Ashwin's Dispatch 003
August 31, 2023
Hello.
From the confines of my bedroom, where I’m dozing off and not writing scripts, novels, or short stories, and I’m wasting my time when I should really just be writing, hello.
I hope you are well.
This has been another uneventful month where nothing I’ve written has been published and nothing I’ve written has been out in the world (at least last month, there were the short stories I was sending out every alternate week).
The only constant has been Gutter Space where Vimoh and I put out stuff regularly. That has been regular -- two videos per week. I hope it grows into something bigger.
Speaking of Gutter Space, I watched a TV show this month, Guns and Gulabs. By all accounts, it should have been a good show, but for some reason it fell short and I wasn’t entertained. I’ve got more to say about the show, clearly, and most of it is outlined in the video below. Go enjoy it.
I’m stuck in a sort of writer’s hell, where I can’t think of a new story for Aadhira Mohi #5. It’s been three weeks. A grand total of zero ideas have popped up in my head.
I know this a huge face-off between Aadhira Mohi and Abiman (Abiman? Is that an anagram for something?). I know there will be zombies. I know the main scientist guy we introduced in Aadhira Mohi #1 will have to return and he will have to fight the heroes and…
And that’s it. That’s all I have so far.
I don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t know how it’s going to happen. All I know it has to be, at the very least, entertaining.
It’s going to take me a while to get out of this hell hole.
In anticipation of the Netflix show that will be released early next year, I began to read The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu this month.
I read 85% of the whole thing and put the book away.
I don’t ever intent to revisit it.
The book started off slow, with a public beating. Then it jumped to a few years ahead. It dropped characters, took up new ones, told a little story about them, then abandoned that too. And this continued for quite a while and after some time, all the stories, and all the characters, they all crossed into one another, forming a giant mess of sorts in my head, and I decided this book just wasn’t for me.
Reading shouldn’t feel like a task, the experience shouldn’t feel unappealing. I had to remind myself that reading should be fun. And fun is what I missed while reading this book.
The Three Body Problem is a rather tedious book. It goes on and on about one thing, then branches off into a completely different story, and then onto a different story and then again onto something else. And there’s barely any science fiction in it. I suppose its hard science fiction (I suppose), but the story is so dull and boring, I just couldn’t bring myself to finish the book.
I’ll still watch the Netflix show, just to see if, somehow, the way I read the book was wrong. Or, if they improve the book somehow and make it interesting. I’ll still watch the show, but I’ll never go back to the book.
Also, I’m reading other books now. So all is well with the world again.
Aadhira Mohi #4 will be out next month. You should be able to pre-order it here: https://bullseyepress.in/
Aadhira Mohi, if you don't already know, is a comic about two orphans who are stuck in the middle of a zombie outbreak but handle it beautifully, by killing all the zombies. They’ve shut down all the factories that were turning people into zoimbies, and now there’s just one factory left.
Aadhira Mohi started out as a light hearted romp, but pretty quickly turned into serious fiction because I cannot write comedy well, at least in comic book form.
Anyway…
The next story goes something like this:
While Aadhira is off killing zombies at the bank, Mohi is being interrogated by people at the hotel she’s at, for murdering one of them. The trouble is, the others aren’t exactly clean either. Almost all of them seem to have some motive for the killings. Things get slightly more complicated when everyone has to split, and more people star getting killed.
Does Mohi have a reason for killing these people? Do any of the others?
Any why is there anything supernatural in this comic until page 23?
Find out in the next episode of Aadhira Mohi.
I wrote the book and I lettered the english version as well.
The Hindi version is lettered by Ravi.
I hadn’t lettered anything since Aadhira Mohi #3, and this took some getting used to. I had to remember everything, from what software to use, to how SFX is added on the pages. I don’t think I did a very good job, at least on the SFX. There’s still a lot I need to learn, still a lot I need to do. But, it’s a journey.
So…
Here are the first four pages of the comic. Maybe it will get you interested in buying the book.
This is the second comic I’ve written, that is being released this year. At least, since I started writing this newsletter. I don’t expect any more comics this year so you can go back to doing whatever you were doing.
You can find more of my stuff on Youtube at Gutter Space. I write occasionally at https://ashwinkalmane.stck.me/ . I also have a website that you can check at http://www.ashwinkalmane.com/. And if you’re interested, just look for me on some of the social media sites (Instagram and Facebook), I should be there too.
I briefly considered sending out two of these newsletters a month, but really, I don’t have too much to say. So, I’ll just stick to a monthly release.
Alright, that’s all I have for you folks this month.
Until next time.
Thanks for the sneak peek.. Aadhira Mohi 4 looks promising! Curious to find out what happens next.