VOF - WEEK SIX

It took me more than a week to get over the shock of not having made it to the chosen 20 list of columnists on Pulsewire. I am a very very bad loser and have been one since I was a little girl. This is not because I have any kind of superiority complex about being the best, but because I work very very hard to compete with myself every day, every minute and every second of my creative life.

I have been writing for nearly 50 years now, writing seriously that is, and my parents, sister, brother and husband have egged me on to keep writing. So, after having worked so hard, won a a few top awards for writing in my country, after having authored 16 published books singly, with three mses under contract for future publication, my name not appearing in the final list was very very distressing, disturbing and depressing.

Then, while I carried on with the ordinary business of writiing for my bread, and sometimes, butter, I surfed through the writings of some of the chosen 20 and found myself wanting. Maybe I had not blogged enough? Maybe, I had not formed a group? Perhaps, I needed to network which I hardly did except responding to the feedback to my weekly inputs? Or, could be that I was over-confident and was not aware of it? Perhaps it was a combination of all these and more.

Never mind. Having lost the race however, it might not be possible for me to keep inputing the way I was inputting all the time. But I will occasionally come in and talk to you all, share my thoughts and feelings from time to time and most importantly, seek to understand all of you through the power of your brilliant minds and pens as you keep clicking the mouse and bang the keys and keep weaving webs of fact, reality, document real life stories of women across the world, to widen the horizons of my knowledge and to keep myself rooted to the earth I stand on.