This week’s featured BookRix Author is Hadi Garib. Every Tuesday, Bookrix features one of its authors on this blog. If you’d like to be our next featured author, please let us know by filling out this form.

1) Your name

Hadi Garib

2) Titles of the work you have on BookRix

Morality: A Private and Costly Luxury

Waves

The U.N.Doing

A Journey Up The Australian East Coast: A Philosophical Conundrum

3) What is your writing method? Do you wake up super early in the morning? Do you burn the midnight oil drinking coffee to stay awake while penning your passion?

In carrying a pen and paper at all times, I find myself reaching for the same the moment inspiration strikes. It doesn’t always have to be a sober hour; I could be sitting about one minute, and suddenly be in a meditative coma the next, jotting down my work.

4) How long have you been writing?

While linguistics have always been a passion, I reckon it wasn’t until I started reading works by the great Greek bard that I was truly inspired to pursue my own.

5) How do you maintain your regular job while writing?

Writing is more of a hobby; something that you willfully pursue. Work on the other hand, is seen as something that living demands. Having said that, you can’t really discount for the frequent urge to escape to serenity to work on something constituting literary resonance.

6) Do you have special places where you go to write?

The beach. The musical rhythm that echos, as if through time, as each wave crashes against the shore; the gulls serving as the choir; the fluttering sand, the stagehands; one can’t ask for more in terms of seeking a muse.

7) Do you have any quirks when writing? Do you need to shut off your phone for the weekend or stay away from family and friends?

It was on Circe’s advice that Odysseus tied himself against his ship’s mast to safely hear the sirens; I reckon I find myself enjoying the same vide tying myself up in my writing, shunning the masses once by the sea.

What inspires you?

Reality. Every work presented has been based on an actual event. For instance, the work Morality was from the sheer frustration at the regional government’s lack of action in helping the victims of the devastating Baluchistan earthquake. The title Waves, resonating queries with reference to the global financial crash. The work The U.N.Doing, inspired by a truly international student body while I pursued my masters down under. Yep, its all about reality.

(Hadi Garib is from Pakistan.)

9) Do you want to make a living from your wordsmith skills or are you doing this for fun?

I reckon the only thing that keeps me from making a living from the same is the fear that financial greed would destroy the childish affection that is associated with writing for fun. Not that the thoughts never crossed my mind. With Bookrix offering the opportunity to establish a reader base, here’s hoping for something to click in the near future.

10) What are your stories about? Are they fiction or non-fiction?

One would have to call it a mix of the two. While based on fact, they often take a philosophical twist, querying the viability of adopting a certain persona. Having said that, if I were pushed for an either / or response, it would have to be non-fiction.

11) Do you have a lesson in your stories? Do you have a philosophical or moral mission you are showing in your work?

Inspired by what is happening the world over, the stories tend to seek the reasoning behind the topic at hand, wondering how the notions of ethics, and uniformity in society permit disintegration of the same.

12) What advice do you have for other authors?

Never allow colleagues, peers, or even society at large, to burden your work ethic. Your muse is what you believe it is – not what others deem fit for you.

13) Please write anything else you’d like for the BookRix blog.

Having spent days on end finding an ambitious place that promotes a dying art, writing, while willfully seeking to expand, one can truly appreciate the value of BooRix. Thanks for the same.

Thanks Hadi for your participation. Visit BookRix to meet him and other authors with the ability to read their work.

Writer’s block

A change in attitude may be all you need to ignite your writing.

I have some ideas on how you can turn your daily ramblings into possible stories based on your real life.

If you find that you are blocked when you sit in front of your computer with the intention to write, talk out your ideas with a friend and record the conversation. Maybe you have a juicy or funny story that you’ve told a friend but you can’t seem to get it to shine when you write. Ask you friends to retell the story and record what they said. By hearing what they recall and the highlights they remember, you will know how to frame the tale to make it most appealing to readers.

Go through your emails to your friends and family. When you were writing straight from the heart about your life, you may not have been self-conscious about how you crafted your sentences because you were just writing for an audience of one person or a few people. See if those emails have any paragraphs that you can use for your story or essay. Raw, unedited, writing can be the most dramatic and fruitful prose that you can later re-work into an autobiographical essay or story.

Another idea is to think of writing a story or an essay as a discussion with a friend. Your notebook or computer is your friend listening to you speak.

Talk over your block with a friend. A good listener may be able to find the source of your block and help you get over it. You may be blind to what is keeping you from writing while it may be obvious to someone who knows you well.

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Welcome to Between Lines. This is the official blog for BookRix.com where every week, Susanna Zaraysky will be sharing tips and also featuring outstanding authors and their work from BookRix.

