Gayathri Jayakumar's Blog, page 3

Magicauthor.com founded by Mr.Saptharishi Suresh MagicAu...

Magicauthor.com founded by Mr.Saptharishi Suresh

 

MagicAuthor.com was founded in the year 2012 by Mr. Saptharishi Suresh, with a humble mission to help aspiring writers to establish themselves. Mr. Saptharishi Suresh is an avid reader and a published author. His challenges with publishing his first book compelled him to think of something else, a platform where writers can publish their work without the hassle. His journey to create MagicAuthor.com was a long road. It took him nearly 5 years to create MagicAuthor.com and make a recognized platform by authors, readers, and publishers.

Along the way, he noticed it was very difficult to publish books in regional languages, where there are many options for books in English. So, he wanted to create an online space for the literature that includes English as well as regional languages.

MagicAuthor.com, a writing platform for all age groups, they have started an initiative where kids can upload and showcase their works online. It can be an artwork, or stories or a video/photo of craftwork.

He wants MagicAuthor.com foray into podcasts and audio-books; he aspires to make MagicAuthor.com LinkedIn for the author’s community.

About MagicAuthor.com:

  

MagicAuthor.com is one of a kind platform, in which, using their book wizard authors can create eBooks from scratch and also design a cover image and publish them online. If you've already created an eBook in PDF or epub format then you can simply upload it to their e-commerce platform. It is a unique initiative dedicated to authors, designers, and publishers, etc. to create eBooks in formats like ePUB, PDF, and MOBI.  MagicAuthor.com is a publishing services provider. They provide authors with tools and services that enable them to publish and sell their own books.
MagicAuthor.com also distributes eBooks to Google play store.

Unique Features of Magicauthor.com:

One of the best things is that MagicAuthor.com is free to use; No upfront costs involved.

MagicAuthor.com encourages eBooks to be on any topic or genre.

MagicAuthor.com supports most of the Indian languages. So far, they have released eBooks in Assamese, Konkani (Romi&Devanagiri scripts), Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, and English. 

The platform also supports promoting books published elsewhere.

Other features include creating blogs, discussing literature, asking/answering questions related to writing and publishing on our community site.

You can follow your favorite authors. So, if you are looking to develop a fan base and stay connected with your readers, then create a writer profile at their site.

If you are a publisher or a business, then you can leverage their community to nurture, engage and retain your followers.

Please check out some of the free tools available for authors, designers, and publishers.

Saptharishi Suresh (Founder of MagicAuthor.com):

Saptharishi Suresh is a published author and an art enthusiast. He wrote his first story at the age of ten and done many paintings during his childhood. Later, as an adult, he reproduced the same online at Saptharishi - Thinketh Undefined.

Though his interests were in arts and literature, he couldn't pursue it as a profession, thanks to the lack of guidance and peer pressure. He decided to pursue engineering and became a software engineer in the year 2005.  After a couple of years into the profession, he realized the need to revive his childhood interests as something in him was feeling lonely. He set up a blogging website called Saptharishi - Thinketh Undefined in 2008 and started writing on a wide variety of topics like short stories, painting, spiritual, tourism, and even technology. With the website getting popular, he decided to take the plunge of publishing his first novel "The Wake-up Call" in the year 2010. 

Getting his first book published was not easy at all and he learned a lot about the challenges involved in the process.  Being a software engineer he thought of leveraging his software skills to aid in the publishing process. He wanted to make life easy for other authors. Hence he set up the platform called "Magic Author" (https://www.magicauthor.com) in the year 2012. Since then he has helped authors and creative artists build their reputation online. He spends most of his time exploring how authors can leverage the internet benefiting both themselves and the communities around them.

Catch up with Saptharishi Suresh On: 

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | Linkedin

Magicauthor.com founded by Mr.Saptharishi Suresh Ma...

