One more day ends. One more evening passes with the changing pallor of the sky, from grey to black, where the stars twinkle so bright as if giving the onlooker a tiny flame of hope, reminding the refuge of the dusk that a new day awaits next.

I too seek a refuge. Not as the coconut climber, who toils his day to earn his salt, rather, I cherish a thought.

At dusk, my wife lights the lamp to invite the divinity of nature, prosperity and protection into the house. The light brings consciousness and clarity. I’m renewed.

For days after completing my fourth book, I was ghost walking through the deserted halls of my mind. The supernatural feeling stemmed from my fear. I feared I would end up in a void or vacuum, and would constantly blabber about the Writer’s Block that ceased to exist.

Recently, when I was cleaning my cupboard, which is a sort of book collector’s delight of Stephen King novels, I hit upon Gold. A forgotten piece of research papers lay submerged in a forgotten corner, untouched for a year.

For a moment, I felt it was a relic. The thought took me back a year when I was flying to Bangalore.

I’m a nervous traveler, who’d not drink water while on a flight, fearing that if I had to use the urinals, I’d be locked until I land. But at the same time, I had the courage to write an article about my future books, 30,000 feet above the ground, while the entire set of passengers were asleep. That included a thought of a new book on ‘Theyyam’. This was the source of the research papers. I wanted to write non-fiction.

But being a fiction writer has its own challenges. My heart beat for fiction, while my logical mind always challenged me to try something different for the sake of an experience. I was in a dilemma of choosing between fiction and non-fiction. It made me feel like using a switch that can be turned ON and OFF.

This was a precarious situation being a writer.

Being choked is a better way to describe this situation. There were days when I was fed with too many ideas and thoughts of both fiction and non-fiction, and I seem to retain them all at length that I began to wonder if I were getting any older to forget them. People die of choking on their own tongue. My problem was having a depressed thought about a sensitive matter of choosing a genre to write.

But something saved my day. I happened to listen to one Podcast called – The Loser’s Club, in which an author and researcher Caroline Bicks said something which stuck me like a speeding bullet.

She talked about how Stephen King was writing Carrie (his first novel) and Salem’s Lot (his second) at the same time. It is indeed, difficult, but Stephen seemed to trust the process. And it seems, after publishing his first book, he immediately published his second within days. Both the books were a success.

You might wonder if the ideas in his books might overlap. But it didn’t. While Carrie was a female oriented book, Salem’s lot was a vampire story. Two different themes but he did it.

Until that episode, I was under the impression, I can write both fiction and non-fiction at the same time and for that, I need to prioritize, as that gives a fresh perception or ideas for my writings.

Maybe true!

But perhaps, looking at it from a better angle that ‘trusting the process’ can make your life easier.

This I understood as I wrote this piece of article on paper rather than typing on a laptop. I did type, I don’t deny that, but, only while reviewing and modifying it. But the initial draft was handwritten on paper. I felt that ideas flow much better when your hand touches the pen and the paper. More ideas (like never before) seemed to fight for a place on your manuscript and you didn’t take much time to decide when to kill your darlings. This was exactly what I meant by trusting the process. It gets better when you tweak a little of your writing styles.

Perhaps, it was a learning that came by the way.

I’m still a refugee of the dusk. Maybe, and just maybe, I might see a new dawn of my cherished thought of writing a creative non-fiction book.