Susanna Zaraysky is a world traveler and polyglot whose goal is to empower people to be global citizens who are knowledgeable about world events and are confident international travelers and communicators. In June 2009, she will publish two books, Travel Happy, Budget Low (a guidebook on how to travel the world on a budget), and Language is Music (about how to learn foreign languages using music, TV, radio, film and other free and low-cost resources). Her website is: createyourworldbooks.com.

This week’s featured BookRix Author is Timothy Dooner.

1) Your name

Timothy Dooner

2) Titles of the work you have on Bookrix

In Antipathia which is a collection of poems.

Metamorphosis – Omitted is an added chapter to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

3) What is your writing method? Do you wake up super early in the morning? Do you burn the midnight oil drinking coffee to stay awake while penning your passion?

I take the T (Boston’s subway system) to work and tend to scratch things out on there but there isn’t any exclusivity to my methods. Jotting down an idea, a phrase, or a sentence can happen just about anywhere. When the opportunity arises I like to write as much as I can at work so I can feel like I’m getting paid for this. I used to not have a notepad on my phone so I’d text myself ideas that I wanted to save for later. When it comes down to sitting at the computer for sessions that usually involves myself, midnight, and a tumbler of whiskey.

4) How long have you been writing?

As a kid, if I didn’t have friends over, I’d script out adventures for my toys or my sister’s. If you were to compile all the Barbie vs. GI Joe wars I’d written out you’d walk away with a tome the size of “War and Peace”. Cobra would usually kill Ken and take over the Barbie grotto. After enslaving Skipper and affixing a napalm cannon to the pink corvette it would be up to G.I. Joe to save the day. Eventually I got into horror and started focusing on werewolves and witches. The Children’s library in the town I grew up in had a junior occult section for whatever reason. It was a great resource for a budding author’s imagination. I’d check out all the werewolf books and read them in the dark with a flashlight while having the shit scared out of me every time a tree branch would run its limbs across my window.

5) How do you maintain your regular job while writing?

Maybe a blessing, maybe a curse but I don’t have an incredibly long attention span so it is pretty easy for me to pull in and out of writing. Also, I’m not all that prolific…

6) Do you have special places where you go to write?

I typically write on my couch using ideas or notes I’d written down in variety of other places. I do like to go up to my roof, though. If I can’t figure out anything to write I can always jump off.

7) Do you have any quirks when writing? Do you need to shut off your phone for the weekend or stay away from family and friends?

The only thing I try and do is avoid the internet which isn’t easy because the browser’s culling song has shipwrecked this sailor on more than a few occasions.

What inspires you?

There is this subway paper in Boston that I pick up in the morning called The Metro. The great thing about it is that it gives you the shortest synopsis possible of news stories. My imagination always run wild because of the lack of details in the paper’s reporting. One of the better recent stories was something along the lines of, “Three martial arts experts arrested for assaulting Revere man.” That was the entire story. Who wouldn’t want to fill in those blanks? I googled the story later to get the full scoop and the reality of the story was far less interesting than what I made up.

9) Do you want to make a living from your wordsmith skills or are you doing this for fun?

Absolutely, who wouldn’t want to have an excuse and a pay check to stole off in a secluded cabin for months on end while finishing a novel? At this point I am more interested in building an audience and sharing whatever I write with others. I try to take a passive approach to self-promotion though. Everybody hates the guy who is always nagging you to read whatever he smacked out on a keyboard. I like the idea of being able to write something, put it some place where people can read it and if they choose to then it is there. As far as getting paid goes, sure, why not?

10) What are your stories about? Are they fiction or non-fiction?

I love non-fiction although I hate that word. How did that become the proper nomenclature for a fact based work? It would be like the news being called non-sitcom. I never write non-fiction, though. Even back in high school I hated doing reports. While research is great, when I have to fuss over and worry about the absolute accuracy I find that it stunts my ability to write. That may be why I enjoy reading biographies, true crime, and history books as much as I do. Because I can’t write them I respect them. Either way, I stick to stories, short and long as well as scripts and some poetry. As for what they’re about, I tend to explore people in dire situations who suffer from some type of internal conflict.

11) Do you have a lesson in your stories? Do you have a philosophical or moral mission you are showing in your work?

I’d love to be able to write an epic that tackles a whole universe but so far I find it too easy to lose touch with my characters. When that happens your book starts to turn into one long agenda pushing essay. I like allegory as much as anybody but I just don’t have much interest in writing about a galaxy filled with the donkey-bat and flying shark people whose political conflicts are a parallel to our own. The one thing I like about poetry, it is such a vague art that whomever reading can apply what they’ve just to read to themselves in whatever way they choose. I try to avoid any proselytizing whenever possible.

12) What advice do you have for other authors?

Let people who you know will be honest read your work. Befriend a good editor.

13) Please write anything else you’d like for the Bookrix blog.

Thanks for taking the time to ask me these questions and all the luck to Bookrix.

Thanks Timothy  for your participation. Visit BookRix to meet Timothy and other great authors with the ability to read their work.