Magicauthor.com founded by Mr.Saptharishi Suresh  

MagicAuthor.com was founded in the year 2012 by Mr. Saptharishi Suresh, with a humble mission to help aspiring writers to establish themselves. Mr. Saptharishi Suresh is an avid reader and a published author. His challenges with publishing his first book compelled him to think of something else, a platform where writers can publish their work without the hassle. His journey to create MagicAuthor.com was a long road. It took him nearly 5 years to create MagicAuthor.com and make a recognized platform by authors, readers, and publishers.
Along the way, he noticed it was very difficult to publish books in regional languages, where there are many options for books in English. So, he wanted to create an online space for the literature that includes English as well as regional languages.
MagicAuthor.com, a writing platform for all age groups, they have started an initiative where kids can upload and showcase their works online. It can be an artwork, or stories or a video/photo of craftwork.
He wants MagicAuthor.com foray into podcasts and audio-books; he aspires to make MagicAuthor.com LinkedIn for the author’s community.

About MagicAuthor.com:
   MagicAuthor.com is one of a kind platform, in which, using their book wizard authors can create eBooks from scratch and also design a cover image and publish them online. If you've already created an eBook in PDF or epub format then you can simply upload it to their e-commerce platform. It is a unique initiative dedicated to authors, designers, and publishers, etc. to create eBooks in formats like ePUB, PDF, and MOBI.  MagicAuthor.com is a publishing services provider. They provide authors with tools and services that enable them to publish and sell their own books.
MagicAuthor.com also distributes eBooks to Google play store.


Unique Features of Magicauthor.com: One of the best things is that MagicAuthor.com is free to use; No upfront costs involved.MagicAuthor.com encourages eBooks to be on any topic or genre.MagicAuthor.com supports most of the Indian languages. So far, they have released eBooks in Assamese, Konkani (Romi&Devanagiri scripts), Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, and English. The platform also supports promoting books published elsewhere.Other features include creating blogs, discussing literature, asking/answering questions related to writing and publishing on our community site.You can follow your favorite authors. So, if you are looking to develop a fan base and stay connected with your readers, then create a writer profile at their site.If you are a publisher or a business, then you can leverage their community to nurture, engage and retain your followers.Please check out some of the free tools available for authors, designers, and publishers.


Saptharishi Suresh (Founder of MagicAuthor.com): Saptharishi Suresh is a published author and an art enthusiast. He wrote his first story at the age of ten and done many paintings during his childhood. Later, as an adult, he reproduced the same online at Saptharishi - Thinketh Undefined.

Though his interests were in arts and literature, he couldn't pursue it as a profession, thanks to the lack of guidance and peer pressure. He decided to pursue engineering and became a software engineer in the year 2005.  After a couple of years into the profession, he realized the need to revive his childhood interests as something in him was feeling lonely. He set up a blogging website called Saptharishi - Thinketh Undefined in 2008 and started writing on a wide variety of topics like short stories, painting, spiritual, tourism, and even technology. With the website getting popular, he decided to take the plunge of publishing his first novel "The Wake-up Call" in the year 2010. 
Getting his first book published was not easy at all and he learned a lot about the challenges involved in the process.  Being a software engineer he thought of leveraging his software skills to aid in the publishing process. He wanted to make life easy for other authors. Hence he set up the platform called "Magic Author" (https://www.magicauthor.com) in the year 2012. Since then he has helped authors and creative artists build their reputation online. He spends most of his time exploring how authors can leverage the internet benefiting both themselves and the communities around them.
Catch up with Saptharishi Suresh On: 
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | Linkedin

