Stuff I Do (Supporting Dementia Care, Writing fiction and non-fiction, etc.)

Using my procrastination mood to create a book trailer video

July beginning. There were heaps of things I should have been doing, but they were all large projects, and I just couldn’t get the energy to plan and get started on them, so I kept nibbling at smaller to-dos. But though I did nibble a few millimetres off my to-do list that spans several pages, I felt dissatisfied. What I wanted was to do something that I found fun, that made me feel productive(even if I wasn’t being productive in a productive way, if you know what I mean). I wanted to make something.

So, though creating this video was nowhere in my active and overflowing to-do list, and merely a small item at the bottom of my huge wishlist, I spent a few days creating it:

(you can see the video directly on youtube, too, at: this link.

Ah well, the sketches were fun to make, and I did learn some stuff about Powerpoint transitions, though I can’t think of anyplace else where I will use that knowledge 🙂

And perhaps this post is another example of productive procrastination 🙂

Editing to add: The book, Aligning Ferret: How an Organization Meets Extraordinary Challenges, (for which I created the book trailer above) is available as a Kindle eBook at Amazon.com and also at Amazon.in.

Quick announcement for new ebooks I have published

I was updating the site to add details about an ebook I published a few days ago when and realized I had not made any blog entries even about my earlier ebook 🙂

I’ll probably do a detailed entry on related stuff later, but here’s the basic data: In the last few months, I’ve published two Kindle ebooks on Amazon as part of my professional work. Both have been co-authored with Rajesh Naik.

My latest book is Quiz Book on CMMI^® – SVC (v1.3) (Authors Rajesh Naik and Swapna Kishore). It is a Kindle eBook with 3 quizzes on CMMI^® – SVC (v1.3), each with 35 questions, and suitable for self-assessment by process/ QA professionals and CMMI specialists and is available at Amazon.com and Amazon.in. This book is part of a set of products created for CMMI^® – SVC (v1.3). Information on these products can be seen here.

Image forAligning Ferret: How an Organization Meets Extraordinary Challenges

My other ebook, my personal favourite, is a business novel, Aligning Ferret: How an Organization Meets Extraordinary Challenges, which centers around concepts of strategy, alignment, and performance management. The story uses a crisis in a fictional organization to explore concepts of strategy and performance management systems for organization-wide alignment. This was first published as a paperback, and is now available as a Kindle eBook at Amazon.com (and on Amazon.in). More information on the book, such as concepts covered and suggested resources, can be seen here.

^®: CMMI is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by Carnegie Mellon University.

Monkeys and writing speculative fiction for persons outside India

I’ve not lived outside India and so I usually base any fiction I write in India (unless I am placing it on some fantasy world or a planet where I am as experienced as the reader). One tricky part of writing fiction based in India for readers outside India is to describe the surroundings here correctly without launching off into elaborate and stilted explanations, and yet with enough detail for non-Indians to feel comfortable about the world–to feel they can see, hear, smell and believe it.

Writers often talk of the challenge of “writing the other”–writing assuming a culture/ race/ setting they do not belong to, in ways that are authentic enough to be accepted by persons of that culture/ race/ setting(and not sound condescending/ insensitive/ over-exotic etc.) It is quite as challenging to be part of a different culture and write about it in ways that are authentic and unstilted and would make sense to readers who are unfamiliar with the culture but have plenty of preconceived notions about it. I think of it as “writing for the other” 🙂

In a story I once drafted, I had a scene where some persons who were escaping into the mountains encountered monkeys. When I put it up in a critique group, one reviewer commented on my “mistake” of having monkeys out in the wild. Monkeys, she informed me, were only found in labs and zoos 🙂

I often smile at that memory when I take my morning walks and encounter company like this :

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