mentioned all the things I did in Mashobra throughout the piece, and you can find a list of them at the end too. Or go to the places to visit in Mashobra Himachal Pradesh now.
Virginia Woolf was once asked to speak about women and fiction.
Woolf wandered the streets of London, sat by the riverside, pored over shelves full of books in the British Museum, went to luncheons, and considered the then state of literature. While working in a constricted space in that London where women weren’t even allowed to walk on turf paths in colleges (only men and students could), Virginia created a masterpiece on why there were limited women writers and even more limited writings by them.
Woolf delivered the lectures in October 1928 at the women’s colleges of Cambridge University. Published in September 1929, A Room of One’s Own is an essay based on those lectures.
Woolf went back to the works of Proust, Shakespeare, Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, Aphra Behn, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Kipling, Keats, and many more known and unknown writers to understand the truth. She read fiction written by women and studied her contemporaries’ books. She contemplated why the writing of men scorned women and if women were writing good fiction.
In the essays, Virginia emphasized — while showing her detailed thought process — “that a woman needs money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
In addition to being a seminal work on feminism, A Room of One’s Own is an infinite pool of wisdom on writing and life. In the essay, Virginia Woolf argued passionately and statistically about how cultural, spiritual, and financial restrictions may limit our creative freedom.
Given the essay has so much to read into, I will only delve into the lessons on life and writing that Woolf was so benevolent in sharing with us.
Out of the 48 or so books I read in 2020, 25 percent—that’s only 12 books—were non-fiction. The rest were fiction books and children’s tales.
I started reading non-fiction in 2017 when I started this blog On My Canvas. I always read stories and novels, but nonfiction wasn’t a big thing around me. Not that reading fiction was a trend in my social circle either. I can count the selected few readers amongst my friends, batch mates, and colleagues at my fingertips.
There was one guy in college who loved Shakespeare and read philosophy. There is a poetry lover and creator who is still a great friend. Some of the elites from Vidya Mandir and other high-class Delhi schools could talk about Mark Twain and J.R.R Tolkien but only seldom did I see them with a book. Or maybe I wasn’t noticing books at that time myself.