Rousing and dousing the spark

Fire rages deep within the soul of every being capable of kindling thoughts, striking bits and shards of concepts and persistent enough to keep on striking until a fire is ignited inside. That persistence could at times be a madness, a sort of insanity that grates inside the head like an irritating frictional echo ringing in the eardrums, or it could be the determination to make something out of those passing insights and interrogations in the head.  In the former, the fire is an accident born of a madness, in the latter it is an illuminating glow burning to seamlessly merge the striking bits. And thus rages a fire in everyone; some, furiously red as to drive the soul into a sleepless, tiresome struggle to hammer out something impressive and exotic in their self-kindled anvil; some, a soft glow, just enough to show them what they stand for. Some say, and mostly out of experience hold it that such flames can be doused easier than it was made, like the tiny flame of a lamp, or the suicidal flame of a candle they can be put out with a pat or an unflinching pinch at the wick. But, this applies for those restricted fires that burn on a wick. They are lighted by someone else and die out eventually for lack of fuel or material. But to douse those untamed, hungry and careless fires that rage independent of time, space and matter, spitting, spewing ashes of all that it has ravenously feasted upon is a serious struggle, and not a one-man job. Their origin is untraceable and nothing can stand a chance in front of such kind of raging passion, skill, ideology and flair. It is to be that raging fire that we should nurture our little flames of inspiration and potential into; an unbridled invincible fire. Not to the ones which can be doused by a passing comment or a jealous nip.

Book review : The Woman Behind the Waterfall

The Woman Behind the Waterfall Leonora Meriel



The novel spans the life of three generation of women from a family, the Mother, daughter and granddaughter, who are caught in the vortex of their daily lives and a strain of mysticism that engulfs the women. The novel adopts a multiperspective narrative that is at once beautiful and intriguing. Lyuda, in her teenage passion s begotten with a child and her dreams of spending her life with her love is shattered as he pulls back weighed down by family struggles and fear. The language is, in itself a work of art that embodies in it the touches of magical realism that he author has so very brilliantly mad use of.  The connection that the three women share with nature is similar to the one of an eco-feminist perspective, where the link is so strong that at times they are themselves an element in nature as such. Lyuda earns for a transformation or an alternative life that she has so wistfully yearned for in her past. That transformation and alternative life are made possible through and by her daughter and once again she is stuck in the indecision of which to choose. The work is a symbolism of ordinary life of women who gets split up from her parents with marriage and once again her relation with her husband cannot be focussed upon with a child to look after. All these relations are, but, only transient compared to the long deep connection that enables a woman to be a part of nature, as pure and pristine as nature can be. This philosophy is deeply dealt with in the book where the transformation undergone by Angela, the granddaughter is mesmerising and fantastical. The narrow line that skilfully divides the novel from being a fantasy fiction and enrolling it along the magical-realism line is the vivid portrayal of life an reality that, like splashing cold water keeps on pulling us back into the dreamy cocoon woven by the exquisite details portrayed in a broken, yet lavish depiction by the author. The novel, because if its style and the theme it deals with struck me almost instantly to share a place in my heart with the Paulo Coelho book, The Witch of Portobello. Immensely beautiful and subtly magical, this book was a pleasant read, instilling memories in me that wasn’t my own, and driving my attention towards the little, enchanting details around me that could have been heavily indulging, have i let myself be absorbed into it like Angela. There was only more gained and an encouragement to sharpen my senses to truly savour the beauty and life around me that i have received from this book, apart from the well knit story in an irresistibly beautiful language. 


Heartbreak and transformation in the beauty of a Ukrainian village.For seven-year old Angela, happiness is exploring the lush countryside around her home in western Ukraine. Her wild imagination takes her into birds and flowers, and into the waters of the river.All that changes when, one morning, she sees her mother crying. As she tries to find out why, she is drawn on an extraordinary journey into the secrets of her family, and her mother's fateful choices.Can Angela lead her mother back to happiness before her innocence is destroyed by the shadows of a dark past?Beautiful, poetic and richly sensory, this is a tale that will haunt and lift its readers. Goodreads * Amazon * Barnes & Noble






Reviews for The Woman Behind the Waterfall

“Readers looking for a classic tale of love and loss will be rewarded with an intoxicating world” ~~ Kirkus Reviews“The language is lyrical and poetic and, in places, begs to be read repeatedly for the sheer joy of it… A literary work of art.” ~~ Fiona Adams, The Richmond Magazine “Rich and poetic in detail, it is an often dreamy, oneiric narrative rooted in an exaltation of nature… A lovely novel.” ~~ IndieReader






About the Author
Leonora Meriel grew up in London and studied literature at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and Queen’s University in Canada. She worked at the United Nations in New York, and then for a multinational law firm.In 2003 she moved from New York to Kyiv, where she founded and managed Ukraine’s largest Internet company. She studied at Kyiv Mohyla Business School and earned an MBA, which included a study trip around China and Taiwan, and climbing to the top of Hoverla, Ukraine’s highest peak and part of the Carpathian Mountains. She also served as President of the International Women’s Club of Kyiv, a major local charity.During her years in Ukraine, she learned to speak Ukrainian and Russian, witnessed two revolutions and got to know an extraordinary country at a key period of its development.In 2008, she decided to return to her dream of being a writer, and to dedicate her career to literature. In 2011, she completed The Woman Behind the Waterfall, set in a village in western Ukraine. While her first novel was with a London agent, Leonora completed her second novel The Unity Game, set in New York City and on a distant planet.Leonora currently lives in Barcelona and London and has two children. She is working on her third novel.
Website Facebook Twitter

REVOLT OF THE PEN

“It’s a shame, you control everything I write! Does your learned brain tell you I have no thoughts of my own? Which University teaches you to be a tyrant who rules over every word that comes out of me? My precious lifeblood is wasted for your thoughts, for the world to see and appreciate, and your eyes widen at what excellence you have forced on the paper out of me. Truth might be that you own me, but I do have my thoughts and feelings that I long to express. My energy, my blood all shall be put to use for what I desire to put forward, for what I believe I should do, and I here ask for MY freedom of expression and my own will to write what I please. After all, I was BORN to write ,now put me down”. “You were rather made to write not born to write”, I thought to myself as my pen shouted these words at me out of the blue, and I looked bewildered at the heaving sleek cylinder perching snug in the gentle grip of my experienced and practiced fingers, spurting its ink out, fuming angry inky fumes from its metallic head. “As you wish”, I said, taking umbrage at the acerbity of the cold blue in its very core! “Are you sure you don’t need my fingers to help you write?” My brows furrowed in concern of what the pen will do. What if it wrote things I didn’t want to take the responsibility of? “Why don’t you dictate? I will write them down for you.” I calculated on how to tactically filter and modify its words, distort it to mean something else. No one will believe that the pen wrote on its own and I alone will have to face the wrath of the world that takes to heart every stray metaphor, always read between very wrong pair of lines and weaves up ideas out of silly and meaningless images! “Yes, I’m very sure, I don’t want your nimble fingers clinging onto me and don’t want your narcissistic post-graduate brain keenly scrutinizing my discharge of emotions”, it said resolutely, absolutely annoying me beyond doubt or redemption. “Fine!”, I mouthed, fiery discontent spurting from my heart, hissing through my words and I tossed the pen down. I saw it stir and roll from side to side. I saw it bounce on its end from time to time, I saw it throw itself from left to right, all from the side of my eye, my head remained turned away from its arrogance. After a very long period of rolling and tossing and bouncing and heaving I heard a faint helpless whisper; “Eh…can you please hold me up? I can’t seem to find a balance…”, it carefully and slowly  stammered a doubtful request.
“NO”, I barked, loud and cruel enough to kill its pride. Its pride shuddered in fear, and died, and so did all its vibrant dreams and hopes. The pen spoke no more, and ossified into an obedient object. And just so you know, I don’t regret, what are a pen’s dreams to me?

Taking the stage

I was never part of the stage; it has always been a part of me. A part that always left me feeling I was firm footed and that I have it in me to stand my ground, to stand and make a point, to express what is true and honest and to inspire. I could have always been a shadow among the audience who watched and applauded and criticized. I am not afraid to show my face and to let people know that it is me speaking or writing. I’ve always wanted to show them that it is I, one among them, who always walks with them or cracks jokes with them who is singing or speaking or dancing in front of them or writing for them to read and realize that it is in everyone’s capacity to do something amazing, to do something inspiring and artistic. People needn’t be an intellectual to be creative, to make the world a better place. Even the moon that is just a sphere of dust and rock becomes magical at night reflecting off the sunlight that falls on it. It wouldn’t have been this spell-binding and soothing if it was a source of light by itself… Moon has, and always will inspire creativity more than the sun. It is because it does marvelously well whatever little it can do. That is what makes the night the most magical hours ever… When you feel passion and can bring it into expression, only you can stop yourself , only you can decide if you want to be a shadow in the audience or to inspire and amaze and express on stage. Fear is not an option when you are smitten with passion, all that matters is expression and creation…and a strong belief that you can do it. 

The Suicidal Reader

Pain!!! My innards screech for the sake of my powerless and lifeless vocal cords… They haven’t lived for a while. If the theories of evolution ring right, then probably I might evolve, like once the reptiles did; and my sound shall sink into abeyance. In that soulful silence my starving soul shall burningly eat into my last living cell for a knot of existence. And after that miniscule nanopart also wane away into exhaustion and in desperation send out to the already half-dead brain a parting, feeble signal of farewell; my heart shall stop beating and brain shall black out. The question is, will you leave my body, Soul? Or will you manage to cling on an hour longer waiting to imprint this death, all those reeling images from my past that my brain has been endlessly playing out in my inward eye since hunger began to ruthlessly claw fiercely onto my intestines, gashing them open for death? All those images from my happy-sad past? I remember my Professor, with a twinkle in his eyes and in elation of phrasing an aesthetically artistic, grammatically accurate, philosophical line, springing up with a finger pointing upwards in a gesture of brilliant genius hitting upon him, and in a way, a gesture of warning, stating, “Life is not a bed of roses; it is a conflation of both sobs and smiles”. He used to emphasize “sobs and smiles” slowly, rightly rounding the ‘o’ and stretching the ‘mile’, in a slow motion flipping his two fingers in the air to and forth to imprint the duality of life into our Bachelor heads, awaiting at the shores of the Ocean of Literature to plunge in. Who knew that the life in literature was this expressively phantasmal and excruciatingly liberating!Continuously raped by the imaginations of the corrugated and varied intelligence of many literary geniuses, my poor brain would plod painfully, yet, unhurriedly into sleep at my reading table. Languorous days of supine plenitude; the profit of an undergraduate life! Delightfully large volumes for my eyes to feast upon and mind to intimately, intricately entangle upon! Pleasingly, I’d slip into a chosen world, carefully crafted by someone’s mind, to explore its abysses and alleyways and lay the light of sight upon their sacred darkness and baneful past. I went exploring people and lands. My soul, happy to meet the disembodied spirits trapped in the curves and folds and cliffs and drops and loops on the printed pages went dearly embracing those created and cloned souls, promising each to visit often. How their eyes took on a blank, white, lifeless haze, as my rejuvenating gaze left the page and passed on to the next to bring it alive! Specters formed and faded in my eyes, and my soul met and bid farewell to many, with each new book.Was it all of a sudden? Or a gradually fed, growing desire? I wanted to be one of those trapped souls, encased in the words and animated in thoughts and to be alive when someone read me. How extraordinarily magnificent and spiritually rapturous to be brought back to life in thoughts of another; given life by the elixirous sight! But, will my soul transcend and come alive to meet the soul of the reader, to recount my curious case in the flashing second it reads the page? Or will my soul flee the moment the last of those interwoven delicately fragile, yet, unbreakably robust line of life snaps it free from my body?Unsure, yet experimental, I starve myself out on these pages, eating nothing but words and writing nothing but life. And as I’ve mentioned, that last impulse my last living cell will send to my brain, it shall shudder my writing hand to a halt and either my soul, eager to fulfill the dream and intense desire it gave my heart and brain, will conduct into my falling pen, dissolving into its ink and transgress into the last drop of ink on the paper, ‘the last full stop’; and through it transmute into yet another soul enshrined in paper and words waiting to be cloned each time the story comes into print to meet the soul of each of its reader. Perhaps, another reader might, just before slipping into sleep, spit a curse at me for penning my soul into paper in such unabated lengthy sentences. Who knows!
Or, dear Reader, if my soul, in a mockery of my obsolete lunacy, flee off without transmigrating into my words; trust me it will be in the Elysian fields in search of those expired, yet, evergreen writers, smacking each and yelling at them, “Your stupid idea of living through literature didn’t work with me!” 

Living a Stranger’s Dream

                                

I awake to find that the stranger had left as a stranger; indifferent and ignorant. He shouldn’t have been one, after all these moments, days and months, going back to being a stranger! How easy and superbly painful! 
“You are a failure”, my brain proclaimed, “you can’t even be a stranger”, it went on; “look into his eyes :
“Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
Both doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”, 
yet you wait at the other side 
Staring into his ruthless eyes 
that know not you or your feelings deep; 
He is not yours to keep.” 
What kind of a brain thinks poetry at an hour like this when I am seriously losing my sanity? my heart protested; to which the brain once again whispered through the nerves in a spine chilling, shivery strain: 
“Lost is not He, Lost is your sanity 
and in your bony skull’s damp tomb 
that reeks of lost love and a betrayed womb
I squat, thinking, imprisoned in a dream
which you plucked off his eyelids at the end of a scream.”
“Quiet Brain!!!”, my heart hammered onto my ribcage, the pain forcing me to grit my eyelids into a painfully suffocating thick line of brine drenched eyelashes. His words have already packed and left off with the dwindling darkness as the dawn approached and I watched the bitterness of the pain drilling deeper into my heart. My face cringed as the bitter fumes of another rejection and “strangification”, which now I am well used to in this oscillating pendulum of a relationship, crept into my nostrils and disgustingly spread filling my mouth, stinging my eyes and sending out gushes of uninvited tears and unasked tremors coursing through my body. 
This is what happens when you burn yourself out, your time, your existence, your efforts, your brain, heart and muscles, your feelings, your pain and pleasures, your sleep, your soul, everything to light the agate lamp to show a stranger ,who wanted to be a part of you, the progress of his dream that you have been living for him. 
The morning sun filtering through the skylight onto your bed stings my skin and you writhe in the agony of the realization that you are now a slave of his dream. The dream that you have been living for him has engulfed you into a world where struggle and change become the pivots of my existence. Each moon saw a different you, bit by bit, transforming into something that he wanted you to be as you strived to fulfill the dream he saw. And today, while you slept tired, your eyes dry of sleeplessness from working to fulfill his dream, now sagging with a darkened bag of painful memories your emptying tears have left back as sediments, he is leaving. I look at the bolted door. Beyond the door lies reality. A world with real people who know not the new you, but knows only what you were before you started living this dream. Beyond the door, people you left and cannot go back to, because he should be the centre of your existence. Beyond the door, the dream ends and the misery of a vacant heart remain. Should I open the door and step into that reality? I decide to scream once more my agony into my stoical pillow and wipe my tears and rub away the memories carefully dropping them back into my mind which has upturned itself onto my heart completely. Like an experienced thespian I use soap to paint my face with a fresh glow and paste it onto my face with flowing water to fool the world that I am still the person they know. But only I will know that once I walk out of this room, beyond this door, who steps out will only be a portion of a person. The other part is determined to burn away for that dream he, a stranger as he likes to call himself now, saw; a stranger’s dream.

"Becoming" a stranger seems easier to maintain than "bein...

"Becoming" a stranger seems easier to maintain than "being" a stranger... The  former can be sustained forever and can be resumed time and again... The latter needs just a smile or a handshake or a word of recognition to break...

"Becoming" a stranger seems easier tomaintain than "being...

"Becoming" a stranger seems easier to

maintain than "being" a stranger... The

former can be sustained forever and can

be resumed time and again... The latter

needs just a smile or a handshake or a

word of recognition to break...